Ramp Hollow

by Steven Stoll

  A humdrum bill dealing with the importation of alcoholic beverages shifts focus at section fourteen, declaring duties on anything distilled within the United States. For alcohol other than rum, between nine cents and twenty-five cents per gallon would be collected, depending on the proof. The government did not excise the sale or consumption of whiskey but its production, as estimated by the size or volume of stills. But the tax made no distinction between whiskey for profit or for domestic use. Even distillers who drank all they made needed to pay it. Commercial distillers needed to pay in advance of sale.

  We can read in the legislation itself the outlines of a comprehensive vision. The Whiskey Tax encouraged exchanges by penalizing those who produced for home use. Similarly, it encouraged the accumulation of money by requiring distillers to pay this month’s tax from last month’s sales. But if the tax was really an attempt at social engineering, what change did Hamilton hope it would cause? He wanted the people of the backcountry to make more things for money, to live on money (to some degree, at least), and to pay taxes with surplus money. For the Atlantic elite, money separated the value of a thing from its use. It was the sine qua non of the social division of labor and the evolutionary transition from subsistence to commercial social relations. The proliferation of money as a medium of production and exchange encompassed much of Hamilton’s conception of the United States.

  But what distillers found as obnoxious as the tax itself was the government’s thuggish way of collecting it. Those who made whiskey needed to paint the words DISTILLER OF SPIRITS on their houses so agents of the state could ride into a village and quickly identify them. They needed to make an “entry in writing” at a central office three days before distilling. No one could remove whiskey from any distillery at night. All stills needed to be inspected with the liquor percolating in situ, not after the fact. Officers needed to brand each cask with a serial number to mark its origin, its quantity, and its proof (“ascertained by actual gauging”), then collect the tax and write a receipt. Only then could a cask travel the roads and rivers to market. Congress piled on the penalties for fugitive stills and noncompliance. Officers who came across unmarked goods on the turnpike had the authority to seize all casks, horses, cattle, carriages, harnesses, tackling, boats, and the full value of the cargo (not just its taxable value) on the spot. The penalty for erasing or changing serial numbers was forfeiture and a fine equal to the highest market price. Other infractions carried a hundred-dollar fine—an impossible sum. Anyone operating a single still under fifty gallons did not have to keep records or mark his house, but he was otherwise subject to the law.

  The whole procedure represented a never-imagined reach into the economy of everyday life, surpassing the most inflammatory British policy. Yet neither Washington nor Hamilton anticipated an armed response. Washington wrote on July 20, 1794, during a tour through the South, “From the best information I could get on my journey … there remains no doubt but it will be carried into effect, not only without opposition but with very general approbation in those very parts where it was foretold that it would never be submitted to by any one.” Most people Washington met told him what he wanted to hear. Hugh Hammond Brackenridge had seen local people calculate their responses to powerful outsiders, appearing “moderate in their transactions,” while they suppressed “the most hostile sentiments.” He noted of officials, “They could not know, so well as others, the general rage of the country, against the excise law.”12

  In fact, hostility had broken out during Washington’s tour. When collectors showed up in Westmoreland, Fayette, Washington, and Allegheny counties, armed men coated them with tar and feathers and whipped them. The insurgents destroyed the stills of any who cooperated. They kidnapped a federal marshal and stopped the courts from operating. On July 16, the regional inspector in charge of collection, John Neville, had just served a writ, accompanied by a local marshal. A band of men on horseback came up behind them. A gun went off. Neville locked eyes with his pursuers and told the marshal to run. Neville rode hard to his home seven miles outside of Pittsburgh. The next morning he awoke to a standoff. No one knows what words the two sides exchanged before Neville opened fire. The rebels pelted the wood-framed house with musket balls, as Neville’s slaves met the volume of the attack. One person lay dead and others wounded. The following morning, Neville wrote to his son in Pittsburgh that five hundred insurgents were massing nearby. The younger Neville reached the house hours after an all-out assault, finding it burned to the ground. Hamilton learned of Neville’s story in early August and briefed Washington on the “almost universal noncompliance” and acts of violence “presumed to amount to Treason.” That’s when he vowed that the republic would come down on the rebels with mammoth force.

