The Whiskey Rebellion

by William Hogeland

  Bouton’s and Fennell’s analyses have been critically important to this book. Yet as I hope my narrative shows, I depart from a tendency I discern, especially in the work of Bouton, but also in that of recent progressive historians in general, to read local regulations like the Whiskey Rebellion—usurpation of the judiciary; armed intimidation of dissenters by self-appointed representatives of the people—as epitomizing the best in popular sovereignty. My thinking on this issue benefits from Garry Wills’s study of American distrust of sophisticated government, A Necessary Evil; my departure from the progressives persists in the face of their well-taken point (also made by the rebels themselves) that such extralegal and illegal regulatory tactics had been essential to achieving American independence and producing the Washington administration.

  With the three major scholarly studies must be ranked chapters on the Whiskey Rebellion in Richard Kohn’s Eagle and Sword, on the early development of the United States military establishment, which deal closely with the Washington administration’s decisions and tactics in suppressing the rebellion. James Patrick McClure’s monumental, unpublished dissertation, The Ends of the American Earth, covers white settlement in the Upper Ohio Valley to 1795; only in McClure’s exhaustively documented chapters on the rebellion did I find scholarly support for my own sense of the chronology implied by the taxman William Faulkner’s deposition of 1792, the watershed represented by the second Pittsburgh convention, and the real nature of various militia-based organizations at the Forks of the Ohio.

  Another important work is Wythe Holt’s major essay “The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794” (part of a larger, forthcoming work), which focuses on legal issues in the interrogations and trials of the rebels. Holt’s use of trial testimony and Judge William Paterson’s papers is essential to understanding issues touched on only lightly in this book. Holt attacks Slaughter’s approach as ideologically wishy-washy, following Fennell on Herman Husband and joining Bouton and other progressives in presenting rebel tactics as admirably evincing working-class democracy in action.

  Other writers who have dealt in various ways with the Whiskey Rebellion: Stephen Boyd, who edited The Whiskey Rebellion: Past and Present Perspectives (with an important historiography by Slaughter); Mary Tachau, whose “The Whiskey Rebellion in Kentucky” covers tax resistance beyond the Forks of the Ohio; and Roger Gould, whose essay “Patron-Client Ties, State Centralization, and the Whiskey Rebellion” must rank among the most deliberately dry essays ever written, yet arrives at some startling and credible conclusions, beyond the scope of this work and calling for further thought. Gould deploys statistics to demonstrate that prominent participants in the rebellion were elites with state rather than federal connections.

  Among many works of Pennsylvania history, Russell Ferguson’s evocatively written Early Western Pennsylvania Politics, published in 1938, focuses with great effectiveness on personalities who acted during the rebellion. Norma W. Hartman’s cited article clarifies the identity of Oliver Miller, killed in the first Bower Hill attack; Hartman’s work is also presented in Mary Pat Swanger’s summary of the rebellion; both writers are members of Oliver Miller Homestead Associates, of Pittsburgh, which possesses much interesting information about the rebellion in the context of local history and genealogy. Among many local histories, Boyd Crumrine’s History of Washington County, published in 1882, serves as a good guide to biographies and genealogies of many principal players.

  Scattered works of related interest include Henry McCook’s The Latimers, a novel published in 1897 and set during the rebellion, drawing in part on local tradition; another fictional treatment appears in Tree of Liberty by Elizabeth Page. A book by the local historian C. M. Ewing, The Causes of That So Called Whiskey Insurrection of 1794, written in 1930, attacks Alexander Hamilton with compelling irascibility and no attempt at impartiality. The guidebooks by Helene Smith and Jerry Clouse are useful for locating rebellion sites.

  Essays below delve into specific sources and ideas for each chapter.

  PROLOGUE: THE PRESIDENT, THE WEST, AND THE REBELLION

  Washington and the presidency. Major sources for the centrality of Washington’s personality to the idea of a U.S. presidency are Wills’s Cincinattus and Elkins and McKitrick’s first chapter. The president’s clothing, hair products, and other personal matters are detailed in Paul Leicester Ford.

  Washington’s aging. Flexner, in his volume 4, describes the memory loss; in volume 3 he discusses Washington’s sensation of rapid aging and concern that he wouldn’t be fit for a second term. Randolph, an eyewitness (with an ax to grind), describes the president as complaining daily of not trusting his own memory. See also conflicts over memory between Washington and Hamilton in Chapter Seven.

