The Whiskey Rebellion

Describes the civil insurrection in Western Pennsylvania against a Federal excise tax on distilled spirits imposed at the point of production. The brainchild of Alexander Hamilton was intended to raise domestic revenue to pay national debts from the war for independence. the tax aroused intense ire of small scale farmers and distillers who believed it constituted taxation without representation and discriminated against small scale Western interests. The insurrection featured multiple lines of conflict: across regions, economic classes, commercial interests, and debtor-creditor relations. hogeland chronicles the breakdown in society reminiscent of the border states before and after the civil war. Economic conflicts presage those of the Jacksonian and Populist eras of the 1830,s and 1890,s, respectively. Hogeland affirms the Madisonian caricature of Hamilton as an ambitious militarist who favored wealthy Eastern creditors over small scale farmers, and was willing to manipulate an aging George Washington to achieve his goals. The book is well researched and has an excellent annotated bibliography. Unfortunately, it lacks footnotes so it is impossible to check specific assertions against specific documents. I would recommend this book for anyone interested in the Federal period of American history or U.S. economic and class history. The breakdown in civil society in the Pittsburgh resembles Thucydides’ description of class conflicts in Greek city states.

Anyone interested in the founding of the United States should find this book engrossing. Thoroughly researched, well written and with deep insight into relatable people and the early years of the Republic, this work takes what history books typically dismiss as a minor uprising and explains how it might instead easily have become the undoing of the new United States and George Washington himself. Surprising elements include a self-appointed militia burning down the plantation of western Pennsylvania's most prominent slaveholder, how deeply the personal financial interests of George Washington himself were caught up in the Pittsburgh area and affected by the rebellion, and how that region and parts of Virginia agreed to form their own nation and created their own large army.The non-fiction narrative flows smoothly and builds characters in a way that keeps you wanting to know what happens next. Fast and fascinating read.

This is a well-written and timely history of the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. President Washington led an army of over 13,000 men to suppress the revolt. At that time this was the largest single concentration of American armed forces. Hogeland does an excellent job at explaining the background to the revolt, and how it began with the raising of excise taxes in 1790 and 1791 by Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton. He is very sympathetic to the demands of the frontier rebels, and makes no secret of his distaste for the machinations of Hamilton. Is the book biased? Yes, but openly so, and this makes for a good read.

This is what I learned in the first 150 pages of this book: any society without a generally accepted rule of law and order, and also lacking a widely distributed, stable currency is doomed to a brutal, horrifying failure. Achieving these goals is worth almost any price.....America is remarkable in having achieved both these goals. Herman Husband’s world makes Faulkner’s Mississippi appear almost gentile. I suppose we should appreciate William Hoagland for reminding us how awful human beings can be without strong but patient guidance....Which is perhaps more rare than we imagine.

The Whiskey Rebellion is a much overlooked episode in American history - sad since it is so important. William Hogeland does a wonderful job of telling the story and bringing to life all of the key players in this real life drama. But for my purposes the entire episode turns on Chapter 2 in which Hogeland puts the whiskey tax, against which the frontiersmen of the west rebelled, in the context of the Federalist scheme to establish a hierarchical society in the mold of Great Britain.The Federalist position, embodied in the person of Alexander Hamilton, was one that believed in an elite ruling class, and the extent to which one did not yet exist in the young United States he was intent on creating one. The mechanisms by which Hamilton would create and empower this ruling class were largely financial, and so Robert Morris was recruited to establish a central bank and to help create and expand a wealthy class out of speculators in war debt. Every move the federalists made was one that benefited the rich at the expense of the poor. And as Hamilton moved to establish a strong federal government, the basis of it was to be the power of taxation. The authority to tax, as well as to print or "coin" money, was to move from the states to the central government. And federal taxation needed to become direct taxation levied by means of federal marshals instead of going through potentially uncooperative state governments.The poor farmer bore the brunt of the American Revolution. The rank and file of the revolutionary army was small farmers whose farms suffered for their absences. If you were unlucky enough to have a farm in one of the counties that surrounded Philadelphia at the time of the Valley Forge encampment, then your harvest and anything else, tied down or not, was likely to be commandeered by Washington's army. If you received chits in exchange - IOUs to be paid after the war - these pieces of paper quickly devalued to the point of worthlessness. Speculators, often with inside information, bought them up for next to nothing. It was Hamilton's idea for the federal government to buy these and other war debt instruments back at face value in order to establish creditworthiness of the federal government. But part of the plan, too, was to establish a wealthy elite that could better manage the country's affairs than a true democracy of the people. So rather than default on the debt, made up of various bonds, chits, and continental currencies, paper that had largely gone worthless anyhow, Hamilton wanted to establish by legislative fiat that the emperor had clothes - that these scraps of paper now in the hands of speculators were worthy of the full faith and credit of the United States. But to honor this debt to the creditors, taxes must be imposed upon those same farmers and soldiers whose backs the war was won on.So the excise tax on whiskey was essential to the Federalist plan to finance the government - financing that would have gone largely unnecessary had the decision been made to just let the paper debt continue on its course to valuelessness. Hogeland explains just how key whiskey was to the primitive economy that existed on the frontier - key to the point that it was used as local currency. And the fact that the way the law was written the tax burden on the small distilleries was heavier than on the larger ones. Once again, Hamilton demonstrated that his idea was to concentrate wealth into the hands of the few.A large army was gathered to march westward with Washington at the lead, and the manner in which this campaign was conducted was most telling. The plan from the beginning to provision this army was to live off the land, so as the army marched westward it requisitioned provisions from the farms unlucky enough to be on the way. The stripping bare of farms that occurred during the 1776 rebellion was repeated during the putting down of this one. To an appalling extent the reader sees how the ends justified most horrible means. The callous attitudes towards those at the bottom rung of the social ladder bear tribute to the sense of rank and privilege the likes of Hamilton and Washington felt. The fathers of our country were anything but champions of the people.