  Hamilton could have taxed other things. He had recommended that the state of New York tax meadows, salt, tobacco, and houses by size. He thought up a tavern tax and a lawyer tax. He could have placed duties on slave sales or absentee land ownership and the proceeds of speculation. Merchant houses were flush with foreign currency. Deriving revenue from malt and brewing enraged the Scots, but it would have been a fairer production to attach because it affected people in every state. He could have squeezed money from citizens who actually had it, in other words, rather than from those whose property sometimes consisted of a cow and a horse. Instead, he taxed something with inestimable value to the people who made it, something deeply rooted in the makeshift economy.13

  Most of the things raised and manufactured on any homestead moved from production to consumption in very small circles. But whiskey was different. Its low perishability translated into stable value. It moved in big circles, entering the second transactional realm of the agrarian world, where things traveled far away and brought back money. Its lengthy transits made it visible to the state. Percolating liquor looked to Hamilton like the ideal taxable commodity. But the people who made it saw it differently. It was the most lucrative form of the rye they harvested from forest clearings. For those who consumed their own whiskey or exchanged it locally, as many did, their stills produced no coin. In the conflict that ensued, agrarians insisted that the secretary of the Treasury had put them in an untenable position. Hamilton didn’t listen to them.14

  * * *

  THE WOODLAND CULTURE LIT OUT for the Allegheny Front. Emigrants traveled with long rifles and large families. Their adaptive traits stressed versatility over specialization, extensive land use over intensive. A German botanist came upon them in the 1780s. “These hunters or ‘backwoodsmen’ live very like the Indians and acquire similar ways of thinking. They shun everything which appears to demand of them law and order, dread anything which breaths constraint. They hate the name of a Justice, and yet they are not transgressors … An insignificant cabin of un-hewn logs; corn and a little wheat, a few cows and pigs, this is all their riches but they need no more.” The unhewn life depended on a great run of woods where settlers could continually re-create an Arcadia of hunting and grazing. But like every Arcadia, this one was in trouble from the beginning.15

  Settlers emigrated to stay ahead of something they could not abide—the valuation of land. The conversion of wilderness into real estate sent them higher and higher into thousands of narrow valleys. Between 1780 and 1810, nonresident planters and merchants engrossed 4.5 million acres, or 93 percent of the land in western Virginia. The average holding consisted of 5,485 acres. Actual settlers occupied the other 7 percent, or 324,000 acres, in various degrees of possession. In 1794, fourteen individuals bought 2.5 million acres from the Commonwealth of Virginia for 2 cents each. Twenty-one speculators claimed one-quarter of Kentucky.

  No one got into the game earlier than George Washington. While a soldier in the French and Indian War, he received an on-the-ground tutorial on the western country. In 1763, as a reward for his military service, the royal governor of Virginia gave Washington a warrant for five thousand acres in the undulating plateau between the rivers Kanawha and Ohio. (He would eventually own thi
rty thousand acres.) That was the same year that King George III forbade any colonist from putting up a cabin or even setting foot there. Washington and other grantees might have reasoned that the Proclamation Line would not exist for long. After all, what did it mean to own land that one couldn’t legally visit? So he broke the law. In 1767, he ordered his personal surveyor, William Crawford, to cross into the highlands “under the guise of hunting game.” There, Crawford would identify the most advantageous portions of Washington’s warrants. “Ordinary or even middling lands would never answer my purpose,” wrote Washington, sounding like any other speculator. “No; a tract to please me must be rich … and, if possible, level.”16

