The Whiskey Rebellion

by William Hogeland

  His neighbors agreed with him about Indians’ savagery. So his taking the case of an Indian accused of murdering a white man seemed nothing but perfect contrariness. Mr. Brackenridge’s usual description of Indians as murderous drunks couldn’t have been better embodied than by his client, Mamachtaga, charged with killing a white man while drunk, a charge that the defendant couldn’t and didn’t deny. Mr. Brackenridge’s view was that if the savages were ever to be converted to civilized ways, their legal rights had to be protected. There were mitigating circumstances in Mamachtaga’s case, and the lawyer was fascinated, during trial, by Mamachtaga’s declining to take refuge in them.

  The lawyer lost the case. His client, refusing an easy chance to escape, was hanged. Aside from the beaver furs in which he was paid, Mr. Brackenridge gained only the bewilderment of the people at the Forks of the Ohio. Yet he continued to puzzle over Mamachtaga. The name translated as “trees blown around by a storm.” The Indian was at once too depraved and too honest, Mr. Brackenridge concluded, to live in either white or savage society. He’d been shunned even by his own tribe.

  While shocking both rich and poor by defending an Indian, Mr. Brackenridge was selectively annoying the rich with another specialty: defending squatters. Tiny illegal farms—a log shack or two, some skinny livestock, and stumpy fields—might be surrounded by miles of timber, standing and fallen on slopes barely penetrable for vines and laurel thicket. Squatters’ farms were hard to find, yet when land agents sent word to eastern speculators that their property was being used at will, the landlords sent sheriffs into the woods, and sometimes squatters were rounded up and evicted. Mr. Brackenridge’s view was that eastern speculators were just like Indians—indolent, unimproving. Most owners hadn’t set eyes on their lands. They rented lots cheaply to tenants, who did the hard work of clearing. Owners hoped, once lands were cleared and Indian problems straightened out, to raise rents sharply or sell at huge profits to later speculators. Mr. Brackenridge insisted that it was good policy to encourage not idle people from far away but hard workers who lived at the Forks. He lost a lot of squatters’ cases too.

  The maddening irony was that these small-scale farmers he kept touting as the future of the west thought of him as an Indian lover, and he might have done better with the farmers if he hadn’t also sometimes taken the cases of rich landlords, who needed his legal services too, but regarded him as a crank. Mr. Brackenridge kept professing belief in republican democracy, in what his college friend James Madison famously called the genius of the people. Genius, meaning creative spirit, was something the whole people might indeed possess. Yet individual people, rich and poor alike, kept forcing on Mr. Brackenridge the impression that they’d never be repositories of wisdom. He always found it at once awful and hilarious that for all his education and prominence, which nobody ever denied, nobody ever got the point of what he was doing or saying.

  • • •

  One night in early September of 1791, Robert Johnson, recently appointed collector of the federal revenue for Washington and Allegheny counties in far western Pennsylvania, was riding through a lonely part of the forest near a tributary of the Monongahela called Pigeon Creek, when he found his way blocked by men who forced him to dismount. The gang numbered fifteen to twenty, armed with muskets, rifles, and clubs. They were blackfaced. Many wore women’s dresses.

  Johnson was amiable but dim. A sharper person might not have been surprised to be confronted, in an isolated part of the forest, by these all-round hunters, militiamen, woodsmen, and laborers, flamboyantly disguised and as hard as men can be. The tax that Johnson had been hired to collect was on distilled liquor, the first tax ever levied by the United States on a domestic product. Only two weeks earlier, a meeting in the nearby town of Washington had adopted a resolution spelling out what ought to be done with people like Johnson, and the resolution had been published in the Pittsburgh Gazette. The tax, the Washington committee complained, advancing a radical social idea, didn’t operate in proportion to property. So as far as the committee was concerned, federal tax officers were to be considered not just silly lowlifes (tax collectors were assumed to be that) but also public enemies. All decent people should refuse these officers aid and cooperation and treat them with contempt.

