In December 1794, George Washington emerged from the
President’s House in Philadelphia to observe a strange parade. As crowds
mobbed the sidewalks to jeer and gawk, mounted officers marched prisoners,
brought over the mountains from western Pennsylvania, through the streets of
Philadelphia. These were trophies of federal victory over the whiskey rebels.
Two years earlier, even while General Wayne was building his army at Fort Fayette in Pittsburgh, an uprising had begun roiling that area. Its sources were in the radical economic populism that everybody in federal government had written and ratified the Constitution to put an end to. Small farmers in the West had long been objecting to eastern landlords’ and investors’ pull on the region’s wealth: government-connected canal projects launched by Washington and others; government delay in pursuing American access to the Mississippi; what western settlers saw as the government’s failure to protect them from Indian attack. These radicals were rank-and-file veterans of the War of Independence, sent home with nothing when the officers were made federal bondholders, and their communities had long been resisting wealthy concentration and trying to get ahead their own way. Western juries refused to convict debtors. Debt prisoners were broken out of jails. Boycotts were enforced against foreclosure sales. Trees were felled to block steep, narrow passes and keep officials out. Militias were formed to kill Indians.
Yet many of these radicals weren’t anti-federalist. Many had hoped the national government would foster economic fairness. Hence the explosiveness of their disappointment in Alexander Hamilton’s revenue measures, passed by the First Congress.
The crux of those measures was a tax on whiskey, the first federal tax laid on a domestic product, earmarked for making regular interest payments –tax free- to the small group of wealthy public bondholders. Whiskey was the small western farmer’s only cash crop, hence their only means of gaining incremental profits. Seasonal distilling helped them to avoid the debt penury that robbed them of independence and sometimes of land itself, making them tenants of and laborers for big planters, merchants, and speculators, those very bondholders who would benefit from the tax. Yet Hamilton carefully calibrated minutiae in the whiskey tax to favor big distilling and shut down small farming, and while his Jeffersonian opposition in Congress didn’t understand these mechanisms or their purposes, ordinary westerners certainly did.
Hamilton and the western radicals understood each other. The tax clamped down hardest at the Ohio headwaters, where the best whiskey was made and radical populism flourished. Hamilton’s taking over supply to Wayne’s army from Henry Knox played an important role: Hamilton placed whiskey sale to Fort Fayette, an essential service advertised politically as a boon to small western farmers, in the hands of the few, rich locals with connections to Washington and other eastern politicians, those same families who had been sewing up the business around the headwaters for years. Hamilton assigned members of one of the biggest planting and distilling families in the region to collect the tax that directly benefited it and to serve as army whiskey contractors; another family member served as quartermaster in Fort Fayette, buying the product. Hamilton also got Congress to pass a measure for removing anyone accused of nonpayment of the tax all the way over the mountains to Philadelphia for trial. Removal of that kind had long been viewed as tyranny.
Each of these stinging measures served as incitement to an uprising. Hamilton labeled the ensuing events “the whiskey insurrection” in order to erase its critique of his economic plan, but the armed militias didn’t call themselves whiskey rebels: they called themselves regulators, in the sense of breaking up monopolistic power, and by the summer of 1794 they’d effectively taken over the whole region, tarring and feathering tax collectors, bullying tax-compliant fellow citizens, and coercing regional loyalty to their cause. Marching in military order under veteran Revolutionary leaders, they exchanged gunfire in battle with a federal officer. They marched against Fort Lafayette, but didn’t attack it; instead, thousands met late that summer, armed, at a reginal congress on a high bank of the Monongahela, where five western counties of Pennsylvania, plus delegations from western Virginia, flew their own regional flag. These radical militias announced that the West was independent of the United States. Sharpshooters, they defied any force to come through the mountain passes to enforce U.S. sovereignty in the West.
So financial investment and U.S. sovereignty in the West had come under threat again. This time the threat came not from the indigenous inhabitants but from American citizens. Washington had told Hamilton that military forcer against the citizenry must only come as a last resort, and here that report was.
