The Federalists may have been the only major party in American history forthrightly to proclaim democracy and freedom dangerous in the hands of ordinary citizens. The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, which broke out when backcountry Pennsylvania farmers sought to block collection of the new tax on distilled spirits, reinforced this conviction.
A 1794 painting by the Baltimore artist and sign painter Frederick Kemmelmayer depicting President George Washington as commander-in-chief of the army dispatched to put down the Whiskey Rebellion.
The “rebels” invoked the symbols of 1776, displaying liberty poles and banners reading “Liberty or Death.” “The citizens of the western country,” one group wrote to the president, “consider [the tax] as repugnant to liberty, [and] an invasion of those privileges which the revolution bestowed upon them.” But Washington dispatched 13,000 militiamen to western Pennsylvania (a larger force than he had commanded during the Revolution). He accompanied them part of the way to the scene of the disturbances, the only time in American history that the president has actually commanded an army in the field. The “rebels” offered no resistance. His vigorous response, Washington wrote, was motivated in part by concern for “the impression” the restoration of public order “will make on others”—the “others” being Europeans who did not believe the American experiment in self-government could survive.