The Whiskey Rebellion

by William Hogeland

  The good product was clear. Inhaling it would water the eyes and rustle nose hairs. Swallowed, it made a hard impact, then a glowing heat; in the end, the feeling was surprisingly smooth, and soon after recovery, another shot might seem to be in order. Barrel storage darkened the drink and brought out redolent grain, woodsmoke, sugar. Drunk raw or aging, whiskey abruptly made the drinker and the world different.

  Americans drank alcoholic beverages in huge quantities. Distilling went on in home stillhouses, at community stills, and in large-scale commercial operations. The Philadelphia elite, downing alcohol with most meals and between them, favored imported wines but also liked French brandy, a whiskey made from wine. Rum—cane whiskey, imported from the Caribbean or distilled domestically from imported molasses—was for a time the country’s favorite drink, and army rations routinely included rum, until grain whiskey came in vogue early in the eighteenth century with the influx of Scots-Irish settlers, who brought expertise in domestic distilling. By the time of the revolution, domestic whiskey was gaining popularity; soon it would replace rum as the country’s drink.

  Many small farmers distilled seasonally. Whiskey was consumed by men, women, and children at all times of day and every sort of gathering: muster, church, election, work, dance, and fight. Often a community distiller kept pot stills going through the harvest, and farmers brought in their grain and took away the whiskey, paying the distiller in a portion of product. The Philadelphia College of Physicians had correctly identified domestic whiskey as the cheap drink of the laboring classes, but people in other classes enjoyed whiskey too, and by the 1790s, even as the west was making itself the home of radical agitation and defiant independence, the best whiskey was known to come from there, especially from the Forks of the Ohio, whose “Monongahela rye” possessed consistent strength and purity. The region achieved brand recognition. Its whiskey was known by name in Philadelphia and in New Orleans.

  Easterners lampooned the people of the western mountains as habitual drunks. Yet it was popularity in the east that made whiskey unusual, among the products of small and subsistence farmers, for being a cash crop, with eager markets both within the regions that produced it, where a gallon might sell for 25 cents, and in regions east of the mountains, where high-quality rye whiskey could bring from 50 cents to a dollar. To haul twenty-four bushels of milled rye over the Alleghenies to eastern markets would have taken three pack animals. Six dollars might result from such effort; costs would outrun revenues. Reducing those bushels to two eight-gallon kegs of whiskey reduced transport requirements to a single animal, and while income from such a venture varied with middlemen and rake-offs, it could approach $16.

  With a value nearing the absolute—it might vary by region but given countrywide appetites couldn’t depreciate—whiskey became currency in places where coin wasn’t seen. Barter paralyzed local economies, but whiskey was a true medium, always exchangeable for cash somewhere down the line, thus maintaining value against metal. A liquid commodity both literally and figuratively, the drink democratized local economies, offering even tenants and sharecropping laborers a benefit. Tenants often wanted to pay rent, and laborers often got paid, in a portion of the grain they harvested. Community stills transformed, for a cut, such cumbersome forms of payment into something fungible. And while landlords often refused in-kind crops, or demanded them in extravagant quantities, they’d take whiskey for rent. The product connected popular-finance theories with the small-scale commercial development that, though marginal, had potential to free rural people of debt and dependency.

  So a federal tax on whiskey was hardly, to the small distillers who made up the majority that would pay it, the mere luxury-tax-with-concomitant-health-benefit that Hamilton had described to a Congress eager to be swayed. The poorest people, hired hands paid in kind, experienced the whiskey excise as a tax on income: if community distillers had to pay the tax, they’d have to compensate themselves by taking a larger share of whiskey—that is, currency—from people who brought their grain salaries in for conversion. Growers too felt the pain. There was no tax on grain, but westerners who raised grain were forced, in part by federal policies that kept the Mississippi closed, to convert grain to whiskey in order to transport it eastward. The tax thus imposed a federal tax on western farmers while leaving farmers in more convenient and prosperous places untaxed.

  The tax had the further potential not merely to crimp but to shut off profits entirely. The duty would be collected by federal officers, in coin, at the point of production, often a log stillhouse on a small farm. It wasn’t clear where cash for the payment would come from, and failure to pay would make the product unconveyable. Not registering a still was punishable by a cash fine, set first at $150, soon at $250; either number was higher than the cash equivalent of most people’s annual income. Assets—the whiskey and the still itself—could be seized as well.

  But even coming up with coin wasn’t the worst difficulty the tax would give small farmers and laborers. Hamilton explained the tax as one on drinkers; producers, he said, simply passed the tax along in the price. That fact had an effect he didn’t describe. Nobody could work up a subject like Hamilton, and he’d studied distilling: the draft excise bill was replete with knowledgeable calculations regarding proof, heads, and low wines. His inspiration was a success of the British Empire, where distilling and government had a long history together. From as early as the seventeenth century, large distillers had actually favored whiskey excises—had even contributed expertise to helping the government write excise laws. In 1785, an act of Parliament gave a tax rebate to big distillers, and later acts went all the way, placing an outright ban on small stills, making it actually criminal in England to distill on anything but the largest scale. Even as the U.S. Congress was passing its whiskey tax in 1791, Parliament was banning stills of less than five-hundred-gallon capacity.

