The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788–1800

By Jay Winik

In The Great Upheaval, New York Times bestselling author Jay Winik reveals the events of the historic decade that birthed the modern world.

It is an era that redefined history. As the 1790s began, a fragile America teetered on the brink of oblivion, Russia towered as a vast imperial power, and France plunged into revolution. But in contrast to the way conventional histories tell it, none of these remarkable events occurred in isolation.

Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian Jay Winik masterfully illuminates how their fates combined in one extraordinary moment to change the course of civilization. A sweeping, magisterial drama featuring the richest cast of characters ever to walk upon the world stage, including Washington, Jefferson, Louis XVI, Robespierre, and Catherine the Great, The Great Upheaval is a gripping, epic portrait of this tumultuous decade that will forever transform the way we see America’s beginnings and our world.

“Buttressed by impeccable research, vividly narrated and deftly organized, this is popular history of the highest order.” —Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 13, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061826719

Jay Winik

The author of the #1 and New York Times bestselling April 1865 and the New York Times bestsellers 1944 and The Great Upheaval, Jay Winik is renowned for his creative approaches to history. The Baltimore Sun called him “one of our nation’s leading public historians.” He is a popular public speaker and a frequent television and radio guest. He has been a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal book review section, as well as to The New York Times. His many national media appearances include the Today show, Good Morning America, World News Tonight, NPR, and FOX News. He is a former board member of the National Endowment for the Humanities and was the historical advisor to National Geographic Networks.

Book preview

PART I

THE PROMISE OF A NEW AGE

CHAPTER 1

AMERICA

SOLDIERS MARCHED THAT DAY in Manhattan. For almost as long as anyone could remember, the sight of soldiers had invariably meant the same thing, whether they were French or Russian, Austrian or English, whether they belonged to kings or were battle-hardened mercenaries, whether they moved in great formations or galloped along on horseback. Too often their presence was ominous, signaling that the campaign was beginning and the war was deepening, that the dead would increase and the bloodshed would continue, and the suffering would go on. But today their footsteps were unique, booming out the rites of nationhood. They called out a celebration of victory and the raising of the flag—the American flag. It was November 25, 1783. Evacuation Day in New York City.

As morning broke, the crowds converged and the collective pulse quickened, murmuring with exhilaration. A hundred years later, the city would still remember and celebrate this day. By Manhattan’s shores, the last British troops, heads bowed, dour and defeated, were ferried out to transport ships waiting for them in the harbor, then, sails aloft, their gleaming masts disappearing into the distance. For the British there was indescribable sorrow at the loss of their thirteen beautiful provinces. And there was then, as one man remembered, a deep stillness. And then pandemonium.

This final corner of occupied territory was now free.

It was precisely one o’clock. The bells of New York, all but silent since the Stamp Act’s repeal and languishing for years in storage, now rang, while at the southern tip of the island, the flag, torn down in September 1776, was soon hoisted anew to flutter in the wind. All across the city, young and old alike collected in anticipation, by the corner of Broad and Pearl streets, where a roar of applause would ebb and mount, and over to Bowling Green, where in 1776 the Declaration of Independence was read and patriots had toppled the king’s equestrian statue and hacked the gilded crown off his head. Handkerchiefs flapped and gawkers hung out their windows, down past Trinity Church, where desperate Americans had once quietly prayed for deliverance. And now, before a thicket of patriots, scores of battle-tested American troops entered to reclaim the city. Led by General Henry Knox and flanked on one side by a hatless George Washington, mounted upon a brilliant white steed, and by Governor George Clinton on the other, here they came. These were the survivors of Bunker Hill, the heroes who crossed the Delaware, the men who had shivered at Valley Forge, and the victors at Yorktown. They were ill-clad and weather-beaten, but the people loved them just the same. Marching southward in formation under a velvety sky, the triumphant procession wound past Blue Bells Tavern, where Washington reviewed the pageantry, past half-ruined mansions where errant British flags still flew, and past the moldering earthworks and trenches that dotted the roads, down to the island’s edge and the streets to the Battery. Crowds gasped and erupted into shouts of Hurrah. A thirteen-gun salute exploded into the air, while artists and scribblers converged, ready to record the event for posterity.

