USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Pittsfield > The history of Pittsfield (Berkshire County), Massachusetts, from the year 1734 to the year 1800 > Part 39
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Few are fully aware of the vast miseries which have been alle- viated, and fewer still comprehend the measure of strength and stability which has been added to the State during the past seventy-five years, by the tender regard shown for the poor and unfortunate, even more in the amelioration of laws and customs than in the institutions provided for the direct relief of suffering.
When the Constitution of 1780 went into effect, the legal hard- ships of the poor were such as required years of liberal legislation for their relief; and how difficult it was to procure that legislation, the Pittsfield reader may learn by examination of the files of " The Sun," which for years was filled with pleadings for the abolition or mitigation of imprisonment for debt, by arguments which, although they seem simple enough now, were persistently resisted then.
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The laws in force, and the customs universally in vogue, for the collection of debts and taxes, were cruel and irrational to a degree which almost passes belief; and they were carried out with less compunction than is now often wasted upon the fate of the most worthless criminal. Imprisonment for debt had no alleviation ; and the sole remedy devised for inability to pay was enforced idleness. The prison-doors closed more remorselessly upon the poor debtor than upon the thief or the incendiary ; for while bail or pardon might obtain the enlargement of the former, whose con- finement at the worst had a fixed duration, no laws for his relief opened the prison-door of the latter, or fixed a period to his incar- ceration within walls where too little regard was had to health, comfort, or decency. His only hope - and a long-deferred one it often proved - was that his creditor might at last despair of ex- torting payment from the pity of his friends, or that his resent- ment might finally exhaust itself.
There are many yet living who remember how their young eyes were shocked by the gaunt forms, long, unkempt hair, grizzly beard, and claw-like hands, of men who, with sunken eyes, peered from behind grated windows, where they had lain for years, guilty of no worse crime than the incurring of a trifling debt, which, per- haps, some unforeseen political or commercial convulsion had rendered them unable to pay; and, in 1786, not a few of these poor creatures, blue with prison mould, were those who had fought long for freedom, and were still largely the creditors of the country whose laws made them the tenants of a debtor's jail.
But if, by chance, the poor man escaped a prison, and, despairing of a livelihood in his native place, sought it elsewhere, he was pretty sure to be met at the threshold of his land of promise by some such welcome as the following warrant, which we copy from the Pittsfield town-records, where the like are thickly scat- tered :-
BERKSHIRE, SS.
To the Constables of the Town of Pittsfield in the County of Berkshire, or either of them, greeting.
Whereas it has been represented to us that Elisha Eggleston, his wife and family ; John French, his wife and family ; Calvin Dunham, his wife and family, - are likely to become burdensome and chargeable to the town if they continue their residence in it, these are therefore to authorize and require you forthwith to warn and notify the above-named persons that they, with-
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their families, immediately depart and remove out of the town, and not to return again, without giving security to the town.
Given under our hands this 22d day of May, Anno Domini 1782.
WOODBRIDGE LITTLE, DAVID BUSH, STEPHEN CROFOOT, JAMES DN. COLT, Selectmen of Pittsfield.
Constable Stephen Fowler returned service of this warning upon John and Calvin on the 7th of June; and doubtless they, their wives and little ones, thereupon resumed their weary pilgrim- age; for, in default of obedience to the warning, the hard law required that the delinquents should be passed from constable to constable through the intervening towns, until they reached that of their proper settlement.
Eggleston appears to have obtained a respite: but in the more dreary month of February, 1784, he received a similar warning out, together with Isaac Churchill, his wife and nine children; Daniel Wheeler, his wife and seven children; Deborah Burrage, alias Deborah Lee, widow; Moses Lee, and several other unfortu- nates, who were suspected of circumstances which rendered them liable to become chargeable to the town. One can well compre- hend that new-comers, with no other means of support than their daily labor, would be less welcome in those days of stagnant in- dustries than they had been in the labor-dearth of war-times.
