USA > Massachusetts > Hampshire County > Northampton > The Northampton book; chapters from 300 years in the life of a New England town, 1654-1954 > Part 5
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During the lucid years between breakdowns, he resumed his leadership in town affairs and sought to influence the shaping of the new constitution of the State of Massachusetts. Against the opposition of such men as Caleb Strong (who had studied law under Hawley), he wrung from the Northampton town meeting approval of his attack upon the constitution's provision that only property-holders should vote for governor or members of the legislature. "Let every adult freeman have the right to vote for Governor," he argued. To keep the vote from the property-less was to treat them "like villains or African slaves." His arguments were similar to those written a year later by Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia. Hawley's views no longer carried weight enough among government-makers to prevail, and as events made clear, his insistence upon the right to vote, upon general manhood suffrage, was a generation too early.
He was also in the van in his opposition to the constitution's requirement that office-holders take an oath of belief in Chris- tianity. It was not surprising that a man who had demonstrated religious independence all his life, who once had fought the estab- lished Congregational church in order to protect the rights of the Baptist minority, should now have challenged the religious quali- fication for office-holding. He called it an affront to the "in- alienable Right of Conscience," and when in 1780 he was elected to the State Senate, he dramatized his attitude by refusing to take his seat. "I have been a professed Christian nearly 40 years," he said, but by "the unconscionable not to say dishonorable terms
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established by the . . . constitution, I am barred from endeavoring to perform the duties" of a senator.
At a period in life when many men once liberal have grown conservative, he was speaking as a liberal and as an upholder of the rights of man which the philosophers had woven into the fabric of his century. He was speaking also as the humanitarian who in his will bequeathed a part of his estate to "the Town where I was born and lived most of my days" for the support of a school that would aid in "the good education of the Successive generations of the lads of Northampton." The school named for him as a result of this bequest is the most obvious monument to Joseph Hawley, but his real monument is the state and nation that he contributed so much to create. In the history of Massachusetts and in the company of Northampton's sons he is a significant figure of whom it was well said on the occasion of his death on March 10, 1788, that the Lord has taken "away from Jerusalem -from Judah, the stay and the staff, the mighty man, the coun- sellor and the eloquent orator."
Chapter Seven
The Ely Outbreaks: Prelude to Shays Rebellion
By SIDNEY KAPLAN
O N a Sabbath day of August, 1787 in the village of Whate- ly, a few miles up the river from the shire town of North- ampton, two baby boys were given names that were symbols of the troubled time and place in which they had been born. One was christened Daniel Shays, the other Benjamin Lin- coln. The first was named after a Pelham farmer and veteran captain of the Revolution who, on that baptismal day, was hiding out somewhere in Vermont, a price on his head, charged with having led a "horrid and most unnatural Rebellion and War" against the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; the second after a general whose army had just driven Shays over the border of the state. Behind those names lies the often-told tale of Shays Rebel- lion, first civil war of the American republic, which, 10 years after Sam Adams had signed his name to the Declaration of Inde- pendence, began in Northampton on August 29, 1786, when 1500 debt-ridden Hampshire farmers, armed with muskets, swords and clubs, told three judges they were sick to death of the rap of the auctioneer's hammer and that the court must adjourn.
Not so well known is the story of an earlier and smaller dis- turbance for which Northampton also furnished the stage. To understand the desperate reasons that would drive thousands of farmfolk-most of them Revolutionary veterans tired of war- to take down from their mantelpieces the weapons they had so recently hung up, it is necessary to know something of the out- breaks that took place in Hampshire County during the spring of 1782 and are unforgettably linked with the name of Samuel Ely, forerunner of Shays.
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It was a bleak homecoming that awaited the Hampshire farmer as he plodded north from the camps of the Revolution. Debts saddled his neglected farm and creditors demanded hard cash. Merchants plagued him to pay old bills; moneylenders pressed for principal and interest; tax-collectors hovered at his door. Toil as he might between the handles of his plow, his produce found meager markets in an economy dislocated by war. In his jeans was a thin fold of paper pay he had brought home from the army. Speculators exchanged it for cash at a 20th of its value. "The griping hand of poverty bore hard upon them," recollected a Con- gressional committee 40 years later, "and the veterans fell as easy prey to the wiles of the artful and insidious speculator who was lying in wait to fatten on their hard earnings.