At Fort Washington, the password of the day was PEACE. The eight-year war was over.

The dawn of a new era had begun.

FROM A DISTANCE, one British officer marveled, The Americans are a curious…people; they know how to govern themselves, but nobody else can govern them. Yet the Revolution had been hard on the country. At least 25,000 Americans had died in the conflict—a staggering one percent of the population, a number surpassed only by the ruthless carnage of the Civil War—indeed, one estimate held that as many as 70,000 had perished. And there were the memories. Legions of American soldiers had been held captive aboard British prison ships anchored in the East River, ships that were damp, cold, and reeking from inadequate sanitation. The filth and the lice, the disease and malnutrition, not to mention the gross mistreatment, had carried off an astounding eleven thousand continentals—nearly half of all the deaths in the war itself. And with grim regularity, the bleached skulls and skeletons of the dead would lap up on the shore, bearing silent witness to British atrocities.

In New York, after seven years of British rule and martial law, the city was a shambles, a legacy of the transforming burdens of war. The day’s delirium aside, as the sun rose that morning, the vistas were chilling. The city was a patchwork of shanty huts and brick skeletons, remnants of the devastating fire of 1776. The enormity of the reconstruction challenge was overwhelming: In every direction spread weed-choked ruins, rotted-out homes, and vacant lots; and everywhere stood the debris of war. The streets overflowed with trash, squalor, and excrement, and block upon block lay bare and decrepit; New York had even been stripped of its fences and trees—the British troops used them for firewood—while its wharves had been left to rot and sink into the river. No less than Trinity Church was reduced to a blackened hull. Bony cows and pigs scavenged freely, and the people themselves were crammed into a haphazard mass of pitched tents and cramped hovels. Pale-faced and unwashed—disease-ridden too—they existed, in the words of one visitor, like herrings in a barrel. No wonder New York’s future mayor, John Duane, ruefully noted that the city looked as if it had been inhabited by savages or wild beasts.

And what now? In these early days—or the final ones, it depended upon your perspective of the British crown—the signs were hardly encouraging. For the Tory supporters of the king, the hallowed era of British rule had come to an inglorious end: Powerful businessmen and overseas merchants were without homes; prosperous shipbuilders had been reduced to nothing short of beggars; great politicians appointed by the crown saw their houses rummaged through and their family dynasties abruptly undone. And hordes of English-American children were cast aside by the only world they had ever known. Already, some 60,000 to 80,000 Tories had fled to England or to the safer outposts of Bermuda, the West Indies, and Canada. They knew that for thousands of American patriots, Tories were little more than hated traitors; they also knew that vengeance, greed, and jingoism made for a lethal cocktail. Sunk in grief, many thus became permanent refugees in foreign lands, clinging vainly to the faint dream of return. Tragically, when the exiles made their way to Britain, more often than not they were viewed as public burdens or social embarrassments, or, in the end, as simply mere bores. We Americans, one loyalist said gloomily, are plenty here, and cheap.

For those who remained, the dreaded Armageddon had finally arrived. Gone were the customary sights that had for so long been an integral part of their British lives—the elegant redcoats with their scarlet uniforms and burnished arms who were their defenders, the glory of the king and the glamour of their empire, the clatter of official carriages and the pitched whistles of British naval vessels that were the great empire’s protector, and, of course, the long skyline adorned by the Union Jacks fluttering aloft; all had changed, absolutely and inexorably forever.

