With no major storms to be expected until word came back from the various missions, foreign problems were now quiescent. But at home, trouble broke loose.
The ostensible cause was an excise tax on whiskey, to be collected from the distiller. The law had been enacted during 1790 to help pay the costs of Hamilton’s financial measures. Excises (levies on the manufacture, sale, or consumption of commodities) were among the few taxes other than customs duties permitted by the Constitution to the federal government. The United States failed to possess many industries extensive enough to be worth taxing. Liquor (always a prime target for tax collectors) was selected along with snuff, loaf sugar, and that luxury, carriages. The legislation was accepted everywhere but on the frontier.
The backwoodsmen had their own particular relationship with whiskey. Many had their own stills and, since they consumed much of their product themselves, they could not pass that much of the tax on to purchasers. Extreme individualists, they objected to strangers—particularly revenuers—snooping on their property. The grain they grew was too bulky to be moved by the means of transportation available to them unless it was distilled into whiskey. Then jugs could be used locally as currency and exported over the mountains for sale. Furthermore federal courts were so scarce that if a backwoodsman was arrested for moonshining, he had to travel for many days in order to stand trial.
Backwoods opposition to the whiskey tax arose almost instantly after the bill had been passed and, at Washington’s recommendation, successive congressional sessions modified the law to make it less objectionable. However, no move was made, even by the frontier representatives, to repeal the law. Opposition gradually quieted down. But during 1794, the issue erupted into violence in the four western counties of Pennsylvania. Informed historians generally agree that this renewed and more extreme opposition was based on the spread of the Democratic Societies across the Alleghenies.
The whiskey grievance was only the foremost among many. The frontier had many interests—one was passionate concern with the opening of the Mississippi—which were not taken with equal seriousness by the various legislatures, state and federal, whose membership was so largely from more settled areas. In addition, there existed in western Pennsylvania what rarely developed in the United States of that time—active class warfare.
Settlement of the backwoods normally proceeded in two phases. There were the pioneers who broke into the virgin forests, often misfits, sometimes psychopaths, but always self-reliant, warlike, physically active. The pioneers were followed by the consolidators, who farmed conventionally, built clapboard houses, set up stores and law offices, began the creation of cities. During the Whiskey Rebellion, the little town of Pittsburgh—some two hundred houses—was in active fear of being sacked by the wild men of the further forests.
The extreme frontiersmen distrusted law coming in from over the mountains and were unable to cope with it. But the consolidators welcomed the laws and used them to oppress the pioneers. On the whiskey excise, there was a specific difference. The better-organized inhabitants, who owned large commercial stills, could afford to pay the tax and were not altogether sorry to foresee that it would put backyard stills out of competition.
An armed band of small distillers attacked the house of the prosperous citizen who had agreed to become tax collector. An army platoon that rushed to the rescue was forced to surrender, and a man was killed.
As the insurrection developed, the still of any man who paid the excise was wrecked; government representatives were seared with hot irons; mail bags were taken at gunpoint and citizens persecuted for what was found in the seized correspondence. Not only did all government come to an end in western Pennsylvania, but the local Democratic Societies appealed to their mates down the mountain line—including the Kentucky Society which had recently threatened its own aggression against Spain—to join in a general rebellion. There was talk of establishing a separate trans-Alleghenian nation, or of marching on Philadelphia to force on the federal government measures dictated by the frontier.
Washington could not foresee that Abraham Lincoln was to face, although on a much larger scale, a similar problem in 1863. But the first President, always conscious that he was establishing precedents, realized that the situation would rise again. Some other section of the United States would surely arm and threaten to secede because of opposition to laws passed by the general government. Should such acts be accepted, the Union could not long stand. Apart from the danger of secession, Washington contended that if a minority—in this case it was “a small one”—were permitted to dictate to the majority, “there is an end put at one stroke to republican government, and nothing but anarchy and confusion is to be expected thereafter: for some other man or society may dislike another law and oppose it with equal propriety until all laws are prostrate and everyone (the strongest, I presume) will carve for himself.”
Washington’s formula, expressed at the time of Shays’ Rebellion, was to define legitimate grievances, right these grievances, and then, if the disturbances continued, “employ the force of the government.” In the case of the Whiskey Rebellion, the first two steps had, in Washington’s opinion, been taken. Force therefore seemed required, and there were strong arguments for moving quickly. If given time, the insurrection might well spread southward down the long frontier. And Washington, having during the French and Indian War fought over the same mountain passes, realized how difficult the approach of winter would make any invasion of the rebellious counties. Yet he decided that at all hazards another effort at mediation should be made. It might succeed. If it failed, the attempt should persuade the nation that the government had done everything in its power to achieve a peaceful solution.