There were a few, of course, who had no such problems-the great merchants of the east, for example, or men like Joseph Haw- ley and Caleb Strong, and others of Northampton's well-to-do. But for average farmers, veterans or not, who owned no large estates or inherited fortunes-and were neither merchants nor moneylenders, lawyers nor ministers-foreclosures, tax-sales, and debtors' cells were the heart-breaking facts of the post-war years. It was these, who had once made a fair living on valley acres or had struggled for subsistence on hardscrabble clearings in the hills, whose cattle was now seized for debt and whose homesteads were knocked down at public auction for a fraction of their value. It was these whom creditors threw into dirty cells for six shilling debts or sold as peons to those who could hire. A county jail, 9 yards wide and 12 yards long, that penned up 90 prisoners for six long months, seemed no fit place to the Jonathans and Davids who had just fought a war to be free.
It was in the west, farthest from markets, that the struggle to exist was bitterer than in any other part of the state. The web in which Hampshire and Berkshire plowmen found themselves caught like flies was tightly spun. If the main strand was crush- ing debt, there were many other entangling threads that held them fast as the spider of bankruptcy drew near. The whole machinery of government and law seemed designed to entrap. The constitu- tion of 1780-a creditors' and large property-owners' document it has been called-favored the wealth of the state: only the very rich could hold high office under it and the poorest could not vote, while the mode of representation in the General Court gave dis-
Caleb Strong, River God
Jonathan Edwards, Puritan
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A Canal Boat arriving at the Mansion House
The Main Building of the Northampton State Hospital
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The Ely Outbreaks: Prelude to Shays Rebellion
proportionate power to the mercantile east. The legal system seemed a conspiracy against debtors, who bore the brunt of costs in suits at law; lawyers guilty of shady practice charged exorbi- tant fees; judges were harsh.
There seemed to be no way out. Although moratoria on tax- sales were plainly the order of the day, when helpless farmers turned to Boston for relief they were answered more often than not with pious platitudes about the sacredness of public honor and private contract-and when Boston acted, its measures were tri- fling. A Tender Act that enabled farmers to pay their debts in kind, was repealed after it had been in effect for a year. When cashless plowjoggers, in order to lighten their tax load, suggested a state issue of the kind of paper money that had done good serv- ice in the crisis of the war and that might now be used to pay off speculators in army notes and public securities, the General Court turned a deaf ear. Arguments to empower judges to give time to debtors, to suspend civil suits and tax collections for 9 months, to simplify the court structure, to curb lawyers, to re- duce high salaries of officials-all were rejected. While the most respectable Boston merchants smuggled luxuries in the colonial manner, the mercantile interest shifted the burden of taxation to the farming masses, so that by 1786 a direct assessment of 25 shil- lings on each adult male of the population accounted for 40 per cent of the total tax bill of the state. No wonder Rufus King warned John Adams that "in Massachusetts, considering the pros- trate condition of our commerce, the government have pressed the subject of taxes of the direct kind beyond what prudence would authorize." As one recent student of the period has summed it up, there was an "utter failure of the General Court to deal in a practical and sensible fashion with the grievances of their constituents."
A generation that had just won a war for independence could not allow itself to be pauperized without a struggle. "They could not realize that they had shed their blood in the field to be worn out with burdensome taxes at home; or that they had contended [for freedom] to secure to their creditors a right to drag them into courts and prisons"-so wrote George Richards Minot, clerk of the House and first historian of the "insurrections" in western Massachusetts. In town meeting and county convention Hamp- shire farmers demanded relief; when no relief was forthcoming
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they gathered in force before the court houses of the county and commanded judges to postpone suits against debtors. During the early months of 1782, while in Pittsfield 300 Berkshiremen were forcing the court to adjourn, Hampshire towns sent delegates to conventions in Hadley and Hatfield that called for a moratorium on executions for debt, the restoration of paper money as legal tender, and the elimination of certain courts that were "rotten with corruption" and a "peril to democratic processes."
