Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
In 1786, insurrection was in the air. There was every reason to doubt that the United States would survive its infancy.
In western Massachusetts, large groups of farmers and laborers who had fallen into debt were attacking government buildings. Their assaults on courthouses were aimed at stopping debt hearings.
And these insurrectionist acts were breaking out elsewhere. Like their Massachusetts brethren, indebted Vermont farmers were laying siege to their own county courthouses.
You could say America was having a constitutional crisis. Except, America didn’t yet have a Constitution. The former colonies were working together under a loose affiliation outlined in the wartime Articles of Confederation. Discussions had been underway to tinker with the document, but these attacks on state governments galvanized support for creating a new agreement, a constitution, to form a more powerful central government that would give the new nation a chance of surviving.
Vermont wasn’t yet a state — it would take five more years of wrangling for autonomy from New York for that to happen — but American leaders knew that what happened here mattered.
The problem in both Vermont and Massachusetts was debt. The combination of a poor postwar economy and new state taxes to pay off war expenses meant that many people ran short of money. Most people, especially farmers, lacked the hard currency (silver and gold coins, which were in short supply) that was required to repay their debts. People focused their anger on the courts, which had the power to seize property to cover debts, or even to throw debtors into prison.
In Vermont, that anger surfaced in the towns of Rutland and Windsor. In August, an estimated 200 farmers gathered outside the Rutland County courthouse to protest. The crowd cursed lawyers as “pickpockets” and displayed a newspaper called a “spirited resentment,” but remained peaceful.
Things took a more menacing turn that fall, however. On Oct. 31, dozens of men armed with muskets, swords and clubs converged on the courthouse in Windsor shortly after sunrise. Their leaders were a blacksmith, Robert Morrison from Hartland, and a farmer, Benjamin Stebbins from Barnard. Many debt cases were on the court’s docket, so they wanted to keep it from opening.
The crowd put on an intimidating show, marching in front of the building with fixed bayonets to the playing of fife and drum.
Opposing the crowd that day were state’s attorney Stephen Jacob and county sheriff Benjamin Wait. They literally read the men the riot act, a legal warning that if they didn’t peacefully disperse, they would be met with force by the sheriff and his men.
Accounts of the event are frustratingly scant on details, such as whether Wait had managed to rally any men before facing the mob. The protesters, however, clearly believed Wait could back up his threat, because they dispersed.
But Jacob and Wait weren’t willing to leave it there. They hauled Morrison into court for his role in the near-riot. Morrison pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a month in jail and fined 10 pounds. Morrison also had to take out a bond, under which he would owe an additional 100 pounds if he breached the peace again during the next two years.
Morrison’s allies rallied to his aid, or at least tried to. A group of 30 to 40 armed men gathered at the Hartland home of Capt. Moses Lull and planned to march on the jail to set him free. Jacob and Wait got wind of the gathering and organized a posse to arrest the would-be rioters. When they reach Lull’s house, a fight broke out involving clubs, the butts of guns and bayonets. Both Jacob and Wait were injured, but no one was killed.
The posse arrested 27 men and brought them to jail. Most of the men were fined and ordered to pay court costs and procure bonds promising good behavior for one year. Things cooled down in Windsor.
But just days later, a strikingly similar incident occurred on the other side of the state. On Nov. 21, 1786, a throng of men, many armed with cudgels, gathered outside the Rutland County courthouse. A small group approached the judges with a petition, calling for the court to adjourn immediately and indefinitely. The judges rejected the demand and opened the court for its afternoon session.
Enraged, more than 100 men from the mob flooded into the courthouse and, “in a most insolent and riotous manner, began to harangue and threaten the court, for not adjourning agreeably to the request of their committee,” according to a letter in the Vermont Gazette. With a crush of people inside the building, the judges were forced to adjourn court, saying it would reopen the following day.
But members of the mob refused to let the judges leave the building. The rioters had planned for this moment by stowing weapons in nearby houses. They fetched these and started an armed siege, holding the judges as captives. However, the judges still refused to relent, so the mob let them leave. But the rioters weren’t leaving; they summoned reinforcements.
That evening, Sheriff Jonathan Bell called on local members of the state militia to rally and retake the courthouse. The next morning, seeing that the militia had arrived in large numbers overnight, many of the insurrectionists left the scene. The militia arrested seven or eight of the leaders on the spot, but several dozen rioters escaped to a home about a mile from the court, where they holed up. A group of militiamen marched to the home and ordered them out. The groups exchanged gunfire before the rioters realized their situation was hopeless. A couple of the men managed to flee, but the remainder were arrested.
In the coming days, the sheriff gathered a posse that arrested more members of the mob. The only significant injury in the incident was to an insurrectionist, who was shot in the arm while fleeing and had to have it amputated.
Ultimately, 13 men faced trial for participating in the riot. Chief among them was Jonathan Fassett, who had just been elected to serve Pittsford in the state’s General Assembly. In fact, Fassett had been the town’s first representative to the newly formed state legislature back in 1777, and had served two other one-year terms.
The court found all the men guilty and ordered them to pay fines and court costs. They also had to secure good-behavior bonds. In his 1872 history of Pittsford, Abiel Caverly defended the behavior of all but one of the town residents who participated in the insurrection. “(T)hat they would have risen in rebellion against the government, had they not been misinformed and perversely influenced, we are not prepared to admit,” Caverly wrote. “The man who of all others did most to promote a spirit of discontent and rebellion in Pittsford was, undoubtedly, Jonathan Fassett.”
The court apparently agreed that Fassett should have known better. His fine and bond charges were roughly 50 percent higher than the others were ordered to pay.
If Fassett thought the court ruling settled the matter, he was mistaken. He still had to face his would-be colleagues in the legislature. When the General Assembly opened its 1787 session in February, the insurrection in Massachusetts was still going. Sensing that rebellion from within their ranks could prove terminal for the government, Vermont lawmakers were not in a forgiving mood.
Rep. Gideon Brownson of Sunderland accused Fassett of delivering “seditious speeches misrepresenting the proceedings of this Assembly” and trying to “influence the minds of the citizens of this State against” the legislature. In doing so, Brownson said, Fassett “did excite them to mutiny and riot & sedition against the Laws & Government of this State.”
Lawmakers impeached Fassett, ordering him to stand trial. He had already been convicted in a criminal court; this would be a trial for political crimes and any possible punishment would also be political in nature. Legislators refused to let Fassett start his term in office, pending the trial’s outcome, so he would stand trial as an ordinary citizen.
The Rutland County state’s attorney would present the evidence against Fassett, who pleaded not guilty. Fassett didn’t attend the legislative session when the case was made against him. Perhaps the outcome seemed inevitable. Lawmakers voted unanimously, 64-0, to expel their former colleague. He never served in public office again.
The insurrection in Massachusetts, known as Shays’ Rebellion after one of its leaders, ended a month before the Vermont legislature ejected Fassett. The rebellion against government authority was over, at least for the moment.
But the near-death experience of the American experiment caused by these revolts sharpened the attention of delegates at the Constitutional Convention. Gathering in Philadelphia for four months, they debated and drafted a document that they hoped would help form the more perfect union promised in the Declaration of Independence.
As they were wrapping up in September, the delegates finished a section designed to deal with federal officials who behaved, like Jonathan Fassett, in ways that threatened the well-being of society and government: the impeachment clause.
