American Historical Ephemera and Photography

15 3/4 x 13 in. letterpress broadside (creased and discolored along old folds, chipping to edges and corners, toning to edges).

After the Revolutionary War, many militiamen returned to their farms, having done their duty to secure freedom from monarchy and peerage for the states. Credit disputes with the mercantile class in seaboard cities, resulting in seizures of farmers' property and debt imprisonment challenged this hard fought sense of freedom, leading to a farmers' rebellion. Led by Daniel Shay, a former Revolutionary War Captain, the rebels organized mass courthouse closings.

On 29 August 1786, a thousand farmers closed the Massachusetts Court of Common Pleas. In December of that year, Massachusetts Governor James Bowdoin called up 1,200 militiamen in preparation for a physical confrontation with Shays' rebels, called "Regulators." Shays' forces approached the federal armory at Springfield on 25 January, and were met with artillery fire, killing four and wounding twenty.

The Disqualification Act, reflected in the broadside featured here, was passed by the Massachusetts Legislature on 16 February 1787, laying out the conditions for granting pardons to noncommissioned officers and privates who participated in the rebellion, including the taking of an oath of allegiance. Though it did not have the intended effect of ending the rebellion all together, as the opposing forces clashed later that month in Sheffield, the insurrection was largely over, and around 4,000 people petitioned for amnesty under the Act.