The Whiskey Rebellion

by William Hogeland

  Hamilton and Washington. In Hamilton’s Papers, the revived relationship can be traced in letters of 3/12/1783, 3/17/83 (with Hamilton’s crossed-out confession of having desired, however briefly, to produce a threat of coup), 3/24/83, 3/25/83, 3/31/83, 4/4/83 (with Hamilton’s most complete confession), 4/15/83, 4/16/83 (with Washington’s qualification of his remarks of 4/4), and 4/22/83. Most Hamilton biographers treat Hamilton’s involvement in the crisis as naughty yet ultimately harmless dabbling for a worthy cause; all sources on Washington describe Washington’s masterful quelling of the coup, which almost all describe as a failed attempt at worst. Bouton suggests that as a means of swelling the debt and its lobby, the crisis was a success, paving the way for Hamilton’s programs of the 1790s. In that context, I note that while many writers admiringly cite Washington’s famous reference to the army’s being dangerous to play with, they ignore the implications of the remark, as Washington himself clarified them in his seldom-cited follow-up letter. Ambiguities in the Washington-Hamilton relationship, surfacing during the Newburgh crisis, went on to play an even more complicated part, I believe, in the Whiskey Rebellion and lead me to see Washington’s role in the crisis more ambiguously than do Flexner, Freeman, et al.

  CHAPTER THREE: SPIRITS DISTILLED WITHIN THE UNITED STATES

  Hamilton’s finance program and the whiskey tax. Readers of American history are likely to have an impression of the whiskey tax as, if anything, the last detail in Hamilton’s persuading Congress to fund a national debt and assume states’ debts in it. The standard view is expressed by Slaughter: “Once assumption of state debts was agreed upon, a method of paying for them inevitably followed.” (p. 19) In this chapter I flip the usual hierarchies—at the very least, I think, correctively—to subordinate funding and assumption to the excise tax. As Ferguson shows, especially in his Chapter Eight, Robert Morris viewed assumption not merely as something to be paid for by federal taxes, including internal taxes, but as a tactic for achieving such taxes and earmarking their proceeds to bondholders. Hamilton clearly had his eyes on the prize of excise at the outset of developing the finance plan: inexplicably to me, biographers make nothing of his writing and appending to the original report of 1790—not draft funding or assumption bills—but a long, fully developed draft import and excise tax bill, almost identical to the one passed in 1791. Brookhiser ignores excise completely, blurring it with the duties on luxury imports, thus managing to ascribe westerners’ resentment of the whiskey tax to their love of whiskey drinking. Chernow too places objection to the tax largely in the context of frontiersmen’s recreational consumption of alcohol. As discussed later in this chapter, Hamilton used the same argument. He at least was being disingenuous.

  Hamilton as treasury secretary. Flexner describes Hamilton as seeing treasury as top job. Hamilton’s letter to Morris: 4/30/1781, Hamilton’s Papers. All biographers delve into the remarkable number of challenging tasks that confronted Hamilton when he took the job.

  Populists, nationalists, and state governments. Foner discusses the postwar shift westward of the popular movement. All sources on the period cover Shays; Ferguson does so with unusual detail regarding tax-and-debt issues involved. For fights in the Pennsylvania assembly over Morris’s bank, the radical plan for state debt, populist recalcitrance in western Pennsylvania and elsewhere, and the disastrous extent of foreclosure: Bouton, Brunhouse, Tinkcom, and Russell Ferguson. Brunhouse sees a paper emission in Pennsylvania as a major populist victory; Bouton sees it as too little, too late; most important for this story, bitter dissatisfaction on both creditor and debtor sides is borne out in most cited accounts of Pennsylvania politics of the period. Crist’s biography of Robert Whitehill is lively but not politically illuminating. Slaughter is the most compact and focused source for the western independence movements’ grievances regarding Indian attacks and the Mississippi; he also notes (with many biographers) Washington’s desire to keep the Mississippi closed until national unity could be established. Of Whiskey Rebellion scholars, Slaughter is alone in focusing closely on violence between Indians and whites, punctuating his narrative with compelling and painful descriptions of massacres. McClure offers much detail on Indian war techniques, populist meetings, and circulars connecting western Pennsylvania with Kentucky.

