The Whiskey Rebellion

by William Hogeland

  As a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, James Madison, then Hamilton’s collaborator, had based his argument for replacing the confederation of states with a national government on a hypothetical situation, which was now arising in fact at the Forks. Suppose Congress were ever called upon, Madison had asked, to maintain order within one of the states. In a confederation, that conflict must occur between the central Congress and the member state. But in a national government, which acts on individuals, not on states, the conflict occurs between the government and the rioters as individuals. Military force can never be applied to citizens collectively without ceasing to be punishment and becoming war; citizens treated in that way will seize the opportunity to dissolve all compacts by which they might have been bound; union itself will dissolve. But when a government insists on treating each citizen as an individual, and treating insurgents, however numerous, however organized, and however they describe themselves, as criminals, not as a regional entity, union can survive even the most egregious crimes against it.

  Others thought otherwise. Both the rebels and the high federalists believed that the people of western Pennsylvania, committed and subjected en masse to armed rebellion, could be recommitted and resubjected to the United States only en masse and by armed force. The federal government was embracing what Alexander Hamilton and Tom the Tinker, disputing theorists of finance, had always believed it must. It would occupy a region, suspend civil liberties, and use military force to police the citizenry.

  • • •

  As debate went on between the state of Pennsylvania and the Washington administration over the legitimacy of calling out the militia against citizens, the cabinet split too, over the question of whether to send troops immediately or seek ways of avoiding such a drastic step. Edmund Randolph urged not only delay but also negotiation with the rebels. It was Randolph who, at the Constitutional Convention, had argued so strenuously for creating a national power to put down insurgencies. Yet the real strength of government, he now urged Washington, lies not in coercion but in the affection of the people. If the rebels would not agree to abide by the law, then they must be prosecuted as criminals, not suppressed as part of a populace; only if courts failed to prosecute could troops legally be used. Randolph was sure Judge Wilson had irresponsibly rubber-stamped the operation, and he asked Washington, with great eloquence and passion, to send a peace commission west in a sincere spirit of reconciliation.

  Hamilton and Knox were arguing for moving immediately, with an overwhelming force of at least twelve thousand men, bigger than any American army to date, more than had beaten the British at Yorktown. Their high-federalist ally Attorney General Bradford, however, joined Randolph in arguing for negotiation. Yet Bradford’s theory of negotiation was entirely different from Randolph’s. In Bradford’s view, negotiations could serve as a means of achieving political cover while readying troops for military action. The question of delay was somewhat academic anyway: Troops would need time to mobilize. Negotiations would meanwhile fail, revealing rebels as intractable. Sympathies of people throughout the nation would swing toward the president, forestalling militias in other western regions from acting in concert with the Forks; Mifflin and the political opposition would be silenced. Then the troops could move with impunity.

  On August 6, Washington took what appeared to be a middle course between Hamilton’s urgency for action and Randolph’s plea for reconciliation, assigning Bradford to lead a presidential commission, including both federal and state commissioners, to negotiate with the rebels. The other federal commissioners would be Washington’s friend and soon-to-be land agent Senator James Ross, already on the ground in Washington County, and Justice Jasper Yeates of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. (State commissioners had already been appointed by Mifflin.) While Randolph still placed fervent hopes in the peace plan, Hamilton—though preferring to have troops positioned in the Appalachians before beginning negotiations—had worked with Bradford on serving the writs; he remained confident that an army would, in the end, march. Isaac Craig had sent word of the expulsion of Lenox and Neville, the muster at Braddock’s Field, and the march on Pittsburgh. Major Kirkpatrick had written twice to the president; other federalists had been writing east, and the term “civil war” had been used. Hamilton responded to news of Braddock’s Field by telling Craig it was highly satisfactory to get this sort of intelligence on rebel movements; he assured Craig that government would not be found wanting. Then: “And can there be any doubt of the sufficiency of its means?” He instructed Craig to flee with his family to Fort Fayette, should the worst happen. He underlined that instruction.

