How Historians Might See the Tea Party Movement
Part Two of Four

(Part One is here.)

In 1786 and 1787, western Massachusetts militants took up armed resistance to the state's government. They forced courts to close, preventing them from hearing merchant lawsuits against indebted farmers. State officials and seaboard merchants -- closely interwoven groups -- regarded the participants in Shays's Rebellion to be a poor and ignorant rabble, western dirt farmers lashing out against eastern law and order.

For two centuries, historians mostly padded along behind the Boston elite, accepting the script but changing some of its meaning. In 1980, David Szatmary described the two sets of belligerents as people engaged in change and people resisting change: on one side," coastal artisans" with an"acquisitive bent" who"passed commercial values on their children"; on the other side, a people"dragged into the marketplace" at the cost of the"disintegration of the traditional culture." Nicely completing the theme, Szatmary described the world of the yeoman farmer as having been"penetrated" by merchant capital.

Shays's Rebellion, Szatmary concluded,"represented the reaction of subsistence farmers against an intruding commercial society."

Twenty years later, Leonard Richards undertook an effort that seems like a near-miracle of scholarship, radically changing our understanding of an event that historians had thought they understood pretty well.

Four thousand participants in Shays's Rebellion were eventually granted indemnity against prosecution by a state that had just passed a series of laws allowing for their punishment by death. In exchange, each had to appear before a court to swear his future allegiance to the commonwealth.

In a series of accidents, Richards -- a professor at UMass-Amherst, in Shays's country -- discovered that the state archives had preserved the records of those four thousand oaths of allegiance. And he learned that no historian of the event had ever used them. Looking at the records, he found out why: They were nearly indecipherable. But he eventually extracted many of the names -- and then compared them to local tax rolls for the period around the rebellion.

Richards discovered that the seacoast elite of the 1780s had misunderstood and misrepresented Shays's Rebellion, passing down an entirely false story about the identity of the rebels and the nature of their grievance.

The dirt poor yeomen who took up arms against the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1786 weren't dirt poor, and they weren't unsophisticated; rather, they were often substantial property owners, led by well-placed local officials and former Continental Army officers. Families took up arms together; in Amherst, for example,"nineteen Dickinson men took up arms against the government," along with still more in-laws and others connected closely to the family.

"Of the nineteen Dickinsons who took up arms against the state, ten held the office of selectman or state representative at one time or another, and three were sons of selectmen. This was hardly unusual...Among these wealthier rebel leaders was Moses Dickinson, who ranked in the top 5 percent in taxable wealth."

So the dirt-poor rebels weren't dirt poor -- and they also"never depicted themselves as dissident debtors. Nor did they refer to themselves as rebels, insurgents, or Shaysites." Rather, they saw themselves (in a long tradition) as"Regulators," citizens correcting a government that had abandoned the common interest.

They saw themselves that way because the seacoast merchant elite had carefully rigged state government to operate under their own control, and were paying off public debt at par to speculators -- seacoast merchant speculators -- who had acquired that debt by dubious means (much of it from veterans of the Revolution, who had been paid in miserably devalued promissory notes for years). The Commonwealth was trying to pay those debts, this is the clincher, by imposing taxes in hard money on a countryside that had been drained of hard money.

And one more thing, a point about the privately funded ad hoc army that put down the rebellion."Of the 135 men who dug into their purses to hire Lincoln's army, over half were speculators, and many undoubtedly had high hopes of making a killing on state notes."

So the dirt-poor, irrational rebels weren't dirt-poor, weren't irrational, and weren't rebels. They weren't lashing out in an expression of cultural rage against progress and change. They were sophisticated people acting on a reasonable grievance. They recognized that a clientelist government had been rigged to steal from them, and they went to work in a disciplined way to stop the theft. (This is, I think, a scenario that will feel familiar to us.)

And then? The first supposedly authoritative account of Shays's Rebellion was written in 1788 by the Boston lawyer George Richards Minot,"a full-fledged member of the Boston gentry." The account written by a sober, responsible elite wasn't sober or responsible. It was deeply self-interested, and it got the most important parts of the story entirely wrong. (Again: familiar.)

This is longer than I'd anticipated, so I'm going to cut this post off here, and make a three-part series into a four-part series. More tomorrow.