InFocus featuring Daniel Bullen (Author, Daniel Shays's Honorable Rebellion)

From the 22 News Plus Studio, this is 22 News in Focus with Patrick Berry. Hello, everyone, and welcome to this edition of In Focus. I am your host, Patrick Berry. I'm going to take you into the Wayback Machine, going back to your history classes when you were a kid. You know, for me, it was a long time ago. For many of you, probably the same. We learned about something here in Western Mass called Shays' Rebellion. I kind of vaguely know it. I think it was Revolutionary War era type thing, but I'm excited because a local author, Daniel Bullen, is joining me today. He wrote a book about it. He is the author of Daniel Shays' Honorable Rebellion, and Daniel Bullen is here to talk about Daniel Shays. So I appreciate you coming in to kind of remind me and all of our viewers why this instance in American history that happened right here in the Pioneer Valley, kind of bring it back to the forefront and why it's so important. And were there things that maybe we were taught in school that were wrong? Uh-oh, you're already out of your head. Let's correct this. But I first want to ask you, what got you interested in Shays' Rebellion? Sure. And thanks for having me in. I found, as I say in the introduction to this book, I found the story on the side of the road. Basically, Basically, I was driving up Route 202. I'm from Pelham up towards Shutesbury, and I saw the Daniel Shays Highway sign. I was fairly new in the area, and I just went home and started reading. I was like, who's this Daniel Shays guy? And it was 2012, and Occupy was recent, and Bernie Sanders was on the scene, and We Are the 99% was something people were chanting. And a lot of that lingo of class warfare, the yellow vest, like as I was writing just in France, the anti-austerity protests in Europe, I just kept seeing this story happening. And when I was reading about Daniel Shays, Um, and there are 19 books with the title Daniel Shays, you know, Shays' Rebellion. It's, it's thing, it's something that's been covered. Um, but nobody told the story, like nobody told the story of what it meant for these people to live through these experiences on a week to week basis. And what I found was, and the reason kind of the obstacle to getting it published was I had to learn the Shays' Rebellion that everybody learned in school and explain, Why? That was the wrong story. Really? Right? Like for deliberate reasons, right? So what you get in school, and it's in the mass standards, right? Like the kids, middle school kids are getting it right now. Um, is Shays' Rebellion was the unrest that led to the Constitution, right? Uh, the farmer, this, so this is the story you get. Farmers were unhappy about taxes. So they tried to overthrow the government, which is already nonsense, right? But so this is the story. The farmers were unhappy about taxes. They tried to overthrow the government. This showed the founding fathers that they needed a constitutional convention in order to strengthen the Articles of Confederation and institute a strong centralized government. The small print for that, which they leave out, the reason they're teaching that story from where I sit, call me a socialist, whatever you like, is they're telling that story to say we need a strong federal government to protect against dangerous poor people. That was the threat. So you've got Henry Knox in Boston while these events are going. Six weeks into these events, Henry Knox is in Boston writing to George Washington in Mount Vernon because George Washington had retired after the Revolution. He was like, I'm out. I want to start planning for my land business out in Ohio, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, in Western Virginia. It's like, leave me out. I did my job. And the wealthy, you know, the elites who we call the founding fathers were saying, these Articles of Confederation need to be reformed. We need to change the way that our government's going to work. And so they're writing to George Washington saying, we're going to lose everything we gained. Everything we fought for in the revolution is going to go away. So they're making existential threats to him in Mount Vernon. But they took the local story that people lived through here. And they just nationalized it and turned it into the story about America and the Constitution. And so that's the story that we've been taught is Daniel Shays' Rebellion was the unrest that led to the Constitution. But just the last thought to finish that is, when I read the stories and I went through the people's history and I made the timeline for how this thing started with economic policy, petitions. Centralized petitions, nonviolent protests for six months, and then peaceful elections that won the reforms for the people. I thought this is a great story to tell about. Regular people need to get together from time to time and show the general populace that when the government gets out of alignment, we need to bring it back into line. So that's the story that I've been really delighted to tell because I think it reflects really well on