A Failed Nation - Shays’ Rebellion

Farmers took up arms in Massachusetts and not in Rhode Island for a reason that comes down to a single difference between the two states.

In Rhode Island, the men who were drowning had taken the state government by lawful election and used it to print money and relieve themselves, and the whole country had recoiled at what a debtor majority would do with power.

In Massachusetts, the other half of the lesson, and the more frightening half, because in Massachusetts the debtors could not take the government.

The government was built so they could not.

The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 was largely the work of John Adams, and it gave the least suffrage in the country.

It set high property qualifications for voting and higher ones to hold office.

It gave the state a strong governor and an upper house apportioned so that the wealthy seaboard counties held the balance of power.

And in 1785 and 1786, the men that constitution put in charge, the merchants and creditors of Boston and the eastern towns, made a decision about the state's war debts.

They decided to pay it in full, in hard currency, and fast.

Massachusetts owed a large debt from the Revolution.

Much of its paper war IOUs had long since left the hands of the soldiers and the farmers who first held it, and been bought up cheap by speculators, many of them in Boston, who stood to make a fortune if the state ever paid at face value.

The legislature resolved that it would pay its debts at face value so that the public credit of Massachusetts would stand second to none.

It was, in a way, an honorable goal.

It was also a transfer, engineered by law, from the western farmer who paid the tax to the eastern gentleman who held the note.

And to find the money, it laid the heaviest taxes the state had ever seen, most of it a direct tax on land and a poll tax that fell on every male head regardless of what he owned, and it demanded the payment of it in specie of gold and silver coin.

By some estimations, the new taxes took a third or more of a western farmer's income, and it required it in hard coin, in a part of the country where a man might go a year without ever handling a real dollar coin.

There was no gold or silver coin in western Massachusetts.

Consider the position of a farmer in Hampshire or Berkshire counties.

He grew what he ate and bartered the rest.

Coin barely passed through his hands from one year to the next.

Now the state wanted its taxes in coin, and the tax was three or four times what it had been.

And on top of it, he still owed his private debts to the local shopkeepers who owed a Boston merchant who owed someone in London, a whole chain of debt running east toward the seaboard and every link of it now calling for hard coin that did not exist in the west.

The farmer had voted, and the men he had voted for did not control the legislature.

He had petitioned, and the legislature in Boston had adjourned without helping him.

And now the collector was coming for the tax, and behind the collector came the courts.