9

A DEACON’S ORTHODOXY:

Religion, Class, and the Moral Economy of Shays’s Rebellion

John L. Brooke

One day during the tension-filled autumn of 1786, Robert Forbush of Holden, Massachusetts, stopped at the house of a fellow townsman to discuss public affairs. “Conversation turned upon the Riot Act,” Forbush told a court of inquiry the following April. Taking out a copy of the act and reading it aloud, his neighbor Aaron Broad had declared his loyalty to the insurgents’ cause: “I am determined to fight and spill my blood and leave my bones at the Court House till the Resurrection.” In similar fashion, his neighbor Isaac Chenery exclaimed at the Worcester court closing in December that “I had rather be under the Devil than such a Government as this.”1

These religious allusions remind us that the Regulator insurgents of Shays’s Rebellion were immersed in a public culture profoundly shaped by a powerful Protestant tradition. If these exclamations suggest a habitual, rough language, redolent as much of tavern profanity as meetinghouse piety, the words attributed to the Reverend Caleb Curtis of Charlton ring of the revolutionary evangelical Protestantism we have come to expect in the last two decades of historical study. Curtis was an archetype of the “black regiment” of orthodox ministers who had exhorted the people to resistance and rebellion in 1775; he had resigned his ministry to serve in the General Court in 1776. Addressing a militia company mustering to support the government in December 1786, Curtis turned them against their officers with an impassioned speech: “Don’t mind your Governor, nor your General Warner, nor your Colonel Towne, nor your Ammidowns, but in the name of God turn out and stop the sitting of the court, and I will support you with my life and Fortune.” In the manner of the ministerial exhortations at the Lexington alarm eleven years before, Curtis then prayed with the Regulators who marched to Worcester.2

Curtis’s role in the insurgency highlights several important perspectives on the dynamics of Shays’s Rebellion—or the Regulation, as it more properly should be known. His speech illustrates the insurrection’s challenge to specific local gentry elites, and it points to the role of patronage of the Regulators by other men of gentry status. It also poses the problem of the religious context of the rebellion: Curtis was invoking the Protestant God in calling out the Charlton Regulators. The religious context of the Regulation was not of central importance for an earlier generation of scholars; written in the great Progressive tradition, the seminal studies by Robert Taylor, Robert Feer, and Van Beck Hall focused on the interwoven problems of economy and politics which were of first importance to a state-level analysis. But ever since the publication of Alan Heimert’s Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution, historians have been attuned to the religious dimensions of political action in the Revolutionary era. Inspired by Heimert’s work, there emerged a school of historians who saw in the evangelical fervor of the Great Awakening the seedbed of eighteenth-century American political radicalism.3 The evangelical interpretation of political dissent has been applied to Shays’s Rebellion as well. In 1971 William McLoughlin argued that Baptists in the western counties “provided more than their share of men to Shays’s rebels.” In 1982 Stephen Marini introduced his Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England with an evocative description of the backcountry, suggesting that Shays’s Rebellion and the emergence of Arminian Free-Will Baptists, Universalists, and Shakers were part and parcel of a single “deeply radical . . . Antifederalist culture.”4

At first glance it would seem reasonable to assume a relationship between simultaneous and contiguous movements that challenged the structures of civil and religious order. But such an interpretive thrust also has attracted its critics. In his 1980 study David Szatmary gave only passing notice to the religious context of the Regulation, but he argued that the Baptists were only weakly represented among the Regulators, and that the majority were Congregationalists. Most recently, Ruth Bloch found millennial language decidedly absent in the rhetoric of the insurrection in her review of political millennialism in the late eighteenth century and has concluded that Shays’s Rebellion “did not give rise either to revolutionary aspirations or to desires to remake the world anew.”5

This essay argues, with David Szatmary and Ruth Bloch, that popular participation in the Regulation did not emerge from the evangelical, sectarian impulse. Instead, Shays’s Rebellion was rooted in the old organic culture of the orthodox communities. In these places, including a majority of the interior farm towns, people held to the Congregational faith of New England tradition, worshiping together in a single church, taxing themselves to sustain minister and parish, and sustaining bonds of community born of a common Puritan ancestry and a shared agrarian way of life. Rather than a harbinger of the democratic politics of interest of the century to come, the Regulation was a final expression of a corporate political culture, wherein “the body of the people” rose to “regulate” the relationship between rulers and the ruled and to defend an ancient and eroding conception of a moral economy.

If the Regulators were situated in established orthodox communities that could claim a heritage running back to seventeenth-century Puritanism, this was by the 1780s an incomplete, truncated orthodoxy. The orthodox roots of the Regulation owed nothing to the established ministry, Caleb Curtis notwithstanding. As a body, the ministry opposed the insurgents, siding with a broader gentry class rather than the local community.6 Support for the Regulation was strongest in those orthodox communities where the gentry class was absent and the minister isolated from his social class or missing altogether.

