 Good afternoon everyone. I'm John Devenal, President of the Board of Directors of the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum. Thank you for joining us for our first talk of the new year. Today we have Dan Bullen, who is the author of the new book, Daniel Shae's Honorable Rebellion, An American Story. I think the key word here is honorable, as we will soon find out. Please be aware that we are trying something new today. For technical reasons, this talk will be pre-recorded. However, Dan will be available to discuss with you and answer questions immediately after the talk via Zoom. If you are on our mailing list, you should have already received a link to a Zoom session. If you did not have that link, send me an email at Devenal13.comcast.net and we'll send you the link. Before we begin, I would like to take a moment to thank our sponsors. And without them, our museum functions would really not be possible. So, we would like to thank BurlingtonCars.com, 802 Cars, Vermont Humanities, AARP Vermont, and Homelight Investment. At this time, I would like to introduce our speaker. Dan has earned his PhD in American Literature from New York University. He is the author of The Dangers of Passion, The Transcendental Friendship of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, and The Love Lies of the Artist, Five Stories of Creative Intimacy. He currently lives in East Hampton, Massachusetts. All right, Dan, take it away. Okay, thanks so much. Thanks to John Deveno and Ethan Allen Homestead Museum. It's a real pleasure to be able to give this talk. I've been working on this book for, oh, years. And it's always beautiful to get a chance to come out and tell the story. I feel like I found a story that wasn't really well known. As I say in the preface to this book, I found this story on the side of the road. I literally saw a sign that said Daniel Shea's Highway and wondered who this Daniel Shea's fellow was, so I came home and started reading. And I'll just keep you up there so that I keep making eye contact. But I need to see the slides. So, the more I read about this story, the more I found that the story that people lived had been kind of obscured by the history, as people had told it. The story I kept having to dig through was that Shea's Rebellion was the unrest that led to the Constitution. Angry farmers created a disturbance in Vermont, and this scared the founding fathers who saw that they needed to create a stronger federal government, and therefore now we have the Constitution. And that story was told as kind of a warning story about the dangers of poor people organizing. And the more I looked into this story, it was 2012 when I found it, Bernie Sanders was just getting on the scene, Occupy had just happened. What I kept finding was that the people looked a lot less threatening than the stories were giving them credit for. What I found was five months of nonviolent anti-austerity protests. The farmers showed up in very organized protests, never threw a stone through a courthouse window, and they ultimately won their cause. They won in elections. I'm giving the end of the story away, but they won their cause in elections, peaceful elections, two months after they were scattered by the government's army. And everything went back to whatever normal was at the time without the panic. But when you look at the correspondence between the elites, George Washington, Henry Knox, Stephen Higginson, James Bowden, Governor of Massachusetts, you find that the panic that they generated as a result of these protests was really useful for them, for their purposes, in pushing this agenda and updating the Articles of Confederation and turning that into the Constitution. So what I'd like to share with you is kind of less of the book. I'm happy to talk about what I've done in the book. I tried to tell a people's history of these events, kind of from the people's perspective, with less of the distant aloof historian voice, and just show the story as it happened on the ground to the people who lived through it. So this story started in economic crisis. It started after the war was over. The Northern War ended in 1780. Then 1783, they concluded the peace in Paris. And Massachusetts, like all of the other states, was in bad shape economically. The state had carried 100,000 pounds worth of debt before the war. After fielding 92,000 soldiers and 38 regiments, they owed debts of 1.5 million pounds after the war. And this is a state where, as you can see, annual tax receipts were about 60,000 pounds. So they were going to have a hard time paying that, nonetheless. A lot of other states and the federal government, such as it was at the time, depreciated those debts. But in Massachusetts, that was a fight they were having, was to see whether they were going to pay those debts in full or in part or in what part. This crisis was also exacerbated by a British decision in January of 1784 to pass Navigation Acts that closed American shipping off from the West Indies ports. The West Indies ports were the destination for a lot of American goods and a lot of New England's goods, the timber, the beef, that was all going down to the West Indies. And we could tell the story of what that was being used for in the West Indies, but that's part of a different talk for another day. But that economic crisis affected all 13 states. It was only in Massachusetts, though, that we end up with the people taking direct action, bringing guns to the courthouses. I should say also that that 1784 decision triggered what they call the chain of debt pulling tight across New England. So American merchants had imported