A Sovereign People

by Carol Berkin

  News of the attack reached Philadelphia by September 1. Although Hamilton was ill at the time, he immediately instructed his assistant secretary to send George Clymer, the federal revenue inspector for the entire state of Pennsylvania, to the western counties on a fact-finding mission. Hamilton no doubt knew Clymer as a quiet, unassuming man, a philanthropist and a devoted Federalist who had attended the Constitutional Convention and supported ratification. But Clymer was hardly the man to take the pulse of the western counties; he was a wealthy businessman, born in Philadelphia and living just outside the city—and, as the chief revenue inspector, he had a vested interest in quelling opposition to the whiskey tax.

  Not surprisingly, Clymer had little success. He was frankly frightened of his reception in the western counties, and this led him to take drastic, and foolish, measures. He decided to present himself as the secretary of war, Henry Knox; when the ruse was discovered, he resorted to a new alias, calling himself Mr. Smith. Arriving in Pittsburgh, he refused to venture far from the town or the protection of the local fort. Thus, he could not discover who had menaced Captain Faulkner or learn who was armed and ready to obstruct the law or gather the names of the delegates to the Mingo Creek convention. Nor was he able to act as Hamilton hoped, as an emissary of law and order, persuading citizens of the western counties to obey the excise.37

  Clymer was stymied even in the actions he did take. When he asked a local judge, Alexander Addison, to take depositions that would reveal the names of those who attended the Pittsburgh convention, his request was rejected. Like Clymer, Addison had been a strong supporter of the federal Constitution, but he was openly sympathetic to the protests against the excise tax. He reminded Clymer that he was a judge of Pennsylvania state courts, not a federal judge, and made clear he had no intention of becoming an active participant in a federal investigation. Clymer’s cool reception, combined with the refusal of local officials to assist him, led him to the unshakeable conclusion that westerners held both the state and federal government in contempt. In his reports, he expressed little hope that the insurgents would comply with the law.38

  Yet Hamilton had already come to the conclusion that the government had a major crisis on its hands. The dilemma was clear: to concede an inability to enforce laws passed by Congress would be fatal to the new government, while to issue idle threats would be as damaging to the government’s reputation as surrendering to the demands of lawbreakers. For Hamilton, then, the question was not, should the government do something, but what was the most effective thing it could do? He had reached out for advice to his friend and coauthor of the Federalist essays, John Jay, in early September, declaring, “There is really, My Dear Sir, a crisis in the affairs of the Country which demands the most mature consideration of its best and wisest friends.” The options Hamilton asked Jay to consider revealed the direction of his own thoughts. Should Washington issue a presidential proclamation that denounced the Mingo Creek convention as a criminal act and warned westerners to abstain from further acts of resistance? Would such a proclamation have any meaningful effect? Or was force necessary? And if so, should the president himself lead a military expedition? Hamilton’s own answers to these questions were obvious: the best and most effective response to the crisis was the speedy suppression of the rebellion by the military. The longer the rebellion continued and the more organized it became, the more difficult it would be to restore law and order.39

  The president also recognized the situation for what it was: a challenge to the sovereignty and legitimacy of the federal government. Writing to Hamilton on September 7, Washington voiced his indignation at the refusal of westerners to obey the law. “Such conduct in any of the Citizens of the United States, under any circumstances that can well be conceived, would be exceedingly reprehensible; but when it comes from a part of the community for whose protection the money arising from the Tax was principally designed, it is truly unaccountable, and the spirit of it much to be regretted.” Washington’s claim that the revenue from the whiskey tax was earmarked for the military protection of the western settlers was probably an attempt at justification; the tax was imposed to ensure that the interest on the public debt could be covered. This did not diminish the seriousness of the crisis. The president, like Hamilton, knew that contempt for the federal government, if left unchecked, would erode the government’s fragile authority. It was time, he agreed, to “check so daring & unwarrantable a spirit.” He had approved Hamilton’s preliminary step of ordering Clymer to survey conditions in the western counties. And he assured his treasury secretary that he would not hesitate to “exert all the legal powers” invested in him as president to see the laws executed. Thus far, he conceded, the government’s policy of forbearance had not had the desired effect. In fact, the hope that these rebels “would recover from the delirium & folly into which they were plunged” had only served to increase the disorder.40

  But Washington was far more cautious than Hamilton. The president thought it wise to pursue all legal means to deal with the insurgents before sending in troops. He would ask Attorney General Edmund Randolph to rule on the legality of the recent Mingo Creek convention and on whether those who attended it were indictable. If the answer to both questions were yes, Washington would have the matter brought before the circuit court at Yorktown that October. Angry as the president may have been at the westerners’ “daring & unwarrantable spirit,” he realized a resort to force before all other remedies had been exhausted would be a political mistake. He had no wish to strengthen the voices of anti-administration critics who warned of the federal government’s potential for oppression and the dangers inherent in a strong executive branch.41

