America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback (25 page)

April 28: Maryland ratifies.

May 23: South Carolina ratifies.

June 21: New Hampshire ratifies. The federal Constitution is formally adopted.

June 25: Virginia ratifies with a call for the addition of a Bill of Rights.

July 26: New York ratifies, also with a recommendation for a Bill of Rights.

In New York, the temporary seat of government, the Congress, under the Articles of Confederation, adjourns on November 1. The United States has no central government until the first week of April 1789, when the new Congress meets.

1789 In the first presidential election, on February 4, newly chosen electors cast their ballots. The election of senators and representatives also proceeds.

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George Washington is unanimously elected president on April 6; John Adams is vice president. On April 30, George Washington is inaugurated on the balcony of Federal Hall in New York.

November 21: North Carolina ratifies.

The first national Thanksgiving Day, established by congressional resolution and presidential proclamation, takes place on November 26.

Intended to offer thanks for the Constitution, it is opposed by Anti-federalists, who maintain that the proclamation violates states’ rights.

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Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it.

—T he Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776)
In monarchies, the crime of treason and rebellion may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.

—Samuel Adams (September 1786)
Are your people mad?

—George Washington,
to a friend in Massachusetts (October 1786)
What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

—T homas Jefferson (November 1787)
Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appear-ance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

—Benjamin Franklin (November 13, 1789)
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a
Spring field, Massachusetts—January 1787

The freshly minted united states was under attack. A small army was on the march near Springfield in western Massachusetts. Two thousand strong, and gaining strength and numbers by the day, this insurgent force was threatening to topple the government of Massachusetts, seedbed of the Revolution. It was little more than four years after the British surrender at Yorktown, and a few months shy of the tenth anniversary of the Declaration’s adoption. But to more than a few worried observers around the country, among them a retired George Washington, the fate of the young nation hung in the balance.

If Massachusetts fell, wider war and chaos might quickly engulf the rest of the country. Everything Washington thought he had fought for was coming undone before his eyes. Along with many others, he even saw the hand of Great Britain pulling the strings: “There are surely men of consequences and abilities behind the curtains who move the pup-pets,” Washington wrote to one of his former aides in Massachusetts.1

The attackers planned to strike on January 25, after a fierce storm blanketed western Massachusetts, leaving snow piled four feet deep in the state’s hilly hinterlands. Three coordinated forces, most of them battle-tested veterans, were on the move. Their target was the federal armory in Springfield, just north of the Connecticut border, and its valuable store of weapons. In a three-pronged attack, they expected to easily overrun the armory, strengthen their hand with captured artillery, and continue east toward Boston from Springfield.

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Since Springfield’s founding in 1636 on the floodplain of the Connecticut River, the surrounding region, known as the Pioneer Valley, had seen its share of war and fighting. During the Revolution, weapons to fight the British had been collected and stored there. In 1777, when Springfield was still a small, struggling farming village, George Washington chose it as the site of a national arsenal. With access to the long, navigable Connecticut River, flowing more than four hundred miles from the New Hampshire–Canada border to Long Island Sound, and located along a key highway linking Boston with Albany, Springfield was well situated. But it was also sufficiently distant from any major British military outposts to be out of harm’s way.

Now the arsenal in rural Massachusetts remained one of the new nation’s two major arms depots, holding most of the guns and artillery pieces in New England. Still stockpiled in the Springfield armory in January 1787 were thousands of muskets and bayonets, artillery pieces and carriages, along with powder and tons of shot and shells, all techni-cally the property of the federal government. At the moment, that government was a rather toothless Congress, formed under the Articles of Confederation. Ratified in 1781, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union was essentially a thirteen-state mutual-defense pact that provided for a Congress operating with a “one-state, one-vote”

rule, and lacking the ability to levy taxes to raise funds. Although Congress had the power to wage war, not a man in its standing army of about seven hundred soldiers was within a rifle shot of Springfield.

Among its many other shortcomings, America’s national government was essentially impotent in the face of its first genuine threat.

The plotters who had come to capture the Springfield arsenal needed those weapons for their army, just as New England militiamen had once confiscated guns and powder from British storehouses such | 210 \

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as Fort Ticonderoga. According to the alarming, hysterical reports cir-culating in the Massachusetts press, these rebels—or “insurgents,” as they were called—aimed at nothing short of marching on Boston with the captured artillery, plundering the town, and laying waste to it.

The insurgent army knew Boston well. Despite Washington’s suspicions, they were not mercenaries, a proxy army playing out a British attempt to retake America. Mostly veterans of the American Revolution, some of them had stood on Breed’s Hill back in June 1775.

They were the soldiers George Washington had heaped derision upon when he had arrived to take command of the Continental army in Cambridge that same year. But Washington came to depend upon their ragtag, undisciplined, and overly democratic kind to win the war.

Some of them had been at the capture of Fort Ticonderoga or made the bitter march to Quebec with Benedict Arnold. They had fought in many of the Revolution’s major battles—the devastating routs and the crucial victories that turned the tide. And they had suffered through the worst of Valley Forge’s winter. Now these same men of the “Massachusetts Line” were ready to make war on the state and the country they had helped create. In their minds, perhaps, this was to be “the American Revolution’s last battle,” as historian Leonard L. Richards called it.

Like the minutemen of Revolutionary legend and lore, most of these soldiers were local farmers, village merchants, or tradesman, some armed with ancient muskets, others with their Continental army issue. Some wielded swords—old family heirlooms—while many carried nothing more than pitchforks. Although some of the men had donned their old Continental uniforms, others wore their everyday clothes. Many of the men also sported a sprig of hemlock in their hats, symbol of the Revolutionary spirit they had once fought for.