goods from England. Their warehouses in New Haven and Boston and along the coast were filled with this British merchandise. They owed small payments. The British allowed them to buy on credit. So they owed payments that they had to make every month to keep up on the goods that they had in their warehouses. And when this crisis came in, or when this crisis came along, they couldn't make money by selling those goods or selling other goods in the Indies. So the merchants who sold those goods didn't have money to pay the merchants and distributors. And all of a sudden there was no money for anybody to pay their debts. And everyone ultimately turned on the farmers who also had, you know, were carrying debts to the merchants. But the farmers were where the buck stopped. Literally the buck ran out because they typically traded in goods and produce and tender. And they didn't have paper money very often and certainly didn't have the hard coin that would let them pay the debts, which is what the British were demanding. And currency policy in the colonies and the revolutionary era is also another talk for another time. So as this crisis came down, John Hancock is the governor of Massachusetts, who's Massachusetts first governor in 1780. By 1784, 1785, he's trying to issue paper money to depreciate these debts. He's trying to pass a tender law. And elites in the Senate are keeping that from happening. And in 1785, in April, they had an election. And John Hancock was kind of stepped out. But right before the election happened, actually, he saw that he wasn't going to win. So James Bowden and a cadre of powerful merchants took over. And really, I think it took a long time for me to find this out in my research. But I think one of the most important things I learned in researching this book was that a lot of this crisis started because all of the British administrators who had governed Massachusetts from the time it was founded until the revolution had left and gone back to England. And that left a vacuum for people with administrative experience. And so what you get was basically like private equity guys, you know, wealthy merchants coming up and stepping into government roles. And they just didn't have the experience kind of maintaining strong relationships with the people. And they kind of drove the state into this crisis. That's James Bowden is on the left there. And to the right there is Samuel Adams, who was one of Bowden's chief advisors. And the way that they proposed to solve this economic crisis was to pay all of the state's debts in full. This triggered some outrage among the people. The farmers, as I say here, were not just angry about taxes. They were angry about the fact that they were being taxed to pay war debts in which they themselves were creditors. They had lent the state value in their service. They had never been paid. They served. They lost friends. They lost limbs. I came back traumatized as people do for more. And they had originally been paid in worthless paper money that lost its value as soon as it was printed. They were ultimately paid in promissory notes. They were told even paid in IOUs. And at the end of the war, they sold those notes to whoever would give them hard coin for them or any coin or any value for them. So they sold them to their generals. They sold them to shopkeepers. They sold them to wealthy merchants. And they sold them for two to three shillings on the pound. So 10 to 15% of their value. But those notes stayed in circulation because they still represented value. And the value rose and fell depending on rumors about whether they were going to be paid by the government or at what rate. But nevertheless, they were circulating and men were buying them up, buying them up by the thousands. James Bowden, the governor at this point, owns 2,990 pounds of these notes. And this is at a time when you can buy a farm of 70 acres or farm of 100 acres for 70 pounds. Right? So the regular people who earned that pay are watching this value build up. And this is all taking place in the newspapers. There are exchanges where these rates are all published. Everybody knows that this is what's happening. Also, 35 men at this point by 1785 own 40% of the notes. So when they vote, they have a vested interest in it. And when they vote to pay those notes in full, they're basically voting to pay themselves windfall profits. And when they vote to pay themselves windfall profits and the people can't pay, those people are going to lose their farms. They're going to be seized by the courts. The courts are going to then sell them at auction. And the people with money can then buy those farms up at a discount of 33 to 50%. Or sorry, buy them up at a third to a half of its value. So just to be clear, as you see in the text box there, the people had given up the value of their own war pay. And they were now being asked to pay taxes, to pay that value to speculators who had never fought. So I wouldn't call that angry about taxes. That's not like we need to build a new wharf. So we're going to tax the people to do it. This was really an explicit injustice that was being perpetrated on the people of Massachusetts. And they resented it. And they felt like they hadn't just fought a war at great expense to themselves and their farms in order to come home and be treated this way and really be shown this kind of disrespect. So they gathered at the taverns of Massachusetts. This is a recreation of Conkies Tavern, which was in Pelham, Massachusetts, which was one of the kind of epicenters of opposition. There were many. This was not one man's crusade. Daniel Shays didn't lead the farmers on a crusade, although that was one of the fears they generated. The hearthstone in this image was original. Everything else here is a recreation, but to give you a sense of the flavor. And in these taverns, the people are reading the newspapers, which are tacked to the walls there. And they were all literate. There was high, very high rates of literacy among these farmers. They're reading the newspapers, which are filled with editorials on either side of the issue. The farmers are saying things like complaining that they were being loaded with class rates and lawsuits pulled and hauled by sheriffs, constables, and collectors. And their land was being sold for about one third of its value, our cattle for half. I've been obliged to pay and nobody will pay me, one farmer complained. Again, this was open knowledge. 