The Whiskey Rebellion

by William Hogeland

  He was also subject to attacks, unfair and unremitting, on his private and public lives. The National Gazette, where Mr. Brackenridge had published his essay on the tax, had been founded to print such attacks. There was a move on in Congress to launch an investigation to remove Hamilton from office for misconduct or, more likely, and just as good to his enemies, destroy him in the process of failing to prove anything at all.

  The creative phase of Hamilton’s career was coming to an end. A defense-and-enforcement phase was beginning. Optimism and charm crashed periodically into a cold rage that did not rob him of energy and orderliness. He had, in Philadelphia, a department taking up a city block, complete with both the largest on-site bureaucracy in the government and many collectors and inspectors in the field. The executive branch had power to enforce its revenue-collection measures. Even as General Neville made the case for using military action to collect the tax, a militia act, supported by Hamilton, was being developed in Congress. In a situation in which federal law was so obstructed, within a given state, that ordinary judicial process broke down, the president would be empowered by the militia law to bring irresistible force against a local insurgency. If the relevant state’s militia refused to serve, the president could—on his own discretion, if Congress wasn’t in session—call out militias of other states.

  So if there was an opposite to what Hamilton evinced, in his report on the petitions, it was sympathy for western tax resisters. Only after demonstrating, exhaustively, once again the invalidity of traditional antiexcise arguments when it came to this excise, and referring to advantages given by the law to domestic over foreign produce, and agreeing to importers’ and big distillers’ requests for leakage allowances, shipwreck drawbacks, and protection of trade secrets, did he turn, as if in postscript, to address what he called some complaints of a local complexion.

  He began by demolishing the idea, put forth by the Green Tree petition, that western dominance in whiskey production made the tax unequal. Any tax on a domestic product would of course be experienced that way by somebody, he said—yet nothing was consumed more equally throughout the country than whiskey. This point held the key to Hamilton’s rejection of western complaints. Defining the excise as taxing consumption, not production, he avoided any discussion of the small producers whom the tax stifled. If the people of the west were greater consumers of whiskey than people elsewhere, as he deftly misread the complaint to suggest they were, all they had to do was cut down on their drinking; equality would be restored.

  He also dismissed Mr. Brackenridge’s explanation that westerners were unique in being forced by economic circumstances and government policies to convert a nontaxed article, grain, into a taxable one, whiskey, merely in order to sell it. So what? Hamilton asked. Consumers pay the tax, not producers. Westerners pay only on their own drinking.

  When it came to scarcity of money in the west, he doubted it. But it wouldn’t make a difference: because scarcity of cash could be invoked in support of objections to any tax, the real purpose of invoking it could only be to promote the dissolution of government. The supposed scarcity of money was obviated anyway by the Indian-war ramp-up, Hamilton said: in the past year, the army’s spending, in Pennsylvania’s four western counties and Kentucky alone, added up to more than five years of whiskey-tax collection there. He didn’t mention new modes of army buying and selling he was working on, meant to keep that army cash outlay in a very few hands. It was true that major customers for western liquor had always been armies; officers had carted batches of whiskey from open marketplaces or sellers’ stills. But now, in concert with the excise tax, Hamilton was launching from the treasury a reform of the army-supply system, dispensing with small, independent sellers. He created commissary offices willing to buy only in bulk, with responsibility for delivery shifted to the sellers.

  That reform offered large-scale producers yet another means of underselling anyone smaller. Merchants with access to big transport—not distillers at all, in some cases—could buy up small batches of whiskey cheaply, from farmers suddenly bereft of markets, and sell them in wagonloads to the commissary. The system offered simplicity and efficiency. At Fort Fayette, for example, the commissary was run by General Neville’s brother-in-law Major Kirkpatrick; Neville’s son-in-law Isaac Craig served as deputy quartermaster; the general himself, along with many in his cohort, was both a large-scale distiller with ample means of transport and an enforcer of the whiskey tax.

  A complaint that Hamilton did address inspired him to make an important revision in the tax law that not only benefited big producers but also pursued his highest goals for American industry. The revised excise law of 1792 removed the distinction between city and country producers. Whether located in towns or in the country, any distiller could now choose to pay either on still capacity or per actual gallon produced. Big distillers everywhere took advantage of the new option, choosing to pay on capacity; constant innovation would ultimately reduce their real tax to a sixth of a cent per gallon. But the option couldn’t help small producers, mainly in the country and already taxed on still capacity: given their brief and occasional processes, the capacity rate was already raising their tax.

  Whichever way they turned now, small producers were further overtaxed by the government and undersold by big competitors, and with the new army-buying procedures in place, they lost their best local customer just as it started bringing government money to the west. Hamilton did propose one reform to the law that he presented as a concession to small distillers. You could get a cheaper, monthly license to distill. It would cost you 10 cents per gallon on the still’s capacity; you’d be prohibited from operating at any other time. With big distillers steadily reducing their real tax toward fractions of a penny, this revision did nothing to encourage competition.

