The Whiskey Rebellion

by William Hogeland

  That struggle had financial, political, and spiritual aspects. In the most literal sense it was about paying the revolution’s debt. The whiskey rebels weren’t against taxes. They were against what they called unequal taxation, which redistributed wealth to a few holders of federal bonds and kept small farms and businesses commercially paralyzed. Farmers and artisans, facing daily anxiety over debt foreclosure and tax imprisonment, feared becoming landless laborers, their businesses bought cheaply by the very men in whose mills and factories they would then be forced to toil. They saw resisting the whiskey tax as a last, desperate hope for justice in a decades-long fight over economic inequality. Alexander Hamilton and his allies, meanwhile, whose dreams had long been obstructed by ordinary people’s tactics—crude, violent, sometimes effective—for influencing public finance policy, saw enforcing the whiskey tax as a way of resolving that fight in favor of a moneyed class with the power to spur industrial progress.

  Problems facing rural people everywhere were amplified west of the Appalachians, and the whiskey tax, wreaking a special kind of havoc on westerners’ lives, helped shape the national concept of the American west. Some of the whiskey rebels envisioned stranding the seaboard cities, vile pits of unrestrained greed, on the far side of the Appalachian ridge and leaving the coast a vestige. Some imagined a new west, spiritually redeemed, with perfect democratic and economic justice: small farmers, artisans, and laborers would thrive, while bankers, big landowners, and lawyers would be closely regulated, even suppressed. Believing they could wrest their country back from frontier merchants and creditors, their own neighbors, some rebels wanted to banish big businessmen as traitors to the region even while fending off the distant federal government in all its growing might.

  The rebellion thus became a primal national drama that pitted President Washington and other eastern founders, along with their well-heeled frontier protégés and allies—all recent revolutionaries themselves—against western laborers with a radical vision of the American future. The rebellion also troubled the inner circle of the president’s administration. Alexander Hamilton and George Washington brought to suppressing the rebellion a long-standing tension and a peculiar closeness, whose background was in the ambiguous wartime politics of the revolution. Edmund Randolph, the new secretary of state, urged the president to avoid the drastic, irreversible step of bringing military force against American citizens; he became the isolated cabinet moderate. Within the insurgency were moderates too, accused by the government of leading insurrection, yet in fact dissenting from their neighbors’ extreme radicalism. Committed to peaceful petitioning, yet unable to control or direct the fury of their neighbors, western moderates faced danger from all sides as the rebellion and its suppression turned into outright conflict. By the time federal forces marched west, the Whiskey Rebellion was bathing all of its actors—founders and terrorists, extremists and moderates—in the stark light, not of an argument between genteel parties in Congress, but of a guerrilla war on the country’s ragged margin, our first war for the American soul.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Over the Mountains

  Hugh Henry Brackenridge was the most cultivated man in Pittsburgh, the village at the headwaters of the Ohio where he practiced law and worked on the great American novel. He’d trained for the ministry at the most advanced college in the colonies and immersed himself in the Enlightenment; he’d served in Pennsylvania’s assembly, when it called a convention to ratify the United States Constitution, of which Mr. Brackenridge was a dedicated admirer. Though he enjoyed great local prominence—he’d helped found Pittsburgh’s college and newspaper and lived, amid log buildings, in the biggest of the town’s few brick mansions—a kind of relentless realism made him do and say things that disturbed his neighbors. Mr. Brackenridge’s eyes, gazing with reserve while popping like a bird’s, could make him look at once terrified and amused. And he was. The foolishness with which every class of neighbor confronted him every day could drive him, against his democratic will, to despair of human nature. The same realism could make him see his own despair as, in the end, nothing but comic. When in the early 1790s terror began to grip the countryside, comedy and realism began jostling so terribly within him that he feared, in the end, not only for his life but also for his reason.

