Jefferson, having resigned his secretaryship and seeing the
unusually prominent part assumed by Hamilton in the expedition,
protested from his retirement at Monticello against such "employment
of military force for civil purposes." To his mind the disorder was
simply a riot and not an insurrection. "Yet it answered the purpose,"
said he, "of strengthening the government and increasing public debt
and therefore an insurrection was announced." To Madison he declared:
"The excise law is an infernal one. The first error was to admit it
to the Constitution; the second, to act on that admission; the third
and last will be to make it the instrument of dismembering the Union."
Madison, who had at first looked upon the suppression of the
insurrection as an electioneering scheme, thought it fortunate for the
lovers of liberty that the movement was so easily crushed, since
otherwise the principle would have been established that a standing
army was necessary to enforce the Federal laws. "I am extremely sorry
to remark," he wrote to Monroe during the ensuing session of Congress,
"a growing apathy to the evil and danger of standing armies.
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