Shays's Rebellion

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

Jefferson regarded the entire affair as a shameful repetition of the Shays’s Rebellion fiasco nearly a decade earlier, in which a healthy and essentially harmless expression of popular discontent by American farmers, so he thought, had prompted an excessive and unnecessary military response.

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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.

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It was much disaffected at the time of Shays’s Rebellion.

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Great Barrington was a centre of the disaffection during Shays’s rebellion, and on the 12th of September 1786 a riot here prevented the sitting of court.

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Shays’s Rebellion, 186 et seq.

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