  The maps that Crawford drew for Washington in this and subsequent expeditions indicated ground as flat and wide as anyone could hope to find in a region where that kind of space hardly existed. In 1774, he marked off nearly three thousand acres along the Kanawha River, blazing G W on a sycamore, a white oak, and (of all things) a cherry tree. What is important about this survey describing the banks of the Kanawha near its intersection with the Coal River is not what it includes but what it leaves out—everything but the bottomland. The topography rises five hundred feet from the valley floor within a quarter of a mile, but no one would know that by looking at Crawford’s map. He left it all blank. In the decades that followed, every acre of Virginia would be granted and engrossed, sometimes to more than one person. Senator Humphrey Marshall of Kentucky, a Virginia-born Federalist, complained of the “infinitude of conflicting claims.” The federal survey system, enacted in the Ordinance of 1785, didn’t settle the confusion because it didn’t apply to the original states or to the western territories under their jurisdiction. Since the states didn’t perform their own surveys for decades, who owned what remained unknown. Such grand omissions cast a cloak of invisibility over oceans of ridges and valleys where dispossessed Indians, escaped slaves, and poor whites found all the resources they needed to live. In fact, we should not think of a single land system as taking shape but two. Official grants and private surveys represented the first. In the other, settlers occupied and later exchanged scraps of landscape with impunity.17

  Some of these scraps are known as runs, coves, and hollows. From six miles above the earth the country looks like wrinkled paper. Each fold is a tiny watershed with a stream or branch that flows into a larger creek or river. Broad and steep at the top, hollows often taper down the middle, where sunshine is limited, opening into marshy glades at the bottom. Floods can rise quickly in a hard rain and can take away topsoil. No one searching for top-quality farmland considered felling trees to plow up a dim and damp hollow. “It seems very strange that any person should have settled there at a time when the whole country was almost vacant,” wrote one observer in 1771. But people who placed a high value on game animals saw nothing strange about it. The folds of the mountains allowed them space for hunting, for burning, and for plowing up to plant rye. They settled at high altitudes out of necessity, but they searched and deliberated to find the greatest advantage. They knew what they were doing. The archaeologist Barry Cunliffe describes the first peasants to colonize Western Europe. The ecological niches they chose “suggests an awareness of geography that could only have come from knowledge based on reconnaissance.” The same can be said about the first white settlers of Appalachia.18

  By the end of the eighteenth century, settlers arriving in the southern mountains entered a landscape that often belonged to other people. Households sometimes received grants from the Commonwealth of Virginia, the same kind of grants Washington received. But more typically, they moved onto land regardless of who owned it. One of them recounted years later, “Many squatted down on lands, not knowing or caring whose they were.” While no one was looking, they wrote and recorded their own deeds, surveying by metes and bounds in the hand of anyone literate. A grantee residing in Philadelphia often had no idea that hundreds or thousands of people regularly bought and sold parts of his estate.

  The backwoods thrived on this neglect. Ten thousand acres on the far side of the Blue Ridge might have looked like inviolable private property inscribed on filigreed parchment. But from ground level it looked much more chaotic and its ownership less obvious. The owner of the filigreed parchment might have acquired the land before counties existed. But these local bureaucracies recorded sales and collected taxes. During the early nineteenth century, new counties formed from older ones like cells dividing. New counties did not, necessarily, receive all the relevant records. In the meantime, anyone who improved a spate of woods and was in good standing with the county began to accumulate rights, even if it turned out that someone else could claim to own the same land. A patchwork of boundaries soon overlapped one another. Courts attempted to adjudicate, but the landscape became a kind of game of hiding in the blank spaces, of right against right. I will have more to say about all this in the next chapter.19

  When absentee owners found out about squatters and locally written deeds, they had to act, even if it meant traveling long distances. If they did nothing, they risked challenges by adverse possession. If Party A owns a piece of land but makes no use of it, and if Party B grazes cattle on it and puts up a cabin, then Party B can assert title after a designated period, usually ten years. Absentees could defend themselves in court, but they needed to explain why they had never visited or turned a spade and why the interlopers did not deserve the benefits of their “sweat equity.” This happened to George Washington.20

