The Whiskey Rebellion

by William Hogeland

  To Presley, the outbreak had already occurred. He stormed out of the lawyer’s office, and soon two associate judges, who were also the town’s militia commanders, appeared in Mr. Brackenridge’s office to ask whether, at Presley Neville’s request, they could legally call out the Pittsburgh militia. (Such judges only assisted a district judge and weren’t always trained in the law.) No, said Mr. Brackenridge: only the governor could do that. The judges went away and came back. Could they, as judges, raise a posse from the county? No, Mr. Brackenridge insisted. But he admitted the county sheriff could. The sheriff pointed out—by now they were all in a tavern—that raising a posse seemed a bad idea, since the mob now was the posse, at least out in the countryside.

  Mr. Brackenridge agreed. Persuasion was the thing, not threat. And seeing himself, when there was any persuading to do, as the man for the job, he volunteered to ride out to Couch’s Fort, where the rebels were said to be planning a full-scale assault on Bower Hill, and address them. Instead of threatening dire consequences, he would appeal to reason. Fired by a hope that he still might prevent the worst for the Forks and the nation, Mr. Brackenridge mounted up and rode down to the Monongahela waterfront, the judges and the sheriff riding with him. As they waited impatiently to cross by ferry, the peacemakers encountered Presley Neville again. Now he had a crew of two other rich men’s sons, flagrantly armed, eager to cross; they were accompanied by Marshal Lenox. Peacemaking clearly wasn’t on their minds.

  Mr. Brackenridge didn’t know what Presley knew: A detachment of soldiers, led by General Neville’s brother-in-law, Major Kirkpatrick, had left Fort Fayette and was hurrying to Bower Hill. Presley, the marshal, and the crew of bloods were on their way to join the defense.

  Hoping to stop what he saw as an escalation, the lawyer picked out the youngest of the men, John Ormsby, whose parents he knew. “What, armed?” he said. “You will not ride with us armed.” “Ride as you please,” the young man retorted, “I am armed.” “We are not all born orators,” Presley told the lawyer. He sat on a gray horse, pistols in his belt, and the chivalric stance didn’t speak well of his judgment, the lawyer thought. The groups took separate ferries, and when in the low water of a dry summer his boat hit a sandbar and stuck, Mr. Brackenridge jumped his horse over the rail and swam it across the channel. Soon joined by the sheriff, he rode up the high barrier ridge, and when the two judges caught up, the men hurriedly conferred.

  Mr. Brackenridge feared the rebels would be patrolling the roads. If they spotted judges and a sheriff, they’d think this was a posse. The sheriff said he knew a back way to Couch’s Fort. The peacemakers hurried down the south side of the steep mountain and rode into the countryside.

  • • •

  After John Holcroft’s cadre had retreated from Bower Hill to Couch’s Fort, militia regiments overlapping with the Mingo Creek Association had called out themselves and other militias in the region. Throughout July 17, about six hundred men gathered at Couch’s Fort. Decision making was democratic. The group voted in favor of bringing more assertive action against Bower Hill. When some brought news that soldiers of the Army of the United States, led by Major Kirkpatrick, were on their way to defend Bower Hill, the rebels voted to face down those troops and make two demands. The marshal must hand over his remaining writs. General Neville must resign as excise inspector. If the demands were met, violence would not ensue.

  No blackface now, no wild disguise. This wouldn’t be a raid by a gang but an expedition by a large, disciplined fighting force, mobilized without orders from any legal authority, offering to do battle with a division of the U.S. Army. A ripple of misgiving at what was turning out to be a very late date passed among the ranks. Two members of the gentlemanly Washington County democratic society—David Bradford, who had treated the Faulkner ransackers to a party, and his partner, James Marshall, who had signed the society’s remonstrance to the president—declined to join in the attack. Perhaps more notably, John Hamilton, though commander of the battalion from which the Mingo Creek Association derived its structure, and a tormentor of Robert Johnson and intimidator of William Faulkner, refused to take this next, potentially fatal step. He would not go to Bower Hill.

