over the legislature and were issuing paper money. In New Hampshire, several hundred men, in September of 1786, surrounded the legislature in Exeter, asking that taxes be returned and paper money issued; they dispersed only when military action was threatened.
Daniel Shays entered the scene in western Massachusetts. A poor farm hand when the Revolution broke out, he joined the Continental army, fought at Lexington, Bunker Hill, and Saratoga, and was wounded in action. In 1780, not being paid, he resigned from the army, went home, and soon found himself in court for nonpayment of debts. He also saw what was happening to others: a sick woman, unable to pay, had her bed taken from under her.
What brought Shays fully into the situation was that on September 19, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts indicted eleven leaders of the rebellion, including three of his friends, as “disorderly, riotous and seditious persons.” Shays organized seven hundred armed farmers, most of them veterans of the war, and led them to Springfield. As they marched, their ranks grew. Some of the militia joined, and reinforcements began coming in from the countryside. The judges postponed hearings for a day, then adjourned the court.
Now the General Court, meeting in Boston, was told by Governor James Bowdoin to “vindicate the insulted dignity of government.” The recent rebels against England, secure in office, were calling for law and order. Sam Adams helped draw up a riot act and a resolution suspending habeas corpus, to allow the authorities to keep people in jail without trial. At the same time, the legislature moved to make some concessions to the angry farmers, saying certain old taxes could now be paid in goods instead of money.
This didn’t help. Confrontations between farmers and militia now multiplied. But the winter snows began to interfere with the farmers’ trips to the courthouses. When Shays began marching a thousand men into Boston, a blizzard forced them back, and one of his men froze to death.
An army came into the field, led by Gen. Benjamin Lincoln, on money raised by Boston merchants. The rebels were outnumbered and on the run. Shays took refuge in Vermont, and his followers began to surrender. There were a few more deaths in battle, and then sporadic, disorganized, desperate acts of violence against authority: the burning of barns, the slaughter of a general’s horses. One government soldier was killed in an eerie nighttime collision of two sleighs.
Captured rebels were put on trial in Northampton and six were sentenced to death. A note was left at the door of the high sheriff of Pittsfield: “I understand that there is a number of my countrymen condemned to die because they fought for justice.… Prepare for death with speed, for your life or mine is short.”
Thirty-three more rebels were put on trial and six more condemned to death. General Lincoln urged mercy and a Commission of Clemency, but Samuel Adams said: “In monarchy the crime of treason may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.” Several hangings followed; some of the condemned were pardoned. Shays, in Vermont, was pardoned in 1788 and returned to Massachusetts, where he died, poor and obscure, in 1825.
It was Thomas Jefferson, in France as ambassador at the time of Shays’ Rebellion, who spoke of such uprisings as healthy for society. In a letter to a friend he wrote: “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing…. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.… God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.… The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
But Jefferson was far from the scene. The political and economic elite of the country were not so tolerant. They worried that the example might spread. A veteran of Washington’s army, Gen. Henry Knox, founded an organization of army veterans, “The Order of the Cincinnati.” Knox wrote to Washington in late 1786 about Shays’ Rebellion, and in doing so expressed the thoughts of many of the wealthy and powerful leaders of the country: “The people who are the insurgents feel at once their own poverty, compared with the opulent.… Their creed is ‘That the property of the United States has been protected from the confiscations of Britain by the joint exertions of all, and therefore ought to be the common property of all.’”
Alexander Hamilton, an aide to Washington during the war, was one of the most forceful and astute leaders of the new aristocracy. He voiced his political philosophy:
All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people.… The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government.… Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.…
At the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton suggested a president and Senate chosen for life. The Convention did not take his suggestion. But neither did it provide for popular elections, except in the case of the House of Representatives, where the qualifications were set by the state legislatures (which required property holding for voting in almost every state), and excluded women, Indians, and slaves. The Constitution provided for senators to be elected by the state legislators, for the president to be elected by electors chosen by the state legislators, and for the Supreme Court to be appointed by the president.
The problem of democracy in the post-Revolutionary society was not, however, the Constitutional limitations on voting. It lay deeper, beyond the Constitution, in the division of society into rich and poor. For if some people had great wealth and great influence; if they had the land, the money, the newspapers, the church, the educational system—how could voting, however broad, cut into such power? There was still another problem: wasn’t it the nature of representative government, even when most broadly based, to be conservative, to prevent tumultuous change?
It came time to ratify the Constitution, to submit to a vote in state conventions, with approval of nine of the thirteen required to ratify it. In New York, where debate over ratification was intense, a series of newspaper articles appeared, anonymously, and they tell us much about the nature of the Constitution. These articles, favoring adoption of the Constitution, were written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, and came to be known as the Federalist Papers (opponents of the Constitution became known as anti-Federalists).
In Federalist Paper #10, James Madison argued that representative government was needed to maintain peace in a society ridden by factional disputes. These disputes came from “the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.” The problem, he said, was how to control the factional struggles that came from inequalities in wealth. Minority factions could be controlled, he said, by the principle that decisions would be by vote of the majority.
So the real problem, according to Madison, was a majority faction, and here the solution was offered by the Constitution, to have “an extensive republic,” that is, a large nation ranging over thirteen states, for then “it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.…”
As part of his argument for a large republic to keep the peace, James Madison tells quite clearly, in Federalist #10, whose peace he wants to keep: “A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it.”
When economic interest is seen behind the political clauses of the Constitution, then the document becomes not simply the work of wise men trying to establish a decent and orderly society, but the work of certain groups trying to maintain their privileges, while giving just enough rights and liberties to enough of the people to ensure popular support.
In the new government, Madison would belong to one party (the Democrat-Republicans)
