Over the weekend I attended a celebration of Constitution Day put on by the Conservative Caucus. The featured speaker was Dr. Gary North, who delivered an interesting lecture on Shays' Rebellion.

To refresh, Shays' Rebellion was a revolt against the government of Massachusetts in 1786. Many of the participants were farmers and Revolutionary War veterans. Captain Daniel Shays, a war vet who led the revolt, gave his name to the event.

Shays' Rebellion is often characterized as a proto-Marxist uprising, but, according to Dr. North, its roots lay in the one of the same issues that inflamed the colonists to rebel against England. "Shays Rebellion was a tax revolt," North remarked. "It was not an attempt to inflate the currency."

North pointed out that the rebels were not generally in private debt, but were angry with Massachusetts for calling in the public debt owed on bonds used to fund the Revolution. Because speculators had bought the bonds--for a fraction of face value--from the same veterans who now had to pay taxes to fund the public debt to the speculators in full, widespread anger engulfed many towns in Western Massachusetts. Had the public debt been paid off with a more gradual plan, farmers worried about land confiscation might not have rebelled against the immediate property and head taxes accessed--taxes that the previous governor, John Hancock, had refused to collect.

Hancock's successor, James Bowdoin (who curiously owned a substantial amount of bonds), enforced collection of the oppressive taxes. When the populace naturally balked at his scheme, he couldn't put down the revolt because so many militiamen sided with the rebels. Despite having more than 90,000 potential militiamen, Bowdoin had to call in the national government, which justified the venture by selling it as an attempt to squash an Indian uprising--"weapons of feathered destruction," North called it.

So why has history gotten the story wrong? North points to the letters by General Henry Knox to George Washington portraying the uprising as one of debtors shirking their obligations. Certainly, this portrayal was meant to cast Shays' Rebellion in the most negative light possible for Washington, who might have seen things differently had the true nature of the rebellion--a revolt against onerous taxation--been made clear to him. The letters helped push Washington to attend the Constitutional Convention, which replaced the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution. Knox's propaganda on Shays' Rebellion designed to win Washington over to the need for a more powerful central government, North argued, has permeated the history books.

The significance of Shays' Rebellion is that it helped pave the way for the Constitution. North seems to view this as a bad thing. I don't.

Most marxist historians see the American revolution as the ultimate marxist revolution. It wouldn't be surprising that they would apply the same label to Shay's rebellion.