Fort Tryon Park, sixty-seven acres just north of the George Washington Bridge in Manhattan, is a bucolic refuge among the skyscrapers of New York City. Children climb in the Javits’ playground; teens toss snowballs in the Heather Garden; tourists queue to visit the medieval art on display at the Cloisters museum; a bundle of black fluff leads an elderly woman past the snow-laden trees of Margaret Corbin Drive, named after the first woman known to bear arms in the Revolution. A rocky outcrop, Forest Hill, stands vigilance over the mighty Hudson River.

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After his exploits during the French and Indian War, Robert Rogers (1732-1795) was indisputably the most famous military leader born in the thirteen colonies; however, he played only a cameo role in the Revolution because both the British and American commanders-in-chief, Thomas Gage and George Washington, not only scorned him but actually arrested him for treason. Rogers’ self-promotion, his financial debts, his indifference to the politics of the times, and his penchant for alcohol all contributed to his demise, but he was far from the only leading man of his day to suffer these faults.

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In 1817, as popular sentiment finally forced Connecticut to adopt a new constitution separating church and state, Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams: “I join you therefore in sincere congratulations that this den of the priesthood [Connecticut] is at length broken up, and that a Protestant popedom is no longer to disgrace the American history and character.”[1] Jonathan Trumbull (1710-1785) ascended to this “popedom” in 1769, becoming Connecticut’s sixteenth governor.

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The January 6, 2021 assault on the Capital rocked America, but it was by no means the largest, or even the most threatening, armed rebellion in the post-Revolutionary War era. In 1786 and 1787, Daniel Shays, a middle-class farmer and decorated Continental Army captain, was one of several leaders of as many as four thousand men against the state of Massachusetts, whose fiscal policies were dictated by the demands of the coastal elite. The Shaysites believed they were well within the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence to alter or abolish any form of government that had become destructive of the consent of the people. After an army of mercenaries hired by James Bowdoin, the governor of Massachusetts, decisively routed the rebels, the Founding Fathers scapegoated Shays, in particular, in order to incite the citizenry to replace the weak Confederation Congress (1781-88) with the powerful tripartite national government that has endured to this day.

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While Daniel Shays (1747-1825) has basked posthumously in the glory of leading the 1786-87 populist rebellion that bears his name, Luke Day (1743-1801) was a co-commander of the forces on the ground that fateful winter. Both Shays and Day were battle-hardened Continental army captains who returned home to rural Massachusetts to find their fellow farmers squared off against the state legislature, financially more oppressive than the British Crown which they had just helped defeat. The newspapers of the day, overwhelmingly biased against the backwoodsmen, needed a rebel leader to demonize and somewhat randomly picked Shays, condemning Day to an eternity of ignominy. In his History of Western Massachusetts, published in 1855, Joshua Gilbert Holland noted: “Day was the stronger man in mind and will, the equal of Shays in military skill, and his superior in the gift of speech.”[1]

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