Lacking a legitimate channel through which to press their point of view, in June 1786, an ad hoc group of angry farmers, many of them veterans, showed up in Taunton and, borrowing a prerevolutionary tactic, blocked the local court, demanding that the judges, clerks, tax collectors, and lawyers pack up and go home. Since a number of the farmers had brought guns with them, the judges and lawyers agreed. Similar protests followed and spread across western Massachusetts throughout the summer. The court shutdowns were soon accompanied by county conventions, after which the locals sent petitions to Boston demanding a redress of grievances.
On August 29, a slightly more organized group of farmers marched on the Court of Common Pleas at Northampton and threatened the judges and administrators with unnamed consequences if they convened. This court, which, like the others, was set to hear a number of cases that could have landed some local farmers in debtors' prison, also decided to suspend operations.
Bowdom continued to take a low key approach, hoping the protests would blow over as the cooler weather set in. Just to be on the safe side, however, he and his fellow merchants—creditors all—opted to bankroll an army to be kept in reserve in case the upheaval did not subside of its own accord.
Out in the provinces, realizing that they had struck on a useful idea, the protestors decided that impeding the judicial process was just the start, and took aim at reforming, if not overthrowing, the state government in Boston. The angry corps of farmers and veterans dubbed themselves "Regulators," shouldered arms, and, possibly backed by impenitent Tories, began drilling in the countryside. One of the Regulators was a forty year old former captain in the Continental army named Daniel Shays. Shays had a distinguished war record, having fought at Lexington, Bunker Hill, and Saratoga, but he never actually "led" anyone, and why the movement came to be named for him remains a mystery.
In September 1786, the "Shays Men," as many called themselves, forced the state supreme court at Springfield to adjourn. The movement began to gather steam as the leaves (ell and Bowdom responded by offering amnesty to any rebel who laid down his arms by January 1, 1787. Few did, so Bowdom approached Benjamin Lincoln—essentially unemployed since leaving the war ministry in 1784—and offered him command of an army of 4,400 men to lead against the rebels. Lincoln, who was by this time speculating heavily in land in Maine, jumped at the chance. To raise additional money for the army, Lincoln, who was friendly with most of the wealthy merchants, "went immediately to a club of the first characters in Boston, who met that night, and suggested to them the importance of their becoming loaners of a part of their property if they wished to secure the remainder." Lincoln, who was described as "very persuasive," had no trouble raising the funds and soon had his army, many of whose officers were either wealthy merchants or their sons, heading west.2
With Lincoln on the march, the Regulators decided to supplement their stock of antiquated weaponry by raiding the arsenal in Springfield. They reached the city on January 25, 1787, before Lincoln's troops could cut them off. Unfortunately for the Shays Men, a militia brigade under General William Shepard was guarding the arsenal and opened fire on the rebels with cannon. Evidently, all that marching and drilling in the hills had not achieved the desired effect, because the Regulators immediately took flight, leaving four dead and twenty wounded. Once clear of Springfield, they found themselves pursued by Lincoln, who caught up with them at Petersham, where they were roundly defeated. Lincoln kept after the remains of the ragtag band, completing a mop-up operation in Sheffield on February 27.3 Shays himself beat a path to Vermont, a safe haven since it had not yet joined the Union and was technically a foreign country.4
All things considered, Shays' Rebellion did not amount to very much. The Regulators has been easily routed, order had been restored, and the authority of the state government reaffirmed. Nothing about this abortive uprising should have instilled fear in anyone. That it did was in no small part the work of Henry Knox.
