A Sovereign People

by Carol Berkin

  The report from Westmoreland was even more distressing. Some residents had given “only general assurances of their submission and disposition for peace” but had not individually signed a pledge to do so. And, as “ill-disposed lawless persons could suddenly assemble and offer violence,” the men submitting this report did not think the government should attempt to establish an office of inspection in Westmoreland in the near future.94

  The Fayette County results came in on September 16. According to Albert Gallatin and six others, the people in county election districts 1 through 3 met as instructed, but no justice of the peace or member of the Committee of Sixty presided in districts 4 or 5. They were able, therefore, to certify only that 560 of 721 men did declare their determination to submit. The 721 who were polled, however, represented less than a third of the male citizens in the first three districts. Despite this poor showing, Gallatin and his colleagues assured the commissioners that the great majority was disposed to behave peaceably.95

  Although (or perhaps because) they were excluded from the commissioners’ terms, Ohio County, Virginia, rebels issued an adamant rejection of compliance. In a set of ten resolves, a delegation of two men from each militia company in the county made clear their determination to continue to oppose the whiskey tax “at the risk of our lives and property.”96

  Though not happy with the results, Hamilton was not surprised by them. Writing to Rufus King on September 22, he reported that “the most influential men & a respectable body of others” had cast their votes in favor of compliance, but a great number of men of violent disposition remained defiant. This meant there would be “no assurance of submission to the laws without the application of Force.” Hamilton’s enemies would later suggest that he was pleased with the outcome. Given the circumstances, all the assigned militia were heading to western Pennsylvania as rapidly as the terrain and provisioning allowed. In an earlier note to King, Hamilton had expressed his relief that all of Virginia except the mountain counties were dedicated patriots. New Jersey too was full of positive support for the military action, and in much of Maryland, including Baltimore, “a pretty good temper prevails.” The most positive sign, however, was that an “excellent & productive zeal” was evident in Philadelphia among both Federalists and their political opponents.97

  Hamilton took considerable satisfaction in the fact that Governor Mifflin was finally exerting himself in earnest. Once he received a direct order from the federal government to call out his militia, further resistance was risky. With the imminent arrival of thousands of troops from other states, he had decided a show of loyalty was his best option. Thus, since the beginning of September, Mifflin had taken a number of steps to prove his unconditional support for military suppression of the rebellion. He had addressed the state’s assembly and senate, referring as so many Federalists and Republicans did to “the deluded inhabitants” of western Pennsylvania and the need to prevent the disgrace that came with noncompliance. Mifflin’s only remaining problem was the refusal of many militia officers to report for duty. He had warned the president that Pennsylvanians would be reluctant to take up arms against their fellow citizens; now his prediction was proving true. Hoping to raise the spirit of patriotism among Philadelphia’s men, the governor had addressed the city’s reluctant militia in stirring terms, calling on them to unite against the rebellion, “for the honor of the militia, for the sake of our laws, and for the preservation of the Republican principles.” As a further spur to patriotic behavior, he had made the surprising decision to ride at the head of the Pennsylvania militia forces.98

  Hamilton’s impatience with any delay in mounting the military attack was palpable. He was aware that the citizens of Pittsburgh had barely fended off an invasion by the rebel army that summer, and he had received reports in August that some men, including Presley Neville, General John Gibson, and Major Abraham Kirkpatrick, had been driven from the city, exiled by order of David Bradford and his fellow rebel leaders. The federal garrison at Pittsburgh’s Fort Fayette had been threatened, and its commanding officer, Major Thomas Butler, warned that he and his men must leave or the fort would be burned down. Believing that it was “extremely important to afford speedy protection to the well disposed,” Hamilton urged Governor Lee of Maryland to press his militia forces forward as rapidly as possible. Hamilton also confided to Lee his belief that the situation in Pennsylvania was proof of the dangers of leniency. The failure to quickly punish insurgents was “perhaps the principal cause of the misfortune which now afflicts itself and through it the United States.”99

  Washington, too, felt a sense of responsibility toward the law-abiding citizens of the western counties, but unlike Hamilton he also wanted to make sure that the vote by the Committee of Sixty did not give the public the false impression that the rebels had surrendered. Thus on September 25 he issued a new and deftly argued proclamation. He sketched the government’s view of the situation in the West: a small but violent minority had rejected all overtures of forgiveness, and thus there would be no voluntary end to the attacks on revenue officials. Under these circumstances, the government could not—must not—allow “a small portion of the United States [to] dictate to the whole union” or permit the outrages of citizens upon their own government to sully the reputation of the United States. To enforce respect for the law and to protect the men willing to obey it, the president had set in motion a military expedition. The proclamation ended with the stern warning that no one was to “abet aid or comfort the Insurgents.” With this public statement on the Whiskey Rebellion and the government’s response to it, the Washington administration had crossed its own Rubicon; there would be no turning back.100

  12

  “To arms once more.”

