In 1798 and 1799, several communities in eastern Pennsylvania mounted an armed challenge to federal taxation.
The Fries Rebellion (pronounced “freeze”) was the third of three important tax revolts in the 1780s and 1790s. The first two — Shays’s Rebellion of 1786-1787 and the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791-1794 — are better known. Both involved some actual bloodshed, which probably accounts for their relative fame.
By contrast, the Fries Rebellion was less violent and more performative. But it was still important, at least politically. While President John Adams crushed it quickly and decisively, his actions cost him dearly in the pivotal election of 1800 — and may have led to the demise of the nation’s first organized political party, the Federalists.
The story of the Fries Rebellion begins with something unusual in American history: a federal property tax. Unknown since the Civil War, this sort of “direct” tax was more common in the early years of American nationhood. Indeed, Congress imposed federal property taxes in both 1798 and 1813 — both times in response to a national security crisis.
The founders had anticipated the need for such a tax, especially in wartime. The Constitution granted the new federal government power to impose both “direct” and “indirect” taxes. Everyone understood that the latter included both excise taxes and tariff duties, and most anticipated that these levies would be the principal sources of federal revenue.
Direct Taxes?
But direct taxes were something altogether different, although it’s hard to say exactly how they could be distinguished from indirect levies. As the historian Nicholas R. Parrillo has observed, the “direct” adjective described “a category whose boundaries were elusive and contested.” There are good reasons why people are still arguing about the meaning of this term even today: Its definition has been uncertain from the start.
Still, leaders of the founding generation broadly agreed that direct taxes included levies on both land and buildings. In addition, most believed that taxes on slave ownership were also direct.
Throughout most of the 1790s, federal lawmakers declined to impose direct taxes of any sort. Their reluctance was understandable, given the unhappy history of state-level property taxes. “These state direct taxes of the 1780s proved to be disastrous politically,” Parrillo has explained. “In contrast to import duties and excises — which were paid by cash — and credit-rich merchants and manufacturers who made up a tiny fraction of the population, direct taxes required officials to assess and extract payment from the great mass of ordinary farmers, who often had little access to cash or credit and thus found payment to be a hardship.”
Tariffs and excise levies proved adequate for federal needs — until they didn’t. In 1796 the nascent United States found itself drifting toward a “Quasi War” with France, and by 1798 formal hostilities seemed imminent. Congress responded by ramping up military spending — and casting about for some way to fund it.
After a long and sometimes contentious debate, Congress imposed a new federal property tax. Levied on both real estate and slave ownership, its $2 million revenue target was apportioned among the states, as required by the Constitution.
The law taxed buildings worth more than $100 at progressive rates ranging from 0.2 to 1 percent of total value. Slave owners were required to pay 50 cents for each healthy enslaved person between the ages of 12 and 50. Finally, the law taxed “land” (a category defined to include buildings worth less than $100) at a rate that varied by state.
As Parrillo has explained, the law treated the tax on land as a residual. Each state’s quota would fall “first on the state’s slaveholders at fifty cents per enslaved person, then on the state’s house-owners according to a progressive rate on the value of their houses.” The remainder would be collected from each state’s landowners “at whatever flat rate on the value of land proved necessary to make up the remainder of the state’s quota.” (For more details on the 1798 tax, see prior analysis: Tax Notes Federal, Nov. 25, 2019, p. 1264.)
Problems in Pennsylvania
Pennsylvanians had already revealed themselves to be touchy about federal tax obligations. The famous Whiskey Rebellion ended when President George Washington led federal troops into the state’s western regions, but that heavy-handed response didn’t stop eastern Pennsylvanians from mounting a similar challenge to federal taxation just four years later.
Pennsylvania’s apportioned share of the 1798 property tax came to $237,177.72. Since the state had few slave owners, most of that sum had to be raised from taxes on land and buildings. Federal officials recruited tax assessors in the state, but not all were local to the regions where they operated. That was notably the case in Bucks, Northampton, and Montgomery counties, all located close to Philadelphia.
Each of these counties had a large number of German-speaking immigrants. The new federal tax assessors, in contrast, were often Quakers or Moravians. The resulting social tension and language difficulties opened the door to conflict. And since assessors were charged (then as now) with an inherently subjective task, there was ample room for suspicion.
Congress approved the new federal property tax on April 14, 1798, and almost immediately, Pennsylvanians started complaining about it. Community organizers convened a series of meetings and public protests, many featuring the erection of “liberty poles.” These symbolic props had featured prominently in colonial protests against British rule of the American colonies. After independence, they remained a potent symbol of political freedom and resistance to oppression. Indeed, liberty poles had been popular during the Whiskey Rebellion. (More recently, they have inspired local whiskey production in those same western regions of Pennsylvania.)
The tax protests of late 1798 gave critics a chance to voice their unhappiness with the new property tax. Initially, resistance was mostly rhetorical and for show, with disgruntled residents gathering to air their grievances in public and private meetings.
But the newly appointed tax assessors were also starting to feel the heat. In the eastern counties near Philadelphia, they faced a rising tide of verbal threats and physical intimidation. Sometimes, the threats were even a bit theatrical. In a bid to systematize the valuation of buildings, assessors were known to count the size and number of windows in a structure. Residents in these structures (often women) would sometimes appear in those windows and dump scalding water on the unhappy officials. This unusual form of protest led some wags to describe the yearlong protest as the “Hot Water War.”
