![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
Abstract
In 1786, backcountry Massachusetts farmers, fed up with government policies favoring aristocratic elites, marched on courts to bar the entry of judges and juries. Enacting a long-standing tradition known to colonists as a “Regulation,” the farmers’ movement became known as Shays's Rebellion. Erupting in the turbulent days following the War for Independence, yet predating the formation of the national Constitution, Shays's Rebellion was understood as a crucial post-war attempt to deploy state violence to manage popular dissent; thus, Shays's Rebellion produced deeply problematic yet lasting rhetorical conventions for justifying the compromised forms of republicanism that mark the early republic.
Acknowledgments
He would like to thank Stephen Hartnett, Donovan Conley, Darren Mulloy, Greg Goodale, Ryan Blum, Anna Engels, David Henry, and the anonymous QJS reviewers for their helpful feedback and suggestions.
Notes
1. Stephen Lucas, “Justifying America: The Declaration of Independence as a Rhetorical Document,” in American Rhetoric: Context and Criticism, ed. Thomas W. Benson (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 75–6; see also Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (1922; New York: Vintage, 1958), 7–8, and Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1978), 49–64. For arguments that violence was critical to the founding of the United States and to American identity, see Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973); Marshall Smelser, “An Understanding of the American Revolution,” in An Almost Chosen People: The Moral Aspirations of Americans, ed. Walter Nicgorski and Ronald Weber (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976), 3–18; Charles Royster, “Founding a Nation in Blood: Military Conflict and American Nationality,” in Arms and Independence: The Military Character of the American Revolution, eds. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1984), 25–49; Richard Maxwell Brown, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 3–66; and No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3–38.
2. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. Richard H. Cox (1689; Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1982), section 229, p. 140.
3. The Declaration of Independence is reprinted in The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John McMillian (New York: The New Press, 2003), 44–47. In 1823, Jefferson recalled that Richard Henry Lee had argued during the Revolutionary War that the Declaration was “copied from Locke's treatise on government,” and he did not object, thereby providing anecdotal confirmation of Locke's influence on the Declaration; see Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, August 30, 1823, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford, 10 vols. (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1892–1899), 10: 267–8.
4. For studies of the Declaration of Independence, see Wilbur Samuel Howell, “The Declaration of Independence and Eighteenth-Century Logic,” William and Mary Quarterly 18, no. 4 (October, 1961), 463–84; Wills, Inventing America; Lucas, “Justifying America,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1, no. 2, and also his “The Rhetorical Ancestry of the Declaration of Independence,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 (Summer 1998): 143–84; and Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). Many “extremist” groups have argued that the Declaration sanctions revolutionary violence, and accordingly have framed their anti-government activities as legitimately American; for examples, see D. J. Mulloy, American Extremism: History, Politics, and the Militia Movement (London: Routledge, 2004), 75–88, and Philip Foner, ed., We, the Other People: Alternative Declarations of Independence by Labor Groups, Farmers, Women's Rights Advocates, Socialists, and Blacks, 1829–1975 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1976).
5. Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, February 22, 1787, in The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson & Abigail & John Adams, ed. Lester J. Cappon (1959; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 173.
6. Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, November 13, 1787, Writings, 4: 467.
7. Stephen Higginson to Henry Knox, February 13, 1787, “Letters of Stephen Higginson,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association (Washington, DC, 1896), 1: 751; Henry Lee to George Washington, September 8, 1786, in volume 8 of Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, 8 vols. ed. Edmund C. Burnett (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1936), 463; Gerry quoted in Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 4 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937), 1: 48; James Otis quoted in Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (1969; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 476; for the most forceful arguments that Shays's Rebellion assisted in the justification of the federal Constitution, see Leonard Richards, Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 117–64, and Richard D. Brown, “Shays's Rebellion and the Ratification of the Federal Constitution in Massachusetts,” in Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity, ed. Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward Carter (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 113–27.
8. Kimberly Smith, The Dominion of Voice: Riot, Reason, and Romance in American Politics (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1999), 45; Stephen Howard Browne, Angelina Grimké: Rhetoric, Identity, and the Radical Imagination (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999), 37; Centinel, Letter 8, December 28, 1787, Letter 9, January 5, 1788 in The Complete Anti-Federalist, ed. Herbert J. Storing, 7 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 2: 178, 181; on “mobocracy,” see Paul Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1762–1834 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).
