As Donald Trump considers using the Insurrection Act to justify sending federal troops into American cities to treat lawfully protesting Americans as enemy combatants, I think that the story of Gov. James Bowdoin and Daniel Shays might be useful as a guide for what to expect.
By the time Bowdoin assembled a private army in January of 1787 (the Legislature was not in session when he took subscriptions of funds from rich men to pay his soldiers) protestors led by Shays, among others, had closed almost all the courts west of Boston for five months. They were protesting explicitly unjust austerity measures that would have transferred their wealth and property to speculators and financiers in Boston, but the governor and Samuel Adams did not see any legitimacy in the people’s protests.
In their new, supposedly representative government, they did not believe the people had genuine grievances — they thought they were lazy moochers, who were just being stirred up by foreign emissaries (plus ça change) and they refused to be bullied even though the protests enjoyed broad support throughout the state.
Bowdoin and Adams were afraid of showing any signs of weakness, so they sent 3,000 clerks, servants and dandies to Springfield, to impose martial law, to scatter the protestors and to arrest Shays and the many other leaders.
When Shays and his men — who called themselves “Regulators” if they even called themselves anything — heard that an army was coming, they made a last-ditch attempt to forestall them by seizing the Springfield arsenal, where they wanted to control the federal government’s stockpiles of weapons, to keep them from being used against them. Just as important, in late January, were the barracks and stockpiles of provisions for the subsistence farmers who had been running a resistance movement out of their own root cellars.
The governor’s private army arrived in Springfield on Jan. 27, two days after Shays’ force of 1,200 men had been repulsed from the arsenal with cannon fire that killed four and wounded 20. The governor’s general pursued Shays to Pelham and then to Petersham, where he scattered Shays’ force for good on Feb. 4.
Historians have generally treated “Shays’ Rebellion” as a failure for this defeat. In reality, the protestors returned to their homes and they bided their time. Some staged guerilla actions against government collaborators, and for six weeks, western Massachusetts was convulsed by fires, intrigues, chases and arrests. But on April 1, the people went to the polls, and they elected John Hancock in a two-to-one landslide. By June, almost all of the economic policies that had tormented them were repealed.
What happened? Bowdoin and Adams did not understand that in a nonviolent protest, whoever spills the blood loses. Whoever can wave the bloody shirts wins the hearts and minds of the neutral populace, who will normally side with the victims of unjust force. Shays’ people had just spent five months demonstrating their restraint. The people knew that they were not a rabble or a mob. Whereas the government forces had bloody snow on their hands, and they looked a lot like the bloody and tyrannical British.
If Trump wants to send the Army against American citizens, he is sealing his fate with the voting public — or else he is backing himself into a corner, where he will only be able to save his political life by suspending elections, and ending the American experiment in representative government.
Let’s hope that in the spirit of Daniel Shays’ sustained and nonviolent protests, the general populace and also the powerful men inside the government understand the danger of the course our exasperated leader is considering, and lead him to the bargaining table, where quite enough blood has already been spilled, to justify compromises and reforms.
Daniel Bullen is the author of “The People’s History of Shays’ Rebellion,” which is currently under consideration with publishers. He lives in Easthampton.