A Sovereign People

by Carol Berkin

  By September 1791, the revolt against the whiskey tax had escalated. Protestors were no longer simply issuing resolutions; they were engaged in acts of physical intimidation and violence. On September 6, about twenty men armed themselves and donned disguises. Some, it was reported, put on women’s dresses, perhaps in homage to the tea party members who boarded British ships in 1775 dressed as Indians. Their target was Robert Johnson, the newly appointed collector of revenue for Allegheny and Washington. In the tradition of prerevolutionary protests, they tarred and feathered Johnson, cut off his hair, and took his horse so he would have to ignominiously walk to get help.

  Throughout the rest of the year, delegate meetings and vigilante violence operated in tandem. While the delegates, including a number of influential men like the novelist H. H. Brackenridge and the Swiss-born supporter of the nascent Jeffersonian Republicans Albert Gallatin, issued resolutions and sent petitions to Congress, gangs of disgruntled farmers and distillers tarred, feathered, and inflicted burns and bruises on anyone foolhardy enough to work as a revenue collector or inspector.

  The intensity of the resistance in these western counties had its desired effect, causing most local government officials to lose heart in their missions. The experience of the deputy marshal of the District Court of Pennsylvania was illustrative. In October 1791, he traveled to Allegheny County to serve processes against several men accused of breaking the law. But his nerve failed him by the time he reached Pittsburgh. He concluded that the western part of the state was in tumult and that his own life was in danger. Certainly the man he recruited to serve the processes would have agreed. Slow-witted and possibly senile, the hapless John Conner was seized, whipped, tarred and feathered, robbed of his money and his horse, and left tied up in the woods, hoping for rescue. No further efforts would be made in 1791 to serve warrants in Allegheny.23

  Even the suspicion that a man represented the federal government seemed enough to set off violence in Allegheny, as one Robert Wilson tragically learned. Wilson was delusional and believed that he was an agent of Washington’s government. When he began snooping around farms and stills, others began to believe it too. Dragged out of bed, burned with a hot iron, and tarred and feathered by local whiskey rebels, Wilson refused to promise his tormentors that he would stop spying on them. He also refused to denounce the government or renounce the tax. Although his connection to the Treasury was entirely illusory, Wilson almost died clinging to the belief that he was a loyal officer of his government.24

  Thus, only a few months after the excise law went into effect, the Washington administration realized it faced a dire challenge. With Kentucky distillers flouting the law by ignoring it, sporadic outbreaks of violence against it in South Carolina, and petitions demanding its repeal making their way to the House, the government began to look impotent. Rumors spread of a plan between the Pennsylvania rebels and the Kentuckians to secede from the United States and create their own independent country. Although the idea went no further than an agreement to name the new country Westylvania, it was enough to convince at least one member of the Washington administration, Alexander Hamilton, that the western communities were tinderboxes of social and political anarchy.

  4

  “What occasion is there for such violent and unwarrantable proceedings?”

  —Chief Justice Thomas McKean, November 8, 1792

  EVERY DAY THAT whiskey distillers failed to pay their taxes meant the loss of much-needed revenue. Far worse, every day they openly resisted the law, the embarrassment of the government deepened. In July 1791, Washington had optimistically written to David Humphreys, his former aide-de-camp, now serving as the US ambassador to Portugal, that “each days experience of the Government of the United States seems to confirm its establishment, and to render it more popular—A ready acquiescence in the laws made under it shews in a strong light the confidence which the people have in their representatives.” Yet by the fall of the year, he found himself searching for an explanation of this western challenge to federal authority. He believed it arose from a moral and intellectual weakness of ordinary citizens. Western farmers, the president concluded, had proven susceptible to manipulation by unscrupulous and ambitious demagogues who told them their liberties and livelihoods were in danger. This trope of demagogues and deluded followers, which had once explained the origin of the Revolution to King George and to his American Loyalists, would appeal to the supporters of government throughout the Whiskey Rebellion.25

  The secretary of the treasury did not care as deeply as did the president about who pulled the strings—if strings there were—in the revolt against federal law. Hamilton believed the growing insurgency revealed the weakness of the federal government. As early as April, writing to Washington, he declared, “It is to be lamented that our system is such as still to leave the public peace of the Union at the mercy of each state Government. This is not only the case as it regards direct interferences, but as it regards the inability of the National Government in many particulars to take those direct measures for carrying into execution its views and engagements which exigencies require.” For Hamilton, the resistance to the excise was a warning that could not be ignored; the federal government must equip itself to enforce its laws, or it was no real government at all.26

  In his message to the House on October 25, 1791, Washington tried to downplay the impact of the opposition to the whiskey tax. On the whole, he wrote, “enlightened and well-disposed Citizens” recognized the necessity for a revenue law. But, he conceded, in the vague and general language he frequently resorted to, that “the novelty… of the tax, in a considerable part of the United States, and a misconception of some of its provisions, have given occasion, in particular places to some degree of discomfort. But it is satisfactory to know that this disposition yields to proper explanations and more just apprehensions of the true nature of the law.” The president expressed his confidence that opposition would “give way to motives which arise out of a just sense of duty, and a virtuous regard to the public welfare.” Washington would return often, in his correspondence and in his public statements, to this notion that duty and a belief in the public welfare must triumph over irresponsible opposition to the law.27

