. The President and his Secretary of the Treasury were not
men who could be frightened by opposition or violent speeches. But
angry frontiersmen, stirred up by demagogues, are not given to much
reflection, and they meant to have their own way.

Washington was quite clear in his policy from the beginning. He was
ready to make every proper concession, but when this was done he meant
on his side to have his own way, which was the way of law and order
and good government. He wrote to Hamilton in August, 1792: "If, after
these regulations are in operation, opposition to the due exercise of
the collection is still experienced, and peaceable procedure is no
longer effectual, the public interests and my duty will make it
necessary to enforce the laws respecting this matter; and however
disagreeable this would be to me, it must nevertheless take place."

Meantime the disorders went on, and the officers were insulted and
thwarted in the execution of their duty. Washington's next letter
(September 7) has a touch of anger. He hated disorder and riot
anywhere, but he was disgusted when they came from the very people for
whose defense the Indian war was pushed and the excise made necessary.
He approved of Hamilton's sending out an officer to examine into the
survey, and said: "If, notwithstanding, opposition is still given to
the due execution of the law, I have no hesitation in declaring, if
the evidence of it is clear and unequivocal, that I shall, however
reluctantly I exercise them, exert all the legal powers with which the
executive is invested to check so daring and unwarrantable a spirit.
It is my duty to see the laws executed. To permit them to be trampled
upon with impunity would be repugnant to it; nor can the government
longer remain a passive spectator of the contempt with which they are
treated. Forbearance, under a hope that the inhabitants of that
survey would recover from the delirium and folly into which they
were plunged, seems to have had no other effect than to increase the
disorder."

A few weeks later he issued a proclamation, declaring formally and
publicly what he had already said in private. He warned the people
engaged in resistance to the law that the law would be enforced, and
exhorted them to desist. The proclamation was effective in the south,
and the opposition died out in North Carolina. Not so in Pennsylvania.
There the Scotch-Irish borderers who lived in the western counties
were bent on having th