The Whiskey Rebellion

by William Hogeland

  Findley bitterly resented the concept of regional, not individual, atonement. Yet he didn’t blame Washington. He blamed Hamilton. He and Redick left Carlisle for the west, placing all hope on the arrival in Pittsburgh of the one man they thought could protect them from what they saw as the vengeful fury of his own treasury secretary.

  • • •

  Washington began seeing troops off from Carlisle on the morning of October 10. The order of march included Jerseyans and Pennsylvanians in mounted legions, many units of footsoldiers, artillery pieces, the whole line bracketed front and rear by horse guards. When errors prevented baggage wagons for the Jersey Horse from arriving, and part of the legion had to wait for the next day to leave, Washington angrily scolded the officers in charge. He was on his way to Fort Cumberland to mobilize the southern wing. He planned on rejoining this northern wing in a few days, farther west, before it pushed into rebel territory. Then, if all seemed well, he’d return to Philadelphia and leave the regional atonement of the Forks to others.

  He traveled southward to Cumberland by back roads, to avoid ceremony. The progress of real estate development in the area mingled with some powerful memories. He was conscious that this was the last time he would view scenes he’d helped change forever. In the 1750s, Washington had made Fort Cumberland his main advance point for the Virginia militia’s desperate efforts against the French and Indians. It had been impossible, then, to imagine a president of a United States. Now, at Fort Cumberland, 3,200 men stood in a double line while Washington rode between them in pomp. The valley road on which he left had been cut from the wilderness, under his command, almost forty years earlier.

  When he rejoined the northern wing, it had progressed to the steep little town of Bedford. Lee’s Maryland and Virginia troops were moving west now too; the wings were to converge at the Youghiogheny on the far side of the mountains. Troops in Bedford were amazed. The scarcity of houses seemed eerie. The narrowness of passes did too. Towering rocks and ancient pines hung over the road and dimmed even the midday sun. The people seemed, to officers and men alike, grotesquely poor, weird, and hard to understand. This was the eastern edge of rebel territory. Bedford County had sent delegates to the Parkinson’s Ferry congress; Herman Husband, who lived nearby, was high on Washington’s and Hamilton’s list for arrest and removal to Philadelphia.

  On the evening of October 18, Washington paraded three thousand troops in Bedford. Metal clanked up the steep dirt street as the mountain people watched in silence. Dragoons shouted orders. Ranks sluggishly responded. At the county courthouse the army lit a patriotic transparency, a traditional holiday dazzlement, sometimes accompanied by fireworks, and rarely seen in Bedford: This one announced the triumph of President Washington himself in large text illuminated by candles. On the reverse it read, “Woe to Anarchy.”

  Yet even as his transparency lit the rebellion’s frontier, the president was preparing to go home. On the twentieth, Alexander Hamilton, writing for the president, sent Henry Lee orders for command of all forces. The next morning, the president started east.

  • • •

  Days and nights of cold, steady rain accompanied Alexander Hamilton, General Lee, and thousands of troops down the Alleghenies’ western slopes in two huge wings, folding on the Youghiogheny. Horses broke down; wheels strained against mud; wagons tipped and capsized. Men slogging ankle-deep, already fighting diarrhea and fever, were drenched and shivering. Tents were still scarce, and now even officers slept in what they considered filthy, lice-ridden hovels. Ascents and descents seemed endlessly steep and tortuous, the valleys deep and narrow. As word came down the line that no glorious battles were likely to justify all this effort, officers grew testy.

  Hamilton did receive written instructions from his eastward-traveling president. It was critical, the president told Hamilton, from an ever-growing distance, that the army maintain the highest standards of legality as it entered the western country. Pillage especially must be stopped. High in the mountains, though, troops were miles ahead of their supplies, with no food or blankets and only frayed clothing. Some wore flaps of ruined shoes; many chose to negotiate the rocky ground, no matter how sharp or frigid, in bare feet. Washington’s standing order, imposed at Carlisle, had been to flog any man caught stealing. Officers carried out that order mercilessly, even while soldiers had no choice but to run amok in narrow valleys and on steep hillsides, snatching from isolated farms all the scarce grain, cows, eggs, and chickens they could find.

