On August 7, 1794, the President issued a proclamation commanding the insurgents to disperse, and summoned twelve thousand militia from the adjoining States to hold themselves in readiness for active service on the 1st of September. Meanwhile, earnestly desiring to avoid the use of force, Washington sent three commissioners to the scene of the riots in the hope of appealing to the sober sense of the people. They held protracted negotiations with representatives of the people in the disaffected district, but were unable to persuade them to deliver up the ringleaders of the revolt. On September 24, the President issued a second proclamation and set the troops in motion. Under the command of "Light Horse Harry" Lee, now Governor of Virginia, the army marched west in two divisions, but encountered no resistance. Many arrests were made and eighteen alleged leaders of the insurrection were sent to Philadelphia for trial. Only two of these, however, were convicted of treasonable conduct, and they were pardoned by the President. Some twenty-five hundred troops were quartered near Pittsburg for the winter; but rebellion did not again lift its head. The utter collapse of the Whiskey Rebellion made the whole affair seem ridiculous to those who gathered in the coffee-houses to hear the tales of the militiamen but the importance of the episode was not slight. Hamilton is said to have remarked on one occasion that a government can never be said to be established "until some signal display of force has manifested its power of military coercion." The Federal Government had now demonstrated that it was equal to the emergency whenever the laws were opposed by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings or by the powers vested in the marshals by law. The days of Shays' Rebellion had gone, never to return. There was an aspect of the insurrection which Washington did not fail to note in his annual address to Congress in November, 1794. The Democratic clubs had been unsparing in their condemnation of the excise law, and their resolutions had more than once a treasonable sound. Washington did not hesitate to deprecate the untoward influence of these "self-created societies" and to condemn those "combinations of men, who, careless of consequences, and disregarding the unerring truth that those who rouse cannot always appease a civil convulsion, have disseminated, from an ignorance or perversion of facts, suspicions, jealousies, and accusations of the whole Government." The Democratic societies now fell into disrepute and did not long survive their great prototype, the Jacobin Club of Paris.