by Steven Stoll
Settlers claimed to protect their families from Indians while they employed vigilante violence to seize Indian land. Writes the historian Honor Sachs, “By negating Indian agency … backcountry residents embraced a racist ideology of Indian hating that portrayed the enemy as savage, predatory, less than human.” Penn saw Pennsylvania as a kind of republican empire, with many peoples each in their homelands. But backwoods settlers saw themselves as a force of racial purification, clearing Indians away in order to replace them with people like themselves.81
They had arrived in southwestern Pennsylvania by the 1780s and crossed over into western Virginia at about the same time. Others traveled down the Shenandoah Valley where they followed the Wilderness Road into Kentucky a few years behind Boone. They thought they would be left alone. But if perfect isolation from government administration defines the frontier, it didn’t last very long, if it ever existed at all. Surveyors walked the same wilderness, some hired by distant landowners. Virginia divided its mountain territory into counties, each with courthouses and tax collectors. The settlers signed on to fight with George Washington in the Revolutionary War, aligning with a nation-state whose leaders had their own ideas about the backcountry.
A century later, the descendants of these same woodland hunters had lost control of the woods, found themselves politically vulnerable, their agriculture insufficient to protect them against forces that pried them out of the same hills that had once provided them with abundance and autonomy. They endured an American version of enclosure. That process began not with the discovery of coal or the first railroad but when the Federalists came to power in 1789. It did not begin with eviction and disputes over deeds but with a failed attempt to impose an excise tax. One Federalist, in particular, represented the entire complement of North Atlantic universals. Facing west, he acted to extend his conception of capitalism and constitutional authority to every hill and hollow.
3. The Rye Rebellion
WHY ALEXANDER HAMILTON INVADED THE MOUNTAINS
Civil power … is capable of diffusing its force to a very great extent; and can, in a manner, reproduce itself in every part of a great empire.
—Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist, No. 13 (1787)
THEY COULD BE SEEN on the roads for miles, a force the size of the Continental Army. The soldiers came from Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, and New Jersey. They met at Harrisburg to begin their advance through Carlisle. Word that George Washington led the column jolted the insurgents, but the president took the militia just halfway before placing Alexander Hamilton in charge. It was Hamilton’s fight anyway. He’d thought it up, mapped every movement, and outfitted thirteen thousand men with shoes, coats, and rifles. One soldier who watched the secretary of the Treasury striding around in camp, dressed in his old uniform, called him “the master spirit” of the operation. Hamilton marched into the mountains to enforce the authority of federal law. Yet in a larger sense he marched as Political Economy personified, headed for a confrontation with Agrarian Autonomy.1
Before the invasion or the tax, the backcountry seethed with rebellion and intrigue. George Washington dreaded the West, which he considered a haven for “banditti who will bid defiance to all authority.” That authority seemed everywhere under attack and in decline. Here are just a few of his frontier problems. James Wilkinson, a brigadier general residing in Kentucky, took it upon himself to negotiate an agreement with the Spanish colonial governor in New Orleans to open the Mississippi River to upcountry commerce. To seal the deal, Wilkinson swore allegiance to Spain in 1787. Around the time of the Whiskey Rebellion, Washington learned that British Canadian officials and Pennsylvania rebels had been planning the secession of the western counties of that state.