  He’d arrived at this strange attempt at a town in 1781, riding in from the east at the breakpoint age of thirty-three, saddlebags stuffed with law books. About four hundred people lived in Pittsburgh then, mostly in log houses nastily redolent of the dying flour and fur trades; the outlying country had a history of remoteness, almost a complete cutting-off from rolling hills, flat barrens, and seaboard cities back east across the Alleghenies. Ten years after Mr. Brackenridge’s arrival, there were about a thousand residents—plus a quarry, mills, a boatyard, a pottery, and other industries—yet wildness still seemed to press against the town. Log and brick buildings lined earthen streets, often muddy, on the low point of land where the two rivers, pinching a point’s tip, converged to become the Ohio and flow west. Along the south side ran the mud-floored Monongahela, up from Virginia in wide bends, seemingly lazy yet treacherous, recurrently flooding the point where a colonial fort had once inspired the first settlement. Across that river, a forested ridge swept up from the bank to look back on the village from a startling height. The ridge darkened the water with a greenish-brown reflection, a permanent shadow, tracking Monongahela mud ahead of the point into the Ohio. Green in summer, stark in winter, at night the ridge became a looming wall under the stars.

  Turning away from the Monongahela, a few minutes’ stroll across the village brought you to the Allegheny, a northern river flowing blue and crisp over granite from New York. Across the Allegheny was no forbidding barrier: hummocks and green hills rolled and flattened toward lakes Ontario and Erie. But all of that was Indian country, by tenuous treaty with the Six Nations of the Iroquois. It was from the south, and from behind that high ridge across the Monongahela, that white people came to town. They farmed the hollows and slopes of steep, wooded areas marked out by the Monongahela; its small tributaries, the Mingo and the Pigeon; a big tributary called the Youghiogheny—which the settlers called the “Yock”—and the Youghiogheny’s own tributaries, the Sewickley, the Turtle, the Jacobs, and the Brush. Those rivers, which pooled through woods and dropped over granite, had made a chaotically ridged and tilting land with deep, narrow valleys. Sweeping down from heights and up from the south and becoming, at Pittsburgh, the flat Ohio, the creeks and rivers were also, by the 1790s, powering ironworks, brickworks, and commercial mills.

  There was new business to do, and when people came to Pittsburgh to do it, they arrived on the high ridge and were presented with a bird’s-eye vista. The Ohio, segmented in flashing glints by rows of hazily violet hills, curled northward before making its big southwestern turn. People rode down the steep slope to the waterfront, busy in the 1790s with flatboats and keelboats, to ford or be ferried to the little town on the point.

  Despite the remoteness, and because of it, white people had been attracted to the region for a long time. They’d violated royal proclamations preserving this land for Indians. They’d disregarded rules of the provinces of Pennsylvania and Virginia. They’d raided and been raided by Delaware and Shawnee, who were resettled in the area by the Six Nations empire, which also maintained here its own emissaries and governors. Building a town at the Ohio headwaters was never in anyone’s official plans. The Six Nations had thought of the area as a reserve for hunting, fur trading, military adventures with armies of European allies, and resettlement of native peoples conquered and depopulated elsewhere—emphatically not a good place for white people to be digging into and settling down on. As late as the 1750s, the only whites legitimately in the region, which became known as the Forks of the Ohio, were traders, who didn’t build. Traders, considered reprobate by the competing companies and governments—French, British, and provincial—who invested in them, moved through, buying pelts from and selling Eu
ropean goods to Indians. For years Indian market centers boomed while the only structures of whites were storehouses and camps.

  When Virginia and Britain began sponsoring settlement companies at the Forks of the Ohio, the young Virginia militia commander George Washington killed a French emissary just south of the Forks and was forced to surrender and apologize. The Seven Years’ War began. That near-global conflict among imperial powers of Europe involved the natives too. The earliest white authority at the Forks wasn’t a province, state, or other civic entity. The far-flung British Army, stationed at a wilderness outpost they called Fort Pitt, commanded the strategic point where the Monongahela and the Allegheny met. When the British started building the fort, the French took it; trying to retake the area, most of a force led by British General Braddock and his young colonial sidekick Washington were slaughtered by French and Shawnee forces. After the British did take back the point in 1758, the officers tolerated and tried in vain to regulate a scrubby set of huts, legally part of no town or province, clinging to Fort Pitt’s walls as a kind of supply-and-support system for imperial soldiers. This poorly defined set of relationships would become Pittsburgh.

