MAN: In 1794, the federal government instituted a federal liquor tax. Now, in certain localities in what we would call then the frontier, which was Western Pennsylvania, due to, of course, an almost non-existent transportation system and also very, very limited paper money, many farmers distilled their wheat into alcohol as a way to much more easily transport it, in fact, as a barter, as a means of barter. And basically that was their livelihood. That's the way that they existed.

This federal law threatened their lives, threatened their livelihood, and led to a mini rebellion, you could say, in Western Pennsylvania among these farmers, which included attacking federal revenue officers and also an attempt to burn down the then new city of Pittsburgh.

Washington would have none of this. He was already unhappy about Anti-Federalist activity and dispatched Alexander Hamilton with 15,000 troops to go down to Pennsylvania to put down this rebellion. By the time they arrived, most of it had dissipated and nothing much came of it. They showed up there, and people-- what rebellion?

Nobody was going to speak. But this, probably over time, fed into the creation of the Alien and Sedition laws, which would then greatly attack freedom of expression and criticism, this notion of both rebellion and criticism that the Federalists were extremely unhappy about.