WHISKEY REBELLION

In 1794 thousands of farmers in western Pennsylvania took up arms in opposition to the enforcement of a federal law calling for the imposition of an excise tax on distilled spirits. Known as the "Whiskey Rebellion," this insurrection represented the largest organized resistance against federal authority between the American Revolution and the Civil War. A number of the whiskey rebels were prosecuted for treason in what were the first such legal proceedings in the United States.

Congress established the excise tax in 1791 to help reduce the $54 million national debt. The tax was loathed across the country. For a small group of farmers west of the Allegheny Mountains, the federal excise tax was singularly detestable. Bartering was the chief means of exchange in this frontier economy, and distilled spirits were the most commonly traded commodity. Cash was a disfavored currency in western Pennsylvania during the late eighteenth century, but whiskey, especially Monongahela Rye, was as valuable as gold. Whiskey was considered an all-purpose liquor, with locals using it for cooking and medicine, and drinking it at social occasions, among other uses.

By modern standards the excise tax of 1791 does not seem oppressive. Distillers were taxed based on the size of their stills. Stills with the capacity to annually produce at least 400 gallons of whiskey were taxed between 7 and 18 cents a gallon, depending on the proof of the liquor. Distillers who made stronger whiskey paid a higher tax. Smaller stills were taxed at a rate of 10 cents for every month a still was in operation, or 7 cents for every gallon produced, whichever was lower. Based on these rates, the average distiller was required to pay only a few dollars in liquor tax each year. But even an annual tax of $5 would have consumed a large percentage of the disposable income earned by farmers in the barter-based economy of western Pennsylvania.

The rebellion began in Pittsburgh during October of 1791 when a group of disguised farmers snatched a federal tax collector from his bed, and marched him five miles to a blacksmith shop where they stripped him of his clothes, and burned him with a poker. Over the next three years dozens of tax collectors were beaten, shot at, tarred and feathered, and otherwise terrorized, intimidated, and humiliated. The home and plantation of John Neville, the chief tax collector for southwestern Pennsylvania, were burned to the ground.

By 1794 the excise tax lay largely uncollected in western Pennsylvania. The national debt was rising, and respect for federal authority was waning. Rebel forces had swelled to 5,000. In October President george washington dispatched 15,000 troops to quell the resistance. Led by alexander hamilton, Washington's secretary of state, the federal troops met little opposition. Within a month, most of the rebels had dispersed, disavowed their cause, or left the state. Keeping a few soldiers in western Pennsylvania to maintain order, the federal army departed for Philadelphia, having arrested more than 150 people suspected of criminal activity.

In May of 1795 the Circuit Court for the Federal District of Pennsylvania indicted thirty-five defendants for an assortment of crimes associated with the Whiskey Rebellion. One of the defendants died before trial began, one defendant was released because of mistaken identity, and nine others were charged with minor federal offenses. Twenty-four rebels were charged with serious federal offenses, including high treason. Two men, john mitchell and Philip Vigol, were found guilty of treason, and sentenced to hang. Seventeen defendants were convicted of lesser crimes, and sentenced to prison terms of various lengths. Upon learning that none of the convicted rebels were principally responsible for instigating the armed resistance, Washington pardoned each of them.

By extinguishing the Whiskey Rebellion, the U.S. government withstood a formidable challenge to its sovereignty. Preceded by shays's rebellion in 1786, and followed by fries's rebellion in 1799, the Whiskey Rebellion is distinguished by its size. While all three rebellions were motivated by their opposition to burdensome taxes, neither Daniel Shays nor John Fries ever gathered more than a few hundred supporters at any one time. On at least one occasion, as many as 15,000 men and women marched on Pittsburgh in armed opposition to the federal excise tax on whiskey.

The Whiskey Rebellion also occupies a distinguished place in American jurisprudence. Serving as the backdrop to the first treason trials in the United States, the Whiskey Rebellion helped delineate the parameters of this constitutional crime. Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution defines treason as "levying War" against the United States. During the trials of the two men convicted of treason, Circuit Court Judge william paterson instructed the jury that "levying war" includes armed opposition to

the enforcement of a federal law. This interpretation of the Treason Clause was later applied during the trial of John Fries, and remains valid today.

further readings

Frear, Ned. 1999. The Whiskey Rebellion. Bedford, Pa.: Frear Publications.

WHISKEY REBELLION

WHISKEY REBELLION (1794). Residents of the American backcountry in the 1790s were intensely democratic and resented the fiscal policies of the secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, which concentrated power in the hands of the upper classes. Their many grievances included the failure to open the Mississippi River to navigation, the dilatory conduct of the Indian wars, the speculative prices of land, arduous and ill-paid militia duty, scarcity of specie, and the creation of a salaried official class. The excise law of 1791, which taxed whiskey—the chief transportable and barterable western product—furnished a convenient peg on which to hang these grievances, and for three years the opposition to this measure escalated.

Tensions erupted during the summer of 1794 in western Pennsylvania. Distillers caught violating the law were forced to travel to York or Philadelphia for trial, an onerous journey that would cost the value of the average western farm. Congress in May and June 1794 acknowledged the inequity and passed a measure making offenses against the excise law cognizable in state courts. While the bill was in Congress, the U.S. District Court of Pennsylvania issued a series of processes returnable to Philadelphia. However, these processes were not served until July, six weeks after the easing measure was passed. While serving a process, a federal marshal was attacked by angered residents in Allegheny County, and on 17 July several hundred men, led by members of a local "Democratic society," besieged and burned the home of General John Neville, the regional inspector of the excise.

