The Whiskey Rebellion

by William Hogeland

  He’d advised Washington that it seemed proper for the author of the tax to accompany troops that were prosecuting it. The president’s giving the secretary of the treasury a high place in directing such an invasion took even some supporters aback. Nevertheless, on September 30, Washington and Hamilton stepped into a presidential coach and rode together down Market Street, leaving Philadelphia to join the army at Carlisle.

  Washington was returning to scenes of his youth. Hamilton was going to the place he’d long been subduing in his mind.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The General Goes West

  Two weeks later, Congressman William Findley, emissary from terrified residents of the Forks of the Ohio, stood before the president, hoping to persuade him to turn the army back. With Findley was David Redick, another Forks moderate. It was October 9. The commander in chief was sitting in pain in his quarters in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, east of the mountains, where forces from New Jersey and Pennsylvania were mustering.

  The Parkinson’s Ferry congress had met again and made a unanimous resolution of submission. Findley hoped it wasn’t too late.

  Carlisle was a town Washington approved of. Laid out on a grid, it had a broad main street flanked by raised, well-swept sidewalks and houses of brick and stone. The western end of town gave a distant view, miles across a rolling, fertile piedmont, of the nearest and least forbidding of what were many long ridges that the army must soon climb. Then, leaving the Atlantic watershed behind, the men would descend through twisting, gigantically wooded clefts and enter a turned-around world, walled off from respectable Carlisle, where rivers flowed backward toward little-known places. The president had committed himself to sending troops on that journey. In the room where he now sat—he had quarters in the home of a prominent local federalist—Secretary Hamilton hovered beside him, and Governor Mifflin, commander of Pennsylvania troops, had joined them to hear out Findley and Redick.

  Findley was now the Forks moderates’ main spokesman. He’d taken over from Mr. Brackenridge, who was in deep trouble. Officers and troops up and down the lines had learned to curse the hated name of Brackenridge, and they gleefully predicted he’d be hanged—skewered, some said—as soon as the army arrived at the Ohio. Thanks to a campaign conducted by General and Presley Neville (they were traveling with the army now, returning exiles, advising Hamilton on high-value insurgents), and to his own, inadvertently inflammatory letter to the Treasury Department, and to his failure to sign the oath on time, Hugh Henry Brackenridge was on the administration’s list of top rebel leaders.

  Findley, ever the politician, had kept up collegial communications with Attorney General Bradford even while remaining aloof from negotiations between the commission and the committee; he was appearing at Carlisle not only as emissary from a cowed region but also as a loyal-opposition member of the House, concerned about the fate of his constituents. In Congress, Findley had loudly opposed not merely Hamilton’s finance plan but Hamilton’s influence, and the influence of any executive department, on processes that he considered strictly the province of the House. He was furious at finding Alexander Hamilton on this expedition at all. The secretary of the treasury, never officially appointed or confirmed by the Senate to any such position, should not be taking charge of a massive military operation to enforce his own policies on the citizenry. The Nevilles were falsely calling Findley a rebel leader too; his name, he’d heard, was on their list. With Hamilton contriving to be always at the president’s elbow, any appeal to Washington’s fabled judiciousness, Findley feared, would fail. His own future might also become grim.

  Still, he had a mission. He was to reassure the president that calm prevailed beyond the mountains and that bringing the army was unnecessary. After the September 11 referendum and the mobilization of thirteen thousand troops, Forks radicals were demoralized and moderates bold. Liberty poles might be going up east of the mountains, but in the radical stronghold of Washington, a liberty pole had been cut down. Tom the Tinker would have made such an act impossible to contemplate only a month earlier. Some of the rebels had started down the Ohio, fearing capture by the army and hoping for refuge in the wilds of Kentucky and beyond. The town committee of Pittsburgh, which had expelled members of the Neville Connection during those strange days and nights of summer, repealed the expulsions, declaring all rebellion at an end. It was becoming clear that the army might be arriving unopposed. Senator James Ross crowed that the commission’s negotiations had cut off the rebellion’s many heads.