  A committee of three, led by the association’s Benjamin Parkinson, asked James McFarlane, a militia major and local hero of the revolution, to command the operation. McFarlane’s acceptance of command was a decisive event. Nobody evinced more dramatically than he the direness of the situation that had developed at the Forks in only forty-eight hours. James and his brother Andrew, brave, enterprising, and no strangers to armed conflict, had come to western Pennsylvania as youths from Scotland in the late 1760s; they’d traded with Indians and made money. During the Virginia-Pennsylvania border war, Andrew McFarlane had been held prisoner in Virginia for two years; later he’d served in the Eighth Pennsylvania Regiment, which marched home across the mountains from Valley Forge in an awful winter to protect Forks families from gruesome Indian attacks. When Andrew was captured by Indians in 1777, the Indians delivered him to the British, who imprisoned him. James had meanwhile been with General Washington, in the First Pennsylvania Regiment, which saw action in the most grueling theaters of the revolution. His talents were such that he rose to the rank of lieutenant. In 1780 he traveled to Quebec, where he’d learned his brother was being held, and brought about a prisoner exchange. The McFarlane brothers left Canada, traveling first to Andrew’s wife’s home in Virginia, where she’d fled, and then back to the Forks and their expanding lands and businesses. Unlike many others, they’d continued prospering, enjoying the respect of all classes of neighbors. By the 1790s, Andrew was living on the banks of the Monongahela, James near the Hamilton clan, high above Mingo Creek.

  Lately, though, like so many other disappointed war veterans at the Forks, James McFarlane had become involved with the Mingo Creek Association. His home seemed again under attack from a distant, oppressive force, which seemed to have made the most cynical use of the commitment of men like the McFarlane brothers to the war for American independence. Shots had been fired. People had been killed and maimed. In the late afternoon, James McFarlane, embodiment at the Forks of the deepest sacrifices and greatest glories of the War of Independence, led ranks out of Couch’s Fort to confront U.S. troops at Bower Hill.

  • • •

  Mr. Brackenridge and his peacemaking party, going as fast as they could, were noticing with dismay that harvesters working in the late-afternoon light were all women. When the party stopped at a farm along the way, hoping for news, the place seemed eerily quiet. A woman was in the house. “Are you of Neville’s party?” she asked, suspicious. Mr. Brackenridge, full of misgiving, hurried his party toward Couch’s Fort.

  Major Kirkpatrick’s troops, meanwhile, arrived at Bower Hill ahead of the rebels. They took up positions in the house. General Neville positioned himself just below the house, in a ravine in the woods, where he could observe the battle.

  The force of six hundred rebels arrived on Neville’s broad hilltop at five in the afternoon. Unarmed men were ordered to hold the horses at the rear. Men in arms began a formal muster in front of the house. Drums beat a tattoo. Orders were shouted. What the general could see from his hiding place was at once impressive and distressing. Ranked men paraded and drilled with discipline on his lawn. With troops deployed and ready, James McFarlane and a committee of three retired to a high point for command.

  McFarlane began by sending a messenger to the house with a truce flag. At the house, Major Kirkpatrick met the messenger, who demanded that General Neville come out and give up his commission. Kirkpatrick replied that General Neville wasn’t home. The messenger came back to McFarlane, then returned to the house with a demand that six militiamen be allowed to search for Neville’s official papers. According to the messenger, Kirkpatrick refused. According to Kirkpatrick, he agreed to the demand but was then told that his soldiers must come out and ground their arms; this he could not allow. Either way, it was an impasse. But the
messenger and Kirkpatrick did agree that women should now leave the house. The women emerged and ran downhill to Presley Neville’s house at the foot of the mountain.

  Some rebels, restive, began setting outbuildings on fire. They also fired desultory shots at the house; then both sides opened fire in earnest. As the gun battle went on, and black smoke again obscured the view, militiamen were still coming up the hill and reporting for duty. Some had received word that failure to appear for this event might have unpleasant consequences.

  Now too came Presley Neville, his friends, and Marshal Lenox. But since they were approaching the rebels from the rear, they had no way of aiding the defense of the house.