  John Jay had also favored political and legal steps over military intervention. In his answer to Hamilton’s request for advice, he suggested the president do nothing drastic until Congress reconvened in October. Washington could address the crisis in his message to the legislature and gauge its support by its reply. Without congressional backing, strong measures might well suggest an overreach of executive powers and thus “render the operations of the administration odious.” Yet, like the president, Jay did not entirely rule out the use of force if further outrages were committed. If another attack on the dignity of the government occurred before Congress met, Washington must leave “nothing to Hazard.”42

  In the meantime, Washington and his cabinet decided to reach out to state officials and the general public through a presidential proclamation. He turned, as he often did, to Hamilton to draft the document. On September 11, Hamilton delivered his draft, along with a cover letter commenting on the recent good news that a court in the eastern county of Chester, Pennsylvania, had indicted and convicted several people for an assault on an excise officer. According to Attorney General Randolph, the jury rendering the verdicts had declared, “It was not a question with them, whether the law was good, or bad; but that they would never countenance an opposition to laws in such a form.” Hamilton considered this to be such good news that he ordered his assistant to publish the account of the case in Philadelphia’s Gazette of the United States.43

  The Chester County convictions were heartening, but they did not persuade Washington that a public warning was unnecessary. Thus, on September 15, 1792, he issued his proclamation on the rebellion against the excise tax. He began by stating that “certain violent and warrantable proceedings” had obstructed the operation of federal laws, making it necessary for him to “admonish and exhort all persons whom it may concern to refrain and desist from all unlawful combinations.” He then charged the courts, magistrates, and other officers to do their duty and urged all persons concerned with “the just and due authority” of their government and the preservation of the public peace to aid and assist in enforcing the law. On Hamilton’s suggestion, Washington forwarded this proclamation to all the state governors. At Hamilton’s urging, he included a brief note expressing his confidence they would use their influence to promote due obedience to the law.44
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br />   Privately, Washington expected little cooperation from the governor of Pennsylvania in prosecuting anyone indicted for criminal activity. His doubts were fueled by his personal history with the man in the governor’s seat, Thomas Mifflin. Early in the Revolutionary War, Mifflin had served as an aide-de-camp for Washington and soon after was appointed quartermaster general for the Continental Army. Washington’s friend Richard Henry Lee believed Mifflin was a man of “real merit and public virtue,” but Mifflin also showed a “warm temper” and frequently quarreled with fellow revolutionaries. By 1777, he had become a vocal critic of Washington. He resigned his position and joined the “Conway Cabal,” a group hoping to replace Washington as commander in chief with Horatio Gates. This explains why, on October 1, 1792, Washington ordered Attorney General Edmund Randolph to personally travel to Yorktown to see that the court business was conducted properly. The president hoped, he told his fellow Virginian, that the presence of the country’s highest-ranking legal officer would give the proceedings “a more solemn & serious countenance aspect.” No one knew better than Washington how important symbols of authority were when that authority was new and not yet firmly established.45

  6

  “Where the law ends, there tyranny begins.”

  —Chief Justice McKean, 1792

  THE PRESIDENT MAY have genuinely hoped that indictments and an appeal to citizens’ patriotism would quell the resistance. When a Methodist congregation in Fayette County sent him assurances of its support, he expressed his pleasure that the opposition to the excise tax was not as universal in the western counties as he had been led to believe. He was, he wrote in reply, happy to learn that the congregation intended to use its influence to “inculcate the necessity & advantage of a peaceable compliance with that law.” But Washington was practical enough to begin preparing for the use of military force if legal action and moral suasion proved inadequate. He was also enough of a realist to know how dangerous military force could be.46

  Unlike Hamilton, whose particular genius was in policy rather than politics, Washington understood the possibly disastrous consequences of calling out the regular army. He was well aware that the anti-administration forces were coalescing around Madison and Jefferson, and he wanted to ensure that the use of force did not provide grist for the opposition’s propaganda mill. The president knew that the opposition press in Philadelphia (where the federal government had moved in 1790) was always ready to stoke the public’s fear of Federalist plots to destroy the people’s liberties, whether through physical force or political aggrandizement. If a federal army marched against Pennsylvania’s western counties, Washington told Hamilton, the critics would shout, “The cat is let out.… We now see for what purpose an Army was raised.”47

  Governor Mifflin’s response to the president’s proclamation came on October 5. It would do little to calm Washington’s fears. Mifflin readily admitted that the law had been broken, but he noted with satisfaction that the culprits in Chester County had been indicted, convicted, and fined by state officials. The same “regular process” had been followed in the case of several Allegheny County men engaged in violent opposition to the law. To emphasize that he intended to enforce law and order, Mifflin enclosed a copy of a letter he had issued to the judges of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the members of the Courts of Common Pleas. In it, he requested officials take every opportunity to “inculcate the indispensable duty of obedience to the acts of Congress.” In essence, Mifflin was sending the president a message: Pennsylvania would handle its own affairs.48

