by Carol Berkin
Hamilton considered the arrest of rebel leaders to be one of his major “endeavours for the public good.” On November 15, he reported with satisfaction that arrests had at last been made. Twenty men were being held in the town of Washington, and additional prisoners were soon to arrive. Several of these men appeared “fit subjects for examples,” as the evidence collected on them was enough to promise a conviction. The likely candidates included the local Baptist minister John Corbly, the sheriff of Washington County, Colonel William Crawford, John Hamilton, and three additional Washington County residents, David Lock, Thomas Sedgwick, and John Munn. The selected group included one rebel leader from Ohio County, Virginia, a man named John Laughery. A warrant had also been issued for the arrest of Thomas Gaddis of Fayette County, but Hamilton feared Gaddis was one of the culprits who had escaped.
On November 17, Hamilton sent William Rawle a list of ten additional men to be denied amnesty. The names of three of the suspected ringleaders, Albert Gallatin, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and William Findley, were not among them. Hamilton had personally interrogated Brackenridge over the course of two days but found no evidence that he had planned to overthrow the government. When Brackenridge later published a history of the Whiskey Rebellion, he recounted Hamilton saying, “My impressions were unfavorable to you, you may have observed it. I now think it my duty to inform you that not a single one remains. Had we listened to some people, I know not what we might have done. Your conduct has been horribly misrepresented.… You are in no personal danger, and will not be troubled even with a simple inquisition by the judge.” Whether Hamilton was, in fact, so effusive in his apology is unknown.111
William Findley painted a very different picture of Hamilton’s interrogation technique in his own history of the Whiskey Rebellion. He insisted that Hamilton had terrorized both Brackenridge and a man named Powers who Hamilton was hoping would incriminate Albert Gallatin. He described his own interrogation as “an inquisition held on my character” that was designed to prove he was “a bad man, as well as a criminal.” The Irish-born Findley also claimed that Hamilton expressed surprise that the whiskey rebels had placed their confidence in foreigners like him and the Swiss immigrant Albert Gallatin. Findley said he found the comment astonishing because it was widely known that Hamilton was a native of the West Indies.112
Although Findley, Brackenridge, and Gallatin avoided charges, rebellion leaders David Bradford, Edward Cook, Thomas Spiers, and Benjamin Parkinson were not so lucky. Yet to Governor Lee’s great consternation, Bradford, the most notorious ringleader, eluded capture. On November 15, one Captain Francis D’Hebecourt reported that he had spotted Bradford going downriver in a canoe and sent four men to arrest him. But when they caught up with him, they found thirteen others “ready to protect Bradford, and massacre any who would undertake to take him away.” Outnumbered, the soldiers retreated, and Bradford was free to “safely preach his doctrine, and spread the flame of a new insurrection.”113
By the end of November 1794, the militias had returned home. Daniel Morgan was left in charge of the small force that would remain through the winter months. Only the legal processes—recognizances, depositions, trials—along with a few more daring escapes occupied federal officials. Satisfied, Hamilton began his journey back to Philadelphia on November 19. On the 29th General Lee issued his proclamation of sweeping pardon to “all persons residing within the counties of Washington, Allegheny, Westmoreland, and Fayette, in the State of Pennsylvania, and in the county of Ohio, in the State of Virginia, guilty of treason or misprision of treason against the United States, or otherwise directly or indirectly engaged in the wicked and unhappy tumults and disturbances lately existing in these counties.” Exempted from this general pardon were those charged and in custody or held by recognizance to appear in court, those who had avoided fair trial by abandoning their homes, and thirty-three men listed by name in the proclamation. Yet, by the summer of 1795, charges had been dropped against a number of the men Lee had exempted. The Whiskey Rebellion was over.114
14
“The spirit inimical to all order.”
—George Washington, 1794
IN THE REBELLION’S aftermath, who to blame for its start remained a point of contentious dispute. In their histories of the rebellion, written largely to vindicate their own role in the uprising, both William Findley and Hugh Henry Brackenridge painted Alexander Hamilton as the story’s villain. They pointed out that it was Hamilton who initiated the hated excise tax and Hamilton who urged the use of the military to suppress the protest in the four western counties. Both of these claims were, of course, true. But Findley’s critique of Hamilton lacked substance. Findley argued that Hamilton had invented many of the violent episodes he reported and that he had “enumerate[d] the acts of opposition with the highest colouring they would possibly bear.” He accused Hamilton of hoping for a rebellion so that the government would have an opportunity to prove its military strength. Findley repeated as true a rumor that Hamilton “expressed his sorrow that the town of Pittsburgh had not been burned by those who rendezvoused at Braddock’s field,” for this would have justified the government’s immediate use of force. Although Brackenridge did not go so far as to accuse Hamilton of escalating the rebellion, he did accuse the treasury secretary of purposely failing to discriminate between peaceful remonstrances and allegedly “intemperate” resolutions. This, Brackenridge declared, proved that Hamilton would gladly take away the right of the people to petition or to legally resist oppression.115
To no one’s surprise, the Republican editor Benjamin Bache joined the chorus of those accusing Hamilton of villainy. By his presence at the head of the army that invaded western Pennsylvania, Bache wrote, Hamilton was guilty of “meddling interference in a department totally irrelative to his official duties.” Some, Bache noted, whispered that he was there without invitation, and many, he added, believed that Hamilton’s conduct during the entire crisis was “a first step towards a deep laid scheme—not for the promotion of his country’s prosperity—but the advancement of his private interests and the gratification of an ambition, laudable in itself, if pursued by proper means.”116
These accounts are clearly biased. Hamilton may have failed to appreciate the difficulties faced by western farmers, and he may have been impatient with their complaints. But his motive for passing the excise tax had been to collect revenue, not to foment a rebellion. He had been given the task of setting the finances of the nation aright, and this required finding new revenue sources. To avoid a tax on property that would arouse near-universal condemnation, he turned to an excise tax. It is certainly true that he was invested in the success of his own economic system, but Bache was mistaken in his claim that Hamilton intended it as a vehicle for his own personal gain or as a monument to his personal ambitions. The ambition that burned in Alexander Hamilton was grander than this; it was not personal glory but national glory that drove him.
