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Fries's Rebellion and American Political Culture, 1798-1800

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Fries's Rebellion and American Political Culture, 1798-1800 Fries's Rebellion and American Political Culture, 1798-1800 URING THE SAME WEEK IN MAY 1800 that President John Adams dismissed his Hamiltonian secretaries, Timothy Pickering Dand James McHenry, a federal court in Philadelphia convicted John Fries of treason for a second time and, for a second time, sentenced him and two accomplices to be hanged. In March of the previous year, Fries had led a group of armed German-American citizens to secure the release of some federal prisoners in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where they had been jailed for resisting a federal tax. These citizens have often been portrayed as confused, illiterate, and ignorant Germans, who simply protested the muscle of outside authority squeezing their insulated and parochial autonomy.1 It might also seem natural to assume that the tax resisters and rescuers resorted to violence, much as most eighteenth- century mobs seeking redress of political grievances were wont to do. An earlier version of this essay was read before the annual meeting of the Pennsylvania Historical Association in Chambersburg, October 1993 Research for this essay was funded in part by a Hallam Fellowship granted by the University of Kentucky In the course of researching, writing, revising, and thinking about this essay, I became indebted to a number of friends and colleagues whose help and suggestions proved invaluable Lance Banning, Daniel Blake Smith, Owen Ireland, William Pencak, James Morton Smith, Paul Doutnch, George C Herring, Thomas Cogswell, Thomas J Kiffmeyer, Matthew G Schoenbachler, Robert Jackman, Craig Friend, Todd Estes, the referees of Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Leon and Annette Magruder, Mike and Jo Hopwood, Doug and Peggy Newman, and most important, Judi and Forrest Newman Such is the claim made by Peter Levme, "The Fries Rebellion Social Violence and the Politics of the New Nation," Pennsylvania History 40 (1973), 241-58 More recently, in The Age of Federalism The Early American Republic, 1788-1800 (New York, 1993), 696-700, Stanley Elkins and Enc McKitnck explain the rebellion as the misguided product of the "parochial view [the Pennsylvania Germans] had of the outside world," and "their ignorance—about which current impressions are certainly not unfounded " For accounts of Fries's Rebellion that characterize the incident as a cultural misunderstanding by ignorant Germans, see Thomas Carpenter, stenographer, The Two Trials of John Fries (Philadelphia, 1800), W W H Davis, The Fries Rebellion (Doylestown, Pa , 1899), Jane Schaffer Elsmere, "The Trials of John Fries," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (hereafter, PMHB) 103 (1979), 432-35, Dwight F Henderson, "Treason, Sedition, and Fries' Rebellion," Journal of Legal History 14 (1970), 308-17, Louis Weinstein, "The Fries Rebellion," M A thesis, Temple University, 1939, Francis Wharton, State Trials of the United States during the Administrations of Washington and Adams (Philadelphia, 1849), 458-648 THE PENNSYLVANIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY 6C BIOGRAPHY Vol. CXIX, Nos. 1/2 (January/April 1995) 38 PAUL DOUGLAS NEWMAN January/April Yet the resistance and the rescue produced neither injury nor damage to property. Still more puzzling, the German Americans explained their resistance to the direct tax on constitutional grounds and defended their actions in constitutional terms as well.2 Nevertheless, the so-called "Fries Rebellion" appeared to the Federalist administration simply as Pennsylva- nia's second armed insurrection in five years, and many Federalists suspected that it was the lack of capital punishment in the first case that precipitated the second.3 Worse still, they also suspected that the French and their American sympathizers, the Republican Party, had orchestrated the entire affair.4 Thus, the "friends of order" urged that an example be 2 Thomas P. Slaughter, "Crowds in Eighteenth-Century America: Reflections and New Directions," PMHB 115 (1991), 3-34. Professor Slaughter's article rebukes the "consensus school"—particularly Jack Greene, Pauline Maier, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and Paul Gilje—for their portrayal of eighteenth-century extralegal mob action as increasingly conservative, acceptive of authority, and diminishing in their violent character. To challenge the consensus model, Slaughter points to example after example of mob violence in Pennsylvania, stressing its continuity from the colonial era, through the Revolution and the founding, and into the nineteenth century. He then offers his own model to explain the peculiarly violent nature of early American mob action: the concept of liminality. Liminality, which he borrows from the work of political theorist