I think one of the most interesting things I\u2019ve taken from Slaughter\u2019s book is the way that traditional methods of protest and petition carried over from prerevolutionary times. However, I think one thing we\u2019ve oversimplified is the relative unity of the western United States. For instance, Eli\u2019s post references the whiskey rebellion as more of a grassroots movement than the American Revolution and we\u2019ve focused on the Eastern critiques of the West and adapted them into our interpretation of events. What we have seen in the lead up to the Whiskey rebellion is actually more complicated than this. The desire to appear legitimate in the eyes of the East was certainly a facet of the decision making process in western communities when they voted on republican committees to represent their grievances (111). Moreover, comments of Alexander Hamilton and others who felt as that the discontent in the West stemmed from the efforts of a few rogues leading the flock show the perception of the elites having a leading role in the lead up to the rebellion. Whether this was actually the case is unclear, easterners could have been projecting their experience in the American Revolution onto the West. Alternatively, perhaps it stemmed from the disbelief that a movement could succeed without elitist leadership, which is plausible given Hamilton\u2019s belief that popular opinion had no value (123).<\/p>\n

While we may have undervalued the influence of the western elite particularly in the early lead up to the rebellion, I think that the grassroots element of this rebellion differentiates it from others. I think the increasing tendency to use extreme violence as a means to intimidate the opposition marks a new development in the types of protest in America. While the reasons this shift can be debated, the most important thing I draw from this change is the growing conflict between elites and the grassroots movement in the West itself. Each group began to differentiate themselves from each other, creating two separate, simultaneous, and competing movements to alleviate their problems. This new group was more willing to use violence as an initial and unrestrained tool rather than as the last link in the chain of a longer process and becoming more like the violence we associate with mobs in the modern world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think one of the most interesting things I\u2019ve taken from Slaughter\u2019s book is the way that traditional methods of protest and petition carried over from prerevolutionary times. However, I think one thing we\u2019ve oversimplified is the relative unity of the western United States. For instance, Eli\u2019s post references the whiskey rebellion as more of … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “There's More than East and West”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[73,74,75,53],"class_list":["post-135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-elites","tag-not-so-simple","tag-violence","tag-west"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his342-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his342-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his342-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his342-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/67"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his342-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his342-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his342-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his342-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his342-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}