Drink (34 page)

In the early days of settlement, stills were the largest, most complex, and most valuable man-made objects to be carried over the mountains. A still literally made money. People even traded slaves for them. A 1788 advertisement in the
Lexington Gazette
(by then a town of nearly a thousand souls) offered “a likely young Negroe” man, in exchange for “two copper stills one of about eighty gallons the other about forty gallons.” When it was discovered that Kentucky was a heaven for horses, stud fees were also priced in “corn juice.” For instance, according to the
Lexington Gazette
of March 17, 1792, the covering charge for “the celebrated swift horse, Ferguson’s Gray” was nine shillings’ worth of whiskey.

Not only was whiskey ubiquitous in the western settlements, it was considered to be a sacred substance that no democratic government should contaminate with taxation. The Scotch Irish had a history of evading excise in their place of origin, and they intended to continue to do so in the Americas. Indeed, it would have been hard to conceive of a more unpopular way to raise money in the West than a tax on whiskey, which served there as cash, savings, refreshment, and heritage. Many Americans in other states, in particular in the South, felt the same way, and when an excise bill, proposing just such a measure, was introduced into Congress in January 1791, it aroused a storm of protest. The only body of people in America to give it full-hearted support was the Philadelphia College of Physicians, which petitioned Congress to tax spirits as hard as they could, on the grounds that they were bad for the health. The bill, and the College of Physicians, met with furious opposition in the House. James Jackson of Georgia described the proposed excise as “odious, unequal, unpopular, and oppressive.” The physicians, moreover, were paranoid busybodies who next would want a law “interdicting the use of catsup, because some ignorant persons had been poisoned by eating mushrooms.”
³⁰
Representative Parker of Virginia assaulted the proposed tax with classical imagery. It would, he predicted, “let loose a swarm of harpies, who, under the denomination of revenue officers, will range through the country, prying into every man’s house and affairs, and like a Macedonian phalanx bear down all before them.”

Despite such spirited resistance, the bill was passed on January 27, 1791, and sent to the Senate, where its opponents labeled it an outrage. Its declared purpose was to raise funds for a navy to fight Islamic nations in the distant Mediterranean, which Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania believed to be spurious: “The trifling affair of our having eleven captives at Algiers . . . is made the pretext for going to war . . . and fitting out a fleet.” If the government was allowed to fill its coffers with excise dollars, who knew what it would attempt next, whether abroad or at home? “Farewell freedom in America,” he concluded.

In the event the bill was carried by the unanimous support of the northern states (southern senators voted thirteen to five against it), the country was divided into districts along state lines, and excisemen were appointed, who received a salary and a small percentage of the revenue that they were to collect. The excise was set at between nine and twenty-five cents a gallon, depending on the strength of the whiskey produced, for urban distilleries, and nine cents a gallon for rural stills. When news of this despotic piece of legislation reached the western fringes of American settlement, the people, as their representatives had predicted, were incandescent. A measure of their rage is provided by a contemporary observation that “a breath in favor of the law, was sufficient to ruin any man. . . . A clergyman was not thought orthodox in the pulpit, unless against the law: A physician was not capable of administering medicine, unless his principles were right in this respect.”

When the excisemen appointed in accordance with the new law attempted to exercise their powers in the fall of 1791, they met with a hostile reception. On September 1, Robert Johnson, collector for Washington and Allegheny counties in Pennsylvania, was attacked by sixteen men dressed as women who gave him a symbolic scalping and a layer of tar and feathers. Other collectors received similar welcomes, and very little excise gathering was done over the next two years, during which anger grew against a government that had presumed to tax “We, the People.” Discontent was encouraged by the appearance, in January 1793, of Edmond-Charles Genêt, an emissary from revolutionary France. A “dwarfish, dumpy man with dark red hair, coarse features, and a huge mouth from which issued forth a constant stream of passionate oratory in seven languages,” Genêt challenged Americans to overthrow their king, guillotine their aristocracy, and murder their tax gatherers. The irrelevant parts of his message were overlooked, his enthusiasm was admired, and the South and western portions of the United States were seized with a bout of Francophilia. Whole towns, stirred by the
partisan
spirit, staged lengthy binges, with bonfires, and whiskey-fueled speeches in favor of liberty from the despots in Philadelphia. President Washington was furious with Genêt: “Is the minister of the French republic to set the Acts of this Government at defiance, with impunity, and threaten the executive with an appeal to the people?” In the event, he might have spared his anger. Revolutionary France kept on revolting in Genêt’s absence, and he was forced to beg asylum in America after his own faction at home was displaced and guillotined.