  Tonight the gang in dresses set about treating Robert Johnson with contempt. Their procedure, for all the whiskey drinking and hilarity that usually attended such an adventure, was far from improvised. When the object was ritual humiliation, not torture, a gentler version was favored, in which a victim was left clothed, but that wasn’t the idea tonight. Soon Robert Johnson was naked. With sharp blades the men cut his hair to bare his skull. On flesh, hot tar not only inflicts pain but also can sear. Pores close, and skin, orifices, and genitals can suffer permanent injury.

  Johnson may have been stupid, but despite abject terror, flickering firelight, and crazy disguise, he was noting the identities of some of his attackers. Collectors weren’t emissaries from the east but local hires; the job paid a percentage of what collectors took from their neighbors. He saw that one of his attackers was Daniel Hamilton, a memorably tough member of the large, generally well-regarded Hamilton family. Loose-knit, both closely and distantly interconnected, with generations that overlapped in age, and roots in Pennsylvania’s Scots settlement back in York, the Hamiltons now lived around Mingo Creek, not far from the town of Washington. The most prominent among them was probably John Hamilton, commander of a regiment of state militia and soon to be the county’s high sheriff. John Hamilton enjoyed the kind of success, as a self-made, well-to-do farmer and businessman, that many people in the area were finding it harder and harder to achieve. He was here too, Johnson noted.

  Daniel Hamilton hadn’t done so well. At forty, he was charismatic and risk-seeking, with combat experience in the revolution and a strong sense of his own power to intimidate. His life had been going wrong. People like Daniel, when asked where they lived or how to get somewhere, tended to orient and identify themselves by creeks and rivers. The Mingo Creek area was a four-county hub: The rivers divided the area in discrete sections; along the rivers were strung boatworks, mills, tanneries, iron furnaces, and artisan shops. Eastern visitors, overawed by mountain outcroppings and virgin timber, could mistake this area for howling wilderness and miss the fact that it was also a complex of neighborhoods and industries. Daniel Hamilton and the other gang members were farmers and hunters, mainly for subsistence and seasonally for barter, sometimes for cash: they grew corn, wheat, barley, rye, ginseng, hemp, flax, and vegetables. Famous sharpshooters, they used muskets and rifles to kill rabbits, bears, deer, squirrels, and birds. But they had industrial skills too: tanning hides, working iron, sawing wood, milling grain, and making bricks, saddles, hats, nails, and boats. Many had the talent, ambition, and skill to make money, by moving and distributing their food and wares, selling them to the army and to buyers across the mountains to the east. If their federal government could get them access to the Spanish-controlled Mississippi, there were huge, untapped markets in the other direction too.

  Yet many of these river industries were no longer owned and operated by the settlers themselves. Men labored more and more often in the mills and yards of rich entrepreneurs and merchants. An ironworks could employ dozens of men while its owner bought up thousands of foreclosed acres recently owned by his laborers. The rivers had become roads for moving products into the Ohio to supply Indian-country forts downriver. Hired men loaded keelboats with milled grain, fodder, ammunition, tar, and horseshoes and steered the boats through tricky Ohio currents, then applied unrelenting muscle to poling and hauling the boats back up to town. Even many who engaged in farmwork no longer owned their own land; they’d become tenants of large landowners and hired hands of commercial farmers.

  Daniel Hamilton had once owned 240 acres. Soon he’d own only 100, and in a few years all of his land would be gone. That these losses were being sustained by a disappointed war veteran made Daniel no different from many o
thers at this tar and feathering; older settlers had even served under harsh British officers in the Seven Years’ War. The War of Independence had meant hard marches to faraway places, leaving families unprotected from hideous torture and slaughter by British-allied Indians. When the war ended at last, these men had mustered out of the army virtually unpaid.

  Daniel was typical; still he stood out. To moments like this tar and feathering he brought a degree of enthusiasm that people remembered. There was a chilling edge of delight in his rendition of the Indian war whoop. He had no compunction about putting his hands on weaker men and seeing them shake, and he could rattle off terrifying descriptions of what his victims would soon be suffering. Made incandescent by loss and betrayal, Daniel Hamilton was focusing his enthusiasm for violence on a belief, shared with his fellows, that wrongdoing could be overawed by terrifying displays of physical punishment.

