Insurrection of the In-Betweens

...One of the country's most significant third-party movements, the Native Americans were swept along in the currents of an even greater third party, the Republicans...

...The frontiersmen made regular pleas to the government for fair representation in the legislature, for tax relief, for military protection against what Bacon called "the barbarous heathen...

...The aristocracy expected these immigrants to protect themselves (and the colony) against the reds (and, where needed, against the blacks) in gratitude for its largess in allowing the newcomers to enter...

...What were these white savages really like...

...the nativist proletarians were the aristocrats of labor...

...Americans at that time," notes Douglas T. Miller in a recent book on the period, "were quick to blame the thousands of foreigners coming to this country yearly for many of the social ills of the day, especially unemployment and low wages...

...The second, "Puncturing the Liberal Illusion" (NL, March 3), dealt with the failure of liberals to take control in Washington...

...In retaliation, a thousand Scotch-Irish marched on the seat of the aristocracy...

...Assembly and all, and then sheathe my sword in my heart's blood...

...The immigrant New Yorker, especially following the potato famine of Ireland, was Catholic, Democratic and poor...

...In the North, the party won the governorships and legislatures of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, California, and Kentucky?no mean feat...

...They were all produced by the cumulative frustration that forced the in-betweens to lash out in both directions...

...A century later, the men of the Whisky Rebellion found themselves similarly oppressed...

...So it seems worthwhile to consider each briefly—less for what they tell of the past than what they portend for the future, because yet another revolt of the middle is in the making...

...The pamphleteer concluded that the seat of sedition was Princeton, "the center of all plots, cabals and perversion of youth...

...But the aristocrats, whose ancestors had driven the Indians from their lands decades earlier by brandishing beads, booze and flintlocks, had lost interest in what seemed to them an endless war between "red" and "white" savages...

...In 1855, it elected the Land Commissioner of Texas, the legislature of Maryland, and enough delegates to come within a hairbreadth of controlling the legislatures of Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas...

...Although a few cool heads finally prevailed, the Low Church frontiersmen were marked as revolutionaries by nature...

...The same year, massive anti-Catholic riots took place in Philadelphia and New Jersey, resulting in deaths and destruction of church property...

...So was it when the Native Americans, dominated by the Know-Nothings, began their noisome assaults upon immigrants, especially Irish Catholics, in the mid-19th century...

...But with or without that tax, inhabitants of the western counties of Pennsylvania were ready for revolt—neglected "middle" children of the state of Brotherly Love...

...The levy on whisky was particularly burdensome, for the distilled grain was mountaineer currency and the tax amounted to a tax on money itself as it passed from hand to hand...

...Along the coastal lands lived the aristocracy: rich, High Church, landed, secure, mannered, politically powerful, close to the Crown, pretentious...

...Said the Governor: "You'll have the commission—you shall...

...on Independence Day (July 4) the Catholic church at Dorchester was blown up...

...here he traces the historical background of the current tensions...

...Fortunately for America, they were a tough set...

...Missiles and Money" (NL, March 31), the fourth installment, examined the relationship between arms control and domestic reform...

...Fifty years of life at high pressure had brought the people to a state of excitement, of lawlessness, of mob rule, such as never before existed...

...And vi-gilantism may again be the simplistic retort to the threat from below as expressed in crime or riot...

...But in both cases violence was in the air...

...In present-day America, as the new middle agonizes with economic squeeze and ethnic friction, history could repeat itself...

...As in the cases of the Virginia frontiersmen and the Whisky Boys, the nativist violence extended over several decades...

...The third, "Uncovering the Riches" (NL, March 17), concerned the need for income redistribution...

...The draft act epitomized all that was obnoxious by exempting the rich and conscripting the poor to fight a Republican war to liberate blacks whose presence—it was feared—endangered the white worker...

...But the insecurities it vented continued to plague American politics for generations to come...

...These rough men in coarse raiment and coonskin, with muskets on their shoulders, were not arrayed for a pose...

...The men at the top looked down their noses with a kindly sympathy at those on the bottom, at no cost to their wealth, and with disdain at those next to the bottom, lest understanding cost money...

...Massachusetts granted 2,500 acres at Oxford to 30 Huguenot families for this purpose...

...The uprisings coincided with moments of unusual violence in American history: Virginia in 1676 was in a state of undeclared war against three civilizations (other colonies, France and Spain), and against red...

...Out of this turbulence arose the American Republican Party, later called the Native Americans, organized in Louisiana in 1841...

...In a number of colonies, the backwoodsmen were relatively recent "immigrants" consciously planted along the frontier as a buffer between aborigines and "first families...

...As the events of the Civil War overshadowed the more limited concerns of the nativists, the organization disappeared...