  Poem, 1794

  NO ONE WAS more pleased than Hamilton to see mobilization begin in earnest. Although he continued to send letters of instruction to the superintendent of military stores for the army and to officers leading the militia units, he was not content to direct the military expedition from the comforts of Philadelphia. On September 19, he had sent a brief note to the president on a subject that rarely occupied his thoughts: public opinion. “In a government like ours,” he wrote, “it cannot but have a good effect for the person who is understood to be the advisor or proposer of a measure, which involves danger to his fellow citizens, to partake in that danger.” In other words, Hamilton wanted to ride with Washington against the whiskey rebels. Whether Hamilton had other, less political motives is unknown. Perhaps years of office work had made him long for the excitement of battle and the camaraderie of military life. Perhaps he felt he had been cheated of his share of military glory because Washington had called him from the battlefront to serve as one of his aides-de-camp in 1777. Whatever had inspired Hamilton’s request, Washington could not deny his former military assistant the chance to don a uniform once again. By early October, the president and his secretary of the treasury were at the army camp at Carlisle, Pennsylvania.101

  There would be little opportunity for Hamilton to prove himself this time on the battlefield, however. His own instructions to Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, the Virginia governor chosen to head the expedition, made it clear that all-out war with the whiskey rebels was not the army’s mission. The president’s goals were straightforward: the restoration of public safety and order, and compliance with the revenue act. Lee was authorized to use his troops to force any hostile armed resisters to surrender, but the only men to be taken prisoner were the leaders of the rebellion. Their followers should be disarmed and sent home, unless they had been guilty of particularly violent acts. Once law and order was reestablished, civilian rules of due process would apply. The judge and attorney who accompanied the army would issue the legal papers required in the cases of arrests, forfeitures of delinquent distillers, and seizures of stills and whiskey. And before Lee withdrew his army, he was to issue a general pardon in the name of the president to all who had not been arrested.

  It is telling
that neither the president nor any member of his cabinet considered calling for mass arrests. This was due, in large part, to their assumption that a small group of demagogues, joined by a band of naturally violent men, was responsible for the “phrenzy” that grew into the Whiskey Rebellion. They shared with elite men of all political stripes the assumption that the general population was susceptible to manipulation by charismatic yet irresponsible individuals. And, like Mifflin and Addison, they believed the people could easily fall victim to their passions. The remedy, however, was not mass execution or imprisonment; as Hamilton was so fond of saying, the antidote to rebellion was to act quickly and firmly to punish the demagogues and restore the sanity of the gullible ordinary citizens who had followed them. This patronizing view of ordinary men made it easier for federal officials to pardon the rebellion followers, but it denied the rebels any claim that their response to the excise was rational or justified.102

  Hamilton had ended his instructions to Lee with a warning: preserve discipline among your troops and respect the rights of persons and property. In a few cases, however, the discipline Hamilton called for failed. On October 10, he had to send a letter to Jared Ingersoll, the attorney general of Pennsylvania, about a homicide. The man accused of the murder was a member of the New Jersey contingent at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Although the death may have been accidental, Hamilton ordered the matter brought to the courts. He then immediately sent off a second letter, this time to Governor Mifflin, expressing Washington’s regrets regarding this event and a second homicide attributed to the New Jersey army as well. “It is a very precious & important idea,” Hamilton declared, “that those who are called out in support & defence of the Laws, should not give occasion, or even pretext to impute to them infractions of the law.” It was a lesson the revolutionary generation had grasped as witnesses to the abuses of the British army during the war for independence.103

  On October 9, two men closely associated with the rebellion entered the camp at Carlisle. William Findley and David Redick ostensibly came as representatives of the rebel Committee of Safety, entrusted with a set of resolutions addressed to the president. But it became clear that they were there as much to distance themselves from the rebellion as to act as its messengers. Washington recorded his meeting with these two men in his diary. Findley, Washington wrote, gave assurances that the people in the towns and countryside that he knew best “had seen their folly” and were ready to submit to the law. Civil authority, he said, was beginning to reestablish itself. Yet his characterization of the people of the region who had looked to him for leadership was far from flattering: “Ignorance, & general want of information among the people far exceeded any thing he had any conception of.” It was not only the excise law that they opposed, but “all law, & Government.”104

  Redick’s report was no less damning of the rebellion. He regaled the president with a tale of terrified government supporters who had slept with their weapons by their bedside when the “frenzy was at its height.” After the riots began, men so distrusted one another that “even friends were affraid [sic] to communicate their sentiments to each other.” The people, he said, had mistakenly believed that opposition to the excise law was universal across the country and that no troops would be willing to march against them. Until recently they had dismissed all accounts that an army was coming as “fabricated tales of governmental men.” Now, however, they were alarmed, and many were planning to sell their land and leave the country, probably for British-held Detroit. The remaining rebels, Redick assured Washington, would not oppose the army, and, even if they wished to, “there was not three rounds of ammunition for them in all the Western Country.”105

  ON THE DAY after this meeting with Findley and Redick, Washington set the troops in motion. William Macpherson’s Pennsylvania battalion, known as “Macpherson’s Blues,” along with a Jersey regiment and a second Philadelphia unit began their march to the rebellious counties. The following day, cavalrymen followed. Washington would soon learn whether Redick’s prediction that they would meet with no resistance was correct. In the meantime, he headed back to Philadelphia. With the militia army in the able hands of Governors Henry Lee, Thomas Mifflin, and Richard Howell of New Jersey as well as Major General Daniel Morgan of Virginia, the president felt confident that he could return to his duties as president. Hamilton, however, would remain in the field, traveling with one wing of the army and continuing his supervision and direction of the supply chain for the troops.

