Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Woody Holton, University of Richmond

Theodore Sedgwick had been a leading opponent of Shays's Rebellion, so when "Regulators" raided Stockbridge, Massachusetts, early in 1787, his mansion was a natural target. Yet they did not get Sedgwick's silver, legend has it, because his servant Elizabeth Freeman hid it among her own modest possessions. This was not Freeman's first involvement in great events. Half a decade earlier, she had become the first black person to sue for, and gain, freedom under the 1780 Massachusetts constitution. Once the decision in Freeman's case had been confirmed by the state's highest court, every slave in Massachusetts was set free, and Freeman went to work for Sedgwick. The story of Freeman's cameo in Shays's Rebellion bears too strong a resemblance to Confederate tales of faithful slaves saving the family silver from the Yankees to be fully credited, but it usefully reminds us that Shays's Rebellion, like the Revolutionary War that had erupted in the same state a decade earlier, forced thousands of Massachusetts men and women from all walks of life to choose sides.	1
Thanks to Leonard Richards's new book, we now know a lot more about those choices. Shays's Rebellion serves as a corrective to what has become the standard treatment of the 1786 Massachusetts farmers' revolt, David Szatmary's 1980 book of the same title. Szatmary squeezed the uprising into a Marxist paradigm, arguing that subsistence farmers were somehow dragged into the global market and thus into debt. When Boston's mercantile elite yanked the credit chain, thus choking the farmers, they rebelled—not only against their creditors but also against the market. Challenging that narrow focus on private debt, Richards points out that an insignificant number of Massachusetts debtors had been jailed: "There is no correlation—none whatsoever—between debt and rebel towns" (p. 60). The real source of the farmers' distress was "the new state government—and its attempt to enrich the few at the expense of the many" (p. 63). An eastern elite (roughly equivalent to Szatmary's) rammed through the undemocratic 1780 constitution, then levied punishing taxes for the benefit of the speculators who had bought up the state's Revolutionary War bonds. In Marxist terms, the farmers' grievances arose not from capitalism or globalism but from old-fashioned primitive accumulation.	2
Richards is by no means the first to claim that taxes provoked Shays's Rebellion. Perhaps the most persuasive of his forerunners is Roger H. Brown, of whose Redeeming the Republic: Federalists, Taxation, and the Origins of the Constitution (1993) Richards seems strangely unaware. Whereas Brown said little about bondholders, however, Richards makes a strong case that the legislators' own bond holdings helped persuade them to adopt the unprecedented taxes of the 1780s. The thirty-five largest investors in state war bonds owned 40 percent of all the bonds (by value), and every one of them either had a close relative who had served in the legislature or had served himself.	3
Based on his comparison of Massachusetts fiscal policy before and after the revolt, Richards also draws the novel—but plausible—conclusion that the Shaysites did something few rebels ever do: they "emerged victorious" (p. 119), having extorted substantial tax relief from the assembly. Numerous scholars have shown that Shays's Rebellion helped pave the way for the federal Constitution (perhaps most crucially by persuading the indispensable George Washington to attend the Philadelphia Convention). Richards takes that one step further, pointing out that even though most Regulators opposed the Constitution (none of the fifty-two most ardently Shaysite towns sent a Federalist delegate to the state ratifying convention, he says), its adoption can be considered part of their victory. The Constitution led to federal assumption of Massachusetts's enormous state debt—and thus to more tax relief.	. . .