The Whiskey Rebellion

by William Hogeland

  Mr. Brackenridge made a final suggestion. If the rebels allowed the marshal to leave with the writs, in any ensuing prosecution for tax evasion—as if that were really the thing to fear now—Mr. Brackenridge would appear for the defendants and get them off. If he failed, he’d pay any fines for unregistered stills out of his own pocket.

  Hamilton and Black agreed to nothing. They did ask Mr. Brackenridge to come present his idea to the rebel committee, which they claimed was waiting only four miles away; they wanted an escort out of town anyway. The lawyer, though sleepless and exhausted, was committed to seeking reason. He agreed to go. Crossing on the ferry, David Hamilton expressed doubts about prospects for peace. He seemed more gloomy and worried than fervent: there were moderates on the rebel side too, apparently. He told the lawyer that the people at McFarlane’s funeral had been ready to burn the town, an event that his and Black’s trip to town had been meant to forestall—but the people would come to Pittsburgh sooner or later, he warned. They would arrest General Neville and the marshal. There was no escape. All roads out of town were now being patrolled by rebel militias.

  Another man had come along on this trip. The excise officer Robert Johnson, tarred and feathered three years earlier, was fed up at last with trying to enforce the law and had agreed to hand over his commission to the rebel committee. The group stopped at Johnson’s house while Johnson wrote out his resignation. Now Hamilton and Black admitted that the rebel committee wasn’t really nearby. It was still at Bower Hill, they said. Arriving on those heights in the afternoon, the party saw the smoking skeletons of what had once been the most elegant home and prosperous plantation at the Forks. The slaves were there, but the rebel committee wasn’t. It was really down in the headquarters at the Mingo Creek church, Black and Hamilton confessed; they’d come to Bower Hill only to look for a dead rebel body.

  At this, Johnson refused to go further. He handed his resignation to Hamilton and Black and agreed to publish it in the Gazette. Mr. Brackenridge was fed up with the rebels’ deceptions too. If Johnson left, no witness could vouch for the lawyer’s reasons for traveling with outright insurgents. Downhearted, he said good-bye to Black and Hamilton.

  As Mr. Brackenridge and Robert Johnson rode down from the remains of Bower Hill, thunder rumbled. Wind whipped leaves inside out. At the Monongahela riverbank, Johnson took the lower ferry, and as Mr. Brackenridge turned north for the upper one he was hit by a blast of rainy wind, blowing up quickly into the most drenching storm he’d ever seen. He took shelter in the ferry house. Flashes lit the sky. Out on the Ohio, a boat carrying two soaked federal officers and an escort of soldiers went bobbing past the point. General Neville and Marshal Lenox were taking their best chance of escaping Pittsburgh.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A New Sodom

  No calm followed that storm. Four days after the general and the marshal flushed themselves down the west’s biggest drain, Mr. Brackenridge was standing before a grim crowd in the Mingo Creek church. The meeting, called by the committee that had overseen the attack on Bower Hill, was turning into a tribunal, at which the people put a direct question to the rich and educated.

  Benjamin Parkinson, tall and red-haired, stood before the crowd. “You know what has been done,” he cried. Mr. Brackenridge heard a kind of anguish in his voice. “We wish to know,” Parkinson said, “whether what has been done is right or wrong.”

  Not to attend this meeting: that had been the lawyer’s fondest hope. After the escape of Lenox and Neville, rebels had been saying that prominent men who failed to support the rebellion would be treated in the same way as the general. The eyes of the rebellion were on Mr. Brackenridge. Tom the Tinker, suspicious of the lawyer’s commitment to the rebel cause, wanted him in the front ranks. Isaac Craig and others in the besieged Neville Connection, for their part, wanted the town to take a stand against insurgency; at times it seemed as if they didn’t care if the town burned. Craig had insisted on keeping the Pittsburgh excise office open as a signal of defiance. Mr. Brackenridge started a rumor that five hundred militiamen were coming to close down the office, and Craig took down the sign with a degree of haste that the lawyer, for all his apprehensiveness, found satisfying. The Neville Connection were eyeing Mr. Brackenridge with suspicion too.