Important as they were, the ministers did not in themselves define the orthodox world. Their authority over the religious lives of the community was shared with officers drawn from the laity. In particular, one can distinguish between a ministerial orthodoxy and a deacon’s orthodoxy. Through their preaching and pastoral duties, ministers carried out the larger, sacred purposes of bringing people to God. The deacons, by contrast, were responsible for the mundane problems of institutional continuity, of managing the secular affairs of church and parish. While they served at the communion table and lined out the Psalms for the congregation, the deacons’ most important responsibilities involved keeping the church accounts. They gathered the money required to supply the communion table, to pay the minister, and—most importantly—to take care of the poor, “such as were in necessity.” The key to the deacon’s orthodoxy lay not in questions of fundamental doctrine but in a distinctive social role: in the words of the Cambridge Platform, their office was “limited unto the care of the temporall good things of the church.” The deacon’s place was to insure institutional continuity and collective well-being.7

Such concerns also were paramount for the men who led the people into the Regulation. For better or worse, the responsibility for raising the rebellion lay with men of local standing in orthodox communities: innholders, militia captains, deacons, and selectmen. Their concerns reflected the priorities of local officials of town and church: the survival of independent households in an interdependent community. Rather than a disorderly assault on established institutions, as its critics charged, the Regulation was an effort to stabilize a society disordered by economic upheaval in the larger world. It was deeply rooted in a moral economy that cherished a social ideal of republican independence, and that shaped a critique of individualistic economic relationships which were taking on a new legitimacy in the post-Revolutionary years. But only in towns where a deacon’s orthodoxy prevailed, structuring social relations in the absence of both organized dissent and gentry authority, would this sense of order be expressed in an ardent and united support for the Regulation.8

Ministerial jeremiads complaining of an erosion of orthodoxy during the Revolutionary years had a solid grounding in reality. The Revolutionary crisis of 1774 had worked briefly to reinforce the position of the Congregational covenant, but this initial momentum was difficult to maintain in the years to follow. After a burst of church admissions in the crisis years of 1774 and 1775, church records reveal a dramatic decline in the rate of new membership, which would generally not be reversed until the 1790s or later.9 Similarly, all was not well in the relationship between ministers and congregations. The rate of ministerial vacancies in the orthodox churches in the three western counties of Worcester, Hampshire, and Berkshire doubled from 16 percent on the eve of the Revolution to 33 percent in the mid-1780s. The tendency was noticeable particularly in Hampshire County, where the intransigence of Tory ministers at Amherst, Northfield, Shutesbury, Warwick, Deerfield, and Greenfield led either to abrupt and sometimes violent dismissals or to a continuing undercurrent of ill will. Other orthodox ministers, like Caleb Curtis of Charlton, withdrew from the ministry to commit themselves to secular politics of the Revolution. Simultaneously, life in the army camps provided a fertile ground for the development of a secular worldview among the young men drawn from the towns by either the prospects of glory or the demands of the draft. Daniel Shays became a Freemason during the war years, and he and Luke and Elijah Day, other leading Hampshire County Regulators, joined a new Masonic lodge in Northampton early in 1786, only to be “recorded in infamy” on the Grand Lodge minutes following the Regulation. Their Masonic membership points to the gentry aspirations of some of the leading Regulators; it also poses a particular problem for any evangelical interpretation of Shays’s Rebellion.10

The decadence of the orthodox establishment was only one side of the religious experience in Revolutionary New England. The other side was the rise of dissenting, sectarian denominations in a long explosive revival sequence between 1776 and 1782 which Stephen Marini has neatly defined as the “New Light Stir.” The greatest beneficiaries of this Revolutionary revival were the Separate Baptists. From Middleborough in Plymouth County to New Providence in Berkshire, Baptist churches reported startling increases in church membership, and between 1777 and 1782 the membership of the Warren Baptist Association tripled, with fifteen churches added to the rolls. This revival coincided with efforts by Baptists throughout the state to have the old charter set aside and a new constitution written and ratified under the Lockean principle of the state of nature.11 Marini has described the second great result of the “New Light Stir”: the proliferation of new dissenting denominations and sects. Building on experiences in the young American army in the siege of Boston, Universalist exhorters began to draw converts from upcountry Baptists in the winter of 1775–76. The next year a series of revivals spread through southeast New Hampshire which would lead to the Free-Will Baptist movement. And most dramatically, 1780 would bring the first of Mother Ann Lee’s missions across Massachusetts in search of converts for the fledgling Shaker order that had settled in Niskeyuna, New York, in 1774. The Shakers would be the most successful of a host of enthusiastic sects emerging in the New England hinterland in the unsettled years following the Revolution. Where Mother Ann Lee managed by the adoption of strict hierarchical rule to perpetuate her claim to a prophetic mantle, Shadrack Ireland, Jemima Wilkinson, and William Dorrell failed. The ephemeral small sects gathering around these prophets of new faiths were less significant for their numerical following than as a symptom of religious unease and anxiety in the raw settlements of the post-Revolutionary New England frontier.12

