Shays's Rebellion

Cultural  

1. An uprising led by a former militia officer, Daniel Shays, which broke out in western Massachusetts in 1786. Shays's followers protested the foreclosures of farms for debt and briefly succeeded in shutting down the court system. Although the rebellion was easily overcome, it persuaded conservatives of the need for a strong national government and contributed to the movement to draft the Constitution.

---

Example Sentences

Authorities identified Daniel Shays, an insolvent farmer and former captain in the Continental Army, as the ringleader and dubbed the movement Shays’s Rebellion, but Shays was only one of several important leaders.

From Textbooks • Jan. 18, 2018

One by one, all the states except Rhode Island agreed to meet, and 55 of America’s most distinguished statesmen slowly converged on Philadelphia, the recent din of Shays’s Rebellion still ringing in their ears.

From Textbooks • Jan. 18, 2018

Cracked the Colonel: "General, you have got a ribbon there for everything but Shays's Rebellion."

From Time Magazine Archive

Miss Rourke calls him as great a democratic force as Shays's Rebellion.

From Time Magazine Archive

Only further threats, notably Shays’s Rebellion of 1786 and the unsolved burden of war debt, overcame the ex-colonies’ extreme reluctance to sacrifice autonomy and pushed them into adopting our current strong federal constitution in 1787.

From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond