The Whiskey Rebellion

by William Hogeland

  Most of his fellow moderates at the Forks, whether they found him brilliant or annoying or both, understood his tactic of feigned support for rebellion. He’d continued to play the role at Parkinson’s Ferry, when moderates managed to get a committee appointed to tone down David Bradford’s and James Marshall’s proposals for armed regional defense. That committee consisted of the three most intellectually sophisticated men at the Forks—Herman Husband, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and Albert Gallatin—who came together for the first time and utterly bewildered one another. Mr. Brackenridge tried to entertain Gallatin by drawing Husband out on the Book of Ezekiel, but Gallatin was impatient with the lawyer’s frivolity. “He laughs alone,” Gallatin said darkly of Brackenridge, with prescience. Gallatin openly advocated compliance with the law and suspected the lawyer of rebel complicity, but Senator James Ross had a hurried discussion with Gallatin, and Gallatin and Mr. Brackenridge did arrive at an understanding.

  Now, arriving to talk to the commission, the lawyer found Isaac Craig already there, telling the tale of the expulsions of members of the Neville Connection. Mr. Brackenridge had to break into Craig’s narrative, reminding Craig that banishees had been sent away only on the insistence of rebels who threatened to burn the town. Craig left, saying nothing, and Mr. Brackenridge turned to his classmate, the attorney general, and made an outright plea. “I am not an insurgent,” he said. “That is a matter for future consideration” is all the attorney general would say. He’d been forwarded Mr. Brackenridge’s letter to Tench Coxe.

  Mr. Brackenridge spent a worried night. If the army did come, he now saw, he was a marked man. For the first time, he gave serious consideration to the rebel cause and its chances of success. The Forks could invite Spain all the way up the Mississippi to the headwaters of the Ohio at Pittsburgh, invite the British to keep their forts, make alliances with the Indians. Marksmen could meet the eastern army in the mountain passes and hold off attack. But even if successful, this plan would never work for long. First would come misery, then poverty. Still, those might be better, Mr. Brackenridge was thinking, than being maligned, disgraced, possibly assassinated by the very people he’d been exhausting himself trying to help.

  The next morning, he saw Senator James Ross and told him that the rebel cause was gaining new appeal. Senator Ross didn’t take this as a joke. He reminded the lawyer that the chance for amnesty, which all moderates had been looking for, had come by luck to the Forks. Moderates must seize the chance and stick to the plan.

  Of course Mr. Brackenridge agreed. The rest of the committee arrived, and in a private house in Pittsburgh, negotiations opened. The federal commissioners threatened the entry of troops into the area and implied strongly, but only implied, that military incursion could be avoided if total submission were demonstrated by all people in the region. Repeal of the excise law was out of the question, but the government might be willing to hear federal tax cases in local courts, as permitted by the new law. The two groups then retired to separate houses. Over the next few days, in a series of elaborately worded written exchanges, the commission and the committee arrived at a deal that gave the moderates hope.

  The president would refrain from commencing new prosecutions for treason, or any other crime against the United States committed in the fourth excise survey, until July of the next year. After that date, if the laws were obeyed, he would give a blanket pardon for all such crimes committed to date, aside from those committed by people already under indictment.

  In turn, members of the entire Parkinson’s Ferry committee of sixty must unanimously declare their determination to submit to the laws of the United States and to refrain from obstructing the operation of the excise law. They must formally renounce violence against U.S. officers and complying citizens. These declarations must be voted on by the committee of sixty, and the vote count reported: unanimity was important.

  Most important, though, would be a full-scale popular referendum, conducted throughout the western counties, in which every township also voted its willingness to support the law. The commissioners never put in writing any promise that, in the event that such universal compliance were achieved, federal troops would not come. They only said that, if these terms were accepted by the standing committee of sixty, troops would be held back at least until the regionwide referendum had taken place. In another shrewd maneuver, they specifically did not include the Virginia delegation to Parkinson’s Ferry in the deal. The Virginians, responding to their exclusion with precisely the panic that Attorney General Bradford was hoping for, began begging for inclusion.

  Moderates were falling over themselves with eagerness to bring things to what they imagined would be a peaceful conclusion. The negotiating committee agreed not only to present the president’s terms to the committee of sixty but also to take the extreme personal risk of openly recommending that the terms be accepted. On the twenty-third of August, negotiations with the federal commission concluded.

  That day William Bradford wrote east again—unofficially again, and this time to Hamilton—to say that there was now reason to hope the army would have an easier time than he’d first predicted. He continued to emphasize the negative: the more he saw in western Pennsylvania, he said, the more he felt that the government should avoid a contest until it could field a regular army, not just a big militia, and that an occupying force would need to stay in the region to protect tax officers.