19 parts of 20 of the public securities were possessed by merchants and opulent gentlemen in the maritime towns, one fellow complained. And the complaint was that they were accumulating fortunes by the general distress. And this is a complaint in Massachusetts that you hear to this day that Massachusetts is split and that Eastern Mass and the city in Boston just are disconnected to the values of Western Mass and that our Western Mass interests aren't considered as much as they might be. There did start to be calls in these newspapers for action on this. Some people, you know, this is one of the other quotes is that we should rise up and put a stop to it and have no more courts nor sheriffs nor collectors nor lawyers. They were afraid that the taxes that this tax burden would turn them into a miserable cruel hearted and wicked people. So this is the people trying to rally support in the populace of newspaper readers for their cause and trying to get people to see that there's been an injustice taking place here. The merchants' editorials, on the other hand, pretty much ignored the economic realities that led to this crisis. And they accused the farmers of being luxurious in their diet, idle and profligate in their manners, and encouragers of foreign manufacturers. They would sign satirical letters with names like Amos Spendthrift, Tom Seldomsober, or Simon Dreadwork. And they were really kind of creating this fear, like what we, I think, hear a little bit with the socialists' accusations now, that this class of, you know, degenerate people were going to threaten every honest landowner. So here's another quote, private property will lie wholly at the mercy of the most idle, vicious, and disorderly set of men in the community. And they created the fear that farmers would overturn the very foundations of our government and constitution and on their ruins erect the unprincipled and lawless domination of one man. So this is the fear mongering. If you think that the Facebook comments are filled with panic and existential crisis now, it was pretty much the same in 1786. The farmers took their concerns to their public meeting houses. Starting in 1785, they started writing very wordy, very kind of almost groveling petitions begging for some kind of relief. The House of Representatives in Massachusetts considered their petitions and looked into them, but the Senate, which was run by the wealthy merchants who had just voted themselves this raise, this windfall profit, universally shot down any requests for paper money, for tender laws, for depreciation of debts, they just wouldn't let it happen. They sent petitions by the dozen, and it wasn't just Pelham. As you can see here, these towns in green are a lot of the towns, some of the towns that sent men to these protests. The cities outlined in orange, Northampton at the top and Springfield there toward the bottom where the courts were. This is a period map, so forgive the roughness of the map. So they're sending petitions, they're sending petitions, they're sending petitions. They're hosting in these towns, they're holding meetings. They're constitutionally authorized meetings where they vote to make themselves a constitutionally authorized body, and they hold these town conventions. And this itself was also a threat to the folks in Boston. They saw this as a usurpation of the state's authority, so there was some resentment of what took place in these meetings and some kind of discounted anything that came out of them. They just thought that the people in the West were these rough cut folks who didn't need to be taken seriously. So in July, this is really when what's known as Shays Rebellion always starts is July 18th, the legislature adjourned without issuing any reforms whatsoever. So the people started to get together. They decided, okay, we're not going to petition as individual towns anymore. They sent 50 towns sent their delegates to Hatfield, which is there and kind of in the center of your screen in blue, just north of Northampton. And they held the Hatfield Convention from August 22nd to 25th of 1786. This has been going on for a year and a half now. The ports have been closed to American shipping since January of 1784. So a lot of people have been letting this thing go on and waiting for waiting for relief. And it's when it's just not coming, they finally said, all right, we're going to have to consider direct action. They didn't take direct action first from Hatfield. They sent a petition with those 50 towns. They made 25 demands. They wanted paper money. They wanted reductions in court fees. They wanted to change the way that representation worked. And they wanted to move the capital from Boston inland at least as far as Worcester, so that they had a better chance of participating. Because sending delegates to