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Shays's Rebellion: Authority and Distress in Post-Revolutionary America. By Sean Condon. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. 164 pages. $19.95 (paperback).
Prof. Sean Condon's Shays's Rebellion: Authority and Distress in PostRevolutionary America is a gem of a monograph. He provides the "whowhat-when-andwhere" of Massachusetts' season of discontent between the autumn of 1786 and the spring of 1787, and the indispensable whys: the reasons, rooted in events and processes driven by separation and war and underway for years, that finally impelled central and western county farmers, agricultural laborers and small landowners, many Revolutionary War veterans, to rearm, form scratch militia, and close courthouses in Worcester, Concord, Northampton, Springfield, Taunton, and Great Barrington. This book could also serve as a case study in the foundations of political legitimacy. It is a warning, understood by many during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, that the road to legitimacy requires constant maintenance.
With clear prose and focused narration Condon recreates the Massachusetts of 1786, which in the aftermath of the American Revolution was overwhelmed by economic dilemmas. These produced winners and losers, often divided along economic, which then meant largely sectional, lines: specie-short farmers and rural laborers in the central and western counties sought more state-issued paper currency with which to pay debts, which had grown through mortgages and escalating taxes, the latter linked to Massachusetts'...