In the winter of 1787, Massachusetts farmers marched on a federal armory under cannon fire from their own state's militia. History remembers this as Shays's Rebellion ? a lawless mob subdued by heroic order. It was nothing of the kind.
Drawing on decades of archival reconstruction, this book restores the true story of the Massachusetts Regulation: a coordinated, community-sanctioned uprising of veterans, selectmen, physicians, and judges, organized through the same town meetings and county conventions that had powered resistance to the British Crown a decade before. Their grievance was not moral weakness but engineered injustice ? a postwar credit collapse, a war-debt scheme that funneled ordinary farmers' taxes into the pockets of Boston speculators, and a legislature that answered a year of lawful petition with silence.
From the sale of Lafayette's sword to the grapeshot at Springfield, from Job Shattuck's brutal capture to Samuel Adams's startling reversal on the meaning of rebellion, this is a story of citizens testing whether the republic they had bled for would answer to them ? and of a founding generation so alarmed by the answer that they rewrote the Constitution itself to make sure it could never be asked again.