At the moment of the British exodus, one anxious loyalist said tearfully, The town now swarms with Americans. And the last loyalists themselves? The wreckage of their lives was soon to be revealed in vivid detail: homes seized and sold at auction; family furniture and precious heirlooms abandoned or outright ransacked; thieves callously picking over their personal effects; and shattered dishes littering the floors of once elegant abodes, everywhere the dishes. Most humiliating were the public notices, formally banning the exiles from ever returning to America—or the laws curtailing their civil and financial rights. And soon would come frightening incidents of revenge: One loyalist, seized by a mob in New London, was strung up by the neck aboard a dockside ship, whipped with a cat-o’-nine-tails, tarred and feathered, and thrown on a boat to New York. In South Carolina, another was hanged by embittered ex-neighbors.

So on that morning the remaining loyalists numbly waited, listening to the haunting sound of American military men marching their way, the thud of enemy feet in the streets, the sharp commands ringing in the air—and the terrible echo of celebratory cannons off in the distance. One New Yorker even observed that the loyalists were now in a perfect state of madness, drowning, shooting and hanging themselves.

But euphoric Americans took little heed. As the loyalists escaped New York, packing the roads and crowding the wharves, a surge of new residents arrived, doubling the city’s population in just two years and quickly turning this restless little seaport into the most vivacious and cosmopolitan society on America’s shores.

New Yorkers, indeed all Americans, were already looking ahead.

TWO DAYS AFTER Evacuation Day, George Washington, hugging his artillery commander, gave a tearful farewell to his officers at Fraunces Tavern. With a heart full of love and gratitude, he told his officers, fighting back his emotions, I now take leave of you. One of his men who witnessed the scene would recall that he had never seen such a moment of sorrow and weeping. But more than that, they saw something else quite startling. Washington was sending out a powerful signal: To a man, they were all mere servants of the nation, even as he resisted calls to become a king.

After crossing the Hudson, Washington then rode south through the gathering chill to Annapolis, Maryland, where the Congress was now meeting. Around noon on December 23, 1783, Washington was escorted into the State House, where he met the assembled delegates. He rose and bowed, and with a faint quiver in his hands, proceeded to read his carefully chosen words. Having now finished the work assigned me… His voice dwindled. He continued: …I retire from the great theatre of action, and bidding an affectionate farewell to this august body…I here offer my commission and take my leave. Now his eyes filled. Neither the heartbreaking loss of New York, or the brazen victory at Trenton, nor the winter nightmares of Valley Forge and Morristown, or the decisive liberation at Yorktown, could have prepared him for this moment inside these hushed chambers. The spectators, fighting back their own tears, also grasped the importance of the day, itself replete with symbolism: For once more, Washington was relinquishing his military power, underscoring civilian control in the new republic.

In London, King George III was soberly informed that Washington would resign and turn to private life. His reply is legendary. If he does that, sir, the king exclaimed, no doubt with a slight tremble to his voice, he will be the greatest man in the world. From a king who could barely hear the words United States uttered in his presence and who would turn his back on Thomas Jefferson, this was a subtle admission packed with historic meaning. American liberty was now not simply a rhetorical chant mouthed to stay the hands of a prevaricating despot or a corrupted parliament, but a reality. And this incipient revolution was, it seemed, not destined solely for Americans, but for peoples the world over, and, at long last, it was coming into full reveal.

In the epicenter of Europe in 1783, France, now the globe’s mightiest empire, felt it too.

IT WAS A paradox, to be sure. Even if France’s support for the young rebels had far less to do with idealism than with a cynical settling of scores with England, and even if the young country to which the monarchy had helped give birth remained a footnote in its attentions, France’s fashionable society felt quite differently. Heroic poems with thirteen stanzas became the rage. So were picnics on the thirteenth of the month, in which thirteen toasts to the Americans were drunk. And so were the hundreds of French nobles who had rushed abroad and risked death so that a young republic might live: the Marquis de Lafayette, who would achieve immortality as George Washington’s protégé and nearly lose his life at the battle of Brandywine; Admiral d’Estaing, who would take Newport and almost die in the struggles to take Savannah; and Admiral Rochambeau, who would eschew the lavish comfort of the French court for one last glorious crusade to fight side by side with the Americans.

