Worcester County, Massachusetts - Chapter 106, 1889

Showing The Part Which Shrewsbury Took In The Shays' Rebei.I.Ion

Daniel Shay.s had a strong following in Shrewsbury - in numbers. The regulators, as the Shays' men were called, controlled the action of the town with irresistible majorities ; but its two most eminent citizens. Gen. Artemas Ward and Col. Job Gushing, were conspicuous by pronounced opposition, and had entered on the town-records, where one may read it to- day, their protest against the insurrectionary proceedings of the town adopted at a town-meeting in 1786. Wisdom may have been with the minority, but the men who took up arms with Shays were not unprincipled and aban- cloned wretches of the criminal class, and it was not for nothing that they took up arms. Shays himself, as well as Ward and Cashing, was a veteran of the Eevolutionary War, and so also were every one of his captains, so far as I have been able to ascertain. Adam Wheeler, of Hubbardston, who in Shays' absence acted in this county as commander of the regulators, was a captain of the Continental Line and deacon of the Congregational Church in Hubbardston. He was born in Shrewsbury and was the great-great-grandson of the famous Captain Thomas Wheeler, of the Indian fight at Brookfield in 1675, and the great-grandson of Thomas Wheeler, the younger, also a hero of the same fight, who, himself severely wounded there, rescued his more severely wounded father from the Indians, who were about to dispatch him, threw him upon the horse of the slain Shadrach Hapgood, and with his father escaped by flight. Captain Wheeler, of the Shays' Rebellion, was also on his mother's side a greatgrandson of the slain Shadrach, four of whose descendants settled in Shrewsbury.'

The leader of the Shrewsbury regulators was a brother-in-law of Wheeler, having married his sister, and a veteran whom we first met as a boy serving his apprenticeship as a soldier in the French War, and who fought for the independence of his coun(;ry from Lexington to Yorktown - Captain Aaron Smith, and the company which he raised for Shays in Shrewsbury were his foriiier companions-in-arms. They were the identical men who rallied to Lexington and Bunker Hill, Bennington and Saratoga. Their purpose was not to overthrow the government, but merely to restrain the courts temporarily from entering up judgments and issuing executions. The people of Shrewsbury were very poor. They had spent their little all for country. Acting under the advice of Governor Bowdoin and influenced by speculating Boston lobbyists, the General Court had laid an enormous tax with a view to pay oft' the public debt. Most of the public creditors were holders of State securities or soldiers' certificates purchased at less than twelve per cent, of their face value. Claims against the bankrupt citizens of the town were in the hands of lawyers and deputy-sheriff's, who held them under contracts for large percentages if collected. In the year 1784 and 1785 about four thousand suits were entered in the courts at Worcester. Lawyers' offices were thronged with suitors, and the neighborhood of them presented the appearance of a public fair. Real and personal property was sold on execution at ruinous prices, nobody having money to buy with at sales. And the jails were crowded with debtors. Only twelve years before exactly the same thing had been done at Worcester - with universal approval - which the regulators now attempted. In 1774 about five thousand men, mostly armed, had assembled at Worcester to prevent and did prevent the sitting of the courts, and no courts were held for two years. This thtn recent precedent suggested to the distressed people ol Shrewsbury the means of relief from their distresses.

The first demonstration of the insurgents at Worcester, in September, was successful in preventing the sitting of the courts. It was upon this occasion that General Artemas Ward, of Shrewsbury, then chief justice of both the Courts of Sessions and Common Pleas, performed the act which will go to posterity as the crowning act of his life. Wheeler's company, which had marched into Worcester on Monday afternoon, September 4, 1786, the day before the courts were to sit, took up quarters in the courthouse Mcjnday night, so as to be sure to be in possession when the judges should arrive next morning. Smith's company marched in from Shrewsbury early Tuesday morning, and was deployed and posted as sentries on Court Hill and around the court-house. An immense crowd of people had assembled thereabouts. Approaching the court-house, the judges were challenged by an armed sentry at the foot of Court Hill. At the order of his old commander, now chief justice, the sentry recovered his musket, presented arms, and the judges proceeded past him to the courthouse. There, upon the broad step at the south entrance, stood Captain Wheeler and Captain Smith, with drawn swords in their hands, and five soldiers with fixed bayonets. Right well did Artemas Ward know the men he had to deal with. Smith was his near neighbor, and lived on the opposite side to him of the Great Road through Shrewsbury. Wheeler, who was about Ward's age (nearly sixty years), had been his schoolmate in youth, and had formerly been a member of the same church. In his younger days, as a militia captain. Ward had drilled, in left foot and shoulder arms on Shrewsbury Common, the very men now in array against him. Smith and Wheeler had both served under Ward at Cambridge and at the siege of Boston, and long after his retirement as mpjor-general he knew that they had, in humbler rank, endured the hardships of the Revolutionary War like good soldiers to its very close, and had been paid off in Continental paper. And he knew, too, that they were both poor, deeply involved in debt and harassed with suits.

