How Freedom Was Lost: A Tale of Two Rebellions

Chapter 9: National Defense

9.2.a. How Freedom Was Lost (A Tale of Two Rebellions)

In regard to original intent, a mere Amendment would not be enough to withstand the military powers its larger brother, the Constitution itself, gave to the new central government. This problem is best illustrated with a tale of two rebellions—one taking place prior to, and the other after the constitutional settlement. In the first, the lack of central military powers ultimately left the decision to form a militia up to the people of the State. In the second, the national government used its coercive power to raise an army of 13,000 to squash a revolt.

Tax Revolt Before the Constitution

The first is the oft-maligned Shays’ rebellion. Granted, there were revolutionary undertones with parts of the Shays’ movement, and likely more than undertones among a few of the rebels; but the rebellion has largely been understood only according to the propaganda of its enemies. That is, until fairly recently: Leonard Richards’s work Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle. The story commonly runs that western Massachusetts farmers were heavily indebted to eastern banks. When time came to collect those debts and farmers could not pay, they revolted in a quasi-class-war against private property. George Washington’s friend, former general Henry Knox, warned him at the time of a proto-communistic uprising:

they feel at once their own property compared with the opulent, and their own force, and they are determined to make use of the latter in order to remedy the former. Their creed is that the property of the United States has been protected from the confiscations of Britain by the joint exertions of all, and therefore ought to be the common property of all. . . .

This is how the story was told to George Washington, and how it was told pretty much ever since. But Knox was primarily motivated in pushing for a stronger union, and he knew he had to get Washington on board for any such venture. Thus, he stretched as far as he could, and what he didn’t say is as important as what he did. Here’s the rest of the story (in a nutshell):

Like other states, Massachusetts had helped fund the American Revolution with that wretched excuse for money, colonial scrip. It was so overinflated after the war that it was sold on the speculators’ market for fractions of a penny on the dollar. This money virtually died—but it was only mostly dead. Many of those western farmers, and especially former soldiers who were paid almost exclusively with the paper, suffered through the inflation and couldn’t get rid of the worthless scraps fast enough. But a cabal of Boston speculators and other investors sat holding the paper just hoping it would recover—in the case of the speculators, for a handsome profit, and in the case of the more conservative establishment bankers, to save themselves from massive losses.

The cabal then made its move. No doubt better connected in the State Assembly than the frontier farmers, the investors got a law passed that the worthless scrip would be redeemable at face value and worse yet, all interest retroactively paid in silver. It was a rigged market if ever one was. But it didn’t stop there. To pay of these now massively, artificially, over-valued investments, the Assembly raised taxes, the vast majority of which would fall on the common people including the western farmers. It was nothing short of a bailout for the failed Boston investors; worse yet, it double-punished the farmers who first were forced to use the money in its devalued state, and now forced to pay it off at face value to the very people who forced them to suffer through its demise.

It was even worse yet. The taxes only got passed because the Senate rammed in a self-interested governor. The former governor John Hancock sympathized with the soldiers especially and had refused to enforce collection of taxes for some time. He was very popular. But an illness forced him from running again in 1785. The new governor—himself a holder of over £3,000 in the debased notes, ready to make a killing on the enforcement of the new taxes—immediately began enforcement not only of the taxes, but of all past taxes as well. This was more than many of the country people were able to pay or willing to tolerate. It is understandable, therefore, why a revolt broke out: a tax revolt, not a proto-communist movement.

But more to the point is the reaction to the organized revolts led by former Revolutionary War captain Daniel Shays’, after whom they are named. When the governor tried to raise a militia from the State’s ranks, it failed miserably. The State petitioned Congress; it’s sympathizers in Congress even lied saying they needed help with an Indian war. Congress pledged 1,320 troops, but Massachusetts had to raise half. Congress could convince only 100 of its soldiers to go. Back in Boston there was decent response, but the western counties largely ignored the governor. Out of over 600 war veterans, 23 showed up. Gary North relates,

Baron von Steuben, who had served under Washington, identified the problem in an article signed “Belisarius.” Massachusetts had 92,000 militiamen on its rolls. Why did the state need military support from Congress? He provided the correct answer: the government was not representative of the opinions of the people.

A group of Boston merchants then paid former Generals Benjamin Lincoln and William Shepherd to get involved and they were able eventually to raise a combined 4,000 men from Boston and Springfield. Shepherd beat Shays to the Springfield armory and illegally—that is, against orders and without the required Congressional approval—raided the armory and awaited the approaching Shays’ forces. When they approached, Shepherd fired “warning shots” that killed four men and wounded 20. This began the decline of the resistance which was over within a month.

Whatever may be said of either side in these skirmishes, the central fact to take away is how difficult it was to raise an army for a corrupt cause before the Constitution. Granted, the corrupt forces still eventually won out, but even this was a function of powerful centralized controls: first the imposition of colonial fiat paper, then the bailout laws for the banks and speculators, and the centralizing of the whole State’s legal system largely under the power of the Bostonians. Even here, out of 92,000 enrolled militiamen, only a tiny fraction was willing to support the cause.