  Yet it was at the urgent, personal request of Presley Neville that Mr. Brackenridge had come to the Mingo church meeting. A written invitation had been delivered to Mr. Brackenridge’s office from David Hamilton, the gloomy moderate of the rebel side, who seemed to think the lawyer might help the rebels succeed without excessive violence. Frightened now of anything connecting him with the insurgency, Mr. Brackenridge tore the invitation in pieces and tossed them into the chaos of an armoire. But Presley came into the office and asked the lawyer to go to the meeting, pressing it as a personal favor. Presley, Mr. Brackenridge remembered, had been the guarantee against the marshal’s leaving town. Mr. Brackenridge insisted on taking witnesses who could vouch for his reasons for attending the meeting, and Presley gratefully agreed to vouch for him too.

  When the Pittsburghers arrived at the church, they were distressed to find not the small committee they’d expected but a mass gathering. A narrow road dropped steeply from forested heights and passed the church on the Mingo. Dozens of men were already outside, dozens more were arriving; and across the road was the tilted graveyard, with James McFarlane’s grave freshly dug. Among the waiting attendees was James’s brother, Andrew, silent and drawn, with a black band on his arm.

  Country people observed the arriving Pittsburgh contingent with subdued rage. Nobody spoke as they waited for the meeting to begin. Men paced around or lay on the grass.

  One of the Pittsburgh group had brought a letter from Presley Neville. When the crowd had entered the church and the meeting began, the letter was read from the chair, and Mr. Brackenridge, seated in the crowd, cringed. If the young man had meant to inflame, he’d succeeded. His letter praised the valor of the hated Major Kirkpatrick, suspected assassin of McFarlane. The crowd grew furious. After making an argument (surprisingly cogent, the lawyer thought) for the marshal’s being no longer bound by any agreements, and Presley’s being thus released from his own obligations as forfeit for the marshal’s escape, the letter went on to brag. Presley had so much property, the letter said, that he didn’t care if the rebels did burn him out. Men glared at the Pittsburghers, who had nowhere to look.

  Then, in answer to Parkinson’s question—was it right or wrong?—the rich Washington lawyer David Bradford addressed the crowd. Though he’d always been a populist, the actions he’d engaged in had merely obstructed creditors, made law enforcement difficult, intimidated collectors, pushed government away; they hadn’t been acts of war. Bradford had declined to participate in the attack on Bower Hill, and in the days since, rebels had been accusing him of encouraging them. When he denied it, they threatened him. On the way to the meeting at the church, he’d conferred with his business partner, James Marshall. Other rich men were wringing their hands too; there was no prominent supporter of the kind the rebels were asking for. Addressing the crowd, David Bradford made a fateful decision.

  He vehemently supported the attack on General Neville. He reviled the government of the United States. He called for organized regional self-defense. He praised the French terrorist Robespierre. And worst of all, for Mr. Brackenridge and the Pittsburgh moderates, he called for an immediate vote, here in the church, to see who truly supported burning Bower Hill and arresting the marshal and who was a hypocrite. On calls for yea or nay, people must literally stand up and be counted.

  The crowd responded avidly. Many who had wavered before Bower Hill were now fully enlisted in the cause. All eyes were on Mr. Brackenridge as he walked to the middle of the aisle in a tense silence. Faces were angry and suspicious; he feared immediate attack. Feeling a need to warm up the room, he did an impression of Isaac Craig hurriedly taking down the excise sign. Mockery of the Neville Connection was something he could share with hi
s audience. He got laughs. Quickly now, he slipped in the idea that he and his colleagues couldn’t possibly participate in any vote, as the Pittsburgh contingent was not here as a delegation from the town, but he did volunteer, simply as a personal friend of the country, to answer Parkinson’s stark question: right or wrong? Burning Bower Hill, he said, might (he emphasized “might”) have been right—morally. But it was wrong legally. He went further. It was treason. He pushed this painful idea against the crowd’s apparent disbelief. Under the Militia Act, he told them, the president of the United States was now empowered to call out an army against them.

