United States or Botswana ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


There were two possibilities, however; one, that the election close at hand might reverse the sympathies of those in power; the other, that Squeaks might find it unwise to use the weapon in his hands. Now was the Cedar Mountain House in peril, for Shay's support was essential. At a word from him, the police might call the club a disorderly house, and order it shut up.

While the country is convulsed by a rebellion unprecedented in the whole history of the world, we are compelled by our principles to look upon it as lawyers, and not as statesmen. We apply to it the same principles which our venerated forefathers applied to Shay's Rebellion in Massachusetts and the Whiskey Insurrection in Pennsylvania.

"Sorra a bit o' me knows; the shay's ruined intirely, and the ould divil there knows he's conquered us. Look at him there, listening to every word we're saying! You eternal thief, may be its ploughing you'd like better!" "Come, come," said I, "this will never get us forward. What part of the country are we in?"

They heard his story, which was simple and straight: Squeaks was holding the papers which would be, at least, damaging to Shay's property and reputation; he got them in confidence and then defied Shay to come and take them. Shay decided it would be well to take two witnesses and went, as planned, to Squeaks's apartments.

Afterward, in 1787, he was a commissioner to negotiate a settlement with the participants in Shay's Rebellion. With the organization of the new national government he became Secretary of the Senate of the United States, and served in that capacity until his death, April 22, 1814. In 1781, Mr. Otis was taken by his friend, Colonel Samuel Osgood, to the home of the latter in Andover.

It was said that no man ever went hungry from Mike Shay's door, which was perfectly true; and the reward that he loved above all things was to be pointed out on the street or in the car as "Mike Shay." To overhear some one say, "That's Michael Shay, the big Boss of the South Ward," meant more to him a thousand fold than any decoration in the gift of the greatest of Old-World potentates.

Her determined and resolute character, which enabled her to limit the ravages of Shay's mob, was manifested in her conduct and deportment during her whole life. She claimed no distinction, but it was yielded to her from her superior experience, energy, skill, and sagacity.

"'Cause 'cause I didn't know where else to come. I been to his house and he ain't to home. Nobody ain't to home. His wife, Mis Parker, she's gone up to Boston yes'day on the coach, and and it's all dark and the house door's open and the shay's gone, so " "Who's sick? Who wants him?"

Long before, on the occasion of Shay's insurrection, he had expressed with some exaggeration a view which has much more truth in it than those modern writers who exclaim in horror at his folly could be expected to understand the view that the readiness of people to rebel against their rulers is no bad test of the presence of democracy among them.

Eli Parsons, was a soldier in the Revolution, and prominent in the Shay's Rebellion, in Massachusetts. His father was a physician of much note in Oswego, and died about 1828, leaving two children; Charles, the younger, is the subject of this sketch.