9. David Zarefsky, “Four Senses of Rhetorical History,” in Doing Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 1998), 30; for the “constitutive approach” to rhetorical criticism, see James Jasinski, “A Constitutive Framework for Rhetorical Historiography: Toward an Understanding of the Discursive (Re)constitution of ‘Constitution’ in The Federalist Papers,” in Doing Rhetorical History, 72–92. On republicanism, see Daniel Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79, no. 1 (1992): 11–38; Wood, Creation of the American Republic, vii–viii, 57; Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 321–79; J. G. A. Pocock, “Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (Summer 1972): 119–34; and The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 95–140, 506–52.
10. For discussions of James Bowdoin, see David P. Szatmary, Shays's Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 44–55; Richards, Shays's Rebellion, 85–89; and Gordon E. Kershaw, James Bowdoin: Patriot and Man of the Enlightenment, ed. Martha Dean (Brunswick, MN: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 1976).
11. Stephen Riley, “Doctor William Whiting and Shays’ Rebellion,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 66 (January 1956): 133
12. Plain Truth, “Untitled,” Massachusetts Centinel, February 18, 1786. Italics in original.
13. Gordon Wood, “A Note on Mobs in the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 23, no. 4 (October 1966): 641; on rural economies in Massachusetts, see Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 21–58, and Robert Mutch, “Yeoman and Merchant in Pre-Industrial America: Eighteenth Century Massachusetts as a Case Study,” Societas 7, no. 3 (Autumn 1977): 279–302.
14. For the Regulators’ proclamation, see the Hampshire Herald, September 5, 1786; for a treatment of the Regulators’ discourse, see Michael Lienesch, “Reinterpreting Rebellion: The Influence of Shays's Rebellion on American Political Thought,” in In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion, ed. Robert A. Gross (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 161–84; for a discussion of “Regulation,” see E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (February 1971): 76–136. Helpful sources on the Regulations in North Carolina and South Carolina include John S. Bassett, “The Regulations of North Carolina, 1765–1771,” in American Historical Association Annual Report for the Year 1894 (Washington DC: GPO, 1895), 141–212; James P. Whittenburg, “Planters, Merchants, and Lawyers: Social Change and the Origins of the North Carolina Regulation,” William and Mary Quarterly 34 (1977): 215–38; and Richard Maxwell Brown, The South Carolina Regulators (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963).
15. Smith, The Dominion of Voice, 27, argues that in early America “mob action” was “the exercise of the community's right to take over the function of government.” Using her analysis, we can argue that Shays's Rebellion occurred in the liminal period between popular acceptance of mob rioting as a legitimate form of government and its displacement by rational deliberation as the preferred form.
16. George Washington to Henry Lee, Jr., October 31, 1786, in The Papers of George Washington: Confederation Series, 6 vols., ed. W. W. Abbott (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 4: 318, 320; on Americans’ desire for the cultural distinction that owning china would provide, see John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 3–24.
17. Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 28, 1813, in Adams-Jefferson Letters, 388; two helpful discussions emphasizing Washington's aristocratic worldview include Bernard Fay, George Washington: Republican Aristocrat (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), and Richard Norton Smith, Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), and note also that Washington is bitterly flayed for being an aristocrat in Philadelphia's Aurora, see Richard N. Rosenfeld, American Aurora: A Democratic-Republican Returns (New York: St. Martin's, Press, 1997), 30–1, 238, 242, 255, 274, 290, 297, 309, 337, 387, 411, 413, 485; on the natural aristocracy's demands for deference, see Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1991), 57–77, 179–80, 271–86.
18. Knox to Washington, October 23, 1786, Papers of George Washington, Vol. 4, 300. According to Szatmary, at Springfield there were 300 men from Berkshire, 1,000 men from Hampshire, and 1,000 men from Worcester and Middlesex. Shepard's army had 1,000 militiamen, and nearly 4,400 men were in the government army under Lincoln that was marching to Springfield but arrived too late for the battle; see Szatmary, Shays’ Rebellion, 100–1; on the battle at the Springfield Arsenal, see George Richards Minot, The History of the Insurrections, In the Year MDCCLXXXVI, and the Rebellion Consequent Thereon. (Worcester, MA: Isaiah Thomas, 1788), 111; Marion Starkey, A Little Rebellion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), 132–33.