Boston for the duration of a session is really expensive if you're a farming town in Western Massachusetts. I've circled Brookfield over there in blue on the right side of your screen. Just I'll come back to that. That's where Daniel Shays kind of part of his story really started. And we'll come back to Springfield as well, because that's where he enters this story. But really, you can see that with this map that the farm towns were up in the hills and the older established towns like Northampton, I think was 1652. Pelham was 1743, right? So it took a long time for people to work themselves up into these hills. So here's our timeline, the 22nd to 25th, they have the Hatfield Convention on August 29th. Daniel Shays was actually asked to lead this first protest to close the foreclosure courts. They were just acting against the courts, the judges who were going to allow debts to be adjudicated, which, you know, watching people's farms be foreclosed. Daniel Shays said he didn't want to lead that. That's not clear why he said no. The man who ultimately led was a civil leader was a deacon, John Thompson led the Pelham contingent. And Luke Day, who was a commissioned officer from West Springfield led 1500 men. He stood at the top of the courthouse steps and said, you can't hold court today. And the forces who showed up from the government side respected them enough that nobody pressed the issue. They surrounded each other, they asked for permission to parade. And sorry, I need to go back and say these, when these men showed up in Northampton, they showed up to fife and drum music. They showed up in lines. They showed up looking like an army with guns on their shoulders, a quarter of them were armed. But the part of the army that they were emulating was the discipline. They wanted to show explicitly that they were not a democratic mob of rough cut people come to overthrow government. They wanted to show the populace of Massachusetts that they were honest, hardworking farmers with integrity who had defended their country, who'd won their freedom, and were here to protest and injustice. And they did that by keeping their guns at their shoulders. So with the two bodies of men, the government men and the people who called themselves regulators, also, they were participating in a long at least 15-year-old tradition of taking the name of regulator as the people who were going to regulate the country for themselves, by themselves, in the absence of state justice. And that's already there starting to feel like we're in this absence, we're in this place where the government isn't looking out for us, we have to look out for ourselves. So they asked for permission to parade. They paraded, you know, if you've ever seen military exercises left, right, oblique, back, return, stop. They did all of this work in the courtyard to show that they were obedient to orders, that they were a disciplined force, that they were the proud, you know, citizen soldiers of Massachusetts. And then when they were done parading, the government sent their troops into the courtyard and they put on their kind of step show in return to show that they were also representing law and order from their side. This is done, both armies go home. Again, nobody's thrown a stone through the court through a courthouse window. But September 2nd, the reaction from Boston is this proclamation from James Bowden, in which he claims that the people have introduced riot, anarchy, and confusion into the state and basically claiming that this is going to lead to the tyranny of degenerate armed men running the government. So there's heavy duty fear mongering right out of the gate. There's diplomacy is not something that happened throughout these protests. And the response from the state, from the people of Massachusetts was to say, okay, well, let's see what anarchy, riot, and confusion looks like. And they closed the courts in Worcester, Concord, Taunton, and Great Barrington. And in Great Barrington, and I love the story, I love telling the story because the people come out looking so good, they just were dignified and restrained and nonviolent start to finish with very few exceptions. In Great Barrington, the militia is called out. It's one of the last courts to be closed. So on September 13th, they call the militia out. 1,000 men line up with this militia to march into Great Barrington to protect the court. And one of the court's own judges, William Whiting, steps out and says, well, whose side are we really on here? Who's to take sides of the road? If you're on the government side over here, if you're on the people side over here. And when that division had sorted itself all out, there's 800 men on the people side of the road. And those are the people who were brought out to implement law and order. So whose law are we enforcing now? Because it's starting to look a lot like it's the people's law to say there should be debt relief. And again, those 200 on the government side didn't press the issue. There was no violence at this court closing. That Justice William Whiting published a pamphlet after this saying that the government were overgrown funders who were just preying on the people, kind of echoing a lot of this revolutionary war sentiment, that the people had a right to determine their own conditions and should have more of a say in them. But then this sentiment was answered again, very strong terms from Boston. Samuel Adams publishes an article in the paper saying that it's one thing to rebel against the laws of monarchy. That's kind of acceptable, but a man who rebels against an elected republic ought to suffer death. And this again