years' good behavior, and sit on a gallows with a rope around his neck; all of which sentence was carried out.1 Those who had participated in the insurrection were for a time disfranchised, and excluded from the jury-box; but these disabilities were soon removed, the offender being merely required to take the oath of allegiance. Measures of reform in the administration of the laws and of the finances were immediately entered upon, at first with somewhat of the crudity of thought which had prevailed before the insurrection. But the light soon began to break, and gleams of those beneficent reforms which have since prevailed began to streak the horizon. It is not the least among the compensations of the rebellion of 1786, that it directed the more earnest thought of cultivated statesmen to the imperfection of the laws, and to popular content as an element in the strength of government. 1 The unfortunate legislator was Hon. Moses Harvey, senator from Hampshire County. CHAPTER XXII. PITTSFIELD IN THE SHAYS REBELLION.-PAROCHIAL DIFFICULTIES. - [1786-1789.] Public Sentiment of the Town. - Its Comparative Prosperity.- Prominent Citizens labor for Law and Order.-Henry Van Schaack eulogizes the Town. -The Malecontent Movement modified in Pittsfield. — Instructions to Representative Childs. A Stormy Town Meeting. - A Conservative Re-Action. Military Occupation of the Town. - Anecdote. - Parochial Dissensions. — Reconciliation effected. Joshua Danforth. — Henry Van Schaack. IN N considering the public sentiment which prevailed in Pittsfield during the memorable commotions just related, nice discrimination is required. Tradition affirms that the great majority of the inhabitants were averse to the insurrection; and, while it is certain that the malecontents more than once controlled the town meetings, it is equally clear that only a small fraction of the voters were, at the close of the rebellion, found to have been seriously implicated in it. The population of the town was about eleven hundred, which would represent at least two hundred voters; but those who are recorded to have taken the oath of allegiance prescribed by the legislature as a condition of re-enfranchisement counted only thirty-one, of whom only eight are minuted as having "turned in their arms." Of these, some denied any guilty connection with the rebellion; and so slight was the evidence against them, that many were found to credit their plea. On the other hand, the names of Thomas Gold, and of two or three others known to have been active rebels, do not appear in the list. But the whole number of whom the oath could justly have been required could hardly have exceeded forty. It should be remarked, however, that some who had been led by a misinterpretation of precedents to consider the obstruction of courts as a very venial offence, if not an altogether justifiable mode of secking reforms, shrank from the extreme measure of appearing in arms against the government, and especially after a "county congress" had expressly refused its sanction to any but constitutional measures of redress. The list of thirty-one contains few names familiar to us, except those of the delegates to the county convention; and it is to be observed, that, with the exception of Col. Root and Deacon Hubbard, not one of the men who had been prominent as patriots in the Revolution, or who, as constitutionalists, had resisted the government of the interregnum, is known to have favored the insurrection of 1786; nor did any one of those implicated in the Rebellion ever afterwards rise to much political consequence in the town. There were substantial reasons why this should be so. Pittsfield, although sharing in a degree in the general. depression of affairs, was a thriving and prosperous village, with interests to be dangerously affected by popular tumults and indiscreet innovations. Manufactures were springing up; public improvements were anticipated; and possibly it may have been suggested that the course of the town in this emergency might influence the contest then pending with regard to new seats for the county courts. Col. Joshua Danforth, John Chandler Williams, Henry Van Schaack, and other gentlemen of influence, had recently removed to the town, and with Rev. Mr. Allen, Oliver Wendell on his summer visits, Dr. Childs, and other eminent citizens of longer residence, united with Hon. Theodore Sedgwick and Judge Bacon of Stockbridge, Gen. Patterson of Lenox, and men of like stamp throughout the county, who at great sacrifice of personal comfort, and much exposure to personal danger and indignity, travelled from town to town, bringing their influence to bear in every possible way in favor of law and order. Just before the outbreak, Major Van Schaack wrote a letter to his brother, from which we may be able to extract a fair idea of the double aspect of the times:1 "Here I have made an advantageous purchase, and live in the midst of those who owe. I have made some other purchases about me, and I have a 1 See note at end of this chapter. 