who we are in Massachusetts and also who we are as Americans. And kind of fast forwarding a little bit, you see that globally, like unrest from the populace to kind of fight back a little bit. So was Shays' Rebellion, did it happen? Anything to do with economic issues, taxes? Oh, totally, totally, 100%. And I always need to point out, like the first thing that needs to be said about that is that the economic policies were coming from the government in Boston, right? This is a Western Mass Boston story to some degree. It's also a story about how governments govern. Reverend, and- There were a group of people in Boston who knew how to administer a state. They knew how to make the compromises that would keep the merchants in and keep the people in and kind of keep the peace. What happened in Massachusetts was all those people left and went back to Boston after 1774, right? All those people with that experience running a state took off because the tension between Boston, you know, between Britain and Massachusetts was increasing. Right. And the people who came up who are making the currency policies during that are leading Leading to these protests that I'm talking about. We're wealthy elites, these elite merchants who didn't have experience in government. And so I need to point out, I like to point it out, I also need to point out that all 12 states had the same exact economic problems after the revolution, all 13 states. But the other 12, they had some protests and they just rearranged the economic policy and they rebalanced the requirements so that the merchants and the people could get along without trouble. So this wasn't a Massachusetts isolated incident? The rebellion part was a totally Massachusetts isolated incident. Everybody else, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, they had some protests and they sorted it out and they took the economic pressure off. And I could get into the weeds of how that happened with depreciation of government debts and allowing people to pay in paper money, allowing them to pay in produce. Those things happened in other states, but in Massachusetts, it was that austerity language that said, no, the government needs to pay its debts in full. Well, and. It was flagrantly unfair what was going down. We are coming up on our first commercial break, but I do want to get into the weeds and the details when we come back. I need to pull the rug out from the violent insurrection. People were just angry about taxes because it's a lot. When you see what was going on, it's a very different story. Good segue. Stay with us, folks. We're back in just a minute. This is 22 News in Focus with Patrick Berry. This is 22 News in Focus with Patrick Berry. Welcome back, everyone, to this edition of In Focus. I'm your host, Patrick Berry. Sitting across the desk from me is author Daniel Boland. Mr. Boland, thank you so very much for joining me. I appreciate it. We're talking about Shays' Rebellion. You did a lot of research on it, and there were some things we got wrong in elementary school about Shays' Rebellion. But the one thing that was right was the economic issue, the crisis between Daniel Shay, other farmers, and government. Right. Um, Walk me through, going back in time, so you're mid, late 1700s. What's going through the farmer's mind that caused this? Rebellion, this insurrection, whatever you want to call it. Sure. So the economic, I mean, without getting into the weeds about the economics of it, there were economic shortfalls after the revolution. Massachusetts sent 92,000 men to fight in 38 regiments during the war, second only to Virginia. They'd made a huge financial commitment to support all of that. The story everybody knows is that they took out a lot of debt from French and Dutch financiers. They also took out a lot of debt from Boston merchants. And when those Boston merchants subscribed their money to the war, they were also given receipts, war bonds, that told them that they were going to get that money back with 6% per year interest. So there was a class of people in Boston for whom this was an investment to make. And those war bonds at the end of the war... The government was in poor shape economically. They had their state. Massachusetts government? Massachusetts government. All the states, but, and the federal government, everybody was not doing well. Okay. The state government in Massachusetts had gone into the war with a million, a hundred thousand pounds of, of state debt. By the time the war is done, they've got 1.5 million pounds of state debt in a, in a state that's bringing in 60,000 pounds a year, right? So there's no way this is going to happen. A lot of the other states and the federal government depreciated those debts and they wrote down the value of those war bonds. But in Massachusetts, they voted to pay those things in full. Here's the problem. And this is the part where I really need to pull the rug out from this idea that the farmers were just angry about taxes. And I'm going to just hold on to the idea of the war bonds for a second, because they're going to come back into play momentarily. But you'll