A Bloodless Insurrection: The Exeter Insurrection of 1786

Most accounts record that not a single gun was fired and all emphasize the avoided bloodshed. Yet all considered this an insurrection for the reasons stated above. I hope this, the second in this series on the Founding generations’ understanding of “insurrection” provides further clarity for the choice we face at the ballot box in November.

A View of a Private in the First Regt. of N.H. Light-Horse on Duty. Three of its companies assisted in suppressing the Exeter uprising. By George Melvill, 1784–92: ink and watercolor on paper. (Photo credit: New Hampshire Historical Society)

A crowd of people processed from the center of town, past the famous landmark, to the capitol building, where the legislature was meeting. The crowd was made up of the working class, the people who got up before first light, dirtied their hands, and did not finish work until after sunset. They were an intensely patriotic crowd. Many of them were veterans. Protesting the legislature’s official meeting was necessary to them to save their way of life. This crowd of citizens felt neglected and forgotten, believing that the richest of their countrymen had hijacked the reins of government and were preparing to permanently take it away from them. The President of the Senate stated he knew their demands but would not honor them. When the mob found out that the legislature would not comply with their demands, they became hostile. They surrounded the capitol building and pressed up to the doors and windows with bludgeons, knives, and clubs. A few had guns. Legislators hid behind the desks in their chamber. Soldiers were eventually called in to disperse the insurgents. It was virtually bloodless besides the roughing up of a few of the insurgents who happened to stand in the way of the soldiers. Following this, the words in the media and among the elected officials was “insurrection.”

The account above is not describing January 6, although at first glance it appears to be. No, it is actually a brief description of the Exeter Insurrection of September 20–21, 1786, in New Hampshire. It was an event that shocked the Founding generation, although it is widely forgotten today. Considered a part of the overall tumult known as Shays’ Rebellion, the Exeter Insurrection, precipitated by the same events and social conditions as the insurgency in Massachusetts, doubly terrified the Founding generation because it appeared to mean the erosion of legal government in Massachusetts was spreading to every part of the Union. And unlike the court closures in Massachusetts, the New Hampshire insurrectionists had struck at the heart of representative government by going after the legislature. The insurrection was also as familiar to those who drafted the Fourteenth Amendment as Shays’ Rebellion was, with school and popular histories repeatedly mentioning it in 1825, 1839, 1849, 1859, and 1864.

Rediscovering the Exeter Insurrection and comparing it to January 6 and the objections raised against labeling January 6 an insurrection will be the subject of this article, the second in a series (please see the first part of this series containing some specific objectors and their grievances).

The farmers of New Hampshire, like their fellow subsistence-based New Englanders in other states, had been hit particularly hard by the postwar depression. Revolutionary debt caused credit to contract, taxes to increase almost beyond the tolerance of the average farm, and debtors’ jails filled with once respectable family patriarchs. The behavior of individual families also led to complications. Finally, co-occurring in New England was the disruptive social transformation to a mercantile- and manufacturing-based society at the expense of agrarian life as argued by John Brookeand David Szatmary. It would be out of line with the intent of this essay to explain in-depth the causes of the Exeter Insurrection. Instead it will explain the rise and fall of the one-day revolt in parallel with the January 6th storming of the Capitol in order to show, by comparison, that if the episode in Exeter was considered by the Founding generation as an insurrection, then so too would January 6th.

Two-hundred assembled quietly in Kingston and began marching northeast. As the Exeter insurrectionists marched to the meeting of the legislature, they did not think of themselves as rebels. They stopped and wrote a petition listing their grievances but were prepared to take public justice into their own hands if the legislature did not accede. Indeed they genuinely believed they were fully within their rights according to the New England legal tradition. The insurrectionists gathering outside the capitol building in Exeter thought of themselves as loyal and patriotic citizens. One anonymous writer using the pseudonym “Crisis,” described himself and the gathering crowd as “supporters of the late glorious revolution” who had “borne the expenses of the war” and “taken the field in defence of their country.” According to this writer, the insurrectionists were not seditionists and traitors, but instead doing the same extralegal resorts sanctified by the American Revolution. “[O]utlawry against such men” who threatened the people’s “peace, liberty, and safety, the dear bought objects of their independency” was necessary: “extreme disorders require extreme medicines as their remedy,” said the writer. As Alan Taylor explained,

the New England Regulators did not intend to overthrow their state governments but simply to suspend execution of particular ‘oppressive’ and ‘unconstitutional’ laws until their rulers could rectify their mistakes. Once they had forced their rulers to do their duty, the Regulators believed that they could quickly and quietly return to their farms and to grateful obedience. The New Hampshire Regulators surrounded the state legislature to demand action that only the captive representatives could enact. In effect, the angry men without doors were also the hostages of the legislators within doors.