Things got even more heated in the cold days of January 1799. As historian Terry Bouton has recounted, an assessor in Bucks County found himself facing a hostile crowd. “We will have liberty!” people shouted in both German and English. “The crowd then ‘damned the house tax’ and other federal revenue laws,” Bouton wrote. “They ‘damned the Congress, and damned the President and all the friends to government because they were all Tories.’ They stated that they were ‘determined to oppose the laws’ because the government was ‘laying one thing after another and if we do not oppose it they will bring us into bondage and slavery.’”
John Fries, a local auctioneer, added his own overheated rhetoric to the event. “If we let them go on,” he warned the crowd, “things would be as in France,” an unhappy place where people were “as poor as snakes.”
Seven Swords
The Bucks County protest was just one of many. Across southeastern Pennsylvania, critics attacked the new federal levy as unfair, excessive, and politically intolerable. Many framed their complaints in terms made famous by the recent revolution against Britain. One man in Northampton County offered seven swords to anyone willing to fight the new tax. As Bouton related in her 2000 article, “some of this man’s neighbors pledged that they would ‘rather die than submit’ to these new taxes, stating that ‘they had fought against such laws’ in the Revolution and they would fight again.”
The rhetoric grew increasingly violent and the threats more explicit. In Berks County, a crowd promised to attack any assessor or federal army that tried to collect the new tax. “They should be shot like flies because [Berks County] had ten men against the law to one who is in favor of it,” Bouton recounted.
In Philadelphia (still the nation’s capital in these early days of nationhood), federal officials were growing impatient with these nearby attempts to resist the property tax. And by late January 1799, they were done: Armed with a slew of arrest warrants, U.S. Marshal William Nichols left the city in late February with a plan to detain the ringleaders.
Nichols arrived in Northampton County on March 1, 1799, and started making arrests. On March 6 he left the county with his prisoners and headed to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he had established a temporary jail at the Sun Inn.
The following day, Fries led several hundred armed men to confront Nichols in Bethlehem. Determined to free the prisoners or at least guarantee that they would be tried locally, Fries intimidated the marshal into releasing the men he had detained.
Adams (Over) Reacts
Back in Philadelphia, President Adams reacted quickly to the events in Bethlehem. On March 12 he issued a proclamation, instructing the protesters “before Monday next, being the 18th day of this present month, to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes.”
The rebels complied, but Adams had already set bigger forces in motion. The protesters, Adams declared in his proclamation, had perpetrated “certain acts which I am advised amount to treason, being overt acts of levying war against the United States.” Fries and his followers had been “armed and arrayed in a warlike manner,” which demanded a military response from federal officials.
“It is in my judgment necessary to call forth military force,” Adams wrote, citing his “solemn conviction that the essential interests of the United States demand it.” On March 22 a local Philadelphia newspaper printed a notice from Secretary of War James McHenry instructing the Pennsylvania militia to assemble. Troops left the city on April 4, determined to arrest the rebels and suppress further rebellion.
Federal soldiers soon located and arrested 31 of the most prominent rebels, including Fries. The prisoners were transported to Philadelphia, where they faced trial in federal court.
Fries and two others were charged with treason, using a broad definition of the crime first developed in response to the Whiskey Rebellion. As historian Patrick Grubbs has explained, the lead prosecutor, William Rawle, had argued in 1795 that “combining to defeat or resist a federal law was the equivalent of levying war against the United States and therefore was an act of treason.”
Fries’s trial began on April 30, and on May 9 he was convicted and sentenced to death. Within a week, officials declared a mistrial, citing evidence that at least one juror had been biased against the defendant.
In April 1800 Fries was tried for a second time. This time, proceedings were supervised (in part) by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase. In a capsule biography, the Federal Judicial Center has described Chase as “an ardent Federalist supporter,” famous for his “open partisanship both on and off the bench.” That partisanship would play an important role in shaping Fries’s fate.
Chase lent more than his prestige to the Fries trial. He also issued a ruling upholding the broad definition of treason that had been used to charge Fries and his fellow ringleaders. (That ruling featured in Chase’s subsequent impeachment by the House of Representatives. He was eventually acquitted by the Senate, helping establish the high bar for conviction in later impeachment proceedings throughout U.S. history.)
On May 23, 1800, Fries was convicted a second time, and he was again sentenced to hang. But Adams had already decided to pardon everyone involved in the rebellion. In fact, on May 21 he had issued a general amnesty for “sundry persons” involved in “the late wicked and treasonable insurrection against the just authority of the United States.”
Presidential Preening
Adams used the pardon as an opportunity to congratulate himself on his wise handling of the rebellion. Further punishment and prosecution were unnecessary, he wrote, since the challenge to federal authority had been “speedily suppressed without any of the calamities usually attending rebellion.” Thanks to his own swift and decisive action, “peace, order, and submission to the laws of the United States were restored in the aforesaid counties, and the ignorant, misguided, and misinformed in the counties have returned to a proper sense of their duty.”
Adams’s exercise in self-congratulation was probably designed to defuse his brewing political problems. Many of his fellow Federalists were unhappy with his decision to pardon the offenders; Alexander Hamilton, in particular, was outraged, describing the pardon as the “most inexplicable part of Mr. Adams’ conduct.”
As Grubbs has observed, the pardon controversy helped divide the Federalists at precisely the wrong moment. The party was facing a strong challenge in the 1800 election from Thomas Jefferson and his nascent Republican Party; the Federalists desperately needed to present a united front if they hoped to stave off disaster.
But the Federalists were a fractious bunch, and their internal squabbles — including over the Fries pardon — played a key role in the 1800 defeat.
At the same time, the Federalists’ muscular response to the Fries Rebellion had alienated crucial voters in Pennsylvania, almost certainly costing the party crucial votes in the electoral college. The loss in 1800 did not mark the immediate end of the Federalist Party, but it was a turning point in its march to electoral oblivion.
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