see why. The farmers were the first creditors to the state. They gave their service. They showed up. They told they were going to be paid as soldiers. They were going to be paid to serve. They gave their time. They served out their enlistments. A lot of times, in the beginning, they were paid with paper money, which lost its value immediately. They just used it to stuff holes in their boots. Then they were paid with promissory notes, which are called the soldier's notes in all the parlance in the histories. Those soldiers' notes also lost their value. Nobody expected the government was going to be able to pay them. So at the end of the war, people are coming back. They need whatever they can get. So the farmers, the soldiers, the veterans gave those notes up to whoever would give them any cash. They gave them up for 10 to 15 cents on the dollar. Wow. Right? But those notes are legal tender. That's an investable. That's receipt of an investment. And the government, people in the government start collecting those notes. Financiers, speculators start collecting those notes. And the rumors, oh, well, they might pay them. Okay, so the prices go up, and then the prices go down when they think the government's not going to pay them. So when James Bowdoin, Governor James Bowdoin, came into office in 1786, his promise was, we're going to pay these notes in full. And Samuel Adams was right at his side saying, we need to make sure that these people honor the state's debts and pay in full, even though, and they didn't expect, I don't know what their thinking was, that's not written down, but they created this problem by deciding that they were going to pay these things in full. Because what they did was, and just to get this clear, they were going to tax the people to pay the full value of the people's own war pay. To speculators who had bought those notes for 10, 15, 20 cents on the dollar. So people weren't just angry about taxes. But here's the thing. What happens when people can't pay those taxes? What happens when they don't have hard coin issued by the state? They only have that worthless paper money. They only have their farms. They only have their produce. If they can't come up with that hard coin. And in a lot of towns, there was not enough coin to pay the taxes that would have been due. So where are the people going to come up with it is this question that the government is driving down the people's throats. And when people can't pay it, what happens? Their farms are seized. They're taken by the bailiff. They're taken to the court. They're evicted. And at that time, the households included the furniture. So you're thrown out with your clothes and your tools in a cart and whatever livestock you could lose herd to a relative's house. And so what the people, and then at that point, the property, the livestock is going to be sold at auction. And who's buying anything at auction in an economic downturn after the war, right? So what the people are looking at is we just made extraordinary sacrifices to defeat the most powerful army on the planet, and we just sent them packing, and our reward is for these elites in government to come down and pay heavier taxes that are going to push us off our land, and the way they expressed it was, they're going to bring us under lordships again, right? So they're going to make us tenants on our own land, right? So it's what they fought against. And out here, where they were fierce advocates during the French and Indian War, then during the revolution, they called themselves regulators. They didn't call them, you know, they were called Shaysites because Daniel Shays' name got put on this. But they called themselves regulators because they all firmly believed, enough to show up with guns at the courthouses to interrupt the flow of their government, they all believed that they had the ability as normal people to regulate the affairs of their region. And they effectively did it. So was this... A violent time? No, no, no, no. Because you just said they show up at courthouses with guns and whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, this is super important. My elementary school brain is saying this was a violent clash. And again, this is why I say that the story is being told to discredit the poor farmers. Because when they came to the courts, they came with fife and drum. They came with uniforms. They came with guns at their shoulders. But what they were saying when they showed up at those courts was... We're not that democratic mob you've heard about, the democratic horde. It was the same vocabulary you hear today. We call them socialists now. At the time, the fear was the levelers were coming to level the wealth of the country, to redistribute the property. They're going to take stuff that's not theirs. And that was the popular caricature that was in a lot of the editorials. And the Hampshire Gazette was founded in September of 1786 to give merchants a place to call people lazy, no good. Like, they were writing satirical letters with... With names like Simon Dreadwork and Tom Seldom Sober, like not making it up. So they're calling