Indeed, nowhere was the French ardor for American liberty more apparent than in their national veneration of Benjamin Franklin. More than anyone else, for the French, he seemed to embody this young republic with all its unspoiled virtues: America as a place of natural innocence, America as a place of patriotic virtue, America as a land of freedom. Thus, Franklin’s likeness was everywhere—on painted porcelain and printed cottons, on snuffboxes and inkwells, not to mention prints and dolls and engraved glass and over mantelpieces. It was even displayed in Versailles itself.

This was a time when, as the Comte de Ségur, another French nobleman who had fought with Washington, would put it: The American cause seemed our own; we were proud of their victories, we cried at their defeats, we tore down bulletins and read them in all our houses. None of us reflected on the danger that the New World could give to the old.

ACTUALLY, ONE PERSON did. Miles away off to the east, in the vast Russian Empire, Catherine the Great, the tsarina and ruler of the world’s largest nation, was much less impressed. And amid the deepening winter snows of St. Petersburg, America’s envoy, a baggy-eyed Francis Dana, was holed up for months in L’Hôtel de Paris, in mortifying seclusion. Dana was the very antithesis of flamboyant—he had the soul of Puritan propriety, with a reputation for judicial temperament and an unfailing devotion to his country. Under direction from the U.S. Congress, he was seeking to establish the mutual interests (his words) that the two nations had in intimate connection with each other. But where John Adams, Dana’s friend and mentor, dined luxuriously with the ambassadors of France and Spain, and Franklin was a household name in Parisian society, in St. Petersburg, Dana was frozen out.

The American Congress, fired with prospects of future glory, insisted that Dana be properly received—the Americans were ambitious upstarts even then. But Dana came to realize that he was less informed about Catherine the Great’s comings and goings, let alone her policies, than every groom and lackey in the palace. I have grown very tired, he sighed, of being a limb of that sovereign. A limb yes, yet he was far from ignorant of the complicated machinery of the Russian court. Catherine, he gravely realized, was still reluctant to admit the United States into the councils of Europe, with serious ramifications for American trade and security. To the empress, there was no place in the established chanceries of the Old World and their dynastic alliances for the pretensions of America. So even as Dana’s health declined—the horrid winters were too much for him—he continued to plug away. He should have. Catherine was the great spoiler in Europe, and she maintained enormous influence. Backed by the towering philosophes of Europe—Voltaire, Diderot, Grimm—she was also seen as treading the clouds of a world Utopia. And as Dana asked, weren’t these now America’s goals and interests, too?

It didn’t matter. By the time peace was secured between America and Britain in 1783, Catherine, the Autocrat and Empress of All the Russias, had grown tired, bored, restless with the whole American matter—to the extent that she thought about it at all. She had already thwarted Britain and its imperial goals, hoodwinked the Hapsburgs, aroused the supportive passions of the great liberal minds of the day, and kept all of Europe off balance. Now she turned her attention away from the wider continental spoils back to her own borders—to the ancient kingdom in Poland, emboldened by the fresh success of the American rebels—and to the Islamic sultanate in Turkey.

And back in the United States, the Founders were drawing their own lessons from Dana’s miserable experience. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, viewing Europe as kings balancing straws on their noses, both agreed that America’s true interest required that they be entangled as little as possible with the Old World. For his part, George Washington looked out on the world stage and saw worrisome portents of things to come. If the disparate thirteen states didn’t form a single, genuine union, he direly warned their governors, Americans would yet become the sport of European politics.

But intoxicated by the glow of victory, nobody was listening; Washington’s admonitions fell on deaf ears. He had watched American liberty survive the challenges of war. Now could it, Washington wondered, meet the demands of peace? Or would it succumb to a hostile world of kings, monarchs, and emperors, greedily waiting for it to fail?