Proceeding to mount the court-house steps, the further progress of the judges was, by order of Captain Wheeler, ariested by the soldiers, who brought their bayonets to bear directly on the chief justice's breast, so that their points even penetrated his clothes. After a parley, the officers consented to allow him lo mount the steps and address the crowd. Though Artemas Ward, of Shrewsbury, had been much in public life, he was a man usually of slow and hesitating speech, had rarely taken part in debates and had never been accounted an orator. He was a graduate of Harvard College, but, though a judge, he was not a lawyer by profe.-sion. As soon as he had looked his audience in the face there seems to have come over him a sort of inspiration, and, with great fluency, fervor and eloquence, he forthwith proceeded to reason witli the i)eople, whose grievances he did not deny upon their mistaken metliod of relief. The newspaper man was not there to report, nor had the speaker in his pocket an extemporaneous manuscript to privately send to the press, and only by tradition has anj' word of what he said survived the more than hundred years since the event; but more than anything he did say or could say - more than anything the greatest of orators could have said - was the dauntless courage and dignity of his conduct as a magistrate,' of which to find a historical parallel you will have to make a far research - reminding one of Horace's " Just and determined man, unshaken in his firmness either by wrath of citizens commanding wrongful things or by tyrant's frown or raging seas or thunder-bolt of Jove, whom the ruins of a crumbling world would strike undismayed.'' - Carmina, III. 3. But Captain Wheeler was as unshaken as his old commander, and continued firm in his determination that the judges should not enter the court-house, and they did not. At the conclusion of the chief justice's speech, which had been interrupted by cries "Adjourn without day," the judges retired to the United States Arms, opened court there and adjourned.

And what with the drumming and fifing, marching and countermarching, tented fields and the ear-splitting fife of morning reveille breaking slumber, you would have thought it a garrison town. Col. Cushing, chairman of the selectmen, had prudently removed the town's stock of gunpowder from the powder-house and concealed it. The regulators surrounded and searched his house, but found neither powder nor selectman. The purpose of this assembling of the Shays' men was to prevent the sitting of the courts at Worcester on the first Monday of December, and both courts were adjourned to January the 23d. The crisis and climax of the rebellion was a week of unprecedented snow-storms ; without blankets, rations, quarters or money, in the public highways of Worcester, in the dead of winter, with the snow three feet deep under foot and more falling, what could the Shays' men do but disperse? It was the weather and the elements that put down the Shays' Rebellion, and not the distracted and inefficient Gov. Bowdoin and his militia, who, before the dispersement of his followers at Worcester, had

1 McMafiters says be cursed and swore, but an examination of the authorities he cites only shows that in his parley with Captain Wheeler, before he mounted the steps and commenced his speech to the people, the judge said he did not care a damn for their bayonets. Hist. People of the U. S., Vol. I., p. 307.

The Governor crowed lustily over his victory, arrested great numbers of the rebels and had fourteen of them convicted of treason and sentenced to death. But the Shays men shortly had their innings - at the spring election of 1787, when Gov. Bowdoin and his party were overwhelmingly defeated by the popular vote. In the previous year James Bowdoin had received a large majority of the votes of Shrewsbury ; this year his votes in that town bore the exact ratio of one to five to those for John Hancock, who, after taking his seat as Governor, pardoned all his predecessor's convicts.

Aaron Smith, of Shrewsbury, like Shays himself, and many of the more prominent of the rebels, went into exile in unknown parts - somewhere out of Massachusetts, doubtless - till alter passage of the amnesty act, when he returned, and spent the remainder of his days (not a few) in Shrewsbury. He died May 9, 1825, aged eighty-nine years, and to his last expiring breath gloried in the part he took with Daniel Shays. Less than a year before his death he walked to Worcester to meet his old commander, the Marquis Lafayette, who immediately recognized and greeted him with kisses and embraces, bringing tears into the eyes of all who witnessed the fraternal salutation. None of the regulators that I ever heard of ever took the attitude of repentant rebels. Within the recollection of the writer a considerable number of them were still living, among the rest his grandfather Howe, who was no more ashamed of his part in the Shays Rebellion than he was of his part in the Revolutionary War, and God forbid that his grandson should oft'er apologies for him and his comrades or tell their story otherwise than he told it himself.