purpose by the
influence of certain irregular meetings, whose proceedings have
tended to encourage and uphold the spirit of opposition by
misrepresentations of the laws calculated to render them odious; by
endeavors to deter those who might be so disposed from accepting
offices under them through fear of public resentments and of injury
to person and property, and to compel those who had accepted such
offices by actual violence to surrender or forbear the execution of
them; by circulating vindictive measures against all who should
otherwise, directly or indirectly, aid in the execution of the said
laws, or who, yielding to the dictates of conscience and to a sense
of obligation, should themselves comply therewith; by actually
injuring and destroying the property of persons who were understood
to have so complied; by inflicting cruel, humiliating punishments
upon private citizens, for no other cause than that of appearing to
be the friends of the laws; by interrupting the public officers on
the highways, abusing, assaulting, and otherwise ill-treating them;
by going to their houses in the night, gaining admittance by force,
taking away their papers, and committing other outrages; employing
for these unwarrantable purposes the agency of armed banditti,
disguised in such a manner as for the most part to escape
discovery: and whereas, the endeavors of the legislature to obviate
objections to the said laws, by lowering the duties and by other
alterations conducive to the convenience of those whom they
immediately affected (though they have given satisfaction in other
quarters), and the endeavors of the executive officers to
conciliate a compliance with the laws, by expostulation, by
forbearance, and even by recommendations founded on the suggestion
of local considerations, have been disappointed of their effect by
the machinations of persons whose industry to excite resistance has
increased with the appearance of a disposition among the people to
relax in their opposition and to acquiesce in the laws; insomuch
that many persons in the said western parts of Pennsylvania have at
length been hardy enough to perpetrate acts which I am advised
amount to treason, being overt acts of levying war against the
United States; the said persons having, on the sixteen