Biography
John Fries was a Pennsylvania Dutch auctioneer and militia veteran who led the resistance to the federal house tax of 1798 in an uprising known as Fries’s Rebellion — the third of the early Republic’s tax revolts, after Shays’ and the Whiskey Rebellion. When his neighbors were arrested for refusing to pay, Fries led an armed band that freed them from a federal marshal. He was captured, tried, and convicted of treason twice, and sentenced to hang — but in 1800 President John Adams, over the objections of his own cabinet, pardoned Fries and the others condemned with him.