The best historical novel I’ve read, pagination from the Harvard Library edition, 1962. It's praised by Samuel Eliot Morrison as better than other, historians’ accounts of Shays Rebellion. Though dense and slow for an appreciative reader like me, it also features wit and Yankee dialect. Amazed I never knew this book, though my ancestor fought under Shays in the Revolution, and maybe a decade later in the Rebellion: Stephen Powers of Shutesbury, whose cousin John Powers headed the committee that chose Shays to lead the Rebellion.
The second chapter, in 1786, resounds such that I feel like quoting from every page. In the tavern, the corncob pipes “largely that expensive weed [tobacco] mixed with dried sweet-fern and other herbs, for the sake of economy”(14). Only two of the score populating the bar are actually drinking, having paid Mrs. Bingham in barter, one, meal from his mill, the other potatoes. The West Stockbridge iron-works, whose remnants I have visited (bringing home pieces of slag), had recently closed, laying off a hundred men.
The Berkshire farmers blame Bostonian women for spending money for English goods: Leghorn hats-wide-brimmed, satin flower-like rolls on brim; “prunelly” shoes/ prunella, heavy black silk, laced from heel up (17). Those farmers thought of joining the Country of Vermont or "New Connecticut" which was proposed (in N.H.), because as Abner says in the tavern, "I can't bear Bosting fellers no more'n I can a skunk, and I kin tell em baout ez fer orf"(254).

Fine account of how the courts and lawyers have all the money; they are filling the jail with debtors, won’t even pay off the land with its own value when confiscated, nor accept Continental dollars printed to pay soldiers in the Revolution. In fact, the courts charge debtors in English pounds and silver shillings. The owner of the Tavern Jail at Barrington charged $1000 for a plate of beans and a pint, hoping for cleaner bills to keep accounts on (31). “The Tories wuz right, arter all..we wuz a dern sight better off under the King,” though Jabez was chased all over Stockbridge Mountain, would have been killed, for saying that back during the Revolution.
Parson West, barely five feet tall, impeccably dressed, gives a rousing sermon agains card games, to two young fellows in the stocks, “devices that do so plainly advertise their devilish origin…Take note of these devilish and deforrmed figures…with two heads turned diverse ways…These are images of fiends”(44). The impoverished farmers gather to hear Squire Sedgwick back from the county convention in Lenox; Hampshire convention at Hatfield had voted with their despairing farmers, but Berkshire voted to support the arrests partly to offset their reputation as the latest-joining, radical county.

Chapter 1 features the 1777 muster. Two of the Stockbridge Selectmen are Indian, Johannes Metoxin and Joseph Sausquesquot; the rest, Squire Edwards, Deacon Nash, Squire Williams and Captain Josiah Jones, brother-in-law of Squire Woodbridge.
Chapter 2 commences nine yrs later, 1786, three years after the Revolutionary War closed. Backroom of Squire Edwards’ store, wigged, shoe-buckled gentlemen, versus the barroom of Stockbridge tavern..no cheering fire in late August, just home-made tallow candles, low ceilings, massive crossbeams. Dim figures by the open door—unsettled scores on the Widow Bingham’s slate account—when she stares with fixity, one scuttles out the door. Some are shoeless, no luxuries in summer. Costume, shirt and trousers of homespun, sheared, spun, woven and dyed. “Some of the better dressed wear trousers of blue and white striped stuff, or the kind now-a-days exclusively used for bed-ticking” (13).

Governor John Hancock did not encourage the arrest or imprisonment of farmers for debt, whereas his successor Bowdoin did. The central defeat of the rebels was at the Springfield Armory, a federal facility that nevertheless, without the U.S. Secretary of War Knox’s okay, was used by the State militia. The militia intercepted the communique from the troops in West Springfield, across the Connecticut River, so Shays’ troops in Palmer and Chicopee lost a third of their support, were defeated by grape-shot, and fled north. After the Petersham battle in a snowstorm in February, Shays retreated over the line into N.H. or the Independent Republic of Vermont. He returned to Massachusetts when pardoned (as were hundreds), but moved to New York because of the vilification in Boston.
George Washington re-entered politics partly because of the Rebellion, which alarmed him, though it did not his fellow Virginian Jefferson. His letter to James Madison in late January, 1787 notes that occasional rebellion serves to preserve freedoms, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

The Springfield Armory, built in brick and supplying the Springfield Rifles that won the Civil War, was the marching ground for my Classical H.S. band in 1960. Part of the Armory now constitutes the Springfield Technical Community College. ( )