  In September 1784, Washington “found it indispensably necessary to visit my Landed property west of the Apalacheon [sic] Mountains,” in what would become Washington County, Pennsylvania. The general acquired this tract as he had most of the others he owned in the region, as a reward for service during the previous war. But by the time of the Revolution he had neglected it, allowing a community to occupy it. He had a few other errands in the same area, so he took a trip. He visited tenants and collected rent. He dined here and there, chatted with friends and relatives, inspected a mechanical boat, and learned about the navigation of the Cheat River in western Virginia. When he arrived at his 2,800 acres, Washington came face-to-face with a breakaway sect of the Associated Presbyterian Church. They weren’t happy to meet him.

  At dinner that evening, the violators asked the general to relinquish the entire tract. The Presbyterians wanted the improvements they had made to around four hundred acres of meadow, arable, houses, and barns. They also wanted all the remaining unimproved land. They believed they had a solid case for adverse possession, that no judge would rule against them. Still, they might have hesitated to drag Washington into court. So the Presbyterians offered a compromise. They would buy the land for a little money on easy terms. Wrote Washington, “I told them I had no inclination to sell.” When he heard their story of schism and hardship, he softened a little and reconsidered. The general’s “last offer” was to sell for twenty-five shillings an acre, in three annual payments, with interest; or they could become his tenants by signing a 999-year lease. This was a common way around adverse possession. By agreeing to pay for the use of land, tenants secured the position of the owner.

  Unintimidated by the most powerful politician and military officer in the United States, the squatters countered that they would pay Washington’s price but over a longer period and without interest. He said no. The negotiation ended. One of the squatters claimed that Washington stood from his seat, “and holding a red silk handkerchief by one corner, he said, ‘Gentlemen, I will have this land just as surely as I now have this handkerchief.’” What is more certain is that Washington asked each of the squatters to stand or sit in a roll-call vote of their individual intentions. He called their names one by one, dramatically and with kingly gravitas, hoping to break their unity. They held firm.21

  Washington did not travel out west for the trial. His lawyer began the assault by suing the squatter with the strongest claim. He won a jury decision by proving that his client had neglected the property because
he was too busy commanding the Continental Army and founding the United States to visit it. The attorney then asked the judge to consolidate the other cases into one. That trial went quickly to the same conclusion. The squatting Presbyterians were evicted. By one estimate, judges in Westmoreland, Washington, and Fayette counties ruled on 654 cases of contested title and ejectment between 1785 and 1795, a number that suggests that squatting was rampant and, often enough, successful.22

  Settlement by preemption and squatting made agrarian existence possible in the mountains. Settling in advance of towns and dense populations ensured an extensive ecological base, a de facto commons if not de jure, that produced everything for subsistence and commodities for exchange without requiring money. And yet, many people in western Pennsylvania owned no land. Were they landless? It all depends on what that means.

  If landlessness refers to one denied access to woods and waters that they owned or not, then the word did not apply to anyone in the Pennsylvania backwoods or anywhere else in Appalachia during the eighteenth century. Consider that segment of the population who owned animals but no land. In 1783, Uriah Glover of Westmoreland County had fourteen animals but not an acre of meadow to his name. Susanah Robertson owned four horses, three head of cattle, and fifteen sheep but not a run of forest for them to graze in. Did Glover and Robertson lack any way of feeding their livestock? Of course not. The same goes for those who owned no taxable property whatsoever. Some were unmarried adult sons who would soon set up their own households. Others worked as tenants, with gardens and fields that they farmed on shares and forest meadows that they used with or without permission. In total, 51.6 percent of the 492 names on the county tax list owned no farm, but they all had access to the ecological base. In this sense, landlessness is a misleading term.23