  Light Horse Harry Lee believed Redick’s prediction was correct. “The insurgents,” he wrote in his notes, “tremble to each extreme. They now see the rod of their offended country shaken over them with a powerful hand and shrink from it, with a degree of pusillanimity, that is equaled only by their former audacity.” Yet Lee was cautious about disbanding the military expedition too precipitously. He responded with skepticism to the Parkinson’s Ferry resolutions that had pledged the leaders’ support for civil authority and to their assurances that those who failed to take the oath would comply. Nor was he convinced that law and order would prevail once the army departed. He thought it prudent, therefore, to “hold the army in this country until daily practice shall convince all that the sovereignty of the constitution and laws is unalterably established.”106

  The reality of an army eager to suppress the insurrection had, in fact, sent several western townships, and a number of prominent leaders of the rebellion, scurrying to express their support for the laws of the federal government. Towns like Tioga and Greensburgh sent resolutions supporting the government, and men who had served on rebel committees hurried to portray themselves and their friends as moderates who had labored to prevent rather than foment acts of violence. In a deposition before Judge Richard Peters of the US district court, Alexander Addison admitted to being present at the Redstone meeting when the rebel negotiators reported on their conference with the commissioners. According to Addison, Albert Gallatin and Hugh Henry Brackenridge, far from being rabble-rousers, had urged compliance with the law in the face of rebel leader David Bradford’s call for continued resistance. Brackenridge, eager once again to show his loyalty to the government, forwarded a set of resolutions drawn up by several Washington County townships, pledging support to civil authorities. Even Bradford insisted in a letter to Mifflin that his conduct was “greatly misrepresented or entirely misunderstood.” He confessed that he had always disliked the excise law, but he had never intended to go further than nonviolent opposition. None of the leadership, it seemed, had advocated armed rebellion; they had simply been unable to prevent it.107

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  “We are very strong & the Insurgents are all submissive.”

  —Alexander Hamilton to Elizabeth Hamilton, October 1794

  AS NOVEMBER 1794 began, General Daniel Morgan was eager to start arresting the rebellion’s ringleaders, but his orders were to wait until civil authorities completed preliminary investigations of those alleged to be guilty. As Lee had reminded Governor Mifflin, there could be no seizures, even of “the deluded,” until the civil authorities had completed their duties. But as the investigations dragged on, Hamilton urged the president to allow the army to bypass these bureaucratic procedures. The troops were growing impatient, he told Washington, and the approach of winter threatened to make military action difficult if not impossible. Even the local district attorney, William Rawle, agreed that the military should act as quickly as possible.

  Hamilton was especially eager to begin the arrests, for he feared that the most notorious ringleaders would seize the opportunity to flee to safety farther west. He was also concerned that some of the guilty might escape full prosecution by claiming they had aided the commissioners. He was particularly concerned that the man he considered “the worst of all scoundrels,” Hugh Henry Brackenridge, would escape justice. Brackenridge, for his part, feared that the military might act in a more summary—and lethal—way in dealing with him. In an effort to protect himself, the novelist published an open l
etter addressed to the military. In it he reminded the troops that they, as much as the rebels, must obey the law. Although they might consider him a criminal for his role in the rebellion, they must acknowledge that a man was presumed innocent until proven otherwise. To strengthen his claim of innocence, he announced dramatically that he would not flee the country. “I stand firm,” he declared, “and will surrender myself to the closest examination of the Judges.”108

  On November 9, General Lee gave the instructions to proceed in a summary manner “against those who have notoriously committed treasonable acts.” Lee provided his lieutenants with two lists: the first, of those who were exempt from arrest and punishment; the second, of men understood to have committed acts of treason. Two days later, Hamilton informed the president that both arrests and the seizure of a number of stills were imminent. Hamilton wanted to make public examples of a few carefully chosen men whose punishment would demonstrate the high price of resistance of federal law. “I hope,” he wrote Washington, “there will be found characters fit for examples & who can be made so.”109

  In the same letter, Hamilton took time to acknowledge the attacks aimed at him by Benjamin Bache, the editor of Philadelphia’s most partisan Republican newspaper, the Aurora or General Advertiser. Bache, the grandson of Benjamin Franklin, regularly hurled accusations of corruption and abuse of power at the administration, sparing neither the president nor his secretary of the treasury. He had charged that Hamilton had no business being involved in a military expedition. “I observe what Mr. Bache is about. But I am more indifferent to it as the experience has proved to me… that my presence in this quarter was in several respects not useless.” He added, in characteristic fashion, “And it is long since I have learnt to hold popular opinion of no value. I hope to derive from the esteem of the discerning and in internal consciousness of zealous endeavours for the public good the reward of those endeavours.”110