by Mark Meyer
The westerners were deeply frustrated with Philadelphia’s inability to suppress the American Indian insurgency, but Washington and Hamilton had their own, more pressing problems. The United States owed millions of dollars to bondholders and foreign governments for their aid during the American Revolution. Hamilton also had to decide whether the federal government would assume the debts individual states had accrued by issuing their own bonds during the war. He likewise had to establish a system to fund the government and pay for the cost of the ongoing war against the native tribes.
Hamilton had struggled over the method for funding the assumption of debt, as well as for financing the ongoing cost of the new, federal government. The country had tariffs on imported goods, but no national domestic taxation system. An income tax was considered too radical. Some in the West favored a property tax, but many political players opposed it. Some in the religious community favored a “sin tax” on alcohol, and Hamilton was taken with this idea. He estimated that such a tax would generate an annual revenue of $270,000, which, when combined with the tariff on imported spirits, would cover the anticipated annual national debt burden shortfall. The tax would have the additional advantages of decreasing consumption and encouraging the “substitution of cyder (sic) and malt liquors.” There were already state taxes on the books for alcohol, but such laws had never been enforced. Hamilton wanted to grab that revenue source before the states started to focus on it.
On January 27, 1791, Congress passed a tax on the domestic production of whiskey, the first internal excise tax in United States history.
Whiskey Rebels Resist
The new tax allowed distillers to pay for the actual amounts of whiskey they produced, or to pay an amount based upon their still’s annual production capacity. Those who paid based on production capacity effectively paid one-third less than the distillers who paid based on actual production. Likewise, because small, rural distillers only used their stills periodically, they effectively paid a higher tax rate than the big distillers who operated year round. And since the rate was based on the gallons produced and not on the sale price, the tax rate effectively doubled if the westerners couldn’t get their whiskey to the higher-priced markets east of the Allegheny Mountains. This disparate treatment gave the big distilleries a significant economic advantage and fed into the small distillers’ perception that Hamilton favored big money and eastern interests. Many saw the tax as an arrogant attack on the “common drink” of the frontier by easterners who did not understand daily life out west.
Some feelings about the tax ran deeper than money. Many frontiersmen were veterans of the American Revolution, which had ended just eight years earlier. To people around Pittsburgh, Philadelphia’s indifference and the imposition of a tax that threatened a vital trade commodity looked a lot like the actions of the British monarchy that had triggered the war. The whiskey tax, in their eyes, was no different than the Stamp Act that had ignited the colonists’ fury against King George. For many on America’s western edge, Philadelphia seemed to have forgotten them and was more interested in promoting financial speculation and deal making on the eastern seaboard.
Washington and Hamilton saw things differently of course. Washington was worried about the country splintering and the mischief that Britain and Spain could potentially cause in the West. Hamilton viewed the tax as fully justified since it had been passed by elected representatives and was needed to fund the army and militia to help defeat the native tribes. He also thought the tax would benefit the common good by encouraging more moderate alcohol consumption. Of all the targets available for taxation, he viewed alcohol as offering the best combination of political justification and revenue enhancement. Although he knew there would be opposition, Hamilton was convinced it was time for the federal government to establish its supremacy in the growing country.
So the stage was set: East versus West, city versus rural, a centralized government versus a local one, the common man versus the moneyed elite, big whiskey makers versus small whiskey makers.
As word of the new law filtered west, it did not take long for the westerners to send a message back. Around the time of the ambush attack on Robert Johnson, delegates from the surrounding counties met at the Sign of the Green Tree tavern in Pittsburgh, near the Monongahela River waterfront, one of the two rivers that joined together in Pittsburgh to form the Ohio. They excoriated the new tax for singling out rye and other grain, and for disproportionately penalizing the westerners and the poor. They lashed out at the concentration of so much wealth among so few men. They also protested that the tax infringed upon their liberty in the same way British taxes had done.