  Law-abiding Forks settlers therefore had a new thing to fear: the avenging force of government. The standing committee had unanimously voted for submission, and Findley and Redick left the Forks in the first week of October to plead with the president.

  Washington and Hamilton, meanwhile, had been traveling to Carlisle from Philadelphia. The two men rode often inside the carriage. The president’s crimped back kept him from mounting up, unless ceremonially necessary, though the carriage too jarred his injury and wore him down. A cavalry unit, learning early in the trip that the president was nearby, got excited by the idea of providing him with a gaudy escort, and since there was no way to refuse such an offer directly, the carriage had to detour a long, tedious way around Germantown to avoid them.

  Washington hoped to avoid tiring salutes and ceremonies. Yet they could be useful to the public-relations aspects of the trip, which were an important part of its purpose. The artillery discharged fifteen guns as he entered Harrisburg, where he reviewed troops, entertained officers with wine, and addressed cheering townspeople. Leaving Harrisburg early the next morning, troops crossed the cold, shallow Susquehanna in boats, but Washington drove his own carriage over the river.

  Mostly, however, he noted the qualities of the roads, towns, farms, and industries. He was passing westward for the first time since the 1780s, when, briefly free of public duties, he’d been the victorious commander in pursuit of land, canals, and opportunities. Beauty of countryside was never a theme of the diaries in which Washington jotted notes on the minutiae of development. He got out to inspect a competing canal company’s locks and found them impressive. He considered the various styles of farming in eastern Pennsylvania, the layouts of towns, the numbers of mills. Even as this plan to march westward had come together, and Senator James Ross had been serving as a commissioner to the rebels, Washington had been sending Ross further thoughts on selling off land.

  He was also deeply engaged in the organizational challenges of the military effort. Converging on Carlisle, and on Fort Cumberland, Maryland, from many points east, were artillery units with cannon, mortars, and the light cannon known as grasshoppers; mounted guards; ranks and ranks of footsoldiers; various quartermaster corps; wagons heavy with ammunition; wagons with forges for making balls; wagons with tents, cookware, officers’ clothing, blankets, and personal supplies; and state governors’ staffs and entourages with their own arms, horses, wagons, and effects. All of these men and supplies were traveling from parts of four states, on differing schedules, under varying conditions, in a hodgepodge of units. They needed to be mixed and matched, camped, fed, deployed, and moved into an alien and hostile area, ready for a pitched battle that might not occur. Cobbled together and cumbersome, this was the nation’s first army of significant size. It was entering terrain unknown to it, preparing to engage what its leaders considered a strange and unpredictable people.

  Washington had always excelled at military administration, and Hamilton was back in his revolutionary role as the chief of staff, enjoying a new one as secretary of war. In his diary, Washington reverted to the old staff term, “family.” Hamilton wrote to state militia commanders to set logistics, to War Department subordinates to harass them about lackadaisical supply, to subordinates in the Treasury Department to cope with army contractors. He worried about canteens, cooking kettles, rounds of cartridges, woolen jackets, pairs of shoes, and artillery field pieces. With carte blanche from Washington to serve as an extension of the president, he op
ened all correspondence; originated, wrote, and personally signed crucial orders; and served as the president’s link with Governor Lee, who not only commanded Virginia’s forces but technically was second only to Washington in commanding the operation. Washington deemed his fellow Virginian a genius lacking in judgment. Hamilton was happy to ensure that Lee caused no slip-ups.

  The citizen army that Washington and Hamilton were moving west had two classes. Officers came from the ranks of the creditor aristocracy in the seaboard cities. These were young volunteers, hyped on the patriotism of Hamilton’s writings as “Tully” and other exhortations, eager for low-risk glory. Gorgeously uniformed, mounted, and armed, they hoped to associate themselves in the public mind with the leaner, more truly endangered army that was finally engaging the native tribes farther west; they called the western rabble they were out to punish “white Indians” and saw themselves as avengers of union. Yet they’d volunteered under certain conditions. Their ranks must be high. Their brigade colors must be exciting and appropriate. Their commanders must not be certain people they didn’t like. State governors spent precious hours trying to salve acrimony among young men over personal snubs and outraged dress sense. When preferences could not be satisfied, many adventurers refused, at the last minute, to participate, and those who did serve brought extreme personal touchiness, along with happy dreams of vengeance, to the western march.

