“Which one did they catch? Was it Nathaniel Austin or that McColloch fellow?”
“Austin,” another man said.
“No, I heard it was McColloch.”
“I swear they said it was Austin.”
“Thanks, anyway,” I said. So I still didn’t know. I continued to walk on into town, heading more or less for the place where they’d put up the gallows. A couple of times more I stopped to listen to gossip or ask questions, but it was always the same—there were a lot of rumors around, but nobody knew for sure what had happened or who had got away. I spent the morning keeping out of the way and trying to scrape up something to eat, but I didn’t have any luck at that.
Then, exactly at noon, there came the sound of drums and a great movement in the streets toward the Northampton church. I slipped into the crowd and followed along. The mob at the church was enormous. There seemed to be thousands of people gathered there. There wasn’t any way they could all fit inside the church. They were standing around outside, jostling for a better view. They had built a platform near the side window of the church. The sound of the drums was coming closer. People began craning their heads over the crowd, and in a moment we could see a double line of marching militiamen, with drummers in the front, coming toward us. I waited, my heart pounding. The procession came closer. In a moment I could see, behind the drummers, two ministers walking solemnly along. Behind them I caught a glimpse of another figure. I strained to see who it was, and when it came closer I saw that it was Peter. They had caught him.
The militiamen were now heading straight into the crowd, which gave way to let them pass as water gives way before a boat. First came the drummers, playing a dreary, thumping march; then the double files began, then the ministers, and then Peter. They had cut off his beard, but they had not shaved him, and his face was hairy. He was pale, but he was standing straight to show that he was not afraid. He passed. He didn’t see me, or if he did he made no sign. And I had been watching him so closely that I didn’t notice until he had gone by, that Molly was coming along behind him. There was a smudge of dirt on her face and her hands were tied behind her back. I couldn’t believe it. They were going to make her watch her husband get hanged.
They pushed Peter up onto the platform at the side of the church, and then the ministers went inside and stood up in an open balcony window where they could be seen and heard by the enormous crowd. One of them began a sermon. I couldn’t hear him very well and anyway, I wasn’t in any mind to concentrate on it. All I could think was that in a little while Peter would be dead. It seemed impossible to believe.
I couldn’t see Molly. They hadn’t put her up on the platform, but had kept her down in the lines of the militiamen. The sermon went on and on. The two ministers spoke in turns. I don’t know how long it lasted, it was nearly endless it seemed, hours long, anyway. But finally the ministers came to an end. Some militiamen made Peter jump down from the platform and prodded him back into the double column again. The drums began to beat, and off they marched for the gallows. The crowd surged along with the procession, ahead, behind, and alongside the double file of militiamen. The people were shouting and talking and drinking rum from flasks. The whole thing was very exciting to them, and they chattered and joked with each other as they went along.
The militiamen reached the gallows. It was set in an open square, just a platform about six feet off the ground with a wooden arm reaching up ten feet and a heavy rope dangling from the arm. There was a coffin on the platform, with the sheriff standing beside it. As warm and humid as it was, I was as cold inside as I had been all winter, and I could hardly get my breath except in little gasps. Four of the militiamen climbed up on the platform and sort of pulled Peter up there. I couldn’t see Molly through the crowd. I wondered if she would keep her eyes closed.
The drums went on beating. The militiamen on the platform were holding Peter tight. The sheriff’s deputy slipped the heavy noose over his head and fixed it around his neck. He was rough in doing it, and I could almost feel the rope myself scraping down over my forehead.
Suddenly the drums stopped. The crowd went silent. Peter stood there staring straight ahead. The militiamen stepped back to the corners of the platform, out of the way but in readiness in case Peter tried to make a break for it. There was no sound from the crowd. They were frozen. In the distance a dog barked. Cold sweat was running down my face and into my eyes, and I had to blink to see. Then the sheriff stepped forward. He reached into his coat and pulled out a paper. He began to read:
By the order of the Governor and the Council of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in their infinite mercy, the man Peter McColloch is to be reprieved . . .
I began to cry, shaking and sobbing with my hands over my face, the tears leaking out between my fingers.
Chapter Fifteen
OF COURSE, IT WASN’T QUITE OVER, NOT then. There were more legalities to be got through until finally a full pardon came and Peter was free to go home. But when Molly and I went back up to Pelham that night, we knew he was safe. It was clear that the government was scared to hang any of the Regulators for fear of stirring up trouble again. They’d come as close as they’d dared, just to throw a scare into everybody. But in the end they hadn’t dared to go all the way.