2 Life of Peter Van Schaack, LL.D., by his son Henry C. Van Schaack. New York: Appleton & Co. number of mortgages in the neighborhood; so that I shall, in all probability, be a considerable landholder in a little time. "The farm I live on I bought for four hundred and seventy-four pounds York money. It contains eighty-six acres good land, with a tolerably good house, barn, and a young orchard, and a pleasant lake in sight of me. In my lifetime, I never lived among a more civil, obliging people. During my residence in Richmond,2 I never was a witness to swearing, drunkenness, nor a breach of the sabbath, or, in short, any flagrant trespass upon morality. A purse of gold hung up in the public streets would be as safe from our inhabitants as it used to be in the great Alfred's time. Beggars and vagrants we are strangers to, as well as overbearing, purse-proud scoundrels. Provisions we abound in: beef, veal, mutton, and lamb, in the spring, summer, and fall, we buy at two pence lawful per pound; in winter, beef and mutton at two and a half and three pence; every thing else in proportion, and very plenty. . . . I have just returned from Vermont. I took your son Harry and F. Silvester with me in the sleigh, who, as well as myself, were much pleased with the jaunt. . . . In travelling sixty-four miles and back again, four days out, lived extraordinary well all the time, and, among other things, dined upon boiled turkey and oyster-sauce at Manchester. The whole expense of our bill, while we were out, horse-keeping in the bargain, was twenty-six shillings eight pence York money apiece. Add to the advantages of travelling, that your persons and property on the road and in the inns are perfectly safe. Murders, robberies, and burglaries, or petty larcenies, are scarce heard of in this country. So perfectly am I satisfied with the manners, customs, and laws of this Commonwealth, that I would not exchange them for any other I know of in the world. "It will be difficult for you to believe, at so great a distance, that, immediately after the horrors of a civil war, the new government should have force and energy, the morals and religion of the inhabitants apparently as pure and uncorrupt as they were at the best a number of years before the late distractions. It is true that the public calamities have brought heavy burthens; but these become lighter, and will be more and more so every year. "The epitome of human misery—I mean the civil war — in this country has been accompanied by a failure of crops. If any of your friends wish to migrate, by way of encouragement you may assure them that lands are cheap and good in Berkshire. Building materials of every sort in great plenty. All that I want in my delightful retreat is a few people of your sort about me." This picture is a good deal rose-tinted by Major Van Schaack, a prosperous gentleman of steady income, who had just saved from 1 Melville. Berkshire. 2 Where Major Van Schaack settled on his first removal to the dangers of civil war more than he had expected of his own and his paternal fortune, who was likely to be enriched by the financial difficulties that impoverished his neighbors, who had secured a delightful estate, and was eulogizing the community where even his Whig opponents had received him with cordiality and confidence when he was exiled by those of his own section. He had, however, but recently become a resident of the town, and there was much in it with which he had not yet come in contact. The Arcadian innocence which he paints so glowingly must be accepted, as a portrait, only with many grains of allowance. And the rich colors in which he depicts the physical comforts of his home were sadly obscured to those of his neighbors who "owed;" to the mortgagers, who saw little in the times to encourage the hope of their becoming or remaining "considerable landholders;" to the farmers, who found that it took a great deal of mutton at two pence a pound to pay such taxes as were levied upon them in order to "lighten the burthens" imposed by "the late public calamities." However it might be with some individuals, the masses of community could hardly felicitate themselves upon low prices, the result of insufficient markets and of a circulating medium utterly incapable of meeting the ordinary requirements of traffic. Pittsfield, with a strong conservative element in its population, and with flourishing material interests which forbade it to favor rebellion, had thus also a large class, especially among its farmers, of men embarrassed, not only by the financial difficulties of the time, but by a succession of bad crops. But there were also many, who, with no desire to overthrow the government, were painfully sensitive to the sufferings of the people, and sincerely believed that the legislature was criminally remiss in postponing the radical remedies which they deemed indispensable, who reiterated the complaints which had become chronic, if not morbid, in Berkshire, of the cumbrous and costly system of judiciary, and who perhaps joined in the charge that the counties. of Hampshire and Berkshire had been unfairly assessed in the State valuation; and they were not unwilling that the apathy of the conservatives should be disturbed by popular tumults rising to the very verge of rebellion. It was a dangerous tampering with fearful elements; but if there were many among the influential classes, who, while rapt in admiration of the Commonwealth, |
