Rebellions

From early colonial times foreign observers have marveled at the richness of the American environment, the absence of the extreme social and economic distinctions that existed in Europe, and the opportunities for advancement available to ordinary people. Yet at various times, numbers of Americans have been so dissatisfied with their lot that they have even taken up arms in an effort to improve it.

During the colonial period settlers in frontier districts were often at odds with eastern-dominated governments over Indian policy. The best-known example is Bacon's Rebellion, which erupted in Virginia in 1676. The Virginia House of Burgesses was dominated by the royal governor, Sir William Berkeley, and the Tidewater planters who supported him. Planters in the western part of the colony resented the uppity attitude of the easterners, but their main grievances were their lack of equal representation in the Burgesses and the refusal of the government to help them kill Indians. Led by Nathaniel Bacon, they organized a small army and murdered some inoffensive local Indians. Then they headed east, burned Jamestown, and forced Berkeley to flee across Chesapeake Bay to the safety of the Northern Neck. Before the year was out, however, Bacon died of "the flux," and when a contingent of Redcoats arrived from England, the rebellion collapsed.

A similar uprising occurred in 1763 in Pennsylvania, when westerners known as the Paxton Boys, angered by Indian attacks that the Quaker-dominated legislature, safe in Philadelphia, refused to do anything about, marched on that city. But no actual rebellion took place. The Boys disbanded peacefully when a delegation headed by Benjamin Franklin promised that the legislature would place a bounty on Indian scalps.

These were democratic protests in the sense that the westerners were not fairly represented in the Virginia and Pennsylvania legislatures. A few years later a more serious conflict known as the Regulator War broke out in North Carolina. Again, eastern domination of the legislature was the primary cause. The protesters, known as "regulators," committed many local acts of violence while protesting against high taxes and other forms of legislative mistreatment. In 1771 the governor, William Tryon, sent more than a thousand militia west. They routed two thousand regulators at the Battle of the Almance. The leading regulators were then executed and the movement collapsed.

Despite its democratizing aspects, the American Revolution did not put an end to conflicts of this type. The Dorr Rebellion of 1841-1842 in Rhode Island was a protest against that state's antediluvian constitution, which disfranchised roughly half the adult males. An extralegal convention organized by Thomas Dorr drafted a new constitution, which was ratified overwhelmingly in an equally unofficial election. The legal governor then called up the state militia, and after a few minor clashes, the Dorrites gave up. Dorr was sentenced to life imprisonment but was soon released.

Another type of rebellion involved minorities resisting particular economic policies of the majority. Shays' Rebellion (1786-1787), the best known of these, was an uprising by Massachusetts farmers protesting strict foreclosure laws and high taxes. In itself it was a mere flurry--in Jefferson's famous phrase, "a little rebellion." When confronted by militia, Daniel Shays and his followers fled the state. But their use of force to prevent foreclosures and their demand for the large-scale printing of paper money to ease their debt problems frightened conservatives in all the states and had much to do with the calling of the convention that drafted the Constitution. In a way this reaction to Shays' Rebellion reflected a new public attitude. Because of the Revolution, "the people" now ruled. Therefore extralegal activities were illegitimate and those who rebelled against the people's government were traitors of a sort.

The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, a protest against a tax on whiskey imposed by Congress, provides a better example. Farmers in western Pennsylvania were accustomed to distilling much of the grain they raised into liquor because corn and rye were too bulky to be transported long distances; the new tax hit them hard in the pocketbook. President George Washington, however, raised an enormous force (larger than any army he had commanded during the Revolution), and the "rebels" quickly dispersed.

In 1799 John Fries, a militia captain who had helped overawe the Whiskey rebels, found himself on the other side of the fence. Once again a federal tax (this one on property) was the reason. Fries and his followers chased a few assessors out of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, but federal troops easily put an end to their activities. Fries was captured, tried, and sentenced to death for treason, but President John Adams pardoned him.

The so-called Anti-Rent War in New York's Hudson Valley was another rebellion of this type. It began in 1839 when the heirs of Stephen Van Rensselaer set out to collect $400,000 in "rent" owed him by several thousand farmers. The rents were feudal-like obligations based on a seventeenth-century charter granted to Van Rensselaer's great-great-great-grandfather. When the Van Rensselaer heirs instituted foreclosure proceedings, "debtors," who insisted that they were freeholders, not tenants, reacted so violently that the militia had to be summoned. Later, in 1844, a legislative committee determined that the rents were legal. Because of the resulting uproar, martial law was declared again, but the farmers held on to their lands. Finally, in 1846, a new state constitution formally abolished the old feudal obligations.

Northerners at the time of the Civil War called it "the war of the rebellion," but from the southern point of view secession was a legal way of separating from the United States, not a rebellion at all. On the other hand, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in October 1859 was rebellious both in fact and in intent. Brown believed that by seizing the government arsenal at Harpers Ferry and commandeering its weapons he could arm the local slaves (whom he expected to rush forward to join him) and eventually invade the South and put an end to slavery. The Civil War draft riots, the most important of which occurred in New York City in July 1863, were violent protests against conscription, with powerful overtones of negrophobia, but they were brief explosions, probably not organized efforts to force the government to change the law. This was less true of the socialist-led Green Corn Rebellion in Oklahoma against the 1917 conscription act. In August of that year a group of German-Americans, blacks, and Indians rallied behind the slogan "Now is the time to rebel against this war with Germany." Although they dispersed quickly when confronted by an angry posse, some were arrested and sent to prison.

Most Indian rebellions--Pontiac's "conspiracy" of 1763-1766 and Tecumseh's confederacy of 1811 are examples--were really wars. The Indians were seeking to drive the whites out of their homelands, not demanding changes in systems of which they were a part. The Indian "wars" of the post-Civil War era were, however, more rebellions against the policies of the federal government than true wars, and after the passage of the Dawes Act of 1887, expelling the whites or even obtaining true sovereignty in limited areas was no longer a viable objective for the tribes.

Slave uprisings--Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion being the best known and bloodiest--were desperate protests aimed at punishing particular oppressors, and only indirectly attempts to abolish the institution. The efforts of American slaves to obtain their freedom were largely individual attempts to escape; no large-scale slave social revolution, such as Toussaint-L'Ouverture's uprising in Haiti, took place in the United States. Nevertheless, slave uprisings were ruthlessly repressed when they occurred, and even when they did not. Nat Turner and some twenty of his followers were executed because of their rebellion, but they had slaughtered fifty-seven whites. When an 1822 uprising planned by Denmark Vesey, a South Carolina black who had managed to purchase his freedom, was betrayed before it could be carried out, Vesey and thirty-five other blacks were nonetheless executed.

Today's rebels usually seek to discommode rather than actually overpower their oppressors. Such is the force available to modern authorities that armed resistance is not a viable alternative. When organized violence has erupted it has been begun by the authorities, as when Gen. Douglas MacArthur used federal troops to disperse the Bonus Marchers in Washington in 1932. The infamous Chicago police riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention is another example. Race riots, such as the six-day uprising in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965 and the havoc wreaked by blacks in Washington, Detroit, and a dozen other cities after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., have produced violence aplenty. But these outbursts were spontaneous and undirected, although the underlying causes of black discontent were real and plain to see.

Author:

John A. Garraty

See also Bacon's Rebellion; Brown, John; Draft Riots; Indians; Leisler's Rebellion; Shays' Rebellion; Slavery.