APPENDIX A: Religion and the Regulation

The following lists summarize the religious circumstances and political loyalties of the 134 taxpaying towns and districts in the three western counties (see table 9.1). The following data were also used in the analysis for a parallel essay, “To the Quiet of the People: Revolutionary Settlements and Civil Unrest in Western Massachusetts, 1774–1789,” WMQ, 3d ser., 46 (1989): 453–57.

Key: B = Baptists; Q = Quakers; E = Episcopalians; UN = Universalists; S = Shakers; SEP = Separates; v = Congregational ministerial vacancy.

Sources:

Dissenting societies: Pocket Almanack for 1787 . . . Massachusetts Register (Boston: Fleets, 1786), 57–60; Minutes of the Warren [Baptist] Association, at Their Annual Convention, Held at Mr. Blood’s Meetinghouse in Newton, 1786 (Charlestown, Mass.: John W. Allen, 1786), 2–3; David D. Field and Chester Dewey, eds., A History of the County of Berkshire, Massachusetts (Pittsfield: S. W. Bush, 1829); John R. Lockwood, ed., Western Massachusetts: A History, 1635–1925, 4 vols. (New York: Lewis, 1926); Nathaniel B. Sylvester, ed., The History of the Connecticut Valley in Massachusetts, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: L. H. Everts, 1879); History of Worcester County, Massachusetts, 2 vols. (Boston: C. F. Jewett, 1879). Shaker locations provided by Stephen Marini.

Congregational ministerial vacancies: Pocket Almanack for 1787 . . . Massachusetts Register 57–60.

Government militia captains: The distribution of captains who raised companies for government service was used to establish the geography of support for the government in the fall and winter of 1786–87. The names of these militia captains were found in the militia muster rolls filed in volumes 191 and 192 of the Massachusetts Archives Collection, part of the Archives of the Commonwealth, located at the Massachusetts State Archives building, Columbia Point, Boston. These names were linked with towns using the 1790 census, Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1790: Massachusetts (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1908).

Regulator leaders: I have used lists of those individuals singled out for arrest and prosecution to establish the distribution of the leadership for the Regulation in the fall and winter of 1786–87. Because the oaths of allegiance signed in the spring of 1787 were somewhat erratically administered and were aimed at the rank and file, not the Regulator leadership, I did not use them to establish this geographic profile. Sources include warrants, indictments, and imprisonments listed in the following sources: Massachusetts Archives, 189:75–76, 81–84, 100–102, 135, 210; Suffolk Files Collection, file no. 155325 (initial list of 21 indictments) and no. 155296–7; Supreme Judicial Court Docket Book, 1787, 58–60, 63, 77–80, 101–2 (and September Session, Worcester County, n.p.); Jail Register, Worcester County, Mass., Papers, folder 1, box 2, American Antiquarian Society; Prison Lists in Original Papers of Shays’s Rebellion, Berkshire Athenaeum; and court notes in Robert Treat Paine Papers, box 23, Massachusetts Historical Society. The Suffolk Files Collection and the Supreme Judicial Court Docket Books, formerly located in the Suffolk County Court Building, are now part of the Judicial Archives located at the Massachusetts State Archives building, Columbia Point, Boston.

“Plus Black List”: The “Hampshire County Black List,” Robert Treat Paine Papers, box 23, identifies 139 leading Regulators in Hampshire County. This list allows for more of Hampshire’s sixty towns and districts to be classified, adding four towns to the “Regulator” category and shifting three towns from the “Militia” to the “Conflicted” category.

For suggestive discussions of the importance of local militia captains as “notables” and of politics as a form of militia muster, see Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years War (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984); Van Beck Hall, Politics without Parties: Massachusetts, 1780–1791 (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), 207–8, and Robert H. Wiebe, The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Constitution to the Eve of Disunion (New York: Random House, 1984), 37–38.

Berkshire County Towns

*Not a taxpaying district in 1786; not used in final analysis.

Hampshire County Towns

Worcester County Towns