  On August 7, the federal peace commissioners started west. The same day, Henry Knox sent orders to the governors of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia to call out a total of thirteen thousand militiamen and hold them ready to march. Washington issued a new proclamation, required by the Militia Law Act before the president could move troops, ordering insurgents to disperse and threatening military suppression if they did not. And the next day, two refugees from Pittsburgh arrived in Philadelphia.

  General Neville and Marshal Lenox, exhausted and bedraggled after three weeks of hard overland travel, had stories to tell. They’d disembarked in Wheeling, Virginia, and sending their escorts back up to Fort Fayette, had continued alone down to Marietta in the Ohio territory, and had then hired two guides. Traveling east across rough country, they’d stayed in Virginia until well past the Alleghenies.

  General Neville was eager to lend his aid to the military operation and looking forward to returning to Pittsburgh.

  • • •

  Even while traveling toward the Ohio, Attorney General Bradford found ways to pursue the real goal of negotiation by sending Edmund Randolph a steady stream of reports on rebel intractability. Bradford spent the first night in Lancaster, where he joined fellow commissioner Jasper Yeates; there they encountered General Neville and Marshal Lenox, still a day west of Philadelphia, who advised Bradford that there was no point in negotiating. The area was lost to rebel control, they said; the commission might as well turn back. Bradford assured them that his mission was to leave insurgents with no excuses and keep other states from coming to the Forks’ aid when an army marched, and he sent an express rider back to Randolph—who was eagerly honchoing, in Philadelphia, the peace mission in which he still placed high hopes—with a report of the negative impressions of Lenox and Neville.

  Bradford and Yeates gathered and sent home more negative impressions as they went west. A handbill had been brought from Pittsburgh, one of those distributed at Braddock’s Field, showing that prominent men were now insurgents too. Farther west, news had it that a proclamation issued by Governor Mifflin had been read at the Forks only for the purpose of exposing it to sarcastic comment; in some places it had been torn up, with magistrates joining in. In Bedford, Bradford learned that the west was actually declaring its independence. At Greensburg, very near Pittsburgh now, he and Yeates met the banished Presley Neville, whose view was as dark as his father’s—especially regarding Hugh Henry Brackenridge.

  Some of these encounters suggested that things might not be as bad as they seemed. The prominent men on the handbill, it emerged in conversation at yet another tavern, were really anti-insurgents. Still, Bradford emphasized for Randolph, a frightening number of people had marched on Pittsburgh.

  While Bradford, from the road, made an official record of the unlikeliness of his errand’s success, Hamilton was taking control of the military buildup. Henry Knox had been worrying over some precarious land investments in Maine. Hamilton encouraged Knox to go and check personally on his land; Washington gave Knox permission to leave; Hamilton stepped with alacrity into the job of secretary of war. On August 14, Governor Thomas Lee of Maryland called out his state’s militia. On the sixteenth, Governor Henry Lee of Virginia called out his. Governor Mifflin, despite his dissent, had already called out the Pennsylvania militia; New Jersey was signed up as well. The go
vernors were responding to Knox’s orders, but it was the author of the whiskey tax who now coordinated the military effort to enforce it.

  Bradford and Yeates were having to travel fast if they wanted to confront the rebels at the Parkinson’s Ferry congress on the fourteenth. They slept as little as possible and made up to forty miles a day; approaching the eastern front of the Alleghenies they put on even greater speed and arrived late on the night of the fourteenth at a house on the banks of the Youghiogheny, only four miles from Parkinson’s Ferry. So exhausted they could barely write, they sent a note to Senator James Ross, the third commissioner, to say they were no good for immediate business but would come to Parkinson’s Ferry the next day.

  • • •

  What the presidential commissioners saw when they arrived at Parkinson’s Ferry astonished them. A huge gathering of people, mostly armed, was dispersing down the high bluff and along the riverfront. The six-striped flag was flying. William Bradford dashed off a note to Randolph reporting the presence of the flag. He also reported the burning of the stables and hay of the Bedford tax man John Webster, who had been made to hand over his papers, stand on a stump, and toast Tom the Tinker.