AT FIRST, THE signs were promising. A slow process of healing began between the patriots and Tories, and a number of loyalists who had not actively resisted the Revolution were able to return, largely unmolested. Moreover, the United States had gained a vast new domain beyond the Appalachians, and America became the undisputed mistress of an immense, rich, and sparsely settled territory. New roads radiated west and south. Studding the landscape with hand-hewn homes and traveling by carriage or horse and buggy, Americans were increasingly everywhere over the vastness of its spaces: from the distant Pennsylvania Alleghenies to the mouth of the Mississippi, from the loamy banks of Nova Scotia to the arid plantations in the Carolinas. The country tentatively began an incipient national art; a thriving, rancorous press; a devotion to education (including for women) as well as the theater; and even new national idioms: Rejecting the sharply drawn class system of the European monarchies, or the prerogative that had once only belonged to the gentry, Mr. and Mrs. came into vogue. From out of nowhere, newspapers sprang up, and so did almanacs, tracts, chapbooks, and periodicals. Great colleges were established. And too, major cities were emerging and expanding, in Boston and New York, Philadelphia and Annapolis, Trenton and Williamsburg, Albany and Lancaster, Raleigh and Columbia, and beyond. The country became a magnet for the hopes of immigrants and an inspiration for those who cherished freedom worldwide, from England and France, Poland and Ireland, and even among reformers in Russia. Increasingly sophisticated and even wealthy, Americans were filled with an extraordinary sense of optimism and a glowing sense of destiny. As the country experienced astonishing postwar growth and a breathtaking vibrancy, there was much to celebrate.

But it was fleeting: Even as the country was riding this crest of approbation, powerful forces were tugging at it from within.

It was all deception.

THE FRAGILITY OF America as a Union from its very first days cannot be exaggerated. Unlike the Old World, America was not born out of ancient custom or claim, its people stitched together from the shadows of feudal, marauding bands, emerging as a nation by the time they could primitively write their own history. Where in most countries a sense of nationhood spontaneously arose over centuries, the product of generations of common kinship, common language, common myths, and a shared history, America was born as an artificial series of states, woven together with the string of precariously negotiated compacts and agreements, charters and covenants. The country did not arise naturally, as in Europe, or Persia, or China, but was made, almost abstractly, out of the guns of a Revolutionary War, and ink and paper, crafted by lawyers and statesmen. Significantly, even in 1776, the birth certificate to become Americans—the Declaration of Independence—did not make it a nation. In fact, the very word nation was explicitly dropped from the draft, and all references were instead to the separate states. Thus, the very heading of the final version of the Declaration of Independence described the document as The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, and the momentous resolution introduced in the Continental Congress on June 7, 1776, by Richard Henry Lee and seconded by John Adams, declared: That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States. As the historian Daniel Boorstin noted, Independence had not created one nation but thirteen.

There was more than a measure of truth to this. Like the colonies that preceded them, these new states were as dramatically different from one another as they were from England. Each jealously guarded its own independence, its self-rule, and its sovereignty. Each meticulously had gathered its own army, chartered its own navy, commanded military actions to protect its own interests, and oversaw its own Indian affairs and postal routes. Each had its own legislatures, its own functioning courts, its own taxes, and, in time, its own individual constitutions. And too often forgotten is this simple but overweening fact: Before independence, Americans were both British subjects as well as citizens of Massachusetts or Virginia, New York or Connecticut. After independence, they were no longer Britons, but neither were they Americans—as yet, they had no American country to which to attach their loyalties. And so they remained faithful, proud members of their sovereign states, Massachusetts or Virginia or Rhode Island or New York, all stretching back nearly 175 years, and older in fact than the collective American nation was at the time of the Civil War. Indeed, to the extent that there was an American national identity, it was unexpected, impromptu, an artificial creation of the Revolution—and secondary.

It is revealing that Thomas Jefferson, for one, referred not to America as his country but to Virginia; that he described Virginians as his countrymen and spoke of the federated Congress as a foreign legislature; and that he soberly warned that a single consolidated government would become the most corrupt government on earth. Patrick Henry agreed. So did George Mason and John Hancock. Nor were they alone in these sentiments. It was precisely these sorts of ruminations, then, that George Washington, back in Mount Vernon, absorbed with dismay.

