Miracles and Massacres (4 page)

In all, fifteen hundred men had descended upon Northampton's courthouse, where Hampshire County's Court of Common Pleas was scheduled to be in session that morning. The sheer size of the crowd made it difficult for the three bewigged, black-robed justices and their clerk to enter the courthouse. “Allow us in,” Judge Eleazar Porter demanded. Derisive laughter rang through the crowd. “You might care to rethink that request, your honor,” snapped Captain Luke Day. “It looks like the people have a different idea about who's meeting where and when from now on.” Day liked talking as much as he liked soldiering.

The three judges nervously conferred. After agreeing that there was no way they could force their way through this jostling, threatening mob, they retreated to a nearby inn. No cases would be heard today and no debtors or tax delinquents arraigned. Soon these judges would mount their steeds and make the wisest decision possible—to ride out of town.

It wasn't until midnight that the mobbers finally departed from Northampton's courthouse. They were tired but emboldened, and their actions had ignited a spark that would lead to an explosion in Pelham and, eventually, in all of western Massachusetts.

Daniel Shays' Farmhouse

Pelham, Massachusetts

August 30, 1786

If Daniel Shays was concerned about changing his reputation, he had a funny way of doing it. The previous morning his neighbors had asked him to lead them on their march to Northampton. He refused. Fifty-year-old Deacon John Thompson took command in his place.

But, now, after a night of rest and some deep thinking, Shays was having second—and third—thoughts. Who was better suited to lead his aggrieved neighbors than he, a man as burdened by debt and Boston oppression as anyone, a patriot who had never even been paid for his wartime service?

The more he thought about it, the more he realized that he had been a fool to turn down his neighbor's request. Daniel Shays resolved to step forward and lead.

Supreme Judicial Court

Hampden County Courthouse

Springfield, Massachusetts

September 26, 1786

The virus spread, hopscotching from town to town and county to county.

An epidemic had begun.

Three hundred men shut down the state's Supreme Judicial Court when it tried to meet at Worcester. A drunken horde—men too poor to pay their debts, but not to buy rum—pulled the same trick when Middlesex County's court convened at Concord. Mob rule struck again at Great Barrington in the Berkshires and at Taunton, south of Boston, near the Rhode Island border. Soon the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court would indict eleven protest leaders for rioting and sedition.

Today, that court was due to convene in Springfield and, with a thousand protesters, or “Regulators,” as they now called themselves, surrounding the courthouse, it looked like the pattern might repeat itself yet again.

“A fine morning for a court closing,” joked Captain Luke Day to the ex-officer standing beside him.

“Indeed,” answered Daniel Shays.

Day eyed Supreme Court justice William Cushing attempting to wade through the mob and called out to him: “No trying of debtors today! The road back to Boston lies yonder! I would advise you to take it, sir! Now!”

From around the corner another column of men approached.

Ah, reinforcements
, thought Shays.

He could not have been more wrong.

The men now marching toward him were responding to a far different kind of call: that of the rule of law. They formed uneven ranks in the sun-drenched courthouse square, but they snapped to a quick and soldierly attention on a sudden call of “Halt!” from Major General William Shepard, the pudgy, fifty-year-old commander of the Massachusetts state militia. “Cannon!” he barked, and a brace of cannons quickly rolled into place. Crews scurried to put them in working order—their barrels aimed squarely at Luke Day's poorly armed Regulators.

With the reinforcements in place, Chief Justice Cushing and his fellow judges gingerly entered the courthouse. Their victory, however, proved hollow. No business was conducted that day as not even one juror had dared run Luke Day's gauntlet to appear for duty.

It was difficult to say who had won the day: General Shepard or Captain Day. But one thing was clear: the forces of the law had finally entered the fight—and so had Daniel Shays.

Daniel Shays' Farmstead

Pelham, Massachusetts

October 23, 1786

“What are you writing so furiously, Daniel?” Abigail Shays asked her husband.

Daniel hesitated before answering.

General Shepard's unexpected intervention at the Springfield courthouse the previous month had angered Daniel Shays. It did not frighten him, which might have made things easier since he would have simply retreated to his own little world and abandoned any contact with the Regulators. No, the show of force was an insult, and Daniel Shays did not like to be insulted.

“Abigail,” said Shays, “I have already put on my uniform. I think it is time to add my name to this fight for our liberties. Listen to this, it is going out to all the counties and towns that stand with us.”

Pelham, Oct. 23, 1786

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.