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Conceived in Liberty Companion · Volume V, chapter 4 · 4 April 1782

Knock their grey wigs off

Before a plain wooden courthouse, a hatless man in a dark coat holds a stick high and points at a woodpile, while farmers in homespun crowd round him and two men in grey wigs watch from the open doorway.
Northampton, Massachusetts, April 1782. As the court of common pleas prepares to sit, the Reverend Samuel Ely lifts a stick and points his neighbors to the woodpile, shouting that clubs will knock the judges’ grey wigs off. Rothbard says the taxed and jailed farmers of Hampshire County had decided to close the courts themselves. Chapter 4 of Conceived in Liberty, Volume V.

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Adapted, with the Mises Institute's permission, from Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, Volume V: The New Republic, 1784-1791 (Mises Institute), CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

The story, from several sources

This account blends Rothbard’s chapter with the other sources listed below and has not yet been separated into Rothbard’s own account and the fuller story. Read Rothbard’s chapter 4 for his account.

In 1782 Massachusetts was collecting about a third of a farmer’s income in hard-money taxes to pay a war debt that had passed from soldiers into the hands of speculators, and the courts threw those who could not pay into jail. In Hampshire County the farmers decided, Rothbard writes, that salvation lay in their own hands: close the tax-enforcing courts. Their leader was the Reverend Samuel Ely of Conway, a Yale graduate and former preacher who had fought at Bennington. In January he stirred up the northern towns against the state constitution and the judges’ pay. On 4 April he addressed the crowd in front of the court of common pleas at Northampton and called on it to rise and shut the court. The historian Robert Gross quotes the cry as the crowd set out: get clubs from the woodpile and knock their grey wigs off. On 12 April he raised another mob and called for an armed rising, but people stood in front of the courts to defend them. Ely was arrested and jailed at Springfield. On 13 June a crowd of 120 men marched from Northampton and freed him, and after a clash with the sheriff’s posse the rescuers gave up three hostages. The General Court suspended habeas corpus and sent a committee headed by Samuel Adams to quiet the county, and Ely escaped to the free air of Vermont. Connecticut and Virginia met the same anger by cutting taxes and giving time to pay.

Where the record differs from Rothbard

Errata notes. Rothbard’s text and his account above are left as he wrote them. Every erratum.

Conceived in Liberty, p. 70
Rothbard says Ely was arrested ‘in mid-May’ for his leadership in the Northampton riots (the mobs of 4 and 12 April), convicted and jailed at Springfield, and freed by 120 men on 13 June.
The evidence The Massachusetts Historical Society’s Adams Papers note (PJA 13, p. 195) has Ely found guilty of ‘seditious and disorderly behaviour’ at Springfield in April 1782, and search summaries of other accounts have him arrested at the Northampton courthouse on 12 April and rescued on 12 or 13 June (110 to 130 men). The sequence of arrest, trial and jailing is not settled by the pages read, none of which was a primary record. The spec paints only Ely’s address before the court and gives the later events as Rothbard has them.
Source the sources named in the evidence column

Sources

  1. Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, vol. V: The New Republic, 1784-1791 (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2019, ed. Patrick Newman), ch. 4, ‘The Burdens of State Public Debt’, pp. 66-72; the Hampshire and Berkshire risings are on pp. 68-71. Printed page numbers of the hosted PDF. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Rothbard
  2. Robert A. Gross, ‘The Confidence Man and the Preacher: The Cultural Politics of Shays’s Rebellion’, Colonial Society of Massachusetts (accessed 2026-10-02, through a fetch tool that summarises pages): Ely’s words ‘Come on my brave boys, we’ll go to the wood Pile and get Clubs enough and knock their Grey Wiggs off and send them out of the World in an Instant’, ‘as they set out to close the Northampton court in April 1782’; Ely a Yale graduate of 1764 and former minister. Secondary source
  3. ‘The Horrid and Unnatural Rebellion of Daniel Shays’, American Heritage 17, no. 4 (June 1966; accessed 2026-10-02, through a fetch summary): Ely ‘a former Connecticut clergyman’ harangued the crowd to ‘go to the woodpile and get clubs enough, and knock their grey wigs off’; arrested and later freed from the Springfield jail by a mob. Secondary source
  4. Worthington Historical Society, ‘Shays’ Rebellion: Trouble in the Hills’ (accessed 2026-10-02, through a fetch summary): in Northampton in 1782 Ely led a mob to the door where the Common Pleas court was meeting, armed with wood found nearby, after the judges’ ‘gray wigs’; the 120-man jail rescue at Springfield, three hostages, habeas corpus suspended. Secondary source
  5. ‘Hampshire County’, American Courthouses (accessed 2026-10-02, through a search summary): the first Hampshire County courthouse at Northampton was built in 1739, the second in 1767, the third (Isaac Damon) in 1812-1813. Secondary source
  6. Historic Northampton, ‘Hampshire County Courthouse’ virtual-tour panel (accessed 2026-10-02, through search summaries; the page itself would not load): first courthouse 1737, replaced in 1767 ‘on the west portion of the lot’ at the site of Main and King streets; before that the court met at the meeting house or in taverns. Secondary source
  7. ‘Began to work att my trade...: Making Men’s Clothing in Eighteenth-Century Deerfield’, Historic Deerfield (accessed 2026-10-02, through a search summary): Hampshire County inventories list coats, vests, breeches and trousers; farmers wore frocks over their clothes. Secondary source
  8. ‘Ely’s Rebellion’, Shays’ Rebellion: A Documentary Resource, Springfield Technical Community College (accessed 2026-10-02 through search summaries only; the page returned HTTP 300): Samuel Ely born 1740 in Connecticut, Yale-educated, died in Maine after 1797. Secondary source