  In November 1791, the House turned to Hamilton for the “proper explanations” the president trusted would turn protest into compliance. They asked the secretary of the treasury to report on the nature of the complaints against the excise tax and to give his opinion on whether, or how, to modify the law to address those complaints. In response, Hamilton submitted a lengthy report on March 5, 1792. In it he frankly conceded that strong opposition to the tax existed, citing the many petitions he had received demanding its repeal or, at the very least, its modification. The criticisms in these petitions ranged from claims that the whiskey tax controverted the principles of liberty to the notion that it injured morals, interfered with the business of distilling, and oppressed those who did not pay or who did not follow proper procedures with heavy and excessive penalties.28

  One by one, Hamilton refuted these charges. His responses were typically thorough and tightly argued. He only occasionally revealed his annoyance at some of the accusations and requests. For instance, he found the charge that an excise tax was “inconsistent with the genius of a free Government” absurd. Free or not, all governments needed revenue, and the only alternative to an excise tax was far more drastic: a tax on land and other property. He was equally dismissive of complaints from distillers that keeping a daily account of the quantity they produced was burdensome. Hamilton, a lawyer and a man of letters, could not imagine how it could be onerous to sit down each evening and enter the required information in a book the Treasury had provided. And he flatly rejected westerners’ claims that they were cash poor and thus needed to pay the tax in whiskey. Other complaints he rejected on practical grounds. Although he sympathized with distillers who found it hard to pay the duty first and then recoup the expense from the consumer, he saw no practical way to
ease this burden. Collecting from the distiller’s many consumers would be far more costly than taxing the liquor at its source.

  Hamilton ended his lengthy report with several sensible suggestions for amending the law, including a proposal that distillers be allowed to register their stills at a central office in each county rather than face an inspection on their property. He also supported a change in the way the duty was calculated so that a man had to pay only for the time he actually worked his still.

  Hamilton’s arguments were sound, his suggestions practical, and his calculations accurate. His mistake was to assume that a protest born of frustration and a sense of abandonment could be laid to rest by a recitation of fact and an insistence on logic and reason. In every sense, the greatest virtue of his vision—its expansiveness—was also its greatest weakness. He was devoted to building the nation he believed America could, and should, become, and he had a plan to ensure it would achieve greatness. But his vision, however patriotic, did not easily tolerate opposition, compromise, or alteration. Law and order, stability, productivity—these were the pillars he believed were needed to sustain the Republic. There was simply no room for violence or even protest, which he believed would lead only to anarchy or tyranny.

  Throughout March and April 1792, the House discussed Hamilton’s report, debated the merits of the westerners’ demands, and argued over what it, as the legislature, should do. There were numerous acerbic exchanges, but the whiskey tax was not always the source of these disagreements. The revenue issue seemed to bleed into others, including sectional tensions. When Fisher Ames of Massachusetts suggested that unanswered requests for more vigorous military protection from Indian attack lay at the heart of western discontent and violence, Pennsylvania’s William Findley angrily corrected Ames’s use of the term “requests.” The people of the frontier do not desire protection as a favor, he declared, “they demand it as a right; they know that protection and allegiance are inseparable; that if they are not protected, their connexion with the Government is dissolved.”29

  Southern resentment against northern advantages also made its way into the discussions. North Carolina representative John Steele began a speech on the floor of the House with a rousing defense of all opponents of the excise tax. He said the refusal to obey the law did not arise, as some of his colleagues were suggesting, from “a restless and disorderly spirit among the people.” Rather, he declared, it was born of “an aversion which freemen… ever will have to this mode of taxation.” Having defended resisters wherever they might be, he narrowed his concern to the men of his own region. Southerners, distilling alcohol for home consumption, were required to pay an excise tax, while New Englanders, producers of rum, could export their alcohol without any duty charged. And this disparity was not unique. He lamented that all southerners, as farmers rather than manufacturers, were disadvantaged, for they had to pay high duties on essential imports like salt, shoes, and nails. Wherever Steele looked it appeared the laws of the federal government favored the North over the South, just as wherever Pennsylvania’s Findley looked he saw the East oppressing the West.30

  April ended with little consensus on what to do to appease the distillers—or whether they should be appeased at all. The only thing the House could agree on was that steps ought to be taken to protect the country if a full-scale insurrection developed.

  On April 26, the legislature passed a bill making it legal for the president to call out the militia if needed “to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions.” If this was the stick, on May 5, as the session of Congress was closing, the House offered the carrot. It passed a bill decreasing the tax rate on domestic spirits made from domestic grains. This effort to accommodate the whiskey rebels went much further than Hamilton had suggested or thought wise. There was nothing to do now but wait to see whether this concession would have the desired effect.31

  5

  The “great and real anxiety is… the ability to preserve the national government.”

