Yet Faulkner chose to ignore his day of intimidation. A few days later, Mrs. Faulkner, tending bar at the tavern, had to put up with some loud antiexcise talk; later the same day, a gang galloped up to the tavern door. Wheeling and shouting, the gang tore down the sign advertising the excise office. Mrs. Faulkner watched them gallop away.
Still Faulkner wouldn’t take the hint, and to Forks moderates like Mr. Brackenridge, the context in which the association finally did attack Faulkner’s house was even more frightening than the attack itself. An anonymous ad in the Gazette called another convention to meet in Pittsburgh to discuss problems with the excise law. This time the call didn’t come from prominent men. Means of representing townships and counties was even less clear than before. The convention that gathered in late August of 1792 was crowded with nearly forty delegates, and moderates were outnumbered by a new and vocal group. In fact, the most prominent of the moderates deliberately stayed away. Both Mr. Brackenridge and his nemesis William Findley declined to serve.
One new and prominent moderate did attend: Albert Gallatin. He’d been at the first, casual meeting in Brownsville, where the plan for delegating the Green Tree meeting had been adopted, but he hadn’t attended the Green Tree meeting, and this more extreme convention was his debut as a local delegate. Gallatin was a Swiss immigrant and American patriot whose intellectual background surpassed even Mr. Brackenridge’s. He’d been dandled on the knee of Voltaire himself. A committed republican and anti-federalist, he’d moved to western Pennsylvania and settled on an estate he called Friendship Hill. He’d fought the creditor interest in 1790, as a delegate to the convention to revise the Pennsylvania constitution; he’d been representing Fayette County in the assembly for two years. A student of finance, Gallatin vociferously opposed federal debt service and thus the whiskey tax. But he was equally sure that violence and lawlessness could only further isolate and impoverish the west.
His voice was weak. It was the Mingo Creek Association that dominated the second Pittsburgh convention. Joining the returning delegate Colonel John Hamilton were newcomers Benjamin Parkinson and John’s relative David, at whose homes William Faulkner had been intimidated. These Mingo Creek men were joined by another Washington County resident, David Bradford, a wealthy lawyer with the fanciest house in Washington, who had attended the Green Tree convention. Bradford wasn’t a member of the Mingo Creek Association, but despite his wealth, he’d long involved himself in road closings and other antigovernment activities; he’d been a participant in the radical Washington meeting, whose resolutions founded the association. David Bradford badly wanted to keep common cause with laborers and farmers.
The convention made a list of radical demands, including the replacement of the whiskey excise with a progressive tax on wealth. They wanted hirelings of the federal government disabled. They demanded the resignation of General Neville, who couldn’t, the petitioners believed, be replaced; nobody would take the job now. They created committees of correspondence to reform government and unite the entire Forks in militia-structured resistance. Most significant, first for William Faulkner, and soon for other civilians who abetted or even complied with the law: they backed up demands with a resolution to support any action taken against any resident of the Forks who aided federal officials.
That’s what gave moderates true cause for fear. A document purporting to represent the people of all four western counties enshrined the radical and violent ideas of Mingo Creek. Albert Gallatin would regret signing the convention’s resolutions.
Two days later, thirty armed men rode up to William Faulkner’s house. Their faces were painted a variety of colors. Aiming their guns at the tavern sign, with its representation of George Washington’s head, they opened fire. The president’s features splintered and flew. Then they battered the door of the house until it split.
Faulkner was out. They threw the beds all over the floor and went everywhere in the house, including the tavern, where they threatened to smash up the bar. Some said they’d shave Faulkner’s head and tar and feather him. Some said they’d take a limb; some said they’d kill him. One man called for burning the house, as it was at a distance from others and wouldn’t start a town fire. Another said that for community safety the house should be torn down, not burned. After breaking everything in the house, they rode away. David Bradford threw a jubilant celebration for the attackers. The next day, when Faulkner finally did publish in the Gazette his decision not to allow an excise office to operate in his home, jubilation overflowed. Unity was growing at the Forks.
