The First Presidential Pardon Pitted Alexander Hamilton Against George Washington

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..............from the Smithsonian ................................

How to handle the Whiskey Rebellion was the first major crisis faced by the new government

It would not take long after the adoption of the Constitution for the office of the President to exercise its power to pardon. First issued by George Washington on November 2, 1795, the pardon put a public end to the earliest major instance of civic violence in the United States since the Constitution’s establishment six years earlier. The presidential action forgave two Pennsylvania men sentenced to hang for treason, simultaneously quelling a nascent uprising and proving the power of the chief executive. The men’s crime? Protesting the most sensitive of matters: whiskey.



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