The Whisky Boys

It started with a carrot and ended with a stick. Alexander Hamilton called for Congress to allow alleged violators of the law to be tried in state, rather than federal courts. This might have pacified the Whiskey Boys, had not Hamilton chosen this time to crack down on past offenders. Excise collectors in Western Pennsylvania pursued tax evaders with renewed zeal. On May 30th, seventy-five distillers were summoned to Philadelphia on charges of tax evasion. What made the pill more bitter for them to swallow was the suspicion that some of the men had been selected for punishment more for their Jeffersonian views and criticism of Hamilton than for tax evasion.

On July 15th, 1794, local Marshall, David Lennox, and General John Neville, excise inspector for the western region were attacked by about forty men. Shots were fired, but no one was hurt. The next day one hundred men unsuccessfully attacked the General’s luxurious house, and on the third day five hundred rebels returned and burnt the mansion to the ground. Two weeks later they marched through Pittsburgh and peacefully dispersed. The Whisky Rebellion was over.

So why was the federal army, two months later, marching on Pittsburgh? Why were the mainly Scots and Irish settlers of this frontier area singled out for the massive show of force by the federal government? Whiskey Boys made violent protests in Kentucky, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, the Ohio Territory, and the Northwest, and their more powerful cousins, the large distillers in the Eastern cities were also against the tax. Yet only the Western Pennsylvanians had to deal with an army. Was the Union ready to collapse, as the Federalists insisted, or was George Washington acting like George III, riding roughshod over the civil liberties of his subjects. Is the Whisky Rebellion the story of a strong government restoring law and order, or is it the tale of an oppressed minority fighting for freedom?

The rights and wrongs are unclear, but what happened in the years after the rebellion says a great deal about this country today. The government of 1794 assembled a large army, and spent a great deal of money to subdue a few frontiersmen, deploying overwhelming force against a ragtag rabble of farmers and laborers. The administration made its point, and took some of the rebels on a tour through the justice system. Court cases dragged on, but the only two men convicted of treason were pardoned, albeit on most unflattering grounds.

Having established its authority the government was seemingly incapable of carrying out what it had been attempting since 1791. Hamilton watched in frustration as local courts, lawyers, and sympathetic judges thwarted his excise men. Of fifty criminal charges brought between December 1796 and November 1800, not one resulted in the imposition of the full penalty laid down by the law. Many of the cases were thrown out. Evasion of the taxes continued.

So the significance of the Whisky Rebellion does not lie in the character of the protagonists. It lies in the fact that, where other societies seem to fly apart in the face of change and rebellion, America flourishes in a state of constant ferment. Americans challenge the restraints of any authority that they have freely elected to judiciously restrain them. American society is routinely stressed by violent change. Other societies, more in awe of presidents and kings, less inclined to irritate the powers that be, might be destroyed. America thrives.