History of the United States I / Unit 8 USH1 1080 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
The 1790s Uprisings, Assembled
The idea
Three risings in five years tested whether the new government could govern. Western Pennsylvania farmers took up arms against a federal excise and sounded out foreign powers about secession. The Ohio Confederacy fought a decade-long war against settlement and lost its claims at Greenville. And in Saint-Domingue, enslaved people overthrew a plantation regime and abolished slavery by force, which American slaveholders watched with horror.
In practice
Washington answering the first with thirteen thousand militia, the second with a standing general, and the third with anxious neutrality.
Where people slip
The federal government proved it could compel obedience from its own citizens and from Native nations, and it discovered it had no answer at all to a successful slave revolt. That asymmetry runs through the rest of the course. Note also that the tactics of the Whiskey rebels were the tactics of the Stamp Act crowds, turned against a government elected by the people who had used them.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
Unlocks
- Nothing yet depends on this.
Something wrong in this lesson? Flag it · Sources for History of the United States I