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Book Review
| Paul Douglas Newman, Fries's Rebellion: The Enduring Struggle for the American Revolution, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Pp. xii + 259. $23.96 cloth (ISBN 0–8122–3815-X); $15.96 paper (ISBN 0–8122–1920–1).
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| The so-called "Fries's Rebellion" broke out in eastern Pennsylvania in 1799, in response to the first federal property tax that Congress had enacted a year earlier. Led by a German-American auctioneer named John Fries, armed resisters harassed and threatened federal tax assessors and successfully demanded the release of federal prisoners from the custody of a federal marshal. For these acts, Fries was twice tried for treason by levying war against the United States. |
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Fries's Rebellion is remembered now, if at all, not for its own sake, but for its effect on the careers of Justice Samuel Chase and President John Adams. At the second trial, Chase issued a pre-trial ruling holding that forcible resistance for public purposes to a particular law of the United States constituted treason. Chase's refusal to permit Fries's attorneys to argue this point to the jury would form one of the primary charges against him in his 1805 impeachment trial. President Adams subsequently pardoned Fries, concluding that his actions did not amount to treason. This pardon was contrary to the unanimous advice of Adams's cabinet and furthered the rift between Adams and the Hamiltonian wing of the Federalist Party. |
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Newman's study is the first book-length treatment of Fries's Rebellion since 1899, when William Davis published The Fries Rebellion. Newman argues that the resisters deserve study in their own right, contending that they were heirs to a revolutionary tradition of "popular constitutionalism" (10). Although President Adams dismissed the resisters as "miserable Germans ... as ignorant of our language as they were of our laws" (183), Newman demonstrates that they were highly literate and, indeed, repeatedly cited provisions of the United States Constitution in support of their actions. He argues that the resisters did not engage in significant interpersonal violence and sought only the non-enforcement of a particular law, not the overthrow of the United States government more generally. As Newman puts it, the resisters sought "to expand the role of the people within the political system, as they understood it, rather than attacking it from outside" (x). Newman's book is thus a natural sequel to Thomas Slaughter's The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (1986), which similarly sought to situate a rebellious group within a continuing dialogue over the meaning of the Revolution. |
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If Newman occasionally veers into a gauzy romanticism of the resisters, his historical spadework is nonetheless highly impressive. His reconstruction of the social, economic, ethnic, and religious demographics of the resisters is subtle and nuanced, and he carefully avoids monolithic explanations of their motives. He also does an excellent job in placing the Rebellion in the context of the frenzied political atmosphere of the late 1790s, even when discussing the viewpoints of the high Federalists, with whom he obviously disagrees. |
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Legal historians, however, will likely be disappointed with Newman's cursory treatment of the significant legal issues raised by the Fries trials. Chase's pre-trial ruling raises important questions about the evolving relationship between judge and jury in early America. There is evidence that such rulings were typical in Chase's home state of Maryland, but uncommon in Pennsylvania. Rather than explore these issues, Newman simply denounces Chase's pre-trial rulings as unjust and unfair. Similarly, his discussion of treason law would have benefited significantly from a sustained engagement with the precedents relied upon by counsel and the court, rather than a largely uncritical acceptance of the defense arguments (the chapter discussing the trials is titled "Injustice"). The court's conclusion that armed opposition to a particular federal law amounted to treason was supported by considerable English precedent and was consistent with many post-revolutionary American interpretations of "levying war." Although there were certainly strong arguments to be made on Fries's behalf, the issue is nowhere as clear-cut as Newman suggests. At times, Newman's argument also seems to confuse the issue of whether Chase's statement of the law of treason was correct with the separate question of whether Fries's actions met that standard. Other assertions seem simply overstated, such as Newman's contention that the first jury was "stacked against" Fries because it included only two jurors from Northampton County and only two who spoke German (167). Curiously, Fries's second trial was ordered only upon the discovery that a German juror from Northampton County had made inimical statements against Fries prior to the trial (173). |
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Despite these caveats, Newman makes a convincing case for studying Fries's Rebellion in its own right, rather than as a sideshow to larger events of the late 1790s. The book should remain the standard work on the subject for some time. It is also attractively illustrated with the author's photographs of extant physical structures relating to the Rebellion. |
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| Carlton F.W. Larson
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| University of California, Davis |
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