  The goal was industry consolidation. Hamilton had learned from the English that commercial agriculture and large industry, when publicly chartered, given tax breaks, and financed by large loans, might turn the United States into an industrial empire to compete with England’s. The labor power dissipated on small family farms and in artisan shops could be gathered up, deployed at factories and diversified commercial farms, and boosted through efficient organization. Big distilling had the potential, given American drinking habits, to be highly profitable—yet small, seasonal producers, especially in the west, competed with industrial distillers and kept revenues scattered, engines weak. Hamilton’s whiskey tax didn’t merely redistribute wealth from the many to the few, subdue rural economies, and pound the restless, defiant west. It also served as one of the heavier cogs in a machine for restructuring all of American life.

  Not that Hamilton was offering an explicit tax break to big distillers, who did pay the tax too. But just as in England, big distillers were all for the excise, and it wasn’t hard to see why. Hamilton was giving them overwhelming competitive advantages. He established two modes of paying the tax. Distillers in towns and villages, more readily monitored by tax officials, paid a per-gallon tax on the gallons they actually produced; distillers in what the law defined as the country, where operations were isolated and hard to reach, paid an annual flat fee on the gallon capacities of their stills, defined as the number of gallons of wash held in the pot. Hamilton’s arithmetic was informed and precise. He wanted to get 9 cents per gallon produced. To set the rate of the flat, still-capacity tax, he observed that 100 gallons of rye or corn wash yielded about 12 gallons of spirit, and 100-gallon still, running at full capacity, produced about 180 gallons a month. Assuming a four-month distilling season, or 720 gallons, collecting 9 cents per gallon came to a little over $60 per year. If you had a 100-gallon still, that’s what you’d pay. Stills with lower capacities paid proportionally lower rates.

  But Hamilton’s calculation was drawn, not surprisingly, from typical processes of large-scale industrial distillers. Small distillers made whiskey within a much shorter cycle, s
ometimes a week, rarely longer than two months—and within those cycles they couldn’t work stills steadily, at full capacity. They had other things to do; they had few employees or none. Producing many fewer gallons than the number on which the flat fee was calculated, they paid far more per gallon than the 9 cents paid by large distillers. Meanwhile, large distillers, with capital to invest, began seeking ways of producing more than the number of gallons on which the flat rate was based, lowering their taxes substantially.

  Producers in towns, whom Hamilton taxed on the actual gallons they produced—these were often the larger distillers—paid their 9-cents-per-gallon tax in cash and received a discount of 2 cents on every ten gallons. If they couldn’t pay that way, they posted a bond every quarter to cover the gallons they expected to remove from the still in the ensuing quarter. For the well-capitalized town producer, moving hundreds of gallons, the cash discount was easy to achieve and offered a nice break; bonds too were not hard to post. While most small producers didn’t operate in towns, ones who did would have to resort to the punitive bond, which, if it could be posted at all, meant paying a higher tax per gallon than the big producer.

  In every configuration, on every level, Hamilton had designed the law to charge small producers who could least afford it a higher tax. And the most significant effect of the higher tax was that it would, as Hamilton said, have to be passed on to consumers. Small producers would have to raise prices. Big producers could lower prices, sharply underselling the small distillers, taking over their customers, ultimately driving small producers out of business. Closing down local whiskey economies, the whiskey tax pushed self-employed farmers and artisans into the factories of their creditors.

  More than a fourth of the stills in America were located at the Forks of the Ohio. Even before passage of the tax, meetings had taken place there to redefine, in western independence, the embattled spirit of the popular movement’s contribution to the revolution. Men like Daniel Hamilton had fought a war that failed hopes for fairness and democracy. Their state constitution had been altered to restore old, pre-revolutionary relations between the many and the few. Industrial entrepreneurs were engrossing small farms, sewing up trade, and turning Forks settlers into hired laborers. That was bad enough. Then Congress passed the whiskey tax.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Herman Husband

  Herman Husband still lived in the lonesome farmhouse in the mountains where, almost ten years earlier, he’d shown Mr. Brackenridge maps and discussed Daniel, Ezekiel, and the New Jerusalem. Husband had seemed, to the younger man, old; now Husband was nearly seventy. He’d also seemed mad. In flickering firelight, with disheveled white hair, Husband had been talking about visions. Mr. Brackenridge had visions too, of course: a world-class United States literary culture, the westward expansion of free yeomen. Alexander Hamilton had a vision of an American manufacturing and commercial empire. Herman Husband’s visions were qualitatively different from both Hamilton’s and Brackenridge’s, not only for involving fulfillment, on the North American continent, of Hebrew prophecies and the Christian millennium but also for being not ideas but things.

  Husband actually saw his visions. They’d led him from indolence and privilege to this mountainside farm, where he wore loose clothes, went barefoot, and in the early 1790s began preaching an imminent spiritual and political conflagration.

