You are all greedy and inconsiderate, you will not happily repay the meager sum of money that was used on you defended you from those dirty French, they were French so you would have won anyway but that’s beside the point. We protected you in the French and Indian War so you need to repay us. You owe your lives to King George III just like every other British subject, no matter how insignificant and ruffian-like you are. How can you oppose the Stamp Act that is ridiculous, just because you don’t like something you can’t act like an infant and throw a hissy fit and boycott all British goods. The Stamp Act is merely the British Crown regaining the wealth lost defending you, I cannot reiterate that enough.

            You Patriots are nothing but brigands with a death wish, you will feel the wrath of the British Army and its well organized killing machine. You don’t even have proper uniforms, SCOFF! God bless the loyalists who live in the United States, those are the real PATRIOTS, because you have no country! You are part of the British Empire! You will never defeat us! You’re Declaration of Independence it void and we will burn it just as soon as we get over there to America, it’s a long boat trip you see… we need reinforcements.

            You claim you will not pay taxes without representation? Well the average American pays one fiftieth of what a British person pays, so why don’t we cut off George Washington’s big toe and he can represent you in our parliament! How’s that for a Modest Proposal? The British government and army are not going to let this go unpunished, prepare for extreme retaliation from the entire might of the British Red Coats. Prepare to kneel at the feet of King George III while you watch Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington are beheaded.  That will only occur though, after your cities burned, your wives’ raped and your children drafted into the Royal Navy.

When Nancy Pelosi declared you a gift from God shortly after your inauguration, I admit that I – like many Conservative Americans – laughed long and loudly.  However, looking back over the past 24 months, I have to finally and humbly admit that we were wrong, and Speaker Pelosi was right.  My, how right she was!

Never, in my lifetime, have we had a President whose occupation of the White House was more obviously the work of Divine Providence.  Of all the nine Administrations I have lived through, yours has been the one that has most filled me with a sense of destiny and a greater purpose for this country.  Because you are the first President who has reminded me, clearly and unequivocably, why we broke from the British Crown in the first place. 

I want to thank you, Mr. President, for giving us a living example of the arrogance and high-handedness that characterized the attitude of George III toward the original colonies.  The narcissistic, callous and dismissive nature of your iron-fisted rule have been like an interactive history lesson, in which we have been made painfully aware of the realities of living under a soverign to whom the citizenry are little more than cattle.  To be truthful, the contempt in which you and your Democrat “Tory” government hold the American people has at times exceeded even that of George III.  Even the control and dignity of our  bodies – indeed, the bodies of our children - have been usurped, so that our freedom to say no to unlawful groping and stripsearching is labelled illegal.  It is not possible, Mr. President, for free people to live in such an environment without determining to see that it is not only destroyed but destroyed utterly, and all its creators with it.  To that end, We the People have become reunited once more, our love of country has been reawakened, and it will be a cold day in hell before the Democrats get  hold of the reins of power in this country again.

So you can see why I agree with Speaker Pelosi that you are, indeed, a gift from God – even though, as so often is the case with God’s greatest gifts, we didn’t recognize the fact at first.  Please accept our thanks for the part  you have played in this Divine wake-up call.  Feel free to leave at any time; I believe God has made his point. 

By the time the army arrived in Western Pennsylvania the hotheads who had protested taxation, not of tea, but whiskey, had gone home to their farms. Soldiers stumbled upon a few surprised workers and arrested seventy-five men, shipping them back east, where they were tried and acquitted of treason, except for two who were pardoned by George Washington, on the grounds that one was feeble-minded and the other insane.

The headaches started in 1791 when Alexander Hamilton pushed through congress a 25% excise tax on whiskey, to be levied at source, which in the case of the Pennsylvania farmers was a multitude of small stills in barns and outhouses dotted around the back country. Hamilton no doubt acted from a sense of fiscal responsibility, but three hundred miles across the mountains was a different world and the wealthy Easterner overlooked several important facts.

One was a belief on the part of the farmers that the tax was one more instance of rich Easterners bleeding hard-working poor frontiersmen. Whiskey was important to these people. They distilled the spirit from grain, since the long journey across the mountains to the major markets of the east was expensive, and whiskey was much easier to transport than the bulky primary product. Distance also meant that a tax at source would be difficult to pass on to the consumer across the mountains, and locally, whiskey was used in what was still largely a barter economy, almost as a form of currency. A familiar tipple, a linchpin of the economy, and a basic money maker, the spirit was dear to the hearts of the Whiskey Boys.

Considering this, the initial reaction in Western Pennsylvania was mild. Petitions were signed. Local luminaries like Hugh Henry Brackenbridge, William Findlay and Albert Gallatin were a moderating influence. Meetings took place in Pittsburgh and surrounding areas where talk and whiskey were dispensed liberally. The tax was evaded wherever possible, and the irritated central government brought sporadic pressure to bear on the distillers.

Over the next three years the excise act was somewhat modified but the tax was still considered unfair by the whiskey boys who conducted a tug-of-war against the government regarding the disposition of their profits. Unfortunate tax collectors, mostly locally based federal employees, were harassed and threatened. Between 1791 and 1793, a handful of excise men were roughed up and intimidated, but this was quite restrained behavior for the wild frontier of a young country which, on the issue of unfair taxation, had less than two decades earlier wrenched independence for itself by violent revolution. It seemed that sooner or later something must break loose, and in 1794, something did, with a vengeance.

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.