... thousands of citizens of Massachusetts. When the Rebellion was put down, there were "eighteen death sentences, two actual hangings, several hundred indictments, and some four thousand confessions of wrongdoing."(p.43) The numbers of rebels therefore were not so small, and Shay's Rebellion was not a simple rebellion of poor people, but a desperate struggle with the regressive tax system and the conservative state government. The classes involved in the struggle were not solely poor farmers and debtors. Although the majority of rebels were poor "yeoman" farmers, there were a handful of influential, wealthy gentlemen. These gentlemen, like Luke Day and Perez Bardwell, played large roles in the events of the rebellion. As Richard's points out, there were "scores of other gentlemen who also took up arms against the government, and the authorities arrested nineteen of them." (p.53) The idea that there were people other than "destitute farmers" involved in Shay's Rebellion ...

See this essay or coursework document in full right now