Why populism and parties terrified George Washington

The People Are Revolting!

By ALAN PELL CRAWFORD

James Madison called it “perhaps the greatest error” of George Washington’s “political life.” That he committed so few makes Washington’s speech of November 19, 1794, memorable in itself.

His words that day—his Sixth Annual Address to Congress—are all but forgotten now, which is unfortunate. There ought to be a yearly commemoration, to remind us how our political elites, from the republic’s earliest days, have regarded anyone who presumes to challenge their wisdom and probity.

The context of the speech was the so-called Whiskey Rebellion, when the 62-year-old president squeezed himself back into his old military uniform and, at the head of 13,000 troops, rode into western Pennsylvania. There Washington was prepared to fire into a gaggle of back-country tax-resisters who objected to the new federal excise on distilled spirits. Washington resented being put into that position and did not want to be provoked by such insolence ever again.

Washington and Treasury Secretary Hamilton, riding with the president as a civilian advisor, had been prepared to wage war on their own countrymen in the interests of federal supremacy. As troubling as this episode was, the speech that followed and the thinking behind Washington’s remarks made it more worrisome still. Washington said he was forced to use the troops because “certain self-created societies” had “assumed a tone of condemnation” against the tax and therefore against the government itself.

The leaders of these “self-created societies” were encouraging something far more dangerous than opposition to a specific policy, Washington claimed: they were inciting a “spirit, inimical to all order,” violating “the fundamental principle of our constitution, which enjoins that the will of the majority shall prevail.” To put down this mischief, “to reclaim the deluded,” it would be necessary to station “a small force for a certain period” until cooler heads prevailed and the troublesome farmers went back to their plows.

Few of Washington’s contemporaries—including his critics, who by this time included Thomas Jefferson and James Madison—questioned the need to enforce the law, make sure the taxes were collected, and put a swift end to the spasms of violence that accompanied the protests. What stuck in the craw was the reference to “self-created societies.” Implicit in it was the notion, largely accepted by those around Washington, that there was something unconstitutional, and in fact subversive, in ordinary citizens banding together to express their disapproval of the national government’s policies. Such organizations, they believed, even when they did not incite violence, should be discouraged and destroyed.

In the judgment of historians, Washington’s response to the Whiskey Rebellion was restrained. The rebels dispersed, and when two ringleaders were tried for treason and sentenced to death Washington issued pardons. The controversies stirred up by the speech, however, were not put to rest, and efforts to discredit the “self-created societies” that supposedly had whipped up the anti-tax fury were only beginning. In the campaign against them—and in the attitudes of Washington, Hamilton, and those we today regard as the founders of the Federalist Party—we can read the dog-eared playbook on which the political class still relies.

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Who were these “self-created societies” that worried Washington so? Their names varied, depending on their location, but for convenience they are known today as the Democratic-Republican Societies or clubs. They first appeared around 1793 in response to a cluster of concerns, only one of which was the whiskey tax. Before the last petered out in 1800, there were at most about 40 of them, from Maine to Georgia. The Democratic Society of Pennsylvania, the country’s largest, could count about 315 members at its peak, but most had some 20 or 25.

One of the larger issues that brought them into existence was the Washington administration’s tilt toward Great Britain in her war with France, when large numbers of Americans still revered the French for supporting our War of Independence and looked on the French Revolution as a continuation of our own. Because of this, they were regarded by Washington, Hamilton, and Chief Justice John Jay, among others, as agents of revolutionary France. This requires some explaining because the political culture of the Federalist Era makes little sense otherwise.

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