The Whiskey Rebellion Series

Recently liberated by the revolution, the people’s movement had strong opinions about democracy and economic fairness.  In America, the people’s movement drew energy from the Great Awakening, whose spiritual radicalism had gripped the colonies in the 1730s and ‘40s. By the 1770s, the movement wanted laws to dictate fair and equal distribution of wealth and credit. It wanted to limit the profits that a few moneyed men could reap from what it saw as the suffering and degradation of entire communities. To achieve those goals, it wanted democratic access to the political process.

During the Colonial period, gold and silver were rarely seen by ordinary people. But still, ordinary people, paralyzed and reduced to barter, had to borrow. When high payments and retiring debt was out of sight, creditors came in effect to own debtors’ labor and property. Farmers over-worked their soil in hopes of success and only failed more rapidly. When they couldn’t pay, their farms and businesses were seized. Families were sent in droves from their farms and shops to prisons and poorhouses, their land, livestock, and furniture auctioned off, sometimes to the very creditors who had foreclosed and were now picking up, at bargain prices, the debtors’ lands, mills and tools.

Many of the river industries were no longer owned and operated by the settlers themselves. Men labored more and more often in the mills and yards of rich entrepreneurs and merchants. An ironworks could employ dozens of men while its owner bought up thousands of foreclosed acres recently owned by his laborers. Even many who engaged in farm work no longer owned their own land; they’d become tenants of large landowners and hired hands of commercial farmers.

The people’s movement wanted that cycle stopped by law and had often used rowdy and sadistic tactics to frighten legislatures into providing relief. The people’s movement had long employed tactics that were extralegal, often illegal. The People’s Movement had shifted westward after the war and the radicals had involved themselves in two incidents in the 1780s that inadvertently enabled Hamilton to impose the whiskey tax of 1791. One was traditional in being criminal and violent. The other, even more disconcerting to creditors, was lawful and political.

Shay’s Rebellion

 

The Massachusetts assembly had taken an aggressive approach to consolidating and paying its war debts, benefiting the few who held interest-bearing state notes. Further taxes were levied on the people. Though some were payable in various kind of paper, they were simply not payable at all by many; mass foreclosures ensued. Protest took the form of petitions and meeting, demanding a revaluation of the debt along realistic lines. In 1786 the debtors staged a classic court riot in Northampton. In January of 1787 they tried to seize the federal arsenal in Springfield, where they were put down by the state militia and ringleaders were arrested.

 

After suppressing the Shays’ Rebellion, the Massachusetts legislature repealed the crushing tax laws. To nationalists like Hamilton, it was the old story; legislatures reacted to the people’s violence by passing laws that robbed investors.

 

 

Pennsylvania

 

In Pennsylvania, the radical state constitution allowed ordinary people an unusual degree of access to the government. The Pennsylvania assembly became a tense place. Throughout the eighties, power lurched back and forth from the party of creditors and merchants. The thing that truly dismayed the Morris circle was the Pennsylvania property requirement for voting: virtually none. Nor was there one for holding office. The poor could not only vote in Pennsylvania but also hold office.

 

Morris and other creditors had picked up depreciated Pennsylvania bonds, at a fraction of face value, from people in urgent need of cash. Having bought at a deep discount, creditors now hoped to get the state not merely to pay interest on but to actually pay off the debt, at face value, for an overnight creditor bonanza.

 

The radicals proposed instead to depreciate the bonds, by law, to real market value, about one-quarter face value, and make those depreciated certificates a legal tender for paying taxes, state mortgages, public fees of kinds, requiring creditors to accept that paper for payments on loans – never indeed redeeming them in gold and silver. Morris and other creditors, forced to accept these depreciated bills, castigated paper as the legalized pillage of the rich.