Definition
In 1786, farmers in western Massachusetts, many of them Revolutionary War veterans, faced heavy debts and a state tax that required part of the payment in scarce gold or silver coin. After the legislature in Boston refused relief, about fifteen hundred armed men who called themselves Regulators stopped the county court at Northampton on August 29, 1786, and crowds soon closed other courts. On January 25, 1787, about twelve hundred men led by Daniel Shays, a former Continental Army captain, marched on the Springfield arsenal, where militia under General William Shepard fired cannon into the column and killed four of them. A Massachusetts army paid for with private loans scattered the rebels in early February, and the state later pardoned nearly all of them.
Why it matters on the AP exam
The rebellion convinced many Americans that the Articles of Confederation were too weak to keep order or pay for troops, and it alarmed George Washington, who feared that the union was falling apart. The call for a convention had come first, from the Annapolis meeting of September 1786, but the uprising won over many doubters, and in February 1787 Congress backed the convention that met in Philadelphia that May. Questions use the rebellion for causation, asking how problems under the Articles led to the Constitution, and for comparison with the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, when the new federal government raised an army and enforced its own tax. The rebels' grievances, debts and taxes owed in scarce coin and a legislature that favored eastern creditors, also fit questions about social tensions after the Revolution.
In the sources
“The unhappy time is come in which we have been obliged to shed blood.”
Connections
- Articles of Confederation: Congress had no money or power to help put down the uprising
- Constitutional Convention: met in Philadelphia in 1787 after the uprising convinced many doubters that the Articles needed fixing
- Whiskey Rebellion: a 1794 tax revolt that the new federal government put down with militia