...The decade covered by the Thirties [18301 is unique in our history," wrote John Bach Mc-Master...

...Yet unless such a policy is devised for America today, the revolt of the middle could become an insurrection of the in-betweens...

...Simultaneously, a wave of immigration from the Catholic states of Europe hit the United States...

...In 1794 the colonies had just passed through the long War of Independence with Britain...

...The explosive bitterness that caused the riot—which left several thousand dead—had been accumulating for decades...

...God damn my blood," stormed Bacon...

...Hence, a starting point of any potent political program must be that great middle —the American yeoman...

...To the aristocracy of Philadelphia the war of red and white savages had its ethical and economic dividends...

...Differences of opinion ceased to be respected...

...The Scotch-Irish of Pennsylvania had been in riotous upheaval for more than 50 years before the whisky war...

...To the west of them—and sometimes in their very midst—were the Indians: cheated, vexed, vengeful, proud, emboldened by firewater and firearms...

...They fought their way against savage forces, subduing nature while warding off the blows of the tomahawk...

...Colonial America, like Gaul, was divided into three parts, economically as well as geographically...

...When word reached Philadelphia, the legislature passed an antiriot act...

...in the Whisky Rebellion of 1791-94, the Scotch-Irish of Pennsylvania's western In his last article, "The Revolt of Mr...

...By staying out of the battle (no troops to keep order), the colony saved money and salved the consciences of high-minded gentlemen whose hearts bled for the Indians...

...To let the Governor know that their leader spoke in earnest, 600 men of the soil loaded their flintlocks and pointed them at the assembled rulers of the colony...

...Anti-Catholic acts occurred before the Native Americans organized formally: A fire was set at St...

...The extent of the nativist movement can be measured by its success at the polls...

...But there is one important difference between present and past revolts of the middle...

...in July, the Catholic population was forcibly expelled from Manchester, New Hampshire...

...I came for a commission and a commission I'll have before I go...

...counties were in a similar vise, between the poor heathen redskin and the rich pious Quakers...

...To the west lived the yeomen, hunters and farmers: poor, Low Church, hard-working, rough, politically weak, neglected by the Crown, exposed, insecure...

...Tyler, Assistant President of n gwu, is the author of many books, including the forthcoming The Great American Riots, to be published by Harper & Row...

...Intolerance, turbulence, riot, became the order of the day...

...The native American mechanic and artisan was particularly enraged by the loss of his status and security as one invention after another replaced the old-fashioned skills of the cordwainer, cooper, ironsmith, printer, weaver...

...Appeals were made not to reason but to force...

...Today's in-betweens are the national majority, informed of one another's acts, quickly communicating their moods—or madness...

...The party was controlled by the Supreme Order of the Star Spangled Banner, a secret organization whose members admitted to nothing?hence, the term Know-Nothings...

...These men were doing more for America than the speculators of Boston and New York, for they were hard working conquerors of the wilderness, felling the forests, redeeming the land for the cultivation of man...

...The potential enemy below was the black man who, once liberated, could compete for low-paying jobs against the newcomers from the Old World...

...The first victory of this party, ironically, was not in the South but in immigrant-laden New York, where both the Democrats and the Whigs ignored native elements in election appeals and programs...

...No luxuries in the log cabins where they fought, wrought, suffered in the Homeric work of extending an empire and making it safe for the soft creatures of the counting-rooms who would ultimately follow...

...In this genteel way did the peace-loving gentry divide and rule, ad majorem gloriam Dei et met...

...Here is historian Claude Bowers" estimate: "The Whisky Boys of the insurrections of 1794 have been pictured as a vicious, anarchistic, unpatriotic, despicable lot—and they were nothing of the sort...

...the New York immigrants had been given jobs and citizenship...

...This decline in economic standing was due not only to the new industrialization but also to the great depression of 1837, which reduced the once proud aristocrats of labor to charity cases...

...Bacon, the head of a movement that sought to protect settlers from the hostile Indians of western Virginia, had come to demand a militarv commission so that the work could be carried out under official aegis...

...Earlier movements were actions of minorities separated from possible allies elsewhere by distances not quickly covered by roads or bridged by modern media...

...The Whisky Rebellion and Bacon's Rebellion were the anguished answers of the in-betweens to onerous patrician authority...

...Faced with this situation, the frontiersmen turned to vigi-lantism, forming ad hoc armies such as the one commanded by Bacon...

...The rioting, first a political demonstration directed against the draft board, turned by the third day into a massive lynching bee against Negroes—a sadistic orgy spiked with alcohol...

...Thus ended the initial episode of what was probably the first insurrection by those whom we would today call "middle class," a term whose meaning has undergone continuous change in the three centuries since Bacon, as new groups have found themselves the neglected middle child of the societal family...