Genêt married an American heiress and spent the rest of his life as a model citizen. However, the spirit of contention he had encouraged kept on growing. “Democratic clubs” flourished in the backcountry, whose purpose was to oppose anything beyond the bare minimum of government, and any form of taxes at all. The petitions they sent to Congress caused dismay. The United States would fall apart if people rejected a federal power of raising money. Republican newspapers set about vilifying democratic clubs. According, for example, to
The Virginia Chronicle
of July 17, 1794, the local democratic club was a “horrible sink of treason,” a “hateful synagogue of anarchy,” an “odious conclave of tumult,” a “frightful cathedral of discord,” a “poisonous garden of conspiracy,” and a “hellish school of rebellion and opposition to all regular and well balanced authority.” Fearing, perhaps, that hyperbolic abuse might not be enough to convince its readers that democratic clubs were evil, the
Chronicle
appealed to their reason: “Here then is the source from whence all your sedition flows, and until those crotalophorus and ostentiferous institutions are disconcantinated—and the individuals who compose them experience a decollation, their querulous bombilations and debulitions will never cease to obnubilate the prospects of their superiors.”

Despite such rebukes, crotalophorus democratic societies increased in number, and the predicted obnubilation over taxes on distillation continued apace. The Excise Act, meanwhile, had begun to divide communities. Some of the larger distillers, especially those with contracts to supply the army, had started to pay their taxes, which inspired opponents of the excise to extend their direct action beyond the people who enforced the act to those traitors who complied with it. Distillers who paid up were tarred and feathered or had their stills shot full of holes. This latter exercise was referred to as “mending” a still, and the marksmen who effected this style of repair adopted a nom de guerre—
Tom the Tinker
. When not occupied in fixing copper vessels, Tom wrote letters to the press in favor of a continuing revolution in the French style.

The volatile mood that prevailed in western Pennsylvania exploded into violence in July 1794, when federal officials were told to collect the excise tax and to serve writs on those distillers who had refused to pay. It was harvest time, and most of the countrymen were engaged in reaping, so that some writs were served in the fields to men surrounded by their families, neighbors, and friends. Such high-handed treatment, reminiscent of feudal Europe, was intolerable to the harvesters, who composed themselves into armed bands and marched on the home of General Neville, the exciseman for Allegheny, Washington, Fayette, Westmoreland, and Bedford counties. They attacked, he killed a pair of them and drove them off, and thus began the
Whiskey Rebellion.

Instead of returning in peace to their fields, the harvesters sent out riders to gather support, and by the following day they numbered over five hundred. From this point onward, they are known to history as the
Whiskey Boys,
and their first collective act was to renew their attack on Neville. They burned his house and its barns and slave quarters to the ground and, true to their new name, emptied the general’s cellar and drank its contents prior to putting the house to the torch. News of this outrage, or brave democratic act, spread through the countryside. Opponents of the excise hastened to join the Whiskey Boys at an assembly in Braddock’s Field, close to Pittsburgh, and debated what course of action to pursue. They robbed the mail to find out what news of their disobedience was being spread and decided to march on Pittsburgh, which was the principal metropolis in the region. The rebels formed a line two and a half miles long, for by now there were at least five thousand of them. Once they had reached their objective, which capitulated without a shot being fired, they stood down and set to drinking. The residents of Pittsburgh supplied them with whiskey, gratis. Hugh Brackenridge, editor of
The Pittsburgh Gazette,
explained the reasoning behind such largesse: “I thought it better to be employed in extinguishing the fire of their thirst, than of my house.”

