Adams Family Correspondence, volume 13
I cannot Say when I shall be able to sett out. But I shall loose no time here. When the Public Business is in such a state that I can leave it, I shall go, be the Roads as they may.— I expect bad travelling all the Way.
Truxton has indeed taken the Insurgent. But We have a silly
Insurgence in Northampton County in this state, which will detain me, I suppose, some
days1 This state is not a moral Person,
it has not Intelligence enough to make it accountable for its Actions. I have recd Thomas’s Letter, with a very entertaining Account of the
Sensation occasioned by what you call the Master Stroke.2 The Effect upon different Parties is described
so naturally that it must be true.
My Volunteers will soon compass the Disturbance in Northampton.— The Spirit in the City is very high against them.
I am as ever
RC (Adams Papers); internal address: “Mrs A.”
In the counties of Bucks, Montgomery, and Northampton, Penn., many German-speaking inhabitants opposed recent federal legislation, including the direct tax, the formation of a provisional army, the Alien and Sedition Acts, and a 1797 tax on stamped paper, for which see vol. 12:420. To articulate their opposition, inhabitants drew up petitions to Congress signed by over 3,000 people, erected liberty poles, declared they would not allow their homes to be assessed, and threatened local tax assessors. By 6 March 1799 twenty resisters of the direct tax in Northampton Co. had been arrested and transported to the Sun Tavern in Bethlehem. The next day, Capt. John Fries of Bucks Co., an auctioneer and veteran of the Revolutionary War and Whiskey Rebellion, led a group of nearly 400 armed men and unarmed resisters to the tavern, where he obtained the prisoners’ release over the objections of the arresting marshal, William Nichols. On 12 March JA issued a proclamation ordering the protesters to disperse under threat of military intervention, and on 21 March James McHenry issued orders to Gen. William MacPherson to mobilize troops to suppress the insurrection.
In all, more than ninety protesters were indicted, including
Fries, who was tried, convicted of treason, and sentenced to hang. Fries’ initial
conviction was dismissed, for which see TBA to William Smith Shaw, 29 June, and note 6,
below, but on 25 April 1800 he was again convicted and sentenced to hang. An
additional 32 people were convicted and sentenced to between two months and two years
in prison and fined between $40 and $1,000. On 21 May, however, JA
pardoned everyone involved, declaring that “the ignorant, misguided, and misinformed
in the counties, have returned to a proper sense of their duty” (Paul Douglas Newman,
“Fries’s Rebellion and American Political Culture, 1798–1800,”
PMHB
119:45, 46,
49–50, 52–58 [April 1995]; Newman,
Fries’s Rebellion
, p. 138, 166–180, 183–184;
Amer.
State Papers, Miscellaneous
, 1:187–188; JA, Works
,
9:178–179).
TBA to JA, 1 March 1799, above.