Needless to say, Hamilton was not pleased with the response. He viewed the delegates’ list of grievances as an attack on the very existence of the federal government. Isaac Craig, part of the influential Neville Connection, warned that the broad scope of the delegates’ petition made him wonder if the assembly leaders were “perhaps secretly hostile to the existing form of government.” In response, Hamilton turned to John Neville, Craig’s father-in-law, and offered him the job of inspector of the Fourth Survey. The position paid $450 per year plus 1 percent of all tax collected. Neville had originally opposed the whiskey tax as a member of the Pennsylvania legislature, but he had later come to support it because it gave him, like other large distillers, an economic advantage.
Neville didn’t need the money, but in the end, to the dismay of his neighbors, he accepted Hamilton’s offer. The people of Pittsburgh could not understand why a man like him, who had so much already, would take a position that would put him in direct opposition to his neighbors. The westerners figured he was either plain greedy or that he had been bribed. Whatever the reason, John Neville became the lightning rod that drew the ire and fire of the whiskey rebels.
In Washington County, no one would rent space to Neville for a tax office; eventually, William Faulkner, newly arrived in the area, offered him a space in his house. Neville announced in the Pittsburgh Gazette that he was open for business and that all stills needed to be registered at Faulkner’s home. The Gazette ad didn’t harvest any registrations, but it did attract a band of whiskey rebels who dressed up as Indians, broke into the house, and shot up every room. Faulkner was not at home during the ambush, but he later agreed, upon threat of tar and feathering, to discontinue renting to Neville.
In August of 1792, as Neville stepped up his attempts to collect the tax, the insurgents called a second meeting in Pittsburgh, chaired by Colonel John Canon, who had served as Washington’s land agent out West and was one of the area’s largest property owners. Hugh Henry Brackenridge, the lawyer who would later try to moderate passions as the insurgency heated up, did not attend, but Albert Gallatin, a political adversary of Hamilton (though generally a moderate) did. The meeting, however, was dominated by militants from the Mingo Creek Society.
The Mingo Creek Society was an extra-governmental organization that included a militia, an alternative court system that resolved disputes quickly and cheaply, and a political machine that greased the wheels on the frontier. It wielded great influence in the rough-edged world of western Pennsylvania, but the political establishment viewed it suspiciously. The Mingo Creek men pushed their agenda hard, and the resolutions they put forward from the second Pittsburgh assembly alarmed the power brokers in Philadelphia and New York.
The assembly declared that the tax on the “common drink of a nation” was “unjust in itself” and “oppressive upon the poor.” The men instead wanted a system that progressively taxed wealth. They resolved to oppose the tax with “every other legal measure” and, hearkening back to the days of the Revolution, they established committees in the various counties to coordinate opposition to the tax. The resolutions were published throughout the western country, and they included warnings that anyone who supported the tax would be ostracized from the community.
Washington and Hamilton responded
with their own proclamation that the federal government would use “every legal and necessary step” to collect the tax. In 1793, however, they had to turn their attention to more pressing matters. The French Revolution threatened the European monarchies and led to a worldwide conflict, pitting France against Britain, Spain, and the Netherlands. Washington and Hamilton feared that Spain and Britain would use the world war as an opportunity to advance and consolidate their positions in America. To make matters worse, the administration was also trying to contain a catastrophic yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia.
Emboldened by the silence of a preoccupied federal administration, the whiskey rebels stepped up their resistance. Anonymous notes signed by “Tom the Tinker” appeared in the Pittsburgh Gazette, threatening reprisals against anyone who supported the law. The rebels also continued to attack tax collectors. Philip Wigle, a Revolutionary War veteran, was “one of the most active insurgents in the western counties.” One day he found Benjamin Wells, the tax collector for Fayette County, investigating his father’s mill and attacked him. Later, with other rebels, Wigle attacked Wells’s house. Wells wasn’t there, but the rebels told his wife that he had to resign as tax collector. Wells refused, so six men with blackened faces, kerchiefs over their noses and mouths, broke into his house again with guns raised, demanding his resignation and any documents related to his collection of taxes. Wells surrendered the documents, including the commission appointing him tax collector, although he later rescinded his resignation. Prompted by Neville, who wanted the federal government to intervene in the increasingly deteriorating situation on the frontier, he made three trips to Philadelphia to provide information to the administration about the incident. Washington was so incensed by the attack that he offered a $200 reward for each rebel involved.