  Even to British officers and men, the settlers seemed shockingly tough and bold. When the army adopted a policy of selling arms to Indians, a local militia turned fearlessly on the army. Men blackened their faces and dressed like Indians, ambushing drovers who moved arms and supplies on lonely tracks; the “blacks,” as they were known, stole army rum, whiskey, and arms and set supplies on fire. They captured officers, forcing them to resign and imposing local rules to keep witnesses from testifying and juries from convicting. When suspects were scheduled to be taken out of the area for trial—trying suspects outside their neighborhoods was considered, in common law, the most heinous abuse of power—the blacks made dashing rescues. There were calmer times too. Bored troops made sorties to clear out illegal settlements, which kept springing up amid what eastern visitors perceived as the horror and gloom of the forest primeval.

  In 1763, the king drew, by royal proclamation, a line at the crest of the Appalachians, reserving lands to its west for Indians, prohibiting new white settlements there, and ending existing ones. Whites stayed anyway. Leading defiant, subsistence lives, they were considered as savage as Indians by soldiers at Fort Pitt and by authorities in the east and in England. Where General Braddock had been defeated, children played around his soldiers’ bloated, half-eaten bodies and bones, thickly piled on the field and growing over with grass. Commanders at the desolate river outpost kept trying to control the squatters, trappers, legal and illegal fur traders, and hangers-on who surrounded their fort, but a town subject to no civic authority was growing; outlying villages on rivers and streams were growing too.

  When a treaty authorized a purchase of the Forks area from the Indians, for the province of Pennsylvania, the region theoretically became subject to provincial, not just military, authority. But people went on living as they’d always lived, in part because Pennsylvania and Virginia both claimed the region. New settlers were coming from the south and the east, many known as Scots-Irish, as indeed earlier settlers had also been: these were the notably tough descendants of Protestant Scots peasantry, who had resettled in Ulster and then been forced, by exorbitant rents and English taxes, to migrate to North America. Absentee speculators too started registering claims and buying large acreages. Pennsylvania erected counties; Virginia opened land offices for the same area, undercutting Pennsylvania’s prices, asymmetrically laying its own counties over Pennsylvania’s. The area had recently been barely governed and officially unsettled. Suddenly comparatively crowded, it was now being subjected to the authorities of two governments, which tried to collect taxes and issued competing titles to former squatters and absentee speculators at once. Having two governments was tantamount to having none. Some people did feel loyalty to one province or the other: Virginia and Pennsylvania militias fought skirmishes that verged on outright war. But many people were eager to remain oblivious to the supposed requirements of either province. The very idea of authority seemed, to some settlers at the Forks, merely annoying. The British soldiers meanwhile marched away. Fort Pitt, though used in the border war, deteriorated.

  When the revolution came, it meant long service far from home for people at the Forks, as well as the devastation of their settlements by British-allied Indians and militias from Canada: Towns were burned, prisoners taken, people killed; often whole neighborhoods abandoned homes and sheltered in stockades. The idea of independence had long had special meaning to Forks settlers. As early as 1771, formal associations of squatters were escorting Pennsylvania’s provincial deputies out of the area with orders never to come west again. In 1776, with the breakdown of all royal and provincial authority, a regional independence movement began to flourish not only among people at the Forks but also among settlers all along the frontier. Watauga, a settlement high in the western mountains claimed by North Carolina, heard rumors of conflicts between the colonies and Great Britain, declared independence, and asked to be legitimized as part of North Carolina, which already had title to the area and didn’t want people living there. Denied representation in North Carolina, the Wataugans named the three western counties of North Carolina the independent state of Franklin, which drew up a constitution and applied to the Congress as a separate state, to no avail. Franklin would soon look to the Spanish across the Ohio for help. Vermont—which also named itself, declared its independence, and drew up a constitution—petitioned Congress for statehood; rejected, it considered an alliance with Great Britain. And at the Forks of the Ohio, still fought over by Pennsylvania and Virginia, some people started calling the place Westsylvania.

  By the time Mr. Brackenridge arrived in Pittsburgh in 1781, the Westsylvanians had a constitution too; they planned to secede from Pennsylvania. They were organizing marksmen. If Congress rejected them, there was talk of going to Britain or Spain.

