Gentlemen:
By information from the General Court, they are determined to call all those who appeared to stop the Court to condign punishment. Therefore, I request you to assemble your men together, to see that they are well armed and equipped, with sixty rounds each man, and to be ready to turn out at a minute’s warning; likewise to be properly organized with officers.
When he finished, he placed his signature below his call to arms. Daniel Shays knew that he might be signing his own death warrant.
Job Shattuck’s Farmstead
Groton, Massachusetts
November 30, 1786
Governor James Bowdoin and his allies in the General Court had assumed the offensive. Tired of seeing their courthouses invaded and their tax collectors harassed, they had quickly passed a series of laws to quell the commonwealth’s festering unrest. They suspended the writ of habeas corpus for eight months and passed “An Act to Prevent Routs, Riots and Tumultuous Assemblies and Evil Consequences Thereof,” known more commonly as simply the “Riot Act.” This new law held sheriffs blameless for any fatalities inflicted against insurgents, provided for the seizure of Regulators’ lands and goods, and stipulated that miscreants be whipped thirty-nine stripes on their naked backs and suffer imprisonment for up to twelve months.
Now, three hundred horsemen, fully armed, thundered west out of Cambridge.
Their destination: Groton. Their assignment: Apprehend Captain Job Shattuck.
The fifty-year-old Shattuck, a veteran of both the American Revolution and the earlier French and Indian War, had taken the lead in organizing attacks on tax collectors by men armed with rough-hewn clubs. He’d also led the Regulators’ drunken attack on the Concord courthouse.
But Shattuck was no Daniel Shays—at least not when it came to finances.
Shays had barely a farthing to spare. Job Shattuck, on the other hand, was the wealthiest man in Groton, the owner of five hundred acres and a fine, three-story, wood-frame mansion. But Shays and Shattuck were both leaders of the insurrection brewing in Massachusetts, and that was enough for Governor James Bowdoin.
The horsemen who were now headed for Shattuck’s home were not a typical crew of besotted roughnecks. This group featured more than its share of lawyers, physicians, and merchants. Two Harvard graduates—Benjamin Hichborn and John Warren—commanded them.
They reached Shattuck’s home at daybreak.
He wasn’t there.
Having been warned by Shays of the massive force hunting him, Captain Shattuck had bolted from his home through the snowy fields leading toward the icy Nashua River. Unfortunately, he’d left too late. One of the lead horsemen, a man named Sampson Read, caught up with him. “I know you not,” Shattuck warned Read, “but whoever you are, you are a dead man.” They grappled, falling to the cold ground, tumbling toward the riverbank. Shattuck lunged to retrieve his fallen sword and make good on his threat, but Fortescue Vernon, another posse member, proved quicker. He aimed his own sword at Shattuck’s arm, but missed, the sword slipping and severing a ligament near Shattuck’s knee.
They bandaged the bleeding Shattuck and carted him off to a Boston prison cell. It seemed like quick and easy work to lock up such a troublemaker. But they would soon learn that there was a much higher price to be paid for the capture of Captain Job Shattuck.
Daniel Shays’ Farmstead
Pelham, Massachusetts
December 3, 1786
“What sort of times have we been cursed to live in, Abigail?” Daniel Shays mused to his wife as a single tallow candle flickered at his side.
Reading in the waning light of a December day was never an easy proposition. Reading the disturbing reports before him was even more difficult.
“They say Captain Shattuck has perished in his prison cell. Terrible! Dreadful! And what these savages did during his capture was pure evil! A sword through the eye of a neighbor woman! Another woman’s breast slashed. An innocent infant murdered in its cradle! The government of Massachusetts has fallen into the hands of men just as barbaric as the heathens who aligned themselves with the French against us twenty years ago! We have no choice: We must fight them!”
Abigail Shays stayed silent. She knew no words could dissuade her husband at this point. And, she thought, if these gruesome reports were true, nothing should.
But they weren’t true at all.
Job Shattuck was indeed crippled, but not dead. No women had been blinded or slashed; no infant’s life snuffed out.
The rumors were false, but that didn’t matter. They spread like wildfire through western Massachusetts—from home to home, tavern to tavern, and church to church.
People believed the lies, and people will fight for what they believe.
Major General Benjamin Lincoln’s Home
North Street
Hingham, Massachusetts
December 4, 1786
General Benjamin Lincoln hunched over his cherrywood desk in the comfortable Hingham home. His ancestors had built this house in 1637, it had seen his birth in 1733, and it was where he hoped to die—unless, of course, these “Regulators” seized it as part of the revolution they now plotted.
Lincoln had been one of George Washington’s favorite generals. He had served at Boston, Long Island, White Plains, and Saratoga. Even his surrender to British forces at Charleston, South Carolina, failed to dim Washington’s respect for the easygoing Lincoln. When the British themselves later surrendered at Yorktown, it was Lincoln, paroled from British captivity, whom Washington designated to accept Lord Cornwallis’s sword.