  Presley was still in chevalier mode. “If any of you is a gentleman,” he shouted to rebels in the woods at the rear, “come out and speak to me!” Marshal Lenox winced at this pointless challenge. Militiamen confronted Presley and his friends and placed the whole group, including the marshal, under guard. Presley could only watch as balls tore into his father’s house and smoke hung over the grounds and farms.

  Firing from the house abruptly ceased. Through the smoke, rebels saw a white flag waving from a window. At his high command post, James McFarlane stepped from behind a tree to tell the men to hold their fire.

  A shot was fired. Someone in the house had picked McFarlane off. Hit in his groin, he fell. He’d survived the War of Independence. He died on the ground at Bower Hill, a few miles from where he lived. In shock, the rebels, robbed of command by what seemed the grossest treachery, resumed firing. Neville’s slaves started shooting at the rebels from their quarters. The rebels lit more outbuildings ablaze.

  Inside the battered mansion, Major Kirkpatrick could see fire spreading quickly toward him. Flames, not shooting, would soon make defending the mansion impossible. The heat was becoming unbearable. The house and everyone in it would burn. Kirkpatrick had no choice. When he came out and surrendered, the militia, so abruptly victorious, dismissed Kirkpatrick’s soldiers, who left, and arrested Kirkpatrick.

  It was evening. Militiamen entered the house and surveyed the shambles. Fine furniture lay splintered. Mirrors and windows were shattered, ornate plaster smashed on carpets. The rebels broke out the general’s whiskey, and as darkness gathered they made a massive bonfire of General Neville’s entire Bower Hill plantation. They ran through the house smashing what hadn’t been smashed. Barns, fences, grain, and crops went up in high flames. Soon the mansion was ablaze too; an orange brightness lit clouds of smoke drifting over the deep Chartiers Valley. Men ran through flaming barns and stables. They shot stamping, rearing horses, a cow, a pig. Slaves were pleading with the rebels to spare the slave quarters, as well as the smokehouse where the slaves’ food was kept, and when it was all over, slave quarters and smokehouse were the only things left standing at Bower Hill.

  • • •

  Only a few miles away, Mr. Brackenridge and his party, cresting a hill, saw the glow in the sky. They’d already turned back, having learned at a house along the way that they were too late. They could hear whoops and shouts as rebels dispersed up and down the steep forest. Some were carrying James McFarlane’s body to his brother Andrew’s house. Some were escorting prisoners to Couch’s Fort. Some were going home.

  Mr. Brackenridge had failed, again, to mediate. Disaster had come at last. He and his companions nudged their horses on toward Pittsburgh.

  Meanwhile, Marshal Lenox was being hustled on horseback into the rebel fallback at Couch’s Fort. A shot was fired, just missing Lenox: drunk militiamen were there, and Benjamin Parkinson and his committee were trying to impose order while deciding what to do with Lenox. Two men with knives approached Lenox and slashed his coat. The committee removed Lenox to a nearby house for safekeeping, where Lenox found Presley Neville, also captive. Lenox was deeply regretting Presley’s loud challenge to the rebels at Bower Hill.

  Yet the killing of James McFarlane and the burning of Bower Hill hadn’t removed the original demands from the committee’s mind. Negotiations began. Marshal Lenox swore to serve no more writs west of the mountains and to surrender himself to the committee on demand. Presley agreed to sponsor the arrangement: should Lenox default, Presley would suffer in his place. With business concluded, the committee assigned a guard for the prisoners’ safe passage to Pittsburgh and released them.

  Out on the road in the darkness, Lenox and Presley were making their way through the dispersing crowd when some drunk militiamen aimed guns at them. Their appointed guard, following orders, stayed between them and the drunks, but the drunks were having none of that and began forcing the whole group back toward Couch’s Fort. The situation could not end well, Lenox saw. He spurred his horse and bolted into the woods. Arriving at about three in the morning at the Monongahela, he rowed himself and his horse to town. Presley soon escaped too; he arrived in Pittsburgh shaken but unhurt.