In other parts of the frontier south of Pennsylvania, distillers were also not paying the tax. In these areas, the tax collectors had simply given up, and the western edges of North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky remained quiet. Those regions, however, did not have a General John Neville who kept scratching the sore of the body politic. Sitting in his Bower Hill mansion overlooking the folks below, he was determined the tax would be collected, come hell or high water.
Neville and his tax collectors became the targets for the increasing frustrations on the frontier over the federal government’s failure to ease the hard edge of life in western Pennsylvania. In the summer of 1793, when the Washington County militia met to elect officers, they burned a straw effigy of Neville. Not long after, Neville and his family were personally attacked while returning to their mansion from Pittsburgh. And as 1793 turned to 1794, things were about to get even worse.
Insurrection
Alexander Hamilton decided it was time to act.
Notices were published that the federal government would take action against anyone not complying with the tax. On January 4, 1794, an announcement appeared in the Pittsburgh Gazette under the name of Robert Johnson, the tax collector who had been tarred and feathered near Pigeon Creek:
PUBLIC NOTICE
WHEREAS, a number of distillers have entered their stills
according to law, those who are distillers or dealers in
spirits, will take notice, that suits will be brought and
seizures made against those who do not comply therewith.
Robert Johnson
Collector of Washington and Allegheny Counties.
In early 1794, the Mingo Creek Society compiled a remonstrance to the president and Congress. The Mingo Creek men complained that the federal government had not fulfilled its obligation to defend them from American Indian attacks and also had not opened the Mississippi River to navigation. Having failed in these core obligations, the government did not have the right, according to the protesters, to demand taxes from them. Needless to say, the remonstrances were not well received in Philadelphia. They only served to buttress the administration’s belief that insurrection was brewing out West. The remonstrance was sent on to the Justice Department so it could monitor the activity of the insurgent organization.
Working from information supplied by Neville, Wells, and other tax collectors, Hamilton, Attorney General William Bradford, and United States Attorney William Rowe compiled a list of sixty westerners who had not complied with the new whiskey tax. They secured subpoenas that required the men to travel over the mountains to Philadelphia to appear in federal court in August. The subpoenas were a bluff; the federal court did not operate in August because it was too hot. Likewise, a new law had recently been passed, which allowed the men to appear in their local court. Hamilton and the Justice Department, however, decided to proceed under the old law; they planned to muscle the men into submission without any need to have a mass trial. David Lenox, a marshal for the federal court, was tasked with serving the subpoenas. On June 7, Neville published a notice in the Pittsburgh Gazette requiring all stills to be registered with the tax collectors by June 30. By June 20, Neville reported to Philadelphia that no stills had done so. The westerners had made their move and now it was the federal government’s turn. With some trepidation, Lenox left Philadelphia on June 22 with the sixty subpoenas in his satchel.
He crossed the mountains and started serving subpoenas in the near western counties of Bedford and Fayette. Unknown to him, farther to the west, the rebels were shutting down numerous tax offices. Benjamin Wells’s office in Westmoreland had been repeatedly attacked by rebels, including Wigle, which prevented Wells from ever collecting a penny of tax. Neville had also subleased a room at John Lynn’s Canonsburg inn to serve as his Washington County office, but rebels had come to the inn and demanded Lynn’s surrender. Lynn, barricaded upstairs, finally came out when the rebels agreed not to harm him. When he appeared, the rebels cut his hair and tarred and feathered him, leaving him in the woods for the night, naked and tied to a tree.