Anne Norton, "is a threshold state betwixt and between existing orders" and "liminars ... are between identities" or "[i]n politics they are between allegiances." Slaughter continues to explain that "[l]iminal status can be the consequence of comparative economic and/or educational deprivation; it can be ethnically, racially, and/or gender based; and it can be the consequence of life on a territorial frontier." Living on various forms of frontiers, "[l]iving at the fringes of power—cultural, political, and economic—people on the frontier are typically, perhaps definition- ally, contemptuous of authority . forced to rely on a justice less influenced by law . and lived in a more interpersonally violent world" (pp. 12-14). Yet there are exceptions to Slaughter's model just as he found exceptions to the consensus model. In almost every way, the Fries Rebels were liminars—ethnically, politically, territorially, educationally, and linguistically. However, when the time came to mobilize for extralegal action they were conspicuously nonviolent in an age when political violence was indeed the norm. And their actions represented attempts to maintain and reaffirm their place within their concept of the existing political order rather than an endeavor to overthrow it. Indeed, they opposed their Federalist leaders not in contempt for national political authority, but to defend and to hold them accountable to the federal Constitution which granted that authority. For another account of the extent and typicality of interpersonal and political violence, see Thomas P. Slaughter, "Interpersonal Violence in a Rural Setting: Lancaster County in the Eighteenth Century," Pennsylvania History 58 (1991), 98-123. 3 Timothy Pickering to James Pickering, June 7, 1800, in The Timothy Pickering Papers (hereafter, Pickering Papers), ed. Frederick S. Allis (Boston, 1966), Massachusetts Historical Society, microfilm, 13:542. 4 Federalist newspapers repeatedly cited the French as the instigators behind the insurrection. See the New York Daily Advertiser, March 23, 1799, or the Gazette of the United States, April 11, 1799. Personal correspondence of the Federalists and the military sent to quell the rebellion, such as a report sent from Captain Adlum to Secretary of War James McHenry, July 22, 1799, in Bernerd Steiner, ed., The Life and Correspondence of James McHenry (hereafter, LCJM) 1995 FRIES'S REBELLION 39 made of Fries, with the loudest cries resonating from the Hamiltonian wing of the party. However, just days before the execution, John Adams, the man who had dispatched a formidable army to quell the rebellion the previous year, ignored the advice of his cabinet and issued Fries and his accessories complete pardons. To the Hamiltonians—specifically Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, former Secretary of War James McHenry, recently fired Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, and Hamilton him- self—this seemed the president's most inexplicable act. The pardon appeared to confirm the Hamiltonian perception that the president was sacrificing the Federalist Party and, with it, the future of the young republic for a chance to retain office in November.6 Adams's behavior since 1799 had convinced Hamiltonians that the president had forged a "corrupt bargain" with the "French Party" and its candidate, Thomas Jefferson, in a last-ditch effort to appease the Republicans and secure the vice-presidency for himself.7 By July 1800, the Hamiltonians had withdrawn their support for Adams's reelection and conceded that the nation could not possibly do worse, even in the hands of a Jacobin. The presidential pardon of John Fries was the last in a series of events that culminated in the Adams-Hamiltonian schism. Until the pardon, and (Cleveland, 1907), 437, also display suspicion of French involvement Opinions concerning the French and the French Revolution became a barometer for American political division by the mid-1790s, as Republicans vocally supported their cause as allies and Federalists denounced the disorder and violence unleashed by the French Revolution On this point see Lance Banning, "Jeffersonian Ideology and the French Revolution A Question of Liberticide at Home," Studies in Burke and His Time 17 (1976), 5-26 5 For the Federalists as the "friends of order" against rebellious disorder, see Thomas P Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion (New York, 1987) 6 Timothy Pickering to James Pickering, June 7, 1800, Pickering Papers, 13 542 All the secretaries agreed that at least Fnes ought to hang 7 Ibid 8 Most historians attnbute the Federalist schism to Adams's repugnance at the presence of Hamilton's cronies in his cabinet and Adams's repeated failure to consult with those secretaries, Adams's suspicion of Hamilton's role in the army, his belief in a limited standing army, his decision to send a peace envoy to France in 1799 without cabinet consultation,
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