  On August 28, with great trepidation, Mr. Brackenridge and the rest of the negotiating committee reconvened with the Parkinson’s Ferry standing committee of sixty to report on the negotiations with the federal commission. This gathering was held not at Parkinson’s Ferry but in the town of Brownsville, where the Redstone enters the Monongahela, and where in 1791 the first meeting of genteel local leaders had met in a tavern to discuss problems of excise unrest. Now the movement was no small, self-selected group of professional politicians; it couldn’t have met in a tavern. The committee of sixty convened under a pavilion of boards hastily constructed to give shade from the blazing late-summer sun. Armed and sweating, men gathered around as a gallery. The first order of business—showing how far the rebels were from handing authority back to the federal and state governments—was to try a man who had made the mistake of calling the Parkinson’s Ferry congress a scrub congress. Seventy men had seized the man and were accusing him of speaking ill of constituted authorities, common-law sedition, punishable at the very least by banishment and house burning. Mr. Brackenridge, resorting to shtick, got the accusers and the standing committee laughing and the punishment reduced to forcing the man to buy whiskey and being called a scrub himself.

  Mr. Brackenridge had transported, by hired rider, one hundred printed copies of the conference committee’s report recommending submission. Copies were handed out, and the report was read aloud. Muttering and protest began almost immediately. The people had seen themselves as being asked to give an amnesty to tax collectors, compliers, and the banished Neville Connection—not to beg an amnesty of the president. Repeal of the tax law had become the symbol of regional autonomy: that no repeal or even suspension of the law had been discussed outraged the gallery. The conference committee seemed to the people to have given up everything and gained nothing. There was talk of the committee’s having been bribed.

  Moderates, desperate now, managed to get an adjournment that delayed a vote on the resolutions until the next day. William Findley, Mr. Brackenridge’s political enemy but fellow moderate, had arrived, and Findley’s loyalty to the west was considered irreproachable by the people; moderates hoped he could help. The next day, no moderate wanted to be first to address the standing committee and the gallery, but Albert Gallatin finally agreed to do so. In a cogent speech, he made all the obvious arguments in favor of submitting to the law and against any foolish attempts at armed secession.

  When Mr. Brackenridge spoke, he did, at last, play it straight. Not only did he back up all of Gallatin’s arguments, he also told the rebels that this
was it. If they didn’t accept these hard-won resolutions and avail themselves of the safety of the amnesty, he was out, and this speech would be his last advice to them. Fully exposed for the first time, he sat down.

  David Bradford, speaking next, urged the rebels to fight any invading army. When Bradford had finished, the committee of sixty—now looking only for safety—voted to hold no vote on the deal. But that meant rejection of all the president’s terms, tantamount to an immediate declaration of and preparation for war; moderates who had just spoken in favor of submission were sure to be arrested as traitors. Gallatin made one last move, for which Mr. Brackenridge, rarely impressed by others’ presence of mind, gave him great credit. The committee of sixty should have an internal vote, Gallatin proposed, just to take its own temperature, not for the commissioners, no standing up to be counted, a secret ballot. Such was the tension that men of the standing committee thought even their handwriting would be too revealing. Sixty slips of paper were handed out, each with “yea” and “nay” written on them. Each committeeman tore off the vote he wanted to cast and threw it in a hat, chewing on the other vote until it was unrecognizable.

  When the vote was counted, the armed gallery in the sun was shocked. Though the margin was slim—34–23—the standing committee had voted in favor of submission to the federal government.

  David Bradford’s face darkened. He left hurriedly. The gallery was muttering. The committee of sixty, divided now, and ever more tense, called a break and met again in the afternoon, diminished by the departure of radicals and the entire gallery. Armed men were hanging in knots around the town and fields, plotting revenge against the traitors, especially Mr. Brackenridge, who had fooled them with displays of loyalty and then sold them out to the commission. The standing committee quickly adopted a resolution approving the conference-committee report. Yet it tried to appease enraged radicals by appointing a new conference committee to seek a better deal with the commission.

  From the point of view of William Bradford and the federal commissioners, all this complexity was absurd. There was no deal now. One of the main terms had been the standing committee’s making a convincing show of unanimous submission. Yet fully two-fifths of the Parkinson’s Ferry committee, as the commissioners read the vote, preferred civil war. Even more preposterous was the idea that better terms could be reached by some new conference committee.

  Indeed, the very turmoil of the Brownsville meeting signaled that William Bradford had achieved his goals with almost perfect success. What had been a disciplined, regionwide movement against government was fatally divided. Moderates, more fearful now of the president than of Tom the Tinker, had been flushed out and exposed by the negotiations; they were vulnerable to violence, and a federal army was needed if only to protect them.

  The commissioners therefore responded to the new negotiating committee with icy dismay. They announced that, given disastrous results at Brownsville, the federal militia—which they reminded the committee was fifteen thousand strong, with fifteen hundred Virginia sharpshooters—could be held back only until the referendum was held, which they now set for September 11 and refused to make any later.

  The president clearly could not now accept, the commission said, a majority referendum for submission, township by township. The army, when it arrived, would need to know the name of each loyal U.S. citizen, in order to prevent confounding the loyal with the treasonous. The fate of males eighteen and older would depend on their signing, on September 11, and not a day later, an oath of submission to federal law. Those who signed on time, did not resist the troops in any way, and complied with the law in the future could count on an amnesty for past crimes. Anyone else, regardless of anything he’d done or not done during the insurgency, would be fair game for arrest by the troops. Leaving Senator Ross in Washington County to manage the oath signing, Bradford and Yeates started back for Philadelphia, their mission complete.