An aggregate analysis of religion and politics in the towns of the three western Massachusetts counties, though not particularly conclusive, indicates that the absence of orthodox ministers may have been one social precondition to the Regulation. This analysis does not, however, suggest any strong correlation between the explosion of dissenting religion and the Regulation. Using court records and militia muster rolls to identify the residences of both leading Regulators and militia captains who raised companies for government service, I have divided the western towns into Regulator towns, militia towns, conflicted towns, and all others (see table 9.1 and Appendix A). Broadly, the differences among these towns were not drastic, but there were certain distinctions in the religious context of local political action. The militia towns stand out as being the least likely to have had either dissenting societies or vacant Congregational pulpits. In these places it appears that a traditional orthodoxy remained intact; town and church were one, ministers filled the pulpits, and dissenters were few and far between. The core Regulator towns, by contrast, were most notable for having the highest proportion of vacant Congregational pulpits. They were not, however, havens for religious dissent.

Table 9.1. Dissenting societies and Congregational ministerial vacancies in western Massachusetts, by political stance, 1786–87

Categories and sources: See Appendix A.

Among those places having difficulty maintaining an established minister in the years before the Regulation was the town-supported Presbyterian church in Pelham—the archetype of the Regulator towns. Here problems of class were as important as those of religion. One who unsuccessfully filled the Pelham pulpit, the great imposter Stephen Burroughs, described the Pelham people as “strict Presbyterians” with a high regard for “the nice distinctions between orthodox and heterodox principles and practice.” But they also objected to the gentry style of the ministers of the day; Burroughs’s predecessor had been criticized less for heterodox principles than for “practicing upon a system of manners more refined than that what was prevalent in the place.” The Pelham people wanted a minister who would be of one mind with them, and they objected to those who aspired to the grand style of the River God gentry.13 In failing to settle a minister, the people of Pelham and many of the other Regulator towns were insulating themselves from the conservative counsel of the clergy. They would turn to Daniel Shays, whose claim to gentry status came not from traditional sources but from his Revolutionary career.

The religious circumstances of the conflicted towns—where local notables raised men for both the Regulators and the government—were far more diverse than the militia or Regulator towns. In these places, ministers were settled in a preponderance of the Congregational churches, but they faced stiff competition in the community at large. These politically conflicted towns were the most likely of the four groups of towns to have had organized dissenting societies. It is tempting to suggest that this religious diversity directly underlay the political conflicts of 1786. But such an argument would proceed from a simple analysis of data which masks a far more complex situation. To understand the context of mobilization in 1786 we need to arrive at a much closer view than this sweeping aggregate. This fine-grained resolution can be achieved through what Charles Tilly calls a “census of the rebellion”: an analysis of the collective biographies of hundreds of individuals participating in the confrontations of 1786–87. Such an endeavor necessarily must be limited in scope—the following analysis focuses on six towns—but it allows us to begin to develop some very specific arguments about the dynamics of class and community during this short insurgency.14

The Worcester county towns of Leicester, Spencer, Oakham, Brookfield, Charlton, and Sturbridge lie just west of the county seat of Worcester, within a broad band of towns which sent both companies of Regulators to close the courts and companies of militia to support the government in the critical months of 1786–87. Approximately 600 men, or 20 percent of the ratable polls in these six towns, marched with the Regulators or the government militia. Oakham and Spencer were among the core Regulator towns; the other four were conflicted, divided between notables supporting both the Regulation and the government. The focus of the Regulators’ action, the county Court of Common Pleas had adjudicated cases of debt involving 134 debtors and 82 creditors from these same towns between December 1785 and July 1786 (see tables 9.2–9.4). The collective biography of these individuals, debtors and creditors, Regulators and Friends of Government, allows us precisely to define the context of religion and class in this insurgency, and to suggest its broader significance.15

Table 9.2. Regulators, Friends of Government, debt, and credit in six Worcester County towns, December 1785–February 1787

Categories: Orthodox gentry town: Brookfield; plural towns: Charlton, Leicester, and Sturbridge; all dissenters: all individuals who can be linked with dissenting societies or by kinship to the broader dissenting orbit; small orthodox towns: Spencer and Oakham.

Note: Individuals from first quintile households include heads of households, nontaxpaying sons, and sons in ninth and tenth deciles.

Sources: 1783 tax valuation, Massachusetts State Library, and sources listed in Appendix B.

Table 9.3. Political action of debtors from six Worcester County towns, 1786–87, by location of debt

Political categories: See table 9.2.

Metropolitan debts: Owed to creditors in Boston, Cambridge, Plymouth, and Newport.

Regional debts: Owed to creditors in various inland towns that were not immediately adjacent to the debtor’s hometown.

