“Uh . . . we’ve . . . we’ve learned that Shays has evacuated his Pelham stronghold and has reached Petersham for the night.”
“Petersham? Where in tarnation is that?”
“It’s about thirty miles northeast of here, toward Gardner.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” said Lincoln suddenly, very softly and calmly. A plan welled inside him. “Gentlemen, alert the troops, we are headed for Petersham . . . tonight . . . now!”
“Now?” stammered Colonel Burt. “It’s nearly eight o’clock. We’d have to travel through the night—and in the most hostile territory.”
“All the better to march by night, then,” answered Lincoln. “Our enemies will slumber peacefully and wake to some very unwelcome company.”
En Route to Petersham
New Salem, Massachusetts
February 3, 1787
General Lincoln and his troops had set off late but in fair weather. At 2:00 A.M., however, and about halfway to Petersham, that changed quickly: Veritable blizzard descended upon them. Temperatures dropped, sheets of snow drifted, and the wind blew so violently that it blinded his caravan. Soon frostbite struck.
Lincoln’s men wondered what sort of madman had delivered them into such disaster, but they kept marching. They had no real choice.
Regulator Encampment
Petersham, Massachusetts
February 4, 1787
The weather was equally horrid at Petersham: freezing temperatures with near zero visibility. Daniel Shays’ men may have shivered, but at least they shivered with a temporary sense of security. No one would dare attack them in this weather. Only a lunatic would dispatch an army in such conditions. Plus, it was now the Sabbath—a day of peace, when armies sheathed their swords and knelt in prayer. They rested without fear and without nearly enough sentries to warn them that trouble approached.
At 9:00 A.M. it was not merely trouble that approached, it was mayhem.
? ? ?
The sun had long since risen, but many Regulators still slumbered, catching up on the sleep that had been so hard to come by lately. Others tarried at breakfast. Suddenly, Shepard’s militia burst upon them, easily pushing past the few sentries on duty and into the rebel camp, catching its inhabitants totally by surprise.
“Militia!” came the shout, as men scrambled to retrieve their unloaded muskets.
Then, a more frightened alarm shattered the morning’s bitter cold air: “Artillery!”
Somehow, Shepard and Colonel Barr’s frostbitten men had dragged with them two heavy field pieces. These were now squarely aimed at the Regulators. “Cannon!” cried the surprised men. Their screams brought back visions of the bloody debacle that had visited them at the arsenal, of lead tearing through flesh, and of Ezekiel Root, Ariel Webster, Jabez Spicer, and John Hunter, all dead or dying upon the frozen Springfield ground.
Once again, the former mobbers fled without firing a shot. Panic-stricken, they simply ran for their lives, though some did not run fast enough. Lincoln took 150 of them—mostly privates—prisoner. They had little will to resist further, but Lincoln had no manpower to waste guarding them. He let most go home on parole.
Daniel Shays and Adam Wheeler did run fast enough, north on the Athol Road. Dreams of capturing Boston had long since left their minds; they now thought only of finding asylum in Vermont.
The Meetinghouse
Lenox, Massachusetts
December 6, 1787
“Attention!”
The guards at Lenox’s Meetinghouse snapped to strict attention, and so did the 250 spectators present.
After all, they were there for serious business.
The rebellion had not formally died after Petersham, but it had been mortally wounded. Some skirmishing continued and some looting and hostage-taking here and there, primarily at Stockbridge, near the New York border. In late February, some real fighting had finally occurred in Sheffield: five men—three Regulators, a hostage they had taken, and a militiaman—were killed, and 30 others were wounded. Colonel John Ashley’s local militia captured another 150 rebels.
Some in Boston thirsted for vengeance against the Shaysites. Leading the charge was one of John Hancock’s oldest enemies and one of the revolution’s most ardent patriots, Samuel Adams. “In monarchies,” Adams argued, “the crime of treason and rebellion may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished. But the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.”
But most people simply wanted the door closed on the whole sorry episode. From Paris, Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend, asking, “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
In the end, Shays, Day, Shattuck, all of their fellow insurgent officers, and nearly all of their men, received pardons. Their blood would not be shed.
But not everyone proved so lucky.
? ? ?
The drums beat a dirge, and the crowd stood bareheaded and silent as two young men stood side by side upon Lenox’s rude gallows. Stout nooses were fixed upon their necks: twenty-two-year-old John Bly, a “transient” of Tyringham, and Charles Rose, a Suffolk laborer and occasional teacher in his early twenties.
They might have been tried and sentenced for treason, insurrection, or sedition, but the authorities had decided otherwise. These two rebels would instead hang for a robbery committed at Lanesboro in the waning, sputtering days of the rebellion, when armies no longer marched and the most valiant protests the rebellion mounted were burglaries.
Bly and Rose, foolishly deluding themselves into believing that Shays would invade Massachusetts from exile in Vermont, had stolen weapons and powder at Lanesboro to facilitate Shays’ phantom attack. Now they stood trembling upon the gallows. John Hancock, miraculously healthy enough to return to the governorship now that the worst had past, had rejected their petitions for mercy. Stephen West, pastor of the First Congregational Church in nearby Stockbridge, ministered to the condemned but had little good to say of them. “As you have set yourselves against the community,” he scolded, “so the community now sets themselves against you.”
Bly and Rose, scapegoats for a stillborn rebellion, and a deadly warning to anyone else who might still harbor similar sentiments, had one privilege left to them: a few last words. The English-born Bly, his voice choking with emotion, chose not to condemn those about to execute him, but instead those firebrands whose angry words and reckless deeds had enticed men like him into this misbegotten adventure. “Our fate,” he cried, “is a loud and solemn lesson to you who have excited the people to rise against the government.”
A constable placed a hood over Bly’s head, and another over Rose’s. Two traps sprang. A pair of bodies plummeted downward, and the necks of two very young Regulators loudly and sickeningly snapped.
Shays’ Rebellion was over, now as cold and dead as the two young burglars hanging in Lenox.
? ? ?
Far to the south, upon the fertile banks of Virginia’s Potomac River, George Washington was done with his duties of chairing a convention in Philadelphia. He continued to ponder what other lessons—besides Bly’s dying testament—might be learned from this botched rebellion.
America, he knew, required a federal government strong enough to resist the kind of lawlessness that had erupted in Massachusetts. The new Constitution he had played a vital role in drafting would be necessary to protect both the government and the governed.
He hoped that James Madison, his new friend, who was now on his way to the Virginia Ratification Convention in Richmond, might be able to help him finally achieve this goal. Virginia’s vote would be crucial in deciding whether the new Constitution would succeed or fail. If it failed, Washington feared that the chaos that had briefly bubbled to the surface in Massachusetts would grow into a roaring boil and scorch the entire Union.