  Finance and the constitutional convention. Most writers on the period cite the Shays Rebellion and the fear of economic leveling that it inspired as a cause of nationalist regrouping. Yet Chernow, quoting The Federalist, Number Six (where Hamilton refers to Daniel Shays as a “desperate debtor”), also describes Hamilton as sympathizing with Shays and suggests that federal assumption of state debts reflected Hamilton’s desire to equalize burdens and relieve debtors’ straits. While Hamilton was indeed critical of the aggressive debt-retirement schemes of Massachusetts, Chernow’s seems an impossible reading when the quotation is placed in context of the whole essay: like other nationalists urging ratification, Hamilton presents Shays (using “desperate,” I think, in its sense of “recklessly violent”) as a type to be eradicated, not relieved. For Randolph’s remarks at the opening of the convention, see Farrand (McHenry’s notes are most to the point). Bouton, seeing the drive toward a national constitution as originating largely in creditor reaction to postwar populism, is supported by Ferguson, who views the failure of nationalism in the confederation Congress and the resulting crisis among creditors as important prods to the convention. Grubb is my inspiration for defining the constitutional prohibition against state currency as the decisive victory for Hamilton and the old Morris agenda. Antifederalism’s shaky alliance with the popular movement is beyond the scope of this chapter; for a detailed discussion, see Bouton, who also covers, with Brunhouse and Tinkcom, the revision of the Pennsylvania constitution.

  The impost triumphant. For the first Congress’s impost bills, see Statutes at Large: “An Act for Laying a Duty on Goods . . .” 7/4/1789; “An Act to Regulate the Collection . . .” 7/31/89.

  Funding, assumption, and the revenue bill. Tracking the excise proposal through Congress, I’ve drawn mainly on Hamilton’s Papers, Annals of Congress, and House Journal. For Hamilton’s March report, see Papers, 3/4/1790. For a comprehensive argument linking excise to assumption, see Fisher Ames’s speech in Annals, 5/25/90; for preassumption votes on the watered-down version of the revenue bill, see Annals, 6/14/90, 6/18/90, 6/21/90. Madison’s insistence on discriminating between “original holders” and “speculators” took over both the debates and much later discussion of the finance plan—misleadingly, as far as both Hamilton and many populists and republicans were concerned. (The staunchly republican Maclay expresses his frustration with discrimination; he thought the only republican thing to do with debt was extinguish it.) For lucid and informative discussion of the issue, see Elkins and McKitrick.

  Speculation fever. All writers on the period talk about it, and many note Maclay’s disgust over it, but E. J. Ferguson, providing detail on the goals of speculators and the machinations of Morris and associates during the debates, is again the indispensable source for understanding it. See also Elkins and McKitrick, who elucidate Madison’s break with Hamilton largely in terms of the speculation frenzy.

  Assumption of state debts and passage of the whiskey tax. For assumption, see Statutes at Large, “An Act Making Provision for the Debt of the United States,” 8/4/1790; and “An Act Making Further Provision for the Payment of the Debt of the United States,” 8/5/90. Ellis, in Founding Brothers, brings to life the dinner at which Jefferson oversaw deals on the capital and assumption; see also Elkins and McKitrick, as well as Mitchell’s chapters on the debates. For Hamilton’s arguments in favor of excise, see his report of 12/13/90, in his Papers. One of his arguments that I cite here—that the tax was on a luxury—he actually made in the original “Report” of January 1790 and revived when responding to antitax petitions in 1792. Slaughter cites Hamilton’s allies Fisher Ames and Tench Coxe on the understanding among Hamiltonians that assumption could pass only if arti
ficially separated from the funding mechanism—and that when passed, assumption would give Congress no choice but to pass the excise and new import duties.

  Whiskey and the tax. “An Act Repealing, after the Last Day of June Next, the Duties Heretofore Laid upon Distilled Spirits Imported from Abroad, and Laying Others in their Stead, and Also upon Spirits Distilled within the United States and for Appropriating the Same,” 3/3/1792, Statutes at Large. It is Bouton’s thesis that in the eighteenth century ordinary people in the countryside had a far more cogent understanding of finance than most people have today. Instructions for whiskey making can be found in Smiley and in Nixon and McKaw. Rorabaugh and Kellner have much detail on drinking and distilling in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century America. The reduction of grain to whiskey as a means of transport is cited by Baldwin, based in part on H. H. Brackenridge’s “Thoughts on the Excise Law,” also explicated in H. M. Brackenridge’s opening chapter. I’ve relied largely on Fennell to develop an understanding of the rural distilling business, whiskey’s use as currency, the relationship of the British government to large and small distilling, Hamilton’s thinking regarding gallon and dollar numbers in the tax, and the concentration of distilling in the Monongahela area. Hamilton’s ideas about government-encouraged industry are best explicated by Elkins and McKitrick, Chapter Seven; also see Slaughter, Chapter Eight, on Hamilton, the distilling business, and the whiskey tax.