But while the poor were thus driven from pillar to post, and from post to pillar, in their struggles to better their condition, or at least "to keep the wolf from the door," taxation rested upon them with a weight which would now be considered grossly dis- proportionate; and the rates were exacted with a rigor which we should regard impolitie, as well as unmerciful.
Of all the taxes which the circumstances of the State demanded, as well as those large additions which were made without absolute necessity, one third part was assessed upon the ratable polls, ~ which did not then number more than ninety thousand; and town charges were defrayed in a similar manner.
The severity with which these rates were collected, and the readiness of the courts to enforce the payment of debts due from towns, are illustrated in a case which, although it was in some respects extraordinary, was far from an extreme one.
GRICULTURAL
HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD. 0 LLE0395
Rev. Mr. Leavitt of Charlemont, a suspected Tory in politics and Arminian in religion, in 1777, on account of the depreciation of the currency, refused to receive his salary at the rate originally agreed upon ; and, after various unsuccessful attempts at a com- promise, the town voted to shut up the meeting-house, which was done, the constable guarding it. Upon this, Mr. Leavitt betook himself to a schoolhouse, where he preached to a few friendly fam- ilies until more peaceful times, when he sned the town for his whole arrears of salary. He was nonsuited at the Common Pleas, but, on appeal to the Supreme Court, recovered £500; which sum was levied on the property of the inhabitants, from many of whom the last cow was taken to satisfy the claim of a minister whom they believed both a heretic and traitor, for preaching ser- mons of which they never heard a syllable.
Add to the picture we have attempted in the preceding pages, that which was given in a previous chapter of the onerons judicial system which the Commonwealth had inherited almost unchanged from the Province, and we shall be able to form some conception of the inflammatory condition of Massachusetts which developed itself in the Shays Rebellion.
The aspect of the general government offered still less of cheer. The shadowy powers of the Confederation had now reached that extreme of tenuity which compelled a resort to the forlorn hope - glorious as it proved - of the convention which framed the Fed- eral Constitution. The confusion had grown to be utter. National credit, respect, power, and influence were rapidly approaching the vanishing point. Congress could do little to rescue either, and, with very inadequate powers to resist invasion, confessed itself destitute of any to suppress internal insurrection.
Imposts upon foreign trade, a prolific source of wealth to national treasuries, proved of little worth, when, the perquisites of rival sea- port States, they were imposed by conflicting legislation, whose in- finitely unwise attempts each to monopolize commerce and manu- factures mutually ruined the interests it was their object to advance.
The citizen of Massachusetts who found gloom and confusion in the affairs of the Commonwealth, if he looked to the national government for relief was met by absolute darkness and chaos. The boundless hope which, in the Colony times, had been the dower of every American citizen, now awaited a more splendid resurrection under the Union, but no signs yet betokened the com- ing of the dawn.
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Public affairs, which in their healthy condition exercise their benign powers imperceptibly, become, in their deranged state, even more apparently than really, the cause of individual misfortune ; and governments are charged with malign influences for which they are not justly responsible. It so happened in Massachusetts at the epoch of which we write. There was lurking in the minds of the great mass of those who had returned poor from service in the Revolution, the not unnatural thought, "To what purpose have our blood and suffering secured the liberties of our country if our own are to be at the mercy of the tax-gatherer, the sheriff, and the jailer, or if, escaping from them, we are to be the serfs of toil which barely procures us a scanty subsistence, with a poorhouse for the hope of our age ?"
In this prevailing discontent, there were not wanting men willing to make themselves leaders. Of these, the most prominent seem to have been sincerely convinced of the justice of their cause, but the victims of an overweening conceit of their ability to cope with the most knotty problems of state, or of that fanaticism which finds the root of every evil in the subject of its morbid contempla- tion. Grievances were abundant enough and real enough; but the peculiarity of the malecontent leaders was, that they rarely fastened odium upon any thing which deserved it, never traced an evil to its true source, and that, even before they resorted to arms, the remedies which they proposed for the undeniable sufferings of the people were the veriest nostrums of political quackery. Not one of those beneficent measures by which legislation, beginning soon after, has since removed all the hardships which we have enume- rated, was so much as hinted at by the malecontent conventions; hardly one of these hardships was specified by them in their long list of "grievances." Their wrongs were as notional as their rem- edies were pernicious.