  Mount Vernon, the Federal City, and the journey of spring ’94. Flexner raises Washington’s childlessness in the context of dynastic ambitions of plantation owners. All cited secondary sources on Washington give detailed information on Mount Vernon’s operations and its economic and agricultural challenges; I follow Smith’s Chapter Ten for Washington’s frettings in the spring of ’94. “Transmutation toward gold”: from Washington’s Writings, quoted by Ford. For more on Washington’s relationship to the Federal City see Elkins and McKitrick, Chapter Four. Descriptions of presidential carriages, travel arrangements, etc., are drawn from the notes of Tobias Lear, in Decatur. Many works on Washington recount the injury of June 1794, the return to the capital, and the dinner with the Indians; Smith cites John Quincy Adams on Washington’s sharing the peace pipe.

  Washington and the west. The subject is covered in all cited Washington biographies. Knollenberg’s Chapter Fourteen details Washington’s efforts, often shady, to engross western land. Of dedicated studies, Cook focuses on Washington’s western lands, Sakolski on the land bubble as a whole. Slaughter devotes an important chapter to Washington’s western interests in the context of the Whiskey Rebellion and notes, with many biographers, Washington’s desire to keep the Mississippi closed. For a lively exploration of Washington’s Potomac projects, see Achenbach.

  CHAPTER ONE: OVER THE MOUNTAINS

  Hugh Henry Brackenridge. Marder and Newlin are the standard biographers—Marder following Newlin closely. In After the Revolution, Ellis gives valuable information and insight regarding the seriousness and scope of Brackenridge’s literary ambitions. Most important to my appreciation of Brackenridge are his own works, often hastily written yet always full of personality and verve. For Brackenridge on Indians, see Narrative of a Late Expedition, and “Thoughts on the Present Indian War” in Gazette Publications, which also has much of Brackenridge’s political writing, as well as the many modes of his poetry and drama not touched on here.

  Settlement and growth at the Forks of the Ohio. For topography, see especially Russell Ferguson’s first chapter. McClure exhaustively details the role of the British Army and its departure; Indian relations and white-Indian violence; the border war; settlement patterns; treaties; and new-state movements. Regarding population statistics, McClure notes that the federal census of 1790 gives a misleading number of 376 for Pittsburgh—when in fact the area that for most people composed the town had about one thousand people by 1790. Before McClure, the Bucks were the major source on headwaters settlement; their work is more readily available than McClure’s. Fennell uses primary sources to tell the story of the “blacks” and describes competing provincial authorities as leading to skepticism about all authority. Some other writers make more than I do of the influence of Scots-Irish culture on the attitudes of the whiskey rebels—but for the importance of that culture to Appalachian life, see David Hackett Fischer’s benchmark study. Slaughter is especially effective in linking the Pennsylvania new-state movement with those of Watauga and Franklin; he also cites contemporaneous observers on children playing near corpses. Findley discusses Indians’ revolutionary-period depredations of white settlements.

  The Johnson tar and feathering. The primary source is Neville’s informal cover note t
o Clymer of 9/15/1791, in the Wolcott Papers, introducing Johnson, who apparently carried the more formal letter to Clymer in Philadelphia and gave testimony there. The front page of the note, describing the attackers’ garb, was not microfilmed and must be read in the original. Johnson’s amiability and simplicity are mentioned by Alexander Addison in a letter to Governor Mifflin, 5/12/1794, Pennsylvania Archives. Washington County resolutions of 8/23/91 appear in a copy of the Pittsburgh Gazette, enclosed by Neville in his letter to Clymer of 9/8/91, in the Wolcott Papers. Fennell’s Chapters Four and Five give detail on the tar and featherers as a class; she describes certain rebels’ situations individually, including Daniel Hamilton’s. The Beers Commemorative Biographical Record, seeming to follow Crumrine, covers the many Washington County Hamiltons.