Yet the army was busy. By the time the rebellion turned to secession, Washington and Knox were urging Wayne to start his march out of Greene Ville, and Washington warned Hamilton that, anyway, if they used regular troops against the citizenry, the anti-army crowd would howl that suppressing the populace was the real purpose of forming a standing army.
What they had to work with was the new Militia Act that Congress had passed in 1792. In contemplation of just such disturbances, the act gave the president the power to call out and federalize state militias to putdown insurrection. Hamilton faced little effective opposition in the cabinet. Jefferson had just resigned his office, and encouraging Knox to request leave to inspect his troubled Maine investments, Hamilton raised a huge militia from new Jersey and eastern Virginia and Maryland and placed himself at the organizational center of planning for a military operation against western Pennsylvania, managing supply, contracting, recruitment, uniforms, and rendezvous. Rich city bravos, too young to have served in the Revolution and eager for a taste of easy glory, signed up as officers and began squabbling over their ranks and spending heavily on uniforms, swords, and horses. The backdoor draft meanwhile filled out the soldiery with the kinds of insubordinate, irregular novices that Washington and Hamilton had always complained about. In the end, they raised about twelve thousand troops, more than double the limit of Wayne’s regulars, more than had beaten the British at the Battle of Yorktown, to march against American citizens.
The president was to lead this operation personally, and Hamilton wrote anonymously for the papers, too, ginning up a powerful outburst of nationalist fervor. Westerners were soon being denigrated by the eastern public as ‘white Indians’ and worse. Some congressmen would later grouse about all of this, but in the face of public opinion few were eager to oppose the executive in putting down an insurrection of grubby western settlers.
The administration was meanwhile employing a technique borrowed from its Indian diplomacy: sham negotiations with the rebels to placate Congress, confuse the enemy, and but time for military buildup. A set of commissioners went west, empowered to give nothing but a promise to hold off invasion under the condition that an overwhelming majority of the people in the region expressly submitted to federal authority.
The most militant rebels had already fled the region, and the headwaters citizens, petrified at the prosect of a federal invasion, did offer complete submission. On a day of referendum dictated by the federal commissions, white adults throughout the region went to polling places to put their names on a loyalty oath supposed to hold off the invasion or, if the invasion must come anyway, guarantee the signers amnesty. But Washington and Hamilton weren’t really about to halt the invasion now, regardless of what the populace might agree too. Hamilton was already changing dates on military orders to disguise the buildup’s timing and preserve the fiction of good-faith negotiations. At the last minute, he asked Washington for permission to go along, and in September, the commander in chief, mostly riding in a coach, was commanding in the field, with Hamilton back in his Revolutionary role as chief of staff.
Yet having led the army to the steep, remote mountains around the village of Bedford, Pennsylvania, President Washington turned back for the capital. He never, in the end, returned to the headwaters where he’d first seen the great wealth of the West and first made his name, but left the operation to Hamilton and Governor Henry Lee of Virginia. While the president sent them instructions, for the record and from a distance, against looting and pillaging the poor farms of the region, Hamilton and Lee came down out of the Alleghenies with astonishing force. The mask was off. Hamilton was no longer accompanying the mission or serving as the president’s chief of staff. He was in charge.
Subjecting the general public to roundups, rough interrogation,, and indefinite detention, the riled-up officers carried out warrantless, door-kicking, late-night mass arrests of hundreds of people against whom both Hamilton and Washington knew they had no evidence, in near total disregard of the supposed amnesty. Adept in the art of rationale, Hamilton wrote to Washington to justify such measures for the record: as a lawyer, he noted that any citizen is empowered to arrest a traitor. Meanwhile, he tried to get detainees to name names, less of rebel leaders than political enemies he hoped to see hanged on trumped-up charges of fomenting rebellion. He’d brought a federal judge long, but per Washington’s orders, as composed by Hamilton, the civil judiciary was subordinated to military authority, and the judge fully cooperated with the executive branch.