  Hamilton resolved this dissonance between orders and reality. He made theft legal. The quartermaster corps, he announced, would impress civilian property along the way. Now families watched helplessly as bayonet-wielding soldiers—no longer freelancing thieves but officials, authorized by the president—commandeered hard-won winter supplies of grain, meat, firewood, and blankets on behalf of the government of the United States. A steady, freezing rain meant the arrival of winter. Families whose sustenance was carted away faced grim months ahead.

  For the army, though, impressment worked. By the end of the first week in November, troops were being deployed, more or less comfortably, throughout the Forks region, and officers were comparing their journey to Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps.

  Hamilton stayed away from Pittsburgh at first, moving among temporary headquarters in Washington, Uniontown, and the various camps. Lee set up his headquarters between the Youghiogheny and the Monongahela. The two communicated by express rider. Lee announced the presence of the army to the people in a proclamation describing the extremes of restraint that President Washington, fatherlike, had gone to, how disappointed their father was to have been forced to bring an army. Everyone in the area, Lee suggested, ought to sign new oaths of allegiance, which soldiers would soon be visiting them to administer.

  Hamilton orchestrated the larger purpose. As he put it in a letter to Washington, the area did give the impression of being in a state of submission, and that state would be all the stronger, he predicted, for what was about to happen. Normal process of law would have required turning arrested suspects over to the civil judiciary for indictment and trial, but as Hamilton had established in his August 5 report and his letter to Governor Mifflin, the situation wasn’t normal. If not exactly war, it resembled war. The whole population had been defined as insurgent. The very presence of federal troops made the Forks a kind of battlefield, even if no shots were fired. Rules for capturing and interrogating prisoners of war weren’t governed by the Bill of Rights. Circumstances at the Forks, as Hamilton, Washington, and Lee defined them, justified a new and impromptu blend of military inquest and civil prosecution.

  A federal judge, Richard Peters, had accompanied the army, along with U.S. Attorney William Rawle, to coordinate civil process with the military authority, but the judge was to be instructed by the military arm, not the other way round, and he was expected to be cooperative; the president had informed Henry Lee of that, above Hamilton’s signature, in the general orders. As Hamilton reminded Washington in a letter, the judicial branch would, of course, be permitted to take charge of suspects, as due process required—but only after the executive branch had finished investigating suspects’ potential value as examples. With these goals in mind, Hamilton and Lee began making arrests.

  The first arrests had actually been made a month earlier. Herman Husband, top man with David Bradford on the administration’s list, was captured at his farmhouse, along with a few others. When Washington had gone to Fort Cumberland to review the southern troops, leaving Hamilton in charge of operations at Bedford, Judge Peters had authorized troops to arrest Husband and a few associates. Despite his eagerness to see Husband behind bars, Washington, on learning of the arrest, was confused by its precipitousness. He expressed concern—well placed, as it turned out—that other important suspects would take alarm at the news and flee. Hamilton did his best to give Washington the impression that high-value insurgents could still be readily arrested, but he’d taken no chances with Husband.
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  Husband had been in jail before. He met this new arrest with equanimity. The arrival of a federal army was no surprise to him. It was a horn of the Beast; he’d seen it coming. He was marched down out of mountains he’d walked so often, forced to travel in the wrong direction, toward the greedy kingdoms of the east. After the hardest kind of overland march, Husband arrived at the Philadelphia jail late in October. Old and frail, amid nasty conditions that tended to weaken prisoners, Husband remained undaunted.

  By the time Hamilton and Lee began making mass arrests at the Forks, it seemed to Forks moderates that more than two thousand men had fled the area; almost anybody who had committed an act of terror, and wasn’t within the amnesty, had gone down the Ohio or into the countryside. Daniel Hamilton was gone, as was the craven Alexander Fulton who had been made to sign the Braddock’s Field orders. Most important, David Bradford had escaped down the Ohio and had been seen on the Mississippi. Anyone left in the area was either innocent of rebel violence, or legally protected by the amnesty, or both.

