A Exciseman, 1792 (Courtesy Atwater Kent Museum)

IN “The Anti-Federalist Papers,” a series of essays against ratification of the U.S. Constitution that appeared in newspapers in 1787-88, the pseudonymous author Brutus argued that the proposed federal government was by definition despotic: It “will penetrate into the most obscure cottage, and finally, it will light upon the head of every person in the United States. To all these different classes of people, and in all these circumstances, in which it will attend them, the language in which it will address them, will be GIVE! GIVE!”

The current conflict between Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who refuses to pay for grazing rights on federal land and has been widely hailed as a freedom fighter and patriot, seems to confirm Brutus’s point.

Defenders of Bundy decry the government overreach they say underlies the grazing fees. But this alleged overreach is commonly seen as something that violates the American order. But does it? Consider the Whiskey Rebellion. George Washington raised an army of more than 12,000 soldiers to quash a rebellion that is similar in its complaints to the one by Bundy against the Bureau of Land Management. Washington’s army confronted and overcame whiskey distillers and their supporters in Western Pennsylvania.  The small-time distillers refused to pay federal excise taxes, which they said were making it impossible for them to do business and compete with large distilleries, who could pay a much less onerous flat fee.

Washington declared resistance by the rebels, who at one point raised a force of 7,000, as constituting “treasonable acts.” Ironically, these acts of treason were similar to those committed by the American Revolutionaries against the British. In his paper, “The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794: A Democratic Working-Class Insurrection,” (as quoted in Christopher Ferrara’s book Liberty, the God that Failed), Wythe Holt wrote that the tax rebels “were amazed that the Washington administration wanted to hang them for the same sort of actions which had been praiseworthy and heroic a short time before, while Hamilton and Washington never seemed to notice this deadly irony.”

Bundy also was born too late. He would have made a great revolutionary against the British — and would have had a better chance of success. British authority at least was not obscured beneath the mantle of Liberty.

— Comments —-

Stuart writes:

I’m a non-American who is interested in American history but don’t have an in-depth knowledge of the subject.

A question if you wish to oblige; what if the revolutionary war had never happened and the British had remained in power?

Would a more peaceful transition to independence have been possible such as in Canada, Australia and New Zealand?

I realize 1700s America was a different place in many ways but were the British that bad?

 Laura writes:

British rule was not anywhere near as bad as the revolutionaries made it out to be. The worst effect of the American Revolution was, as Ferrara argues, its idolatry of liberty as an end in itself, a mythos which was the foundation of the American government and the modern secular state. Americans have great difficulty believing they are anything but the golden beneficiaries of freedom. It’s really the most brilliant of formulas for progressively enslaving a people. Talk of freedom, freedom, freedom. Paint a golden future liberated from the shackles of the past. Pretend the democratic vote actually means something. Here is a quote from an interview with Ferrara, whose book has some serious weaknesses when it comes to the Civil War but is excellent on its central subject:

One of the things that’s interesting is, the admissions of John Adams toward the end of his life about what in fact he knew he had unleashed, and I quote him, where he says to Benjamin Rush, one of the second-rank founders and a very prominent one, “Have I not been employed in mischief all my days? Did not the American Revolution produce the French Revolution? And did not the French Revolution produce all the calamities and desolations to the human race and the whole globe ever since?”

Adams knew what was happening. He knew that this engine of government unrestrained by divine and natural law principles, unrestrained even by the limits that effected and limited the powers of monarchs, was going to cause calamity throughout the world. Elsewhere in the book, I talk about how he in his correspondence with Jefferson admitted that oceans and rivers of blood would have to be let loose before government on the basis of what he called rational principles could be established. In other words, there would have to be bloody revolutions in Europe, certainly in France, to destroy the Catholic social order that stood in the way of this brave new world we’re living in today.

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