This surprised Mr. Brackenridge. Hamilton seemed to be offering him a way out. Perhaps to avoid arrest, he had only to implicate others. He knew of Hamilton’s desire for evidence against Findley and Gallatin. A door to safety had been thrown wide. So with his next statement the enervated lawyer felt that he handed over his life. “I am not within the amnesty,” he acknowledged. “And I am sensible of the extent of the power of the government. But were the narrative to begin again, I would not change a single word.”
He resumed the tale, and after he’d told of Presley Neville’s asking him, as a personal favor, to attend the Mingo church meeting, and of Presley’s promising to vouch for his reluctance to go to that meeting, Hamilton again stopped writing. He wanted to adjourn for the midday dinner break. Lee was sending messages to Brackenridge to come home and dine again at the general’s table, but the lawyer was near the edge of sanity and could only wait. Hamilton, meanwhile, was having what Mr. Brackenridge later realized was a tense lunchtime discussion with Presley Neville, during which Hamilton sharply quizzed Presley, for the first time, on circumstances surrounding the lawyer’s attending the Mingo church meeting. And in the afternoon session, Hamilton began by saying that Mr. Brackenridge’s actions seemed to have been grossly mischaracterized. The remark offered more hope than Mr. Brackenridge had been able to feel in a long time.
Yet Hamilton soon grew testy again. The lawyer was describing his speech at the Mingo Creek church. Hamilton had been given to understand that the speech supported rebellion and mocked the government. Mr. Brackenridge suggested they get affidavits from those he’d asked to join him as witnesses at that meeting. Hamilton’s inner turmoil only seemed to increase. Then came the story of Brackenridge’s pretending, at Braddock’s Field, to support the rebellion in order to keep Pittsburgh from burning. This idea seemed to stagger Hamilton, and Brackenridge was mildly emboldened, venturing a similarity between his own conduct at Braddock’s Field and that of King Richard II before a mob of 100,000 at Blackheath. Hamilton was listening.
The day ended abruptly when Hamilton complained of an aching chest. Brackenridge’s spirits fizzled. He hoped the secretary’s pain was caused by sympathy for the prisoner, though he believed it was caused by too much writing, and feared Hamilton had decided, if regretfully, that an arrest must be made that evening. Again fully clothed, Mr. Brackenridge passed a watchful night. The next morning, finding himself not arrested, he returned for more questioning, and by now Hamilton had made up his mind.
When the lawyer finished dictating, Hamilton was actually smiling. The famous charm, rarely glimpsed by residents of the Forks, was on him as he assured Mr. Brackenridge that not a single doubt was left about the lawyer’s conduct, which had indeed been horribly misrepresented. General Lee would be informed of the situation. There was no need, Hamilton said, even for an interview with Judge Peters.
As Brackenridge stared at him, Hamilton said, “Had we listened to some people, I do not know what we might have done.”
When Mr. Brackenridge was asked to sign each page of his statement, he found he could barely work his fingers.
• • •
On Christmas morning, 1794, twenty thousand Philadelphians mobbed the broad, cobbled streets of their city to see the defeated whiskey rebels brought in from the west. At eleven-thirty, troopers mustered the rebels before the Black Horse Tavern in preparation for the parade.
If the people were expecting a big show, they had reason to be disappointed. Thousands had marched on Braddock’s Field. There were twenty prisoners, and General Blackbeard White himself had been given the job of escorting them from the Forks. Already skinny, pale, and exhausted by questioning and imprisonment when leaving Fort Fayette on November 25, they’d spent a month crossing mountains forbidding enough in summer, locked now in winter. Each prisoner had walked, alone now, between a pair of mounted troopers. Days, they pulled each foot from snow and ice and put it in front of the other. Light on bare branches faded quickly. When the sun set behind them, they slept in frozen barns or cellars. The troopers kept swords drawn, ready to fend off any attempt at rescue. General White had ordered the beheading of anyone attempting escape: heads, he’d announced hopefully, would be displayed in the city.
