Miracles and Massacres Read Online Free PDF

appear for duty.
    It was difficult to say who had won the day: General Shepard or Captain Day. But one thing was clear: the forces of the law had finally entered the fight—and so had Daniel Shays.
    Daniel Shays’ Farmstead
    Pelham, Massachusetts
    October 23, 1786
    â€œWhat are you writing so furiously, Daniel?” Abigail Shays asked her husband.
    Daniel hesitated before answering.
    General Shepard’s unexpected intervention at the Springfield courthouse the previous month had angered Daniel Shays. It did not frighten him, which might have made things easier since he would have simply retreated to his own little world and abandoned any contact with the Regulators. No, the show of force was an insult, and Daniel Shays did not like to be insulted.
    â€œAbigail,” said Shays, “I have already put on my uniform. I think it is time to add my name to this fight for our liberties. Listen to this, it is going out to all the counties and towns that stand with us.”
    Pelham, Oct. 23, 1786
    Gentlemen:
    By information from the General Court, they are determined to call all those who appeared to stop the Court to condign punishment. Therefore, I request you to assemble your men together, to see that they are well armed and equipped, with sixty rounds each man, and to be ready to turn out at a minute’s warning; likewise to be properly organized with officers.
    When he finished, he placed his signature below his call to arms. Daniel Shays knew that he might be signing his own death warrant.
    Job Shattuck’s Farmstead
    Groton, Massachusetts
    November 30, 1786
    Governor James Bowdoin and his allies in the General Court had assumed the offensive. Tired of seeing their courthouses invaded and their tax collectors harassed, they had quickly passed a series of laws to quell the commonwealth’s festering unrest. They suspended the writ of habeas corpus for eight months and passed “An Act to Prevent Routs, Riots and Tumultuous Assemblies and Evil Consequences Thereof,” known more commonly as simply the “Riot Act.” This new law held sheriffs blameless for any fatalities inflicted against insurgents, provided for the seizure of Regulators’ lands and goods, and stipulated that miscreants be whipped thirty-nine stripes on their naked backs and suffer imprisonment for up to twelve months.
    Now, three hundred horsemen, fully armed, thundered west out of Cambridge.
    Their destination: Groton. Their assignment: Apprehend Captain Job Shattuck.
    The fifty-year-old Shattuck, a veteran of both the American Revolution and the earlier French and Indian War, had taken the lead in organizing attacks on tax collectors by men armed with rough-hewn clubs. He’d also led the Regulators’ drunken attack on the Concord courthouse.
    But Shattuck was no Daniel Shays—at least not when it came to finances.
    Shays had barely a farthing to spare. Job Shattuck, on the other hand, was the wealthiest man in Groton, the owner of five hundred acres and a fine, three-story, wood-frame mansion. But Shays and Shattuck were both leaders of the insurrection brewing in Massachusetts, and that was enough for Governor James Bowdoin.
    The horsemen who were now headed for Shattuck’s home were not a typical crew of besotted roughnecks. This group featured more than its share of lawyers, physicians, and merchants. Two Harvard graduates—Benjamin Hichborn and John Warren—commanded them.
    They reached Shattuck’s home at daybreak.
    He wasn’t there.
    Having been warned by Shays of the massive force hunting him, Captain Shattuck had bolted from his home through the snowy fields leading toward the icy Nashua River. Unfortunately, he’d left too late. One of the lead horsemen, a man named Sampson Read, caught up with him. “I know you not,” Shattuck warned Read, “but whoever you are, you are a dead man.” They grappled, falling to the cold ground, tumbling toward the