Despite these foreign crises, it was the effect of Federalist policies on the American frontier that crystallized Republican opposition and led to the development of a Democratic-Republican Party. In the early 1790s, Republican societies from Maine to Georgia had demanded the removal of British and Spanish troops from frontier areas, while frontier farmers lashed out at Federalist enforcement of the so-called whiskey tax. Many farmers on the frontier grew corn and turned it into whiskey to make it easier to transport and more profitable to sell. The whiskey tax hurt these farmers, who considered themselves “industrious citizens” and “friends of liberty.” Hundreds of them in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Kentucky petitioned the federal government for relief.
Much like their counterparts in Massachusetts in the 1780s, western Pennsylvania farmers rallied in 1792 and 1793 to protest the tax and those who enforced it. Former North Carolina Regulator Herman Husband was one of the most outspoken critics of the excise tax (see chapter 5). They burned sheriffs in effigy, marched on courthouses, assaulted tax collectors, and petitioned the federal government. Washington and his advisers failed to respond, paralyzed by a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia that ground government operations to a halt. By 1794 an all-out rebellion erupted, with protesters adopting slogans from Stamp Act protests, Shays’s Rebellion, and even the French Revolution.
President Washington and his advisers worried that the rebellion could spread and feared that uprisings by white settlers might encourage Indians to rise up as well. Furthermore, Spanish and British soldiers were eager to foment trouble along the frontier, and the Whiskey Rebellion might spark intervention by either Spain or Great Britain. Federalists suspected that pro-French immigrants from Scotland and Ireland were behind the insurgency.
When Shays’s Rebellion had erupted in 1787, the confederation government had had no power to intervene. Now, however, the United States could raise an army to quash such insurgencies. In August 1794, Washington federalized militias from four states, calling up nearly thirteen thousand soldiers. The president asked Hamilton, author of the whiskey tax, to accompany the troops into battle. The army that marched into western Pennsylvania in September vastly outnumbered the “whiskey rebels” and easily suppressed the uprising. Having gained victory, only two of the leaders were tried and convicted, and they were later pardoned by Washington. See Document Project 7: The Whiskey Rebellion.
Washington proved that the Constitution provided the necessary powers to put down internal threats. Yet in doing so, the administration horrified many Americans who viewed the force used against the farmers as excessive. Jefferson, who had resigned as secretary of state in 1793, joined Madison in his outrage at the government’s action. Despite a strong aversion to partisan politics among leaders of the Revolutionary generation, the divisions inspired by Hamilton’s policies convinced Jefferson and Madison to launch an opposition party known as the Democratic-Republican Party.