In the winter of 1787, a few thousand indebted farmers in western Massachusetts marched on their own government — and though they lost their one real battle in minutes, in the snow outside a federal arsenal, they did more to reshape the country than any army of the age. This is the story of Shays’ Rebellion: the veterans who had won the Revolution and come home to lose their farms to it, the creditor legislature in Boston that taxed them in coin they did not have, and the courthouses they closed by force to stop the foreclosures. It is the story of Daniel Shays, who sold the sword Lafayette gave him to feed his family and then reluctantly led an uprising he never wanted. And it is the story of the fear that rippled out from a Massachusetts courthouse to Mount Vernon and Paris and every statehouse in the union — the fear that convinced George Washington to leave his retirement, and convinced a wavering country that the government it had built could not govern. Both sides were right. That was the trouble.