Creating a Demagogue: The Political Origins of Daniel Shays’s Erroneous Legacy in American Political History

Abstract

What are the political consequences of negative political theory concepts such as demagoguery? What happens when they are deployed in a way that brands an innocent victim with a reputation he or she does not deserve? This article contends that Daniel Shays was just such a victim. Despite playing only a peripheral role in the erroneously named “Shays’s Rebellion” of 1786–87, Shays himself was singled out by elites looking for ways to deflect blame away from themselves and their oligarchic Massachusetts regime. Subsequently labeling the movement “Shays’s Rebellion,” these elites cemented the narrative that Shays had led protest movements in western Massachusetts. Shays thus entered American political vernacular as the paradigmatic demagogue—and “Shays’s Rebellion” became the example of demagogue-led state failure—through the successful weaponization of a political idea. More broadly, the Shays case functions as a window into the relationship between ideas and political development in American politics.