Knox was perhaps the most unlikely hero of the Revolution. With no formal education or military training, the grossly overweight bookseller was appointed as Washington's commander of artillery when he was only twenty-five years old.5 He proved to be expert at both tactics and logistics, possessing an instinctive understanding not only of how to place and use artillery in battle but also of how to move heavy cannons long distances in a short time. After Lincoln had resigned the post, Knox was made secretary at war by Congress, a position he would reprise during Washington's first term.*
In late 1786, Knox heard rumors that the British were planning to incite a counterrevolution and that Tories in western Massachusetts had recruited and armed thousands of disaffected farmers and war veterans to seize the arsenal at Springfield and then march on Boston. The British were plotting to provoke an Indian uprising as well. Knox instantly wrote a letter to Washington presenting this wholly uncorroborated story as fact, adding some embellishment of his own in case Washington did not appreciate the gravity of the situation.
Not only was the number of Shays Men drastically inflated from perhaps fifteen hundred to fifteen thousand, but, according to Knox, the rebels wanted to impose a kind of pre-Marxian communism on the United States. "They see the weakness of government," he wrote, "and they feel at once their own poverty, compared to the opulent, and their own force, and they are determined to make use of the latter in order to remedy the former. Their creed is that the property of the U.S. has been protected from the confiscations of Britain by the joint exertions of all, and therefore should be the common property of all."6
Knox's letter eventually enjoyed wide distribution in Congress and state legislatures. Thus, as news that Shays' Rebellion had been crushed filtered south, it became not the revolt of a thousand or so undisciplined farmers who had bolted at the first cannon blast, but an uprising of fifteen thousand determined anarchists.
If this sort of insurrection against life and especially property could happen in Massachusetts, it could happen anywhere. A single state might not have sufficient resources to quell such an uprising. Perhaps a stronger national government was not such a bad idea after all. For southerners, an even more dire specter had been raised.
What if the insurgents had been slaves?
Fear of black rebellion among planters was deep and long-standing.7 It began in the first years that African slaves were brought ashore, but in 1739, an incident of unprecedented ferocity caught every slaveowner in its grip.
Shortly after midnight on Sunday, September 9, about twenty miles from Charles Town, South Carolina, a group of about twenty slaves, led by an Angolan called Jemmy, slipped away from their plantations and met up at a bridge over the Stono River. Hugging the banks, they proceeded to Hutchenson's store, where they broke in and stole guns and ammunition. In the process, the slaves murdered Hutchenson and his clerk, cutting off their heads and depositing them on the front steps. The slaves then left the river and moved south, "in a Daring manner out of the Province, killing all they met and burning several Houses as they passed along the Road," according to a report the following month to the Board of Trade by William Bull, lieutenant governor of the colony.8 By the time the sun rose, at least ten white Carolinians were dead.
The runaways recruited other slaves they encountered on the way and by noon more than one hundred had joined the group. The rebels continued to kill any whites who were unfortunate enough to be in their path to Florida and freedom. The Spanish in Saint Augustine, either because of humanitarian concerns or, more likely, to nettle the English with whom they were at war, were well-known for offering safe haven to any escaping slaves who could make it there.
Early in the afternoon, the rebels were spotted by a party of five men on horseback, who galloped off before the runaways could bring them down. One of the men happened to be Lieutenant Governor Bull. One can only imagine Bull's reaction at encountering a band of one hundred blacks carrying guns and machetes on a South Carolina road. He immediately spread the alarm and marshaled a militia. Soon an equal
number of armed white men was pursuing the rebels.
That afternoon, after a twenty-mile march, Jemmy's band stopped in a field near the Edisto River for the night. They had killed more than twenty white men, women, and children. Bull's militia came upon the camp at about four o'clock and rode in firing. The rebels fired back but the whites had better weapons and better training. Fourteen of the slaves were killed and others captured and summarily executed. The remainder escaped into the woods as the whites returned to send out a broader alarm.
South Carolina went on what was described as a "war footing" and commenced the hunt for the remaining slaves.9 Every white male in the colony was armed, and checkpoints were established at ferry crossings. Members of the local Chickasaw and Catawba tribes were offered a bounty for every black they caught.
