ennsylvania. The
frontiersman in hunting-shirt and moccasins blazed a path for the New
Englander in broadcloth coat, velvet collar, bell-crowned hat and heavy
boots. These emigrants all possessed valuable qualities for the building
up of new States, and they all displayed in the trials which immediately
beset them the courage which had carried the nation successfully through
the war for independence. They were entering upon a vast and fertile
domain which the aboriginal possessors, notwithstanding treaties, did not
propose to abandon, and which was the scene of sanguinary conflict before
it was finally surrendered.

CHAPTER XXI.

The Spirit of Disunion--Shays' Rebellion--A National Government Necessary
--Adoption of the Constitution--Tariff and Internal Revenue--The Whiskey
Insurrection--President Washington Calls Out the Military--Insurgents
Surrender--"The Dreadful Night"--Hamilton's Inquisition.

The spirit of disunion was brewing; the people were tax-ridden, the
States without credit and the prevailing discontent found expression in
riot and rebellion. The insurrection of Daniel Shays and his followers in
Massachusetts, the disturbances in western North Carolina and other
outbreaks in various parts of the country were but symptoms of radical
weakness in the body politic, and of the complete failure of the
loose-jointed confederation to command the confidence of the people and
maintain the credit of the nation. It became evident that union was as
vitally important in peace as in war; that national burdens could only be
sustained by a national government, and that the welfare of trade and
commerce required one system of interstate laws enforced by the united
power of all the States. The adoption of the Federal Constitution created
a nation; it created a free government worth all that it had cost; it
realized the dream of Franklin and the prediction of Adams; it made
possible the American Republic of to-day, and the great work was
fittingly crowned with the election of George Washington as first
President.

* * *

The first business of the new government was to establish the public
credit. Alexander Hamilton, Washington's Secretary of the Treasury,
proposed with this object a tariff on imports, and a tax on whiskey. To
the former the people submitted readily enough; the latter provoked an
insurrection which for some time threatened to be formidable. The farmers
of