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Opposing them were some eleven hundred state militiamen, well equipped with cannons and howitzers taken from the Springfield arsenal, which they had managed to reach before the insurgent army could. Technically, as a state militia, they had no right to take the weapons, either, but the state’s survival hung in the balance. Polite legalities were pushed aside. The state’s first line of defense, this militia was led by Major General William Shepard. A fifty-year-old farmer from Westfield, Massachusetts, Shepard had served eight years in the Revolutionary War. As commander of the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment, he had been wounded at the disastrous battle of Long Island on August 27, 1776, when the British had routed the patriot army and chased George Washington from New York City. More than likely, Shepard had commanded or served with some of the men now ready-ing to assault his troops. With Massachusetts men filling the ranks on each side of the battle, this was an American civil war.

What William Shepard knew and the attackers moving toward the armory did not was that one key component of the insurgents’

battle plan was missing. In West Springfield, on the far side of the Connecticut River, commander Luke Day had decided not to attack and was holding back his four hundred men. Instead of joining the assault, as planned, Day had decided to send Shepard an ultimatum, allowing him twenty-four hours to lay down his arms in the hopes of avoiding a bloodbath. Luke Day’s wisdom might be questioned—and it would be—but not his courage or patriotism. Like General Shepard, he had spent eight years in service to the American cause. Born into a prominent West Springfield family, he had been among the first men to answer the call after Lexington and Concord. Day had manned the lines during the siege that chased the British from Boston. He was also among the Massachusetts volunteers who had accompanied | 212 \

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Benedict Arnold on the deadly march to Quebec and the disastrous assault on that city. Promoted to captain of the Seventh Regiment of the Massachusetts Line, he served until the end of the war, and Day was part of the regiment that led the charge at Yorktown, helping to force Cornwallis to surrender. 2

But on the eve of the attack on Springfield, Luke Day’s message to his two fellow commanders, conveying his change in plans and counseling a delay in the attack, had been intercepted by General Shepard. Nearly one-third of the expected assault force, which was supposed to swoop in on one flank of Shepard’s militia, never left for the armory. Knowing this, Shepard was able to concentrate his forces on a single frontal attack.

Preparing to lead that assault on the Springfield armory was an advance guard of about four hundred “old soldiers,” as the Revolutionary veterans were called. They marched shoulder to shoulder, eight deep. As the first ranks moved toward the armory through the deep, fresh snow, General Shepard ordered a warning shot. The first volley was fired over the advancing regiment’s heads. But instead of slowing their progress, the cannon fire spurred on the men in the front ranks, and they broke into a trot. Meanwhile, the horses of the mounted men behind them were thrown into confusion; mostly farm animals, they were unaccustomed to the crash of artillery. A dozen men fell from their mounts, adding to the general mayhem of the moment.

A second volley was ordered by Shepard, this time at “waistband height.” Finally, the ranks of the oncoming insurgents were sprayed with grapeshot, loosely packed metal balls fired from a hidden howitzer. Three men died instantly, and a fourth was mortally wounded.

Seeing the many wounded men fall, and facing overpowering artillery, the rear ranks of attackers broke and ran off in a panicky, confused retreat. And like that, the assault on the federal arsenal was over.

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Soon after the brief but deadly face-off, another detachment of three thousand militiamen arrived on the scene. Sanctioned by War Secretary Henry Knox and Congress, they were ostensibly organized to defend against an Indian threat, a flimsy cover that was widely mocked in Massachusetts, where their real purpose was all too clear. They were there to put down an armed insurrection by American citizens.

Paid with funds raised by private subscriptions from some of the wealthiest men in Massachusetts, including Governor James Bowdoin, this “federal” force was commanded by an overweight, fifty-three-year-old Benjamin Lincoln. A veteran of the Revolution, Lincoln had performed heroically at the crucial battle of Saratoga. But after surrendering an entire army to Henry Clinton at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1780, in one of the Continental army’s worst debacles, Lincoln had been captured. Later exchanged for a British officer—and in spite of his visible and costly failure—Lincoln remained in Washington’s good graces and had actually been given the honor of accepting Cornwallis’

sword at the Yorktown surrender.

Benjamin Lincoln’s militia arrived too late to help repel the assault on the Springfield armory, but they soon joined Shepard’s troops to give chase to the disintegrating rebel army as it retreated from Springfield. Lincoln pursued the men north through the Connecticut River valley, while Shepard moved his men up the frozen river. Marching his troops through a blinding snowstorm, Lincoln caught the rebel army by surprise at Petersham, about fifty miles north of Springfield, early on February 4. In a bloodless battle, a boastful Lincoln reported that about 150 of the insurgents were captured, a claim unsupported by evidence; the rest, including their leader, escaped. There were a few small follow-up incidents, but the insurgency that had seemed to threaten America’s very existence was shattered. The “horrid and un-

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natural Rebellion and War,” as the Massachusetts legislature called the uprising, ended with a few small bangs and a whimper.

The “little rebellion,” as Thomas Jefferson would describe it— famously writing from Paris that the “Tree of Liberty should be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and Tyrants”— came to be known throughout New England and the rest of America as Shays’ Rebellion. It was named for its putative and somewhat reluctant leader, a forty-year-old farmer from Pelham, Massachusetts, Daniel Shays. Back in 1775, Daniel Shays had been among the thousands who eagerly joined the patriot army gathering outside Boston right after Lexington and Concord. Becoming a member of what was known as Woodbridge’s Regiment, Shays fought at Bunker Hill, earning a promotion to sergeant. Rounding out his relatively distinguished five years in George Washington’s army, Shays had, as Alden T.