The Whiskey Rebellion Series

The Militia Law Act, as well as certain parts of the Constitution itself, had been constructed for the very purpose of allowing troops to police citizens. The militia could “enforce the law,” “cause the laws to be duly executed,” and “suppress combinations,” all of which must mean, Hamilton said, that the militia can also break up meetings and assemblies that exist simply for the purpose of noncompliance with the law, when such meetings are supported by violence that baffles ordinary law enforcement.

The federal commissioners threatened the entry of troops into the Forks area and implied strongly that military incursion could be avoided it total submission were demonstrated by all people in the region. Repeal of the excise tax law was out of the question. Members of the entire Parkinson’s Ferry committee of sixty must unanimously declare their determination to submit to the laws of the United States and to refrain from obstructing the operation of the excise law. Two-fifths of the Parkinson’s Ferry committee preferred civil war.

The fate of males eighteen and older would depend on their signing, on September 11, and not a day later, an oath of submission to federal law. Those who signed on time, did not resist the troops in any way, and complied with the law in the future could count on an amnesty for past crimes. Anyone else, regardless of anything he’d done or not done during the insurgency, would be fair game for arrest by the troops.

The federal marshal for Pennsylvania was sent to serve summons to the people on the list. The writs required defendants to appear in court in August; courts were closed then. The rebels moved instantly to shut down all tax offices and punish not only officials but also civilian collaborators. Under the Militia Act, the president of the United States was now empowered to call out an army against them. And with Congress in recess, the president would be empowered by the new militia law to call out the largest possible force on his own discretion. 

Hamilton and Knox were arguing for moving immediately, with an overwhelming force of at least twelve thousand men, bigger than any American army to date, more than had beaten the British at Yorktown. The question of delay was somewhat academic anyway: Troops would need time to mobilize. Negotiations would meanwhile fail, revealing rebels as intractable.

Eastern newspapers railed against the insurgency; the officer classes in city militias were gung ho to march for glory. The seaboard cities filled with patriotic fervor, expressed hatred for the rebels, and wondered why the president hadn’t already moved against them. The troops could now move with impunity.

Hamilton began ordering arms and supplies and sending work to Henry Lee of Virginia, who would serve under Washington as commander of the whole force. Troops from New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia began marching west. On September 30, Washington and Hamilton stepped into a presidential coach and rode together down Market Street, leaving Philadelphia to join the army at Carlisle. Washington had always excelled at military administration, and Hamilton was enjoying a new one as secretary of war.

The Whiskey Rebellion Series

Washington felt he knew the Forks well. He’d been getting immensely frustrated with the major project of his life, western land speculation. In five decades, that speculation had given him a total of sixty thousand acres across the Appalachians. He’d deployed land scouts with instructions to break and get around laws limiting tract size. He’d threatened and bullied people who were eyeballing plots to which, by virtue of having eyeballed them first, he claimed title. When the royal proclamation of 1763 prohibited land purchases west of the mountains, he told his agent to buy there anyway. The War of Independence legitimized his titles by overturning royal injunctions. After the revolution, he showed no patience for illegal possession: he spent much energy bringing actions against squatters, disdaining their idea that title – or at least affordable rents – should be offered to those willing to live on and improve the land.

He needed full rent. He had a constant need for cash. Making Mount Vernon pay for itself was always a problem, and his late mother had been a carping, ungrateful drain on his slim cash resources. He’d hoped to gain solvency through collections of western rents and then – when canals and roads were supported by the government and built by his own company, when Indians were suppressed by the United States Army, when regional government became what he called well toned – make a fortune by selling those lands.

But his hopes for the west were growing dreary, his patience thin. The land was still squatted on; rents were uncollected The absence of cash in the west was well known to Washington: he had to accept grain and other barter as rent, which always sold, through his agents in the west, for less than he knew it was worth.

The whole problem was becoming encapsulated for Washington in the western people’s resistance to the tax law, which hadn’t been enforced anywhere over the mountains, from Kentucky to the Northwest Territory. Failure to collect a national tax imposed an embarrassing limit on the national reach. Tax resistance weakened big creditors’ confidence in the financial stability of the United States, which had promised to pay bondholders interest derived from excise revenues. To make up the shortfall, Hamilton had been forced to propose new federal taxes: excises on snuff, sugar, and carriages, as well as stamp taxes and new import duties. Because such taxes shifted burdens back to eastern merchants and creditors, now even federalists were worried about excessive taxation.

The western land bubble would soon burst for everybody if lands appeared not to be under effective control of the United States.