people lazy degenerates who are encouraging foreign manufacturers, which is their code for they're drinking a lot of Jamaican rum. Right? And so we've got this incoherent caricature of Daniel Shays as a drunken rabble-rouser on one hand, and a potential tyrant who's going to rule over the state with an iron fist. Right. And none of it could be true. It's the same stuff you hear today. Those are the same caricatures you hear when people are stirring up this kind of class warfare language is, well, their concerns aren't legitimate. They're lazy. They just don't want to contribute. These are people who just fought the war and contributed, right? So all they're asking for, and we can talk after we come back from the break about the different protest traditions, because they were part of a firm protest tradition that came from England, and that was part of what led to the revolution. They were just replaying that script of, hey, the government's kind of out of alignment. Maybe we should do some things to line things back up. Like, just hold the phone for a second. We've got to work things out, right? So that was the tradition that they were out of, which... There are other traditions which we have in America, and we can talk about that. Fantastic. We are up on our second commercial break. Still plenty more to talk about. So join us when we're back in just a minute. This is 22 News in Focus with Patrick Berry. This is 22 News in Focus with Patrick Berry. Welcome back, everyone, to this edition of In Focus. I'm your host, Patrick Berry. Sitting across the desk from me today is author Daniel Bullen. He wrote the book Daniel Shays' Honorable Rebellion. Daniel Bullen, thank you so very much for joining me today. I appreciate you giving me some of your time. When we went to break, we started talking about the myth of violence in Shays' Rebellion. I think before we get to that, how long was Shays' Rebellion? Was Years long or was it like 20 days, you know, did we get it wrong? Like the, the, the, the length of it. Yeah. So one of the subtitles for that was in consideration for my book was, um, a year of resistance because the thing typically starts, the clock starts in July 7th, July 18th, 1786, when the legislature in Boston adjourned without hearing anybody's complaints. The people in the town sent petitions by the dozen to Boston. They were all systematically ignored. The House might take something up and pass it and then the Senate would squash it. And then the governor would veto it if it even made it through. through. And so by late August, the people are looking at those first foreclosure courts are going to start meeting. And at those courts, property is going to start changing hands, right? And so this is the place where the people finally said, they had one in Hatfield at the end of August, the 22nd to 25th of August, 1786, 50 towns sent delegates to say, wow, we don't like the way this is going. And so they issued, they sent one big petition to Boston and they were asking for things like the ability to pay in, in, um, In paper money, which lost its value a little bit to adjust the values, they were asking for the ability to pay in produce. They were asking for a reduction in court fees. They even asked for the state government to be moved west from Boston to Worcester because of the cost of sending delegates to participate in the legislature. It was a couple-day event. Yeah, especially when it's winter. I mean, part of the story of the Massachusetts, the 1780... Sorry, 1779 constitutional draft, which was written before the 1780 Constitution, which the state followed, they had a hard time approving it because there was a big snowstorm and people couldn't get to Boston. These are the problems that they're trying to solve. Problems we face today. Yeah. So. August 29th was the first protest in Northampton. Then you get protests in Worcester, Concord, Taunton, and Great Barrington. In the beginning, first couple weeks of September, government responds. Basically, Samuel Adams says, he who rebels against the laws of a monarchy, that's one thing. But he who rebels against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death. This is what the government is coming down with. And then the people... There was one court that met in Worcester the late part of September where they issued arrest warrants. And then Daniel Shays stepped in and took kind of leadership of, I think, to introduce restraint to make sure that nobody got out of line. Because then that the circuit, when the judges are riding that circuit, they came from Worcester down to Springfield to have the criminal court issue arrest warrants for the people who had interrupted the previous courts. Um, that's when Daniel Shays is leading 2,500 guys and they're shutting down the criminal court and that's where things started to escalate. Then the government late October responds with a riot act, more inflammatory, no negotiation, just inflammatory. If you don't disperse, when we tell you to disperse, we're going to arrest you, take you to Boston for a year in prison, whip you 39 times every three months. You're