President Millard Fillmore Reads a Book on Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts, and Passes It on to the Attorney General

An ALS as President

In August 1786, Shays’s Rebellion broke out in western Massachusetts. Initially, debt-ridden farmers petitioned the government in Boston to issue paper money, to halt foreclosure of mortgages on their properties, and end their own imprisonment for debt as a result of high land taxes. Anger was particularly high against the commercial interests who controlled the state senate, a body they condemned as aristocratic and inappropriate in a representative republic. When the state senate failed to undertake reform, a thousand armed insurgents in the Berkshire Hills and the Connecticut valley, under the leadership of Daniel Shays and others, began forcibly to prevent the county courts from sitting to make judgments for debt. In September they forced the state supreme court at Springfield to adjourn. Meanwhile, demonstrators and rioters used violence to protest high taxation, the governor’s high salary, high court costs and similar grievances. This revolt threatened to plunge the area into a full scale insurrection, and to spread; and while the poor were ready to fight, the wealthy classes were frightened. The inadequacy of the Articles of Confederation manifested itself at home with weakness if not paralysis of government, and economic conditions worsened. Virginia was asking for states to send representatives to Annapolis to consider revising the basis of government.

The entire nation was alarmed by reports of Shay’s Rebellion and the outbreak of violence and the challenges to government that resulted. In response to the growing crisis, George Washington wrote desperately that “commotions of this sort, like snow-balls, gather strength as they roll, if there is no opposition in the way to divide and crumble them.”

By December 1786, the conflict between eastern Massachusetts creditors and western rural farmers escalated. Massachusetts Governor James Bowdoin mobilized a force of 1,200 militiamen to counter Shays. The army was led by former Continental Army General Benjamin Lincoln and funded by private merchants. Lincoln’s forces anticipated that the Shay’s men would storm the federal armory at Springfield, Massachusetts, and were waiting when Shays approached the armory with approximately 1,500 men on January 25, 1787. The army fired warning shots followed by artillery fire, killing four of the insurgents and wounding twenty. The rebel force quickly faltered and scattered into the countryside. Many participants were later captured and most men, including Shays, eventually received amnesty as part of a general pardon.

Later that year, the Constitutional Convention was called to address these deficiencies of government.

A friend named Taylor sent a copy of a book on Shay’s Rebellion to President Fillmore. He thought it so important that he in turn lent it to the Attorney General. Autograph letter signed, as President, Washington, July 28, 1851, to F. Taylor. “I return herewith the History of Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts; with many thanks for its use and many apologies for having detained it so long. But I lent it to the Attorney General to peruse and it was mislaid. Do you hear from that 18 inch globe? When may I expect it?” It is interesting to know that Taylor was supplying Fillmore with significant works in multiple areas, such as history and cartography, and that Fillmore was interested in them.