The leaders built their hopes upon a foundation which could sustain no such superstructure. They had seen the assumption of power by county conventions, supplemented by the obstruction of the courts, twice crowned with success ; and, not comprehending the change which had been wrought by the adoption of the Con- stitution in the nature of the allegiance due from the citizen, they undertook to pursue the course which had in other cases led to the desired ends. The Constitution had, indeed, never been permitted to long have quiet sway. As early as 1781, it was represented to
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the General Court, " that sundry persons in the counties of Worces- ter, Hampshire, and Berkshire, enemies to their country, were endeavoring to subvert the Constitution of the Commonwealth, and poison the minds of the good people of the State." Commission- ers were sent into the counties named to obtain evidence of the treasons concocting there.
Samuel Ely, the leader, was, in the spring of the next year, in- dicted for attempting, under the authority of a convention, to pre- vent the session of the Superior Court at Northampton, confessed, and was placed in jail at Springfield, from which he was released by a mob. The ringleaders in this affair were arrested ; and, a mob collecting to rescue them, the militia were called out, and rallied with spirit to the number of twelve or fifteen hundred. The rioters were overawed when the parties met on the field, and the disturbance was quieted without bloodshed. But the Tender Act, under which judgment in private suits was satisfied by neat cattle or other speci- fied articles at a fair valuation, followed so close upon the uprising, that, not without plausibility, it was claimed as its result; and the malecontents were encouraged to look upon insurrection as a legiti- mate as well as very effectual means of obtaining desired legislation. It was not, however, again resorted to for four years.
The conventions continued to be held, and, after 1784, with in- creasing frequency and violence of agitation. But, for the most part, they confined themselves to peaceable and lawful action ; and, however unwise their utterances, they were, in manner and form, such as are now found to be perfectly consistent with the stability of government. We cannot participate at this day in the horror of the conservative historian of that, when he affirms that the conventions " undertook to censure and condemn the conduct of the public rulers ; that they voted the Senate and judicial courts to be grievances, and called for a revision of the Constitution." The conservatives of Berkshire took a wiser view, met the malecontents on their own ground, outreasoned them, - a not very difficult feat, - and outvoted them.
A portion of the acts of the Hampshire and Worcester conven- tions was, according to Minot, of a less defensible character, in that they " attempted to collect a body of men as a general convention [for the revision of the Constitution] which might rival the legis- lature itself."
The Constitution of 1780, whether wisely or unwisely, made
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no provision for its own amendment or revision previous to the year 1795, when the sense of the people was to be taken whether any were required. In the modern view, the absence of any express authority in that instrument would not be construed to impair the right of the legislature to submit the question of re- vision to the people at any time ; but such was not the conservative opinion of 1784, while, as Minot alleges, the malecontent conven- tion was called with the intention of subverting the existing Con- stitution, without awaiting legislative action. The Berkshire view, as in other cases, coincided with the modern.
Experience has shown, that, the difficulty inevitably arising from the distracted condition of national affairs being obviated by the Federal Union, the evils under which the people of Massachu- setts were suffering were all removable through the medium of ordinary legislation, which would have been hindered rather than aided by any change in the fundamental law.
But, in 1786, a large portion of the people, groaning under bur- dens of which they imperfectly comprehended the nature, and still more imperfectly the remedy, impatient of the slow process and long results of legislative reforms, and suspecting the State government of indifference to their sufferings, were eager for a change in those provisions in the Constitution which, as they im- agined, created an aristocratic element in the government, by re- moving its officers from the direct control of their constituents. Inspired by this idea, a clamor was raised for measures no less radical than the abolition of the Senate, a change in the basis of representation, and the dependence of all officers upon salaries annually granted.
