Essay Questions for Thinking through Sources 7

Defend the Rebels: The American Revolution began, in part, with protests against unfair taxation that grew into a larger movement to defend Americans’ rights to property against the power of Great Britain’s government and to establish a more just republican state. The whiskey rebels, like the patriots of the 1770s, were resisting an internal tax that they perceived as an unjust infringement on their property rights. Using the evidence in these documents and your textbook, develop an argument that the whiskey rebels and their actions were the true heirs of the American Revolution, struggling to defend their rights to liberty and property against a powerful central government.

Defend the Federalists: The American Revolution began, in part, with protests against unfair taxation that grew into a larger movement to defend Americans’ rights to liberty and property against the power of Great Britain’s government and to establish a more just republican state. Many of the revolution’s leaders then went on to form the new American government, including drafting the Constitution and creating a federal government structure that was intended to protect the revolutionary ideals of democracy and republicanism and to put them into practice. Using the evidence in these documents and your textbook, develop an argument that George Washington and his Federalist government were the true heirs of the American Revolution, struggling to defend the new republican government against a traitorous armed insurrection.

Assess Change and Continuity: Using the evidence available in these five documents, develop an argument about ways that the United States of the 1790s was both similar to and different from the American colonies of the early 1770s. To what extent did the American Revolution transform American politics, and in what ways did older political patterns persist?

Assess the Reliability of Evidence: These five documents represent several different perspectives on the events that took place during and after the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. Which of the documents do you see as the most reliable indicators of what happened during that period and why, and which do you see as potentially biased and unreliable? What conclusions do you reach about which types of evidence are most reliable, and which are less so?