The January 6th insurrectionists also believed they were within their rights. To this day, Trump and others spin those arrested for breaching the Capitol on January 6th as activists, patriots, and peaceful protestors exercising their constitutionally guaranteed right to assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances. This is where both the Exeter insurrectionists and Jan 6ers run into a wall. Whether or not they intended to be insurrectionists overthrowing the government is not what matters: the moment they attempted to force political change through violence instead of voting they became insurrectionists. In a republican form of government, where power is derived from and delegated by the consent of the whole sovereign people, and regular modes are agreed to for the instruction and disciplining of representatives who come from and are chosen by the people themselves, any attempt to execute political power outside of the constitution is treason and usurpation against the people. The leaders of New Hampshire said as much. John Sullivan, President of New Hampshire and the State senate, as well as a hero of the American Revolution, told the insurrectionists as much when he confronted them with their petition on the steps of the capitol with a speech proclaiming, “the Legislature ought not to comply with it, while they were surrounded by an armed force. To do it, would be to betray the rights of the people, which they had all solemnly engaged to support, and that no consideration of personal danger should ever compel him to so flagrant a violation of the constitutional rights of the people.”

This enraged the insurrectionists causing them to surround the meeting house and not allow the legislators to leave. Both the former president and the likes of Tucker Carlson have repeated that the insurgents on January 6th could not have been dangerous rebels. They claim that because of the lack of widespread firearms among the participants, Congress could never have been in real danger, and hence January 6th could not have been an insurrection. The witnesses to the Exeter Insurrection disagree. John Sullivan, State President, Jeremy Belknap, a member of the New Hampshire House, William Plumer, a member of the militia that dispersed the insurrectionists and later US Senator, and Jeremiah Smith, another member of the New Hampshire House all considered the petitioners to be insurrectionists despite the lack of firearms with them. Despite less than one third of the two hundred having muskets with them, most were armed with whips, clubs, cudgels, knives, and spears. A group of individuals using any type of object as weapons to threaten and force political change had become insurrectionists. John Sullivan, in his General Orders to the militia following the quelling of the insurrection, wrote that to “have even with arms demanded from the legislature an immediate compliance with measures proposed” was “injurious and unjustifiable conduct” that would “overturn and destroy all constitutional authority and government.” Belknap referred in his letters to all participants as insurgents, specifying that he meant even those without weapons. Jeremiah Smith wrote that despite not “firing a single gun” the incident was a treasonous rebellion because of “the idea of forcing the government into submission.”

“If an angry mob could resume the legislative authority any time they were inconvenienced by law or uneasy by the procedural methods of orderly redress, then republican government was at an end. That is what made the affair ‘mad and treasonable transactions.’ ”

These were not the overreactions of politicians, because the public too considered this an insurrection. David Humphreys, a Connecticut aide-de-camp to George Washington during the Revolutionary War, wrote to inform Washington that “Genl Sullivan has behaved nobly, & put a period to a very considerable insurrection, without the effusion of blood” (emphasis added). Charles Storrer, a close family friend to the Adamses, wrote to John Adams saying that there had “been an insurrection in the State of New-Hampshire.” What had made it an insurrection? Not the quality of arms or shedding of blood but “that an armed mob, abt: 500, surrounded the House & swore no one shd. come out untill they had voted an Emission of Paper Money.” Cotton Tufts, a future member of the Massachusetts ratifying convention, wrote to Abigail Adams assuring her that “Newhamshire Government has I imagine crushed the Rebellion there in its Embrio.” An anonymous citizen signing himself as “A Friend to Law and Liberty” condemned the “lawless insurrection of a number of insurgents under an unhappy and dangerous delusion.” What constituted that insurrection? According to this anonymous citizen it was by circumventing the procedures established by “the constitution and the laws, by which they are protected in their lives, liberties, and properties.” If an angry mob could resume the legislative authority any time they were inconvenienced by law or uneasy by the procedural methods of orderly redress, then republican government was at an end. That is what made the affair “mad and treasonable transactions.” Another New Hampshire citizen, styling himself “One of the People” believed any circumvention of the legal process and ordered liberty established by the state constitution, no matter how justifiable in its intent, was nevertheless “subversion” and insurrection because it was a resort to violence when “the annual election of the legislative body, the right in legal meeting assembled of instructing our representatives, the freedom from any oppressive or illegal arrest of our persons, and the security that is provided for our lives and property, in the establishment of the trial by jury” stilled remained as modes of redress and correction.

By early morning on September 21, thousands of local militia units, as well as impromptu bands of volunteer loyal citizens bringing their privately owned firearms, descended on Exeter to save the legislators and crush the insurrectionists. As the encamped insurrectionists saw them orderly marching with loaded guns and shining sabers, the rebels scattered for the nearby hills, with many tripping and falling over rocks and fences in a mad dash. “Huzzah for the government” and “How shall we live without government, and shall we give ourselves up to a Mob?” resounded through the air as the insurrectionists were tackled and arrested. Most accounts record that not a single gun was fired and all emphasize the avoided bloodshed. Yet all considered this an insurrection for the reasons stated above. I hope this, the second in this series on the Founding generations’ understanding of “insurrection” provides further clarity for the choice we face at the ballot box in November. I shall end with an extract from “A Friend to Law and Liberty”: “The motto of every wise government should be to favour and support the innocent, and punish the guilty: to defend and protect those who obey the laws, and subdue those who rebel against them.”