Such were the amendments in the Constitution demanded by a convention in Hampshire County, Aug. 22, 1786; and the reforms upon which they insisted, as within the province of ordi- nary legislation, were no less radical, and most of them no less unwise, than those enumerated. It was asked that the courts of Common Pleas and General Sessions should be abolished ; that the General Court should not sit at Boston ; " to have a bank emitted of paper money subject to depreciation," 1 making it a tender in all
1 A more exact idea of this hopeful financial scheme will be found from the action of Conway, which, on the 24th of October, "instructed its representative in the General Court to use his influence to have a bank of paper currency emitted that should sink one penny a pound per month." - Rev. C. B. Rice, in Conway Centennial Address.
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payments equal to gold and silver; that the system of imposing and collecting taxes should be remodelled, the fee-table reduced, and a general reform instituted in managing the finances of the Commonwealth.
They deprecated mob violence, and recommended a resort to only constitutional methods of redress, but denounced the govern- ment in terms, which, as their opponents alleged, led to the violent outbreaks which commenced on the last Tuesday of the same month, when nearly fifteen hundred men collected at Northampton, and prevented the session of the court at that place.
Be that as it may, the passions of a large part of the people were so much exasperated by real sufferings and supposed grievances, that the slightest spark was sufficient to set the interior counties aflame. The example of the Hampshire malecontents was followed, with similar success, by their brethren in Worcester and Middlesex ; while in Bristol they made a formidable demonstration, which was only checked by the spirited course of the friends of order in the militia.
The course of the Berkshire people was peculiar. The insur- gent leaders had evidently modelled their proceedings upon those of this county previous to the adoption of the Constitution, and from this circumstance, as well as from its defensible location, had counted upon this as their stronghold. But the six years' discus- sion of political and constitutional questions previous to 1780 had rendered the people here more familiar with the great principles of government, and less liable to be misled by false or ignorant teachers, than were those of most portions of the State. The in- consistency of seeking so soon to overthrow the edifice which they had erected at such infinite pains was instinctively felt by those who had been prominent in the struggles for a Constitution ; and doubtless they were too familiar with the evils attendant upon an obstruction of the laws to favor a light resort to it. Few of them, therefore, were involved in the Shays insurrection. Rev. Mr. Allen, indeed, was so active in his opposition as to be the special mark of the rebel ire, and found it necessary to keep arms. in his bedroom as a precaution when it was most rampart. His. earnest preaching against the sin of rebellion at this time won him many bitter and lifelong enemies.
But the leading citizens of Berkshire had learned confidence in the people and in the flexibility of the laws, as well as respect for
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constitutional authority; and, instead of leaving the convention called in the county to be controlled by those who sought a violent remedy for sufferings perceptible alike to all, they tried their strength before the people, and elected a majority of moderate men. This was more important, as, in the imperfect organization of party politics which then existed, delegates were elected by the towns, and not, as now, by sections of the people, whose opinions alone they are entitled to represent. The County con- vention then carried with it something of the authority of the municipalities by which its members were chosen, and often instructed; and by many its authority, as being nearer the people, was held paramount to that of the legislature, - a heresy which, although it deserved no respect from the constitutionalists, was an element in the political situation which it was necessary for them to take into account.
The delegates elected from Pittsfield were Daniel Hubbard, Thomas Gold, and Major Oliver Root.
Gold was a demagogue, whose character afterwards came to be understood by the people. His present escapade is described in " The Berkshire Chronicle," printed in Pittsfield in 1789, as "an attempt to overthrow the present system, of law and lawyers, and render the practitioners as bad as possible." The other delegates were old soldiers, and men of high character for probity and patriotism. They were themselves in good circumstances for those times, but were deeply imbued with the insurgent spirit through sym- pathy with the undeserved sufferings of less fortunate comrades.
The delegates were left uninstructed, and were also chosen a Committee of Correspondence for the town. The small number of citizens who at the close of the rebellion were found to have been implicated in it, and the known loyalty of most of the lead- ing men of the town, indicate that the untoward result of this meeting was brought about by the activity of a minority, aided, no doubt, by the apathy or indecision of others.