Indian nations demanded their own independence, like the confederacy led by the Miami chief Little Turtle in the Ohio Territory. Washington did not follow a unified policy to hold the West steady. With one hand, the administration sent waves of violence against Little Turtle. With the other, it signed a treaty that enforced Creek boundaries against the interests of Georgia politicians and speculators. Some blamed the disorderly frontier on the size and complexity of a nation-state too big to govern. Washington’s secretary Tobias Lear predicted, “Within fifteen years the inhabitants to the westward of the Alleghany will be a separate, independent people.”2
The fears and motives of the Federalists, however, get us only so far in understanding the Whiskey Rebellion. The politics of the 1790s create a thick context, overwhelming other kinds of interpretations. The event itself should not be buried as the “frontier epilogue” to the Constitution, with Shays’ Rebellion playing the part of prologue. When agrarian protest becomes a phase or stage, a lingering tension between old and new that is inevitably resolved, writes Ed White, “rebellions themselves have no place in the larger history … So one of the most stunning manifestations of early American culture is frequently evacuated of meaning.” Seeing the Whiskey Rebellion ideologically has its uses, but it might lead us into thinking that only ideology matters. We might fail to see the intricate material world of the rebels and how stress against their household economies provoked them to rise up.3
Agrarian protest suffuses the history of British North America. Shift the focus and the Whiskey Rebellion takes its place as one event in an era of agrarian violence: Bacon’s Rebellion (1676), Virginia’s Plant-Cutter Riots (1681–1683), the Conojocular War (1732–1737), the Jersey Land Riots (1745–1755), the colonial New York anti-rent riots (1753–1766), the Paxton Riots (1763–1764), the North Carolina Regulation (1769–1784), the Vermont insurgency (1770–1775), Shays’ Rebellion (1786–1787), and John Fries’ Rebellion (1799). They were wars over autonomy and against taxation or the penalties of debt. Others enforced racially defined realms of control. War with Indians (like Little Turtle’s War of the 1790s, just to the west of the Pennsylvania border) took place on the same frontier.
These conflicts should be understood as political rebellions in which settlers and Indians asserted their own conceptions of independence. The United States attempted to crush their autonomy in order to achieve legal and economic uniformity. Insurgency shaped the United States itself—its military, land laws, territorial integration, and Constitution. Frontier revolt should also be seen as an Atlantic-wide response to administrative power. For 125 years, the West unleashed a barrage of violence comparable to the 300 years of peasant uprising in Europe that Fernand Braudel called “a latent social war … a structural kind of warfare without end.”4
Hamilton fought this structural war—an attempt to bring administrative control to the unruly people of the West. The Revolutionary leadership had all learned from the ineffectual Proclamation of 1763 that fictitious lines promote fictitious authority. The land ordinances of the 1780s attempted to get around the problem of an imperium ruling over subordinate provinces. The law of 1784 called for the land west of the mountains and north of the Ohio River to be divided into states. The law of 1785 stitched the wilderness with a grid. It created the federal survey system: townships of six square miles divided into thirty-six sections, each of which consisted of 640 acres. This conceptual infrastructure facilitated the transition of wilderness into private property. The acts of 1787 and 1789 created the Northwest Territory as an administrative unit, anticipating the eventual establishment of six new states. Yet like Britain’s attempt to enforce the Proclamation Line, declaring a boundary did not produce thoroughly governed space. Borders on a map meant nothing to people living in the folds of the mountains. Hamilton imagined the United States as a legal and economic totality, but he confronted it as a relentless process of integration. State formation, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s terms, is an attempt to “make each part an expression of the whole.”5
The Whiskey Rebellion took place in four western counties of Pennsylvania, which is to say that it took place in northern Appalachia. Though the best-documented series of events draws our attention to the region south of Pittsburgh, we should think more broadly
about what happened. Nearly the entire population of Kentucky nullified the tax. In Morgantown, Virginia, a crowd surrounded the home of the excise collector, allowing him to escape only after he resigned. Washington and Hamilton considered sending a punitive expedition against western North Carolina. But more important, the tax and the invasion represented the first attempts since the end of the Revolution to force the backcountry into the Atlantic economy. Hamilton’s method of choice was to lever open western households by compelling them to sell more of the things they made. As he had learned from Adam Smith, value comes from labor exerted against environments in making useful things. Money converts this value into a form that can travel far away and accumulate in banks. A nation-state can grab its share by collecting taxes. The Whiskey Tax proposed to do something that Hamilton once called impossible. It reached into the relationship between mountain farmers and their land by requiring that they convert one very important product of their labor into money.