Despite Brackenridge’s claim, the militia had not marched against men guilty only of “peaceful remonstrances” and “intemperate resolutions.” The whiskey rebels were guilty of insurrection. They had flouted the law; they had resorted to violence against the agents of the federal government; they had threatened citizens who opposed their cause. There is no doubt that Hamilton had preferred to assert the government’s readiness to enforce its laws at the first sign of insurgency. He believed that the need to preserve order and enforce law, essential for all governments, was especially critical for the survival of a republic, especially one as young and untested as the United States. Whether the suppression of the rebellion in its infancy would have been wise cannot be known, because Washington chose a more cautious and deliberate policy that allowed the government to claim all legal and diplomatic methods had been exhausted. If Hamilton’s approach appeared too abruptly punitive, Washington’s meant that the government faced a larger, better-organized rebellion. It was Washington’s good fortune that this march of one part of the people against
another had ended without bloodshed.
For Hamilton, there had been more at stake than the reputation of the federal government or its sovereignty. The president may have sent the militia army into western Pennsylvania to restore law and order, but implicit in his success was a victory for the Hamiltonian system. If the president had not been willing to risk his government’s reputation, that system might have unraveled. Certainly, successful resistance to the excise would have encouraged anti-administration forces to continue their efforts to dismantle all that Hamilton had created.
When President Washington pondered the cause of the rebellion, he did not look to the economic burden of the whiskey tax on distillers or what they saw as the inconvenience of its regulations or the character of the men appointed for its collection. He found the cause in the demagoguery of a few men who had tapped into the “spirit inimical to all order” among the rebels. In his sixth annual message to Congress, he located the source of the rebellion in men “who labored for an ascendancy over the will of others, by the guidance of their passions.” Among the chief guilty parties, Washington declared, were certain “self created societies,” known as Democratic Societies, that regularly condemned the government. The violence that resulted, he declared, “was not pointed merely to a particular law”; it arose from the strains of anarchy within these frontier communities. Fearing that those strains had not died with the defeat of the whiskey rebels, he recommended that Congress enact legislation that would allow the federal government to call out a “well regulated militia” to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions.117
In pointing a finger at “self created societies,” the president had publicly acknowledged the party strife that he believed was the greatest domestic threat to the Republic. His insistence that organizations calling themselves Democratic Societies were the serpent in Eden prompted Thomas Jefferson to condemn this “extraordinary act of boldness… from the faction of Monocrats.” Washington’s message also roused the ire of the Republican forces in Congress. The result was an acrimonious debate over the rights of free association versus the maintenance of law and order. Federalist members echoed their president’s concern, condemning the societies as dangerous to the Republic and labeling them extralegal pressure groups, guilty of spreading lies about the government’s policies, slandering members of the administration, and spurring rebellion. House Republicans, however, opposed any attempt to censor these societies, preferring, they said, to let the public decide whether to support, ignore, or oppose the views they espoused. Four years later, a similar, and far more consequential, argument would take place over the regulation of newspapers. But, for the moment, the House, now dominated by Republicans, chose to skirt the issue of extragovernmental political organizations and their role in the insurrection. In its reply to the president, the House expressed only a general regret that “individuals or combinations of men” might have misrepresented the government and its proceedings to “foment the flagrant outrage which has been committed on the laws.” This careful language was enough to make Washington realize he had been rebuffed. The Federalist-dominated Senate, however, roundly condemned the Democratic Societies, declaring their mission was “calculated, if not intended, to disorganize our government.” Party loyalties had determined both points of view.118
In August 1795, Washington issued a proclamation pardoning all persons found guilty of treason or failure to report treason in the Whiskey Rebellion. Immediately afterward, Governor Mifflin did the same. Meanwhile, two landmark events in 1794 and 1795 greatly eased the anxieties of the western Pennsylvania communities and relieved their economic distress. General Anthony Wayne’s August 1794 victory over the Indians of the Western Confederacy in the Battle of Fallen Timbers led to a peace treaty that alleviated fears of attack within the western Pennsylvania communities. And in October 1795, the United States and Spain negotiated the Treaty of San Lorenzo, giving Americans the right to free navigation of the Mississippi River and duty-free transport through the port of New Orleans. Half a decade later, in 1801, President Thomas Jefferson’s government repealed the whiskey tax. It is not without irony that the man who oversaw that repeal was a former whiskey rebel, Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin.