  CHAPTER FOUR: HERMAN HUSBAND

  Herman Husband and the Whiskey Rebellion. Jones’s unpublished dissertation is the only full-scale scholarly biography of Husband. Lazenby’s trade book, often fanciful and unsupported by scholarly apparatus, has been out of print for decades. Lazenby’s correspondence with Husband descendants and her notes on Husband family lore, in the Darlington Library of the University of Pittsburgh, include copies of docket notices for Husband’s arrests in North Carolina and letters from Emmy Husband. Other sources include Schoepf, H. H. Brackenridge in Incidents, and most important, the works of Husband that I’ve cited, especially his unpublished manuscript exegesis of the Book of Daniel, in the John Scull Archive.

  Husband’s role in the rebellion is important yet obscure. While Lazenby is committed to the notion that Husband was not involved, Julian Boyd’s scathing review of Lazenby’s book calls Husband a “powerful influence” on the rebellion. Jones discusses Husband’s involvement but doesn’t see Husband’s late-career sermons as preaching violent insurrection. It is Fennell, in devoting a major chapter to Husband, and presenting his late work as urging outright insurrection, who links Husband’s late sermons to the decisive shift in the rebellion from a series of blackface attacks to an unmasked, militia-organized insurrection.

  I follow Fennell, as have Bouton and Holt; Holt also gives attention to the legal issues involved in Husband’s being prosecuted for seditious speech. Evidence for Husband’s leadership includes depositions by Benjamin Wells and Philip Reagan, since lost but referred to in a letter of 10/1/1794 from Hamilton’s deputy Tench Coxe to William Rawle, in the Tench Coxe Letters, National Archives: Coxe mentions only Husband, Husband’s associate Filson, and David Bradford (see later chapters) as leaders he recalls being named in that deposition. As further discussed in Chapter Ten, Washington and Hamilton, evidently responding to information given in depositions, and possibly also given by Neville and Marshal Lenox, placed Husband at the top of the list of high-value suspects. Hamilton risked the alarm and flight of David Bradford and others, and worried Washington on that account, by moving early on Husband; Husband was sent with the other Bedford suspects directly to Philadelphia. Washington refers only to Husband, Bradford, and a Mr. Guthrie as high-value suspects in a letter to Hamilton of 10/26/1794, and by name only to Husband in a letter to Hamilton of 10/31/94. Chapter Nine of Brackenridge’s Incidents describes the hopes of many Parkinson’s Ferry attendees as involving extreme restructuring of society, along the lines of Husband’s late sermons (with which Brackenridge seems unfamiliar).

  Still, Husband’s appearance at Parkinson’s Ferry is the sole direct evidence of his serving in a leadership role—and at that point he was working with Brackenridge and Gallatin to urge moderation. With Fennell, I connect the themes of the late sermons, especially specific references to citizen militias in XIV Sermons on the Characters of Jacob’s Fourteen Sons, Sermon Seven, to the Mingo Creek Association’s mobilizing those militias not only against promoters of the whiskey tax but also against anyone at the Forks who appeared to benefit from or comply with the national finance plan. Given Washington’s and Hamilton’s thinking about Husband, and the government’s prosecuting him for sedition, it seems overwhelmingly likely that those sermons played a direct and important part in the radical activities of the Forks militias in the summer of 1794.

  The Great Awakening and the American millennium. I am informed and inspired by Heimert in emphasizing the unifying effects of Whitefield’s tours and the impact of postmillennial evangelicism on ideas about social justice in an independent America; Heimert also deemphasizes fire-and-brimstone preaching in the Awakening and presents rationalist ideas as serving the interests of the creditor class. Other sources, primary and secondary, for evangelical, apocalyptic, and related thinking include Edwards, Lowman, Newton, Williams, Tracy, and Niebuhr. Nash, in The Urban Crucible, Chapter Eight, is illuminating on Whitefield and his successors and makes strong connections between evangelicism and the popular movement. Noll describes the soldiers taking Whitefield’s garments.

