10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America

On May 26, 1637, during the Pequot War, a contingent of English Puritans led by Major John Mason, and their allied forces of Mohegans and Narragansetts warriors, set fire to a Pequot Fort located near the Mystic River in Connecticut, burning hundreds of Pequots alive, including women, children, and the elderly. Mason considered his actions to be righteous and “went to his grave believing that the violence at Mystic pleased the English God in true Puritan form” (9).

When Puritan settlers first arrived in Massachusetts in 1630, they viewed the Native tribes of the region as obstacles to the land and resources which they felt entitled to as God’s chosen people. The Pequot had become the dominant tribe of the region by the 1630s, but diseases decimated their population after the arrival of the English. By 1634, “the tribe that had numbered thirteen thousand a few years earlier now had only three thousand” (13).

Gillon argues that “the battle at Mystic lasted less than an hour but it cast a long shadow over future relations between Indians and English settlers” (19).The Pequot War officially ended a year after the Massacre at Mystic, but it led to even bloodier battles between Native peoples and the English. By 1675, Puritans numbered nearly 50,000 and their continued expansion brought them into conflict other tribes. That year, war broke out when Metacom, the Wampanoag sachem known as King Phillip to the English, objected to land seizures and attempts to convert Indigenous people to Christianity. King Phillip’s War ravaged New England, with nearly 5% of the English population dying and nearly 30% of the region’s Native population being killed. Gillon argues that “the Puritan victory over the Indians, which started with the raid at Mystic and ended with King Phillip’s War, set the pattern for European and Indian relations for the next two centuries” (25).

Chapter 2 examines the armed uprising that took place in Massachusetts when Daniel Shays, a western Massachusetts famer, led thousands violently protesting unfair tax policy. Gillon argues that “it is very likely that had Daniel Shays not taken up arms against his own government, the founders would not have abolished the truly dysfunctional Articles of Confederation and written a new constitution” (30). The Articles were dysfunctional in part because they did not provide for a strong central government with the ability to regulate trade or collect taxes. Instead, tax collection was left to the states.

One issue that led to the rebellion was that the Revolutionary War destroyed the previous system of bartering for goods and services—now, merchants needed actual currency from farmers to pay their creditors. The other issue was that Massachusetts had to collect heavy taxes to pay back its hefty war debt. The state had issued bonds to its troops rather than money during the war; later, powerful speculators from Boston bought the bonds from desperate soldiers at a fraction of their worth. When the state chose to redeem those bonds at face value to pay off the war debt quickly, the move benefited the speculators but hurt veterans: “the heroes of the revolution were going broke paying their own salary” (34).

When the state legislature could not address these grievances, farmers began to believe that the ideals of the revolution had been “subverted by a powerful elite in Boston” (35). In August 1786, 1,500 protestors forcibly shut down the courthouse in Northampton, where farmers were frequently jailed for outstanding debts. Such protests spread to other New England states and by the end of the year included over 9,000 insurgents. The legislature attempted to quell the rebellion by extending tax deadlines, and also expanded police powers to control rioters. In January 1787, Shays led over 1,000 men in an attack on the federal arsenal in Springfield, but a 4,400-soldier mercenary army called up by Governor James Bowdoin stopped the assault. Although the rebellion failed, it exposed “the weakness of the federal government as it existed under the Articles of Confederation” (43). This led directly to the Constitutional Convention that took place in the summer of 1787.