...In colonial Virginia, the middle was the backwoodsman, pressed between the Indians and the Tidewater aristocracy...

...South Carolina established Scotch-Irish, German and Swiss settlements to strengthen the frontier after the great scare of the Yamasee War...

...in the Know-Nothing Riots of the mid-19th century, the native proletariat felt trapped between immigrants and industrialists...

...How dare they protest...

...The Whisky rebels challenged a Federal government ready to act against the troublesome mountaineers...

...In the South, they were the lords of the Tidewater...

...Above were the rich Republican Protestants who had just won the mayoral election and whose President, Abraham Lincoln, was drafting the poor folk to fight his war...

...The native American worker now became the in-between, pressed from the top by employers with their newfangled inventions and from the bottom by newcomers who offered to work for less...

...Formerly, the middle was treated as a class with no right to complain: Bacon's people had land of their own...

...In the romance that attaches to words, two of the four insurrections of the in-betweens, Bacon's Rebellion and the Whisky Rebel-ion, sound sweet, while the other two, the Know-Nothing movement and the Draft Riot, sound sour...

...But in fact, viewed objectively all four had elements of good and evil...

...The natives rebelled—with bullet and ballot...

...The Great New York Draft Riot of July 1863, coming at a time when the city was drained of potential recruits, was in a way a backlash to the Know-Nothings—a revolt of New York's semiskilled, unskilled and unemployed against the Protestant Establishment...

...elsewhere in New England and in Pennsylvania the Scotch-Irish were used...

...His role in the politics of the late '60s and the importance of his relationship with the young, the intellectuals, and the militant minorities will be the subject of my next piece...

...He had enemies above and a potential enemy below...

...Their lot was hard...

...In 1844, the city's Native Americans elected both the Mayor and the Board of Aldermen...

...The yeomanry was overtaxed, underrepresented, in constant political conflict with the aristocrat, and in daily physical conflict with the redskin...

...Mary's Church in New York City in 1831, and the Ursuline Convent in Massachusetts was burned down in 1834...

...The remarkable aspect of these insurrections—as well as the War of the Carolina Regulators in the 18th century, the periodic torture and massacre of the Chinese on the West Coast in the 19th century, and the rising backlash of the 20th century—is that an almost identical script appears to be re-enacted by a changing cast of characters...

...Middle" (NL, April 14), Gus Tyler probed the lustrations of the contemporary American middle class...

...reforms, ideas, institutions that were not liked were attacked and put down by violence...

...The tax revolt is a simplistic political protest against the power above...

...politically against the top?the Tidewater aristocracy, the Federal government, rich industrialists, and Protestant Republicans—and physically against the bottom...

...The scattered riots of the 1830s set off a chain reaction lasting into the 1850s...

...Journeymen hatters saw their pay fall from $12 a week in 1835 to $8 a week in 1845...

...their counterparts were the Philadelphia Quakers, the merchants of New York City, the Hudson Valley patrons, and the theocracy of the Bay Colony...

...There was an attack in May 1854 on the Irish settlement in Chelsea, Massachusetts...

...Hopefully, there is another difference between the past and the present...

...Some say that the wily Alexander Hamilton intended the whisky tax as a provocation to force the factious frontiersmen into line...

...I'll kill Governor, Council...

...By keeping the two lesser peoples engaged in constant combat, the top group ensured that neither would overrun Philadelphia...

...black and white savages...

...in June, a church was burned in Coburg...

...His first article in this series, "1970: Year of Decision" (NL, February 17), focused on the next national election...

...While none of these riotous groups fits the term "middle class" as we now use it, they were all "in-betweens," exploited by a class on top and fearful of a class (sometimes a race) underneath...

...By giving the land-hungry frontiersmen a free hand, the governors of Pennsylvania extended their territorial claims against Maryland and Virginia...

...The immediate cause of the riot was an iniquitous draft law that exempted any man with enough money to buy a substitute...

...the Whisky Boys had whole counties of their own...

...Long known as the "wild Irish" and the "white savages," in 1769 they massacred 20 Indians, including 14 who had sought shelter in the Lancaster workhouse...

...By now we ought to have learned something from the sad history of previous uprisings...

...in the Great Draft Riot of 1863—the biggest and bloodiest ever—the Irish Catholic worker of New York feared he would be crushed between the newly liberated blacks and the Protestant plutocracy...

...In the past, no attempt was made to reduce the economic pressure on the middle as a means of lessening its friction with the bottom...

...Wrote one Anglican theologian: "Presbyteri-anism and Rebellion are twin sisters, spring from faction, and their affection for each other has been so strong that a separation of them could never be affected...