  The men these cavaliers were supposed to be commanding were mainly militia draftees. Because better-off draftees hired substitutes to serve in their places, the ranks were crowded with the poorest laborers and landless workers, recent immigrants and subsistence farmers. They had no uniforms. Their clothing couldn’t keep out autumn dampness and chill. To Hamilton’s frustration, the supply process was chronically sluggish, and desperately needed tents, overalls, and jackets, even blankets, were scarce. The men slept in cold fields, sometimes in tents but always on the ground, usually without straw for insulation. Drinking water could be bad, food paltry. Officers stayed in warm taverns and homes, where they spent their plentiful coin on extra food and drink. At times they were lavishly fed and entertained by hosts who could proffer fine wines and the charms of piano-playing daughters. Out in the camps, men drank whiskey and fired newly issued muskets for fun. Drunk on wine in brick houses, officers didn’t focus on orders not to waste powder.

  Mornings began with floggings. Draft evasion had been rampant, with militiamen simply running and hiding. Once pressed into service, men deserted incorrigibly, embarrassing state governors and undermining the mission’s political spin: this was supposed to be a patriotic citizen army, reporting eagerly for duty to suppress ambitious traitors. Despite the governors’ repeated calls for troops, filling draft quotas had been almost impossible. The mission required forced marches of up to twenty-five miles a day. Rumors circulated among the troops that they were actually being sent to reinforce the Indian war. The men malingered; they organized mass refusals to follow orders. Much time was spent dispatching parties to hunt deserters, who were then beaten by festively dressed commanders before ranks of surly men.

  Some of the footsoldiers—especially those from New Jersey—did seem to harbor as much hatred for westerners as their officers did. New Jerseyans had been aroused by a sardonic article, published anonymously in many seaboard papers in September, slighting the entire militia as “your watermelon army from the Jersey shore,” whose puny efforts would be no match for westerners. The piece was attributed by the troops to the hated Brackenridge. In response, New Jersey’s Governor Howell whipped up a romantic song, “Dash to the Mountains, Jersey Blue.” It had lines like “Unstain’d with crimes, unus’d to fear/In deep array our youths appear” and “Push home your steel, you’ll soon re-view/Your native plains, brave Jersey Blue.” Howell’s troops were the rowdiest and least disciplined, with the highest proportion of geared-up volunteers prone to plundering.

  Footsoldiers from the other three states, if less personally irked by the rebels, felt resentment for the mission and had hopes mainly for plunder too. They were all hungry and cold. While families cowered in farmhouses, freelancing soldiers crashed drunk through fields of just-ripened crops, tearing down fences for firewood, slaughtering chickens and pigs, building fires, and sleeping where they fell.

  Troops were supposed to be rounding up, along the way, suspects in eastern liberty-pole raisings. One pumped-up officer, hunting men who had raised a pole at Carlisle, accidentally pistol-shot an innocent boy who had an illness that kept him from standing when ordered to. The ball lodged in the boy’s groin; death came with agony. Some officers and men drinking at a tavern were greeted by a local drunk, who gave huzzas for the whiskey rebels. The soldiers tried to ignore him, but he followed them into a back room, cursing out the army and mocking its mission. A captain ordered a private to arrest the man, who grabbed at the private’s bayonet. In the struggle the private accidentally stabbed the man, who died praising the rebels. When President Washington joined the troops at Carlisle on October 4, accompanied by Secretary Hamilton and a small escort of mounted scouts, bells rang and artillery shook the ground, but the people of Carlisle, subjected to occupation by hordes of unruly soldiers, and now to killing, stayed quiet.

