| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Fries's Rebellion: The Enduring Struggle for the American Revolution. By Paul Douglas Newman. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. xii, 259 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8122-3815-X.)
Paul Douglas Newman has given us the best book yet on the so-called Fries rebellion, a 1799 uprising in the German-speaking counties of eastern Pennsylvania. The direct cause of the uprising was a federal house tax that induced many German farmers to chase federal assessors from their neighborhoods. The highlight of the protest was the march of approximately four hundred armed men to the town of Bethlehem to free prisoners whom a federal marshal had arrested for tax resistance. The jail break prompted President John Adams to call out an army to put down what he called an insurrection.	1
Newman provides a thorough and frequently gripping narrative of the resistance and its aftermath. He recounts the rural protests with verve, offers an insightful analysis of the Federalist response, and gives a dramatic blow-by-blow account of the trials of John Fries. Newman places the insurgency in wide-ranging contexts that span religious beliefs, economic hardship, and the conflict with France at the close of the eighteenth century. Most important, he shows that the protests involved a great deal more than the antitax sentiment or the provincial fear of centralized government that historians usually identify as the protesters' primary motives.	. . .

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