Two years earlier, even while General Wayne was building his army at Fort Fayette in Pittsburgh, an uprising had begun roiling that area. Its sources were in the radical economic populism that everybody in federal government had written and ratified the Constitution to put an end to. Small farmers in the West had long been objecting to eastern landlords’ and investors’ pull on the region’s wealth: government-connected canal projects launched by Washington and others; government delay in pursuing American access to the Mississippi; what western settlers saw as the government’s failure to protect them from Indian attack. These radicals were rank-and-file veterans of the War of Independence, sent home with nothing when the officers were made federal bondholders, and their communities had long been resisting wealthy concentration and trying to get ahead their own way. Western juries refused to convict debtors. Debt prisoners were broken out of jails. Boycotts were enforced against foreclosure sales. Trees were felled to block steep, narrow passes and keep officials out. Militias were formed to kill Indians.
Yet many of these radicals weren’t anti-federalist. Many had hoped the national government would foster economic fairness. Hence the explosiveness of their disappointment in Alexander Hamilton’s revenue measures, passed by the First Congress.
The crux of those measures was a tax on whiskey, the first federal tax laid on a domestic product, earmarked for making regular interest payments –tax free- to the small group of wealthy public bondholders. Whiskey was the small western farmer’s only cash crop, hence their only means of gaining incremental profits. Seasonal distilling helped them to avoid the debt penury that robbed them of independence and sometimes of land itself, making them tenants of and laborers for big planters, merchants, and speculators, those very bondholders who would benefit from the tax. Yet Hamilton carefully calibrated minutiae in the whiskey tax to favor big distilling and shut down small farming, and while his Jeffersonian opposition in Congress didn’t understand these mechanisms or their purposes, ordinary westerners certainly did.
Hamilton and the western radicals understood each other. The tax clamped down hardest at the Ohio headwaters, where the best whiskey was made and radical populism flourished. Hamilton’s taking over supply to Wayne’s army from Henry Knox played an important role: Hamilton placed whiskey sale to Fort Fayette, an essential service advertised politically as a boon to small western farmers, in the hands of the few, rich locals with connections to Washington and other eastern politicians, those same families who had been sewing up the business around the headwaters for years. Hamilton assigned members of one of the biggest planting and distilling families in the region to collect the tax that directly benefited it and to serve as army whiskey contractors; another family member served as quartermaster in Fort Fayette, buying the product. Hamilton also got Congress to pass a measure for removing anyone accused of nonpayment of the tax all the way over the mountains to Philadelphia for trial. Removal of that kind had long been viewed as tyranny.
Each of these stinging measures served as incitement to an uprising. Hamilton labeled the ensuing events “the whiskey insurrection” in order to erase its critique of his economic plan, but the armed militias didn’t call themselves whiskey rebels: they called themselves regulators, in the sense of breaking up monopolistic power, and by the summer of 1794 they’d effectively taken over the whole region, tarring and feathering tax collectors, bullying tax-compliant fellow citizens, and coercing regional loyalty to their cause. Marching in military order under veteran Revolutionary leaders, they exchanged gunfire in battle with a federal officer. They marched against Fort Lafayette, but didn’t attack it; instead, thousands met late that summer, armed, at a reginal congress on a high bank of the Monongahela, where five western counties of Pennsylvania, plus delegations from western Virginia, flew their own regional flag. These radical militias announced that the West was independent of the United States. Sharpshooters, they defied any force to come through the mountain passes to enforce U.S. sovereignty in the West.
So financial investment and U.S. sovereignty in the West had come under threat again. This time the threat came not from the indigenous inhabitants but from American citizens. Washington had told Hamilton that military forcer against the citizenry must only come as a last resort, and here that report was.
Yet the army was busy. By the time the rebellion turned to secession, Washington and Knox were urging Wayne to start his march out of Greene Ville, and Washington warned Hamilton that, anyway, if they used regular troops against the citizenry, the anti-army crowd would howl that suppressing the populace was the real purpose of forming a standing army.