  George Clymer, whose reports to Hamilton had become increasingly grim, would have dismissed Mifflin’s claims as an empty assurance. On October 10, Clymer offered his own assessment of conditions in the four western counties, and he left little doubt that lawlessness reigned. Washington County, he wrote, “is the most repugnant to the law and furnishes the most examples of violence.” The leaders there were David Bradford, a lawyer, and James Marshall, a former county lieutenant. The county’s justices of the peace and clergy were equally complicit in the rebellion. Clymer considered Fayette County scarcely more moderate, though the rebels here, led by state assemblyman John Smilie and Congressman Albert Gallatin, had as yet committed fewer acts of violence. Westmoreland County, under the leadership of the former Antifederalist, Congressman William Findley, was “engaged in the general opposition.” Clymer referred to Findley as “the father of all the disturbances of the Western Country.” In Clymer’s estimation, the heart of the problem was the degenerate character of these westerners. What could be expected from them when “the duties of Citizenship are but poorly understood, or regarded, [and] where the moral sense is so greatly depraved as it is in this Country, by the intemperate use of the favourite drink”?49

  There were some Pennsylvania justices who supported strong measures against those who did not obey the laws of Congress. On November 8, 1792, the state’s chief justice Thomas McKean issued a stern charge to the Philadelphia grand jury. McKean, who had abandoned his support of the federal government over Hamilton’s fiscal policies, nevertheless found the increasingly violent resistance inexcusable: “It is strange that a people, but just rescued from the galling yoke of foreign bondage, having just got rid of a despotic government, will not submit to one free and equal.” The revenue tax, he declared, was small; it promoted industry, and it restrained the excessive consumption of alcohol that made men “restless and impatient.” There was a remedy available to those who believed the whiskey law bore too heavily upon them: present their case to the legislature they elected. Any alternative was unthinkable, for “where the laws end, there tyranny begins.” Despite McKean’s vigorous defense of law and order, few indictments were brought across the state for riots or breaches of the peace connected to the revenue act. When indictments came down, as in the case of the men who attacked Robert Wilson, charges were often dismissed. James Brison, the Pennsylvania official reporting the proceedings in the Wilson case, seemed eager to categorize the attack as an act of violence against a private individual. “The indictment,” he noted, “only states the Riot, assault, battery and burning, without mentioning anything of the Revenue law.” This allowed Brison to claim that he did not need to forward the details of the case to the governor or the federal authorities.50

  On November 6, 1792, Washington sent his message to the new session of the Second Congress. He assured the legislators that contentment with the excise law was growing, although he admitted there were still pockets of resistance. After the usual lengthy debate, the Federalist-dominated House of Representatives responded with a declaration of its support for the measures the president had taken and an expression of its collective regret that “symptoms of opposition… have manifested themselves.” “No particular part of the community,” the representatives agreed, “may be permitted to withdraw from the general burdens of the country.” If this was less than a rousing endorsement, it was nevertheless a pledge of support.51

  Meanwhile, in what was surely a cynical step, Governor Mifflin asked the purported leader of the rebellion, William Findley, to report on the mood of western Pennsylvanians and the role influential men might be playing in the resistance to the whiskey tax. Findley responded on November 21, providing the governor with an evaluation that perfectly fit Mifflin’s own public position on the matter. The leading citizens of the western counties, Findley declared, had no “disposition to maletreat [sic] the public officers or to make a riotous opposition to the execution of the Excise law.” Any misconduct that had occurred was rare and had been “too much magnified,” for it involved a very small part of the district. Findley assured the governor that the guilty men had been severely punished by local courts and expressed his confidence that the federal courts would meet with no interruption as long as they did not attempt to transport the accused out of their home counties. Findley could not resist citing what he termed a miscarriage of justice: two respectable citizens of Washington County had been indicted upon the o
ath of a “hostler of low character.” This sort of reliance on disreputable witnesses, he warned, was “pregnant with dangerous effects.”52

  Armed with Findley’s report, Governor Mifflin issued his own annual message, assuring Pennsylvanians that the instances of outrage were few and the offenders had been prosecuted. What Mifflin conveniently failed to convey was Findley’s doubts that the western counties would, under any circumstances, comply with the excise law. On this issue, Findley spoke frankly and no doubt with some pride: “The execution of the law, even conducted with the greatest discretion, has some serious difficulties to encounter. It is well known that in some Counties, as well of Virginia as of Pennsylvania, Men have not, and cannot be induced by any consideration to accept of the Excise offices.… Whatever method may be adopted to carry the law into effect, though I hope that riots will be prevented, yet the assistance of the people to support the officers, I presume, is not to be expected.” Of all the statements in William Findley’s report, this alone rang true.53

  7

  “It is the duty of the general government to protect the frontiers.”

  Resolutions of a meeting at Lexington, Kentucky, May 24, 1794

  AS 1793 BEGAN, the violence in the western counties became sporadic. But as General Neville knew, and reported to the government, this did not mean that the resistance had dissipated. The Mingo Creek Association remained strong, and, with the support of local militias, it was slowly seizing control of governmental functions. In an effort to make some progress in enforcing the law, Neville looked to Benjamin Wells, deputy collector for Fayette and Westmoreland Counties.