  The church was silent. The people seemed amazed. Many in the militias apparently possessed only the weakest conception of how far their actions had taken them. They expected to be left alone to force officials to resign and flee, to winnow out overactive creditors and engrossers of business and property, and to impede distant government with acts of regional self-defense. They didn’t seem to understand that state and federal governments had recently been restructured to cope with just such outbreaks—that those governments had, to a great degree, come into existence specifically to do so.

  Having scared them, the lawyer offered a way out. If they couldn’t make a revolution, he warned them, they would only make a rebellion, and a rebellion would be crushed; this meeting didn’t have the official support of all of western Pennsylvania, or western Virginia, or the Kentucky territory. But the Washington administration, he advised them, had always been pathetically eager to prevent war at all costs. The president was likely to agree to an amnesty for crimes committed, if the rioters made a statement of full submission to the laws. He gave them his best impression of fat Henry Knox, in broken-English parley with the Seneca chief Cornplanter. People were too disconcerted to laugh much. The lawyer explained his point: if mere Indian tribes could exact leniency from the president, the westerners might expect no less.

  This idea, a statement of regional submission and a plea for amnesty, would become the best plan of the prominent moderates at the Forks, who would go on hoping, with growing desperation, that destruction and civil war might be prevented. At the church, however, Mr. Brackenridge saw anger pass across Benjamin Parkinson’s face in response to the lawyer’s proposing that those not involved in the Bower Hill attack be appointed to ask the president for amnesty on behalf of the attackers. This was hardly the univocal support that Parkinson and his committee were demanding. Other militiamen were shaking their heads. The meeting took a break. People wandered around outside, talking angrily. Daniel Hamilton approached Mr. Brackenridge, to whom the mercurial Daniel seemed to have taken a sudden liking, and confided that Parkinson and Andrew McFarlane were excoriating the lawyer. Mr. Brackenridge began moving his colleagues onto their horses, and to avoid being put on the spot in a vote, the Pittsburghers rode off.

  Then, fearing that such a quick exit might reveal outright dissent, the lawyer changed his mind, rode back quickly, hid his horse near a stream, walked up to the church, slipped inside, and began mingling and chatting as though he’d never left. But there was nothing more he could do here. With Bradford now in the lead, the meeting had responded, in a way the lawyer hadn’t intended, to the idea that broad regional support was lacking. The rebels now called for a grand western congress two weeks hence, a gathering of all four western Pennsylvania counties, plus Bedford, and as many Virginia counties as would join in the defense of the region. The lawyer had prevented a vote that might have brought immediate destruction on Pittsburgh. But he’d failed to push back rebel rage, which kept seeking broader avenues. He slipped out of the church and rode for town.

  • • •

  Alexander Fulton was a wealthy distiller in his thirties, a veteran officer of the revolution. Before Bower Hill, he’d loudly derided the rebels, whom he scorned as a faction. Men who blackened their faces and disguised themselves had to be ashamed, a mob, nothing for the likes of Alexander Fulton to fear. He’d openly claimed a connection with General Neville; he’d offered Neville the use of his house and the support of his person, should Neville’s home ever be attacked. Fulton was, in other words, just the sort of propertied, educated man of whom the rebels were now demanding demonstrations of wholehearted loyalty to the western cause. Fulton prided himself on knowledge of military tactics, and the rebellion needed just such expertise.

  So what Fulton had once considered his unassailable pride had been replaced by bowel-loosening panic. He could barely master his shame. He’d been in a tavern, drinking wine—not whiskey—when local moderates had come in with the news of the rebel defeat in the morning attack on Bower Hill. Fulton had expressed pleasure in the news, and learning that the rebels were gathering at Couch’s Fort, believing too that radicals were now out of power—in any event, he was sure they’d never have the effrontery to attack Neville in force—he thought he’d go to Couch’s Fort. He could play on the crowd. He could disperse the rebels. On the way, however, he went to his uncle’s house and fell asleep.