  What Hamilton wanted from the new law was enforcement. A central excise office was to be opened in each county; distillers must go there to register stills; failure to register would mean forfeiting the still, and the fine was raised to $250. Nonpayment too was now a lien on the still. The earlier law had exempted the smallest stills, with under forty-gallon capacity, not from the tax but from registration. That exemption was removed.

  Congress debated and passed the new excise law on May 8, 1792. During the debate, William Findley, now in the U.S. Congress, argued for lowering the tax and succeeded in getting a 1-cent reduction, too little too late, he believed, for his constituents. Perhaps more significantly, he also objected to Hamilton’s rationales being read aloud as arguments on the floor of the House. With the doggedness that Mr. Brackenridge mocked in Traddle the Weaver, Findley rose again and again to declare the procedure out of order. Only members of the House with local knowledge should provide information, Findley said: Reports from what he called the secretary’s closet were drawn from collectors—unelected bureaucrats of the permanent government—as well as from interested parties like the Nevilles. The reading of Hamilton’s arguments was stopped. Findley had distinguished himself as an enemy in the eyes of Hamilton and the administration.

  • • •

  Mr. Brackenridge had failed to mediate. His arguments, made in a national paper in the capital, had done nothing but irritate the secretary of the treasury. Hamilton’s report had decisively rejected every grievance of small western operators; the revised law had arranged to further disable the rural whiskey economy. It was summer, season for enforcement and resistance. New outbreaks of violence could be expected not only at the Forks of the Ohio but elsewhere up and down the frontier.

  Hamilton began musing aloud about enforcing the law not through normal judicial process but through a military expedition directed by the executive branch. As he contemplated using troops against the citizenry, Hamilton would often resort to an unaccustomed delicacy, which inspired euphemism and recalled his subtlest letters to Washington during the Newburgh crisis. The thing must, he declared in July of 1792, be brought to an issue. Just as Mr. Brackenridge feared, certain people at th
e Forks of the Ohio, less inclined to euphemism, were coming to the same conclusion.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Tom the Tinker

  The armed body of free militiamen could, Herman Husband preached, throw off the yoke of eastern tyranny and bring on the millennium in the west. Even as Alexander Hamilton began considering ways of bringing a federal military presence to the Forks of the Ohio, five hundred men calling themselves the Mingo Creek Association emerged as a power at the Forks. They had a shrewd and ambitious idea, which involved the armed bodies Husband was talking about. In meetings at the Mingo Creek church—a small log structure on comparatively flat ground near the creek, where the four western counties converged—the Mingo Creek Association began setting official militias at odds with the government.

  The association had a long ancestry. Men who became members and allies of the association had, in the years leading to ratification of the U.S. Constitution, closed roads to towns where debt cases were heard and foreclosed property was auctioned; they’d enforced boycotts on liquor brought in from the east. They’d corresponded with Virginians and Kentuckians on the need for western unity. At the recent Washington County meeting, they’d condemned federal tax collectors and sent delegates to the Green Tree convention; they’d participated in attacks on Robert Johnson, John Connor, and Robert Wilson. They were inheritors of attacks on British soldiers, carried out in the 1760s by the Indian-clad “blacks,” and of squatter associations that had escorted Pennsylvania’s sheriffs out of the area in the early seventies.

  Now the association set goals far broader than attacks on collectors. It planned to unite the four western counties, add Bedford County, and bring General Neville’s survey and the whole trans-Appalachian west into armed opposition to eastern oppression. Conveniently for the association’s plans, the sanctioned state militia, which organized and armed all able-bodied adult white males, was subject to extreme degrees of popular democracy.

  Militia musters were the scenes of drills, drinking, debating, caucusing, and electioneering. Armed service, a sometimes onerous requirement of citizenship, offered the only officially sanctioned arena for community action outside state and federal elections. From colonels down, officers were elected by the militiamen themselves, including by landless men and dependents in others’ households. Anyone possessed of charisma and effectiveness, even if lacking gorgeous uniforms, proud mounts, gleaming arms, or money, could rise in the militia system.

  Using the democratic process, the Mingo Creek Association perpetrated a takeover, from within, of the authorized militias of the Forks. The association didn’t merely use militia musters to recruit men to the antitax cause. It turned the militia itself inside out. The nucleus was the battalion commanded by Colonel John Hamilton. Almost every member of the Mingo Creek Association also served in Hamilton’s militia battalion—but the two entities did more than overlap. The association gave itself eight subdivisions, corresponding to the battalion’s eight companies, and gave those companies the task, to be carried out at official musters, of electing representatives to the association’s leadership, which held regular meetings at the Mingo Creek church to plan obstructions of federal tax law. Company captains received copies of the committee’s resolutions, speeches, and endorsements for public office. Those records were to be kept secret among the militia companies. Colonel John Hamilton presided, so far without objection, over the merging of his battalion with the association: he’d been present at the attack on Robert Johnson and was in sympathy with the goals of the attackers. But the beauty of the operation lay in the fact that, had an officer objected, he would have been stripped of command by vote of the men under him. Attaching itself to and replicating the militia, the association turned official resources—arms, armaments, and hierarchies—and official purpose, armed defense of the region, against officialdom.

