1784 - Four counties in western North Carolina declare their independence as the state of Franklin. Four years later they rejoin North Carolina for protection from hostile Native Americans. Before the century’s end, the U.S. Congress would establish the region as Tennessee.
1786 - More than 500 armed farmers and Revolutionary War veterans, upset at the state government’s failure to provide debt relief, block access to a county court in Northampton, Massachusetts. The populist uprising marks the start of the infamous Shays’ Rebellion.
1920 - The 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote, is formally adopted into the U.S. Constitution. The amendment was the culmination of more than 70 years of struggle by the women's suffrage movement.
1939 - The first televised Major League baseball game is broadcast at the New York World’s Fair. The game was between the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Television was still in its infancy and regular programming wouldn’t exist for another 7 years.
1963 - On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his "I Have a Dream" speech to about 250,000 people attending the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Who the hell was Shays?
Daniel Ogden Shays was a decorated captain in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Upon returning home, Shays was summoned to court for unpaid debts, which he could not pay because he had not been paid in full for his military service. Shays was alarmed to discover that many of his fellow veterans and farmers were in the same financial situation.
Thousands of farmers in Massachusetts—particularly Continental Army and militia veterans who had received little or no pay for their military service—struggled to pay their debts amid a severe economic recession. Debt collectors made arrests, seized possessions and foreclosed properties for unpaid debts and delinquent taxes. In 1786, the state legislature showed little sympathy and actually raised taxes on the populace.
On August 29, Shays and others marched on Northampton and successfully prevented the county court from sitting. Weeks later, Shays led hundreds of protestors in Springfield who forced the supreme judicial court to adjourn. The movement grew as rebels prevented courts across Massachusetts from sitting and enforcing further property seizures, debt collections and foreclosures. Although his leadership role in the rebellion is often overstated, Shays did direct 1,500 armed rebels on January 25, 1787, in an attempted raid on the federal weapons armory in Springfield. Four rebels were killed and twenty others were wounded. A week later, the privately-funded state militia ambushed Shays and his forces and extinguished the rebellion.
Shays would be sentenced to death but eventually pardoned a year later. He was vilified as a radical opposed to the government. He would later be granted a pension by the federal government for the five years he served in the Continental Army without pay. He would live out the last few years of his life in poverty and a heavy drinker.
Shays Rebellion would greatly accelerate calls for a Constitutional Convention and raise alarm among the Founding Fathers of the government’s inability to quell uprisings. A new federal government framework was desperately needed.
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Martin Luther King Jr. at his home in Montgomery, Alabama in May 1956.