Interesting times........................

      In late August, 1,500 farmers blocked the  Court of Common Pleas in Northampton, and then moved on to Worcester, Taunton, Concord, and Great Barrington.  In several cases, militia conscripts refused a direct order from Governor Nathaniel Bowdoin to disperse the protestors.   The populist insurgency, known as Shays' Rebellion, seemed to threaten the legitimacy of government itself, and turned even the most fiery revolutionaries into defenders of the established order.  Samuel Adams, hero of the Boston Tea Party, helped sponsor the Riot Act, which authorized the suspension of habeas corpus.
      Harvard knew very well where it stood in a battle between merchants and farmers with pitchforks.  Harrison Gray Otis recruited a light infantry from among his friends to be put at the disposal of the governor.  John Quincy Adams had no fortune to protect and no intention of joining a militia, but in this, the first serious political conflict of his adult life, he immediately arrayed himself with the forces of duly constituted order.  He had no sympathy for the protestors' complaints.  "Citizens," he wrote in his journal, "must look to themselves, their idleness, their dissipation and extravagance, for their grievances."

-James Traub,  John Quincy Adams:  Militant Spirit


By way of background, from the Gospel of Wikipedia:

Shays' Rebellion was an armed uprising in Massachusetts (mostly in and around Springfield) during 1786 and 1787. Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays led four thousand rebels (called Shaysites) in rising up against perceived economic injustices and suspension of civil rights (including multiple eviction and foreclosure notices) by Massachusetts, and in a later attempt to capture the United States' national weapons arsenal at the U.S.Armory at Springfield. Although Shays' Rebellion met with defeat militarily against a privately raised militia, it prompted numerous national leaders (including George Washington, who came out of retirement to deal with issues raised by Shays' Rebellion) to call for a stronger national government to suppress future rebellions, resulting in the U.S. Constitutional Convention and according to historian Leonard L. Richards, "fundamentally altering the course of U.S. history."^[1]