  The Green Tree meeting. In Incidents, Brackenridge describes the meeting and, secondhand, the earlier, nondelegated Brownsville meeting; he frequently evinces his disdain for Woods, sardonically calling him “my brother of the bar.” It is my belief that Woods, as the Nevilles’ lawyer, attended the meeting only to report on it; Neville’s letter to Clymer of 9/8/1791, in the Wolcott Papers, refers to Neville’s having been “informed” (incorrectly, in this case, thus probably deliberately) that the meeting’s demands were radical. Newlin is the source for Brackenridge’s relationship with David Bradford. Fennell focuses on the elite status of the Green Tree attendees; it is her idea that the tar and feathering of the night before was intended to send the delegates a message (Baldwin, on the other hand, calls the attack “desultory”). Resolutions of the Green Tree meeting: Pennsylvania Archives.

  Brackenridge and Husband. Brackenridge describes the meeting in Incidents; Schoepf also visited Husband’s farm and had similar if less sardonic impressions. For more on Husband, see Chapter Five.

  CHAPTER TWO: THE CURSE OF PULP

  Excise protest. Inspired by Fennell and Bouton, I view rebel objections to the tax as having less to do with antiexcise traditions than with particular mechanisms Hamilton built into the tax. But Slaughter places the rebellion in a long tradition of protest against excise, exploring riots going back to the fifteenth century and the crisis of the Walpole era; following Bailyn’s seminal work on the subject, he also invokes the connection of British country-party politics and American colonial and independence politics. Readers interested in British country- and court-party traditions and their relationship to American politics should see, along with Bailyn and Slaughter, Black and Kramnick; for Walpole’s excise crisis, see Langford. Walpole’s influence on Hamilton is suggestive in this context; Ha-Joon Chang traces that influence with regard to manufacturing and tariffs.

  Hamilton’s nose. Hamilton to Laurens, 4/1779 (no day given), Hamilton’s Papers. Concocting a mock list of attributes that might prove attractive to a wife, Hamilton refers with self-mocking pride to the impressive length of his nose. Implications, evidently lewd, were blacked out of the original letter by Hamilton’s son John Church Hamilton: see editor’s note 2 on the letter.

  The public debt and the war effort. Much of this chapter closely follows Bouton’s analysis; I paraphrase Bouton’s interpretation of the original floating and funding of the blue-chip tier and use his example of what a buyer was really getting with a thousand-dollar bond. The most complete understanding of state and federal debt instruments, currencies, requisitions, depreciation laws, taxation efforts, army buying procedures, and final-settlement accounting is that of E. J. Ferguson, on whom Bouton relies. One of Ferguson’s most important conclusions is that the familiar distinction between patriotic “original holders” and crass “speculators”—rehashed in many works on the founding period—is largely a bogus one, at least regarding the blue-chip portion of the debt: Ferguson shows that the most attractive bonds moved very little, and that their original holders were also speculators, who like lower-scale speculators gambled, often irrationally, in all forms of public debt, both state and national. Bouton is unique in developing Ferguson’s work with reference to the Whiskey Rebellion.

  Robert Morris in the Congress. Nobody else has followed Morris’s turbulent congressional career with the closeness of E. J. Ferguson, in both The Power of the Purse and the introduction and notes to Morris’s Papers. Ferguson shows, I think conclusively, that Morris’s nationalist agenda, in which Hamilton was a key congressional operative, was direct precursor to Hamilton’s federalist finance program. But Syrett and Cooke, editors of Hamilton’s Papers, explicitly disagree with those who emphasize the Morris influence on Hamilton (see their general note on “Report on the Public Credit,” January 1790), pointing to Hamilton’s independent development of ideas shared with Morris and Hamilton’s reading of the economist Jacques Necker. Most of Hamilton’s biographers, citing especially Necker and Hume as influences, pass lightly and uncritically over the relationship with Morris—though Mitchell calls the relationship an apprenticeship and Morris the one person from whom Hamilton would take correction in finance; Miller does go so far as to call Morris a war profiteer. Bouton is the eye-opening source on the opposition of Morris’s agenda to that of the rural popular movement, hence of Morris’s significance to Hamilton’s activities during the Whiskey Rebellion. See also Hamilton’s famous finance letter to Morris of 4/30/1781 in Hamilton’s Papers. My description of the mercantile code and its effects distills Ferguson’s.