  As Daniel and the gang applied hot, noxiously fuming tar to the shaved pate and nude body of Robert Johnson, the sludge’s oiliness was absorbed by Johnson’s skin, and a scalding crust grabbed hair, holes, and pores and clung everywhere. When Johnson was sufficiently sticky the gang applied poultry feathers, which, when shaken over a freshly tarred victim, or when he was made to lie down and roll in them, bonded with the slowly hardening blackness and could be removed only with time and effort. The triumphant gang took Johnson’s horse and fled. Anguished by the scorn due all public enemies, the taxman was left alone in the dark forest.

  • • •

  The next day, Mr. Brackenridge attended a meeting in Pittsburgh. It was September 7, 1791, the second day of a three-day conference at the Sign of the Green Tree, a tavern on the Monongahela waterfront. The conference had been called to discuss local feeling against the federal whiskey tax and other policies of the new federal government. Angry talk by men like Daniel Hamilton and his cohort, at militia musters, taverns, and impromptu meetings, had inspired a self-appointed committee of prominent men to meet during the summer at a town called Brownsville, down the Monongahela. The Brownsville meeting had proposed that each township in the four western counties—Fayette, Westmoreland, Allegheny, and Washington—formally elect delegates for county conventions, which in turn would send county representatives to this meeting at the Sign of the Green Tree.

  The meeting’s agenda wasn’t to attack anyone. These men were leaders at the Forks; many had experience in and hopes for elective office in the state and federal governments. Now they had a message from their constituents: the previous night’s treatment of Robert Johnson. He’d been left clothed tightly in nothing but pitch and feathers. He had no transportation. Praying for a quick death was the only alternative to an immediate, unforgiving need: start walking your naked, disfigured body along the track. Your goal would be to present your awful condition to someone. You’d have to be seen in this sorriest of states, and that’s what would make the operation a success. Johnson did somehow make it home. A scouring mixture of grease, soap, and sand finally removed tar and feathers. He would soon swear out a complaint, in which he would bring the names of Daniel Hamilton and others he’d recognized to the attention of the federal government.

  What most of the prominent men at the Sign of the Green Tree wanted to do was send a petition, explaining the negative local effects of the whiskey tax, to the Pennsylvania assembly at the statehouse in Philadelphia and to the U.S. House of Representatives, also in Philadelphia. Not all of these men were so moderate, however. One was John Hamilton, the prominent and well-off Hamilton, colonel of a regiment of Mingo Creek militia and a tar-and-featherer of Johnson the night before. Many attendees didn’t know one another; no love was lost among some who did. David Bradford, a rich man from the town of Washington, had successfully invaded Mr. Brackenridge’s law practice, partly by suggesting, to Mr. Brackenridge’s indignation, that the Pittsburgher had no natural sympathy with common people. Bradford had the fanciest house in the town of Washington, but he’d attended the radical Washington County meeting, and for all his wealth he’d long been engaging in populist actions. At the other extreme was an even bitterer professional enemy of Mr. Brackenridge, the lawyer John Woods, a member of the little Pittsburgh elite that scorned Mr. Brackenridge for defending squatters and was sewing up army trade and monopolizing land and business throughout the area. Woods’s friends favored federal policies, including taxes; Woods was clearly here as a spy.

  Mr. Brackenridge had been asked to bring an opening address. He’d also brought some resolutions for debate. He planned to make the speech, introduce the resolutions, then stay aloof. As he rose to speak to the Green Tree meeting, he made his first move in what would become, as events outran his ability to repair them, a persistent, ultimately impossible task: imposing reason on the unreason that seemed to proliferate on every side.

  • • •

  Though he could not now imagine the madness toward which the next three years would drive him, Mr. Brackenridge had been given a glimpse of things to come when, on his first journey to his new home over the mountains, he’d stopped for the night with an old man who lived above an Allegheny valley known as the Glades. The man was white-haired and disheveled. He lived in a small house on a farm that he and his grown sons had cleared more than a decade earlier, when no other white people had settled in these mountains.