It was at the Hatfield convention that there emerged the first outlines of a pattern of conflict that was to characterize the in- surgency in Hampshire County from beginning to end. The rich and the comfortable, together with those that followed their lead, alarmed by a movement that threatened to place the well-being of the farm family above the "rights" of creditors, began to or- ganize their strength in defense of things as they were. In the larger valley towns, where for generations the River Gods had wielded influence and power, the "men of wealth and talent" (as they called themselves) were apparently able to quiet the voices of their debt-burdened townsmen. Thus, to the Hatfield convention Northampton sent the rich patriot Joseph Hawley and Timothy Dwight, an ex-Tory of means, who together with the delegates of the more prosperous river towns of Springfield and Hadley, fought tooth-and-nail against the grass-roots ma- jority from the outlying villages. Hawley, more than any other of the conservative group, was fearful of explosions to come: even the officers of the Revolution, he complained to Caleb Strong, incensed because of their neglect by the state, were "on the Point of turning to the Mobb"; if they were not relieved, they would become "outrageous" and the numbers who would side with them would be "irresistable."
What Hawley feared was to come to pass when, during the spring of 1782, one Samuel Cullick Ely, an unfrocked Connecti- cut minister who had settled in the village of Conway, made his appearance in the streets of Northampton with a constitution in his pocket that "the Angel Gabriel could not find fault with" and with the avowed mission of mobilizing the county to direct ac- tion against the court that was about to sit. For James Russell Trumbull, the historian of Northampton, Ely was nothing more than "a brazen-faced hypocrite," an unprincipled demagogue "ambitious of notoriety"; more important is the fact that, as a
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The Ely Outbreaks: Prelude to Shays Rebellion
forerunner of Shays, Ely gave voice to the smoldering despera- tion of thousands of Hampshire farmers. While the judges within were hearing their first case, outside the court house Ely addressed a "great crowd," persuading it to endorse a letter that called on debtors to flock to Northampton to silence the court. The farmers of the county responded in force. Although Hawley, as Justice of the Peace, charged Ely with "treasonable practices," 8 days later hundreds of angry yeomen, bludgeons in their hands, in- vaded the court house and were stopped only by the muskets of a militia guard.
Nor did the subsequent sentencing of Ely to 6 months in prison-Caleb Strong was state's prosecutor-allay the insurgent spirit that pervaded the countryside. Early in the morning of a June day, 150 Hampshiremen in military formation marched through Northampton and in the evening broke into Springfield jail with axes and cleavers, carrying off with them not only Ely, but with him 2 cellmates, one a debtor, the other a runaway slave. At South Hadley a pursuing company of Northampton and Springfield militia caught up with the insurgent party and a few heads were broken before a parley was arranged. What the par- leyers agreed on attests to insurgent strength: both parties would send a joint petition for relief to the General Court.
By the terms of the agreement Ely was to be returned to his cell, but during the negotiations he decided to flee. When the rumor spread that 3 hostages for Ely were being mistreated in Northampton jail and were to be tried in his place, the dispersed farmers began to reassemble and threatened to burn down the town. To Strong, Hawley confided his fears: "I suppose that they design to retain Ely and get the Hostages by flatteries and Peti- tions and if not by that way, to rescue them (as they did Ely) and then to glory, and break up courts, mob all officers, pay no taxes, nor debts." If the government was not firm, it would be "con- quered, and these insurgents triumphant and Ely ruling Tyrant, for these Western Regions if not for the whole State." Concluded Hawley, who, behind each insurgent plowman, discerned a Tory spy: "If ... such Insurgents prevail, Britain prevails."
On Saturday, June 16, 300 armed farmers who had gathered at Hatfield captured a sheriff's posse on its way from Deerfield, and while a Boston order to suspend the habeas corpus was en route from the east, they began their march on the Northampton jail.
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Sheriff Porter of Hadley with almost 700 militiamen and a field piece waited at the jail as Dickinson, at the head of 450 farmers, half of them mounted and armed with clubs, filled the lane from the jailyard to the schoolhouse. The situation was tense; it was near dawn when Dickinson reported the results of his parley to the farmers awaiting him on the plain near the Burying Yard: a county convention was to be called to decide whether the hos- tages should be released, the final decision to be left to the General Court. On Tuesday, pressed by the insurgents, Hawley and others advised Porter to free the hostages.