Lying in front of Benjamin Lincoln today was a letter sent from Mount Vernon by Washington, dated almost a month earlier. “Are your people getting mad?” Washington had asked Lincoln, displaying uncharacteristic bluntness. “Are we to have the goodly fabric, that eight years were spent in raising, pulled over our heads? What is the cause of all these commotions? When and how will they end?”
Lincoln answered that, yes, people in Massachusetts were indeed angry. “If an attempt to annihilate our present constitution and dissolve the present government can be considered as evidence of insanity—then yes, you are accurate in your descriptions.”
Lincoln paused before answering Washington’s second question—whether the government would unravel. “There is, I think, great danger that it will be so unless the current system is supported by arms. Even then, a government which has no other basis than the point of the bayonet is so totally different from the one we established that if we must resort to arms then it can hardly be said that we have supported ‘the goodly fabric.’ This probably will be the case, for there does not appear to be virtue enough among the people to preserve a perfect republican government.”
Lincoln’s answers to his former commander’s first two queries were pessimistic, but his third answer conveyed even worse news. “It is impossible for me to determine when and how things will end,” he wrote. “I see little probability that their efforts will be brought to an end and the dignity of government supported without bloodshed. Yet, once a single drop is drawn, not even the most prophetic spirit will, in my opinion, be able to determine when it will cease flowing.”
General Lincoln knew there was no easy answer. The root cause of this growing insurrection was related to state issues like debt and property rights; issues in which the federal government, operating under the Articles of Confederation, had no ability to intervene. Lincoln also knew that other states faced similar issues. If Massachusetts’ citizens could sink into such a state of disillusionment as to pick up arms against their duly elected leaders, it could happen anywhere. The mob would supplant the law and trample liberty.
And that scared him to death.
Governor’s Mansion
Boston, Massachusetts
January 4, 1787
“You asked to see me, Governor?”
General Benjamin Lincoln had rushed north from Hingham as soon as he’d received the governor’s message that morning.
“Yes, I have requested your presence, and I think you fully comprehend why,” Bowdoin said.
“The mobs?” Lincoln asked. Massachusetts’ situation had deteriorated even further in the month since he had written back to Washington. Rumors had even been circulating that the Regulators intended to attack Boston itself.
“Of course,” answered Bowdoin. “We require a larger, more reliable force than General Shepard’s militia to crush this pox.”
“That will require patriotism . . . and, of course, gold and silver,” said Lincoln, well aware of the financial difficulties the commonwealth was already suffering.
“Funds will be provided, General,” answered Bowdoin. “I have taken it upon myself to raise them privately from one hundred thirty-five of the commonwealth’s most substantial and patriotic citizens. Men who know the value of the rule of law.” What the governor did not say, but the wily Lincoln knew very well, was that these men were not merely patriotic, they also now owned the bulk of the state’s debt—most of which had been acquired at a substantial, and now very profitable, discount. The money Bowdoin raised from increased taxes went to them. Their pledge of capital to fight the rioters was motivated by their desire to ensure that the current system, which supported their wealth, remained in place.
Motivations aside, this was the solution that Lincoln had already suggested to George Washington. The commonwealth’s men of property would have to dig into their pockets to fund an armed force that would guarantee both their property and the rule of law.
And that was just fine with Lincoln.
“I’m at your service,” he said to the governor.
Continental Arsenal
Springfield, Massachusetts
January 19, 1787
A ragtag stream of ill-clad, freezing men marched through the falling snow up a steep New England hillside. They resembled white-covered scarecrows, with rags around their heads to secure their shabby three-cornered hats in place and rags bound around their feet to stave off frostbite.
“Column halt!” the man on horseback barked. “Take shelter indoors! You’ve earned it, men!”
“Damn right we have!” muttered one of the scarecrows, ice forming around his beard. “We’ve marched a good twenty miles today!”
The men were Massachusetts militia, and the person shouting orders was none other than Major General William Shepard, the same man who had rolled out the cannons in his face-off against Daniel Shays, Luke Day, and their band of Regulators at the Springfield courthouse nearly four months earlier.
Governor Bowdoin may not have possessed much faith in the commonwealth’s militia, but General Shepard still did to a degree.
A thought—no, a fear—had raced through Shepard’s mind for months. Springfield possessed more than a courthouse; it also possessed a Continental Arsenal, chock-full of everything an army might need: 7,000 muskets and bayonets, 1,300 pounds of gunpowder, and 200 tons of shot. These supplies could transform a disorganized rabble into a formidable army capable of marching right to the State House in Boston.
If the mobs seized that arsenal, Shepard’s men would be cut to ribbons against them. So might General Lincoln’s new contingents. If they made it all the way to Boston and overtook the State House . . . well, he couldn’t even bring himself to think what might happen then.
And that was why William Shepard was marching his men through snow, ice, and cold to seize and secure that arsenal before Shays and Day finally thought of it.
But Shepard was already too late.
Daniel Shays and Luke Day had thought of it.
Parsonage of the First Church of West Springfield
West Springfield, Massachusetts
Four months earlier: September 1786
Even the most agitated of the Regulators grappled with the question: could their rebellion really succeed? Those who thought it could were left with another question even more difficult to answer: Was this rebellion just?