The Whiskey Rebellion Series

Even as Alexander Hamilton began considering ways of bringing a federal army presence to the Forks of the Ohio, five hundred men calling themselves the Mingo Creek Association emerged as a power at the Forks. The association had a long ancestry. Men who became members and allies of the association had, in the years leading to ratification of the U.S. Constitution, closed roads to towns where debt cases were heard and foreclosed property was auctioned; they’d enforce boycotts on liquor brought in from the east, they’d condemned tax collectors, and they’d corresponded with Virginians and Kentuckians of the need for western unity.

When word spread that a deputy was trying serve papers in the Johnson case, the tax collector encountered a gang that took him into the woods and began by using a horsewhip on him. His naked body, stripes new and raw, received the blistering tar. He was stuck with feathers, tied up, and left in the woods in agony, his horse, money, and warrants seized.

Now the association set goals far broader than attacks on collectors. It planned to unite the four western counties, and the whole trans-Appalachian west into armed opposition to eastern oppression. Conveniently for the association’s plans, the sanctioned state militias, which organized and armed all able-bodied adult white males, was subject to extreme degrees of popular democracy.

From Colonels down, officers were elected by the militiamen themselves, including by landless men and dependents in others’ households. Anyone possessed of charisma and effectiveness, even if lacking gorgeous uniforms, proud mounts, gleaming arms, or money, could rise in the militia system.

The association took an even more radical step. The revised, conservative state constitution had ended popular elections for local judges. The governor appointed judges. Creditors had been finding debt cases easier to bring and win. No citizen in the militia’s district, the association announced, was to bring suit in county court against any other citizen in the district without first applying to the association for what it presented as mediation. Mediators would be chosen by popular elections, held outside sanctioned political process.

Not surprisingly, given the association’s identity with the local militia, and the assaults for which it was becoming known, lawsuits for debt collection in the county court dropped off sharply. Going to law to collect debts or bring foreclosures suddenly took courage, even foolhardiness.

By May 1794, liberty poles were rising. Up to a hundred feet tall, these were symbols made most famously in Boston. The appearance of liberty poles in the western country thus had a meaning that was clear to everyone. Rebellion against tyranny was under way.

The western country had its own flag now too. Six stripes, alternating red and white, stood for the unified six counties of western Pennsylvania and northwestern Virginia. The people saw the whiskey tax only as a symbol. They wanted repeal, but they were also talking about a redistribution of wealth, especially of land, with rules for access to land and rewards for improvement.

Mingo Creek Militia – Colonel John Hamilton

Herman Husband – Philosopher of the Allegheny

The Whiskey Rebellion Series

Whiskey came in vogue early in the eighteenth century with the influx of Scots-Irish settlers, who brought expertise in domestic distilling. The Scots-Irish were notably tough descendants of Protestant Scots peasantry, who had resettled in Ulster and then been forced, by exorbitant rents and English taxes, to migrate to North America. By the time of the revolution, domestic whiskey was gaining popularity and would replace rum as the country’s drink.

Eighteenth-century Americans distilled whiskey just as their ancestors had, using a pot still. The good product was clear. Inhaling it would water the eyes and rustle nose hairs. Swallowed, it made a hard impact, then a glowing heat; in the end, the feeling was surprisingly smooth, and soon after recovery, another shot might seem to be in order. Barrel storage darkened the drink and brought out redolent grain, woodsmoke, sugar. Drunken raw or aging, whiskey abruptly makes the drinker and the world different.

Many small farmers distilled seasonally. Whiskey was consumed by men, women, and children at all times of the day and every sort of gathering muster, church, election, work, dance, and fight. Often a community distiller kept pot stills going through the harvest, and farmers brought in their grain and took away the whiskey, paying the distiller in a portion of product.

The best whiskey was known to come from the Forks of the Ohio, whose “Monongahela rye” possessed consistent strength and purity. The region achieved brand recognition. Its whiskey was known by name in Philadelphia and in New Orleans. More than a fourth of the stills in America were located at the Forks of the Ohio.

Whiskey became currency in places where coin wasn’t seen. Barter paralyzed local economies, but whiskey was a true medium, always exchangeable for cash somewhere down the line, thus maintaining value against metal. A liquid commodity both literally and figuratively, the drink democratized local economies, offering even tenants and sharecroppers laborers a benefit. Tenants often wanted to pay rent, and laborers often got paid, in a portion of the grain they harvested. Community stills transformed, for a cut, such cumbersome forms of payment into something fungible. And while landlords often refused in-kind crops, or demanded them in extravagant quantities, they’d take whiskey for rent.