Excerpted from "The Legal and Ethical Environment of Business" by DeAngelis, M; Great River Learning (2016):
The gravel crunched beneath their feet punctuating the
rhythmic tramp of their gait as the grim band sturdily marched through the Western
Massachusetts countryside. Hundreds of men, their numbers swelling as they
passed through each village and crossroads. Most were former soldiers, veterans
of the fight for American freedom from the tyranny of Great Britain. All were
friends, neighbors, farmers and tradesmen, unafraid of hard work but brought
low by hard times. While they
patriotically fought for their new nation, their families secured credit from the
local merchants in order to sustain. The merchants in turn borrowed from
European lenders to maintain their businesses. When the soldiers returned home
from the war, their pockets were full of nothing but paper promises from the
government that they would be paid someday when the government could get the
states to cough up their shares of the war debt. The merchants’ European
creditors were less patient than the American veterans and with the end of the
war called in their notes of debt. The American merchants followed suit and
called in the debts owed by the hapless farmers and rural tradesmen to whom
credit had been extended. Hopelessly
unable to pay, these veterans watched helplessly as the merchants obtained
judgments against them in the state courts and their farms and homes and
property were sold out from under them to satisfy the court orders.
But they would stand by helplessly no longer. They marched
now with their well-worn flintlock muskets on their shoulders and their cartridge
boxes on their hips. These weapons had already been leveled in deadly measure
against the forces of foreign tyranny. What difference now that tyranny’s
treachery was cast upon them by their own judges and statesmen? They were
determined to shut down the courts at Springfield by force if necessary to end
the foreclosures. They gave little thought to their actions as treason. After
all, they were patriots, sorely used and discarded by the country in whose
favor they suffered years of privation, hardship and the fear of death.
As the rutted wagon paths of the countryside gave way to the
manure-fouled city streets they closed ranks and assumed the best military airs
of their training. Ahead, within sight now, surrounding the courthouse stood a
merchant’s militia of mercenaries, paid with the very money the loathsome creditors
had eked from the land and homes stolen from their neighbors. As the rebels
marched past they saw former comrades-in-arms and neighbors standing among the
mercenaries, some of whom blanched and to the chagrin of their well-paid
officers, defiantly bolted and swelled the ranks of the army of the
disgruntled.
A show of force and determination coupled with demonstrated
military tactics and training from maneuvers throughout the day were sufficient
to convince the court to adjourn without conducting any business. No shots were fired that day in 1786. No more
farms were lost. But the fate of the nation had been thrown into uncertainty. Americans
marched in armed rebellion against Americans. Something had to be done.
The scene described above was part of an incident that has
come to be known as Shays’
Rebellion, named after former colonial militia captain, Daniel Shays. Shays
had been among the grim band that closed the court in Springfield and he would
march with them five months later in an assault on the federal armory that
resulted in rebel fatalities. Shays’ rebellion subsequently dissolved, but without
decisive action, the issues that it illuminated would not. . . .
While Shays’ rebellion . . . served notice that the Articles of Confederation
were unworkable, the events also illuminated a conundrum facing those who
sought to craft a workable governing structure. A strong national government
was necessary to pull the states together financially but a strong national
government if controlled by persons of like mind, could wield tyrannical power.
In order for the US to survive, let alone thrive, the country’s commercial
classes and practitioners could not be placed in danger from marauding rebels
and small-minded legislatures, alike. The repulsive tyranny of the British
monarch must not be replaced with the specter of a tyranny of a rabble-rousing
majority. The educated class, the merchants, the men of commerce, the
statesmen, who knew the economic matters necessary to build a strong national
economy were a decided numerical minority. These elite thinkers surmised that if
“the people,” that is the farmers who owned land but knew little about how to
run a country or an economy, elect themselves into the legislature, as in Rhode
Island, then they could make laws that would suppress the good works of the
merchants that were necessary for national success.
[Earlier in the text] we discussed the countermajoritarian
difficulty and exposed the need, in a democracy, for protection of minority
rights even while respecting the will of the majority. Thomas
Jefferson said, “All, too, will
bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in
all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the
minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to
violate would be oppression.” James Madison wrote of his similar concern, “Wherever the real
power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our
Governments, the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the
invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of
Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which
the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.”
The minority that our thoughtful, educated forefathers sought to protect from
the tyranny of the majority were not the same minorities that we, today, see as
vulnerable. Madison and his like-minded contemporaries wanted to protect the
businessmen of the day from oppression by the numerically superior farmers and
tradesmen. Our Constitution in great part was written to protect the liberty of
businessmen from the tyranny of government.
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