  Nevertheless, in the middle of the cold night of November 13, what Husband had envisioned as a horn gored and tossed the people. A synchronized effort throughout the region—focused most vociferously on Washington and Allegheny counties—brought soldiers to the doors of slumbering families. To prevent suspects from taking alarm, the effort involved no warrants. General Lee and U.S. Attorney Rawle had recommended that course of action, and Hamilton offered further legal support: Treason has different rules, he reminded Washington in a letter; any law-abiding man, according to common law, may on his own authority apprehend a traitor.

  The Dreadful Night, as Forks lore would call it, involved three lists compiled by Hamilton, the Nevilles, and U.S. Attorney Rawle. On the first list were people within the amnesty. On the second were those suspected of committing treason; these should be arrested. On the third were material witnesses, also to be brought in. Yet Lee’s orders also empowered each general to arrest, at that general’s own discretion, anyone whom that general suspected was guilty, whether or not the name was on the lists. Offenses for which these new, unlisted suspects could be arrested weren’t limited to such things as attacks on collectors and on Bower Hill, expelling the Nevilles from Pittsburgh, or robbing the mail; generals were given discretion to arrest people on suspicion of having marched to Braddock’s Field, served at a Parkinson’s Ferry meeting, raised a liberty pole, or, in the case of local officials, having failed to prevent rebellious activity.

  And since the first list, with names of people protected by the amnesty, wasn’t included with Lee’s orders—it could be supplied, Lee said, if requested, but the generals weren’t to wait for it—almost every adult male was fair game for capture. That most of those arrested would have to be turned loose later was not an issue for the Dreadful Night. Lee qualified the discretion he was granting his generals by instructing them to arrest only real offenders, and prominent people or those especially violent. But since each general passed the orders, along with the empowerments and discretions, down to lower officers to execute, the Dreadful Night was carried out by cavaliers delighted, after pent-up weeks of travel, to be given extraordinary powers over the widest range of potential suspects, on grounds not limited to acts of terror or treason.

  The operation went exactly as would have been expected. Hundreds of Forks residents, within and without the amnesty, were yanked from bed at bayonet point in the cold. Footsoldiers prodded the startled prisoners, close to naked and some barefoot, out of cabins into new-fallen snow while mounted officers barked commands and told furious wives and crying children that the men were being taken to be hanged. Supposed witnesses were treated as suspects; local magistrates were rousted too. All were run through the snow in chains, toward various lockups in town jails, stables, and cattle pens, to await interrogation by Hamilton, Lee, Rawle, the Nevilles, and their subordinates.

  General Anthony “Blackbeard” White, of the New Jersey militia, was well known for mental instability. Having been prevented from getting the militia command he wanted, he’d made it to Carlisle by tagging along with a horse guard; since then he’d managed to get control of a small corps. It was Blackbeard White whom Lee selected to handle prisoners arrested at Mingo Creek, where so many rebel actions had originated, and where Alexander Hamilton hoped to get the most valuable intelligence. Forty Mingo Creek prisoners were brought to a dark log structure, where White was waiting for them. He had them tied back to back in pairs and forced into sitting positions in the icy mud of the tavern cellar. The building he’d selected was new: chinks between the logs were undaubed, the cellar floorless. White ordered the guards to build a fire for themselves, but to keep prisoners away from warmth, at the end of the cellar. He then met with the tavernkeeper who operated the place. On pain of death, the general said, these prisoners were to get no food or drink.

  For more than two days, White starved and dehydrated his shivering, exhausted captives, steadily cursing and castigating them, glorying in their helplessness and describing their imminent hanging. Even White’s troops became concerned about the captives, who seemed barely alive when White finally decided to move them out. He quick-marched them twelve miles through bad weather to the town of Washington, where in physical and emotional collapse, they were held in jail, without charge, ready for questioning by the military.