And the corruption did not stop with the Bostonian bailout and its mercenary militia, it continued in Knox’s leveraging of the crisis to convince Washington into the Constitutional Convention. Knox wrote,

What is to give us security against the violence of lawless men? Our government must be braced, changed, or altered to secure our lives and property. . . .

[T]he men of property and the men of station and principle there are determined to endeavor to establish and protect them in their lawful pursuits; and, what will be efficient in all cases of internal commotions or foreign invasions, they mean that liberty shall form the basis,—liberty resulting from an equal and firm administration of law.

They wish for a general government of unity, as they see that the local legislatures must naturally and necessarily tend to the general government.

Urged by others was well—and not to mention his own predilections for stronger central government—Washington bit. You know the rest of the story: we got that “government of general unity,” along with its new military powers, including a standing army and central control over state militias.

Tax Revolt After the Constitution

In light of this new government we now move to the second rebellion in this tale of two: the Whiskey Rebellion of 1792. The situation was very much similar to Shays’: the government (national now as opposed to state) had now centralized all the war debts from the Revolution, and Hamilton was seeking new sources of revenue to pay them off. He studied how he could best raise taxes while angering the fewest people. His answer was what we today would call a “sin tax”—a tax on all distilled spirits. Madison agreed surprisingly quickly, and the two rammed the bill through Congress. But it was not accepted as wise by everyone. Senator William McClay of Pennsylvania, wrote a startlingly accurate prophecy in his journal: “War and bloodshed are the most likely consequence of this.”

Within a few months of the bill taking effect, reports of revolt were reaching Washington. Tax collectors were shunned and threatened. By the following summer, some collectors and other agents had been tarred and feathered, some beaten and whipped. Opposition spread, especially west of Appalachia, and in nearly every State. Some States refused to enforce the tax at all, and in conjunction with other concerns, groups of Georgians and Kentuckians were forming secession movements.

Instead of rescinding or even reconsidering the tyrannical tax, the administration planned stiff coercion. Hamilton—eager as always to impose his will by force—immediately called for a swift and harsh military solution. Washington welcomed whatever was necessary to suppress the revolts, as long, he said, as the solution was constitutional. Before all-out military suppression could take place, however, the administration needed at least two things: it needed to appear to the public as having attempting a peaceful solution, and it needed to expand its militia-raising powers so that it could draft soldiers by compulsion.

The draft powers came with the two Militia Acts of 1792. Whereas the Constitution had already centralized military powers, it generally left the power to call up the militia within the powers of Congress, and then it was only a call, not compulsion. The first Militia Act of 1792 remedied the first problem, delegating power to the President to call up the militia to repel invasions, etc.. This was ostensibly in response to Indian Wars in the Northwest Territory, but the statute included language directly applicable to the tax revolts of late: the President could call up the militia “whenever the laws of the United States shall be opposed or the execution thereof obstructed, in any state, by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” The second Militia Act ensured that such a call would be answered, because it by decree conscripted every able-bodied male between 18 and 45 years of age (Congressmen and Senators, however, were conveniently excepted) into their respective state militias, ready to be called up, and provided some unifying structure throughout. (And with great irony, this conscription—which as we have seen before is a form of slavery—applied to “each and every free able-bodied white male citizen.”)

Within months Hamilton began drafting a proclamation to be made by Washington condemning the revolts in western Pennsylvania. Made a national broadside on September 15, 1792, the proclamation condemned the tax revolts as “contrary to the duty that every citizen owes to his country.” Ignoring the obvious imposition of the tax itself, the letter praised “the moderation which has been heretofore shewn on the part of the government,” and promised every “necessary step” would be taken and “all lawful ways and means will be strictly put in execution” to enforce collection of the taxes. Hamilton was already ready for the military option, but the time was not quite ripe for it.

Hamilton eventually ramped up a campaign of propaganda and outright deception to move the nation toward his goal. Recalling the earlier discussion of the different periods in his life, this 1792–1794 window saw Hamilton engaging in a general attack on his political opposition as agents of the French Revolution, atheism, and anarchy—all of it false. His response to the whisky rebellion fits perfectly into this mold. And with the multiple efforts at secession and refusal to pay the tax, and now the Militia Acts in place, Hamilton sensed a perfect “opportunity for successful assertion of federal dominance.” His campaign deceptively portrayed the rebellion as uniquely located in a few western Pennsylvania counties—though he knew otherwise that opposition was widespread. He pulled out the conspiracy theory card, claiming these revolts were the work of a few local elites and “malcontent persons” aiming “to confirm, inflame, and systematize the spirit of opposition.”

Washington concurred with Hamilton’s sentiments. He feared the rebellion was fomented by French revolutionary-style activism in political clubs that arose in the wake of a visit to the U.S. by French Ambassador Charles Genêt. The conspiratorial paranoia is evident in Washington’s letters: the clubs were designed “primarily to sow the seeds of jealousy and distrust among the people of the government” and spread “nefarious doctrines with a view to poison and discontent the minds of the people.”

