Born in Massachusetts in 1747, Daniel Shays was a Revolutionary War veteran and farmer who led a populist rebellion against unfair tax policies in 1786 and 1787. Following the Revolutionary War, Massachusetts was dealing with a debt crisis because of its staggering war debt; additionally, its traditional system of bartering for goods and services was destroyed. Like Shays, many of the farmers who were losing their farms were veterans who had never been paid for their service. In September 1786, Shays led a group of 600 men to the courthouse in Springfield to protest, and a few months later he and more than 1,000 men attempted to take over the federal arsenal. The rebellion was eventually stopped, but it successfully exposed the flaws in the federal government “as it existed under the Articles of Confederation,” the nation’s original frame of government (43). Shay’s Rebellion led directly to a new constitutional convention, which took place in the summer of 1787.

John Augustus Sutter was born in Germany in 1803 to Swiss parents and immigrated to the United States in 1834. He traveled to California in 1839 and established a 50,000-acre ranch and settlement east of San Francisco.