So far so good seems to have been the conclusion of the Whiskey Boys, who elected a council and debated their next steps. They considered forming an independent republic and seeking alliances with France, Spain, and/or Britain, but settled for holding another meeting on August 14, at Whiskey Point, close to Pittsburgh, and inviting Virginia to send delegates. The mood at this gathering was bellicose. Brackenridge, after viewing the assembled riflemen, despaired of a peaceful solution. He noted that his fellow westerners were “warlike, accustomed to the use of arms; capable of hunger and fatigue; and can lie in the water like badgers.” Moreover, they were “enthusiastic to madness; and the effect of this is beyond all calculation.”

Meanwhile, news of the insurgency had reached Philadelphia. President Washington decided that the firmest measures were necessary to enforce the powers of the United States. He issued a proclamation that labeled the Whiskey Boys traitors and sent orders to the governors of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia to call out their militias. While these forces were being assembled, commissioners were sent to the fractious counties with the offer of amnesty to every insurgent who swore on oath the validity, and his acceptance, of the whiskey excise. The commissioners arrived while the Whiskey Boys were holding yet another meeting and delivered their ultimatum to the assembled masses: obedience or the noose.

Back East, recruitment of the militia was interrupted by protests. Americans resented being called up to fight against each other in favor of taxes. The eastern newspapers thrilled their readers by magnifying the scale of the insurrection. The
Boston Mercury,
for example, credited the rebels with possessing a formal army and a potent navy. Moreover, rumors were printed that the militia were being recruited because further oppressive taxes were on their way, including a one-shilling duty on men’s jackets and a fifteen-shilling charge for giving birth to a son.

Despite such negative press, an army of 12,950 had been mustered by October, and Washington traveled to Pennsylvania and to Maryland to inspect its component parts. The Pennsylvanian section was in action almost straightaway, when Governor Mifflin sent some Philadelphia light-horsemen to attack a party of New Jersey troops. Fortunately, there were no casualties and Mifflin issued a formal apology the next day, explaining he had been drunk. In the event, this was the only occasion in the entire campaign that shots were fired and sabers drawn in anger. At the same time as the federal army was being assembled, the Whiskey Boys had put the amnesty that they had been offered to the vote and had decided to capitulate.

This volte-face did not stem from cowardice—the rebels were happy to fight—but rather from the huge changes that had occurred in the short space of time between the excise bill becoming law and the fall of 1794. Settlement had proceeded at an astonishing pace around and beyond the Whiskey Boys. Moreover, they were isolated in their resistance: The Kentuckians, who might have been their allies, were focused on getting free navigation on the Mississippi, which was a federal matter, and potential friends in other states that did not suffer from the handicap of being landlocked simply avoided the excise by smuggling their spirits overseas.

Despite the resolution in favor of submission, there were still many democratic hotheads who opposed amnesty and advocated total war. Tom the Tinker shot up a few more stills and posted notices in which he warned, “My hammer is up and my ladle is hot.” As a consequence, when delegates of the Whiskey Boys met with Washington to hand in their resolution to submit, it was decided that their submission was incomplete and unconvincing, and the two wings of the army that had been gathered to enforce the law were dispatched to the backcountry. Along the march the soldiers refreshed themselves morning and night with the substance whose taxation they were there to support. According to the evidence of one of the militiamen, printed in the
American Daily Advertiser,
the campaign held more pleasures than hardships: “No sooner does the drum beat in the morning, than up I start, and away to my canteen, where a precious draft of new distilled whiskey animates and revives me. This being done, away to fire, where in ten minutes you will hear more genuine wit than Philadelphia will afford in a month. When we halt at night, our tents being pitched, we sit down on the straw, cover ourselves with blankets, and push about the [whiskey] canteen so briskly that at length we are obliged to lie down: A sound sleep then enables us to endure a repetition of fatigue—and so on.”