It was justified. In truth, there was no greater testament to the feeble unity of the country than America’s governing body: the Congress. After pathetically wandering from Princeton to Annapolis, from Trenton and then to New York, where it finally settled, the national legislature could scarcely muster a quorum. It remained a weak and wayward instrument, whose members either didn’t appear, often had no work when they did appear, or weren’t listened to when they actually sought to enact policy. At every step, its actions were marked by temporizing, indifference, hesitation. And governing was impossible: They couldn’t tax, they couldn’t raise an army to repel invaders—Congress had been forced to sell off its last warship—and they couldn’t suppress internal insurrections. And under the Articles of Confederation, all thirteen states had to agree to any amendment to the federal government’s powers. By any standard, it was woefully impotent.

Abroad, for all the world to see, the weakness of the federal government was impossible to disguise. There were consequences. England took advantage, contemptuously refusing to withdraw its troops from its forts on American soil in the West, as had been promised in the 1783 treaty, and barring American ships from moving freely about the West Indies, stifling much-needed American trade. If that weren’t enough, separatist movements were plotted with the Indians in the borderlands of the Northwest and Virginia. Spain took advantage too, taunting the new nation by prohibiting Western settlers from shipping farm produce from the port of New Orleans; they also supported renegade separatist movements, this time in the Southwest. Even Arab Barbary pirates made a veritable sport of preying on American ships, selling off captured American sailors in the harsh Muslim slavery bazaars of North Africa, and destroying the young country’s Mediterranean markets.

Month by month, the American confederacy was increasingly shaky, and month by month, with ever-growing impunity, the thirteen states acted like thirteen independent countries, and squabbling, ill-tempered ones at that. New York laid onerous import duties on simple rowboats crossing with produce from New Jersey; it taxed lumber from Connecticut too. Pennsylvania followed suit (indeed, Pennsylvania and Connecticut literally waged a twenty-year war over land). So did Massachusetts, which was selling goods with inflated prices to Connecticut and New Hampshire. Rhode Island tried to stick out-of-state creditors with its debts, as did Maryland. And the inhabitants of Kentucky and the newly formed state of Franklin were threatening to arm 10,000 men to settle the question of navigation on the Mississippi.

Soon, between the swelling debt, shrinking money supply, and dwindling trade, the flush of prosperity was snuffed out. Seamstresses, shoemakers, and other craftsmen and artisans were suddenly without work; the shipbuilding industry collapsed too. As would quickly follow in France, there were now dreadful visions of the poor rising up against the well-to-do. The situation became dire: There was no common trade policy, no real foreign policy, barely any domestic policy. And there was the debt, accumulated during the war. The young nation had borrowed millions from France and Holland to finance the Revolution, which it had scant hope of being able to repay. No wonder James Madison luridly warned about this flagrant and present anarchy. Or that John Sullivan referred to the confederacy as a Monster with thirteen heads! In fact, the future president of the Congress, Nathaniel Gorham, openly worried that the clashes between New York and its neighbors would erupt into civil war.

And in 1786, with the formal peace with Britain a mere three years old, New England delegates were suddenly talking about disunion and separate confederacies—James Monroe warned Thomas Jefferson that the northern provinces were planning to form their own nation, while Northerners would soon fear that the South would form alliances in Europe, and then all will be irrevocably lost.

The question now lingered: Could this fragile confederacy withstand the accumulated strains between haves and have-nots, between states’ rights and federal powers, between the country’s divided nature and divided philosophy? One of the original signers of the Declaration of Independence, Gouverneur Morris, put it this way: The fate of America was suspended by a hair.

More than ever, this was the case when in the fall of 1786 delegates from all the states were invited to a meeting in Annapolis to discuss the crumbling Articles of Confederation and the mounting chaos spreading across the land—and only a paltry twelve delegates from just five states showed up.

Then came the thunderclap that rattled across the frail Confederation: Shays’s Rebellion.