  At eleven in the morning his uncle awakened him, alarmed. Word was out. Fulton must go to Couch’s Fort, and not as any kind of peacemaker: if he stayed away, his property would be destroyed. Flustered by his abrupt change of status, suddenly afraid for his farm, distillery, and home, Fulton arrived at Couch’s Fort to find the militias gone, already marching to Bower Hill. The march must be bravado, he thought. The mob couldn’t really mean to strike, undisguised, at the vitals of government. He went after them anyway. When he caught up, self-assurance washed away. This wasn’t a mob but a force, six hundred strong, hardy war veterans led with discipline by those he once would have called respectable people: Benjamin Parkinson, James McFarlane. Civil war had broken out. Incredibly, Alexander Fulton was on the wrong side. His property and even his life appeared to be in danger. As the line marched by, two militia officers offered Fulton a command.

  He declined. He’d come, in fact, unarmed, a violation of a call to arms: if you owned weapons, you were required to bring them. The officers returned with a request from James McFarlane himself that Fulton accept the rank of brigade major. Fulton again declined. A murmur broke out along the line: Fulton had offered aid to General Neville and must be here as Neville’s spy. McFarlane, riding up in person, asked Fulton to take a command. Miserably, Fulton averred that, having never held militia command, wouldn’t it be considered assuming if he took one now?

  McFarlane rode off, and an officer told Fulton that if he refused command he’d be a prisoner. Amplifying Fulton’s discomfort, Daniel Hamilton, commanding a company of his own, made his always intimidating presence felt. Not only was Fulton a prisoner, Daniel informed Fulton, but if he tried to escape he’d receive far worse treatment. Daniel had a way about him. Fulton agreed to lead the march.

  At Bower Hill, after hanging back with the unarmed horse guard, Fulton fled to a high field to watch the battle. He saw the surrender of Major Kirkpatrick, then the burning and mayhem. Now he understood. This would happen to anyone boasting a connection with General Neville. In the days after Bower Hill, Fulton went around boasting instead of faithful service to the rebel cause.

  After the Mingo church meeting, therefore, when James Marshall asked Fulton to come to a meeting at David Bradford’s, Fulton had no choice. He was one of them. Arriving at Bradford’s elegant brick home in the town of Washington, Fulton was further amazed. Bradford had followed up his speech at the church by expanding the rebellion’s base. Writing to leaders in the Virginia counties that bordered Pennsylvania, he asked them to send delegates to the upcoming grand congress. He’d also decided to examine and police local commitment to the rebel cause. Two days earlier, on the post road twenty miles east of Pittsburgh, men sent by Bradford had waylaid the carrier of the U.S. mail and stolen bags of letters. The purpose was to take action against anyone writing for federal help.

  Now Bradford, Marshall, Benjamin Parkinson, and the discomfited Alexander Fulton opened the mail. Members of the Neville Connection, they discovered, had inde
ed been writing to the government in Philadelphia to describe not only the burning of Bower Hill but also—treacherously to this committee—Bradford’s rousing antigovernment speech at the Mingo Creek church. Bradford, Marshall, and Parkinson decided to go to Canonsburg to review these letters with others and consider what measures to take against Presley Neville and the treasonous cohort.

  Alexander Fulton made excuses. He fled home. The committee followed him. They insisted he come with them. Awash in fear and shame, Fulton could do nothing but comply.

  In a room at Canonsburg, the letters were pulled from saddlebags and read by a larger group. All other letters were put carefully back in bags to go to Pittsburgh and be mailed again. The traitors’ letters were heatedly discussed. Fulton, availing himself of copious drafts from the whiskey cask, was in a weird state of terror and drunkenness. With Bradford, Marshall, Benjamin Parkinson, and others, he shakily put his signature on a circular letter to all militia commanders in the region.

  What this once-proud aristo had signed was a revolutionary document. It called out all the militias of the region. Only the governor could do that, but Bradford’s committee was now openly usurping military authority, just as committees of safety and correspondence had done in the seventies. A regionwide force, dwarfing the one that had destroyed Bower Hill, was to muster near Pittsburgh. It would arrest the letter writers and their sympathizers, place them in the Pittsburgh jail, and attack the garrison at Fort Fayette. Like the Massachusetts militias in ’75, like the Green Mountain Boys at Fort Ticonderoga, the people would seize the oppressor’s arms and use them for the defense of what Bradford was now explicitly calling the western country. Braddock’s Field, where the British general had been defeated in the 1750s, and where the militias were now ordered to muster, would take its place in glory.