doesn't sit well with people who just fought a war for no pay, and then came home and finding themselves kind of in danger of being kicked off of their farms. There we go. So what this does is it creates a strong reaction in the people who are now looking forward to the next set of courthouses opening. And those are the criminal courts. And let me see. Here we are. So September 18th, a week later, less than a week after those courts are opened, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which is the criminal court meets in Wooster, and these judges would ride a circuit. This is why courts are described as circuits. They get to their first stop in Wooster and they issue arrest warrants for Adam Wheeler and Henry and Abraham Gale and eight other men as leaders of this rebellion and surrection. The terms vary for it. And this heavy step, in addition to the rhetoric from Boston, creates an outpouring of outrage from the people. And they start wanting to show up in Springfield on September 25th and really make a show of force. As the people who are running these protests are looking forward to the 25th and trying to figure out how they're going to keep a lid on this thing, there's also what's known into history as the paper money riots in Exeter, New Hampshire, where Governor Sullivan has taken a similarly hard line to the line they've taken in Massachusetts and hundreds of people have shown up to protest and demand paper money. And Sullivan has brought out a force of 2,000 men to arrest them to humiliate the leaders, and he kept five of the men in prison in Exeter, New Hampshire. So this is just up the way from these protests in Massachusetts. And people are starting to wonder, are we going to be facing repression now if we show up and protest against these explicitly, again, explicitly, unjust economic policies. So this is when Daniel Shays is pulled in. Here we go. Daniel Shays was, I find him a really fascinating character. I think he was asked to lead because he had buy-in. He had authority with men of every rank. He was born the son of an indentured servant. He was the third child and first son. He hired out his labor as soon as he could work for other people to bring in money. He was hiring out his labor. And he married, ultimately married the adopted daughter of a wealthy landowner whose name, the Gilberts in Brookfield, were folks who had been around for some time. Abigail Gilberts, great-great-grandfather, had built Gilberts Fort in 1688 when there was still danger of war with the native people. That was right after, still right after what's known, again, inaccurately as King Philip's War. And there's another book for that for another time to correct the ledger on that one. Then Daniel Shays with his dowry was raised to the rank of gentleman farmer. He bought a farm and shoots very mass, then went off to war from there after having two kids. And in the war, he rose from the rank of ensign, which is just above the rank of private, to the commission rank of captain. So now he's kind of in the elite class a little bit. And he was asked at this point in September as things are coming to a head, hey, can you step in? You've got authority with a lot of different people. The poor laborers respect you. The leadership class respects you. Can you come in and keep a lid on this? So he ends up marching out of Pelham with, I think a couple hundred men in September, marches down to Springfield mass for the Supreme Judicial Court. And by the time people are done drifting into Springfield, he's presiding over 2,000 men. And they close not only the Springfield Supreme Judicial Court, but they also convince the judges to just abandon their plans to go out to Great Barrington to open that court as well. So it's kind of a two for one deal. There is the, you know, the Springfield arsenal is just up the hill from where this courthouse is. The men ignored it. And, you know, the accusation is that these were degenerate farmers trying to arm themselves and wage war against the state of Massachusetts. This is their first opportunity to arm themselves from that arsenal where the federal government stockpiled weapons and provisions and gunpowder and cannon, and they just ignored it completely. But now that the government has suffered, you know, a string of six courts being closed and the official business being obstructed, there's more panic in Boston. So instead of sending diplomats, instead of trying to negotiate a solution here, they just start ratcheting down the repressive language. They start by early October. There are rumors that Massachusetts is drafting a riot act. Henry Knox is in Boston calling for federal troops to be stationed at the Springfield arsenal. They actually passed that through the federal Congress and raising his, he requested 700 troops. They agreed to send 1,340. And then all of the states except Virginia refused to fund that request. So Massachusetts is playing, casting itself as the victim in this. You're going to antagonize the people and then not have the ability to enforce their laws. As this threat of the riot act is circulating, a letter circulates over Daniel Shea's name, asking people to keep, you know, asking the towns to keep their men ready with 60 rounds of ammunition ready to march on a moment's notice. I find this letter a little suspicious since most of the letters that circulated at this point were official documents that were signed by committees, signed by multiple men. And Daniel Shea's also complains, you know, in January, he's on the record complaining that no letters had been signed and put into circulation over his name without his