The Whiskey Rebellion

by William Hogeland

  The certificate is the prize. It travels with the whiskey, proving to buyers that duty has been paid. Certification makes the product legal.

  West of the Appalachians, none of that happened. Even finding deputies willing to start locating and registering stills caused mayhem. General Neville’s first hire was Robert Johnson—waylaid, tortured, and humiliated. Prominent local enemies of the Neville Connection meanwhile gathered at the Green Tree Tavern for the purpose, General Neville believed, of obstructing operation of the law.

  As leaves changed and flew and chilly winds disturbed the Ohio, enforcement efforts deteriorated. Johnson had recognized among his attackers Daniel Hamilton and others. The information was communicated to Philadelphia. In October a deputy federal marshal named Joseph Fox arrived in Allegheny County to serve the suspects with warrants on federal charges. Far from home, Fox was keenly aware that the crime for which he was supposed to be serving processes involved attacking a federal officer like himself. What would have happened if Fox had actually served his warrants became academic when Fox explained his trepidation to General Neville.

  Fox’s very life was in danger, the general agreed. Then he made a surprising suggestion: send the warrants by proxy. Even more surprising, the proxy Neville recommended was an ancient cattle drover named John Connor, widely considered stupid if not senile. Deputy Fox agreed to the plan with great relief. John Connor was given the warrants and instructed to serve them to Daniel Hamilton and a number of others.

  Many who deplored what came next considered it inevitable. If General Neville, so sharp and decisive, had wanted to enforce the law and have arrests made, people wondered, why did he send old John Connor out with a fistful of warrants? For when word spread that Connor was trying to serve papers in the Johnson case, Washington County’s recommendations regarding the treatment of tax collectors kicked in. The old man encountered a gang that took him into the woods and began by using a horsewhip on him. His naked body, stripes new and raw, received the blistering tar. He was stuck with feathers, tied up, and left in the woods in agony, his horse, money, and warrants seized.

  Fox got news of his process server’s fate and fled the area. No warrants were served that fall.

  General Neville added the atrocity to a list and began sending the Treasury Department urgent complaints about tax resistance, calling for serious assistance. Only an armed force, the general said, would be capable of ensuring federal tax collection at the Forks.

  Later that month, a young man named Robert Wilson appeared in the area. Seemingly refined and well-educated, Wilson claimed to be looking for work as a schoolmaster, but it soon emerged that he was some kind of spy, a shadow inspector for the Treasury Department. He snooped around farms and community stills and worked casual conversation around to who had or hadn’t registered. Late one night, Daniel Hamilton and a gang came to where Wilson was staying, rousted him out of bed, and took him five miles through the dark woods to a blacksmith shop, where coals were glowing. Someone placed an iron in the fire and worked the bellows. The gang was blackfaced. They stripped Wilson naked, tossed his clothes in the fire to burn, and held the hot iron to Wilson’s flesh, demanding that he swear to stop spying. Hot tar was being prepared for the next step—but for all his refinement, Wilson was no coward. His dedication to the government, and to the job he’d undertaken on its behalf, was so complete that no matter how horrific the pain he refused to swear anything at all, wouldn’t renounce the tax law or grovel for mercy. Amazed, the men began to tar him, and though submission was the only thing, the ritual thing, to show when being tarred and feathered, Robert Wilson fought so hard that in the melee, tar stuck to attackers, feathers stuck to tar, and backlit by the flickering fire, the tussle might have been taking place among shadowy, winged creatures in a nightmare.

  Still Wilson wouldn’t swear. The feathered gang had to either kill him or stop, so they stopped. Wilson, too, they abandoned, naked and injured. He’d been staunch, but unlike Robert Johnson, Wilson had no superior to take his troubles to. General Neville didn’t know who this man was. The Treasury Department in Philadelphia hadn’t heard of him either. Robert Wilson, it emerged, wasn’t a tax inspector or a federal spy. He only desperately wanted to believe he was, and he’d been willing to die for his belief.

