J. H. Temple, A History of North Brookfield, Massachusetts, published by the town of North Brookfield, 1887, 245.
Temple, A History of North Brookfield, 245; details of Shays' early working career from Judge Samuel Hinckley whose father employed Shays in Brookfield, quoted in James Russell Trumbull, History of Northampton, Massachusetts from its settlement in 1654, (Northampton: Gazette Printing Company, 1898-1902, Vol II, 491.
Ibid; Richardson Wright, Daniel Shays, Rebel in Charles H. Johnson and Richardson Wright, Transactions of the American Lodge of Research for Free and Accepted Masons The Lodge, [New York] [1955?] Vol. III, no. 1, 186-87.
Lexington Alarm Amherst Company Roll, Special Collections, Jones Library, Amherst, MA
Marion Starkey, A Little Rebellion, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955) 70-71. A 19th century history of Worcester was typical in attributing Shays' sale of an "heirloom of inestimable value" to his "deficiency of honorable sentiment in his mental constitution." William Lincoln, History of Worcester, Massachusetts, from its Earliest Settlement to September, 1836 (Worcester: Moses To. Phillips and Company, 1837), 370.
Wright, Daniel Shays, Rebel, 186. After the war, Shays joined the Hampshire Lodge of Northampton, Massachusetts, of which Luke Day was also a member. The Northampton Lodge voted to send the names of both men to the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts "to be recorded with Infamy in consequence of their participation in the late Rebellion." Ibid. 186.
Ibid.
Gregory Nobles, Shays and his Neighbors, in Robert Gross, ed., In debt to Shays: the Bicentennial of an Agrarian Insurrection, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993) 185-203; David P. Szatmary, Shays' Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 66.
Richards, Shays' Rebellion, 26; Nobles, Shays and his Neighbors; Pelham Petition, Shays' Rebellion Collection, American Antiquarian Society.
Address from the General Court to the People of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (Boston: Adams and Nourse, 1786), Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association.
Richards, Shays's Rebellion, 26; Starkey, A Little Rebellion, 76-82.
Starkey, Little Rebellion; Justus Forward diary, AAS.
Richards, Shays's Rebellion, 26.
Ibid., 79; extant accounts of the Springfield protest in September 1786 concur that the Regulators were not well or uniformly armed. For example, Justin Hitchcock of Deerfield reported that of about 1,300 Regulators, he estimated that approximately 300 were armed with muskets. Justin Hitchcock, "Remarks and Observations," Hitchcock Family Papers, PVMA.
Diary of Justus Forward, AAS
Szatmary. Shays' Rebellion, 93; Starkey, Little Rebellion, 99-101; Letter of the Committee of Seventeen, 9 December 1786, Massachusetts Archives Collection, Records, Vol. 189: 297, MA.
Subscription list for paying and supplying a militia, 4 January 1787, Massachusetts Archives Collection, Records, Vol. 189: 64, MA.
Rufus Putnam, quoted in Starkey, Little Rebellion, 119-21; Governor's Council report of a letter from General Putnam to James Bowdoin, Massachusetts Archives Collection, Records, Vol. 189: 74, MA. The Council authorized Putnam to offer Shays a pardon if Shays surrendered himself in Boston, but by the time Putnam received this information Shays had already put himself beyond the reach of a pardon by marching on the Springfield Arsenal in January 1787.
Starkey, Little Rebellion, 128.
William Shepard to Henry Knox, 17 December 1786, Shepard Papers, Memorial Libraries, Historic Deerfield.
A copy of this communication appeared in the March issue of the Worcester Magazine, AAS.
The most current and detailed description of the action at the Arsenal is Richard Colton, "Unwilling to stain the land: Conflict and Ambivalence in Shays's Rebellion," unpublished paper presented at the Shays' Rebellion Symposium hosted by Springfield Technical Community College, January 2007.
Starkey, Little Rebellion, 137-139.
Journal of Park Holland, Petersham Historical Society; recollections of the Reverend Samuel Willard, Petersham Historical Society.
Marian Starkey offers a compelling and well-researched narrative of Shays' exile in Little Rebellion, 164-168.
Starkey, Little Rebellion, 248-250.
Charles H. McClellan, "Colrain's Early Days", delivered at a field meeting at the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, 1898, PVMA; Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly Paper, quoted in Frederic L. Paxon, A Recent History of the United States (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929).
Schlesinger's review appeared in The New England Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 1 (January, 1932) 168.
The legend of the Horse Caves is almost certainly false. Amherst turned out many Regulators, including the Dickinson family from which the famous poet Emily Dickinson was descended. It was unlikely that Shays would have needed to hide under a ledge in Amherst when there were so many in the community with Regulator sympathies. James and Christopher Collier, The Winter Hero, (New York: Four Winds Press, 1978).
Selection of verses from The Ballad of Daniel Shays, composed before 1793, printed in The Poets and Poetry of Springfield in MassachusettsCharles Henry Barrows, 1907, pgs. 26-28; also printed in The C.O. Parmenter, History of Pelham: from 1738-1898 (Amherst: Carpenter and Morehouse, 1898).
Gross, Robert A., ed. In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion. Charlottesville : University Press of Virginia, 1993.
Kaminski, John P., Saladino, Gaspare J., Leffler, Richard, Schoenleber, Charles H. and Margaret A. Hogan eds., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, Ratification of the States: Massachusetts vol. 4, pg. 904.
Parmenter, Charles O. The History of Pelham, from 1738 to 1898 including the Early History of Prescott. Amherst, Mass., 1898.
Richards, Leonard. Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
Szatmary, David P., Shays' Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1980.
Starkey, Marion L. A Little Rebellion. New York, Knopf, 1955.
| Print | Top of Page