  Ensuing interrogations resulted, not surprisingly, in the eventual release of most prisoners. In the days after the Dreadful Night, mass arrests went on anyway: the brutality of the arrests and the torment of detention served the purpose of discouraging citizens of the Forks—and everywhere else—not only from engaging in resistance but also from forming societies and organizations. The world was watching. The ultimate goal, superseding any individual prosecution, was national unity. When Judge Peters did take charge of prisoners whom the military hadn’t simply sent home, the speed and scale of arrests forced him to review an extraordinary number of cases very quickly. Women mobbed his court to plead for their husbands, sometimes padding their dresses to appear pregnant, seeming to weep pitifully. Peters released many detainees; some he turned over to the state courts to prosecute for minor crimes. But Hamilton and Lee had made clear to Peters that, regardless of evidence, a reasonable number of insurgents must be taken to Philadelphia. Grand juries were dispensed with, per battlefield conditions. With pumped-up officers cursing him furiously whenever he turned anyone loose, the judge feared the army would revolt. He held a number of men for removal to Philadelphia despite what he viewed as lack of evidence against them.

  Moved from jails and holding pens to the lockup at Fort Fayette, there to await removal to Philadelphia, the chosen prisoners were escorted by horse guards, the most trim and gleaming of the eastern urbanites. Even in Philadelphia the Philadelphia Horse was striking; its gorgeousness here was breathtakingly strange. Uniformed in smooth blue broadcloth, riding huge bay horses so perfectly matched and powerful they could have pulled coaches, these well-bred scions of a distant city moved along bare fields and through russet woods in a line of pairs, silver-decorated bridles and stirrups glinting. They rode with swords held aloft and pointing upward to reflect the sun.

  Between each pair came a pair of prisoners bound for the fort’s lockup. However defiant, they were starved and cold, atop horses of every shape, color, and condition, on bare backs and threadbare blankets, men as varied in size, shape, and condition as their mounts. People watched in astonishment as the column undulated half a mile through wet leaves and tall pines: badly mismatched pairs of mortals between sets of blue-silver centaurs, all beneath a sawtooth edge of steel.

  • • •

  William Findley was sorrier than ever that the president had failed to accompany the troops. So great was Findley’s desire for Washington’s controlling presence that, before the army had arrived, he’d traveled eastward one last time, hoping to give the president even greater assurances of utter submission, but he’d found Washington no longer with the army. Now, just
as he’d expected, Hamilton and Lee seemed to take it on themselves to unleash dragoons and show the Forks no mercy.

  Yet the real dissonance between what the president expected and what Hamilton was doing was invisible to Findley. Other observers also believed that had Washington been present, he wouldn’t have authorized such things as mass arrests on no evidence. Had he been present, he couldn’t have, but Washington had returned untarnished to the seat of government and left in charge his treasury secretary, of whose tendencies nobody was more keenly aware than he, and whom almost nobody else considered an appropriate leader for the expedition. Findley might yearn for a firm, guiding beneficence that would have saved the Forks from degradation. But the president and Hamilton exchanged letters about the arrests. Washington was in perfect harmony, both explicitly and tacitly, with Hamilton’s execution.

  It was with regard to the purpose behind that execution that Hamilton was taking a course plausibly resembling, but really the reverse of, the one expected by the president. Washington was hardly squeamish about frightening people with roundups and shaking information out of them, and his official orders had subordinated the civil to the military authority. But he thought the purpose of doing so was to get intelligence on the conniving few who had, he was sure, led ignorant people astray. He wanted to indict French-inspired opposition politicians, public officers betraying their country for twisted ambition. Hamilton had promised Washington a long list of such suspects, many of them merely attendees at the Pittsburgh conventions—he’d even named Judge Addison. Yet the decisions that Hamilton was making on the ground were predicated on his own keener understanding of the rebellion’s real origins. It would have been useful and satisfying to hang a David Bradford. But Hamilton was out to remove the heart of the people’s movement he’d been struggling with for more than a decade, not to prosecute individuals. William Findley, when trying to persuade Washington to turn the army back, had argued that only the very poor and the landless were still insurgent. To Hamilton, that news didn’t make heavy enforcement any less necessary; quite the contrary. Throughout the arrests and prosecutions, ordinary rural men—their names might appear only on militia lists—became the subjects of Hamilton’s example. Only Herman Husband, who could be seen both as the authentic voice of ordinary people’s resistance and as a rich, prominent rabble-rouser, fulfilled both Hamilton’s and Washington’s profiles. Hence Hamilton’s precipitous move to arrest him.