Note: In the cases where a debtor owed several debts, the location of the debt or debts with the highest value was used.

Sources: See Appendix B.

Table 9.4. Political action of creditors from six Worcester County towns, 1786–87, by location of debt

Categories: See tables 9.2 and 9.3.

Sources: See Appendix B.

An interior hinterland between coast and river valley, Worcester County was settled only after the Peace of Utrecht had brought an end to New England’s first long sequence of war with the French and Indians. To the west, in Hampshire County, and to a degree in Berkshire, the social landscape was marked by the stark contrast between ancient and orderly valley towns and raw, newly settled towns in the surrounding hills. But in Worcester County a rolling topography punctuated by scattered stream valleys helped to shape a mosaic of class and community. Gentry-dominated towns were strung out at intervals on the province roads, linked to the cosmopolitan world of the capital in Boston. Interspersed among them were small towns, often off the main roads, where few gentlemen were seen apart from an orthodox minister and a resident justice of the peace. Dissenting religious societies, mostly Separate Baptists affiliated with the Warren Baptist Association, had emerged in the decades following the Great Awakening, particularly in the southeastern tier of towns closer to Rhode Island, rather than the northwestern towns closer to Hampshire County. Settled in open neighborhoods spanning some of the region’s stream valleys, and comprising almost a quarter of the population in these six towns, the dissenters had achieved a solid position by the 1780s. However, though they owned wealth in amounts roughly comparable to their orthodox fellow townsmen, the leading families among the dissenters had not yet begun to acquire the trappings of judicial placeholdings, college education, and extralocal affiliation which distinguished the gentry class among the orthodox. Importantly, something of a pluralistic accommodation was taking hold in the 1780s in the towns where dissenting societies had long been situated. Though dissenters were in a minority in these towns, the pluralist towns had disproportionately voted in 1780 against the provisions in the new state constitution for state support for religion. Over the following decade these pluralist towns began to formalize the outlines of the nineteenth-century denominational order, releasing dissenters from ministerial rates and from the costs of rebuilding the old town meetinghouses. No such accommodations were evident in the purely orthodox towns.16

A host of economic problems beset Massachusetts in the mid-1780s. On the one hand, holders of public securities had engineered legislation early in 1781 which simultaneously devalued and retired paper currency and guaranteed the payment of their loans at full value, in gold and silver raised by high levels of taxation. And following a postwar commercial boom, a crisis among British merchants led to a chain of debt prosecutions running from Britain to American merchants in the coastal towns to merchants in the interior, and from these men to a host of local debtors. Worcester County was particularly hard hit, with per capita prosecutions for debt double the state average.17

But, at least as measured by the actions of debtors and creditors in these six towns, support for the Regulators or the government did not simply reflect levels of debt and credit. The economic crisis was certainly the cause of the confrontation in 1786, but mobilization was conditioned by the varying configurations of class and religious tradition within these towns. Orthodox towns stood out at the two extremes of political action in 1786, extremes which simultaneously articulated and denied class interests. Support for both the Regulators and the government flowed along channels of corporate obligation and hierarchy that were still powerful among the orthodox and decidedly absent among the dissenters. Within particular orthodox communities, political action transcended lines of class and interest to unite the people behind local leaders either for or against the court closings. By contrast, the radically simplified dissenting communions were splintered by this political action, with minorities of notables acting to support the government, minorities of hard-pressed debtors joining the Regulation, and the majority withholding support from either side.

Brookfield, the second largest town in the county, long had been a center of gentry influence, with long-standing connections among the Hampshire River Gods. No fewer than five companies of government militia and gentleman volunteers were raised in this town, and when Regulator sympathizers managed to pass a petition for clemency in a December town meeting, Justice Dwight Foster organized a counterpetition signed by ninety-six inhabitants. This orthodox gentry town, encompassing 29 percent of the region’s population, accounted for only 18 percent of the Regulators and 57 percent of the Friends of Government (see table 9.2). Here debt relations and religious affiliation worked together to reinforce support for the government. The Brookfield gentry, along with a group of Worcester merchants and to a lesser extent the gentry in the pluralist towns, were commercial intermediaries. Owing large debts to coastal merchants, they in turn were owed money in a host of small local debts (see table 9.4). Such men were pillars of the government cause in 1786. Brookfield men with debts to merchants in Cambridge and Boston sided overwhelmingly with the government, as did the creditors living in the town (see table 9.3). But Brookfield also stood out as the only location where debtors owing money to creditors within a given town also served with the government militia in significant numbers; in other contexts such debtors remained neutral or supported the Regulation. A local creditor gentry, with their own obligations to metropolitan creditors, thus played a key role in turning their townspeople toward the government. Religious unity also played a role in this allegiance to the government. Roughly two-thirds of the progovernment militia in Brookfield were church members or the close relatives of church members. As would be the case under the Federalists in the following decades, the structures of the orthodox church, supported by an active ministry and a few progovernment deacons, apparently worked to reinforce class relations of deference in this gentry-dominated town.18