What they had to work with was the new Militia Act that Congress had passed in 1792. In contemplation of just such disturbances, the act gave the president the power to call out and federalize state militias to putdown insurrection. Hamilton faced little effective opposition in the cabinet. Jefferson had just resigned his office, and encouraging Knox to request leave to inspect his troubled Maine investments, Hamilton raised a huge militia from new Jersey and eastern Virginia and Maryland and placed himself at the organizational center of planning for a military operation against western Pennsylvania, managing supply, contracting, recruitment, uniforms, and rendezvous. Rich city bravos, too young to have served in the Revolution and eager for a taste of easy glory, signed up as officers and began squabbling over their ranks and spending heavily on uniforms, swords, and horses. The backdoor draft meanwhile filled out the soldiery with the kinds of insubordinate, irregular novices that Washington and Hamilton had always complained about. In the end, they raised about twelve thousand troops, more than double the limit of Wayne’s regulars, more than had beaten the British at the Battle of Yorktown, to march against American citizens.
The president was to lead this operation personally, and Hamilton wrote anonymously for the papers, too, ginning up a powerful outburst of nationalist fervor. Westerners were soon being denigrated by the eastern public as ‘white Indians’ and worse. Some congressmen would later grouse about all of this, but in the face of public opinion few were eager to oppose the executive in putting down an insurrection of grubby western settlers.
The administration was meanwhile employing a technique borrowed from its Indian diplomacy: sham negotiations with the rebels to placate Congress, confuse the enemy, and but time for military buildup. A set of commissioners went west, empowered to give nothing but a promise to hold off invasion under the condition that an overwhelming majority of the people in the region expressly submitted to federal authority.
The most militant rebels had already fled the region, and the headwaters citizens, petrified at the prosect of a federal invasion, did offer complete submission. On a day of referendum dictated by the federal commissions, white adults throughout the region went to polling places to put their names on a loyalty oath supposed to hold off the invasion or, if the invasion must come anyway, guarantee the signers amnesty. But Washington and Hamilton weren’t really about to halt the invasion now, regardless of what the populace might agree too. Hamilton was already changing dates on military orders to disguise the buildup’s timing and preserve the fiction of good-faith negotiations. At the last minute, he asked Washington for permission to go along, and in September, the commander in chief, mostly riding in a coach, was commanding in the field, with Hamilton back in his Revolutionary role as chief of staff.
Yet having led the army to the steep, remote mountains around the village of Bedford, Pennsylvania, President Washington turned back for the capital. He never, in the end, returned to the headwaters where he’d first seen the great wealth of the West and first made his name, but left the operation to Hamilton and Governor Henry Lee of Virginia. While the president sent them instructions, for the record and from a distance, against looting and pillaging the poor farms of the region, Hamilton and Lee came down out of the Alleghenies with astonishing force. The mask was off. Hamilton was no longer accompanying the mission or serving as the president’s chief of staff. He was in charge.
Subjecting the general public to roundups, rough interrogation,, and indefinite detention, the riled-up officers carried out warrantless, door-kicking, late-night mass arrests of hundreds of people against whom both Hamilton and Washington knew they had no evidence, in near total disregard of the supposed amnesty. Adept in the art of rationale, Hamilton wrote to Washington to justify such measures for the record: as a lawyer, he noted that any citizen is empowered to arrest a traitor. Meanwhile, he tried to get detainees to name names, less of rebel leaders than political enemies he hoped to see hanged on trumped-up charges of fomenting rebellion. He’d brought a federal judge long, but per Washington’s orders, as composed by Hamilton, the civil judiciary was subordinated to military authority, and the judge fully cooperated with the executive branch.
There wasn’t much legal to do anyway. As Hamilton
and Washington discussed by letter, they were seeking to make intimidating
examples, not achieve convictions based on evidence. A gaggle of detainees was
sent eastward over the mountains, in chains and on foot in harsh conditions -
it was winter now- under and officer known taking pleasure in demeaning and abusing
prisoners. Hamilton meanwhile subjected the entire headwaters region to military
occupation. Citizens signed loyalty oaths delivered by armed dragoons, and
Hamilton and Lee established, for the foreseeable future, a federal soldiery at
Pittsburgh and in towns nearby.