  This was Herman Husband, also known as the Philosopher of the Allegheny, as the Quaker, as Hutrim Hutrim, and as Tuscape Death. Looking at him, Mr. Brackenridge might not have guessed that Husband had been raised the pampered scion of colonial tidewater gentility, had made a fortune in business, and was an autodidact of profound if spotty learning. The lawyer did know that Husband had come into these mountains as a fugitive wanted by the royal governor of North Carolina for violent agitation on behalf of farmers against provincial authorities. Husband had also been elected to the revolutionary Pennsylvania assembly. Mr. Brackenridge’s main impression was of a loony old man.

  The impression was confirmed when Husband, pleased to have educated company, showed Mr. Brackenridge some maps of the area that Husband had drawn up himself. Apparently he’d spent many hours—years, really—bushwhacking the almost impassable ridges and the deepest valleys, and he’d come to believe that the Alleghenies were one of the walls of the New Jerusalem of biblical prophecy. Husband was a draftsman. As he showed his guest the maps, beautifully detailed and plotted to scale, with neat notes, symbols, and keys, he pointed out connections between the geological features of the mountains and passages in the books of Daniel and Ezekiel.

  Listening, Mr. Brackenridge achieved the command of himself that he often tried for but could so rarely sustain. He gave a perfect imitation of a man struck with fascination by the brilliance of what he was hearing. His certainty, now, that he was in the presence of a madman he concealed by asking pertinent questions that showed depths of understanding. Husband was moved. Nobody other than Mrs. Husband, he told Mr. Brackenridge, had understood what he was saying about these things. While nodding sympathetically at the insensitivity of the world, Mr. Brackenridge made a mental note that Husband’s church, like many others, was made up of two classes of people, the lying—Mr. Brackenridge himself—and the stupid, which Husband had just proven his wife to be. Then he went on drawing Husband out.

  That night, when he was thirty-three, Hugh Henry Brackenridge hadn’t yet seen the town that would become the home he’d love and deride. He couldn’t imagine that one day he’d be a wanted man, named with this Herman Husband, stalked by soldiers as ringleader of a rebellion against a United States of America that, as they talked in the firelight of the visions of Daniel, did not yet exist, and for whose founding Mr. Brackenridge only hoped. If he could have imagined what lay ahead, his eyes might have relayed their characteristic blend of terror and humor. He might have laughed outright, and he might have turned back for a life of obscurity in Philadelphia.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Curse of Pulp

  The law that both the blackfaced gang in dre
sses and the politicians at the Sign of the Green Tree wanted repealed, or at least adjusted, was entitled “An Act Repealing, after the Last Day of June Next, the Duties Heretofore Laid upon Distilled Spirits Imported from Abroad, and Laying Others in their Stead, and Also upon Spirits Distilled within the United States and for Appropriating the Same.” Passed by the first Congress of the United States in March of 1791, part of that cumbersomely named act—“and Also upon Spirits Distilled within the United States”—heralded something new, the first federal tax on an American product.

  Excises, as such duties—laid not on imports but on domestic products—were commonly called, had long caused lamentation where rights and liberties sacred to Englishmen were worshiped. Because excises had traditionally been attended by summary arrests and denial of jury trials, aristocratic literature condemned all excises as nasty attempts by crown and ministry to shift the economy from its only legitimate basis, land, associated by landowners with aboriginal English freedoms, to grubby ones like manufacture and slimy ones like finance, associated by landowners with decadence and tyranny. It was an irony of English politics that this rhetorical abomination of excise had long enabled alliances between landowners and merchants, groups whose real interests were often at odds. Colonial Americans had forged just such an alliance, drawing on familiar antiexcise themes and condemning the Stamp Act as an arbitrary internal tax. With independence won, a U.S. Congress’s imposing hated excise would seem, to some, the ultimate in ideological betrayal.