WHILE THE ANNAPOLIS conference foundered, rural turmoil was flickering in western Massachusetts.

It happened like this. Thousands of farmers, wrestling with the gritty particulars of their common lives, were unable to pay their debts. When they weren’t imprisoned, and ever-greater numbers were, many had lost their farms and were now asking themselves if this was the liberty for which they had fought. And they did more than just ask. Taking their cue straight from the Revolutionary War, they resolved they would prevail against the state’s onerous new taxation scheme much as they had confronted another far-off body, the British Parliament.

So in the tense, early days of 1786, disgruntled farmers grabbed pitchforks and guns, donned their old Continental Army uniforms, and started assembling companies of men—and they drilled. But this was not some rogue, backwoods undertaking. Actually, the chief architect of the rebellion was a much respected officer who had served bravely on the front lines of the Revolutionary War, Daniel Shays. To his critics, Shays was an impatient hothead with a short fuse. But he was also a former captain in the Continental Army, had fought at Bunker Hill, marched at Saratoga, and put his life on the line at Stony Point. With his firm-set lip and charismatic bearing—he soon became a local folk hero—he was, by all accounts, a man displaying a passionate zeal for reform. Living day-to-day in constant fear of losing his small Massachusetts farm, he was also prepared to shake up the edifice of the country. Moreover, he was in good company, aided by like-minded men such as former Continental major Luke Day.

Their voices edged with frustration and anger, the Shays protest movement quickly reached into other Massachusetts counties, and found ardent sympathizers in neighboring New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island as well. Then the violence began. When judges arrived at their county courts, furious protesters greeted them with clenched fists and violent insults; ashen-faced, the judges swiftly fled. The Massachusetts governor, James Bowdin, reacted swiftly, prohibiting unlawful assemblies and summoning the militia to scatter the mobs. In doing so, he was supported by Samuel Adams, cousin of John and one of the nation’s most admired revolutionaries. But if such company was reassuring, it was also, at the time, calamitous. Suddenly the Shaysites were even more determined to fight back: Wearing sprigs of hemlocks in their hats, thus evoking the spirit of 1776, they threatened to overthrow the Boston government. Just as suddenly the image of a Revolutionary War redux was conjured up, now reenacted as an American civil war. The horror—and surprise—was not lost on Massachusetts’s desperate governor. He suspended habeas corpus and appealed to the national Congress for help.

It was a futile gesture. No assistance was coming. Bankrupt, the Congress instead asked the states to come up with $530,000 for an army. Twelve of the thirteen united states rejected the request. Virginia alone provided aid, and it was hardly enough. Beyond that, Massachusetts was unable to muster a single soldier. In dismay, a Virginia delegate begged George Washington to ride for Massachusetts to use his immense influence to dispel the rebellion. Washington testily fired back, Influence is no government.

Meanwhile, the extremism grew, and converts in the unlikeliest of places were found. Ominously, many members of the militia broke ranks and also joined the insurgency. Then Shays’s Rebellion began to spread. From New Jersey to South Carolina, uprisings swept the countryside. In York, Pennsylvania, an agitated mob refused to allow the sheriff to auction off cattle confiscated for taxes. Maryland’s Charles County courthouse was forcibly shut by angry rabble. In South Carolina, judges fled the Camden courthouse under a cloud of destruction and plunder. In Virginia, a fulminating mob torched the King William County courthouse, terrifying local residents and burning all the tax records. With each action, the Shaysites grew progressively more brazen and angrier at the power and privilege arrayed against them: unresponsive judges, unelected tax collectors, and an uncaring government, joining hands to wrest from them the few things they cherished most dearly—their farms and their livelihoods. If this could happen, then what next in this new country? Tyranny? Monarchy? Indignant and emboldened, the Shaysites, in a move hauntingly reminiscent of what would soon happen in the historic storming of France’s Bastille, decided to strike. Their target: the federal arsenal at Springfield, which held 15,000 muskets and a number of