Читать книгу Blood of Tyrants - Logan Beirne - Страница 18

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The Shadow Government

The American “shadow” government was unable to reverse the nation’s descent into anarchy. This fact was made abundantly clear to Washington and the rest of the nation by a poor farmer in the Massachusetts backcountry.

Daniel Shays, the uneducated son of an Irish indentured servant, toiled on a small farm with his wife and six children. His dark, accusatory eyes, doughy chin, pug nose, and drooping jowls made him resemble a bulldog, which was a fitting match to his personality.¹ A “smart, active” man with “much taste for the military,” he was a fiery veteran of the Revolution who had courageously fought in multiple decisive battles.² But he had fallen on tough times after the war ended.

In a microcosm of the nation’s general suffering after the grand Revolution, Shays’ family was brought to the brink of financial ruin by the deep recession and rampant inflation that gripped the country. Like many other veterans, he had yet to receive his military pay and pension from the cash-strapped government and was therefore unable to pay down his debts. He lost possession of half his farmland to creditors. And he was relatively fortunate, since many of his neighbors lost everything.³ Even worse, others were carted off to jail, since any debt above a mere five dollars was cause for imprisonment. The people of Massachusetts—the hotbed of unrest that had started the Revolution just a few years earlier—were again rearing for a fight.

Reigniting his firebrand spirit and oratory, Shays led his fellow debtors in protest. The frustrated group started out peacefully, calling for debtor relief and government reform. But the financiers were unwilling to lose money on their loans and continued to go after the delinquent farmers’ lands. Unmoved by the farmers’ pleas, the Massachusetts government refused to halt the foreclosures. Instead, the state infuriated the farming communities by suggesting they exercise patience and frugality.⁴ From the farmers’ perspective, it was preposterous to ask them to be any more patient as their lands were confiscated. It was impossible for them to be any more frugal when they were having trouble just feeding their families.

Enraged, the protesting farmers seized local courthouses—without courts, the creditors could not foreclose on them. Meeting with success, Shays’ mob grew bolder. During the dog days of summer in 1786—barely two and a half years after the official conclusion of the Revolution—Shays donned his Continental Army uniform once again and led a crowd armed with muskets, pitchforks, and clubs to the highest court in Massachusetts. A reluctant leader who yearned to preserve peace amidst the protest, Shays negotiated the peaceful surrender of the courthouse; however, such a transgression would not go unanswered by the state.

Declaring that he would “vindicate the insulted dignity of government,” the governor of Massachusetts sent the state’s militia to confront the insurgency.⁵ Governor James Bowdoin was a stern-looking gentleman with a gently cleft chin, arched eyebrows, and a high, aristocratic brow framed by long, regally styled gray hair. A brilliant intellectual in his mid-fifties who had served in the Continental Congress as well as various political posts during the Revolution, he was no stranger to rebellion. But although he had helped to lead the people in their revolt against the British monarchy, he had little sympathy for rebellion against the new republic.

Bowdoin feared that if he did not crush the uprising quickly, the republic for which they had just fought would be lost. Unwilling to allow this “civil War” to “destroy the fair temple of American liberty,”⁶ he vowed to take “vigorous measures [towards] the effectual suppression of the Insurgents.”⁷ Instead, he ended up fanning the flames.

Having inherited enormous wealth from his merchant father, this Harvard-educated member of the Boston elite was far more adept at writing scientific papers in Latin than at empathizing with farmers. He thus became an easy target for the rhetoric of the brewing class war. The poor farmers viewed Bowdoin as yet another wealthy Boston merchant seeking to oppress them. The firestorm spread further, and Shays was unable to mediate a peaceful resolution when Bowdoin’s state militia fired on a group of rowdy protesters one hot summer day. Three farmers fell dead, while the rest scattered in terror. With blood spilled, Shays proclaimed, “The seeds of war are now sown.”⁸ And with that, the farmers began a new revolution. This time they sought to throw off the reins not of the British but of Massachusetts and the new American government.

Calling upon the lingering revolutionary spirit, thousands of famers—many of the very same men who had just fought the British—joined in the so-called “Shays’ Rebellion.” The revolt raged for almost a year, pitting Bowdoin’s Massachusetts establishment army—financed by the wealthy merchants of Boston—against the “common people,” whose champions “tried to make real the vision of justice and equality embodied in our revolutionary declaration of independence,” as a monument to the rebellion put it. Adopting the revolutionary rallying cry, “True Liberty and Justice may require resistance to law,” these class warriors’ uprising led many Americans to fear that the Revolution’s democratic impulse would rage unchecked, pulling the nation into perpetual anarchy.⁹ Democracy was a new experiment for the Americans, and perhaps it was already a failed one.

In bloody skirmishes that pitted neighbor against neighbor, the poorly armed farmers were confronted by the booming cannons and rifles of Bowdoin’s well-trained state militia. Despite Shays’ fierce leadership, his hungry, ill-equipped and ill-trained men were scattered before the Massachusetts militia’s firestorm. Losing battle after battle, the farmers began to return home as the bodies began to pile up in the fields. The rebellion was crushed. With ransoms on the heads of the rebel leaders, Shays fled into hiding in Vermont. He lived on the lam for many months, seeking to escape the Massachusetts gallows.

Governor Bowdoin, meanwhile, suffered politically for his harsh suppression of the rebellion. He was voted out of office and replaced with a more conciliatory administration. The incoming governor pardoned Shays as a step towards reconciliation with the farming communities. Shays was able to return to what was left of his farm and resume his humble existence. Although his rebellion in and of itself was not much of a military threat to the new country, it was significant as a symbolic one. The message of Shays’ Rebellion was clear: the American republic was failing miserably.

Washington could remain on the sidelines no more. He was appalled by the country’s downward spiral. “What gracious God, is man! that there should be such inconsistency and perfidiousness in his conduct?” he lamented. “It is but the other day, that we were shedding our blood to obtain the Constitutions under which we now live; Constitutions of our own choice and making; and now we are unsheathing the sword to overturn them.”¹⁰ Reflecting on the economic and political turmoil all around him, Washington bemoaned how far his nation had fallen:

No morn ever dawned more favourably than ours did; and no day was ever more clouded than the present! . . . Without some alteration in our political creed, the superstructure we have been seven years raising at the expence of so much blood and treasure, must fall. We are fast verging to anarchy and confusion!¹¹

He warned, “the wheels of Government are clogged, and . . . from the high ground on which we stood, we are descending into the vale of confusion and darkness.”¹²

So perilous was the situation that “even respectable characters [spoke] of a monarchical form of Government without horror.” Washington exclaimed, “what a triumph for our enemies to verify their predictions! what a triumph for the advocates of despotism to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal and fallacious!”¹³

Just four years after his glorious victory over America’s bitter British foes, the nation’s founding hero asserted in 1787, “We are either a united people under one head, and for federal purposes; or we are thirteen independent sovereignties, eternally counteracting each other.”¹⁴ Without some sort of federal power that “pervade[d] the whole Union,” Washington could “not conceive” how the United States would survive.¹⁵ The nation needed a new government.

Washington was gravely concerned about his legacy. He was intent on protecting his pedestal in history and feared risking it by coming out of retirement. He agonized over the reputational damage should he throw his support behind government reform only to have it fail. But in the end, he was a man of action and not about to sit idly by while his beloved country unraveled. He readied his trusty horse and set off from his estate to meet with other leaders in a desperate attempt to salvage the United States.