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Chapter 5 Repression Federalist leaders-Hamiltonians especially-and even Republicans saw insurrection rather than riot or constitutional resistance in 1799. Both viewed the happenings in the Lehigh Valley that year through a set of republican lenses that overcorrected their vision concerning matters of domestic tranquility . But Federalists, especially those obsessed with social order, used Fries's Rebellion to justify their prior restrictions of individual liberties and military measures. The Hamiltonians' emphasis on an ordered public liberty blinded them to the popularity of democratic trends in post-Revolutionary America, and in 1799, it preconditioned them to view challenges to their policies as threats to order and to interpret questions to their elected authority as acts of sedition or treason. The deeply held beliefs of their conservative republican political culture, together with other circumstantial evidence, convinced Hamiltonians and other Federalists in March that a real rebellion was underway. Moreover, it at first appeared to be the French inspired insurrection that they had spent the entire Fifth Congress preparing to repel. As a result, neither President Adams nor his Hamiltonian advisers bothered to investigate the need for military force before applying it. Four days after the rescue, on March 11, John Fenno, Jr.'s Gazette of the United States broke the story to Philadelphians, warning readers that this insurgence was more dangerous and more formidable than the western insurrection five years earlier. Fenno reported that "a most rebellious disposition pervades the whole county of Northampton, insomuch as no man dare avow his attachment to government; and that a sentiment of hostility to France jeopardizes his life.... These disturbances are related directly to the political posture between this country and France."l The next day William Cobbett's Porcupine's Gazette warned that "If the Provisional Army be not ratified without delay, a civil war or surrender of Independence, is not more than twelve month's distant."2 The following week the New York Daily Advertiser charged that the cause of the "mania insurrection ... is Jacobin Resolves, and the inflammatoryand seditious movements of the French Party in the United States."3 Repression 143 A few days later the Philadelphia Gazette charged that the "Chiefs of the Northampton Insurrection already begin to imitate their revolutionary brethren in other parts of the world.... About the same time that a pair of emissaries arrived at Charleston from the French Directory, the sans culottes of Northampton raised the standard of rebellion. There is a singular coincidence in the schemes of these miscreants."4 A week later Cobbett added that "merely to quell such an insurrection as this will answer but little purpose. It is a weed that has poisoned the soil, to crop off the stalk will only enable it to spring up again and to send out a hundred shoots instead of one. It must be torn up by the root."s A reporter in Trenton, New Jersey, worried «that the spirit of disaffection to the Federal Government ... is spreading itself into the northern part of this state, bordering on Northampton County."6 And on March 23, the New York Daily Advertiser alerted its subscribers that the rebels remained at large, and that «some of them [are] now on the way to this city!"? The Federalist press succeeded in fanning the sparks of resistance into the flames of rebellion for the imaginations of its partisan readers. News of the rescue also shocked John Adams. Marshal William Nichols had made his way back to Philadelphia by Sunday, March 10, and had reported to Judge Peters that the prisoners had been stolen by «an armed force consisting of fifty horsemen, some in their military uniform, and as many foot." He mentioned nothing of Fries's reassurances that they intended no harm to himself or his deputies. Nichols merely shrugged his shoulders before the judge and explained that «the violence of the ARMED FORCE was not to be resisted ."8 Finally, he added, «I am well satisfied ... that the laws of the United States cannot be executed by the officers of the Government, throughout the county of Northampton, without military aid; the people are determined to resist; they calculate largely on their strength in this State, and the aid they will have from the neighboring States, and particularly that of Virginia." Judge Peters relayed the information to President Adams on March 11. Peters reported to Secretary of State Timothy Pickering that «a daring combination, and treasonable opposition to the laws of the United States" had occurred in Northampton County and...

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