permission. Again, we're only two months, we're not even really two months into this, into this campaign. And Henry Knox in Boston is warning George Washington that 12 to 15,000 degenerate and unprincipled men are preparing to wage a war against the principle of liberty and the idea of good government. Again, they're trying to get George Washington out of retirement. They're really creating the fear to refer to our contemporary politics that this was going to be a January 6th type moment instead of a kind of what we've seen as the kind of the social justice protests, which are more demonstrations and more nonviolent. Again, there was no violence in these organized protests at all across the board, no violence, no stones thrown through courthouse windows. Nobody menaced, nobody beaten, just none of it. But the fears that they were creating were that the state was going to be overthrown. So when this letter gets to Boston over Daniel Shay's name, and it might have been written by somebody who wanted to create this outcome, they passed the riot act, they suspend habeas corpus. And the riot act provisions are enough to get people off the couch to defend their liberties because if you are in a crowd of armed people, if there's a gun in the crowd and you're told to disperse and you stay, you're liable to be arrested, taken to Boston to be imprisoned, where you will be whipped 39 stripes every three months for a period of up to a year, your property will be taken by the state and probably most offensive is that the deputies who were charged to arrest these folks were indemnified against any damages if they killed or injured the protesters. So it looks to the people like they're just flooding back toward tyranny as the government is passing these measures kind of one after the other and the government and so as they're watching these measures come in, the next date that's on the calendar is November 21st because that's the next round of court dates are going to start in Worcester on November 21st and everybody's starting to wonder, all right, what's going to happen on November 21st? And we remember what's going to happen on January 6th. It's kind of the same pressure. Which way is it going to go? Because everybody saw it coming and they saw these conditions being set up for some violent confrontations and the government as a way of trying to diffuse things offered pardons for people who participated in the protests, but they issued no reforms. So you could be free, you could go back to your farm and suffer the economic injustices, but you wouldn't be in danger for protesting. Needless to say, this didn't this didn't dissolve the populace, it just kind of hardened their resolve. So they show up at November 21st, they show up in Worcester, Daniel Shays and 350 picked men in addition to Adam Wheeler, Abraham and I forget the other Gail, Henry and Abraham Gail's name, Henry and Abraham Gail and the Worcester folks close the Worcester court, there's no opposition. But what's interesting now is there's snows come down. And so the people are starting to feel like it's hard to move armies around in Massachusetts in the snow. So if we can just get this into the cold, we'll be good till April, right? We can just worry about all of this down the road. They close that court, there's no opposition, there's no violence. However, a week later, November 28th, the government sends 400 horsemen in search of some leaders, and they arrest Job Shaddock from Groton, in addition to two other men who are taken to Boston. And when Job Shaddock is arrested, he resists arrest and a Harvard graduate named Jonathan Hickborn slashes at him, gets him behind the knee, severs the tendons in his leg and cripples him for life. And now there's blood on the snow. And now people are waiting for things to blow. And Daniel Shays is at the head of this party who's trying to keep things under control. And there's starting to be signs that he doesn't want to be there. It doesn't sound like an enviable position. However, testament to the respect he had earned, nothing happened. And nothing happened for the next month and a half. They went back to Worcester, they closed another court on December 5th. The histories really skimped on this period. They're just kind of going action point to action point. But Daniel Shays then spent three weeks, he couldn't go home because he was liable to be arrested. He spent three weeks riding through central Massachusetts and down to Connecticut to recruit men, to recruit promises of support, to recruit some money, and commitments to fight if it went that far. Depending on who you talk to, you're going to hear that he was recruiting an army. Other people are just going to say he was recruiting support. December 26th comes around, the last courthouse of the year, court date of the year. Daniel Shays is in Springfield with Luke Day and Thomas Grover from Montague Mass. And 300 men, and they close that court as well. And the sheriff writes to James Bowden in Boston and says, I don't know, we didn't expect this. It totally took us by surprise as a way of not being responsible for it. But of course, the report that the people are so powerful and clandestine that they could stage this without detection doesn't make things, doesn't make people feel better about stuff in Boston. So in Boston, James Bowden has had enough of this. He's starting to recruit funding for an army. He raised 6,000 pounds from his wealthy friends to field an army that was supposed to be 4,400 people strong. It ended up being about 3,000 people. The legislature was not in session. The legislature never approved this army. This was