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Okla-homey
5/8/2006, 05:30 AM
May 7, 1792, the Militia Act establishes conscription under federal law

214 years ago on this day in 1792, Congress passes the second portion of the Militia Act, requiring that:


“every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years… be enrolled in the militia.”

Six days before, Congress had established the president’s right to call out the militia. The Militia Act was a manifestation of Congress's desire to enable the federal government to deal with rebellions -- something it was unable to do under the looser Articles of Confederation six years earlier.

The 1786 outbreak of Shays' Rebellion, a protest against taxation and debt prosecution in western Massachusetts was alomost successful in defying the national government because Congress had no authority under the Articles to raise a federal force to quell it.

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Shays' rebel's operations culminated with a failed attempt to capture the federal arsenal at Springfield, Massachusetts

The inability of the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation to respond to the crisis was a major motivation for the peaceful overthrow of the government and the drafting of a new federal Constitution.

The Militia Act was tested shortly after its passage, when farmer/distillers in western Pennsylvania, angered by a federal excise tax on whiskey, attacked the home of a tax collector and then, with their ranks swollen to 6,000 camped outside Pittsburgh, threatening to march on the town.

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Called "the Farmers Flag" this banner was carried by the whiskey rebels. The first "stars and bars?"

They were angry because one of the steps taken by the Congress to pay down the stifling debts of the Revolution was a tax imposed in 1791 on distilled spirits. Large producers were assessed a tax of six cents a gallon. However, smaller producers, most of whom were Scottish or Irish descent located in the more remote western areas, were taxed at a higher rate of nine cents a gallon. These Western settlers were short of cash to begin with, and lacked any practical means to get their grain to market other than fermenting and distilling it into relatively portable distilled spirits, due to their distance from markets and the lack of good roads.

From Pennsylvania to Georgia, the western counties engaged in a campaign of harassment of the federal tax collectors. "Whiskey Boys" also made violent protests in Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia.

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Major General Henry Lee

In response, President Washington, under the auspices of the Militia Act, assembled 15,000 men from the surrounding states and eastern Pennsylvania as a federal militia and put it under the operational command of Virginia’s Henry Lee (aka "Lighthorse Harry Lee") to march upon the Pittsburgh encampment.

Upon its arrival, the federal militia found none of the rebels willing to fight. The mere threat of federal force had quelled the rebellion and become the first application of the bedrock Constitutional principle of the supremacy of the federal government in disputes with the people of an individual state.

In one of those strange twists of history, that force the President sent to put down the rebellion over federal authority marched under a Southern general named Lee. In fact, he was Robert E. Lee's father!

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Henry Lee's son Robert and grandsons Curtis Lee, W. H. F. Lee, Robert E. Lee Jr.

The next time a Lee would march armed troops into Pennsylvania, it would be 71 years later and that force was composed of men formed into an army to fight the principle of supreme federal authority. At Gettysburg they were met and defeated by a Federal army.

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TUSooner
5/8/2006, 11:33 AM
Those Americans -- just a bunch of whiny rabble rousers.
;)