Washington sent three federal commissioners into western Pennsylvania. He reinforced their hands with a proclamation commanding that all insurgents “disperse and retire peaceably to their homes” by September 1. And he ordered that 12,950 militiamen prepare to march if the proclamation were not obeyed.
Washington reviewing the whiskey army, by Frederick Kemmelmeyer (Courtesy of Hall Park McCullough)
The risks that would be involved if military action proved necessary were, Washington well knew, frightening. If the frontiersmen mobilized to protect their territory, they would be formidable in the mountain passes. States’ rights sentiments offered another hazard. Since Pennsylvania was unwilling to take on the rebels by herself, Washington was forced to call also on the New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia militia. There might well be outrage at the “invasion” of one state by another. And the extreme Republican press was shouting that an aristocratic executive was planning to fall without adequate justification on simple farmers in their fields. Did this mean that the militiamen who answered Washington’s call would all be (as Hamilton secretly hoped) Federalists? Such a partisan army would distort the national precedent Washington wished to establish and perhaps incite general civil war.
Alarming reports came in from the rebellious counties. The efforts of Washington’s commissioners to stage a referendum were frustrated by terrorism. At one polling place, for instance, the attendant mob shouted down a motion that those who supported the government should not have their barns burned—and then everyone was invited to vote in public. But other news was enchantingly good. The old fear that the inherent danger of republicanism was anarchy motivated the vast majority of the American population even as it had at the time of Shays’ Rebellion. Whatever their private emotions, the leaders of the opposition did not dare accept the onus of encouraging armed resistance to the law. The parent Democratic Society, that of Pennsylvania, having denounced the excise in highly colored terms, nonetheless voted that, since it had been constitutionally enacted, the law must be enforced. Five times as many men offered to enlist as could be accepted.
“It has been,” Washington exulted, “a spectacle displaying to the highest advantage the value of republican government to behold the most and least wealthy of our citizens standing in the same ran
ks as private soldiers.” This would show the Britons who had asserted “we should be unable to govern ourselves … that republicanism is not the phantom of a deluded imagination; on the contrary, that under no form of government will the laws be better supported, liberty and property better secured, or happiness more effectually dispensed to mankind.”
The time Washington had set for the insurrection to cease having passed with the law still prostrate, he called for the army to come together, under the shadow of the Alleghenies, in the Shenandoah Valley. He decided that he would himself take command. Perhaps because he no longer felt competent to handle the necessary masses of detail, he agreed to take Hamilton along. Hamilton had been his chief of staff during the Revolution, but he was now known as the father of the excise, the man most accused of wishing to suppress government by the people and to establish rule by force. By riding off side by side with the hated Federalist, Washington committed what was to date his worst political indiscretion.
En route to join the army, Washington received gratifying news of another campaign. General Wayne had decisively defeated the northwestern Indians at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, and had furthermore obeyed orders by avoiding any engagement with nearby British troops, who had encroached on American territory and were completely in his power.
After Washington had established his headquarters at Reading, Pennsylvania, he received a two-man delegation from over the mountains. Both prosperous landholders who had infiltrated the radical movement, they stated that “the people of consequence” were in favor of submission. The simpler people were not. They had been convinced that their cause was so popular that Washington could not raise an army against them. Now they were thoroughly frightened. Being “men of little or no property” who “cared but little where they resided,” the leaders of the revolt would, if given time, flee the threat against them, allowing quiet to return. Since the situation would thus eventually right itself, the delegates begged that no army be sent into the western counties. If, as seemed probable from the unruly behavior of the troops at Carlisle, the army wreaked havoc, the inhabitants would have to unite against them.
Washington answered that, since the object of the whole expensive maneuver was “the support of the laws,” the army would march unless there were proof of total submission.
Although it seemed highly improbable that any military effort would be made to defend the rebel area, no proof could be offered that the laws could be enforced there without the presence of the army. Washington’s concern thereupon came to be the psychological state of his own troops. It was essential that they function not as “executioners. They should do no more than bring offenders before civil authorities for fair trial. But some of the soldiers had turned out with the intention of punishing the rabble; one man had already been killed. Washington, as a Pennsylvania politician recorded, “labored incessantly” to impress on the soldiers “a conduct scrupulously regardful of the rights of their fellow citizens, and exemplary for decorum, regularity, and moderation.”
Leaving Governor Henry Lee of Virginia in the military command and Hamilton to represent the federal government, Washington rode back to Philadelphia, where Congress was about to convene. The army that advanced across the mountains met no opposition and obeyed orders so scrupulously that not a single citizen was hurt, no property damaged. Washington, who was eventually to pardon the two insurrectionists sentenced to death, boasted to Jay that the whiskey rebels had been brought to “a perfect sense of their misconduct without spilling a drop of blood.”