something that James Bowden did as governor and believed he could make that legal retroactively. That army was supposed to march from Boston on the 19th. In advance of that, James Bowden issued arrest warrants for Daniel Shays and 16 other leaders. So all those towns that were in green around the court towns, and sometimes it was arbitrary. Sometimes that's the only place those names show up in the record is in this arrest warrant. It's not clear that those people were agitating or leading large numbers of men. And there's kind of a sense that the government was just lashing out at whichever ring leaders they thought they could get at. And sometimes they're just settling private scores, settling some old scores from other kind of rural grudges. Nevertheless, the people decide to gather in three places around Springfield. Luke Day is going to have about 600 men west of Springfield in West Springfield, north of West Springfield in Chickapee. Eli Parsons will have another 400. And Eli Parsons is an artillery officer who'd marched with George Washington and crossed the river with him in that first year of the war. And Daniel Shays has gotten going to have another 1,000 to 1,200 people up in Pelham. And they call themselves together and they don't do anything. They just waited. The goal was the Springfield arsenal. They knew that that was the place that the government was going to be focused on because there were weapons and provisions there. The accusation has been that the people were trying to arm themselves and overthrow the government. I really can't see this any other way except that the people were trying to keep those weapons out of the government's hands because they knew they would be used against them. And to make one last ditch attempt to negotiate some peace. They didn't move until after General Benjamin Lincoln had left Worcester with 3,000 men. So now he's three days out from Springfield, three days out from coming into the heart of Western Massachusetts and starting to set up martial law. And that's when the people said, okay, fine, we finally have to go. So January 24th, they headed out to be in Springfield on the 25th. And I'm going to go. So this is what they found when they showed up at the 25th that Westfield General William Shepard had brought about 900 or 1,000 men into the arsenal grounds. He had brought some cannon out from inside the storehouses. And when the people marched up, they were arrayed out against them in the road. The people, you know, Daniel Shays had met two different kind of diplomats had come out to ask what his intentions were. He said he wanted barracks and stores. He said he was there to defend his country. And he was told that he told them that he wasn't going to stop. So he marched his men up by platoons is the record, which is to say eight across. So they're marching up in disciplined lines, eight across. The roads are narrow. There's been a lot of snow this winter. And they take warning shots. Two shots went over their heads, didn't hit anything. And then when they kept coming, General William Shepard said to lower the cannon to waistband height. And he fired these shots you see down here on the left side of the screen, just grape shot, just kind of like a shotgun shell for a cannon. So you can see all of those iron balls that are held together by twine in the cannon that twine dissolves. And what comes out of that cannon just as a spray of these balls, they hit those, those lines. Four men in those first three lines were killed and the other 20. So if they're marching by eights, the first three lines are just wiped out by these balls. The 1200 men who are lined up again by eight. So this column went for some time. They kind of turn themselves inside out and disappear. They turn around. They never fired a shot back. They just retreated to cries of murder, murder, right? Now they're the victims. They can show that the government has been oppressing them has been, you know, using violence against them. And they retreat to Ludlow. And then this is a sketch by Ezra Stiles, contemporary sketch. You can see General Lincoln coming in on the 27th, 23rd, he says. Lincoln didn't arrive in Springfield till the 27th. Daniel Shays at that point is in Chickapee, gathering, you know, merging forces with Eli Parsons. Luke Day is still in West Springfield. I need to back up and say neither of those guys showed up with their forces. Daniel Shays was the only force to show up. Luke Day had decided, or his pastor apparently, the story is that Luke Day's pastor told him he would be in danger of murder if any of his men were killed in this encounter in this confrontation. So he said, Hey, I want a one day delay. But Daniel Shays never got that note. It was intercepted. So Eli Parsons got the note. He stayed and waited till the next day. Daniel Shays didn't get the note. So William Shepard, the general at the arsenal, was able to concentrate all of his forces on the Eastern approach. And again, it needs to be said, Daniel Shays didn't make a military approach. Only one in four had muskets, only one in 10 of those had bayonets. They just marched up and demanded the barracks and stores. They were not making a military approach surrounding the grounds, looking for weaknesses in the defenses. They were just there to make this demand and to negotiate a peace. What happened in the next few days was basically Daniel Shays ended up up in Pelham. General Benjamin Lincoln is in Hadley mass, about 12 miles apart. And then finally, Daniel Shays says we need to remove further. They go to Petersham mass. General Benjamin Lincoln makes an overnight march. And he starts