Since God speaks to you, through me, you can imagine how confusing it becomes when someone else intrudes on the conversations that God and I have about the sorry mess you’ve made of your lives.
Just the other day, I was aroused from a deep sleep by the late Daniel Shays, who stuck his ghostly left index finger in my chest and said, “It’s been 220 years now — and they still don’t have it right!”
Dan has been nursing his grudge since 1787, back in the days when the Hartford Steam Boiler Insurance and Inspection Co. still, like, you know, inspected boilers and stuff; and Aetna still did property and casualty and stuff.
It was called “Shays’ Rebellion,” an uprising of debt-besotted farmers in Western Massachusetts, who, led by Captain Daniel Shays, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, confronted the militia in Springfield, Mass. (to no avail) in 1786; and then, in 1787, waged an armed rebellion against a Massachusetts political system unsympathetic to the farmers’ credit crunch.
The farmers who had followed Shays into battle wanted, among other things, the production and circulation of paper money — rudimentary “easy money” relief from the crushing debt that couldn’t be resolved in the 1700s by selling your farm to condo developers.
The states were under pressure from what passed for a central government at the time to cough up some dough to pay off Revolutionary War debt — and Massachusetts, for one, wasn’t inclined to add to the financial pressure by bailing out the farmers. The governor of Massachusetts at the time was a merchant, not a farmer — and he wanted the farmers to pay off their credit card balances and refinance their mortgages as best they could.
Shays was not the only angry man in Massachusetts. There were protests and threats of violence in Northampton, in Great Barrington — in many Western Massachusetts towns that would eventually shed the “farm” nonsense and become adept at selling expensive coffee and liquor to tourists.
Massachusetts did ease the legal burden against debtors — and the threatened harsh penalties against the rebels were quietly dropped or watered down.
But it was too late. Shays’ Rebellion is given considerable credit for what eventually became the Constitutional Convention of 1787; the final and essential phase in the establishment of a grown-up federal system with powers carefully divided between states and the central government.
The fact that Shays could arouse farmers to grab their pitchforks and march on the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield had scared the powerful; they saw the need to create the constitutional document that made sense of the hodge podge of conflicting centers of power.
In his new book, “Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution,” historian Woody Holton notes that the angry farmers “extorted substantial tax and debt relief from reluctant state legislatures” — and that many state legislators and bondholders wanted a stronger central government to take some of the heat.
All of which, of course, brings us to my recent bedside conversation with Dan Shays, who went on and on about the current home-loan debt crisis, and the fall of the dollar, and the general mess that he thought he had taken care of back in the good-ol’-days.
As Dan pointed out, the current system of finance and financing is a terrible mess of state and federal regulatory overlap and contradiction; that once again, debtor and politician alike were looking to the federal government to bail everybody out.
Although I am undecided on the matter, I can report to you that Dan Shays recommends marching on the Springfield Armory with pitchforks, chanting something about subprime mortgages.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
