What changed the political chemistry in the late fall of 1786 was an outbreak of violence in western Massachusetts that came to be called Shays’s Rebellion. The Shaysites were farmers, many veterans of the Continental Army, who were protesting mortgage foreclosures and tax increases imposed by the Massachusetts legislature in Boston, which they linked to the arbitrary taxes imposed by Parliament twenty years earlier. A generation of historians has tended to describe Shays’s Rebellion as the earliest manifestation of the Populist movement, but subsequent scholarship has more persuasively seen
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