Looking ahead a century or so, we can see that the industrialization of the mountains extended and deepened this very process. But coal and lumber companies did not want to monetize only a portion of the value highland folk created. They sought to separate them from land altogether, compelling them to turn all their labor into money. Mountain people became enmeshed in the national economy and the global division of labor. Hamilton did not have this in mind when he marched an army into Fayette County. But like the corporations that followed, he believed that moving people from rye and beans to coins and currency furthered capital, the power of the United States, and historical progress.6
One way to understand Hamilton’s thinking is by comparison with his rival Jefferson. They did not disagree about whether or not the United States should seize and rule territory but about the concentration of governmental power that should prevail. They worked from different conceptual “maps.” In Jefferson’s realm, the whole would be present in some of the parts, but not all. He might have had in mind something like William Clark’s dead-reckoned pencil sketches of the Missouri River watershed. Jefferson annexed those hundreds of millions of acres in order to dilute centralized power, without diminishing that power where it existed. He wanted places for planters and yeomen to escape into. But Jefferson had his own imaginary nation, one without Indians, whose presence violated his ideal as surely as untaxed Pennsylvanians violated Hamilton’s.
Hamilton’s map looked more like the peace of 1783, stressing enforceable borders and internal improvements. He wanted one seamless system that governed every acre of the United States. One way of doing this was to tie distant people to the central government by making them pay a tax. The tax, in turn, would demand an infrastructure and instill a national presence. Taxation was so essential to Hamilton because it fused authority and economy. His political economy is more accurately understood as a governing economy. The future of the state could not be separated from the commercial evolution of its people. In his optimistic phase, Hamilton saw a virtuous cycle. A thoroughly administered nation fostered a widening division of labor. Money from commerce sustained taxation. And taxation created a robust and powerful state, with institutions and internal improvements. This led to further widening of the division of labor as the state reached into new territories.
But Hamilton’s map was inadequate for his task. It told him nothing about the people he confronted. This is part of the context and meaning of the Whiskey Tax. It came out of a search for order. The measurement, quantification, and public identification that it demanded tied western Pennsylvania to the United States by forcing distillers to submit to distant forms of definition and value.7
Hamilton knew that taxes provoked anger. He led his own insurgent artillery unit against the British in the battles of White Plains and Trenton, part of the tax rebellion known as the American Revolution. He must have known about the English excise riots of 1733 and the violent resistance to a malt tax in Scotland. In 1725, crowds enraged by the high price of beer attacked collectors in Glasgow and destroyed the homes of members of Parliament. Adam Smith used the malt tax to recommend caution to rulers in The Wealth of Nations. “It must always be remembered … that it is the luxurious and not the necessary expense of the inferior ranks of people that ought ever to be taxed.” But when revolutionary leaders become a postrevolutionary elite, they often consolidate their political victory by turning to social transformation. Whatever Hamilton thought about debt and taxes in 1777, a decade later he saw them as “national exigency,” as tools in the social consolidation of the United States. We can glimpse his thinking at an early stage in his response to another uprising, Shays’ Rebellion.8
After the Revolution, Europeans merchants hesitated to extend credit to American merchants. They would only be paid in gold. The hard-money policy tumbled down the financial ladder until it hit the bottom rung. Farmers owed local storekeepers, mortgage holders, and landlords. They were overwhelmed by threats of foreclosure and imprisonment. They depended on easy currency to cover their debts. Daniel Shays had just returned from the Continental Army—wounded, never paid, and in arrears. He found his neighbors in the same bind. One of them grieved,
I have laboured hard all my days and fared hard; I have been greatly abused; been obliged to do more than my part in the war; been loaded with class-rates, town-rates, continental-rates, and all rates, lawsuits, and have been pulled and hauled by sheriffs, constables and collectors, and had my cattle sold for less than they were worth: I have been obliged to pay and no body will pay me. I have lost a great deal by this man, and that man, and t’other man; and the great men are going to get all we have; and I think it is time for us to rise and put a stop to it, and have no more courts, nor sheriffs, nor collectors, nor lawyers; I design to pay no more.