  • • •

  Mr. Brackenridge’s first project was to put a stop to new-state and secessionist talk. He was that rare thing, both a western sympathizer and a nationalist. When he arrived in Pittsburgh, he hoped for a national government, but he was no stranger to the high regard for regional independence held by westward migrants. In the 1750s, when he was five, the Brackenridges fled rural poverty in Scotland and arrived on the busy Philadelphia docks. They started walking west, through settled farmlands and rolling hills. The dirt road became a track through dark, high thickets. Arriving at the small plot they’d bought, in a Scots settlement in the barrens of York County, then on the western edge of the province’s white settlement, they began to cut the huge hardwoods and vines and break into tough, poor soil.

  The growing boy never liked hard labor. He’d plow all day, then read by the firelight. Once a cow made him distraught by chewing up his copy of Horace.

  Yet he wasn’t considered unduly effete. Scots immigrants in the York barrens respected Greek, Latin, and learning. He got his classical education by studying with a local scholar. His mother delightedly envisioned him a Presbyterian minister of the gospel, and at the College of New Jersey at Princeton, he did train for the ministry, but like so many Princetonians of his day, he also came under the influence of Dr. Witherspoon, the college president, who was introducing his charges to modern French and Scottish philosophers. Visions of an enlightened classical republic fired members of the self-styled Whig Literary Club, ambitious youngsters like Brackenridge and James Madison, who wrote and declaimed broad, self-congratulatory satires in a manner that, they thought, combined the best of Cervantes, Swift, and Lucian.

  In 1779, with war far from over, the British abandoned Philadelphia, and Mr. Brackenridge went there to live. His plan was to start a newspaper for the United States. Though he’d been ordained a minister, he’d long since taken up the rationalism of the philosophers and wits, and when revolution came, he had written a verse drama to celebrate the Battle of Bunker Hill, then gained a post in the arm
y of General Washington himself. The post was as chaplain. Mr. Brackenridge’s preaching consisted solely of independence agitprop. He wanted his Philadelphia paper to extend that spirit. The defining cultural organ for an emerging nation, it would blast Tories and glorify both independence and rationalism, in the process founding a distinctively American literature and earning Mr. Brackenridge honor and a good living as that literature’s chief author.

  But wartime Philadelphia was already crowded with intellect and politics. Three years earlier, independence had been declared there; now the Congress was coming back, and some of those men were giants. In Philadelphia, Hugh Henry Brackenridge was hardly the most cultivated man, or even the most ambitious.

  He may have been the most realistic. After only a year, his paper a failure, he assessed his position and came to the conclusion that he had no chance of becoming anything in Philadelphia. He was disappointed in the quality of the American mind, which had failed to respond to his paper; he needed to make his name elsewhere, he decided, and then come back. The western frontier had moved since his hard childhood in the barrens. Across the Allegheny watershed, he reasoned, he might distinguish himself.

  He turned out to be right about that. Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s ideas about western development, like his ideas about most things, struck people in his new home in Pittsburgh as odd. He was like them mainly in not being able to stand Indians. Romantics back in Philadelphia, full of ideas cribbed from Rousseau, went on and on about natives’ natural nobility, but Mr. Brackenridge enjoyed telling of a philosophical botanist, visiting from France, who made impassioned pro-savage speeches and ended up scalped. Mr. Brackenridge had interviewed survivors of an ingenious, slow-burning murder practiced by the Shawnee, whose naked victims, bound to the stake, begged to be shot; as a boy in York he’d lived with the night terrors of the French and Indian War, when babies’ limbs were sliced off while their mothers were forced to watch, the babies’ brains dashed out, the mothers then scalped and killed. Most absurd to him was the idea that natives’ prior occupation of the land gave them a current right to it. Why couldn’t the buffalo make the same claim against the Indians, since they were here before the Indians, and whatever was here before the buffalo against the buffalo, and so forth? Indians didn’t improve land, and right to land, for Mr. Brackenridge, came from improvement. He wasn’t in favor of slaughtering Indians. He wanted Indians permanently subdued, then absorbed, to whatever extent possible, in the new American culture.