Miracles and Massacres Read Online Free PDF Page B

riverbank. Shattuck lunged to retrieve his fallen sword and make good on his threat, but Fortescue Vernon, another posse member, proved quicker. He aimed his own sword at Shattuck’s arm, but missed, the sword slipping and severing a ligament near Shattuck’s knee.
    They bandaged the bleeding Shattuck and carted him off to a Boston prison cell. It seemed like quick and easy work to lock up such a troublemaker. But they would soon learn that there was a much higher price to be paid for the capture of Captain Job Shattuck.
    Daniel Shays’ Farmstead
    Pelham, Massachusetts
    December 3, 1786
    â€œWhat sort of times have we been cursed to live in, Abigail?” Daniel Shays mused to his wife as a single tallow candle flickered at his side.
    Reading in the waning light of a December day was never an easyproposition. Reading the disturbing reports before him was even more difficult.
    â€œThey say Captain Shattuck has perished in his prison cell. Terrible! Dreadful! And what these savages did during his capture was pure evil! A sword through the eye of a neighbor woman! Another woman’s breast slashed. An innocent infant murdered in its cradle! The government of Massachusetts has fallen into the hands of men just as barbaric as the heathens who aligned themselves with the French against us twenty years ago! We have no choice: We must fight them!”
    Abigail Shays stayed silent. She knew no words could dissuade her husband at this point. And, she thought, if these gruesome reports were true, nothing should.
    But they weren’t true at all.
    Job Shattuck was indeed crippled, but not dead. No women had been blinded or slashed; no infant’s life snuffed out.
    The rumors were false, but that didn’t matter. They spread like wildfire through western Massachusetts—from home to home, tavern to tavern, and church to church.
    People believed the lies, and people will fight for what they believe.
    Major General Benjamin Lincoln’s Home
    North Street
    Hingham, Massachusetts
    December 4, 1786
    General Benjamin Lincoln hunched over his cherrywood desk in the comfortable Hingham home. His ancestors had built this house in 1637, it had seen his birth in 1733, and it was where he hoped to die—unless, of course, these “Regulators” seized it as part of the revolution they now plotted.
    Lincoln had been one of George Washington’s favorite generals. He had served at Boston, Long Island, White Plains, and Saratoga. Even his surrender to British forces at Charleston, South Carolina, failed to dim Washington’s respect for the easygoing Lincoln. When the Britishthemselves later surrendered at Yorktown, it was Lincoln, paroled from British captivity, whom Washington designated to accept Lord Cornwallis’s sword.
    Lying in front of Benjamin Lincoln today was a letter sent from Mount Vernon by Washington, dated almost a month earlier. “Are your people getting mad?” Washington had asked Lincoln, displaying uncharacteristic bluntness. “Are we to have the goodly fabric, that eight years were spent in raising, pulled over our heads? What is the cause of all these commotions? When and how will they end?”
    Lincoln answered that, yes, people in Massachusetts were indeed angry. “If an attempt to annihilate our present constitution and dissolve the present government can be considered as evidence of insanity—then yes, you are accurate in your descriptions.”
    Lincoln paused before answering Washington’s second question—whether the government would unravel. “There is, I think, great danger that it will be so unless the current system is supported by arms. Even then, a government which has no other basis than the point of the bayonet is so totally different from the one we established that if we must resort to arms then it can hardly be said that we have supported ‘the goodly fabric.’ This probably will be the case, for there does not appear to