Mutiny, Shays’ Rebellion, and the Making of the Constitution

Claire Brooks

It is January first, 1781, and, uh, fifteen hundred soldiers in the Pennsylvania Line have completely had enough. They turn their bayonets on their own officers, kill a captain, and start marching straight toward Congress in Philadelphia. They were not asking to surrender to the British. They wanted basic clothing, and they wanted their back pay in real money, not worthless paper continental currency.

Oliver Hart

Fifteen hundred armed veterans marching on the capital tends to clear the mind of a politician, doesn't it?

Claire Brooks

It really does. And, you know, while those soldiers were nursing frostbite in winter quarters, men like Robert Morris, the chief financier of the revolution, were getting immensely rich off war speculation. When the New Jersey Line tried a similar mutiny just weeks later, George Washington did not negotiate. He ordered two of the ringleaders executed by firing squad, shot by their own weeping comrades, to crush any thought of a soldier revolt.

Oliver Hart

That detail about the firing squad, I, I mean, that really exposes the raw class fracture right at the center of the military effort. Howard Zinn famously wrote that the American victory over the British army was made possible by the existence of an already armed people. But once the British were beaten, those same armed people turned out to be a massive threat to the patriot elite.

Claire Brooks

Okay, but, but Zinn framed those mutinies as if they were early socialist uprisings or class conscious rebellions. I, I think that misreads the soldiers entirely. Those men were not trying to overthrow Washington or tear down the government. They were hungry, they were freezing, and they wanted the contract honored. They wanted the pay they were legally promised so their families would not starve back home.

Oliver Hart

Fair enough, but look at what happened to the land when the fighting actually stopped. Huge loyalist estates were confiscated during the war, thousands of acres. Did those go to the working class soldiers who actually fired the muskets? No. They were auctioned off to wealthy land speculators who had the hard gold to buy them up. The post war economic hierarchy ended up looking remarkably like the pre war one, just with local merchants in charge instead of British crown officials.

Claire Brooks

It, it certainly left thousands of veterans broke and landless, which leads us straight into what happened five years later in Massachusetts.

Oliver Hart

Summer of 1786. Daniel Shays, a former captain in the Continental Army who had to sell his prized ceremonial sword just to pay his debts, leads hundreds of destitute farmers in western Massachusetts. They take up their old Revolutionary War muskets, march on county courthouses, and shut them down by force so judges cannot foreclose on their farms or send them to debtor prison.

Claire Brooks

Shutting down the courts with loaded muskets. That terrified the political leaders of the era, didn't it?

Oliver Hart

It sent pure panic through the elite. Henry Knox wrote to Washington warning that the rebels believed the property of the United States had been protected by the joint exertions of all, and therefore ought to be the common property of all. That fear is what built the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. James Madison came prepared. In Federalist Number 10, Madison openly argues that a strong federal government is needed to suppress factions, specifically warning against a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, or for an equal division of property.

Claire Brooks

And, and you see that as proof the Constitution was basically an economic defensive maneuver?

Oliver Hart

Well, the historian Charles Beard made a pretty compelling case when he pointed out that forty of the fifty five delegates at the Philadelphia convention held government bonds that were nearly worthless under the old Confederation. A strong central government with the power to tax meant those bonds would be paid out at face value. Plus, Article One gave the federal government the power to call forth the militia to suppress domestic insurrections. Which they used just seven years later, in 1794, when Washington marched thirteen thousand troops to crush the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania.

Claire Brooks

Okay, forty out of fifty five bondholders is a striking statistic, Oliver, but I think focusing purely on financial self interest misses the bigger structural reality. The Articles of Confederation were failing completely. States were imposing trade tariffs on each other, paper currency was hyperinflating, and the central government could not even pay its diplomatic debts or defend its borders. Without Madison's framework of checks and balances and federal power, the alternative was not some egalitarian agrarian paradise. It was economic collapse and potential civil war between rival state militias.

Oliver Hart

So you see the Constitution as a necessary stabilization, even if it protected creditors at the expense of small debtors?

Claire Brooks

I do. Creating a durable republic meant balancing liberty with order. The founders were deeply afraid of mob rule, yes, but they also built a constitutional amendment process that eventually allowed for the expansion of democratic rights to those very same working people. It was a compromise with real human costs, but it built a structure that survived.

Oliver Hart

A compromise where the soldiers fought the war, and the bondholders wrote the rules. Alright, good debate today Claire. Let's pick this up next time.