Epilogue
DESPITE FINDLEY AND Brackenridge, despite Bache and the anti-administration members of Congress, the American people applauded Washington’s handling of the Whiskey Rebellion. Over the months that followed, legislative bodies in Pennsylvania and its adjoining states expressed their gratitude and affection for the president, Governor Mifflin, and the brave soldiers of the militia army. They applauded the preservation of the federal government and the blessings of American liberty. Towns and churches sent resolutions of support and appreciation. It was the general view that the federal government had demonstrated to its citizens, and to the world, that it could withstand domestic rebellion without resorting to tyrannical measures. In their resolutions, Washington’s admirers and supporters expressed their appreciation for a president who had shown patience in his attempt to restore law and order through legal and judicial means and had not resorted to force until all other avenues had been traveled. And they applauded the government’s decision to show both resolve and leniency.
There was little recognition, or consideration, of the fact that Washington’s strategy of delay might have ended in disaster. He had pursued a policy of restraint not from any knowledge that the rebels’ response would be compliance but because he wished to protect the reputation of his administration and the public’s image of its president. In a circumstance where the commitment to resistance and the goals of an insurgency were unknown and unpredictable, Hamilton’s approach—to act quickly, before the rebellion was well organized and its membership large—had merit. But Hamilton thought like a soldier while Washington thought like a politician. The burdens of office on these two men were different: Hamilton was responsible for fiscal policy; Washington, for securing the loyalty of the people to a national government.
To a great extent, the public response to the handling of the Whiskey Rebellion revealed how critical the charisma of George Washington remained for the survival of the federal government. The affection and respect for George Washington was still the major source of the affection for the government he headed. The man, not the institution, still mattered most. Yet, by 1794, there were clear signs that a transfer of loyalty to the Constitution and to the federal government had begun. The Whiskey Rebellion had drawn people’s attention to that government and to the role it could play in maintaining law and order. Fears of the government’s potential for tyranny were calmed, and attention to its capacity for justice had emerged. The cooperation of several states in putting down the rebellion had promoted nationalism rather than the provincialism so prominent in the Antifederalist battle against ratification. And, ironically, the fact that a Republican opposition could arise and that its battles were waged within Congress rather than on the streets suggests that acceptance of the legitimacy of the Constitution and its government was growing.
Part II
THE GENET AFFAIR
IN 1793, IN the midst of the Whiskey Rebellion’s growing challenge to the authority of the federal government, a young and brash Frenchman named Edmond Charles Genet arrived in America as the revolutionary government’s minister to the United States. Citizen Genet, as he called himself, would pose a foreign challenge to America’s federal government as disturbing as the domestic rebellion in western Pennsylvania. His primary mission was to press Washington’s government to accept the French interpretation of the treaties signed by the two countries in 1778. This would allow France to establish a base of operations on American soil and in American territorial waters. France would then use the United States as a launching pad for privateers who would prey on British ships and recruit an army of American citizens for an invasion of Spanish-held Louisiana and Florida. Genet had also been instructed to demand a single full payment of the loans
France had made to America during the Revolution. Genet was confident that he could achieve all these goals. He was certain that Americans were grateful to the French for their assistance in the war for independence, and that they were eager to stand by their sister republic in the war it was waging with Europe’s monarchies to expand “the empire of liberty.”
From the moment of his arrival, Edmond Genet challenged the president’s major foreign policy decision: American neutrality in the European war. The English, of course, challenged that neutrality too, but they confined themselves to manipulating American trade, while Genet brought French manipulation directly into the cabinet, the ports of Philadelphia, New York, and Charleston, and the countryside of Kentucky. In his brief tenure, he insulted the sovereignty of America, exacerbated the tensions between Republican supporters of France and Federalist supporters of Great Britain, and ignored every protocol of diplomacy foreign ministers were expected to obey. Perhaps his greatest insult was to the authority of the president himself. When Washington took steps to curtail Genet’s activities, the Frenchman threatened to go over the head of the president and appeal directly to the people to support his demands. The challenge for Washington and his cabinet was to end the Genet crisis in a manner that upheld the president’s prerogatives in diplomacy and assured the American people of their government’s autonomy in navigating America’s place in world affairs.
The prevailing interpretation is that Genet was a diplomatic failure of epic proportions. He was ignorant of American political structures and refused the tutelage and advice of his only ally in the administration, Thomas Jefferson. He underestimated Washington’s popularity and the respect citizens had for their president while he fatally overestimated the readiness of Americans to join the French fight with Great Britain and its allies. Although this judgment by historians is harsh, it is nevertheless correct.
