A rabble-rouser named David Bradford has great potential as a central character. The Societies encouraged the 70,000 pioneers in western Pennsylvania to attack federal tax collectors and persuade westerners in Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina to join them in forming a separate country. With Thomas Jefferson’s encouragement, newspapers have been echoing this attempt to launch a French style revolution - a war against the rich. “Democratic Societies” modeled on the radical Jacobin Clubs of Paris have been denouncing President Washington’s administration for months. The Whiskey Rebellion would dramatize the first attempt by Americans to secede from the Union. But I saw a good movie in one part of the story. Here Fleming highlights an episode from American history ripe for adaptation to the big screen: I never visualized a movie that would encompass this whole book. His new book is The Great Divide: The Conflict between Washington and Jefferson that Defined a Nation. A frequent guest on PBS, C-SPAN, and the History Channel, Fleming has contributed articles to American Heritage, MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, and many other magazines. Thomas Fleming is a distinguished historian and the author of more than fifty books.
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