going to forfeit your property to the state. And the government indemnified deputies if they killed or injured protesters in the process of arresting them. So the people who just fought a war against British tyranny are looking at those same measures coming down from Boston. And these are the Boston elite that are putting out these edicts about how, and like you said, there's no discussion. It's just, this is what happens. Right, they're not sending envoys out from Boston to say, okay, what can we do? How can we make this work? They just came down with a lot of this heavy-handed language. And you can really see the difference between that cosmopolitan, coastal Atlantic culture. I mean, they're reading Enlightenment scientific journals about crop rotation and metallurgy and astronomy, all this new stuff. The people out here are farming the same way that their ancestors have always been farming, right? And so you see a real split between those cultures. But the people out here had felt like, this is our land. We made it. We took it. I mean, Pelham Pelham, Montague, that's not great land for farming. I mean, Montague's on the floodplain, but Coleraine and Pelham were sister cities. And these guys are working it to get anything out of those sandy, rocky hills. So did it ever at any point become a violent clash? Okay, so here's what it went. Here's how it went. And my answer is no, it was not. It was not violent. When the men were organized and they showed up with discipline, they showed up to say, we're not the violent mob you've heard about. Um, small footnote, we do have that tradition in America of using violence to interrupt the courts. We saw this on January 6th. We saw it largely in the period from 1865 to 1877 when the South fundamentally, you know, systematically negated federal law, right? Through arson, murder, the intimidation. This is why Heather Cox Richardson, the presidential historian, wrote how the South won the war, right? Stetson Kennedy, the historian, also did after Appomattox, same thing. The North didn't win the Civil War. That's the propaganda. They're just trying to hide the fact that that law stayed in effect. So to fast forward through it, government issued arrest warrants in January. There was a confrontation at the Springfield Armory. January 25th, the men were approaching the armory. They said they were there for barracks and stores. They were told they would be fired upon. And their response was, it's what we want. Why would you say that? The reason they said that was because in their protest tradition, in their nonviolent protest tradition, whoever shoots loses. And we saw what happened when two people were killed in Minneapolis, when two protesters were out, again, protesting ICE. When those guys were killed, everybody came out and the government had to change tactics, right? So whoever can take those bloody shirts and wave them in the marketplace, in the editorial pages. They have the higher hand. Now they have, because here's the thing. What we call Shays' Rebellion, what I would call the regular people called the regulation was not a fight for property and territory and resources. It was a fight for the hearts and minds of the people. Who are we going to be as a populace? We're going to be as Americans. Right. And the people are saying. The regulators are saying, we can trust ourselves, we can regulate our own territory, we're regular people, we can do this work ourselves. And the government in Boston is saying, you need to follow our laws, you need to obey, and that's where the real tension happens. So January, there's the fight at the Arsenal, there's the shots fired. Government cannon fired at regular people, four killed, 20 wounded. Fast forward, April 1 is there's elections and Governor James Bowdoin is pushed out. Out here, it was three to one against. So picture a 75-25 election. In Boston, it was two to one against. So picture a 66-33 election. And this is why when you get Thomas Jefferson in France listening to these reports, he said, can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honorably conducted? That's where I took the title of my book God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. And so what he's holding up in Jefferson's small-D democratic idea is these are people who can hold their government to account. At the same time, though, it pains me to say George Washington is writing to a friend in his letters saying mankind, when left to their own devices, cannot be trusted with their own government. So that's the story we're telling. But the violence... was like sporadic after the effect, like personal score settling. But when the people were disciplined, when the people were together, they were disciplined. There's not a record of even a stone being thrown through a courthouse window. What a great story. Make sure you pick up the book, folks. It's Daniel Shays' Honorable Rebellion. Author is Daniel Bullen, who's sitting across the desk from me. What? How much we got wrong? Yeah. Thank you so very much. Thanks for having me in to correct the record a little. This is 22 News in Focus with Patrick Berry.