Another said, “The great men pocket up all the money and live easy, and we work hard, and we can’t pay it, and we won’t pay it.” But creditors made no exceptions for difficult circumstances. The plowmen petitioned the statehouse. They asked for lower taxes, more paper currency, and security from arrest and trial. Unable to endure their hardship any longer, they did rise and put a stop to it.9
On August 29, 1786, an army of 600 led by Shays stormed the Court of Common Pleas at Northampton, shutting it down. Protestors in Great Barrington, Worcester, Taunton, and Concord did the same. Some of them wore their Continental Army uniforms. Governor James Bowdoin had no soldiers to meet the insurgents. No federal army existed. He and General Benjamin Lincoln raised funds for a private militia from 125 merchants. In January 1787, a force of 3,000 invaded Worcester. In the meantime, Shays led 1,500 to take over the federal armory in Springfield, but 1,200 local militia under William Shepard outgunned them, killing four and wounding twenty. In a surprise attack on February 3, Lincoln’s army scattered the rebels and made arrests. Eighteen received death sentences for treason. Two were hanged. Governor John Hancock commuted the remaining sentences and released the prisoners, including Shays.
It is often said that Shays’ Rebellion moved the Revolutionary leadership to “establish justice and insure domestic tranquility,” but it did not move them to address any of the reasons given by farmers for their insurrection. Instead, the framers of the Constitution instilled the chief executive with the power to crush future uprisings by calling up federal soldiers and state militias. As for the most talented political economist in North America, he was not moved to write a treatise on the paradox of rebellion in a democratic republic, nor did he examine the economic condition of the agrarian class. Hamilton didn’t blame a credit crisis or an inadequate money supply or the end of the war. No. He dismissed a revolt involving thousands of citizens as one man’s personal failing. “If Shays had not been a desperate debtor,” sneered Hamilton in The Federalist, No. 6, “it is much to be doubted whether Massachusetts would have been plunged into a civil war.”10
Hamilton elaborated in the months that followed. There could be no exception to the sovereign right to tax, which he propounded in The Federalist, No. 12: �
�As revenue is the essential engine by which the means of answering the national exigencies must be procured … the federal government must of necessity be invested with an unqualified power of taxation.” Unqualified power was exactly what anti-Federalists feared most. Hamilton stared them down with the unrelenting argument that political power did not exist without financial power. Money flowed through any nation-state like blood. Duties on trade were somewhat more popular because they taxed other countries (though they raised domestic prices). But if tariffs ever proved insufficient, only one source remained. “If the principal part be not drawn from commerce, it must fall with oppressive weight upon land.” He understood the risks. Farmers, he admitted, would “ill brook the inquisitive and peremptory spirit of excise laws.” He called their property “too precarious and invisible a fund” to be attached, meaning that government had no way of identifying assets as mobile as cattle and ephemeral as rye. In 1787, he balanced the forces in play. He sensed and dreaded the consequences of revenue raised the wrong way. Such a tax would not “fail to be productive of glaring inequality and extreme oppression.”
Hamilton squared the contradiction between the necessity of taxation and the incapacity of farmers to pay by falling back on the theory of stages. Social evolution would make money appear where it was needed. Time would bring economic development and the mutual dependency that comes from a complex division of labor. “In the usual progress of things,” he lectured assuredly in No. 30, “the resources of the community, in their full extent, will be brought into activity for the benefit of the Union.” In other words, the full extent of the value derived from land and labor would be available to the nation-state, eventually. The state could then impose itself by taking a portion. Hamilton offered a now familiar formula for the changes he expected. “The ability of a country to pay taxes” depended on “the quantity of money in circulation.” Since commerce circulates money, it “must of necessity render the payment of taxes easier.” The problem of taxation only required people to move from one stage to another, for farmers to grow more for market sale. But in 1791, Hamilton was secretary of the Treasury. By then, he had determined that an excise was necessary and that whiskey would be its source.11