out as a full moon night on February 3rd. He marches into this toward this full moon going east. And then the clouds come in, the snow starts coming down. And by the time he arrives in Petersham, Massachusetts, to disperse Shays force, there's 18 inches of fresh snow on the ground. So it's kind of this heroic feat. Daniel Shays men all disperse. Shays ends up in crossing. They go north into New Hampshire, cross the frozen Connecticut River north of Brattleboro, and then follow the roads up toward kind of the pass between Stratton Mountain and Grout Pond, coming out on the western side of Vermont by Arlington, which is where Ethan Allen's farm was. And then they end up, a lot of, there was about 300 men came with him, end up camped on land near Ethan Allen. Daniel Shays had a sister and brother-in-law in Bennington. He had a sister across the border from there in Cambridge, New York, sorry, in Salem, New York. And Vermont was an independent republic at the time, right? So they were fleeing the country. And the laws of the Articles of Confederation weren't going to allow Benjamin Lincoln to cross state lines to come after them. So what started as a nonviolent protest campaign ends up looking a lot more like a refugee story as Daniel Shays and these 300 men are looking for asylum in Vermont. And the people in Vermont didn't want to give it to them. They didn't want the political troubles. They didn't want to be dragged into this. They wanted to be kind of left out. Let's see if I can get this to go. So when Daniel Shays petitioned, he wrote as far north as Williston and then as far north as Quebec, asking for asylum first from Tom Chittenden and then from Canadian Governor Lord Dorchester, everybody said, we don't want to get involved. And they ended up down in Egg Mountain in Sandgate, Vermont, which has now been excavated by this fellow Steve Butts from, I think, Cambridge, New York, found this stuff up on a snowmobiling trip and started digging and is turning up all this really beautiful 18th century, these artifacts that are coming up from the ground there, which is a fascinating project. So there should have been, here we go. And Daniel Shays is in exile. There is sporadic violence in Massachusetts. People are settling private scores, burning each other's warehouses down, really small handful of problems. But April 1st comes along, people go to the polls, John Hancock is elected in like a three to one landslide to come back into office to start issuing pardons, issue reforms, change the economic policies. James Bowden realizes that things are going against him. So he decides that it's, he better start getting on the other side of things. So he starts issuing pardons and the temperature just starts coming down from that point. These fellows, Parmenter and McCuller, were held for hanging and they just kind of kept bumping that along and stringing it out and letting time lapse and bumping it until they were ultimately reprieved on the gallows in June of 1787. So wrapping this up, the reason I kept following this story to tell this, to bring this story out was it really wasn't the insurrection they were telling you about. And I think that the actual story here is a fascinating one about this proud tradition we have as Americans of nonviolent opposition, people getting together, banding together with their neighbors and saying, we can tolerate inequality, like that's part of that's built in, but we're not going to tolerate injustice. And what I really got to see is this project went on was the degree to which any agitation was just turned into propaganda against the people to turn the people against each other to discredit each other. But the system worked then and we've seen the system work here where the people, if they agitate enough, can change things through elections. So that's pretty much the story that I found. I did a certain, again, people's history from the people's perspective in the book. So it doesn't read like a history, it reads more like a narrative. And I'm happy to take questions about really any part of this. I've steeped myself in this history long enough it's really a delight to talk about it with folks who are curious. So thanks again, John. Thanks to the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum. And I'll look forward to questions and discussion. Well, thank you very much, Dan, for retelling this fascinating story of Shades Rebellion. For those of you who are watching this on Sunday afternoon, the 16th, the reminder that if you go to the link that you might have received, Devonville 13 at, I'm sorry, that go to the link that I sent you at the Zoom link, you can join us in a conversation over Zoom. If you did not get that link, send me an email at Devonville13 at Comcast.net and I will send you the link so you can join us in that way. One last reminder, let me put my address up here so you can get that. February is Black History Month. In observance of Black History Month, the Homestead, Ethan Allen Homestead will have a book discussion on February 7th. It's in the evening, I believe it's a Monday evening. And the book that will be discussed is Harvey Imani Whitfield's The Problem of Black Slavery in Early Vermont. If you would like to join us for that book discussion, go to the Ethan Allen website, EthanAllenHomestead.org. Look at the calendar and click on February 7th and all the information is there on how to get the book and how to join the book discussion. And there's no cost for the book discussion. So again, thank you for joining us today and thanks again, Dan, for this great talk today. Great. Thanks so much. See you guys in the talk.