Miracles and Massacres by Glenn Beck Page B

warn them that trouble approached.
    At 9:00 A.M . it was not merely trouble that approached, it was mayhem.
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    The sun had long since risen, but many Regulators still slumbered, catching up on the sleep that had been so hard to come by lately. Others tarried at breakfast. Suddenly, Shepard’s militia burst upon them,easily pushing past the few sentries on duty and into the rebel camp, catching its inhabitants totally by surprise.
    â€œMilitia!” came the shout, as men scrambled to retrieve their unloaded muskets.
    Then, a more frightened alarm shattered the morning’s bitter cold air: “Artillery!”
    Somehow, Shepard and Colonel Barr’s frostbitten men had dragged with them two heavy field pieces. These were now squarely aimed at the Regulators. “Cannon!” cried the surprised men. Their screams brought back visions of the bloody debacle that had visited them at the arsenal, of lead tearing through flesh, and of Ezekiel Root, Ariel Webster, Jabez Spicer, and John Hunter, all dead or dying upon the frozen Springfield ground.
    Once again, the former mobbers fled without firing a shot. Panic-stricken, they simply ran for their lives, though some did not run fast enough. Lincoln took 150 of them—mostly privates—prisoner. They had little will to resist further, but Lincoln had no manpower to waste guarding them. He let most go home on parole.
    Daniel Shays and Adam Wheeler did run fast enough, north on the Athol Road. Dreams of capturing Boston had long since left their minds; they now thought only of finding asylum in Vermont.
    The Meetinghouse
    Lenox, Massachusetts
    December 6, 1787
    â€œAttention!”
    The guards at Lenox’s Meetinghouse snapped to strict attention, and so did the 250 spectators present.
    After all, they were there for serious business.
    The rebellion had not formally died after Petersham, but it had been mortally wounded. Some skirmishing continued and some looting and hostage-taking here and there, primarily at Stockbridge, near the New York border. In late February, some real fighting had finally occurred in Sheffield: five men—three Regulators, a hostage they had taken, and amilitiaman—were killed, and 30 others were wounded. Colonel John Ashley’s local militia captured another 150 rebels.
    Some in Boston thirsted for vengeance against the Shaysites. Leading the charge was one of John Hancock’s oldest enemies and one of the revolution’s most ardent patriots, Samuel Adams. “In monarchies,” Adams argued, “the crime of treason and rebellion may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished. But the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.”
    But most people simply wanted the door closed on the whole sorry episode. From Paris, Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend, asking, “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
    In the end, Shays, Day, Shattuck, all of their fellow insurgent officers, and nearly all of their men, received pardons. Their blood would not be shed.
    But not everyone proved so lucky.
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    The drums beat a dirge, and the crowd stood bareheaded and silent as two young men stood side by side upon Lenox’s rude gallows. Stout nooses were fixed upon their necks: twenty-two-year-old John Bly, a “transient” of Tyringham, and Charles Rose, a Suffolk laborer and occasional teacher in his early twenties.
    They might have been tried and sentenced for treason, insurrection, or sedition, but the authorities had decided otherwise. These two rebels would instead hang for a robbery committed at Lanesboro in the waning, sputtering days of the rebellion, when armies no longer marched and the