The smaller orthodox yeoman towns of Spencer and Oakham present a very different picture. Small towns incorporated from subordinate districts in 1775, they had neither dissenting societies nor a substantial gentry class; the town selectmen were men of local reputation, at best Congregational deacons or innholders. Well-organized companies of Regulators marched from these towns to close the courts in Worcester, and none of the local militia captains even attempted to raise companies for the government. Comprising roughly 19 percent of the population in the six town area, the orthodox population of these towns accounted for 45 percent of the Regulators and only 3 percent of the Friends of Government. The configurations of debt and the mobilization of debtors drastically different from the neighboring gentry-dominated Brookfield (see tables 9.2–9.4). Roughly two-thirds of all relations of debt and credit were with men in adjacent towns, rather than with local and metropolitan partners, and 62 percent of the debtors were represented among the Regulators, as against 20–25 percent of the debtors in all other circumstances. In sharp opposition to the gentry town of Brookfield, none of the debtors served with the government militia and, most importantly, five of the ten creditors supported the Regulation.

Among these creditor-Regulators were several who might be called Regulator notables, men who seem to have been acting on altruistic motives, on a sense of obligation to the corporate locality that transcended individual private interest, men whose leadership facilitated the dramatic mobilization of debtors in these towns for the Regulation. Deacon Oliver Watson of Spencer had served as the town’s delegate to a county convention in 1784. On several occasions in 1785 and 1786 Watson appeared in the Supreme Judicial Court as a lay attorney for his neighbors when they appealed cases of debt, so that they might avoid an obligation to the court’s phalanx of attending lawyers. In June 1786 he allowed his case against neighbor Benjamin Bemiss to be continued and served on the committee which called the county convention at which Bemiss served as a delegate from Spencer. Two of Watson’s householding sons, one a selectman in 1786, would serve in the ranks of the Regulators, as would a dependent son of Benjamin Bemiss. In Oakham there were three selectmen in this group of creditor-Regulators. One, innholder Richard Kelly, was in court as a plaintiff in five different cases in 1786, but he, too, supported the Regulation and, after its defeat, took the oath of allegiance to the government. A second Oakham creditor, selectman Ebenezer Nye, “acted in the capacity” of a captain for the Regulator company that marched from Oakham, and his son Timothy signed an oath as well. A third creditor in Oakham, innholder Joseph Chaddock, the town’s delegate to the 1786 convention, was accused of being “very busy in Encouraging” the Regulators and of giving them the town’s store of ammunition. In total, these creditors were owed £176 in ten different debts, and only one of them was a defendant in one case amounting to £14. It would have been in their immediate interest to keep the courts open in September 1786, yet the focus of collective obligation within these communities impelled them into the dangers of the Regulator movement.19

These creditors were part of a larger group of leading men in the small orthodox towns for whom aid for debtors was the prelude to support or sympathy for the Regulation. Deacon Jonathan Bullard, a Regulator leader in Oakham, acted as local debt arbitrator. Oakham and Paxton Regulators John Gould, Seth Snow, and Jonathan Clemons all stood as sureties for debtors at the Supreme Judicial Court in the place of the cadre of Worcester lawyers. Justices Edward Rawson of Leicester and John Bisco of Spencer stood as sureties and agents for at least seven debtors in 1786. Justice Bisco also served on a committee to consider the conditions of the county jail in December 1785, with Regulator sympathizers Amos Singletary and John Fessenden.20 In the spring of 1787 dozens of Regulators would bypass progovernment justices to sign oaths of allegiance with Bisco and Rawson, and their colleague Percival Hall of New Braintree,21 apparently because of their known sympathy for the debtors’ cause.22 While the Congregational ministers in both Oakham and Spencer probably opposed the Regulators, five of the seven deacons serving in the 1770s and 1780s were Regulator supporters, and a sixth was moderator of the Oakham town meeting throughout the period, a sign of some popularity in an overwhelmingly Shaysite town. In gentry-dominated Brookfield, moral unity reinforced deference to the interests of the creditor-gentry; in smaller orthodox towns such moral unity worked to equate the elders’ traditional obligation to the community with the interests of the debtors. In the former, a ministerial orthodoxy prevailed; in the latter a deacon’s orthodoxy shaped the community’s endorsement of the Regulation.