  —Alexander Hamilton, May 1792

  IT WAS CLEAR that the cost of the apparent failure of the excise tax, and the debates it engendered, had to be measured in more than dollars and cents. The revenue issue was entangled with too many others, some of them centered on Hamilton’s fiscal policies, others on emerging conflicts over foreign affairs, and still others on negotiations over navigation of the Mississippi that affected Kentucky and western Pennsylvania so acutely. Most ominously, the debate over the revenue issue exposed the tensions between agriculture and commerce and between coast and interior. In April 1792, John Steele of North Carolina had bluntly pointed out where the fault line lay: “This, sir, may not improperly be termed a struggle between two classes of citizens whose interests are and will be for some years, dissimilar—the agricultural and manufacturing parts of the United States.” Steele saw little hope for a peaceful resolution of this conflict. “It will not be difficult,” he declared, “to predict how it will terminate.”32

  By 1792, sectional tensions had splintered the coalition of nationalists that had produced the Constitution. Madison, Hamilton’s most important ally at the Philadelphia convention, had joined his fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, in transforming the anti-administration concerns of men inside and outside of Congress into an organized opposition party. Their success meant increased criticism of Hamilton’s policies in the press and on the floor of Congress. Damaging but unfounded rumors of corruption on the part of the secretary of the treasury were also surfacing, rumors used by Jefferson and his supporters in an attempt to alienate the president from Hamilton.33

  Hamilton resented the polarizing role his policies were playing in American politics. On May 26, while he waited to hear whether the accommodations made to the distillers had produced positive results, he poured out his anger and frustration to his friend Edward Carrington. The target of that anger was Thomas Jefferson, who had, Hamilton reported, “thrown censure on my principles of government and on my measures of administration.” The tale Jefferson and his allies have spread of a monarchical party bent on “the destruction of State & Republican Government” was, he assured Carrington, pure fabrication. The “great and real anxiety is not the destruction of state governments, but the ability to preserve the national government.” The “language of my heart,” he confided to his friend, spoke for the success of the American experiment in republican government. Yet he feared that success was uncertain. “It is yet to be determined by experience whether [republican government] be consistent with that stability and order in Government which are essential to public strength & private security and happiness.” For Madison and Jefferson, the possibility of a monarchy and the ascent of one segment of society over others were the most pressing domestic threats; Hamilton, by contrast, pointed to the danger of national financial instability and the emergence of social anarchy.34

  The crowning of an American king did not seem imminent as the summer of 1792 began, but the threat of social anarchy did appear to be a very real possibility—and not only in western Pennsylvania and Kentucky. In some areas of North Carolina, for example, the revenue could not be collected. Hamilton was ready to use force, but he was uncertain whether North Carolina’s militia would cooperate. Writing to his friend Carrington once again on July 25, the secretary asked whether Virginia’s militia could be counted upon to restore order in North Carolina. The query pointed to the central problem of enforcement: the only acceptable military forces available were the state militias, because the use of the federal government’s western army would provoke serious opposition. But would a militia act in support of a federal law—and in another state, no less? And could a governor be counted on to call out his militia if the president made the request? No one, including Hamilton, knew the answer to these questions.35

  Pockets of resistance in the lower South might not turn into open rebellion, but no one in Washington’s administration could be hopeful about the situation in the West. There, residents were
preparing for a guerrilla war against the federal government. In Pennsylvania’s Washington County, some five hundred men met to form an organization they called the Society of United Freemen. The society, which quickly became known as the Mingo Creek Association, had a pedigree that stretched back to the Confederation era. Like the men who had joined Shays’ Rebellion, many members of the society had been active irritants in the postwar years, disrupting debt cases in the courts and interfering with the sale of foreclosed property. They had also been boosters of the local economy, protecting local production of whiskey by enforcing boycotts on liquor brought in from the East.36

  By late August 1792, the society had succeeded in recruiting the local militia company, led by Colonel John Hamilton, to spearhead armed resistance to the government. Colonel Hamilton had proven his loyalty to the resistance in 1791 by participating in the attack on Robert Johnson. Now, the society was eager to take on a bigger target: General John Neville, the inspector for the entire Western District of Pennsylvania. They began by attempting to prevent Neville from operating out of rented office space in the home of one William Faulkner. The society threatened to burn down Captain Faulkner’s house and tar and feather its owner if he did not withdraw his offer to assist Neville. When Faulkner refused to be intimidated, the society ramped up its tactics. First, it placed an anonymous ad in the Pittsburgh paper, calling for a convention. The forty delegates who attended issued a set of radical demands, including a demand that the federal government repeal the excise tax and replace it with a tax on the wealthy. Two days later, thirty armed men attacked Faulkner’s home and his tavern. They fired their guns at the tavern sign, which featured a head of President George Washington. They ransacked Faulkner’s home and refrained from burning it down only out of fear that the fire would spread throughout the community. Faulkner had had enough; the next day, the Pittsburgh Gazette carried his notice that he would remove Neville’s office from his home.