"
A few weeks later he issued a proclamation, declaring formally and
publicly what he had already said in private. He warned the people
engaged in resistance to the law that the law would be enforced, and
exhorted them to desist. The proclamation was effective in the south,
and the opposition died out in North Carolina. Not so in Pennsylvania.
There the Scotch-Irish borderers who lived in the western counties
were bent on having their way. A brave, self-willed, hotheaded,
turbulent people, they were going to have their fight out. They
had ridden rough-shod over the Quaker and German government in
Pennsylvania before this, and they no doubt thought they could do the
same with this new government of the United States. They merely made a
mistake about the man at the head of the government; nothing more than
that. Such mistakes have been made before. The Paris mob, for example,
made a similar blunder on the 13th Vendemiaire, when Bonaparte settled
matters by the famous whiff of grape-shot. There is some excuse for
the error of our Scotch-Irish borderers in their past experience, more
excuse still in the drift of other events that touched all men just
then with the madness of France, and gave birth to certain democratic
societies which applauded any resistance to law, even if the cause was
no nobler than a whiskey still.
Perhaps, too, the Pennsylvanians were encouraged by the moderation
and deliberate movement of the government. A lull came after the
proclamation of 1792.
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