Thomas P. Slaughter

“Easterners condemned even the methods of protest used by the farmers. According to merchant David Sewell, “these conventions of counties are seeds of sedition [that] ought always to be opposed.” A “Citizen” wrote to the Worcester Magazine that such meetings were “treasonable to the state” and the proposed remedies of the petitions were simply “measures to defraud their own and public creditors.” The irony of such reactions to their pleas for redress was not lost on the westerners. Parallels to the colonies’ petitioning of Great Britain seemed obvious to the rural New England patriots. It was the state’s rejection of this parallel that a “Freeman” caricatured in the Worcester Magazine: “When we had other rulers, committees and conventions of the people were lawful—they were then necessary; but since I myself became a ruler, they cease to be lawful—the people have no right to examine my conduct.”22”
― Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution