In January of 1787, just a few months
before the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, four thousand armed men,
led by several revolutionary war officers, including Daniel Shays, marched on
the federal armory in Springfield, Massachusetts. Their purpose, clearly
stated, was to overthrow the government in Boston and write a new constitution.
These same men had been active throughout the winter of 1786-1787, shutting
down courthouses in six, widely-separated counties.
Farmers all,
they had grievances aplenty, though whether an outright rebellion was justified
is a matter of debate among historians. But justification isn’t the point of
this posting. We don’t have to root for one side or the other to admit that
this was a Second Amendment remedy and every bit as purposeful (if not as effective) as the
Revolution that ousted King George. Most of the rebels – and each of their
leaders – were battle-tested Revolutionary War veterans and they knew how to
fight.
The State of
Massachusetts initially called out its various militias, only to discover that
many of them were already under arms. They were marching alongside Daniel
Shays. The State then petitioned the federal government, formed at that time under
the Articles of Confederation. Though sympathetic, the Congress took a pass. It
had neither an army, nor the taxing power to raise an army. So sorry.
The mercenary
force that eventually rode out to confront the rebels was hired by a small
group of Boston bankers, the same bankers who’d been preying on the farmers now
in revolt. General William Shepherd commanded this army as it headed off to
battle, forty-five hundred strong. No fool, Shepherd knew that if Shays took
the Springfield Armory, the rebels would be the best-armed force in the region,
more than a match for anything the state could throw at them. He had to get
there first and he did.
Shepherd found
what he needed inside, several cannons, one of which he filled with grapeshot
and fired waist-high into a rebel charge. And that was that, at least as far as
the revolt was concerned.
Shays and his
cohorts weren’t the first to rebel, even in Massachusetts, only the most famous.
In 1782, five years before, a preacher named Samuel Ely organized a Second
Amendment solution of his own. The muster form for his ragtag, and ultimately
unsuccessful, army included the following pledge: “We do Each of us acknowledge
our Selves to be Inlisted… for the Suppressing of the tyrannical government in
the Massachusetts State.”
Other states
experienced similar uprisings as courts were shut down by angry farmers in one
state after another. Shays’s Rebellion was special because it caught the attention
of a relatively small group of men who wanted a more powerful central
government, men like George Washington, James Madison Alexander Hamilton,
Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, James Wilson of Pennsylvania and Charles
Pinkney of South Carolina. One and all, they were outspoken nationalists who
wished to transform what amounted to an alliance of nation-states into a single
nation.
Writing as an
observer of Shays’s Rebellion, General Henry Knox, Washington’s Artillery
Commander during the Revolution, described the rebels as “levelers”, equivalent
in that era to the 20th Century charge of Communist. “Their creed is
that the property of the United States has been protected from the confiscation
of Britain by the joint exercise of all, and therefore ought to be the common
property of all….”
Writing back, Washington told Knox that he
expected the nation to be “much tumbled and tossed, and possibly wrecked
altogether.” Later, he explained, “I could not resist the call to a convention
of the States which is to determine whether we are to have a Government of
respectability… or are to submit to one which may be the result of chance or
the moment, springing perhaps from anarchy and Confusion….”
Others chimed
in. According to James Madison, “The insurrection in Massachusetts admonished
all the States of the danger to which they were exposed.” James Wilson, later a
Justice of the Supreme Court, echoed Madison’s and Washington’s opinions. “The
flames of insurrection,” he declared, “were ready to burst out in every
quarter….” Wilson wasn’t describing the situation in Massachusetts, but
conditions in western Pennsylvania.
Charles
Coatesworth Pinckney of South Carolina committed the obvious remedy to paper.
“There must be a real military force,” he wrote. “The United States has been
making an Experiment without it, and we see the consequences in their rapid
approach to anarchy.”
On May 25, 1787,
representatives from every State except Rhode Island met to form a new, far
more powerful, truly national government. These men (all, of course, were male)
were among the richest and most powerful in the country. They represented many
interests, including men with large agricultural holdings, like the Livingstons
who owned 160,000 acres spread out along the Hudson, and George Washington who
owned 317 slaves. One agricultural interest, however, went virtually unrepresented,
the interest of small farmers like Daniel Shays, who comprised 70% of the
population. No, the delegates in Philadelphia were determined to put this class
of Americans in its place. And they did.
Five Examples,
all found in Article 1:
Article 1,
section 10, clause one: No state shall “impair the obligation of contracts.”
One form of relief certain states allowed hard-pressed farmers was a postponement
of the due date for payments on mortgages and loans. These were called “stay
laws” and states would no longer have the power to write them.
Article 1,
section 8, clause 5: “No state shall… make Anything but gold and silver Coin a
Tender in payment of debts.” Some states had issued paper money because gold
was so scarce. In rural areas, where these small farmers raised their families,
gold was literally not to be found, which made it impossible to pay taxes and
debt obligations. Paper money, under these circumstances, was a blessing when
it was handled properly, but it would be a blessing no more. Once the
Constitution was ratified, the federal government would control the supply of
money.
Article 1,
section 8, clause one: “The Congress shall have the Power to lay and collect
Taxes….”
Article 1,
section 8, clause 12: “The Congress shall have the power to… raise and support armies.”
Article 1,
section 8, clause fifteen: Congress is given the power, “To provide for calling
forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.”
Article 1,
section 9, clause 2: The privilege of the writ of habeus corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the
public safety may require it.”
OK, so I stuck
in my own italics. The obvious nevertheless remains the obvious. The framers of
our founding legal document (the
Declaration of Independence is not a legal document) provided the delegates
with the means to confront and contain a problem, not in the distant past or
the far future, but a problem at hand, an ongoing problem as events would
prove.
Beginning in
1791, two years after George Washington became our first President, farmers in
western Pennsylvania, incensed by an excise tax on whiskey, started what has
come to be called the Whiskey Rebellion. Again leaving aside the merits of
their grievances, they initially enjoyed enough success for them to be
declared, by Supreme Court Justice James Wilson, to be in a state of rebellion. That allowed
Washington to call up the militia which he promptly did, eventually assembling
an army of 13,000 men from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Maryland.
With Washington in the lead (the only time in American History when a President
rode into war at the head of an army), they proudly marched off. True, the
rebellion was pretty much over by then, but a point had to be made. Never again
would the United States of America tolerate a Second Amendment solution for any
grievance, no matter how just.
Second Amendment
solution advocates commonly turn to Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of
Independence for justification. So, I’m going to close with a passage Jefferson
included in a letter to C. W. F. Dumas shortly after the Constitution was
signed.
“Happy for us,
that when we find our constitution defective and insufficient to secure the
happiness of our people, we can assemble with all the coolness of philosophies
and set it to rights, while every other nation on earth must have recourse to
arms to amend or to restore their constitutions.”
Sorry, but I
can’t resist on more jibe. In 2014, Clivon Bundy, assisted by a few hundred
Second Amendment remedy types, stood off the Bureau of Land Management for a
couple of months. I’m sure they were very proud of themselves, what with the
cammo gear, the cartridge belts, the side arms, the AR-15’s, the K-Bar knives,
the MRE’s. But I particularly recall video of perhaps fifty of them stretched
out along a highway overpass. Though I’ve never been to war, even I had the
good sense to pose an obvious question.
“What exactly do
they plan to do when the helicopter gunships come over the hill?”
Credit where
credit is due. I drew the facts in this piece from a number of sources, but I
owe a special debt to a book by Leonard L. Richards: Shays’s Rebellion. It’s impossible to come away from reading the
book and still believe the founding fathers supported Second Amendment
remedies.
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