Whiskey Rebellion

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WHISKEY REBELLION

An uprising in western Pennsylvania sparked by a tax on distilled spirits, the so-called Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 tested and ultimately affirmed the power of the national government. The roots of the conflict reached back to the severe depression that beset rural America during the 1780s. As urban elites enriched themselves with banknotes and government certificates left over from the Revolution, farmers were left with heavy debts and scarce currency. Economic distress—and anger towards "moneyed men"—grew the further one traveled from the Atlantic coast. The crisis stretched from Maine to Tennessee and triggered the New England Regulation, or Shays's Rebellion, of 1786–1787. Western Pennsylvania suffered as much as any region; in some counties, a majority of households faced debt prosecutions and foreclosures. When, in 1791, the new federal government imposed an excise tax on whiskey—a major commodity as well as libation on the frontier—western farmers refused to pay. Invoking the memory and message of the American Revolution, frontiersmen decried the invasions of "corrupt" government and called for a more equitable legal and economic order.

From 1791 to 1793, settlers in rural Pennsylvania and elsewhere used protest petitions, scare tactics, and simple foot-dragging to defy the excise. Few farmers who owned a distillery registered it; local constables and justices of the peace refused to enforce foreclosures on their neighbors' farms. On more than sixty occasions between 1787 and 1795, Pennsylvania farmers blocked roads to keep out tax collectors. Tax men who made it through these social and physical barriers risked tar and feathering, hair shaving, and other forms of public humiliation. Over the course of a decade, frontiersmen fused revolutionary and evangelical values into a logic of resistance. Engaged in chronic warfare with Indians and enmeshed in labor obligations with neighbors, they defined their "public" in opposition to a remote, oppressive government. Living close to survival's edge, they embraced an emotional form of Christianity that underscored the frailty of human will and effort. Itinerant preachers told frontier seekers that God did not respect earthly titles, that the wealthy and powerful had once persecuted Jesus, and that the meek and lowly would soon inherit the earth. Why, then, should patriotic citizens heed the unjust decrees of distant magistrates? Did they not have the same right to resist arbitrary power that their colonial forbears had so recently exercised?

Federal authorities in Philadelphia, however, insisted that popular defiance of the law was no longer legitimate once the United States had established a republican government with ratification of the Federal Constitution in 1788. For President George Washington, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton (author of the excise tax), and other Federalist power holders, the Revolution was definitively over: it was something to be defended, not reenacted. Indeed, they viewed dissent of any kind as seditious. Drawing from a cultural register that privileged "conspiracy" as an explanation for events, the Federalists believed that their Republic faced enemies within and without during the 1790s. Hence their reactions to western unrest: Hamilton wanted to suppress it with "super abundant" force. Washington initially took a more moderate tack, but when a furious crowd destroyed an inspector's mansion on the Pennsylvania frontier in July 1794, he declared that the frontier rebels menaced "the root of all law and order." The president was particularly alarmed by reports that some westerners had met with Spanish and British agents, perhaps to foment secession all along the frontier.

The Pennsylvania backcountry thus became the focal point of the government's response to rural discontent. From July to August 1794, Washington's cabinet mobilized a force to cow or crush the farmers. The state government of Pennsylvania, meanwhile, pursued negotiations with its distraught citizens. Early in September, rebel leaders agreed by a vote of 34 to 23 to the state's demands of loyalty oaths and the gradual payment of taxes. But the high number of nays, along with the continued harassment of customs officers, convinced Washington that force was still necessary. After mobilizing nearly fifteen thousand militiamen from four states, Washington and Hamilton personally led the troops westward in late September. Intimidated by this army and by the apparent turn of public opinion against them, the rebels offered little resistance. Federal troops arrested 150 men and sent 24 back to Philadelphia for trial; two were convicted, and Washington pardoned both. The defeat of the rebels continued (and continues) in the collective memory of the new nation. The name "Whiskey Insurrection"—coined, it seems, by Hamilton—suggests that the unrest was sudden, knee-jerk, and alcohol induced. Aggrieved farmers who had disputed profiteering and "speculation" since the 1780s became intoxicated, paranoid yokels who shook a fist at progress itself. By defeating the insurrection and then trivializing its roots, Federalist elites narrowed the scope of legitimate popular action to the ballot box.

bibliography

Bouton, Terry. "A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-Independence Pennsylvania." Journal of American History 87, no. 3 (December 2000): 855–887.

Kohn, Richard H. "The Washington Administration's Decision to Crush the Whiskey Rebellion." Journal of American History 59, no. 3 (December 1972): 567–584.

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

J. M. Opal

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation