By the end of the eighteenth century, many common folk in the United States believed that the American Revolution had not fulfilled its promise, and that the true war was but half done. The subsistence farmer and the laborer asserted that a relatively small number of families–wealthy, and long-established in the New World–controlled the political arena, the courts, and even the official interpretation of recent history. Many veterans of the Revolution believed that this rule by the few and the wealthy was no more than a new face on the Old World’s system of aristocratic privilege.

Several armed rebellions were mounted as the nineteenth century drew close, particularly in the northern states, and often against that “old devil” taxation; but these small insurrections were quickly put down by either federal or state authority.

In the District of Maine (then part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts), men known as the “Great Proprietors” claimed vast tracts of territory on the strength of old King’s Grants and often contradictory Indian deeds. Their claim of entitlement was a direct extension of the very system of European aristocracy that the United States of America had ostensibly turned its back upon.

Meanwhile, the poorer folk, who were clearing the great forests of the northeast, believed that unsettled land was the right of any who could physically wrest it from the wilderness, and they used sometimes brutal tactics to drive off and intimidate the proprietors’ land agents and surveyors. These bands of settlers who organized themselves against law and authority called themselves first the “White Indians” and then the “liberty Men.”