Glenn Beck - Miracles and Massacres - True and Untold Stories of the Making of America

They bandaged the bleeding Shattuck and carted him off to a Boston prison cell. It seemed like quick and easy work to lock up such a troublemaker. But they would soon learn that there was a much higher price to be paid for the capture of Captain Job Shattuck.

Daniel Shays’ Farmstead

Pelham, Massachusetts

December 3, 1786

“What sort of times have we been cursed to live in, Abigail?” Daniel Shays mused to his wife as a single tallow candle flickered at his side.

Reading in the waning light of a December day was never an easy proposition. Reading the disturbing reports before him was even more difficult.

“They say Captain Shattuck has perished in his prison cell. Terrible! Dreadful! And what these savages did during his capture was pure evil! A sword through the eye of a neighbor woman! Another woman’s breast slashed. An innocent infant murdered in its cradle! The government of Massachusetts has fallen into the hands of men just as barbaric as the heathens who aligned themselves with the French against us twenty years ago! We have no choice: We must fight them!”

Abigail Shays stayed silent. She knew no words could dissuade her husband at this point. And, she thought, if these gruesome reports were true, nothing should.

But they weren’t true at all.

Job Shattuck was indeed crippled, but not dead. No women had been blinded or slashed; no infant’s life snuffed out.

The rumors were false, but that didn’t matter. They spread like wildfire through western Massachusetts—from home to home, tavern to tavern, and church to church.

People believed the lies, and people will fight for what they believe.

Major General Benjamin Lincoln’s Home

North Street

Hingham, Massachusetts

December 4, 1786

General Benjamin Lincoln hunched over his cherrywood desk in the comfortable Hingham home. His ancestors had built this house in 1637, it had seen his birth in 1733, and it was where he hoped to die—unless, of course, these “Regulators” seized it as part of the revolution they now plotted.

Lincoln had been one of George Washington’s favorite generals. He had served at Boston, Long Island, White Plains, and Saratoga. Even his surrender to British forces at Charleston, South Carolina, failed to dim Washington’s respect for the easygoing Lincoln. When the British themselves later surrendered at Yorktown, it was Lincoln, paroled from British captivity, whom Washington designated to accept Lord Cornwallis’s sword.

Lying in front of Benjamin Lincoln today was a letter sent from Mount Vernon by Washington, dated almost a month earlier. “Are your people getting mad?” Washington had asked Lincoln, displaying uncharacteristic bluntness. “Are we to have the goodly fabric, that eight years were spent in raising, pulled over our heads? What is the cause of all these commotions? When and how will they end?”

Lincoln answered that, yes, people in Massachusetts were indeed angry. “If an attempt to annihilate our present constitution and dissolve the present government can be considered as evidence of insanity—then yes, you are accurate in your descriptions.”

Lincoln paused before answering Washington’s second question—whether the government would unravel. “There is, I think, great danger that it will be so unless the current system is supported by arms. Even then, a government which has no other basis than the point of the bayonet is so totally different from the one we established that if we must resort to arms then it can hardly be said that we have supported ‘the goodly fabric.’ This probably will be the case, for there does not appear to be virtue enough among the people to preserve a perfect republican government.”

Lincoln’s answers to his former commander’s first two queries were pessimistic, but his third answer conveyed even worse news. “It is impossible for me to determine when and how things will end,” he wrote. “I see little probability that their efforts will be brought to an end and the dignity of government supported without bloodshed. Yet, once a single drop is drawn, not even the most prophetic spirit will, in my opinion, be able to determine when it will cease flowing.”

General Lincoln knew there was no easy answer. The root cause of this growing insurrection was related to state issues like debt and property rights; issues in which the federal government, operating under the Articles of Confederation, had no ability to intervene. Lincoln also knew that other states faced similar issues. If Massachusetts’ citizens could sink into such a state of disillusionment as to pick up arms against their duly elected leaders, it could happen anywhere. The mob would supplant the law and trample liberty.

And that scared him to death.

Governor’s Mansion

Boston, Massachusetts

January 4, 1787

“You asked to see me, Governor?”

General Benjamin Lincoln had rushed north from Hingham as soon as he’d received the governor’s message that morning.

“Yes, I have requested your presence, and I think you fully comprehend why,” Bowdoin said.

“The mobs?” Lincoln asked. Massachusetts’ situation had deteriorated even further in the month since he had written back to Washington. Rumors had even been circulating that the Regulators intended to attack Boston itself.

“Of course,” answered Bowdoin. “We require a larger, more reliable force than General Shepard’s militia to crush this pox.”

“That will require patriotism . . . and, of course, gold and silver,” said Lincoln, well aware of the financial difficulties the commonwealth was already suffering.

“Funds will be provided, General,” answered Bowdoin. “I have taken it upon myself to raise them privately from one hundred thirty-five of the commonwealth’s most substantial and patriotic citizens. Men who know the value of the rule of law.” What the governor did not say, but the wily Lincoln knew very well, was that these men were not merely patriotic, they also now owned the bulk of the state’s debt—most of which had been acquired at a substantial, and now very profitable, discount. The money Bowdoin raised from increased taxes went to them. Their pledge of capital to fight the rioters was motivated by their desire to ensure that the current system, which supported their wealth, remained in place.

Motivations aside, this was the solution that Lincoln had already suggested to George Washington. The commonwealth’s men of property would have to dig into their pockets to fund an armed force that would guarantee both their property and the rule of law.

And that was just fine with Lincoln.

“I’m at your service,” he said to the governor.

Continental Arsenal

Springfield, Massachusetts

January 19, 1787

A ragtag stream of ill-clad, freezing men marched through the falling snow up a steep New England hillside. They resembled white-covered scarecrows, with rags around their heads to secure their shabby three-cornered hats in place and rags bound around their feet to stave off frostbite.

“Column halt!” the man on horseback barked. “Take shelter indoors! You’ve earned it, men!”

“Damn right we have!” muttered one of the scarecrows, ice forming around his beard. “We’ve marched a good twenty miles today!”

The men were Massachusetts militia, and the person shouting orders was none other than Major General William Shepard, the same man who had rolled out the cannons in his face-off against Daniel Shays, Luke Day, and their band of Regulators at the Springfield courthouse nearly four months earlier.

Governor Bowdoin may not have possessed much faith in the commonwealth’s militia, but General Shepard still did to a degree.

A thought—no, a fear—had raced through Shepard’s mind for months. Springfield possessed more than a courthouse; it also possessed a Continental Arsenal, chock-full of everything an army might need: 7,000 muskets and bayonets, 1,300 pounds of gunpowder, and 200 tons of shot. These supplies could transform a disorganized rabble into a formidable army capable of marching right to the State House in Boston.