The Constitutional Framing: Republican Democracy, Private Property, and Free Expression

In 1785 and 1786, Massachusetts fell into economic depression. When the state government responded with fiscal restraint, many landowning farmers, particularly in the central and western portions of the state, fell behind on loan and tax payments and faced possible foreclosures. Town meetings produced demands for legislative action to protect the vulnerable landowners. The government instead pressed the debtors to fulfill their obligations, with imprisonment the penalty for non-payment. In desperation, groups of farmers formed armed vigilante bands. One of the leaders was Daniel Shays, a former Revolutionary War militia captain. No pauper, Shays owned a farm of more than 100 acres, yet he already had been dragged into court twice for small unpaid debts. Shays and the other armed insurrectionists, numbering somewhere between 2000 to 3000 men, forcefully closed local county courts, terrorized sheriffs, and even threatened an armory at Springfield, the main federal arsenal for all of New England.1 The Continental Congress asked Henry Knox to investigate in the fall of 1786. The corpulent Knox, a wartime confidant of George Washington and also a major landowner in Massachusetts, responded with a report wildly exaggerating the danger. In a letter to Washington, who had gladly retired in 1783 to his Mount Vernon estate in Virginia, Knox claimed the Shaysites were “determined to annihilate all debts public and private.” By Knox’s estimate, “12 or 15,000 desperate and unprincipled men” were on the verge of “a formidable rebellion against reason, the principles of all government, and against the very name of liberty.”2 Knox’s inflammatory