In this learning activity, you will learn about the tumultuous early history of the American republic. Americans had just participated in a successful rebellion against the political authority of Britain. Given this, it is not surprising that many Americans viewed violent acts as a legitimate response to unpopular government policies or actions. In 1786 and 1787, farmers in Western Massachusetts rebelled against efforts to foreclose on their farms by seizing court buildings. In 1794, farmers in Western Pennsylvania rebelled against a tax on liquor. Men and women who felt persecuted by British taxation felt similarly about taxes levied by their own state governments. Ultimately, military force would be used to suppress insurrections.
Enforcing a New Government
Shay’s Rebellion
In 1786 and 1787, a few years after the Revolution ended, thousands of farmers in western Massachusetts were struggling under a heavy burden of debt. Their problems were made worse by weak local and national economies. Many political leaders saw both the debt and the struggling economy as a consequence of the Articles of Confederation which provided the federal government with no way to raise revenue and did little to create a cohesive nation out of the various states. The farmers wanted the Massachusetts government to protect them from their creditors, but the state supported the lenders instead. As creditors threatened to foreclose on their property, many of these farmers, including Revolutionary War veterans, took up arms.
Led by a fellow veteran named Daniel Shays, these armed men, the “Shaysites,” resorted to tactics like the patriots had used before the Revolution, forming blockades around courthouses to keep judges from issuing foreclosure orders. These protestors saw their cause and their methods as an extension of the “Spirit of 1776”; they were protecting their rights and demanding redress for the people’s grievances.
Governor James Bowdoin, however, saw the Shaysites as rebels who wanted to rule the government through mob violence. He called up thousands of militiamen to disperse them. A former Revolutionary general, Benjamin Lincoln, led the state force, insisting that Massachusetts must prevent “a state of anarchy, confusion and slavery.” In January 1787, Lincoln’s militia arrested more than one thousand Shaysites and reopened the courts.
Daniel Shays and other leaders were indicted for treason, and several were sentenced to death, but eventually Shays and most of his followers received pardons. Their protest, which became known as Shays’ Rebellion, generated intense national debate. While some Americans, like Thomas Jefferson, thought “a little rebellion now and then” helped keep the country free, others feared the nation was sliding toward anarchy and complained that the states could not maintain control. For nationalists like James Madison of Virginia, Shays’ Rebellion was a prime example of why the country needed a strong central government. “Liberty,” Madison warned, “may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of power.”
Depiction of Daniel Shays and accomplice Job Shattuck. The American Yawp. A Free and Online, Collaboratively Built American History Textbook, 2017-2018 Edition.
The Whiskey Rebellion
Grain was the most valuable cash crop for many American farmers. In the West, selling grain to a local distillery for alcohol production was typically more profitable than shipping it over the Appalachians to eastern markets. Alexander Hamilton’s whiskey tax thus placed a special burden on western farmers. It seemed to divide the young republic in half—geographically between the East and West, economically between merchants and farmers, and culturally between cities and the countryside.
In the fall of 1761, sixteen men in western Pennsylvania, disguised in women’s clothes, assaulted a tax collector named Robert Johnson. They tarred and feathered him, and the local deputy marshals seeking justice met similar fates. They were robbed and beaten, whipped and flogged, tarred and feathered, and tied up and left for dead. The rebel farmers also adopted other protest methods from the Revolution and Shays’ Rebellion, writing local petitions and erecting liberty poles. For the next two years, tax collections in the region dwindled.
Then, in July 1794, groups of armed farmers attacked federal marshals and tax collectors, burning down at least two tax collectors’ homes. At the end of the month, an armed force of about 7,000, led by the radical attorney David Bradford, robbed the U.S. mail and gathered about eight miles east of Pittsburgh. President Washington responded quickly.
First, Washington dispatched a committee of three distinguished Pennsylvanians to meet with the rebels and try to bring about a peaceful resolution. Meanwhile, he gathered an army of thirteen thousand militiamen in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. On September 19, Washington became the only sitting president to lead troops in the field, though he quickly turned over the army to the command of Henry Lee, a Revolutionary hero and the current governor of Virginia.
As the federal army moved westward, the farmers scattered. Hoping to make a dramatic display of federal authority, Alexander Hamilton oversaw the arrest and trial of a number of rebels. Many were released due to lack of evidence, and most of those who remained, including two men sentenced to death for treason, wereThi soon pardoned by the president. The Whiskey Rebellion had shown that the federal government was capable of quelling internal unrest. But it also demonstrated that some citizens, especially poor westerners, viewed it as their enemy.
Enforcing a New Government
Shay’s Rebellion
EMS History. Shays’ Rebellion. (2012, October 4). [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haDt2Ubc7Ao
The Whiskey Rebellion
Scott, T. The Whiskey Rebellion. (2011, October 31). [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwenAlLvbFY
Summary
Today, it is difficult to imagine an armed insurrection emerging to threaten state governments in the United States. In the late eighteenth century, this threat was all too real. The American republic was born out of a rebellion against taxation and government authority. Many of the men and women who participated in the American Revolution remained wary of the power of government. During the Revolution, public acts of resistance were used to protest taxation and other unpopular policies. This traditions carried over into the early republic. The two most significant insurrections in the early republic were Shay’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion. It is noteworthy that each insurrection was led by farmers on the western frontier.