One reason that the whole situation had been viewed with such anxiety by the Republicans was the fear that the Hamiltonians would succeed in presenting it as proof that a standing army was needed to keep the peace at home. Madison commented that this would surely have happened had not the expedition been so managed that there was no fighting. Even as it was, Madison continued, the dread conclusion might have been drawn if “the President could have been embarked in it.” The President would not embark on it. He ordered that the army be disbanded.
However, Washington had been so worried by the Whiskey Rebellion that he committed the most indiscreet act of his entire presidential career.
FORTY-TWO
The Democratic Societies
(1794)
Washington reached Philadelphia from a campaign exhausting to an elderly man only eighteen days before he was to deliver his Sixth Annual Address to Congress. In the bustle of the army camps, he had wondered whether he ought not to warn the people against the Democratic Societies, on which he blamed the insurrection. Randolph, the most Republican of his advisers, spontaneously urged that he do so. In dark moments, Washington “felt perfectly convinced” that if the societies “cannot be discountenanced, they will destroy the government of this country.”
In his address, delivered on November 19, 1794, Washington spoke disaparagingly of “certain self-created societies” and asked the people to “determine” whether the insurrections “had not been fomented by combinations of men who, careless of consequences and disregarding the unerring truth that those who rouse cannot always appease civil convulsions, have disseminated, from ignorance or perversion of facts, suspicions, jealousies, and accusations of the whole government?”
Compared with what was daily published in pamphlets and the press, Washington’s strictures were milk and water. He denounced nothing and nobody by name; connected what he attacked with no faction at home or (although he believed French machinations were involved) no influence from abroad; opposed no political conception except inciting and misleading the people; urged no penalties legal or social, no political reprisals. Yet his few sentences caused a sensation. They were remarkable as the first criticism of any aspect of the opposition that the national hero had ever publicly uttered.
The Democratic Society movement, which had up till that moment been burgeoning, wilted as if sprinkled with weed killer. The Republicans, who had been encouraging the societies as a political weapon, did not dare come to their defense. It was only in private they fumed, accusing Washington of things he had never said. Thus Jefferson wrote angrily, “It is wonderful, indeed, that the President should have permitted himself to be the organ of such an attack on the freedom of discussion, the freedom of writing, printing, and publishing.”
The Democratic Societies were, of course, an initial step towards the organization of the political parties which have become an integral part of American democracy. This has induced historians to state that Washington was attacking the democratic process itself. But organized “factions” (as they were then called) had not yet received broad popular acceptance. Washington was not alone in fearing the effect of bodies that were considered extraneous—“self-created” since not provided for in the Constitution—which nonetheless sought to insert themselves between the people and their government. He had on the same principle opposed political activity by that organization of the opposite complexion from the Democratic Societies, the Society of the Cincinnati.
Washington believed that the government should have the most direct possible connection with each citizen as an individual. He was in favor of everything that would enable the individual citizen to act intelligently: education was his favorite charity, and he urged again and again that the government should give every encouragement to the dissemination of newspapers and political pamphlets through the mails.
Realizing that it was hard for one simple citizen to make his voice heard, Washington saw as the natural grouping the neighborhood. It was not by chance that his one formal intervention in the Constitutional Convention had been to reduce the size of the districts that would elect a member of the House of Representatives. These representatives should carry their constituents’ wishes to Congress; should work out with representatives from other regions what was best for all; and should then report back to their constituents.
The people had two methods of expressing displeasure: one was the ballot box, the other the calling of a mass meeting that would
in a resolution express their views to the government. Washington visualized these meetings as arising from the neighborhood rather than being engineered, as the Democratic Societies were, from some political center. As President, he paid attention to every such resolution, himself answering each message in an individual reply. Thus the neighborhood could, when it felt strongly enough, establish direct contact with the President.
Everything that intervened between the people in their neighborhoods and the federal government Washington regarded as an impediment to the true functioning of the republican system. This went for the state governments with their attendant flocks of politicians serving local views. And it went for “demagogues,” whose object was not, he contended, to give the people the materials from which they could make up their own minds but rather to sell them predigested opinions, make them not thinkers but followers. Washington regarded the Democratic Societies as the creation and stamping grounds of demagogues. He deplored the adversary theory which sees government as a tug of war between the holders of opposite views, one side eventually vanquishing the other. Washington saw the national capital as a place where men came together not to tussle but to reconcile disagreements. This attitude grew out of his entire experience and also from the nature of his own genius. The Revolution had been won only by gathering as many people as possible into the cause. His greatest fear for the Constitutional Convention was that the delegates would arrive with their hands so tied by regional instructions that they could not learn from one another, working out by mutual understanding and compromise a government satisfactory to the whole far-flung nation. And Washington’s own greatest mental gift was to be able to bore down through partial arguments to the fundamental principles on which everyone could agree.
Washington- The Indispensable Man Page 35