  Further justifications for action were appearing. Rebellion seemed to be spreading east of the mountains even as it was falling apart at the Forks. Around the time of Bower Hill, pole raisings, blackface attacks, and burnings in effigy had started in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland—but it was when the state governors, answering the president’s call for troops, began raising militias to suppress the Forks rebels, and draft resistance began springing up east of the mountains, that disaffection began to feel rampant. In Cumberland County, Virginia, two townships held a meeting that began by protesting the draft and ended by embracing and even surpassing the vision of Herman Husband: unless land is divided equally among the people, said the Cumberland protestors, there can be no true republican government. The governor of Maryland learned that rebels were planning to seize the armory at Frederick’s Town and called out seven hundred men from seaboard militias to garrison the armory and protect it. The Maryland rebels were only ninety men, and they were turned down when they tried to buy flint and powder. The militias overwhelmed them; twenty rebels were arrested. Still, federal troops were needed now just to police eastern regions while marching west.

  The seaboard cities, meanwhile, filled with patriotic fervor. The writings of “Tully” and other federalists had done their work. Eastern newspapers railed against the insurgency; the officer classes in city militias were gung ho to march for glory. The opposition party could take no credible position. More than one opposition paper avidly supported sending troops.

  William Bradford, arriving home from his mission, was delighted to discover in Philadelphia what he called a federal and military spirit. Writing to his fellow commissioner Yeates, he noted with relish that such was the popularity of military suppression that even the Philadelphia democratic society had been forced to pretend to support it. Bradford expressed confidence that what he called the new revolutionary spirit—he underlined “new”—would soon be suppressed.

  • • •

  To Mr. Brackenridge, September 11, 1794, though an awful day for the Forks, gave new grounds for optimism. “I do solemnly promise henceforth to submit to the laws of the United States; that I will not, directly or indirectly, oppose the execution of the acts for raising a revenue on distilled spirits and stills; and that I will support, as far as the law requires, the civil authority in affording the protection due to all officers and other citizens.” Such was the language of submission dictated by the presidential commission. Men eighteen and older, from Pittsburgh and Washington, from dozens of scattered settlements, from riverside industries and isolated cabins, came to their township meeting places and election-district polling places to assure themselves of amnesty. After the proposition was read aloud, each man answered yea or nay, and then, with either a justice of the peace or two members of the Parkinson’s Ferry standing committee presiding, signed his name under a written version. People signed in fear of federal troops, but they feared signing too: Tom the Tinker was working hard to shut down the polls. He was feeling sorry for himself. Poor Tom, he wrote in the Gazette, having managed to get the country unified, had thought he could retire, but learning that the leaders were traitors, he was being forced to resume activities. Tom was giving fair warning. His hammer was up, his ladle hot, and he couldn’t waste his time traveling the country without using them. Nonetheless, long strings of names filled the “yea” columns of final returns, page after page, with only blankness under “nay.”

  Rumors of violence flew all day. Senator James Ross was urged not to leave Washington with the returns: plans were afoot to waylay people carrying returns and burn out everyone who had signed. Mr. Brackenridge heard that rebels at Mingo Creek were determined to shoot anyone who tried to sign the oath; he saddled up and rode for a meeting at Mingo church to see if he could help. He spent the day running around the Mingo Creek area, and at one point he encountered Benjamin Parkinson and Andrew McFarlane, the two men he’d feared most at Braddock’s Field. Yet Parkinson said he was recommending submission, and McFarlane and the lawyer, after a moment of tense silence, gruffly agreed that these
were difficult times.

  If two top rebels were signing the oath, Mr. Brackenridge thought, the amnesty might work; the troops might stay home; peace really might prevail. Yet Parkinson and McFarlane told him they were now under threat too, and Mr. Brackenridge, deciding not to attend the violent meeting at the church, started home. His way took him past the home of John Holcroft. The lawyer had not met Holcroft, who had led the first attack on Bower Hill and was believed to be the author of Tom the Tinker’s notes. Mr. Brackenridge had passed the house, with trepidation, when he met a stranger who seemed to know him. This was Holcroft himself. Even he was considering signing the oath, he told the lawyer.

  Mr. Brackenridge arrived in Pittsburgh in the evening. His polling place was closed. He was too late to sign. He signed the next morning, believing he ought to give personal support for what he’d recommended.

  • • •

  When the returns were tallied, James Ross sent a report to his fellow commissioners Bradford and Yeates, who were to report to Washington and the cabinet. While there were pages and pages of “yea”s, and an utter absence of any nay vote in any township, the commissioners cited what they called credible information that some towns still had a majority for resistance. Authority at the Forks, they advised one more time, now purely for eastern public-relations purposes, should be aided by military force.

  That force was ready at last. The next day, troops from New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia began marching west. The right wing, from the northern states, was to muster at Carlisle, in central Pennsylvania. The southern left wing would muster at Fort Cumberland in Maryland. The picture Hamilton had conjured two years earlier, when he’d imagined the plot thickening, the application of force appearing to be unavoidable, and the president’s repairing in person to the scene of commotion, had been amplified. For Hamilton was going too.