From the standpoint of the Union it was also fortunate that a military man was President. Those who criticised the choice for the Presidency of a man with military experience but no civic training, and those who deplore a custom so frequently repeated since, may find here some benefits arising from having a man with such an education. "I have no hesitation in declaring," replied Washington to Secretary Hamilton, when notified of the resistance manifested in western Pennsylvania to the revenue officers, "that I shall, however reluctantly exercising them, exert all the legal powers with which the executive is invested to check so daring and unwarrantable a spirit. It is my duty to see the laws executed." Very carefully the soldier-President felt his way through his civic powers of coercion before using his military authority in this first of several cases of preserving the Union against insurrection. There was absolutely no precedent for the coercion of citizens by the National Government. The Federal courts had not yet come into conflict with any considerable number of citizens of a State. But they extended as a judicial network over the whole national domain. They covered every inhabitant. To them Washington turned first. Although Attorney-General Knox decided that the insurgent meetings were not illegal, several rioters were fined by the United States Circuit Court, special sessions of which were held in Pennsylvania.
The President showed his appreciation of the delicate adjustment between State and national authority by consulting the Governor of Pennsylvania at every step. If the State at this formative hour had possessed an executive confident in himself and in his ability to suppress the disorder, he might have done a lasting service to the preservation of the supremacy of the States and forestalled the prestige which the Central Government was bound to obtain from its leadership in this crisis. But Governor Mifflin was content to support the national authority, claiming that the militia of his State was inadequate to the emergency.
In the summer of 1794, the disorder broke out afresh, extending to the spoliation of the United States mail. The National Government dared hesitate no longer. Hamilton, by private letters and public reports, urged the President incessantly to action. His unusual foresight saw the opportunity for strengthening the nation. Weakness in the written Constitution might here be remedied by the precedent of strong action under it. At last a Federal judge of Pennsylvania notified the President that the laws could no longer be enforced in his district. Washington immediately issued the required proclamation of warning, which had been penned by Hamilton. Five weeks later, the Chief Executive called upon the governors of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia for militia and issued a second proclamation commanding peace. He based this action on the constitutional provision requiring the Executive to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
The seat of the National Government being at Philadelphia, near the rendezvous of the militia, enabled the President to place himself at the head of the militia. No later President has interpreted so literally his office as commander-in-chief of the army. As he reached Bedford, Fort Cumberland, and other scenes of his campaigns against the French a half-century before, he must have compared that errand with his present one. Then he was saving helpless colonists from a foreign foe; now he was preserving a government from its own constituents.
"No citizens of the United States," he wrote to Governor Lee, of Virginia, when leaving him at the head of the militia in order to return to Philadelphia for the opening of Congress, "can ever be engaged in a service more important to their country. It is nothing less than to consolidate and to preserve the blessings of that revolution, which, at much expense of blood and treasure, constituted us a free and independent nation."
It was also fortunate that Washington had passed through some instructive experience in Revolutionary days on the disadvantages of an insufficient military force. To put down the small body of insurgents in the western borders of Pennsylvania he called for almost thirteen thousand militiamen. To a delegation of the insurgents who met him on the way to complain of such an armed force coming to conquer them, Washington replied that although we had made a republican form of government and enacted laws under it, yet we had given no testimony to the world of being able or willing to support our Government; that, this being the first instance of the kind since the commencement of the Government, he thought it his duty to bring out such a force as would not only be sufficient to subdue the insurgents if they made resistance, but to crush to atoms all opposition that might arise in any quarter.
Washington foresaw the effects of using the military power in behalf of the Union. "The most delicate and momentous duty the chief magistrate of a free people can have to perform," he called it. Early in the excise resistance he had declared that the Government must not use the regular troops if order could possibly be effected without this aid. "Otherwise," said he, "there would be a cry at once, 'The cat is let out; we now see for what purpose an army was raised!'" But individualistic spirits who were alarmed at this new distortion of the Government toward centralisation feared the results of using even the militia. Jefferson, having resigned his secretaryship and seeing the unusually prominent part assumed by Hamilton in the expedition, protested from his retirement at Monticello against such "employment of military force for civil purposes." To his mind the disorder was simply a riot and not an insurrection. "Yet it answered the purpose," said he, "of strengthening the government and increasing public debt and therefore an insurrection was announced." To Madison he declared: "The excise law is an infernal one. The first error was to admit it to the Constitution; the second, to act on that admission; the third and last will be to make it the instrument of dismembering the Union." Madison, who had at first looked upon the suppression of the insurrection as an electioneering scheme, thought it fortunate for the lovers of liberty that the movement was so easily crushed, since otherwise the principle would have been established that a standing army was necessary to enforce the Federal laws. "I am extremely sorry to remark," he wrote to Monroe during the ensuing session of Congress, "a growing apathy to the evil and danger of standing armies." This remark was brought out by the failure of the minority, with which Madison had now fully allied himself, to restrict the use hereafter of any militia to its own State. A "Federal army," the bugaboo of the opposition, had been brought into existence by this unwarranted use of the militia. Seven acts placing the military power of the United States on a permanent basis and giving the Central Government efficient control were passed at this session of 1795, the first fruits of the Western rebellion to be reaped by the Union. Madison accounted for this legislation by the influence of the Chief Executive and the confidence of the people that he would not abuse the power. What later Presidents might do could not be foreseen.
Outside the disaffected districts and with the exception of a few alarmed leaders like Jefferson and Madison, the people undoubtedly sustained Washington in his firm action against rebellion. An ode written for the birthday of the President in 1796 contains an allusion to his influence in suppressing the insurrection:
"When o'er the western mountain's brow,
Sedition rear'd her impious head,
And Tumult wild his legions led,
Serenely great, the Patriot rose.—
Yet in his breast conflicting throes
Of mercy check'd the impending blows.
"He view'd them with a father's eye,
Dimmed by thy tear, Humanity!
Reluctant Justice half unsheathed the sword.
Scar'd at the awful Sight,
Sedition shrunk in realms of night,
And Order saw her peaceful reign restored."