  At the congress, tension between insurgents and moderates had reached a high pitch. Herman Husband might be counseling peace, but the militias he’d inspired were ready to fight the United States. For moderates, therefore, the arrival of these commissioners from the president offered providential hope, after weeks of terror and tension, that at the last minute the situation might be salvaged.

  Mr. Brackenridge assured the rebels that the commission was so unimportant that it didn’t much matter who met with it; many rebels now believed he was on their side anyway, and the lawyer got himself elected by the congress’s standing committee of sixty to serve on a small committee of the conference to negotiate with the federal commissioners. On this committee were the radicals David Bradford and James Marshall, but so was the moderate Gallatin; Senator James Ross, the moderate from Washington County, was on the presidential commission itself. An understanding might be reached.

  Moderates still had a difficult task. They’d not only have to arrive at an agreement with the commission but also sell any such agreement to the mass of delegates and militias. Still, they thought they’d lucked into a good chance to avoid either armed secession or military suppression.

  William Bradford and his federal commissioners had a different plan. Already determinedly pessimistic about peace, they found further grounds for pessimism in the secessionist mood of Parkinson’s Ferry, as well as in a rowdy crowd erecting a liberty pole outside the window of the tavern in Pittsburgh where they’d settled to await the Parkinson’s Ferry conference committee. The first meeting with the committee was scheduled for the twentieth. The state commissioners hadn’t yet arrived. Yet on the seventeenth, the federal commissioners wrote to Randolph to report that there was no prospect of enforcing the law without using what they called, with greater bluntness than most in the administration, the physical strength of the nation. William Bradford also wrote to the president unofficially. In the personal letter, he argued that delay in sending troops risked running into the paralyzing winter months. He warned Washington that rebels would only further arm themselves and bring in sympathizers from other states.

  Bradford’s letter to Washington had an even more important purpose, which neither Bradford nor the president would have wanted to reveal to Edmund Randolph. Under the relative safety of his guise as a negotiator, Bradford had been gathering an impressive amount of military intelligence. Ammunition was happily lacking here, he told Washington privately, as were bayonets, but every man had at least one working rifle, and there were eleven barrels of powder and five hundred stone of arms in the town of Washington. The army in Fort Fayette had cannon for defense, but militiamen at Fort Le Beouf up on Lake Erie had been recruited mainly from the Forks and might come to join the rebels; they could command Fort Fayette from the hills. A goal of the negotiations, Bradford said, must be to drive a wedge between moderates and radicals. By holding out hope to moderates, the negotiations might weaken the radicals’ control over the region and make invasion easier.

  Bradford’s private letter, reaching Philadelphia on the twenty-third, along with the official commission report urging military action, had been preceded, around August 15, by Mr. Brackenridge’s letter to Hamilton’s deputy Tench Coxe. The lawyer’s decision to write for two audiences at once—the government, begging forbearance and understanding at the Forks, and the rebel militias, who might rob the mail, and must see Mr. Brackenridge as committed to the cause—had some unintended consequences.

  Pray for delay, Mr. Brackenridge urged Coxe, for if a federal force were sent west, people in the midlands wouldn’t let it pass. The funding system, the lawyer just couldn’t refrain from noting, in what was supposed to be a plea for conciliation—and to the treasury—was detested and abhorred by all intelligent people, as well as by the yeomanry of America; it would bring people together against the army. A growling, lurking discontent, Mr. Brackenridge said, would soon burst and discover itself everywhere. The rebels had even talked of making overtures to the British. Wait till Congress reopened in the fall, he begged; then the westerners’ grievances could be addressed, and the excise suspended, as he took the liberty of noting he’d recommended two years earlier. Having worked himself into a terrified and terrifying lather, he closed by insisting that the real fear wasn’t that the federal army would march to the Forks. The real fear was that the insurgents would march east, cross the Susquehanna, and take Philadelphia.