After that, things began to improve. We had a lot of our own men in the General Court now, and bit by bit they passed laws that improved our situation. The steady stream of taxes slowed down, and the heavy expenses for court costs and lawyers were reduced. A man had a chance of keeping his farm if he worked hard.
And so it was over. In time, people came to call it Shays’ Rebellion, and to write it up in books. In later years, I was proud that I’d been a part of it, and if anybody asked me about it, I’d tell the whole story from beginning to end. Of course, by then I wasn’t living on Peter’s farm anymore. I’d been able to buy a farm of my own.
So that was that. I married and had children of my own and worked hard, and after a while I was able to buy a second farm, and I prospered. But every once in a while, I thought about Shays’ Rebellion, and what we’d done, and I would wonder what anybody had learned from it.
One thing I had learned was that there wasn’t much point in going out to be a hero, because you never know how something is going to look to everybody else. You might as well go along and do your best, and not worry about who’s the hero and who isn’t.
A second thing that came out of it had to do with the making of the United States itself. At the time of Shays’ Rebellion, most of the people figured that it was important for the states to keep power to themselves and not turn it over to the Federal Government. They felt that the states should be more important than the Federal Government and have the major say in most everything, like taxes, and the militia. But Shays’ Rebellion scared a lot of people. They decided that if we didn’t have a strong Federal Government there might be other revolts coming along, keeping things in a turmoil all the time. And that’s the way it finally came out. So, as you can see, what we did in the winter of 1786 and 1787 had a big effect on the future of the nation.
And one last thing that we learned out of it was that if you don’t take the trouble to vote your own representatives to the government, the government is likely to do a lot of things you don’t like. If we’d sent our people to the General Court in the first place, we might have never had to fight.
But then again, we might have. If there hadn’t been a rebellion, maybe nobody much in western Massachusetts would have got fired up enough to go out and vote. This was a question I never could decide. Would we ever have got our grievances redressed if we hadn’t shown the government that we were willing to fight?
THE END
How much of this book is true?
Historians are often very clever at reconstructing the past so we can understand it, but even the cleverest of them will admit that there are many things we cannot be sure about. This is true of Shays’ Rebellion—we cannot be certain of every detail. N
onetheless, as far as we have been able to understand, all the major, and many of the minor, events that are portrayed in this book happened just as we have described them. The battle at the Springfield Arsenal, the rout of Shays’ forces at Petersham, the fighting at Sheffield, and even the suffocation of Levi Bullock and Tom Mayo in the potato hole are taken directly from eyewitness accounts. Uncle Billy Conkey was real, and his tavern still existed in the town of Pelham into the early part of this century. There are still Conkeys in that area today. Major Mattoon was also the sort of River God we have described him as. However, we do not know that he was quite as unsympathetic a person as we have made him out to be. Nathaniel Austin is also real, and did the things we have him do in the escape from the jail. So were the petitions that were sent to Boston and the efforts the women made to get their husbands pardoned.
However, Justin Conkey is a made-up character. There were plenty of boys around who lived the way he did, and some of them fought in Shays’ Rebellion, but Justin’s role in the events of the rebellion are fictitious. Molly, too, is made up. But Peter McColloch has some basis in fact. We created him by combining two men who did exist, Peter Wilcox and Henry McColloch. McColloch was jailed for his part in the rebellion, did attempt an escape with the help of his wife, who got the sixteen-year-old guard Abel Holman drunk. (Poor Abel was put in jail for letting the men escape.) He also went through the ordeal of the false execution just as we have described it. We cannot say, however, that either of the men who make up Peter were like him; we simply do not know.
The matter of the language in which this story is told is another question. Historians do not know exactly how people of Justin’s time talked. Therefore, we have told the story in more or less modern English to make it comprehensible to our readers.
About the Authors
James Lincoln Collier has written many books for children, including Give Dad My Best and Planet Out of the Past. Mr. Collier has also contributed more than five hundred articles to such publications as The New York Times Magazine, Reader’s Digest, and Boys’ Life. Along with his brother, Christopher Collier, he has written six books, including War Comes to Willie Freeman. James Lincoln Collier lives in New York City.
Christopher Collier is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. His field is early American history, especially the history of Connecticut and the American Revolution. Along with his brother, he won the Newbery Honor for My Brother Sam is Dead. Collier and his wife live in Orange, Connecticut.
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