The convention met at Lenox during the last week of August, while insurrection was raging in the lower counties, and pursued a course peculiar to itself, differing even from that of the people of Boston, who, although showing an admirable spirit and a chari- table view of the errors of the insurgents, while entreating them to seek redress for grievances only in a constitutional method, could not truthfully express the same earnest desire for reform which was conspicuous in the Berkshire assembly.
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The latter, says Minot, "explicitly approved the appropriation of the revenue arising from the impost and excise duties, and the grant of the supplementary funds to the United States; and they manifested a decent and respectful regard towards the adminis- tration of government in general. They disapproved of the plans for establishing paper money and of the Tender Act. They solemnly engaged to use their influence to support the courts of justice in the exercise of their legal powers, and to endeavor to quiet the agitated spirits of the people."
The wisdom of the Berkshire conservatives, in taking part in the county convention, was apparent in its effects; for, had that body given the warrant of its authority, even by implication, to the uprising, hundreds would have joined the ranks of the in- surgents, who were now rendered the friends of law and order, or at least restrained from active participation in the disturbances of the day.
It does not appear, from the meagre report of its proceedings, whether the convention gave countenance to any of the preposter- ous political notions of the malecontents : but the contrary may well be inferred from their opposition to the Tender act; for this, of all the measures with which it was classed, was that least liable to modern censure, and most completely justified by the exigencies of the day. At a time when the circulating medium had been reduced to a point which rendered the possession of any considerable quantity of it impossible to men in ordinary circum- stances, this much-maligned act simply provided that executions should be satisfied by property of a marketable kind, taken at a fair valuation, instead of being sacrificed under the hammer, with a moral certainty that it would be sold for a tithe of its value, perhaps being " bid in " by the creditor for a nominal sum, through the sheer inability of the impecunious neighborhood to compete with him. At the worst, a small harm was done to the creditor by the Tender Act in order to shield the debtor from a very grievous one ; and it is difficult to see how bankrupt-laws can be justified by those who condemn this old measure of relief to those who would otherwise have suffered from the failure of the Com- momwealth to provide a sufficient circulating medium. Its repu- diation in the Berkshire convention affords a fair presumption that the follies which were enunciated by the similar assembly in Hampshire were not approved.
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The influence of the convention did not, however, avail to save the county from participation in the insurrection; for it had hardly adjourned before a mob collected at Great Barrington, and not only prevented the session of the Court of Common Pleas, but broke open the jail, and released the prisoners. After which ex- ploit they by threats induced three of the judges - among whom was our old friend, Capt. Charles Goodrich, who seems to have lost somewhat of his inflexibility - to sign an agreement that they would not act under their commissions until the grievances com- plained of had been redressed. To the credit of the fourth judge, Hon. Elijah Dwight of Great Barrington, as well as that of the rioters, it is related, that, upon his making a manful resistance, he was not compelled to sign the papers.
The mob was estimated at eight hundred men.
Traditions of incidents which occurred in Pittsfield and Lenox enable us to understand how the insurgent forces were recruited, and from what material. The village orators, previous to court day, gave out, cither plainly or by innuendo, that the session must be prevented; and the word passed from mouth to mouth. On the evening preceding the appointed day, the disaffected farmers in the towns within a convenient distance, - or perhaps throughout the county, - as their men quitted work, said to them, " Well, boys, they say there's to be goings-on at Barrington to-morrow; and, if you like, you can have the day, and take the team and go down." One leader in Pittsfield sent his two sons in this way; and one in Lenox, his son and an apprentice. These were the bet- ter class of the insurgents; but in every town there were then an unusual number of unemployed men, ready for whatever excite- ment offered, and generally hostile to the government, which they regarded as the cause of their evil condition ; so that, be- tween those ready for any mischievous frolic and those earnestly hostile to the courts, a boisterous and excited crowd was easily collected, which soon received the additional inflammation of strong drink ; and thus fitting instruments were ready to the hands of the designing leaders, who seized the opportunity to commit their followers so deeply to the rebellion that retreat was difficult.
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