With in a week, as many as sixty of the rebels had been killed or executed, thirty in one skirmish. Their heads were also cut off, and then left on pikes on the side of the road for other slaves to see. A few escaped again, only to be hunted down and executed over the coming weeks. One man managed to elude capture for three years, until he was finally betrayed by other runaways, after which he was captured and hanged.
The Stono Rebellion, as it came to be called, was the largest slave uprising in the North American colonies before independence, and it had a profound impact on slaveholders for decades afterward. The effects were still being felt when the delegates met in Philadelphia. In the short term, it caused South Carolina to place a prohibitive duty on slave imports, although rice economics soon overwhelmed that idea. Far more significantly, the following year, after authorities uncovered another plot involving more than two hundred slaves, the colony passed a slave code called the Negro Act. It eliminated whatever small freedom slaves had enjoyed and placed severe restrictions on their conduct, their activities, what implements they could carry, what they could do with their free time, and even the way they could dress.
What the slave code could not do was lessen the fears of white southerners. Having spent decades justifying slavery as the natural domination of a civilized race over a savage one—"translating a set of human beings from a bad country to a better," as Rawlins Lowndes later put it—they were now forced to live with their own propaganda. Fear of uprisings by frenzied, barbaric blacks grew exponentially and wildly out of proportion to actual events.
Stono aside, most "rebellions" involved two to four slaves, whose interest was escape, not fomenting revolution. The larger, significant uprisings of Denmark Vesey and Nat Timer were still the better part of a century away. There were numerous incidents of slaves who were driven to violence by the barbarity of their treatment, but they hardly amounted to rebellion.10 Overall, in fact, the colonial period in British North America was notable for the quiescence of its slave population.
To justify their fears, however, slaveowners of the southern colonies needed to look no further than the West Indies, where the conditions on the sugar plantations were far worse than even in the rice fields of South Carolina, and slave revolts were more common and far more deadly. They also knew of the famous Maroon uprising in Jamaica, where an enslaved Coramantee warrior named Cudjo led an uprising that lasted an incredible forty years, and resulted in the British governor signing a peace treaty in 1738 that ceded part of the island to the rebels.
One danger that the West Indian slaveowners did not have to face was having slaves freed by other white men. That was reserved for the five southern colonies in mainland North America, who saw themselves facing increasingly hostile neighbors to the north. As northerners either outlawed slavery or phased it out,* southerners were convinced that their northern neighbors intended to compel them, either by financial pressure or force, to do the same.11 At best, the northern colonies might easily come to offer the same safe haven to escaping slaves as the Spanish in Florida, thus further encouraging murderous runaways who might then seek freedom in either direction.
Or perhaps foreigners would free the slaves. During the French and Indian War, Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia, when informed of French victories in the Ohio territory, which supposedly had created rumblings among the slaves, wrote that "the villainy of Negroes on any emergency of government is what I always feared." Five days later, he ordered military commanders to "leave a proper number of soldiers in each county to protect it from the combinations of negro slaves, who have been very audacious since the defeat on the Ohio. These poor creatures imagine the French will give them their freedom."12
As Madison would later note in the Federalist, belying his enduring reputation as a nonracist southerner, "An unhappy species of population abounds in some of the states who, during the calm of the regular government, are sunk below the level of men; but, who, in the tempestuous scenes of civil violence, may emerge into the human character, and give a superiority of strength to any party with which they may associate themselves."13
When the Revolution came, the fear of imposed emancipation was transferred to the British. "On September, 26 [1775] Edward Rutledge [of South Carolina] moved that Washington be instructed 'to discharge all the Negroes as well as Slaves as Freemen in his Army' Rutledge was worried about the example that armed black men would furnish for South Carolina's numerous slaves. False rumors of an impending British-mstigated slave insurrection had touched off a panic in the colony in May and June 1775."14
Rutledge was not alone. Two days before in Philadelphia, Archibald Bullock and John Houstoun, two congressional delegates from Georgia, spent the evening with John Adams. Adams reported that "These Gentlemen gave a melancholy Account of the State of Georgia and S. Carolina. They said that if 1000 regular Troops should land in Georgia and their commander be provided with Arms and Cloaths enough, and proclaim Freedom to all the Negroes who would )oin his camp, 20,000 Negroes would join it from the two Provinces in a fortnight. The Negroes have a wonderfull Art of communicating Intelligence among themselves. It will run severall hundreds of Miles in a Week or Fortnight."15
That Rutledge turned out to be right likely gave him scant comfort. During the war in the South, British forces freed more than twenty-five thousand slaves, promising them permanent freedom if they helped defeat their masters. A few eventually escaped, but almost all of the rest were killed or recaptured, or died of disease.