  • • •

  Appearances to the contrary, reason could prevail at the Forks of the Ohio. Or so Mr. Brackenridge believed. Winter put a temporary end to resistance and collection efforts, and early in the new year of 1792, Mr. Brackenridge left Pittsburgh for Philadelphia on a mission to prevent further excise-related violence. He wanted to act alone, before things got worse.

  In the end, he hadn’t put his name to the Green Tree Tavern petition. He’d made his opening speech and proposed his resolutions, but John Woods, the Neville family counselor, called some of Mr. Brackenridge’s language—“until our remonstrance shall roll like a tempest to the head of government”—treasonable. Mr. Brackenridge thought Woods lacked the taste to distinguish between literal threat and figurative language. Between Woods’s criticisms and the committee’s revisions, the document got so carved up that Mr. Brackenridge had to disclaim connection with it.

  The petition was sent to Congress and the Pennsylvania assembly. It deployed the old English tropes, in which any excise necessarily infringes liberty, which Hamilton had demonstrated to Congress this one did not. It did also make a specifically western protest: Despite supposed uniform operation throughout the nation, the excise discouraged small operators and hit westerners hardest; it was thus a selective tax, the petition said, levied more on some than on others; the tax was also bad for domestic manufacture, something the petitioners implied the federal government had a responsibility to foster. Still, the petition contained little that was likely to persuade federalists in Philadelphia to repeal or reform the tax.

  Riding the ridges and icy valleys eastward through the short days, Mr. Brackenridge hoped to succeed where the petition failed. Unhindered by local committees, and by enemies like Woods, he would persuade Congress and the secretary of the treasury to repeal or at least substantially adjust the tax, forestalling a crisis that he believed need not occur. He had two worst-case scenarios. In one, the federal government, obstructed by blackface violence, tacitly gives up enforcing law at the Forks, effectively abandoning the west and ending the dream of a great American future there. In the other, the federal government doesn’t abandon but further suppresses the Forks, leading to full-scale civil war, another kind of ruination. Mr. Brackenridge was forever getting stuck between terrible extremes like these. It was a position he found anything but neutral. Rejecting, for all the obvious reasons, extremism, he was both a federalist and a republican, a populist and an elitist. He therefore found himself perpetually at odds with federalists and republicans, populists and elitists.

  Things had seemed to be developing nicely back in 1786, when he’d been elected to the Pennsylvania legislature and, as an assemblyman from the Forks, returned to Philadelphia to sit in a chamber hallowed by Congress’s having used it a decade earlier to declare independence. This was one of the great rooms in Continental politics, and Robert Whitehill and William Findley were squaring off with Robert Morris and James Wilson over paper finance. Mr. Brackenridge, elected as a western populist, worked hard in committees to promote greater equality for the west, including Mississippi access and the establishment of Allegheny County, with Pittsburgh as its seat. Yet he declined to pander, putting it mildly. He worked on the law that made new-state agitation a capital crime. In the floor fight over the radicals’ plan to let rural people pay land-bank mortgages with Pennsylvania’s bonds, Mr. Brackenridge heard Robert Morris out and concluded that Morris had a longer-range perspective than that of western voters. He’d promised to vote for the populist plan, but he changed his mind and followed Morris in supporting a cash-only payment policy. He also voted to restore the charter of Morris’s bank, persuaded that, despite many abuses by bank directors, national
banking could be a good thing for everybody.

  Defending his reversal, Mr. Brackenridge presaged James Madison’s idea, in The Federalist, that an elected official rightly acts on behalf not of his constituents’ interests but of their judgment, which voters assign, temporarily, and under limited circumstances, to somebody better equipped to exercise it. Representatives don’t act as instructed delegates. Sincere debate, conducted far from the pressures of voter influence, shapes the represented judgment of the people. Mr. Brackenridge had never claimed to be consistent. He was trying to learn and think.