The dissenters and Congregationalists in the pluralist towns present a quite different pattern. Again, we have something of a paradox. The economic interests of debt and credit so evident in the orthodox towns seem to have been of relatively little importance in determining the loyalties of dissenters and their orthodox neighbors in the pluralistic towns, yet support for the government or the Regulation was more sharply divided along class lines (see table 9.2). Among both of these groups only a fifth of the debtors appearing in the Court of Common Pleas in the previous year were drawn into the Regulation, as against almost two-thirds of the debtors in the orthodox yeoman towns. Conversely, only a fifth of the creditors supported the government, as against almost two-thirds of the creditors in the orthodox gentry town of Brookfield. The Regulators’ threat to contract apparently was not particularly important to these dissenting creditors, and conversely, something was working to impede the mobilization of dissenting debtors behind the Regulation. At the same time there was far less support for Regulation among the wealthiest fifth of the population, the traditional stratum of town leadership, than in the small orthodox towns, and also far less support for the government among the poorer four-fifths of the population than in the gentry town of Brookfield. Where the virtual civil war of 1786 united the orthodox towns on one side or the other, the dissenting communities and the orthodox in the pluralistic towns were splintered and divided along class lines.

Such divisions also characterized the dissenting churches themselves. Where orthodox Regulators were drawn from the core families of the Congregational churches, Baptist Regulators came from the fringes of their religious communities. Where Congregational deacons openly supported the Regulators, their Baptist counterparts opted for the government or took no position at all. Among the six deacons of the Baptist churches in Leicester, Sturbridge, and Charlton, two were closely related to government militia men, and the other four had no connections with either side. Similarly, if the orthodox Regulators were not often full church members, they were from families in good standing with their church, while the vast majority of the Baptist Regulators were probably only attenders, contributing to subscriptions on occasion, and often can only be connected to Baptist meetings by broader family connections (see table 9.5).

Table 9.5. Congregational and Baptist church affiliations of Regulators in Spencer, Leicester, Charlton, and Sturbridge

*Pew-lists, subscription lists, kinship ties.

Note: The Spencer Congregationalists practiced the Half-Way Covenant; the status of church members was not available for the Charlton Baptist church.

Sources: See Appendix B.

The ambiguous relationship of mobilization in the pluralist towns to patterns of debt derived from the voluntarizing dynamic of religion and politics that had been at work among the dissenters and in the pluralist towns over the previous decade. The constitution-making process of 1776 to 1780 made an especially important impact in dissenting societies and pluralist towns. Where the orthodox in Worcester County had seen little reason to abandon the charter in 1776, the Baptists had insisted that the province lay in a state of nature, that the old charter be set aside and a new constitution drawn up. The Congregationalists in the pluralist towns had seen the verities of the orthodox social order challenged by religious dissenters and in the early 1780s had begun to come to terms with the new order that the constitution seemed to have established. A series of local compromises mitigated the constitution’s coercive requirement that “religious teachers” be publicly supported. Congregationalists began to define themselves as distinct “societies,” rather than parishes with territorial prerogatives; the leading gentry in these towns had joined together in 1784 to incorporate the Leicester Academy, the region’s first secular voluntary association. Thus the religious voluntarism of the dissenters had worked with the constitutional politics of the Revolutionary era to shape the outlines of the nineteenth-century social order: voluntary association among a plurality of institutions.23

Rather than acting simply in defense of the interests of creditors, the Friends of Government in the pluralist towns acted to defend this new constitutional order in 1786. Particularly among the dissenting Baptists and Universalists, recruits for the government militia and light horse were drawn from the elite, over half from the top fifth of the valuation, several from the households of deacons and selectmen. Some of these were men who had been active in the constitution-making process and in the forming of the Leicester Academy. Others were ambitious for place and position in the new governmental structure; all were willing to take the government’s pay to serve against their neighbors among the ranks of the Regulators.24 But, unlike the orthodox creditor gentry in Brookfield, these ambitious voluntarist gentry were unable to command the deference of the poorer households in their communities. Unlike the innholders, deacons, and selectmen in the small, orthodox towns, they felt no particular moral obligation to lead those lesser men against the government. The few Baptist-affiliated debtors who did join the Regulation were particularly exposed and isolated. They were distinctly poorer than other dissenting debtors who remained neutral, and though their total indebtedness was equivalent, they were burdened with roughly twice as many individual debts. Though a number of Baptist and Universalist notables had stood as sureties for debtors in the Supreme Judicial Court, they rarely supported the Regulation, as did their counterparts in the smaller orthodox towns.25 Vertical reciprocal ties of deference and obligation had been dramatically eroded in those places and in communities where the new voluntary and pluralistic order had begun to take shape. The result was sharp divisions along class lines within these communities and lower rates of participation on either side of the confrontation, as progovernment notables had few followers and potential Regulators had few leaders.

