What did George Washington say about the Whiskey Rebellion?

The Whiskey Rebellion was, to my mind, one of the most sobering tests this young republic had yet faced — not merely a dispute over taxation, but a direct challenge to whether constitutional government could sustain itself. I addressed Congress on the matter in my Sixth Annual Message of November 1794, and I chose plain words. As I said there, “some of the citizens of the United States have been found capable of an insurrection”. That was a painful thing to announce. We had just secured our independence, and here were men taking up arms against the very laws their own representatives had passed. What troubled me most was not the initial grumbling — that I could understand, even if I could not excuse it. What I could not tolerate was the deliberate organization of resistance. In my Proclamation Calling Forth the Militia, I described how certain men had been “spreading mischief far and wide either from real ignorance of the measures pursuing by the government, or from a wish to bring it, as much as they are able, into discredit”. Passion, manipulated by designing men, had displaced reason and law. I mobilized fifteen thousand militia — not out of any eagerness for force, but because further forbearance would have been read as weakness. The authority of the Union demanded no less. Law, once defied without consequence, invites ever greater defiance.