• • •
“If the plot should thicken,” Alexander Hamilton was musing, “and the application of force should appear to be unavoidable, will it be expedient for the president to repair in person to the scene of commotion?” This anticipation, in which, as during the Newburgh crisis, he imagined moving the great man like a chess piece, came to Hamilton in the first week of September 1792, while he was writing to John Jay, chief justice of the Supreme Court. Jay wrote back to advise caution: warlike preparations, he reminded Hamilton, might only inflame matters on the frontier. That didn’t faze Hamilton, who was busy conjuring for the president the benefits of an armed military suppression, somewhere, of whiskey-tax resistance and the promising features of the Forks of the Ohio as the scene for such action.
Hamilton had given western North Carolina serious consideration too. But the attorney general of the United States, Edmund Randolph, had reviewed the situation in North Carolina and found no evidence for federal prosecution there, let alone for a military expedition. Most surveys beyond the mountains were making it impossible to collect the whiskey tax—revenue inspectors in North and South Carolina were resigning, no tax had been collected in Kentucky—and decisive action at the Forks, Hamilton told Washington, would serve as a good example for all. The Forks were a special embarrassment, he added, as the region was in the same state as the seat of government; it was convenient for suppression because of the army presence there. Indecision, Hamilton reminded Washington, would make the executive branch look weak.
Washington found petitioning at least as disturbing as attacks. He authorized Hamilton to push Attorney General Randolph to get indictments against attendees of the second Pittsburgh convention, whose daring extralegality, Washington assured Hamilton, would be checked by the full force of executive power. Randolph, however, noted that while the attack on Faulkner’s house did provide a cause of legal action, the Pittsburgh convention did not. Assembling to remonstrate, Randolph reminded Hamilton, is among the rights of citizens.
A tense disagreement was developing between Randolph and Hamilton in competition for Washington’s judgment. Unbidden, Hamilton whipped up a presidential proclamation—the natural prelude, he said, to a new course of conduct—in which the president not only condemned the Faulkner and other attacks but also warned the people of the Forks not to hold meetings like the Pittsburgh conventions. In Hamilton’s draft, the president flatly threatened the use of federal troops if order were not restored. Randolph, reviewing the draft, crossed that part out as inflammatory, and Washington signed the proclamation with Randolph’s modifications. Hamilton pushed: issuing a proclamation means resolving to act on it, he reminded Washington, with all the powers and means enjoyed by the executive—another of his and Washington’s euphemisms for using military force on citizens.
In a private letter, Washington counseled Hamilton in terms that were not, for these two, unfamiliar. The subject was the highly problematic nature, no matter how lofty the end, of using the army as a political means. Washington expressed no doubt that the proclamation was likely to fail, and military action—here he called it “ulterior arrangements”—would have to be taken. But the law and the Constitution must rule, he insisted, and in the event, citizen militias and not regular troops should be used if possible. He and the federalists had been pushing for a regular peacetime army, and Washington could do a pretty accurate impression of the knee-jerk opposition. “ ‘The
cat is let out,’ ” he imagined it squalling, “ ‘we now see for what purpose an army was raised.’ ” Using troops against citizens must, Washington reminded Hamilton, always be a last resort.
Hamilton understood that. He’d told John Jay, when imagining a military suppression, not that force would be unavoidable but that it would appear unavoidable. Now he began bringing the thing, as he put it, to an issue.
• • •
The first step was to send George Clymer, federal revenue inspector for all of Pennsylvania, out to Pittsburgh. Had Hamilton meant to give the people of the Forks a view of the executive branch as disinterested and fair, governing all the people, acting with restraint yet fully capable of enforcing federal laws throughout the nation, the choice of Clymer would have been a strange one. Any inspector from the east would have been viewed with suspicion over the mountains. George Clymer offered the people of the Forks a crude caricature of their worst fears about the real nature of the Treasury Department, the federal government, and the east.