  The association took an even more radical step. The revised, conservative state constitution had ended popular elections for local judges. The governor appointed judges. Creditors had been finding debt cases easier to bring and win. So the Mingo Creek Association constituted itself as a court of law. No citizen in John Hamilton’s militia district, the association announced, was to bring suit in county court against any other citizen in the district without first applying to the association for what it presented as mediation. Mediators would be chosen by popular elections, held outside sanctioned political process.

  Not surprisingly, given the association’s identity with the local militia, and the assaults for which it was becoming known, lawsuits for debt collection in the county court dropped off sharply. Going to law to collect debts or bring foreclosures suddenly took courage, even foolhardiness. And the association’s ideas spread quickly. A similar association in Allegheny County was soon imposing an extralegal court too.

  • • •

  The Mingo Creek Association began making its desires felt when General Neville took out an ad in the Pittsburgh Gazette in July of 1792, seeking to rent space for the registration offices now required by the revised excise law. Almost nobody was willing to rent to him, but he did get one bite. Captain William Faulkner, an officer in the army at Fort Fayette, owned a house in the town of Washington, where he and his wife lived and operated a tavern. Faulkner offered to rent Neville a room in the house.

  A number of people came to visit Faulkner to suggest politely that this was a bad idea. Faulkner insisted on his right to use his private property in any way he chose; Neville made the deal and ran another ad in the Gazette, informing the distillers of Washington County that twice a week, Neville himself—he was finding it almost impossible to hire deputies—would be in attendance at Faulkner’s to register their stills. The first excise office at the Forks seemed to be open for business.

  One day William Faulkner was riding near Pigeon Creek, hoping to find some of his soldiers. (Preparations for the Indian war hadn’t been going smoothly; desertions were common.) Faulkner’s search was interrupted by Robert Morrison, who farmed near the Mingo. Confronting Faulkner on the road, Morrison showed him a copy of the Gazette. There was General Neville’s ad, announcing an excise office at Faulkner’s house. Irate, Morrison demanded that Faulkner accompany him to discuss the matter further with a man named Benjamin Parkinson.

  Intimidated, Faulkner went with Morrison to Parkinson’s house. Parkinson, a tall, red-haired former justice of the peace, passionate and influential, was already known to Faulkner, who had enjoyed more or less cordial relations with him. Inside, Morrison handed the paper to Parkinson, who looked at it a long time before speaking. Then Parkinson asked if it was possible that Faulkner was such a damned rascal that he’d given consent for an excise office in his house. “Never in my company again,” Parkinson told Faulkner. Repeating the deliberately insulting expression “damned rascal”—both were fighting words—he noted that the ostracism he’d just imposed meant that nobody else would speak to Faulkner either.

  Faulkner stalked out into the daylight. Parkinson and Morrison followed him. In the front yard, Parkinson took a more reassuring tone. He’d just been giving Faulkner advice, he said, Faulkner had nothing to fear; simply being in Parkinson’s house gave Faulkner protection. They went back inside. Faulkner went out. They kept going in and out: Faulkner, trying to leave, feared outright bolting, and Morrison, acting as enforcer for Parkinson’s interrogation, repeatedly managed to escort Faulkner back inside without resorting to outright violence.

  Finally Parkinson came to the point. Throw Neville out of your house, he ordered. The demand would not be made again, he said; it was coming not from Parkinson alone but from five hundred men for whom Parkinson spoke, and they would be only too happy to turn Faulkner into an example. Faulkner must not only evict General Neville as a tenant but also announce in the Gazette that he’d done so. Nothing less, Parkinson said, would satisfy the association.

  Faulkner didn’t know what this association might be. The group hadn’t yet written its constitution, for which the Washington Cou
nty resolves for violent treatment of taxmen served as founding principles. To demonstrate the association’s scope and power, Morrison and Parkinson escorted Faulkner to the home of another of the Mingo Creek Hamiltons, David, brother of the wild Daniel, where they read the Washington County resolutions to Faulkner. They put it to him in a friendly and logical way. What would happen to him for having rented space to General Neville? He would, they answered themselves, be tarred and feathered and have his house destroyed.

  Soon Colonel John Hamilton arrived, along with Daniel Hamilton himself. Informed of the existence of an excise office in Faulkner’s house, Daniel gave a sudden whoop and grabbed the hair on top of Faulkner’s head. Tugging on Faulkner’s scalp, Daniel asked if the tavernkeeper understood the meaning of that. Faulkner did. The men repeated the demand: Faulkner must announce the discontinuance of the excise office in his house or see his house destroyed and suffer himself. Daniel took Faulkner outside and reviewed the situation again, with vehemence. Then he sent Faulkner on his way.

  This treatment was emblematic of the association’s approach. Faulkner, though considered a lowlife as a tavernkeeper and army officer, wasn’t a federal official or tax collector. He was a local abettor. The association intended to bring all such people, throughout the region, to an understanding. Anybody suspected of serving as a hireling for the Nevilles and their federalist masters must now publicly avow loyalty to the people of the Forks.