ate an opinion of impotency or
irresolution in the Government. Legal process was therefore delivered
to the marshal against the rioters and delinquent distillers.

No sooner was he understood to be engaged in this duty than the
vengeance of armed men was aimed at _his_ person and the person and
property of the inspector of the revenue. They fired upon the marshal,
arrested him, and detained him for some time as a prisoner. He was
obliged, by the jeopardy of his life, to renounce the service of other
process on the west side of the Allegheny Mountain, and a deputation was
afterwards sent to him to demand a surrender of that which he _had_
served. A numerous body repeatedly attacked the house of the inspector,
seized his papers of office, and finally destroyed by fire his buildings
and whatsoever they contained. Both of these officers, from a just
regard to their safety, fled to the seat of Government, it being avowed
that the motives to such outrages were to compel the resignation of the
inspector, to withstand by force of arms the authority of the United
States, and thereby to extort a repeal of the laws of excise and an
alteration in the conduct of Government.

Upon the testimony of these facts an associate justice of the Supreme
Court of the United States notified to me that "in the counties of
Washington and Allegheny, in Pennsylvania, laws of the United States
were opposed, and the execution thereof obstructed, by combinations too
powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings
or by the powers vested in the marshal of that district." On this call,
momentous in the extreme, I sought and weighed what might best subdue
the crisis. On the one hand the judiciary was pronounced to be stripped
of its capacity to enforce the laws; crimes which reached the very
existence of social order were perpetrated without control; the friends
of Government were insulted, abused, and overawed into silence or an
apparent acquiescence; and to yield to the treasonable fury of so small
a portion of the United States would be to violate the fundamental
principle of our Constitution, which enjoins that the will of the
majority shall prevail. On the other, to array citizen against citizen,
to publish the dishonor of such excesses, to encounter the expense and
other embarrassments of so distant an expedition, were steps too
delicate, too closely interwoven with many affecting considerations, to
be lightly adopted. I p