By traveling in manifest terror, Clymer managed to make an impression even before arrival. He’d been at the Forks in 1778, when he’d started land speculating; the area, he’d noted then, was a good place to do penance in. A fifty-three-year-old Philadelphian of the Robert Morris type, wealthy even before independence, he’d profiteered successfully throughout the revolution and become one of the richest men in Pennsylvania. He’d opposed the state’s radical constitution, supported the conservative revision of 1790, participated in the federalist victory at the ratifying convention for the U.S. Constitution, and was now deeply involved in western Pennsylvania land speculation. He was therefore under the mistaken impression that he was famous throughout the state.
To remain incognito, on his way west he introduced himself as Henry Knox, secretary of war. While Clymer was not, in fact, well known, Henry Knox was known at least to be fat, and the traveler was skinny. People whom Clymer encountered had no idea who he was, but knew he wasn’t Henry Knox, and word spread of a mysterious man on a badly concealed errand.
As Clymer rose into crisp mountain air, it distressed him to learn that news of his approach had preceded him. He came up with a new alias—the time-honored “Smith”—and traded roles with his servant, giving his good mount to the man and taking the poorer horse himself. Role reversal meant he had to handle the stabling at a tavern, where the tavern’s groom announced that Smith had no idea how to take care of a horse. Word spread again. By the time Clymer, now almost unbearably frightened, rode down from the highlands, ferried the river, and appeared on Pittsburgh’s mud streets, he’d donned yet another disguise. He’d beaten up his hat; he slouched in the saddle. He took lodgings at the Indian Queen, a tavern depressingly unlike the gentleman’s lodging house of the same name back in Philadelphia. Then he went straight to Fort Fayette, still in its slow and chaotic state of blockhouse construction, the staging area for efforts to defeat Indians in the northwest. Within the gates, safely among soldiers, Clymer doffed his disguise. As a federal officer, he asked the commander to provide security for an official stay in the area.
Riding from the fort with soldiers assigned to his protection, Clymer could at last relax. He checked out of the room at the Indian Queen and moved up to the fancier Bear Inn.
He thought that he could not, for his life, leave the marginally civilized confines of the village and fort. Though he’d seen nothing personally to support the impression, he’d already decided that the counties he was supposed to inspect were in a state of outright insurrection. He therefore sent a message to the district judge, Alexander Addison, asking Addison to take depositions to provide names of attendees of the Pittsburgh convention. Judge Addison was no judicial nullifier—he’d been appointed by the state governor, under the new constitution, not elected by the people, and he could be a tough enforcer—but as a Pennsylvania-rights man he was a stickler for what he saw as constitutional process. He pointed out to Clymer, with asperity, that a state judge had neither jurisdiction nor responsibility to become the agent of a federal investigation. Had Clymer come to him as an officer of the court, Addison said, that would be one thing; but Clymer was trying to delegate federal judicial process to a state court, turning a state into a federal department. Addison couldn’t allow it.
Clymer concluded that the insurrection was even worse than he’d thought. Local judges were in on it too.
That conclusion was important. From it would follow a further conclusion, critical to invoking the president’s powers of suppression under the militia law: If state judges were described as insurgents, then Pennsylvania law enforcement had no chance—no inclination—of enforcing law at the Forks. Judicial process could be said to have broken down beyond repair.
Clymer did get justices of the peace in Washington County to take depositions from Faulkner and witnesses to the ransacking, and Faulkner named some attendees of the latest Pittsburgh convention. Meanwhile, General Neville confirmed for Clymer in person everything the general had been writing in letters. People throughout the entire area weren’t only insurrectionary and anarchic, Neville and Clymer agreed. The people were drunk, depraved.
Clymer galloped out of Pittsburgh like a man pursued by nightmares, the hooves of his cavalry escort beating retreat. He’d been in town only a few days. His impact was lasting. As an emissary from the luxurious east, at first traveling in disguise like the secret agent of a hostile nation, then moving officiously about with an armed guard, he gave the people of the Forks a clear picture of their government as remote and ostentatious, timorous, slippery, and, though entirely incompetent, in command of thuggish dragoons.