Both pretended that the whole political fabric of America hung on suppressing this allegedly small, local rebellion. Washington feared “anarchy and confusion.” Hamilton went over the top, writing, “It appears to me that the very existence of government demands this course.” In this same letter to Washington, on August 2, 1794, Hamilton provided a very specific plan of action for raising the militia of several States: that is, the raising of at least 12,000 troops to shock and awe the rebels. Newspapers picked up the French conspiracy motif and the exaggeration, decrying “total subversion of government” due to “sans culottes of Pittsburgh.” And yet despite the alleged threat to the whole foundation and existence of government itself, Hamilton revealed the real issue at the root of the administration’s firmness: “The immediate question is whether the government of the United States shall ever raise revenue by any internal tax.” Determined to solidify and uphold this central power, Hamilton was willing to exercise another—the military—and shed American blood.

But the military means to the end couldn’t be on the surface of the program lest the administration risk alienating the public. This is not to say they respected the will of the people, for Hamilton would write Washington later saying he had “long since learned to hold popular opinion of no value” while pursuing his own unpopular agendas. Instead, they saw public opinion as an obstacle to be maneuvered and manipulated. Thus, they began preparing for war as much as possible, and yet going through the motions required by a peaceful solution with the mind that these motions would fail. Hamilton went so far as purposefully to undermine peace negotiations with a series of letters under the pseudonym “Tully”—again propagandizing the public with the conspiracy plot.  Around the same time he was having General Henry Lee begin the draft and prepare the troops with the command to keep it secret and to postdate all written orders to September 1, to make it look as if the administration had not been planning attack all along. The whole effort was a public façade:

For “particular reasons” of a political nature, no one was to know that the decision to raise an army had been made before August 25. The peace negotiations were a sham, but a necessary political maneuver to forestall criticism of the administration’s policy. It must appear that the President had made every effort to settle the dispute without resort to arms, even though he privately longed to teach the western Pennsylvanians a stern lesson.

That lesson would come upon these western Pennsylvanians, but whereas Hamilton had earlier pretended the revolt was localized there, he now prepared a show of force calculated to include opposition joined by several other surrounding States and counties. From this he concluded the need for at least 12,000 troops. And he was out for more than the suppression of the rebellion. He wanted to make public examples of some of the rebels, as he would later write to Washington, November 11, 1794: “To-morrow the measures for apprehending persons and seizing stills will be carried into effect. I hope there will be found characters fit for examples, and who can be made so.” With the power of the Militia Acts behind them, an inter-state militia of 13,000 was raised, and personally led by Washington and Hamilton on horseback to quash the “rebellion.”

These two rebellions, however, illustrate the power of the centralized militia and thus the ability for the central government to impose its will on its subjects. Before the Constitution, the people of Massachusetts could choose whether or not to support the Governor’s call to raise a militia, and most did not. People were left free to decide if the cause was just—a much more biblical design. All of this changed with the advent of the Constitution. Now, the standing army power was enshrined and the Hamiltonian machine in place to make it even more powerful. And every “free” able-bodied man was forced into the slavery of conscription—whether they agreed with the justness of the cause or not. And many people did disagree, and Washington knew it: he was fearful that even the Militia Acts may not be powerful enough to force the raising of the militia. These fears were, of course, allayed, and thankfully, there was very little bloodshed as the overwhelming forces melted any organized opposition. But this was never the point anyway: the point was to have the military power to enforce the will of the central government despite any unpopularity in its decrees—the very thing the antifederalists foresaw and warned against.

Thus, while some 20 men were arrested in the raid, and several indicted in Philadelphia, only two were ever convicted in court, and George Washington eventually pardoned these. After all that public façade and exercise of overwhelming force, why finally pardon the only convicts out of a movement which he and Hamilton both had described publicly, repeatedly, as “treason”? Because the point never really was to bring justice: it was rather to impose the will of the central government. It was to crush all possibility of political control beyond the taxing and warring dictates of Washington, D.C. In this, the response to the Whisky Rebellion was successful, and it was built on the back of the Constitution. In these regards, the United States departed further from the biblical standard of a free society—specifically in the creation, expansion, and use of the military power.

This change was a small but effective beginning. It was also a precedent for much more to come. Yes the Constitution created this power, and it was used overwhelmingly to crush political dissent to Hamilton’s tax scheme. But at least the national forces remained somewhat small. Prior to the Civil War the entire active peacetime militias stood at a total of only 16,000 troops. And at least during this time, those forces were not used beyond constitutionally-achieved powers.

But the next step in the growing loss of freedom in this area would do just that. . . .

Restoring America One County at a Time

Read the rest of Restoring America here, or purchase a copy here.

Next section: Lincoln versus Taney: A Case of Military Tyranny