The Regulators certainly had their grievances. Boston called the tune, and the rest of the state danced to it. Restrictive property ownership regulations kept good men from serving in public office. Squalls and storms often kept western Massachusetts representatives away from the capitol during key legislative votes. Still, this was not 1775 or 1776. There was representation now, imperfect as it might be.
Was it right to rebel against a lawful, elected government? Should our fight be in the State House instead of the streets?
The questions gnawed at Luke Day, and that is why he found himself seeking out the Reverend Dr. Joseph Lathrop, minister of West Springfield’s First Church. Lathrop was a man Day respected and trusted. So, after finding him at the church, Day shared a secret: He and his men were going to march on the arsenal across the Connecticut River in Springfield, seize it, and kick over the whole rotten cabal in Boston.
“You’re wrong, Luke,” Lathrop said.
“Well . . . no . . . I . . . I’m . . . not!” Day stammered, fidgeting with the brass buttons on his uniform coat as he spoke.
“You’re wrong,” chided the white-haired Lathrop, jabbing a bony finger into Day’s chest, “and you know it. Your very manner tells me you know it. A resort to arms for supposed grievances is wrong. And your men know it, too. The path down which you lead them will destroy them—and you as well. If you refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured by the sword.”
The conversation ended abruptly, there was not even a terse good-bye, but Lathrop’s words had found their mark. Luke Day might never admit it, but he was having second thoughts.
Daniel Shays’ Headquarters
Wilbraham, Massachusetts
January 24, 1787
Armies were on the march.
General Benjamin Lincoln had quickly assembled an army at Roxbury and was bringing it toward Springfield via Worcester. But the Regulators were marching, too. Three separate groups of them raced against time to head off Lincoln and seize the arsenal from General Shepard’s militia: Luke Day’s 400 men advanced from West Springfield; Captain Shays’ nearly 1,200 Regulators encamped near Palmer; and 400 Berkshire County men, led by Eli Parsons, another Revolutionary War veteran, marched from Chicopee. Combined, they had a huge size advantage over Shepard’s 1,100 men.
Shays hurriedly dispatched orders to Day and Parsons: rendezvous with him before the arsenal in the waning sunlight at 4:00 P.M. on Thursday, January 25.
The clock was ticking. Seize the arsenal before Benjamin Lincoln arrived to reinforce Shepard’s militia or do not seize it at all.
Zenas Parsons’ Tavern
Springfield, Massachusetts
January 24, 1787
The atmosphere in the normally sleepy town of Springfield was electric. From the snow-covered streets to the handful of businesses that dotted its commercial area, a sense of excitement and dread filled the town. Nowhere was this sense of foreboding greater than at Zenas Parsons’ Tavern.
While some towns had flocked to the Regulators’ cause, Springfield was not counted among them. Its citizenry had stubbornly held loyal to their elected government. They had no appetite for seizing courthouses or marching on arsenals.
They also, like most people across the states, carefully scrutinized strangers stopping at the local taverns, especially in times of rebellion and sedition like the one they found themselves in now.
“Who’s the bumpkin that just sauntered in?” whispered a man attired in brown. It was a cold night and he was wisely sitting near the blazing fireplace.
“Can’t say I know,” came the answer from a bearded man in blue. “But I do reckon that he came into town on the West Springfield road.”
His companion nodded wisely. Zenas Parsons’ newest customer wasn’t from these parts, and West Springfield was where Luke Day’s “troops” were quartered. One didn’t need to be Ben Franklin to figure out what that might mean.
The man in brown sauntered over to the tavern keeper to refresh his drink. While waiting, he engaged the curly-haired stranger in conversation. “Terrible day to be out,” he said.
“That’s why I’m in here. A little grog never hurt anyone in this weather—nor in any other sort of weather!” the stranger laughed.
“No, not at all,” said the man in blue, who was now standing on the stranger’s other side. “Hope you don’t have much further to go. Otherwise, you’ll need two glasses of grog!”
“No, not far. Just over to Wilbraham.”
Wilbraham was where Shays was encamped.
“Say,” said the man in blue, “it looks like the wind’s picking up out there. I wouldn’t head outside until it lets up. Maybe another ration of grog will do the trick—on me! We like to treat strangers proper here in Springfield.”
Several grogs later, the stranger was . . . groggy. A few more and he slumped over unconscious.
Quickly, the locals pawed through his coat. There, inside his pocket, was an envelope sealed securely with red wax.
A peek inside might very well be worth the price of a few glasses of grog.
Boston Post Road
Five miles from Springfield
January 25, 1787
“There’s a rider coming forward, sir . . . I think . . .”
“Yes, I think so, too,” answered Daniel Shays, though the descending snow made seeing anything a winter’s guessing game.
“Do you measure him as friend or foe, sir?”
Shays, at the head of his column of men, pulled his spyglass up to his eye. “Both.”
“Both, sir? How may that be?”
“Friend once. But now, I doubt it. It’s Captain Samuel Buffington. I served with him in the Massachusetts Line. I rather doubt he is here to discuss old times.”