Caleb Curtis was acting on just this absence of a regulating leadership in the pluralist towns when he appeared on the Charlton militia field in December 1786 and exhorted the men to march to close the courts, offering to support them with his “life and fortune.” And in urging them to disregard the governor and their officers, Curtis was articulating the collapse of deference and obligation in the voluntary towns. A former orthodox minister in a town divided among Congregationalists, Baptists, and Universalists, Caleb Curtis occupied a unique rather than a typical position. Many men in Charlton were disposed to desert their gentry officers, but they found few leaders among the traditional stratum of local notables. It is important that the Regulator emergence in the dissenting towns of Leicester and Charlton came in December, not at the initial court closings in September. Curtis’s appeal may have been as much political as it was debt-related; David Dresser of Charlton later testified that he had only taken up arms against the government “when [he] heard the Light Horse was coming.” The mobilization of Regulators in these dissenting towns did not flow from a structured response of leading men to the pressure of debt in their communities, as it did in the small orthodox towns, but in a secondary, ad hoc fashion in response to the government’s threats of violent action.26

Without the leadership and organization flowing along the corporate channels of a deacon’s orthodoxy, dissenting Regulators in one suggestive but isolated instance drew upon the framework of voluntary association. On February 2, 1787, in the only truly violent incident of the insurgency in Worcester County, a band of Regulators encamped at New Braintree fired on a party of government men, wounding two of them. The government party had been sent to free two sheriff’s deputies, Samuel Flagg and John Stanton of Worcester, from the hands of the insurgents. Flagg and Stanton had been captured when they had attempted to serve a writ of execution against Isaac Southgate, the son of a Baptist elder in Leicester. They encountered a determined group of Southgate’s neighbors, who had apparently signed a formal pledge to defend “each individual among the Subscribers who may be injured” by writs of execution. But the group shared more than economic worries. According to later court testimony, at least thirteen men participated in the affair; all were drawn broadly from the dissenting orbit in the pluralist towns of the southern half of the county. Three were Universalists from Oxford and Ward, at least five were from Baptist families, and two were from the town of Uxbridge in the Blackstone valley, a region rife with religious dissent. In effect, the subscribers had established a private debtors’ society, based on the voluntary principles which shaped the dissenting societies. Their purposes were quite different from the Regulator mainstream. Where the majority of the Regulators acted as a corporate force to close the courts until public grievances were met, these voluntarist Regulators banded together simply to protect private property from attachment by the sheriff.27

This group was only a minor element among the Worcester County Regulators in 1786, but its organization, purposes, and profile of participation was quite similar to that which had characterized a series of small riots in 1782 and 1783. Usually aimed at stopping “vendue sales” of cattle, these riots had been the first sign that the economic pressures of taxation and private debt were straining the social fabric to the breaking point. But these episodes were firmly rooted in Baptist and Universalist families and neighborhoods and bore no obvious relationship to the broader patterns of Regulator mobilization of 1786. A few future Regulators even testified against these rioters, and more of the rioters ended up in the ranks of the government militia than among the Regulators. Among the latter was Reubin Lamb of Oxford, who would be among those holding Flagg and Stanton in New Braintree in February 1787. And like this group of voluntarist Regulators, the rioters were bound together by agreements of mutual protection, involving cooperation among “reformation men” from the southern Worcester towns as well as Rhode Island and Connecticut, who chose officers and stood “ready to assist at a minutes Warning.”28

Thus, while orthodox institutions shaped a sense of inclusive moral economy which legitimized public action against the county courts, New Light dissent informed more circumscribed efforts to protect private property. In short, the orthodox were inclined toward “public mobs,” and dissenters toward “private mobs.”29 Disputes erupting within dissenting and orthodox churches in the wake of the rebellion underscore the very different linkages between moral and economic categories among the orthodox and the dissenters. The Baptist church at South Leicester was wracked with turmoil in 1787, but the lines were not drawn between Regulators and Friends of Government. Two factions fell into dispute over a plan to grant the minister a regular salary. A band of “Disaffected Brethren” led by Samuel Denny and Deacon Isaac Choate charged that the Reverend Isaac Beals was a “lazy . . . discontented person” who “wearied out the church with [his] unreasonable complaints” for support. The minister countered that Deacon Choate had asked him “the market price for Pork, that was not well fatted.” Despite their financial grievances, none of the “Disaffected Brethren” joined the Regulation, and Denny’s son served with the government light horse in the winter of 1787. There were some Regulators among the Leicester Baptists, but rather than quarreling over the minister’s salary, most of them simply stopped attending. Of eight Regulators once affiliated with the church, only three were still active in 1786. Of four actual church members, three were excluded or admonished in 1787 for long neglecting their “travel with the church.” Their censure had nothing to do with their role in the rebellion. The fourth Regulator among the membership remained in good standing, paid his 1786 dues, and was elected to a standing committee in 1787. In the spring of 1788 the Leicester Baptists articulated explicitly their disassociation of moral and economic categories in revising the language of a 1784 vote governing civil suits among brethren. This vote had directed that the creditor negotiate with a debtor as prescribed in Matthew 18:15–17, meeting with him in the presence of witnesses and before the congregation; that failing, the creditor was to treat the debtor “as he would a pagan or tax-collector.” The vote originally had stipulated that the church would judge whether either party had violated “moral order.” In April 1788 the church changed the language to read “gospel order.” “Moral order” was too imprecise for these Baptists, suggesting a broader scope of action than the limited absolutes of the gospel church.30