• • •
As the Mingo Creek Association expanded its mandate, General Neville redoubled his attempts to get military help from Philadelphia. Both Neville’s and the association’s efforts devolved on a man named Benjamin Wells, the deputy collector for Fayette and Westmoreland counties. If Benjamin Wells couldn’t stay in business as a collector, nobody could: So eager was Wells to make money—not only by rake-offs on commissions but also by rewards for turning in unregistered stills and giving testimony against resisters—that in hopes of founding a kind of junior Neville Connection, he had one of his sons in the quartermaster’s office at Fort Cumberland in Maryland and wanted to see his son John in the potentially lucrative collections business.
Wells was poking around a mill belonging to a man named James Wigle when he was confronted and punched out by Wigle’s son Philip, a landless veteran, like so many in his generation at the Forks. Wells dusted himself off and went on with his job, complaining to both General Neville and Clymer that his neighbors’ scorn made him live like a dog, yet eager enough for the bounty on reporting unregistered stills that throughout 1793, he kept snooping. He took voluminous notes. He was repeatedly attacked. He saw the house in Uniontown where he was trying to operate an excise office stoned and its windows smashed; he had to run from the place, while moderate citizens held off the attackers. In April, when he was away from his house, men visited his wife, threatening violence against her and her husband.
Wells was undeterred. In November his house was again attacked by a disguised gang. He was home this time, and under threat of the usual punishments, he did turn over to the gang his excise commission and record books and publish his resignation in the Gazette. The association and its allies were interested in this kind of formal resignation of office and published recanting. Such gestures signified the gathering unity of the Forks under a new, self-appointed officialdom based on militia elections. In accepting Wells’s papers, they assumed administration of his office, which they nullified.
Wells, by the same token, believed there was a loophole to his public disavowal of tax collection. He got General Neville to give Wells fils the coveted excise commission to carry on the family trade.
Neville used the Wells situation in his ongoing push, and Alexander Hamilton’s concomitant pull, for military intervention. In 1793 alone, Benjamin Wells t
raveled three times to Philadelphia to give the Justice and Treasury departments names of delinquent distillers and testimony against his attackers. Meanwhile General Neville made a record, in a steady flow of letters to the Treasury Department, of the imminent likelihood of his deputies’ quitting under threat of violence and their prospect of no earnings. He cajoled deputies into staying on and urged them to keep offices open. He tried to find homeowners and tavernkeepers who would rent him space, and he urged his deputies to do the same. He tried to add to the corps of deputies. He orchestrated Wells’s trips east to give testimony.
Yet unhappily for Neville and Hamilton’s shared plan to bring military enforcement of the law to the Forks—it had seemed on the verge of fulfillment in Hamilton’s communications with the president in 1792—the cabinet found itself beset by bigger problems, and a military solution had to wait. The king of France was decapitated. Algerian pirates harassed American shipping. A new war with Britain seemed more and more likely. The French minister to the United States tried to recruit Americans to the French cause, sparking a craze for French extremism that made George Washington, who had proclaimed U.S. neutrality in the French-British conflict, fair game in the press for the first time. People mobbed the Philadelphia streets; then yellow fever broke out, forcing the evacuation of anyone who could afford to leave, panicking survivors, shutting down government operations and mob restlessness alike. Hamilton contracted the disease and barely survived it.
Meanwhile, the resistance movement at the Forks found a new leader. Tom the Tinker, joyously violent, seemingly everywhere yet visibly nowhere, had begun writing personal notes to individuals who seemed less than fully committed to the cause. You might find a note posted on a tree outside your house, requiring you to publish in the Gazette your hatred of the whiskey tax and your commitment to the cause; otherwise, the note promised, your still would be mended. Tom had a macabre sense of humor and a literary bent: “mended” meant shot full of holes or burned. Tom published on his own too, rousing his followers to action, telling the Gazette’s editor in cover notes to run the messages or suffer the consequences. He was always sorry to have been forced, by someone’s waywardness, to pay a visit. But nobody was exempt from his service, he reminded his readers. He asked his victims to imagine his fires making the hills give light to the vales.
The Whiskey Rebellion Page 14
