page_916 < previous page page_916 next page > Page 916 ever, Bacon died of "the flux," and when a contingent of Redcoats arrived from England, the rebellion collapsed. A similar uprising occurred in 1763 in Pennsylvania, when westerners known as the Paxton Boys, angered by Indian attacks that the Quaker-dominated legislature, safe in Philadelphia, refused to do anything about, marched on that city. But no actual rebellion took place. The Boys disbanded peacefully when a delegation headed by Benjamin Franklin promised that the legislature would place a bounty on Indian scalps. These were democratic protests in the sense that the westerners were not fairly represented in the Virginia and Pennsylvania legislatures. A few years later a more serious conflict known as the Regulator War broke out in North Carolina. Again, eastern domination of the legislature was the primary cause. The protesters, known as "regulators," committed many local acts of violence while protesting against high taxes and other forms of legislative mistreatment. In 1771 the governor, William Tryon, sent more than a thousand militia west. They routed two thousand regulators at the Battle of the Almance. The leading regulators were then executed and the movement collapsed. Despite its democratizing aspects, the American Revolution did not put an end to conflicts of this type. The Dorr Rebellion of 18411842 in Rhode Island was a protest against that state's antediluvian constitution, which disfranchised roughly half the adult males. An extralegal convention organized by Thomas Dorr drafted a new constitution, which was ratified over-whelmingly in an equally unofficial election. The legal governor then called up the state militia, and after a few minor clashes, the Dorrites gave up. Dorr was sentenced to life imprisonment but was soon released. Another type of rebellion involved minorities resisting particular economic policies of the majority. Shays' Rebellion (17861787), the best known of these, was an uprising by Massachusetts farmers protesting strict foreclosure laws and high taxes. In itself it was a mere flurry  in Jefferson's famous phrase, "a little rebellion." When confronted by militia, Daniel Shays and his followers fled the state. But their use of force to prevent foreclosures and their demand for the large-scale printing of paper money to ease their debt problems frightened conservatives in all the states and had much to do with the calling of the convention that drafted the Constitution. In a way this reaction to Shays' Rebellion reflected a new public attitude. Because of the Revolution, "the people" now ruled. Therefore extralegal activities were illegitimate and those who rebelled against the people's government were traitors of a sort. The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, a protest against a tax on whiskey imposed by Congress, provides a better example. Farmers in western Pennsylvania were accustomed to distilling much of the grain they raised into liquor because corn and rye were too bulky to be transported long distances; the new tax hit them hard in the pocketbook. President George Washington, however, raised an enormous force (larger than any army he had commanded during the Revolution), and the "rebels" quickly dispersed. In 1799 John Fries, a militia captain who had helped overawe the Whiskey rebels, found himself on the other side of the fence. Once again a federal tax (this one on property) was the reason. Fries and his followers chased a few assessors out of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, but federal troops easily put an end to their activities. Fries was captured, tried, and sentenced to death for treason, but President John Adams pardoned him. The so-called Anti-Rent War in New York's Hudson Valley was another rebellion of this type. It began in 1839 when the heirs of Stephen Van Rensselaer set out to collect $400,000 in "rent" owed him by several thousand farmers. The rents were feudal-like obligations based on a seventeenth-century charter granted to Van Rensselaer's great-great-great-grandfather. When the Van Rensselaer heirs instituted foreclosure proceedings, "debtors," who insisted that they were freeholders, not tenants, reacted so violently that the militia had to be summoned. Later, in 1844, a legislative committee determined that the rents were legal. Because of the resulting uproar, martial law was declared again, but the farmers held on to their lands. Finally, in 1846, a new state constitution formally abolished the old feudal obligations.  < previous page page_916 next page >