  Western voters didn’t see it that way, not that their assemblyman bothered persuading them to. At home, letters attacking him appeared in the Gazette, and in Philadelphia, representatives from the Forks met at a private house where his fellow politicians confronted Mr. Brackenridge. They cited the will of the people as a reason to vote against Morris. Stung, Mr. Brackenridge phrased his philosophy in the negative: the people, he snapped, are fools. William Findley, the weaver from Westmoreland County, had been seeking a chance to bump Mr. Brackenridge aside as the leading Forks politician; he wrote to the Gazette to report the lawyer’s remark.

  Mr. Brackenridge’s reelection was therefore far from likely when, in the next session, things got worse. The assembly had again moved upstairs, now giving space to the Constitutional Convention. Debate on establishing a state ratifying convention, which would adopt or reject the controversial Constitution, became chaotic. Anti-federalists, hoping to prevent ratification, or at least delay it, denied the body a quorum by staying away, but a creditor posse broke into the boardinghouse bedrooms of two members and hauled them onto the floor for a vote. Mr. Brackenridge, famous now for being the only frontier federalist, led debate in favor of hurrying the ratifying convention, and with the session over, he returned to Pittsburgh and wrote a series of articles for the Gazette, in which he urged the people of the Forks to imagine the benefits for the west of a national government. He didn’t realize that his political career was over.

  When he offered himself as a delegate to the state ratifying convention, he suffered the humiliation of seeing his anti-federalist enemy William Findley chosen instead. Despite Findley’s efforts, Pennsylvania did ratify the Constitution, as Mr. Brackenridge had known it should, and when the Constitution became law, he celebrated by giving a poetic oration to an outdoor audience in Pittsburgh. He got an enthusiastic response, but orating couldn’t restore his career as a politician. Forks settlers believed that, dazzled by the vices of the capital, he’d been bought off by Robert Morris. William Findley encouraged that idea. Mr. Brackenridge tried courting local federalist support instead, but federalists had never liked his republican opinions; he’d never liked the local federalists led by General Neville. Between what he saw as populist demagogues and greedy mercantilists, Mr. Brackenridge could find no political home.

  Having been kicked by both parties out of the political process, he returned the favor and withdrew from it. He began to distinguish himself as a dismayingly deadpan humorist. His remarriage raised some eyebrows. In the fall of 1787, the wife he’d brought west had died, leaving him with a son not yet two. Riding between courts in a company of lawyers one hot day, he saw a wild-looking girl, darkly beautiful, tending cattle. When one of the cows broke away, the girl gave chase. The lawyers stopped to watch. Coming to a fence, she didn’t stop, or even vault it, but leaped the fence without touching it and kept running. Women wore only loose garments under their dresses. Mr. Brackenridge considered. If she does that again, he thought, I’ll marry her. She did. A few days later, he was taking shelter from a storm in a farmhouse and there she was, the farmer’s daughter. Her name was Sabina Wolfe. Her father pointed out that he needed her for a job in his fields that otherwise would cost ten dollars. Mr. Brackenridge paid up. After a stint in Philadelphia, where the lawyer sent her to be educated in the ways of polite society, Sabina returned to Pittsburgh and took up duties as the second Mrs. Brackenridge.

  Meanwhile he began working up satires of the ignorance and foolishness of ungrateful backcountry settlers and their conniving, backbiting leaders. He was returning to an early ambition, writing a book, which he entitled Modern Chivalry, the first American novel. Picaresque and episodic, it was published in a series of volumes; the third, printed not in Philadelphia but in Pittsburgh, was the first book published west of the Appalachians. In Modern Chivalry, Captain Farrago, an amazingly reasonable and amiable man, travels Quixote-like through frontier America accompanied by his self-aggrandizing, comedy-Irish servant Teague O’Regan, encountering clowns and charlatans who engage in low political chicanery and pursue bad ideas that doom their pitiful efforts at betterment. Broad regional dialects fill the book, for which Mr. Brackenridge apologized to his readers: he’d hoped, he said, to create an American character who was neither African nor fresh off the boat from Ireland—but sadly such Americans just don’t exist in real life. He worked especially carefully on a verbal portrait of William Findley, in real life a perspicacious, hardheaded Irish immigrant, lacking Mr. Brackenridge’s delight in the awful ironies of human comedy, and possessing, possibly as a result, political skills the lawyer could only mock. Findley appears in the book as Traddle the Weaver, a rude mechanical with a knack for thudding banality. Cracking himself up writing Modern Chivalry gave Mr. Brackenridge many happy hours.