Lenox rode into Pittsburgh in July, unaware that rebels in the far west were roaming the woods, looking for tax collectors. He had dinner in the village with Brackenridge, who assured him that the locals would respect his authority as a federal marshal. Brackenridge suggested, however, that it might be best if Neville did not accompany Lenox on his appointed rounds.
Lenox did not take Brackenridge’s advice. He agreed to have Neville show him around the western Country. It was harvest time, a time of a “kind of Saturnalia, when liquor was freely drunk.” Lenox quickly learned that things were going to be different for this round of subpoenas. The first four men he served “showed much contempt for the laws of the United States.” Things would only get worse.
As Lenox and Neville moved into Mingo Creek territory, word passed along the frontier that they were in the area, serving legal papers on whiskey men. Men began to trail the two officials at a distance. Around noon, Neville and Lenox arrived at the farm of William Miller, who was supervising field hands helping with the harvest. Neville stayed on his horse as Lenox dismounted to read the subpoena to Miller, a war veteran who had voted for Neville in the past. Miller had sold his farm a few months before and intended to move to Kentucky. As he listened to the marshal, he became “mad with passion.” He felt his “blood boil at seeing General Neville along to pilot the sheriff to my very door.”
As the scene unfolded, rumors spread that Lenox and Neville were taking people back with them to Philadelphia. Lenox and Miller continued to argue, and at some point, Neville realized that armed men were approaching. He shouted at the marshal that they needed to leave quickly. They rode directly toward the approaching men who let them pass. Rifle fire rang out, and Lenox, no shrinking violet, turned to dress down the crowd, who yelled back in dialects that confused him. Neville knew it was best to leave, and they rode away quickly—Neville to his fortified mansion and Lenox back to Pittsburgh.
While the two men retreated to places of safety, word of the encounter reached the Mingo Creek militia. Confusion reigned, then discussio
n, and finally a plan of action—the Mingo Creek men would go to Neville’s house, capture Lenox, secure the warrants, and bring him back to be tried by a Mingo Creek court. The men selected John Holcroft, the infamous “Tom the Tinker,” to lead the “thirty-seven guns” to Bower Hill to confront Neville and the marshal, and bring Lenox back for some Mingo Creek justice.
The men arrived at the bottom of Bower Hill around dawn the next day. Neville had armed his enslaved people and fortified his house; he was waiting inside with his wife, granddaughter, and a friend of Mrs. Neville. When he saw the rebels, he demanded they identify themselves. The rebels, thinking Neville was Lenox, offered him safety if he would surrender. Neville spurned the offer and fired his rifle, hitting William Miller’s nephew, Oliver. The Mingo Creek men fired back, eliciting a broadside from Neville’s enslaved people. Several more rebels fell, and Holcroft decided the house was too well fortified for further battle. The rebels retreated down the hill to Couch’s Fort to regroup.
Word spread quickly about the initial skirmish at Bower Hill, and by day’s end, approximately seven hundred rebels had gathered at Couch’s Fort to consider their next move. While the rebel force was gathering, Neville had requested that General Wilkins, brigadier general of the militia, call out the rest of the militia to fight the rebels. Wilkins consulted Brackenridge, who told him that only the governor could call out the militia. The two men then met with the local sheriff and judges to determine if a posse could be organized to defend the Neville homestead. The sheriff explained that any posse he could muster was already at Couch’s Fort, ready to attack Bower Hill.
The rebels elected John McFarlane as their leader. McFarlane and his brother, Andrew, were Revolutionary War heroes and well respected on the frontier. At around 5:00 p.m. on July 16, the armed men followed McFarlane up Bower Hill and took positions less than one hundred yards from the Neville mansion. Neville wasn’t in the house, but was instead hiding in a ravine where he could watch events unfold. Unknown to the rebels, Neville had also been able to secure the help of his son-in-law, Major James Kirkpatrick, who had come with ten soldiers from Fort Fayette in Pittsburgh to help defend the house. The rebels put on a show, marching to beating drums and taking time to assume their positions surrounding the house.