  Debtors, creditors, and founding-era economies. Much of the currency scholarship I cite is ultimately based on Brock, who refutes the common view that all colonial paper was wildly inflationary. E. J. Ferguson’s first chapter is essential to understanding colonial currency; another important source is the readable and illuminating Grubb. Bouton equates the Whiskey Rebellion with the depressed American economy, debtor-creditor struggles, and populists’ commitment to paper and land-bank finance, fleshing out the decades-long economic depression with special attention to rural Pennsylvania. Opinions of paper finance expressed by Robert Morris and other financiers are a subject in themselves: E. J. Ferguson and Hawke, among others, point to merchants’ allegiance to paper throughout the colonial period; Bouton equates creditors’ growing hatred of paper with an alliance to nationalist government and fear of state legislatures’ popular-finance laws.

  The popular movement. Elkins and McKitrick, though naturally more interested in official politics and the ideology of the democratic societies, are unusually fair to the popular movement. Hamilton, rejecting the finance philosophy of labor radicals, declined to acknowledge that they had a philosophy at all; that tactic has been borrowed by historians who view as anachronistic any attempt to take seriously economic radicalism in the eighteenth century. Progressive historians, for their part, often sentimentalize the movement’s traditional tactics, which in English village life had most often been dedicated to maintaining rather than overturning social hierarchies. Readers who want to piece together the story of eighteenth-century labor radicalism and its impact in the 1770s on protests in Boston and Philadelphia, hence on American independence, should see Young, Nash, Foner, Zobel, and Countryman; Foner is my source for Adams’s remark on the Pennsylvania constitution. Bouton serves as a chief guide to sources on this subject and as an important source himself; he is the most focused authority on road closings and other obstructive tactics in Pennsylvania, as well as for assembly battles of the 1780s between creditors and debtors. For more on the popular movement’s tactics, its roots in village regulation, and Parliament’s Black Act, see Thompson, whom Fennell also cites; for analyses of how those tactics emerged in revolutionary America, see especially Young, Pencak, and Shaw.

  The Pennsylvania constitution. Key primary sources include Paine and the 1776 Pennsylvania constitution itself. Good sources for the political battles of revolutionary and postwar Pennsylvania include Lincoln, Selsam, Brunhouse, and Ryerson. Tinkcom argues that the radical constitution wasn’t the disaster that some others claim it was. Hawke, a disarmingly fine writer and skeptical thinker, takes issue with the idea that rural Pennsylvanians
felt any special resentment for eastern policies; his shrewd analysis is compelling, yet to me it can’t withstand the petitions and statistics cited by Bouton, Selsam, and others.

  The bondholder lobby and the impost. Bouton streamlines and focuses the story, which E. J. Ferguson supports in greater detail, of Morris’s mounting desperation and his schemes regarding funding the war debt and the creation of the bondholder lobby; Bouton cites Morris’s letters, especially to Ridley on 10/6/1782 and to Washington on 10/16/82, and his reports to Congress, especially of 7/29/82, all in Morris’s Papers. While many writers on Hamilton discuss nationalists’ hopes for the impost, few focus on the impost as a wedge for a full slate of federal taxes, including excise, or on the fact that for the Morris group in Congress, the primary purpose of federal taxation was not to pay and supply soldiers but to ensure regular interest payments to investors. For full exploration of those matters, see E. J. Ferguson.

  The Newburgh crisis. The officer petition, the Newburgh addresses, the impost bills and votes, and Washington’s letter to Congress are in Journals of the American Congress for late 1782 and early ’83 (the petition and addresses are appended to Hamilton’s committee report of 4/24/1783). The story is clearly and thoroughly detailed by Kohn, who describes its purpose as a threat, at least, of coup d’état, with Hamilton and the Morrises encouraging, for their own ends, Gates’s dream of mutiny. Kohn presents his evidence for the Morris-Hamilton conspiracy—circumstantial yet logical and persuasive, especially in light of Hamilton’s letters to Washington during and after the crisis—in footnote 19 for his William and Mary Quarterly article, not in his book. Kohn also describes the Society of the Cincinnati as a means of perpetuating the officer class as a force in politics. For a dissenting view, see Nelson, who argues that there was no real threat of coup from Gates (his article is followed by a rebuttal from Kohn). Morris’s tactics in Congress during the crisis can be followed in E. J. Ferguson, who cites Madison’s reference to the excitement caused by the officers’ demands. For Hamilton’s efforts to push the impost through Congress during the crisis, while keeping funds attached to bondholders, see his resolutions and opposition to motions proposed on 1/27/1783, 1/28/83, 1/29/83, 2/19/83, and 3/11/83, in his Papers.