John Hamilton, the most prominent among them, had never been questioned. Neither indictments nor verdicts had been needed to bring about this phase of what became, as prisoners prepared to be marched through the city, an example in the most literal sense. Before the Black Horse the prisoners were given white slips of paper and ordered to place them on their hats as cockades. This was General White’s idea: the few, thin rebels must be identifiable amid expectant crowds. Parades had become common lately. The city was celebrating, with days of pealing churchbells and booming salutes, the return of each army unit from the west. The president himself had been seen to emerge from his house and watch, with what seemed to onlookers inexpressible pleasure, as a returning regiment rode past.
The troopers arranged their prisoners in the usual order of march and drove them, the slips of brightness on their heads, through streets of shouting crowds. The rebels made a pitiful impression. The route was long and circuitous. Led at last into the Philadelphia city jail, they found Herman Husband and the others who had been arrested in October. To welcome new arrivals, orders were not to feed them and to give them no light.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
That So-Called Whiskey Rebellion
Only Herman Husband didn’t get home. District Attorney Rawle and Attorney General Bradford couldn’t persuade grand juries even to indict some of the prisoners who had been marched over the mountains and paraded as victory prizes; actually convicting anyone in that first group, as well as others brought in later, proved nearly impossible.
It wasn’t that Philadelphia juries were nullifying in protest. As Judge Peters had predicted, there simply wasn’t any evidence against most of the men who had been selected for removal and trial. Despite Peters’s concerns, none of the twenty men brought in that Christmas was released for lack of evidence. Charges weren’t revealed to prisoners in advance of hearings. The judges explicitly instructed juries to return indictments and guilty verdicts. But there were just too many mistaken identities, too few witnesses, too much confused and inconclusive testimony. When certain high-value suspects did turn themselves in, they were offered deals to testify against their less well-known followers. Since normal law enforcement strategy was to get low-level criminals to testify against higher-level ones, Philadelphia juries disdained the prosecution and discredited the testimony.
The prosecution strategy confounded the administration’s critics too. It seemed as if Hamilton and Attorney General Bradford were incompetently ignoring guiltier parties, who would have made good examples, and foolishly tormenting the innocent while failing to convict them.
But successful prosecution had never been the way Hamilton expected to drive his point where he wanted it driven. He’d hoped to hang Findley and Gallatin, and he’d tried to substitute Brackenridge, but the real subject of his operation had remained the whole people of the Forks, not prominent individuals pressed into leadership. Holding large numbers of lesser-known people in Philadelphia for long periods of confusion and fear, and then sending them home, extended the policy Hamilton and Lee had imposed on the entire Forks in the fall. Hamilton had started this fight in the confederation Congress in the 1780s. The idea was to destroy the will of an enemy that, though stubborn, had in the end been no match for the energy and scope of the national government.
Only twelve cases went to trial, and in the end only two rebels were convicted. These were Philip Wigle, who had beaten up Benjamin Wells and been among the cadre that burned Wells’s house after Braddock’s Field; and a John Mitchell, widely considered simple, whom David Bradford had sent to rob the mail. A landless miller’s son and a subsistence farmer of dwindling property were hardly the arrogant, French-inspired politicos whom Washington had described, in an address to Congress, as having l
ed the ignorant people of the Forks into treason. The administration was still enjoying renewed popularity. Hanging what appeared to be two sad cases might have raised questions about the real purpose of the operation.
Washington evinced the mercifulness that, with the crisis over, and easterners sated, most people hoped to see. He pardoned the condemned men.
By then, prisoners had been forced, despite lack of evidence, to wait for months in Philadelphia. Some stayed in rooming houses on bail; others couldn’t post or hadn’t been granted bail and lay in the city jail. Witnesses came slowly from the Forks. Trials didn’t even start till May of 1795. It would be 1796 before everyone was released, to make his way, however he might, home to the Forks of the Ohio.