It was fear rather than mercy that prompted Hawley's ad- vice. To Strong, a week later, he penned a long letter full of alarms and urging the government to despatch a committee to the west to see what was at stake: "You would be astonished to know with what amazing rapidity the Spirit of the Insurgents propa- gates. Many are infested with it, of whom you never would have the least Suspicion . .. the fire is now become Such a flame as I cannot describe to you. . . . I was told three weeks ago by as calm and sedate a man as any I have seen of their number that two thirds of these Western People fully believed that they were miserably deceived by Hutchinson's opposers ... their number in fact ... increase daily. .. "
In August the committee that Hawley had demanded-on it was Sam Adams-met with conventions in Conway and Hatfield. It had little to offer in the way of relief, and although the con- servative towns did their best to quiet the insurgent delegates, the convention reiterated their old grievances, condemned those that had slandered them with the Tory label and demanded an in- demnity for all except their fled spokesman. In November the General Court granted full pardon to all the partisans of Ely.
But lawyers were still brazen and courts still merciless; legisla- tors in Boston were still more worried about paying interest to speculators than about alleviating farm distress. Homesteads still went under the hammer; debtors still went to jail; money was still scarce. In Amherst, a certain citizen found that he lacked two dollars in coin to pay his taxes; he walked to Worcester, borrowed the money and walked back. In Springfield, 90 per cent of the townspeople, for lack of cash, worked out their highway taxes on the roads. "We are almost ready to cry out under the burden of our taxes," complained one town meeting, "as the children of
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The Ely Outbreaks: Prelude to Shays Rebellion
Israel in Egypt when they were required to make bricks without straw." The wishful thinking indulged to his diary by Jonathan Judd, Jr., an alarmed Southamptonite, that the insurgents had been stilled, simply ignored the hard reality of unrelieved hard- ship. Conventions continued in Hampshire County-4 of them would meet in 1783, and at the gathering in Hatfield the delegates would not proceed to discuss their grievances until Hawley had left. In May of that year 60 farmers attempted to close the court in Springfield; before they were routed some were wounded, but 4 months later they assembled again to repeat the attempt. In August, a Chesterfield veteran, Justus Wright, failing to rescue an Ely partisan from Northampton jail, called together a group of farmers at Westfield and tried to dissuade the militia train-band of his home town from "imbodying under their officers." When he was jailed in 1784, Goshen and Chesterfield petitioned for his release in order to quiet the "unhappy Tumults and Disorders" in the commonwealth, and Wright himself flayed the "aristocracy" of the state "as great tyrants as Louis the fourteenth." During that same August farmers once again tried to break up the court in Northampton. In the year 1785 the Hampshire courts tried 800 cases, one for every four families in the county, most of them suits of creditors against debtors who could not pay.
The further history of Samuel Ely, although it is of consider- able interest-after serving a term in a Boston jail, he turned up in Vermont and Maine as an outspoken champion of the poor and indebted-is another story. For the history of Northampton, it suffices to note that in this town he staged a small-scale rehearsal for the rebellion that 4 years later was to sweep over central and western Massachusetts. When, on August 29, 1786 Hampshire- men marched into Northampton to open the first act of that re- bellion, they knew their parts. "Early in the morning of this day," recorded Robert Breck, a native of the town who earned 200 Pounds a year as clerk of the court about to sit, "there was col- lected a considerable number of persons under arms, who paraded near the court-house, with a proposed design to prevent this court from sitting; a committee from whom presented a petition, requesting the court would not proceed to any business." Until their grievances were redressed, demanded the armed petitioners,
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no judgment of creditor against debtor should be handed down by the judges: "If your Honours will be so kind as to compare the Grants of the Legislature to the officers of Government & Salaries that are established by Law with the principles of the Constitution & the present Circumstances of the Good People of this Commonwealth & also consider the great Scarcity of Cash, we have not the least Doubt but that your Honours upon a serious Consideration will join us in Sentiment."