  This extraordinary communication, which was passed quickly around the administration, seemed to say that unless Congress acceded to rebel demands in the next session, not only armed secession but an actual attack on the nation’s capital would soon follow. Such was the effect of Mr. Brackenridge’s prose that when the official commission report arrived, urging force, along with Bradford’s private report to the president on the Forks’ defense capabilities, nobody except possibly Edmund Randolph expected or even hoped to receive better news about rebel attitudes.

  An eight-hour cabinet meeting on August 24 became a war council, with Hamilton in high gear as secretaries both of war and treasury. Randolph’s hopes for a happy outcome were broken. The peace commission itself was now urging force. Randolph had no choice but to support Hamilton, who was scribbling notes on militia numbers and supply chains and sketching out plans with Washington for moving fifteen thousand men. Hamilton began ordering arms and supplies and sending word to Henry Lee of Virginia, who would serve under Washington as commander of the whole force.

  Absolute secrecy was critical to these mobilizations. The rebel negotiating committee in Pittsburgh, Governor Mifflin, the U.S. Congress, and the public at large must not learn that before completing—or even beginning—peace negotiations, the administration was planning an invasion. Writing to Henry Lee, Hamilton told the governor not only to keep his orders secret but to postdate them.

  Hamilton got busy in another area as well: stirring up public sentiment. As “Tully,” he addressed a series of newspaper articles to “the virtuous and enlightened citizens of a new and happy country!” Addressing the people directly as “you,” he presented the western counties of Pennsylvania as having nullified “your” will. Tully scoffed at the traditional complaints of western settlers, confident that “you” would never be so gullible as to believe any human suffering existed beyond the Alleghenies, where “a scene of unparalleled prosperity upbraids the ingratitude and madness of those who are endeavoring to cloud the bright face of our political horizon, and to mar the happiest lot that beneficent Heaven ever indulged to undeserving mortals.”

  This tone proved effective in confirming the new mood of patriotism that had followed the year of instability of 1793. Many people around the country expressed hatred for the rebels and wondered why the president hadn’t already moved against them.

  Finally, Hamilton wrapped
up the administration’s ongoing struggle with Governor Mifflin. Mifflin’s administration was continuing its practice of sending long, heated letters to the administration, and this month’s batch had defended and explained the governor’s reluctance, on both legal and political grounds, to call out his militia; Mifflin also tacitly challenged the legitimacy of Judge Wilson’s certification and even the president’s right to create a federal militia. Writing for Randolph, who was fast becoming irrelevant, Hamilton now launched the kind of attack in which he took the greatest pleasure. Excessive politeness emphasized the enjoyment he took not in persuasion but in decimation. One of Mifflin’s most passionate arguments had been that the militia could disperse an insurgency but not occupy a region, nor hunt and arrest suspects. To Mifflin and many others, a militia’s authority was immediate and situational, dissipating as soon as a riot was put down. Real police work and prosecution were reserved, by law, for local, state, and federal officers; empowering an army to enforce laws was itself illegal, Mifflin believed.

  Hamilton was pleased to demonstrate, at exhaustive length, that the Militia Law Act, as well as certain parts of the Constitution itself, had been constructed for the very purpose of allowing troops to police citizens. The militia could “enforce the law,” “cause the laws to be duly executed,” and “suppress combinations,” all of which must mean, Hamilton said, that the militia can also break up meetings and assemblies that exist simply for the purpose of noncompliance with the law, when such meetings are supported by violence that baffles ordinary law enforcement. He was talking now not only about attackers of Bower Hill but also about delegates at meetings and signers of petitions. His letter gave off a white heat.

  • • •

  The conference committee from Parkinson’s Ferry, with its hopeful moderates, came to Pittsburgh on August 20 to meet with the federal commissioners, who had been joined at last by Mifflin’s two state appointees. Mr. Brackenridge had already been to see the commissioners; he and Attorney General Bradford had been friends at Princeton. The lawyer felt he could explain the real situation to the commissioners before negotiations officially began. What emerged during his attempted prenegotiation shook him.