  Washington had Hamilton write Governor Mifflin to express poignant regret for the two civilian deaths. The perpetrators were arrested and tried in civilian courts, and a judge released both men. Washington announced to the governors and their generals that he wanted officers to start exercising control over the men and themselves. He remained fixed on the idea that protest and outright rebellion were twin expressions of self-created democratic societies, which must be eradicated. Yet it also remained a precious principle, he directed Hamilton to tell Governor Mifflin, that those enforcing the law not themselves break it, or even seem to break it.

  Mifflin wasn’t the best recipient of advice. He got falling-down drunk one night in Carlisle and ordered the Philadelphia Light Horse to fire on all comers; the Horse happily responded by shooting up units of the Jersey militia; Mifflin had to issue a formal apology. Proud horse units were forever vying with one another. As the president first entered camp at Carlisle, the Jersey and Pennsylvania cavalries tried to ride each other off the road to be first to salute him. When the president officially reviewed the troops, the solemnity and straightness of his bearing, the acres of glinting steel surrounding his augustness, were covered in the national and international press, as intended; he also attended church services, during which a Presbyterian minister preached subservience to the government. Yet when William Findley and David Redick arrived in town, five days after the president, it seemed to them that barely restrained pandemonium reigned in both town and camp.

  What Findley encountered in Carlisle made him more concerned than ever for the Forks. The two civilian killings had been at the very least avoidable, he thought, but even worse was the seeming eagerness of officers and men to commit deliberate and indiscriminate butchery as soon as they got over the mountains. The keeper of a tavern begged Findley and Redick, for their own safety, not to proceed to Carlisle, where soldiers swaggered about declaring themselves ready to murder anyone from the west. Ideas like skewering Mr. Brackenridge seemed to Findley to be coming from the top down—yet the men seemed restrained from utter abandon only by the toughness and clarity of Washington himself.

  Findley blamed Hamilton and the Nevilles. The scene reminded him of the Forks region itself, when under the thumb of rebel militias. Yet this army seemed thirstier for blood, more intent on murder, less disciplined. Rebel militias had been trying to take over the legitimate government. These soldiers were even more frightening: they were the legitimate government.

  • • •

  Washington and Hamilton interviewed Findley and Redick and found the news from the west heartening. These emissaries, along with their constituents, were clearly scared; apparently the army was unlikely to meet any real opposition. Though receiving them with irreproachable politeness, Washing
ton suggested that in the future, citizens might want to be more cautious about inflaming others with antigovernment talk. He reminded Findley of the effort and expense involved in preparing military expeditions; momentum was moving this army; it was too late for assurances, no matter how sincere, to stop it. At times Hamilton stepped in to cross-examine his political opponent, whose name he’d already placed on a list for possible arrest. How, specifically, could Findley be sure that submission would prevail in Washington County? In Allegheny County? In Fayette?

  The fact was, Washington said, that atonement of some sort would have to be made by the entire region. Yet the troops would be law-abiding, the president promised. They would establish peace, not prosecute, judge, sentence, or execute; those functions would be reserved for civil authorities. He said that imposing discipline on the army had been his main project since arriving at Carlisle, and he’d been successful, he believed. He also reminded Findley that citizens at the Forks who had signed the September 11 submission would, as promised, be under the amnesty, safe from harm no matter what they’d done.

  Washington also said—as if in passing, and disconcertingly to Findley and Redick—that with Congress about to begin its session, and much pressing business at the capital, he might turn back and send the army on to the Forks without him. Findley vehemently hoped not. If troops must come to the Forks, he badly wanted the president there too. He believed that Washington was doing his best to enforce restraint among the officers and troops; he believed that the president would abide by the amnesty and use troops only to secure peace, not to punish. But Findley had long suspected Hamilton of inciting this rebellion solely for the purpose of quelling it with brutal force, which the soldiers outside in the streets were looking forward to indulging. During this very discussion, Findley witnessed Hamilton’s role as busy second in command, reading letters and dispatching messengers even while managing never to leave the president’s side. Hoping fervently that Washington, not Hamilton, would be the one to control this operation, Findley repeatedly urged the president to come all the way.