Shays' Rebellion - Background

Background

In the rural parts of New England, particularly in central and western Massachusetts, the economy during the American Revolutionary War had been one of little more than subsistence agriculture. Most residents in these areas had little in the way of assets beyond their land, and often bartered with one another for goods or services. In lean times, farmers might obtain goods on credit from suppliers in local market towns who would be paid when times were better.

In the more economically developed coastal areas of Massachusetts Bay, the economy was basically a market economy, driven by the activities of wholesale merchants dealing with Europe, the West Indies and elsewhere on the North American coast. Not surprisingly, the state government was dominated by this merchant class.

When the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, the European business partners of Massachusetts merchants refused to extend lines of credit to them and insisted that goods be paid for with hard currency. Despite the continent-wide shortage of such currency, merchants began to demand the same from their local business partners, including those merchants operating in the market towns in the state's interior. Many of these merchants passed on this demand to their customers, although the popular governor, John Hancock, did not impose hard currency demands on poorer borrowers and refused to actively prosecute the collection of delinquent taxes.

The rural farming population was generally unable to meet the demands being made of them by merchants or the civil authorities, and individuals began to lose their land and other possessions when they were unable to fulfill their debt and tax obligations. This led to strong resentments against tax collectors and the courts, where creditors obtained and enforced judgments against debtors, and where tax collectors obtained judgments authorizing property seizures.

At a meeting convened by aggrieved commoners, a farmer, Plough Jogger, encapsulated the situation:

"I have been greatly abused, have been obliged to do more than my part in the war, been loaded with class rates, town rates, province rates, Continental rates and all rates ... been pulled and hauled by sheriffs, constables and collectors, and had my cattle sold for less than they were worth ... The great men are going to get all we have and I think it is time for us to rise and put a stop to it, and have no more courts, nor sheriffs, nor collectors nor lawyers."

Overlaid upon these financial issues was the fact that veterans of the war had received little pay during the war and faced difficulty collecting back pay owed them from the State or the Congress of the Confederation. Some of the soldiers, Daniel Shays among them, began to organize protests against these oppressive economic conditions. Shays was a poor farmhand from Massachusetts when the Revolution broke out; he joined the Continental Army, saw action at the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill and Saratoga, and was eventually wounded in action. In 1780, he resigned from the army unpaid and went home to find himself in court for nonpayment of debts. He soon realized that he was not alone in his inability to pay his debts and began organizing for debt relief.