The example went on there too. An occupying force of fifteen hundred remained camped in the town of Washington. Lee had issued a general pardon; loyalty oaths had been collected; stills were registered. Judge Addison was deputized to work with the army on bringing in remaining suspects. The Neville Connection resumed its entrepreneurial endeavors, and General Neville resumed enforcing the excise law. The Wells family, happy to be back in the collections business, helped out. The amazing sight, that hot summer of 1794, on the bluff at Parkinson’s Ferry, when for two days a new flag had flown over a western congress, wouldn’t recur around Pittsburgh. Radicals’ hopes for the American Revolution were over.
Yet the whiskey tax remained hard to collect. There were occasional disruptions of court proceedings and occasional threats, but mainly there was sneakiness and recalcitrance, smuggling and moonshining. The authority that established itself at last in the western country was not challenged. It was eluded.
• • •
“The Whiskey Rebellion”: this was Alexander Hamilton’s term for what people at the Forks had been doing. With it Hamilton scored a final victory over the rebels, permanently reducing their struggle to one over a beloved local drink. Hamilton did retire from the cabinet early in 1795. The experience of suppressing the rebellion had revived some old dreams. His hopes for empire were not exclusively commercial; the martial called out to him with increasing urgency, and at the end of the 1790s he commanded the United States Army, only technically second to the infirm Washington, who had been called out of retirement to put a beloved face on a possible war with France. In official charge, at last, of American military power, Hamilton badly wanted that war to happen. Preparations for it were swelling the army; he wanted to make the force permanent and fill it with his own sense of order. But the supply process became infuriatingly chaotic, as usual, and when war didn’t come, and the army shrank almost to nothing, Hamilton’s disappointment raged. He’d imagined marching troops south, preemptively invading Spanish Florida before it could be taken by the French, not stopping there, driving onward, into South America. He mused too about bringing his army into Virginia and putting that state, as he phrased it, to the test.
Yet he had some jubilant moments during and after the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion, and when in high spirits, he could be surprisingly frank about the useful part insurrection had played in realizing his vision for the country. The rebellion (he didn’t say its suppression) had strengthened the government, he was happy to boast. The rebellion solidified the country, he said, and it made national finance flourish.
• • •
In Washington’s stated opinion, suppressing the Whiskey Rebellion had drawn from the American people the support for law and government that marked their highest character. Washington also noted that the operation worked out well for him personally. With commercial distilling newly profitable, he added whiskey making to his endeavors at Mount Vernon. He continued to fret over his western lands: letters to his lazy land agent included orders to deliver files and papers to Presley Neville and Senator James Ross, his new agents. When the president had been on his way to Carlisle in the fall of ’94, he’d received satisfying news of decisive victory over the far western Indians. British and Indian power in the northwest was effectively ended. The far west was truly opened. With the suppression of the rebellion, his land in the west, which he’d been annoyed about having to sell cheap, increased in value by about 50 percent.
• • •
Edmund Randolph found himself having a nightmare from which he never awakened when, one morning in August of 1795, he arrived at the president’s house for a meeting that had already been mysteriously postponed. With Washington were Hamilton’s successor in the cabinet, Oliver Wolcott, and Knox’s successor, Timothy Pickering, third-string functionaries of high federalism, which Hamilton, from outside government, was making the monolithic philosophy of the executive branch. Randolph had become the last surviving member of the first-term cabinet.
Washington mystified Randolph by asking him to wait outside. When ushered in, Randolph was surprised to be presented with a paper that the president asked him to read and explain. It was a dispatch from the French minister to authorities in Paris, analyzing the U.S. government’s conduct in the Whiskey Rebellion. The minister cited Randolph as his source not only of privileged information but also of a portrait of Washington as a puppet—frontman for the monarchist ambitions of Hamilton and other federalists, who had incited the rebellion in order to exercise absolute power over the American people and punish political enemies in government. Randolph had also solicited a bribe from the French government, the dispatch said.
Washington invited Pickering and Wolcott to interrogate Randolph. Recovering himself, Randolph declined to be questioned under these circumstances; he left the room; he tendered in writing his resignation as secretary of state. He did have a relationship with the French minister. He’d been probed for information; he may have been less than discreet. But he was anguished over the accusation of disloyalty to the United States—and especially to Washington—and he was correct in thinking that it was Pickering and Wolcott who had accused him of treason.
