Causes and Effects of Shays' Rebellion

On August 29, 1786, Shay's Rebellion began. An excerpt from the article:

"The threat posed by Shays’ Rebellion helped persuade retired General George Washington to reenter public service, leading to his two terms as the first President of the United States.

In a letter regarding Shays’ Rebellion to U.S. Representative William Stephens Smith dated November 13, 1787, Founding Father Thomas Jefferson famously argued that an occasional rebellion is an essential part of liberty:

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
Taxes in the Face of Poverty
The end of the Revolutionary War found farmers in rural areas of Massachusetts living a sparse subsistence lifestyle with few assets aside from their land. Forced to barter with each other for goods or services, farmers found it difficult and prohibitively expensive to obtain credit. When they did manage to find credit, repayment was required to be in the form of hard currency, which remained in short supply after repeal of the despised British Currency Acts.

Along with insurmountable commercial debt, unusually high tax rates in Massachusetts added to the financial woes of the farmers. Taxed at a rate some four times higher than in neighboring New Hampshire, a typical Massachusetts farmer was required to pay about one-third of their annual income to the state.

Unable to pay either their private debts or their taxes, many farmers faced devastation. State courts would foreclose on their land and other assets, ordering them sold at public auction for a fraction of their real value. Worse yet, farmers who had already lost their land and other assets were often sentenced to spend years in dungeon-like and now illegal debtors’ prisons.

Enter Daniel Shays
On top of these financial hardships was the fact that many Revolutionary War veterans had received little or no pay during their time in the Continental Army and were facing roadblocks to collecting back pay owed to them by Congress or the states. Some of these soldiers, like Daniel Shays, began to organize protests against what they considered to be excessive taxes and abusive treatment by the courts.

A Massachusetts farmhand when he volunteered for the Continental Army, Shays fought in the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, and Saratoga. After being wounded in action, Shays resigned—unpaid—from the Army and went home, where he was taken to court for nonpayment of his pre-war debts. Realizing that he was far from alone in his plight, he began to organize his fellow protesters.

A Mood for Rebellion Grows
With the spirit of revolution still fresh, hardships led to protest. In 1786, aggrieved citizens in four Massachusetts counties held semi-legal conventions to demand, among other reforms, lower taxes and the issuance of paper money. However, the state legislature, having already suspended tax collections for a year, refused to listen and ordered the immediate and full payment of taxes. With this, public resentment of tax collectors and the courts escalated quickly.

On August 29, 1786, a group of protesters succeeded in preventing the county tax court in Northampton from convening."