  He was born in 1724 and annoyed his family, fifteen years later, by being born again. He wasn’t being trained for religious enthusiasm. The Husbands had risen, in only two generations in America, from laboring in bondage to owning tobacco fields on the Chesapeake Bay, enjoying a second-echelon Anglican plantation lifestyle, and raising a son to reach the first echelon. Herman Husband would spend much of his life trying to smash the system of tenancy and debt that made life impossibly hard for laborers and small farmers. It was a system his grandfather had broken out of, surviving a term as an indentured tobacco worker, marrying a landed widow, obtaining appointments in law enforcement, making shrewd land purchases, planting tobacco, diversifying with a small ironworks. With an inheritance from the former indentured servant, Herman’s parents moved east, bought more than 1,700 acres, and built a large brick house on the main road on the east side of the Susquehanna River. They were slave-owning tobacco farmers. The boy grew up in luxury.

  The confrontational style that would mark Herman Husband’s career became evident at the age of seven, when he was so hard to control that he was sent to live with his maternal grandfather. This grandfather was another hard worker—he kept a tavern, operated a ferry, and grew tobacco—but he was attentive to his own and others’ salvation and therefore owned no slaves. He did have indentured laborers, and the boy found himself working alongside them and sleeping in their outbuilding. His grandfather required the workers to recite, before they slept, the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed. Herman lay in the dark and listened. He took stern correction from his grandfather. When he went home at the age of eight, the grandfather had died, bequeathing the boy strong feelings about dire inner struggles. Still willful and passionate, Herman spent much time alone, seeking salvation. The deep voice of his late grandfather told him that the weekly, polite devotions the Husband family made among other rich Anglicans could do nothing to save each corrupt soul from delighting in the luxury, waste, and greed by which we shut ourselves away from love and forgiveness. Everything the boy saw, as he grew into adolescence and took his part in the gaming, riding, and partying of the Chesapeake planting class—supported, he was more and more agonizingly aware, by the forced labor of thousands of human beings—told him that what his grandfather said was true.

  By the time he was fifteen, Herman Husband’s willfulness was taking new forms. Hunts, cards, drinking, and house-to-house frolics were the arenas of manly accomplishment in his set, which aped the richest set just above it. He was shy, but his father encouraged him to participate in social life, as did the local Anglican clergyman, who told him that no spiritual degradation could result from taking a rightful place among the cavaliers. A deep inner voice suggested otherwise. The conflict was resolved when George Whitefield came to town.

  An English preacher, only twenty-five but already a superstar in Great Britain, Whitefield was making his first major tour of the American colonies. In Philadelphia, where he preached on the courthouse steps, eight thousand people packed the streets around him. He was a skinny youth with a bad squint. What made him riveting were his voice, which carried astoundingly far, somehow wafting every crystalline syllable into the most open parts of listeners’ hearts, and his theology. Whitefield was preaching new birth for every person. Individual faith, not received form, was the means of achieving it, and there were no conditions: utter forgiveness of ineradicable sin could be sought with simplicity. Whitefield was unrestrained in arraigning Episcopalian and other established colonial denominations, which, he believed, actively obstructed people’s chances for salvation. But hellfire was not his emphasis. Bliss was. Conversion was a feeling, he taught, an unmistakable personal experience not to be achieved by thought or doctrine. Though indescribable, conversion suffused the reborn person with delight in the surpassing loveliness of godhead. It transformed a life.

  Shortly after his arrival in the colonies, Whitefield preached in the village of North East, near the Chesapeake, to what was for him a small crowd: publicity had been weak, and only 1,500 people turned out. One of them was Herman Husband, who was hardly the first privileged adolescent in eighteenth-century America to be converted by fervent preaching to a fresh view of himself, his church, and colonial society as a whole. This was the Great Awakening, a movement entering a new phase even as young Husband encountered it. Intense experiences of the kind described by George Whitefield had been inspiring conversions in huge numbers throughout the colonies. As early as the 1720s, certain ministers had stopped worrying specifically about sexual immorality and irreligion and started denouncing all the vagaries and fashions of the modern world. Throughout the thirti
es, ministers like the famous theologian Jonathan Edwards, of Northampton, Massachusetts, preached less on sensual sin than on ways such sin expresses itself in greed, a sign of general spiritual degradation. People in every denomination and province were challenging practices of established churches, which were coming to be known as “old light” and “old side,” in contrast to the “new lights” and “new sides,” who broke away from dead churches, flocked to hear preaching in fields, delighted in the immediate presence of godhead, and condemned the acquisitiveness that had long been seen—fatally, new lights believed—as a sign of spiritual virtue.

  Not that the first Awakening preachers were mere social reformers. Redemption didn’t come, they believed, by tinkering with human institution, inherently flawed, but by grace. Yet they made explicit connections between the transcendent joy of new birth and the general happiness of people in the American colonies. This melding of the redemption of the individual with the redemption of society would determine the course of Herman Husband’s life. A half century after he first heard Whitefield preach, Husband would be trying to bring that kind of redemption to the Forks of the Ohio and the entire western country.