  Major Kirkpatrick had been taken by another group of rebels, who were saying that he’d personally shot James McFarlane. David Hamilton, calmer brother of the wild Daniel, joined the group, and Kirkpatrick, knowing David, felt safe enough to start berating his captors. But when David told him quietly, “I’m putting my life at risk trying to save you,” Kirkpatrick fell silent, and David found a way to let Kirkpatrick too escape. The major arrived in Pittsburgh, where the whole Neville Connection, distraught, was gathering around General and Mrs. Neville, who now owned literally nothing but the clothes they wore. The Nevilles were staying at the home of their daughter and son-in-law, the Craigs, while the Connection tried to absorb the losses of the night and the peril of the immediate future.

  General Neville had been warning the Washington administration for years that law at the Forks of the Ohio needed the immediate, armed help of government. Isaac Craig wrote hurriedly to his boss, Henry Knox, in the cabinet in Philadelphia.

  • • •

  James McFarlane’s marker would stand out on the steep hillside across the road from the Mingo Creek church, where only children had been interred before him. The burial, a day after the destruction of Bower Hill, became a crowded scene of grief and rage, at once a funeral and a meeting of militias and the association, led by Benjamin Parkinson’s committee. Mourners were talking about more fire. This time they wanted to burn the town of Pittsburgh, where the Nevilles and their friends were gathered with the marshal. The committee chose to send the calmer David Hamilton and another rebel, John Black, to collect the warrants that the marshal had already served and demand the resignation of General Neville. If these conditions were met, Pittsburgh might be spared.

  Meanwhile, at the village on the point, some were saying that surrendering the Nevilles and the marshal to the rebels might be the only way to escape destruction. When David Hamilton and John Black crossed the river that evening, fearing arrest, they told people that the rebel committee was waiting in a nearby tavern. Townspeople walked restlessly in the dirt streets and stared across the river at the ridge. Rumor had it that a thousand men were up there, ready to rush down, ford the river, and sack the town.

  David Hamilton met with General and Presley Neville and asked for the general’s resignation as tax inspector. Even Presley now advised his father to comply with the demand: the Nevilles’ home, their animals, their fields and harvest were nothing but charred hulks. The general wrote out and handed David Hamilton a resignation full of conditions and haughty language. Hamilton refused to accept it. It seemed calculated, he said, to insult—as if Neville actually wanted to incite the rebels to march on Pittsburgh.

  Mr. Brackenridge, in his office, found himself mediating a disagreement that he could hardly believe was taking place. The rebels and the marshal were arguing over what had been agreed to the night before. The rebels Black and Hamilton said that the marshal had agreed not only to serve no more writs but also to hand over the writs he’d already served. The marshal insisted that he was under oath to return all served writs to Philadelphia. The lawyer watched in amazement as a dispute of almost monstrous irr
elevance unfolded before him. Pandemonium threatened the nation while the marshal argued, rightly, that a writ is only a summons, not a judgment in itself, and John Black wondered whether people’s lands would be seized and sold in Philadelphia if the marshal returned the writs. Black wanted to hear from Brackenridge whether the marshal was really bound to return them.

  Mr. Brackenridge could have laughed, but he was beginning to see the trouble he was in. These rebels, fretting over trivialities like the return of writs, fearing their lands could be seized, were probably guilty of the capital crime of treason. The Nevilles and the marshal, for their part, clung to papers, offices, and pride in the face of the threatened burning of Pittsburgh and the outbreak of civil war in the United States. If the lawyer told Hamilton and Black that having their lands seized was the least of their problems—that they’d probably all hang—rebel desperation would spill over. Nor could he advise the marshal to do the simple thing, give up the writs, defuse the conflict, save the town. Asking a federal officer to relinquish his sworn duty might, in Lenox’s eyes, place Mr. Brackenridge among the group to be hanged.

  Gamely, the lawyer offered to render an opinion on the question. He stayed up all night studying the excise law and the language of the writs, and in the morning he wrote out a formal, if useless, statement: The writs were summonses to show cause why process should not issue, not judgments in themselves; yes, the marshal was on oath to return them, but no lien could ensue from their mere return. He gave a copy of the opinion to the marshal, another to Black and David Hamilton. But the committee, Hamilton said, wouldn’t accept this. If the rebels had known that the marshal meant to return the writs, they would have killed him when he was their prisoner, and Presley Neville was surety for the marshal’s not leaving town.