The skinny, bedraggled prisoners in the parade the president was watching in Philadelphia that December day hadn’t been indicted, in most cases, for a crime. None had been convicted of anything. Indeed, only three of these captives would ever be convicted. Even eastern juries could perceive the lack of evidence, and adding to the sense of presidential large, Washington would pardon those few convicts. Indictments and convictions were beside the pointy. This parade was the point. Blame for the operation’s extremity – really ,its total unconstitutionality – would forever rest on Hamilton, not Washington.
It was when he’d been with Hamilton on the march that Washington had received news of Wayne’s victory at Fallen Timbers. With that victory over the western Indian confederation, and now with the suppression of western Pennsylvania, there could be no doubt in the American public mind, or the mind of the world, that the United States possessed the West. And Wayne’s victory had been achieved by a regular, federally organized army. It this represented a world changing success for the nation and Washington.
He’d long been hoping to sell much of his western properties and gain rewards, so long obstructed and deferred, of a lifelong investments amounting to decades of complicated headaches. Management at a distance, in letter after letter, both of his western claims and of Mount Vernon, took up many hours during is presidency and contributed top Washington’s often evincing stoic, barely contained beleaguerment. He’s begun speculating in the West in his energetic teens. Now his energy, hearing, and memory were flagging. Together, Wayne’s march and the suppression of western Pennsylvania not only established U.S. sovereignty west of the Alleghenies and in the Northwest Territory but also increased the value of Washington’s western land portfolio by about 50 percent.
He rarely showed emotion, of course, and Philadelphians watching the president stand outside his house had come to project on the great man whatever they imagined he might be feeling. Still, the story goes that on the day of the prisoner parade in Philadelphia, the public saw a look of immense, calm satisfaction over the face of the American Cincinnatus. He was halfway through his second term. Setting a tradition unbroken until 19490, and later enshrined in law, he wouldn’t accept a third. He returned to his farm.
The skinny, bedraggled prisoners in the parade the president was watching in Philadelphia that December day hadn’t been indicted, in most cases, for a crime. None had been convicted of anything. Indeed, only three of these captives would ever be convicted. Even eastern juries could perceive the lack of evidence, and adding to the sense of presidential large, Washington would pardon those few convicts. Indictments and convictions were beside the pointy. This parade was the point. Blame for the operation’s extremity – really ,its total unconstitutionality – would forever rest on Hamilton, not Washington.
It was when he’d been with Hamilton on the march that Washington had received news of Wayne’s victory at Fallen Timbers. With that victory over the western Indian confederation, and now with the suppression of western Pennsylvania, there could be no doubt in the American public mind, or the mind of the world, that the United States possessed the West. And Wayne’s victory had been achieved by a regular, federally organized army. It this represented a world changing success for the nation and Washington.
He’d long been hoping to sell much of his western properties and gain rewards, so long obstructed and deferred, of a lifelong investments amounting to decades of complicated headaches. Management at a distance, in letter after letter, both of his western claims and of Mount Vernon, took up many hours during is presidency and contributed top Washington’s often evincing stoic, barely contained beleaguerment. He’s begun speculating in the West in his energetic teens. Now his energy, hearing, and memory were flagging. Together, Wayne’s march and the suppression of western Pennsylvania not only established U.S. sovereignty west of the Alleghenies and in the Northwest Territory but also increased the value of Washington’s western land portfolio by about 50 percent.
He rarely showed emotion, of course, and Philadelphians watching the president stand outside his house had come to project on the great man whatever they imagined he might be feeling. Still, the story goes that on the day of the prisoner parade in Philadelphia, the public saw a look of immense, calm satisfaction over the face of the American Cincinnatus. He was halfway through his second term. Setting a tradition unbroken until 19490, and later enshrined in law, he wouldn’t accept a third. He returned to his farm.
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