Abigail Adams by Woody Holton

Author:Woody Holton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2009-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

Abigail had not yet digested the news of all these domestic broils when she received distressing information of an altogether different order: the farmers of western Massachusetts had launched a rebellion. Unable to pay either their personal debts or the massive taxes adopted by the legislature in March 1786, farmers pleaded with the legislature to make both tasks easier by printing up paper money. Nearly everyone in the state’s political establishment—including both Adamses—saw paper currency as nothing more than a ploy by which debtors could defraud their creditors. When the state assembly refused to print money, residents of central and western Massachusetts resorted to violence. Participants in “Shays’s Rebellion” (Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays was actually only one of the movement’s many leaders) surrounded the county courthouses and forced the justices to halt proceedings. Closing the courts protected debtors from being sued, and many of the protestors viewed the siege of the courthouses as “the only means to Convence” state assemblymen “that We Need Redress.”

None of Abigail’s correspondents in Massachusetts sided with the insurgent farmers, and her sister Elizabeth was typical in comparing them to unruly horses. The lesson of the rebellion, she informed Adams, was that “The reins of Government must e’er long be drawn closer.” Abigail agreed that the fundamental problem was not economic, as the rebels claimed, but political. In liberating themselves from the oppression of the British monarchy, she believed, the residents of Massachusetts and the other states had swung too far toward the other extreme, creating governments that were too susceptible to popular pressure. “Our Liberty is become licentiousness,” she wrote. The farmers’ grievances—excessive taxation, the dearth of currency, high government salaries, and the rest—“have no existance but in their immaginations,” she assured a skeptical Thomas Jefferson.

Many of the Adamses’ friends and relatives suffered personally as a result of the rebellion. Richard Cranch was a judge and a state senator, and he also did occasional work in the state treasurer’s office. By the summer of 1786 the government owed him three hundred pounds’ worth of back salary that it was not able to disburse for the simple reason that tax collection was so far in arrears. “If the People will not pay their Tax how Shall we ever get it[?]” Mary asked Abigail. Richard might soon be forced to “come home and go to watch mending and Farming and leave the publick business to be transacted by those who can afford to do it without pay,” she wrote. Mary cited her husband’s inability to collect his government salary as the reason she was “oblig’d to do what gives me great pain”: charge the Adams boys rent when they stayed with her during Harvard vacations. Up until this time, she had boarded John, Charles, and Thomas for free as a token of appreciation for the many gifts their mother had sent the Cranches from Europe. “The dissapointment” at having to abandon this arrangement “Sinks my spirits,” Mary told her sister, “and has caus’d me not a few tears.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.