19. Sam Adams quoted in William V. Well, The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams, 3 vols. (Boston: Little Brown, 1865), 3: 246.
20. Jeremy Belknap quoted in John H. Lockwood, Westfield and its Historic Influences 1669–1919 (Springfield, MA: Springfield Binding Co, 1922), 112.
21. William Shepard to James Bowdoin, December 17, 1786, in The Bowdoin and Temple Papers, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 7, no. 6 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1907), 119.
22. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (1975; New York: Vintage, 1995), 73–103, 257–92; Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 434–5.
23. Fisher Ames, “Lucius Junius Brutus Essays,” in Works of Fisher Ames, 2 vols., ed. Seth Ames (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1854), 2: 96; David Humphreys to George Washington, November 1, 1786, and Knox to Washington, October 23, 1786, Papers of George Washington, 351, 300.
24. The few letters and editorials by Regulators published in newspapers emphasize patriotism, and, using the recurring tropes of the American Revolution, the lawfulness and constitutionality of Regulation. Indeed, for the Regulators, the goal was not to overturn government, but rather to improve their situation within that government. See Adam Wheeler, “To the Publick,” Worcester Magazine, November 22, 1786; A Member of Convention, “Untitled,” Worcester Magazine, October 1, 1786; “The following is a copy of a Letter from a Number of Principle Regulators,” Worcester Magazine, February 1, 1787; and “Petition from Shays’ Rebellion (1786),” reprinted in The Radical Reader, 51–3.
25. Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, & the Culture of Performance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 1–62; Hutcheson, quoted in Wills, Inventing America, 212; Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), ed. William Peden (1954; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 93; on the Scottish view of the moral sense and its influence on Jefferson and America, see Wills, Inventing America, 193–239, and William Charvat, The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810–1835 (1936; New York: Russell and Russell, 1968), 27–58; for a study of how one orator negotiated the rhetorical terrain between sympathy and logic, see James M. Farrell, “Fisher Ames and Political Judgment: Reason, Passion, and Vehement Style in the Jay Treaty Speech,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76 (1990): 415–34.
26. Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, 45, 62.
27. Shepard to James Bowdoin, February 18, 1787, Bowdoin and Temple Papers, 142.
28. Dana Rabin, “Bodies of Evidence, States of Mind: Infanticide, Emotion and Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550–2000, ed. Mark Jackson (Burlighton, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 78; Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (1961; New York: Vintage, 1988), 219.
29. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2 vols., ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser (1690; New York: Dover Publications, 1959), 1: 121–2, 157.
30. John Locke, Essay, 2: 146.
31. Bernard Lamy, The Art of Speaking (1676), reprinted in The Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Lamy, ed. John Harwood (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 374.
32. Bernard Lamy, 361, 247, 230.
33. For background on Lamy, see Thomas Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 173–6.
34. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (1642), in Man and Citizen, ed. Bernard Gert (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1998), 231; Lamy, Art of Speaking, 241.
35. Shepard to James Bowdoin, February 18, 1787, Bowdoin and Temple Papers, 142; David Humphreys to George Washington, November 1, 1786, Papers of George Washington, 351; James Bowdoin, “Speech to the General Court,” Bowdoin and Temple Papers, 159; “Act for Granting Indemnity to Sundry Offenders on Certain Conditions,” Worcester Magazine, December 1, 1786.
36. Bowdoin, “Speech to the General Court,” Bowdoin and Temple Papers, 160–1.
37. “Riot Act,” Worcester Magazine, November 8, 1786.
38. “Act Declaring Rebellion,” Worcester Magazine, February 15, 1787; King George III, Proclamation, August 23, 1775, reprinted in The Spirit of '76: The Story of the American Revolution as Told by Participants, ed. Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 281.