The attackers would probably have stopped there, but certain leaders robbed the mail and found in the stolen letters expressions that they used to incite an attack on Pittsburgh. The southwestern militia was mustered at Braddock's Field on 1 August. The citizens of Pittsburgh were so alarmed that they exiled the odious townsmen, including Neville. The militia marched without violence on Pittsburgh on 2 August. Nevertheless, on 7 August President George Washington issued a proclamation ordering the disaffected westerners to their homes and called up the militia from Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

On 14–15 August delegates from the Monongahela Valley metat Parkinson's Ferry, but were prevented from drastic measures by the parliamentary tactics of the moderates. A committee appointed by Washington met with a western committee and arranged to poll the people of the western counties on their willingness to submit. The vote was unsatisfactory, and Washington set in motion the militia army that had meanwhile been gathering in the East. The western counties were occupied during November, and more than a score of prisoners were sent to Philadelphia. All of them were acquitted or pardoned, or the cases were dismissed for lack of evidence.

The federal government had passed the first serious test of its enforcement powers. The rebellion strengthened the political power of Hamilton and the Federalist Party. Circumstantial evidence seems to indicate that Hamilton promoted the original misunderstanding and sent the army west solely for that purpose. It is likely also that the defeat of the frontiermen encouraged investors to accelerate the economic development of the region that they had already begun.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baldwin, Leland D. Whiskey Rebels: The Story of a Frontier Uprising. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968.

Miller, John C. The Federalist Era, 1789–1801. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960.

Slaughter, Thomas P. The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Leland D.Baldwin/a. r.

See alsoAmnesty ; Distilling ; Hamilton's Economic Policies ; Insurrections, Domestic ; Moonshine ; Pennsylvania ; Taxation .

Whiskey Rebellion, 1794 uprising in western Pennsylvania by settlers protesting a federal excise tax on distilled whiskey.Although similar protests erupted elsewhere, western Pennsylvania became the flash point because it was where the federal government tried to enforce the tax by legal coercion and military intimidation.

A tax on whiskey at the still was part of Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton's program, enacted in 1790–1791, to fund federal and state debt. But the excise measure roused anger in the cash‐poor backcountry, particularly because it taxed large distillers at a lower rate, forcing small, seasonal distillers either to absorb the added cost or charge more to their customers, many of whom were small farmers and rural laborers. As backcountry protests, intimidations, and stonewalling erupted from Georgia to Pennsylvania, halting tax collections, President George Washington and Hamilton, mindful of Shays's Rebellion of 1786, decided in the summer of 1794 on a forceful response. Because of western Pennsylvania's proximity to the federal capital at Philadelphia, it was selected as a test case. As federal marshals served court orders requiring noncomplying distillers to appear in federal district court in Philadelphia, several thousand armed men defiantly gathered near Pittsburgh. In August and September, Washington called up thirteen thousand militia and ordered them into western Pennsylvania. With Washington and Hamilton personally leading the troops, along with the Revolutionary War hero Henry Lee, organized resistance collapsed. Two ringleaders convicted of treason were pardoned by Washington.

For the first time under the new Constitution, the central government had marshaled impressive power to uphold federal authority. Although the government in fact never effectively collected the whiskey tax, which was repealed in 1802, Federalists could nevertheless plausibly claim that the new nation had demonstrated its determination to enforce the law against defiant citizens. This display of Federalist power, however, also stirred resentments that helped elect Thomas Jefferson president in 1800.
See also Early Republic, Era of the; Federalist Party; Taxation.

Bibliography

Thomas P. Slaughter , The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution, 1986.
Stanley Elkins and and Eric McKitrick , The Age of Federalism, 1993, Chapter 10, pp. 451–488.

Roger H. Brown

Whiskey Rebellion 1794, uprising in the Pennsylvania counties W of the Alleghenies, caused by Alexander Hamilton 's excise tax of 1791. The settlers, mainly Scotch-Irish, for whom whiskey was an important economic commodity, resented the tax as discriminatory and detrimental to their liberty and economic welfare. There were many public protests, and rioting broke out in 1794 against the central government's efforts to enforce the law. Troops called out by President Washington quelled the rioting, and resistance evaporated. Nevertheless Hamilton sought to make an example of the settlers and illustrate the newly created government's power to enforce its law; many were arrested. President Washington pardoned the two rebels who were convicted of treason. The tax was repealed in 1802.

Bibliography: See L. D. Baldwin, Whiskey Rebels (rev. ed. 1967); W. Hogeland, The Whiskey Rebellion (2006).

Whiskey Rebellion the refusal of U.S. grain farmers and whiskey distillers to pay a new excise tax on spirits in 1794, and the subsequent government quashing of this rebellion, regarded as the first real test of the federal government's power to enforce laws. The conflict was largely confined to western Pennsylvania, where much whiskey was produced. President George Washington ordered a large militia to meet the resistance, which quickly disappeared. The Whiskey Tax was repealed under President Thomas Jefferson.

Whisky Rebellion (1794) A rising of farmers in western Pennsylvania, USA, in protest at Secretary of the Treasury Alexander HAMILTON's excise tax of 1791. The frontiersmen who made whisky considered the tax discriminatory. President George WASHINGTON called out 15,000 troops to quell the rioting, proving the federal government's power to enforce the country's laws and earning the frontiersmen's hatred of the FEDERALISTS' policies.

Whiskey Rebellion (1794) Revolt against the US government in w Pennsylvania. It was provoked by a tax on whisky, and was the first serious challenge to federal authority. Collection of the tax met violent resistance, but when President Washington called out the militia, the rebellion collapsed.