  Yet for all his disdain for pandering populism, Mr. Brackenridge remained scornful of high-federalist decadence, embodied now in Pittsburgh by the Neville Connection and liberated as never before by the triumph of the Constitution, which Mr. Brackenridge had helped bring about. In local courts, he defended rioters, squatters, and Mamachtaga. When creditors in the Pennsylvania assembly called the convention to revise the radical Constitution, Mr. Brackenridge opposed revision. When Alexander Hamilton’s finance plan was revealed, Mr. Brackenridge published Gazette essays criticizing it as socially and regionally unfair and politically shortsighted. By the time the federal whiskey tax was passed, he’d come to believe that, whereas populist extremists failed to appreciate the gift to human liberty that the Constitution had built into the federal government of the United States, federalist extremists were abusing that great document by subverting it to low ends. Stuck in the middle, understood by neither side, he’d been growing bitter.

  Now, riding toward Philadelphia, he felt a renewed desire to take part in political life, not just satirize it. Alexander Hamilton’s excise tax, he thought, tended to remove political equality from the large class of people whom—though he mocked them—Mr. Brackenridge still saw as the best hope for the future, independent western smallholders. Attacks on collectors were grotesque, but what would the people, knee-jerk anti-federalists anyway, not resort to if the Washington administration kept confirming their suspicions that drafting the Constitution, and even gaining independence from Great Britain, had been nothing but tricks for liberating rich merchants and landlords to prey on settlers who improved land and built economies?

  The tax was irrational. Irrational responses to it were inevitable. The middle position, to which inveterate realism had long cursed him, might allow Mr. Brackenridge to explain the two sides to each other. He’d begun thinking about running for Congress in the next election. His period of withdrawal was coming to an end.

  • • •

  The whiskey tax had opened Congress to a barrage of petitions and complaints. Now Mr. Brackenridge, wintering in Philadelphia, published in the National Gazette—the nation’s opposition-party organ—a number of reasons and arguments for adjusting the whiskey tax, addressing his thoughts directly to the secretary of the treasury as well as to the Congress. The essay began in humility, pointing out that obstruction of the river forced western farmers to convert an untaxed product, grain, into a taxable one, whiskey. But it ended with a vision of the fulfillment in the American west of the ideals of a democratic republic. Leaving the excise far behind, Mr. Brackenridge swept himself into a paean to a new way of looking at American cu
lture.

  He didn’t sweep Hamilton along with him. In March of 1792, the secretary reviewed petitions and complaints against the whiskey tax. From large-scale distillers and his own inspectors he accepted some suggestions for revising the law. But he rolled western arguments slowly around in his mouth and then, with pursed-lip disgust, spat each soggy bit out. Digesting this stuff wasn’t on his mind.

  Hamilton wasn’t in a good mood. Funding, assumption, excise, and the central bank—his triumphs of the year before—had led not to greater successes but to the permanent resentment of opposition politicians and voters. Many of his plans were faltering. He’d hoped to follow up the national finance system by inspiring large-scale national manufacturing, but the House had ignored his impassioned call for government participation in industrializing America. Even as Hamilton was considering the antiexcise petitions, financial ruin was hitting the New York markets. Fantastically overvalued bank stocks and government bonds had started sliding. Both the rise and the fall were the work of a crowd surrounding an ethically vacuous insider named William Duer, who would go to debtors prison while ruined investors demanded his head. Unfortunately for Hamilton, Duer had for a time been his top assistant in the treasury, part of the national web of federalist speculators, officials, and hangers-on. Worse, Hamilton had put Duer in charge of an especially cherished part of the national-manufacturing concept—a showcase factory town of the future, privately owned by a consortium, drawing energy from the Passaic Falls in New Jersey. Duer had embezzled that project dry. Hamilton would expend great effort in trying to salvage it, but moneyed men on its board were losing confidence.