A01=Daniel Bullen
Alexander Hamilton
anti-austerity protest
Arlington
Articles of Confederation
Author_Daniel Bullen
Benjamin Lincoln
Bennington
Berkshire County
Boston
Category=DNBH
Category=JPHL
Category=JPQ
Category=NHK
Category=WQH
Chittenden
Constitution
Constitutional Convention
Daniel Shays
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
exile
farmers
Federalists
financiers
freedom
frontier
George Washington
Governor Bodwoin
Hampshire County
Henry Knox
inequality
injusitce
insurrection
James Bowdoin
liberty
Massachusetts
narrative history
natural history
nonviolence
nonviolent protest
Nonviolent protests
Northampton
Pelham
people's history
rebellion
refugees
Regulation
Regulators
resistance
Samuel Adams
Shays
Shays Settlement
Shays's Rebellion
solidarity
speculators
Springfield Arsenal
William Shepard
Worcester
Product details
- ISBN 9781594164170
- Weight: 254g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 24 Apr 2024
- Publisher: Westholme Publishing, U.S.
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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On January 25, 1787, in Springfield, Massachusetts, militia Major General William Shepard ordered his cannon to fire grapeshot at a peaceful demonstration of 1,200 farmers approaching the federal arsenal. The shots killed four and wounded twenty, marking the climax of five months of civil disobedience in Massachusetts, where farmers challenged the state’s authority to seize their farms for flagrantly unjust taxes. Government leaders and influential merchants painted these protests as a violent attempt to overthrow the state, in hopes of garnering support for strengthening the federal government in a Constitutional Convention. As a result, the protests have been hidden for more than two hundred years under the misleading title, “Shays’s Rebellion, the armed uprising that led to the Constitution.” But this widely accepted narrative is just a legend: the “rebellion” was almost entirely nonviolent, and retired Revolutionary War hero Daniel Shays was only one of many leaders.
Daniel Shays’s Honorable Rebellion: An American Story by Daniel Bullen tells the history of the crisis from the protesters’ perspective. Through five months of nonviolent protests, the farmers kept courts throughout Massachusetts from hearing foreclosures, facing down threats from the government, which escalated to the point that Governor James Bowdoin ultimately sent an army to arrest them. Even so, the people won reforms in an electoral landslide.
Thomas Jefferson called these protests an honorable rebellion, and hoped that Americans would never let twenty years pass without such a campaign, to rein in powerful interests. This riveting and meticulously researched narrative shows that Shays and his fellow protesters were hardly a dangerous rabble, but rather a proud people who banded together peaceably, risking their lives for justice in a quintessentially American story.
Daniel Shays’s Honorable Rebellion: An American Story by Daniel Bullen tells the history of the crisis from the protesters’ perspective. Through five months of nonviolent protests, the farmers kept courts throughout Massachusetts from hearing foreclosures, facing down threats from the government, which escalated to the point that Governor James Bowdoin ultimately sent an army to arrest them. Even so, the people won reforms in an electoral landslide.
Thomas Jefferson called these protests an honorable rebellion, and hoped that Americans would never let twenty years pass without such a campaign, to rein in powerful interests. This riveting and meticulously researched narrative shows that Shays and his fellow protesters were hardly a dangerous rabble, but rather a proud people who banded together peaceably, risking their lives for justice in a quintessentially American story.
DANIEL BULLEN earned a 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 Lives of the Artists: Five Stories of Creative Intimacy. He lives in western Massachusetts.