Southerners often put slave control on a higher level than defeating the enemy. In April 1776, as Washington was desperate to strengthen the Continental army in an effort to repel the expected land-sea assault by England, Major-General Charles Lee pestered Congress with a series of panicked letters about controlling the slaves. The last of these, to Robert Morris, urged that three or four regiments be kept in Virginia to protect against a slave uprising.16
Fear of slave rebellion had a practical impact on the war. In 1779, South Carolina reported that it was unable to use its militia effectively against the British because it was needed as a home guard to prevent rebellion and flight among the slaves. Perpetuation of slavery united Whigs and Tories. "When the war came, South Carolina had to deal with large numbers of barbaric Africans. The most influential citizens, whether 'patriot' or 'loyalist,' were determined to preserve the existing industrial and social order as a necessary condition of life in the district, no matter which system of government and allegiance should prevail."17 In fact, when Bullock and Houstoun were warning Adams of the danger of a slave uprising in South Carolina, they noted that "their only Security in this, that all the Kings Friends . . . have large Plantations and Property in Negroes. So that the Slaves of the Tories would be lost as well as those of the Whiggs."18
The combination of Shays' Rebellion (or at least Henry Knox's version of it ) and the ongoing fear of slave revolts turned out to be the lever that Madison, Dickinson, and Hamilton needed to generate interest in a meeting of all the states. On February 21, 1787, six months after it had received Dickinson's report from Annapolis, and one month after the Springfield raid, Congress endorsed the commission's recommendation that a national con
vention be called in Philadelphia that May to consider changes to the Articles of Confederation.
* After ratification the title was changed to secretary ofwar.
*In 1780, the Massachusetts constitution abolished slavery and Pennsylvania passed a law of gradual abolition. Connecticut and Rhode Island passed gradual emancipation laws in 1784; New Hampshire in 1792; New York in 1799; and New Jersey in 1804. Vermont had outlawed slavery in 1777, while it was still a territory.
4. TAMING THE WEST: THE OHIO COMPANY OF VIRGINIA
The Jay-Gardoqui affair had exposed the nation's deepest rift, one that could cleave the United States between North and South. The rift was not new. For four decades, before even the most ferocious patriot contemplated independence, the forces that later combusted in New York had been building in the ports of New England, the tidewater of Virginia, the swamps of South Carolina, and, perhaps most of all, in the vast untamed frontier that stretched to the Mississippi and beyond.
This was in no way lost on the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. Not one of them came to Philadelphia believing that he was there to create a new government—or reform an old one—only for the benefit of thirteen states on the Atlantic. Roger Sherman would say on July 14, 1787, that "we are providing for our posterity, for our children & our grand Children, who would be as likely to be citizens of new Western States, as of the old States."1
The United States was exploding westward. Elbridge Gerry called it "a rage for emigration from the Eastern States to the Western Country."2 Frontier expansion was the future, with fertile land for new farms and new farmers, rivers to carry goods across a larger and more prosperous nation, lumber and furs, minerals and trade. If managed deftly, all this would create wealth for the country and profits for shippers, merchants, and manufacturers, to say nothing of those who owned the land itself.
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