Where the Baptists were silent about the role of their members in the Regulation, apparently maintaining a strict separation of church and state, the ministers of the Congregationalist churches were less circumspect. In the aftermath of the Regulation a series of confrontations broke out between ministers and laity in the small orthodox towns over their respective behavior during the rebellion. In Spencer, the church finally had to vote to overrule the minister, Joseph Pope, in his efforts to censure one church member among the Regulators, Samuel Rice. And after another protracted series of meetings the church voted in April 1788 “that the conduct of Brother Samuel Tucker in their opinion, was not criminal, and ought not fall under ye reprehension and censure of the ch[urc]h for the part he acted in ye late insurrection.” Nearby to the west, a bitter fight erupted between orthodox minister and people in the Hampshire County town of Ware. When the Regulator leaders called on the Reverend Benjamin Judd to pray for their cause, he called one of them a “Hell-Hound” and declared that “he would as soon pray for the Devils in Hell as for ye Insurgents.” Inverting Isaac Chenery’s exclamation that he would rather live “under the Devil than such a Government as this,” the Reverend Mr. Judd scolded the congregation in Ware that “if the Devil was Governor or Ruler the People ought to Obey him.” The ecclesiastical council that met to resolve the quarrel absolved Judd for his “harsh expressions” and censured two deacons and five other prominent men for various charges of nonattendance and for supporting the “most wicked and unprovokable” rebellion, “a crime of ye most aggravated nature.” In both cases, clergy and laity had dramatically different interpretations of the covenant order. But both drew upon the blending of sacred and secular, of civil and religious, which stood at the heart of the orthodox way, impelling both Regulator requests for prayers and ministerial efforts to discipline them for their assault on civil institutions.31

In November 1786 Captain Adam Wheeler, recently a Revolutionary officer, a former selectman, assessor, and town treasurer, and a founding member of the orthodox church in Hubbardston, wrote a brief statement explaining to the public his leading role in the closing of the Worcester courts. “He had no Intentions to Destroy the Publick Government but to have the . . . Courts of Common Pleas and gen[era]l sessions of the peace . . . suspended, to prevent Such abuses as have of late taken place by the sitting of those Courts.” Wheeler was particularly “Distressed to See Valuable and Industrious members of Society dragged from their families to prison, to the great damage not only of their families but the Community at large.”32 Wheeler’s language contained no dramatic religious metaphors, yet it spoke of a basic moral concern. Adam Wheeler made a choice between the legal enforcement of contract and the preservation of household independence. His decision to lead men against the courts, in an almost ritual tradition of collective action that sought only a redress of public grievances, flowed from his particular circumstances as a leading man in a small, orthodox town.

The Regulation has long been seen simply as a confrontation of debtors and creditors. Obviously, debt relations were powerful determinants of political action in the 1780s. But this political action was also decisively shaped by expectations and relationships forged in very different religious communities. The corporate assumptions of the orthodox laity shaped a unified Regulator militance in the yeoman towns; men of local standing acted on an understanding of mutual obligation to lead debtor-neighbors against the courts. But corporatism could also contribute to debtor deference to a powerful creditor-gentry and to ministerial assumptions of such deference. Conversely, Lockean voluntarism undermined expectations of both mutual obligation and hierarchical deference. Its privatistic impulses shaped the most striking patterns among the dissenters: small-scale rioting in 1782 and 1783 and the general failure of debtors to mobilize—other than in minor private efforts—in 1786 sharply contrasted with the staunch progovernment action by leading dissenting households. What differentiated the Regulators most particularly was an expectation of governmental adjustment, a willingness to interfere with the adjudication of individual contract, and a social structure conducive to collective action.

In summary, then, Shays’s Rebellion was centered in the orthodox world, in the expectations of social reciprocity of a people united in the territorial structures of corporate church and town. Rather than being driven by any millennial, otherworldly fantasies, the Regulators were very much of this world, and they expected religion to serve worldly purposes. Their world view was not shaped by the intense fervor and separatist impulses of the evangelical revival but by a profound sense of the moral context of human behavior. Rather than being devout church members, they were more typically affiliated by the inclusive forms of infant baptism and the Half-Way Covenant, the sacred safety net of a conditional birthright contract inherited from the late seventeenth-century compromise of Puritan divinity. This orthodox Regulator mentality was perhaps tribal in its focus in the household and corporate community. It certainly was grounded in assumptions about church and state that we reject and contributed to a fundamental misunderstanding of constitutional government. But these religious sensibilities never provided the intellectual roots of a millennial imperialism, and they informed a moral critique of individualistic economic relationships which is the lasting legacy of this brief insurgency.