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.Jefferson had set thetone for the Republican rebuttal in a December letter to Madison in whichhe called the denunciation of the societies  one of the extraordinary acts ofboldness of which we have seen so many from the fraction of monocrats :It is wonderful, indeed, that the President should have permitted him-self to be the organ of such an attack on freedom of discussion, thefreedom of writing, printing & publishing.It must be a matter of rarecuriosity to get at the modifications of these rights proposed by them,and to see what line their ingenuity would draw between democraticalsocieties, whose avowed object is the nourishment of the republicanprinciples of our constitution, and the society of Cincinnati, a self-createdone, carving out for itself hereditary distinctions.³²Hamilton recognized the political advantages accruing from insurrec-tion and wrote to one of his confidants that its suppression  will do us agreat deal of good and add to the solidity of every thing in this country.One Federalist congressman called crushing the rebellion  the happiestevent that ever happened because it would  give the Government.atone, an energy, and dignity, which will defy all efforts of Anarchy and Jaco-binism. Madison, too, saw the political dangers that the insurrection and56 The Taming of the American RevolutionWashington s verbal anathema posed to any political opposition, and helabored to prevent the House from censuring the societies, writing to Jeffer-son regarding those who sought  to draw a party advantage out of Wash-ington s popularity and censure of the societies:  The game was, to connectthe democratic Societies with the odium of the insurrection to connectthe Republicans in Congs.with those Societies to put the P.[president]Ostensibly at the head of the other party, in opposition to both. Madisonprevented the House from leveling a direct censure against the societies,but soon the societies would become far less active and give way to otherpolitical strategies and, for the time being, less controversial forms of asso-ciation among Republicans to create an infrastructure for successful elec-tioneering.The societies, indeed, had  laid the groundwork for the Repub-lican party. ³³ But in an antiparty political culture, subsequently and forsome time each contending party would regard their opponents as a partyyet regard themselves as transcending faction and particular interests andserving as the true representatives of the people.To that extent, at least, thepopulist ethos invoked by the Democratic societies continued.THE CENTER MOVES RIGHTMany former Anti-Federalists, especially elite and middling, who werenow Jeffersonian Republicans, parted company with plebeian or radicalpopulist Anti-Federalists over the  Whiskey Rebellion. Cowed to varyingdegrees by the Federalists association of dissent with insurrection, mostelite and middling opponents of too energetic a government disavowedthe backcountry resistance, while populist Anti-Federalists, continuing toespouse a radical egalitarianism, found themselves relatively isolated inseeing the actions of the Whiskey rebels as  the will of the people. Penn-sylvania Republican leaders also modified their stance, having organizedDemocratic-Republican societies as part of the first stages of building aparty organization.They denounced equally any Federalist attempt to stiflelegitimate protest but now insisted that such protest be legal: violence andextralegal crowd action were no longer acceptable.Like the Federalists theydefined the Whiskey protesters as rebels.Increasingly, according to Cornell,the Anti-Federalist heritage would itself be tamed, identified more  with adissenting constitutional discourse used by elite and middling democrats todefend a vision of localism compatible with state authority. ³tThe next major insurgency of the 1790s also arose in Pennsylvania.Al-though on a smaller scale, it was more authentically a populist action andThe Taming of the American Revolution 57also indicated that  the people were learning their lessons, or at leastgrowing in political sophistication, under the Federalist ascendancy.Once again Federalist prosecutors succeeded in inaccurately labeling a rebellion what was more of a regulation and a brief quasi-military showof force that reflected widespread and long-standing discontent [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]