  Early Quakers, ranting, other nonconformism. Rexroth is a good source on dissenting sects; Schama’s volume 2 gives a lively overview; “English Dissenters” at exlibris.org is a deft and handy reference. Much Quaker writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries condemns the taint of the “ranting spirit.”

  The North Carolina Regulation. I’m showing the regulation through the narrowest of prisms. Husband gives his idea of an impartial account in A Fan for Fanning . . . . For further reading, good sources include Kars and the concise “Commemorative Souvenir Program of the Bicentennial of the Battle of Alamance.” In the exegesis of Daniel cited above, Husband describes his reaction to the Stamp Act protestors. It is Jones’s speculation that before the Battle of Alamance, Husband involved himself in negotiations with provincial troops.

  Husband in Pennsylvania. For Husband on sex, marriage, fidelity, and parenthood, see his interpretation of “The Song of Songs,” following errata to Sermon to the Bucks and Hinds of America, in a collection of three publications at the library of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania. Husband’s exact family situation in the Bedford area is unclear: Two of his elder sons left to return to North Carolina; other children lived with Husband and Emmy in the Glades. The Woods political ring is covered in Jones and Bouton. For Husband’s surveying and mapping, including his descriptions of clothing himself and his horse and the size of fallen trees, see his undated letter to Governor Mifflin in the John Scull Archive. Husband sets out his monetary theories in Proposals to Amend and Perfect; he describes his vision of the Alleghenies and the New Jerusalem in A Sermon to the Bucks and Hinds; he expands on the Allegheny topography with reference to Daniel’s visions in the unpublished manuscript cited above. The maps are referred to by Schoepf; one of Husband’s hand-drawn maps is in his letter to Mifflin; see also his own plates to Bucks and Hinds and Dialogue between an Assembly-Man and a Convention-Man. Schoepf is the source for Husband’s planning a trip to Canada (it’s not certain that the trip was made).

  Husband’s constitution. Nothing in Husband’s work is more open to interpretation than Proposals to Amend and Perfect, A Sermon to the Bucks and Hinds, and XIV Sermons on the Characters of Jacob’s Fourteen Sons, where Husband sets out his not always internally consistent ideas about constitutional government. My interpretation is influenced by those of Jones and Fennell. That Husband was becoming frustrated after ratification of the U.S. Constitution can be seen in some of the inconsistencies: As Fennell notes, To Amend and Perfect and Buc
ks and Hinds are more limited in scope; XIV Sermons offers a larger and more ambitious plan, based in part on Husband’s disappointment over the U.S. Constitution. My presentation of Husband as unique in prefiguring the modern welfare state combines Husband’s constitutional writings with some of his other ideas, referred to elsewhere in this chapter.

  Husband and the militias. Sermon Seven of XIV Sermons makes Husband’s most explicit call to action against oppression and his most explicit connection between existing militia structures and the means of throwing off the yoke of tyranny. There is no direct evidence to show that Husband personally inspired the rebel takeover of local civic and military functions that I explore in the next chapter (Husband may also have been observing such activities and approving them). Yet as explained in the first note on this chapter, Wells’s and Reagan’s testimony, the intensity that Hamilton and Washington brought to capturing Husband, and Husband’s prosecution for sedition suggest that the call for militia action in XIV Sermons and the emergence of the Mingo Creek Association, described in Chapter Six, were directly related.

  CHAPTER FIVE: THE NEVILLE CONNECTION

  Administration of the whiskey tax. In Hamilton’s Papers: Washington to Hamilton, 3/15/1791; Hamilton’s “Circular,” 9/30/91.

  The Nevilles. Background on John Neville comes from Felton, the Craig-Neville Papers, Findley, Baldwin, and McClure. H. H. Brackenridge in Incidents and Henry Marie Brackenridge both give vivid pictures of Presley Neville and Kirkpatrick. Background on Craig is in the Craig-Neville Papers. The description of Bower Hill is based on Felton, Baldwin, and my observation of the parking lot on the mansion’s former site. “Diversified commercial farm” is Fennell’s term for Bower Hill; my description of the Neville Connection as an army-contracting operation, and as monopolizers of the whiskey trade, is also based largely on Fennell.