Randolph wrote Washington a letter. Seeking public vindication, he also printed it as a pamphlet. But the appeal was impossible. Randolph could only beg Washington to recall the times when Randolph had been a trusted counselor, plead with Washington to remember that sometimes Washington didn’t remember things. Torturing events again and again, the pamphlet ran to more than one hundred pages, an impenetrable thicket behind which a man stood screaming. Randolph, as Washington’s former confidant, knew all the signs: the president just wanted him gone now. It didn’t matter what Randolph had done, or not done, or what Randolph might say about it now. Knowing that writing could never penetrate Washington’s feelings drove Randolph forward instead of suggesting he stop.
When Washington received the published pamphlet he threw it on the floor, beleaguered. Randolph didn’t achieve any vindication from the public either, in part because the letter, protesting too much, made him look at once foolish and guilty, but mainly because it wasn’t the vindication of the public he needed.
• • •
In the election of 1800, the Jeffersonians came to power and the whiskey tax was repealed. President Jefferson’s treasury secretary was Albert Gallatin. The new regime was good for some other former rebels too—or at least for those branded rebels who were actually moderates. Having escaped down the Mississippi, David Bradford never came back to live in western Pennsylvania; he spent the rest of his life on a plantation in Bayou Sara, in what under Jefferson became the Louisiana territory of the United States. William Findley, however, served in Congress until 1817. Though hated by the Morris and Hamilton federalists, he’d never been especially beloved by the Jefferson-Madison opposition. Earlier in his career, Findley had suggested, in debate in the Pennsylvania assembly, that Madison to the contrary, interest can be a political good, if acknowledged. Findley thought it more honest for representatives—not really high-minded public servants, reluctant for power, but professional politicians—to admit to representing not disinterested judgment but interested constituencies. Mentally living in the coming age of Jackson gave him, during the federali
st era, an embattled energy, which paid off during the Jefferson administration in credibility and power.
Mr. Brackenridge, for his part, though vindicated by Alexander Hamilton, wasn’t vindicated by the army, and his terror and outrage went on. He tried to clear his name, but he also refused to keep a low profile; he represented settlers in damage suits against occupying officers. Then General Neville, hiring additional legal help for prosecuting local distillers, thought having a reputed rebel on the team might move juries the government’s way. He offered Mr. Brackenridge the job. Mr. Brackenridge, true to erratic form, accepted.
With time, he became known less for irony than for irascibility. By the end of the decade, he was a leader of the Pittsburgh Jeffersonian party, but even as he watched Findley and Gallatin win elections, the voters continued to view him with suspicion, and he never again held elected office. When the Jeffersonians took power in Pennsylvania, Brackenridge was appointed a justice of the state supreme court and moved east to Carlisle. By then he had a reputation for steady drinking. He was known for charging juries with his bare feet propped on the bar of justice. A tavernkeeper in Canonsburg who had inspired his wrath was confronted by the sight of Judge Brackenridge stomping into the crowded tavern, damning the tavernkeeper fifteen times, and then, overwhelmed by fury, ripping off his own clothes and standing near-naked before the startled crowd, fuming. He took to chastising even the Jeffersonians for political sins, but his judgeship was for life, and he died in office.
He often sought refuge in new chapters of Modern Chivalry. It had no plot, so it needed no ending, and the characters’ idiotic ploys went on and on.
• • •
Herman Husband was indicted and tried not for treason but for sedition. A conviction might have seemed easy to get: there had been depositions from Benjamin Wells and Philip Reagan laying the blame for rebellion on Husband’s writings and sermons, which could easily be read as urging violent revolution against the federal government. Yet at Parkinson’s Ferry, where the prosecution focused its questioning, nobody had heard Husband preach violence. He’d advised peace. The jury quickly found Husband not guilty. He was released on May 12, 1795, and collapsed on the way out of Philadelphia. He could go no farther than a tavern just outside town.
The Whiskey Rebellion Page 26