The language of the petitioners was deferential, but the judges knew it was earnest language. Before them on their desks lay a mountain of business; in the heaped-up papers rested the fate of scores of debt-ridden farms that had been tilled by generations of Hampshire families, the fate of scores of Hampshire farmers who must pay their debts or go to jail. The three judges-one was a Mather-fingered the petition that had been thrust into their hands and looked thru the windows. Outside 1500 farmers waited for their answer. The judges did not immediately reply. Instead, they decided to move their court; solemnly they walked over to the house of Captain Samuel Clark, inn-holder of the town. A gavel rapped; the court opened.
In the street before Clark's house the farmers waited. Finally Clerk Breck appeared to give the answer to their petition: the court had adjourned; the three judges had decided to postpone all cases to the November session in Springfield.
All this had happened in the morning; during the rest of that day the farmers remained in Northampton, conducting them- selves, as one hostile observer phrased it, "with less insolence and violence, and with more sobriety and good order, than is gen- erally accepted from such a miscellaneous crowd bent on such an unlawful errand." Most of the time they kept together in and around the court house; drums beat; fifes played. At midnight they quietly departed to their farms scattered over the county from the Vermont to the Connecticut line.
This was the beginning. Before August came again other courts throughout the state would be similarly halted; embattled farmers who called themselves Regulators and wore hemlock sprigs in their hats would organize into companies officered by Revolution- ary soldiers and would display their strength in the western coun- ties; two armies of Hampshire citizens would face each other on a hill in Springfield, while another force marched from the east
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over snowy roads; guerilla bands would fight skirmishes with mounted posses; shrapnel and musket balls would wound and kill; the jail at Northampton would bulge with prisoners of war; and gallows would be erected on Pan Cake Plain for "horrid and most unnatural" rebels who plotted to "subvert and overthrow the Constitution of the Commonwealth."
In the hindsight of history it is easy to condemn the despera- tion that drove these Massachusetts farmers to exchange argu- ments for guns. Too often, perhaps, have historians viewed them as did Trumbull half a century ago, as "malefactors" and "mal- contents," eager to escape their "honest debts" and "to evade punishment for their misdeeds." Such invective is apt to obscure the deeper and more instructive issue. Had the comfortable and complacent of the commonwealth taken to heart the primary les- son of the Ely outbreaks-that democracy cannot thrive when men are needlessly insecure-Daniel Shays would never have taken up arms.
Chapter Eight
Caleb Strong: The Last of the River Gods
By EDWIN C. ROZWENC
I. THE MAKING OF A CONSERVATIVE LEADER
S (INCE many of the more violent episodes of Shays' Rebel- lion had taken place in Hampshire County, the Connecti- cut Valley area had earned a reputation for radicalism. In- deed, even the newly-elected state legislature of 1787 which attempted to soften some of the harsher measures against the in- surgents by an Amnesty Act found it advisable to raise troops for the continued "protection" of Hampshire and Berkshire counties. Actually, these fears proved to be exaggerated. Most of the in- surgent leaders had fled into exile and, with the offer of amnesty, all organized opposition to the government of Massachusetts had collapsed.
Moreover, it must never be forgotten that Shays' Rebellion was an important stimulus to the rallying of the conservatives in the Connecticut Valley. This conservative resurgence became strong- er and more enduring than the relatively brief flare-ups of re- bellion in the hard times immediately after the American Revo- lution. Hampshire County and the Connecticut Valley became known in the half century after Shays' Rebellion as a stronghold of conservatism and orthodoxy in politics, religion, and social or- ganization. To a large extent, Northampton was the center of this conservative revival, and Caleb Strong was its most distinguished and effective leader.
Caleb Strong was well fitted by birth and training to lead the . conservative forces of the Connecticut Valley. He was born into one of the leading families of the colonial town of Northampton. His great-grandfather was Elder John Strong, a leader of the church and community in the early days of settlement and the
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prosperous owner of a successful tannery. Caleb's father, Lieu- tenant Caleb Strong, Sr., was listed among the first ten taxpayers of Northampton in 1748, and had the added distinction of living in a newly built house which was the first in the town with a gambrel roof. This house was located on the Strong home lot, a choice location which extended from Pleasant Street to Pudding Lane (Hawley Street) along the main thoroughfare of the town. The superior social standing of the Strong family is also suggested by the fact that Lieutenant Caleb Strong owned one of the ten negro slaves in the town-this particular negro being an accom- plished fiddler who was taken along on picnics and parties.
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