Daniel Shays (1747–1825)

American soldier, the leader of Shays’s Insurrection in W. Massachusetts in 1786–1787, born in Hopkinton, MA, in 1747. In the War of Independence he served as second lieutenant in a Massachusetts regiment from May to December 1775, became captain in the 5th Massachusetts regiment in January 1777, and resigned his commission in October 1780. After the collapse of Shays’s Insurrection he escaped to Vermont. He was pardoned in June 1788, and died at Sparta, NY, on the 29th of September 1825.