39. William Shepard to James Bowdoin, February 18, 1787, Bowdoin and Temple Papers, 142; Ames, “Camillus,” Works, 103; Samuel Lyman to Samuel Breck, December 27, 1786, Bowdoin and Temple Papers, 122; “Act for Granting Indemnity,” Worcester Magazine, December 1, 1786; Knox to Washington, October 23, 1786, Papers of George Washington, 300; Worcester Magazine, November 22, 1786; on punishing insanity and crime, see Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 226–9. On the rhetorical functions of dehumanization, see Kenneth Burke, “The Rhetoric of Hitler's ‘Battle,’” in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), 191–220; Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America (1979; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 36–144, and “The Tempest in the Wilderness: The Racialization of Savagery,” Journal of American History 79 (1992): 892–912; Robert L. Ivie, “Images of Savagery in American Justifications for War,” Communication Monographs 47 (1980): 279–94; and Michel Foucault, “The Abnormals,” in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, Volume 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 51–8.
40. Howard's narrative is reprinted in Richard D. Brown, “Shays's Rebellion and Its Aftermath: A View from Springfield, Massachusetts, 1787,” William and Mary Quarterly 40, no. 4 (1983): 598–615 (quote, 603); Daniel Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993), 119–20; Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy, 71–92; for one study of how the public sphere developed in America to replace techniques of popular violence like Regulation, see Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
41. “Untitled,” Worcester Magazine, March 1, 1787.
42. The perception that citizens might mimic criminals was rooted in 18th-century epistemology, which created the problem of “mimetic corruption” discussed in Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760–1835 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 87–127.
43. “An Act for Suspending the Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” Worcester Magazine, December 1, 1786.
44. Richards, Shays's Rebellion, 18–21, 93.
45. “Indemnity to Certain Persons Concerned in the Rebellion!” Worcester Magazine, March 22, 1787; “An Act for Preventing Persons Serving as Jurors,” Worcester Magazine, March 22, 1787; “An Act for Suspending the Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” Worcester Magazine, December 1, 1786.
46. James Sullivan to Rufus King, February 25, 1787, in The Life and Correspondence of Rufus King, 6 vols., ed. Charles R. King (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1894), 1: 214.
47. Webster to James Bowdoin, March 15, 1787, The Bowdoin and Temple Papers, 175, 178; on Webster's efforts to create a national language, see Jill Lepore, A is For American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 15–41.
48. Lincoln to James Bowdoin, February 20, 1787, The Bowdoin and Temple Papers, 145.
49. Lincoln to James Bowdoin, February 22, 1787, The Bowdoin and Temple Papers, 157.
50. Howard reprinted in Brown, “A View from Springfield, Massachusetts,” 610.
51. Howard reprinted in Brown, “A View from Springfield, Massachusetts,” 609.
52. Brown, “Shays's Rebellion and the Ratification of the Federal Constitution,” 120.
53. Howard reprinted in Brown, “A View from Springfield, Massachusetts,” 612.
54. James Madison, Federalist 10, and Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 21, in The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: Mentor, 1961), 82, 139–40; for background on the Federalist Papers, see Arthur Furtwangler, The Authority of Publius: A Reading of the Federalist Papers (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); for an analysis of the rhetoric of the ratification debates, see James Jasinski, “Rhetoric and Judgment in the Constitutional Ratification Debate of 1787–1788: An Exploration Between Theory and Critical Practice,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 197–218; for a study of the ratification debates in Massachusetts, see Terence S. Morrow, “Representation and Political Deliberation in the Massachusetts Constitutional Ratification Debate,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 3, no. 4 (2000): 529–53.
55. Massachusetts Gazette, October 19, 1787; Jefferson to Smith, November 13, 1787, in Writings 4: 467; Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 321; Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 606, 499.
56. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963), 235; on this “legitimation crisis,” to use Jürgen Habermas's term, see also Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 132–75, and The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993), 29–67.
57. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776), The Age of Reason (1794), and Dissertations on Government, the Affairs of the Bank, and Paper Money (1786), in The Thomas Paine Reader, ed. Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin, 1987), 93, 400, 66, 182, 176, 175, 168; for background on Common Sense, see Scott Liell's excellent, and at times thrilling 46 Pages: Thomas Paine, Common Sense, and the Turning Point to Independence (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2003); and for a rhetorical analysis of the pamphlet, see J. Michael Hogan and Glen Williams, “Republican Charisma and the American Revolution: The Textual Persona of Thomas Paine's Common Sense,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 86, no. 1 (2000): 1–18.