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The Whiskey Rebellion

Page 11

by William Hogeland


  To ensure proper oversight of these and other laws, the next tier of government sorts the states into four large regions. Each of the four regions is operated by a senate, to which the unicameral assembly of each member state appoints a number of representatives apportioned by population. These four senates monitor laws of their member states, vetoing any that violate fairness and freedom. Finally, at the highest and most refined level of government, sits an executive body of twenty-four men—the four-and-twenty elders of Revelation—six appointed by each of the four regional senates. Elders hear appeals on vetoes of state laws, appoint judicial systems for the four regions, and buy, instead of steal, Indian lands. Western expansion is not a free-for-all dominated by those with cash and muscle: new lands are granted in the normal fashion to those who work them, and the elders form new states and regions by orderly process. When enough new states are formed, elders create a new region and place the states under a new senate, subject to the federal system.

  Elders receive no salaries. They make decisions by majority rule. They hold their property communally. Appointees are between the ages of fifty and sixty and have risen through purifying lower levels of government. They serve ten-year terms, with one elder retired by lot every other year, to ensure rotation, and replaced by the appropriate senate.

  Husband saw this federally structured kingdom of heaven, with its broad foundation and increasingly pure upper levels, both as a government and as the image of the restored temple of Jerusalem. It featured things like a progressive tax on wealth; an income tax; rules against nepotism; public promotion of arts and sciences; profit-sharing for workers; and paper currency, pegged to no gold standard, with a slow, centrally managed rate of inflation. It allowed no slavery. It made peace with the Indians. Thinking like this made some call Herman Husband “the madman of the mountains.” Millennial interpretation might have been common, but linking it to a vision of a nation state, committed through dozens of administrative mechanisms to the welfare and advancement of all citizens, with the most successful and privileged bearing the larger portion of responsibility for all—to some this made old Herman Husband manifestly insane. But he didn’t seem insane to those of his neighbors who listened with growing fervor to his sermons. In 1789, they sent him again to the assembly.

  By then, however, all his visions and hopes were shredded. In the eleven years since he’d served in the radical assembly, the struggle had gone on between the creditors and the radicals. The creditors had won. The U.S. Constitution had been ratified. When it was first published, Husband had begun reading it with great excitement, in part because George Washington, whom he’d long considered a model of disinterested judgment, an elder, had worked on its framing. He finished reading in horror and disgust. The thing was an obscene fraud.

  Washington had betrayed the people by endorsing, in pursuit of national pomp, the return of tyranny. The Constitution, inverting Husband’s own idea for a federal structure—a broad foundation, with levels successively purified—had a top-down authority, with an elite, unelected upper house, the whole thing clearly intended to extinguish ordinary citizens’ only hope for direct representation: their state legislatures. Husband too had wanted to see the states managed from above. But the U.S. Constitution created unlimited freedom within the states for precisely the wrong people, making the creditor class solvent and giving it the private use of a whole nation’s strength.

  Then the Pennsylvania assembly called for a convention to revise the revolutionary state constitution, reestablishing traditional relations. Quickly following that debacle came Alexander Hamilton’s plan of national finance. The Beast, not merely resurgent, was ravenous as never before. The west, now holiest of holies in Husband’s spiritual geography, was being opened to exploitation by the seacoast landjobbers, speculators, and other merchants, whose expensive educations had been purchased solely for the purpose of freeing them from doing any useful work. They were already beginning the demolition of the west, where Jacob had told Joseph the children of Israel would bless all nations. The federal government organized the infidels in an almost irresistibly powerful system. The courthouse ring in Bedford, the elites of Pittsburgh: these were the advance guards of degeneracy, harlotry, the rule of Antichrist. The idolatry natural to mankind—even Samuel’s sons, Husband preached, were made judges and took bribes—had surfaced in the official corruption that Daniel called the abomination of desolation, now flooding the federal government. Profit-sharing and equal land distribution weren’t on the minds of the industrialists who had invaded the west. Landless workers were nearly slaves. Hamilton’s finance plan was a declaration of war on the holy city, whose people were already becoming captive.

  Back when Husband’s hopes for American transformation had been so thrillingly high, he’d embraced even the urban seaboard in his vision of good government: Unified with the transformed federation, the east might look up to the west as an image of the temple; judgment would be gentle. But by the early 1790s, with the passage of the finance plan, the east had exposed itself as incorrigibly wicked and degenerate. The resurgence of luxury and vice was all the more bitter because it followed a moment of hope for fundamental change.

  Husband’s long commitment to nonviolence faltered. The Alleghenies had come to seem a fortification against the earthly kingdom of the east.

  In his sermons, he began telling the western people that a body of free laborers, militiamen, and voters, being numerous, has the physical power to overcome a sinful few. In the last days, he reminded them, a laboring, industrious people would prevail over the armies of kings and tyrants, who rob the people and live in idleness on their labor. Husband identified the industrious people with local militias—freemen democratically electing their officers, armed for regional defense. Salaried hirelings were everywhere in the westerners’ midst, yet the militias, like the Jews when in the infant and virtuous state of their own government, could throw off the yoke of tyranny anytime they chose. Hirelings could be identified. Every person must watch for them.

  Your old men shall dream dreams, prophets had said. As Herman Husband approached his seventieth year, far from depressed, he was preaching a long-promised millennium that waited only for the last battle with the Beast. People were listening. The militias were drilling.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Neville Connection

  The man appointed to collect the whiskey tax in western Pennsylvania was General John Neville, an entrepreneur and commercial farmer, whose plantation, which he called Bower Hill, sprawled on a mountaintop a few miles south of the Monongahela above the valley of Chartiers Creek. Despite his wealth, the high style in which he enjoyed it, and the control he exercised over the local economy, General Neville had been fairly popular with the people of the Forks of the Ohio, where he’d lived for almost ten years. That popularity began dissipating quickly when, in the spring of 1791, the general received an appointment as inspector of the revenue for the fourth survey of what was now termed, for purposes of federal excise collection, the district of Pennsylvania.

  For General Neville was also a large-scale distiller. The leading local beneficiary of the tax had been given the job of enforcing and collecting it.

  With passage of the excise law in March of 1791, the executive branch had divided the nation into federal districts, each corresponding to a state. The larger states were further divided into surveys, whose inspectors’ responsibilities included hiring deputies, registering stills, monitoring production, coordinating collection, and reporting violators. General Neville’s wasn’t just any survey. Comprehending Pennsylvania’s four westernmost counties—Washington, Allegheny, Fayette, and Westmoreland—as well as Bedford, in the highlands just to the east, it placed under Neville’s purview the heart of distilling in America.

  Sixty when he received the appointment, testy and fearless, Neville was Virginian by birth and ancestry and had long been known to the president as not only ambitious and rich but also tough. He differed in significant w
ays from most of his neighbors. Before moving here, he’d served his native state in the border war. Of English, not Scots-Irish or German, stock, he took pride in his Elizabethan ancestors and their forebears of the Wars of the Roses. An Episcopalian, he eschewed both low-church grimness and religious enthusiasm. Hunting, riding, and dynasty were his pursuits, and in his background was an element of romance: his father had been kidnapped from England to the colonies; his mother was a cousin of Lord Fairfax, who had owned a large part of Virginia. Neville had been attracted to the west from a young age and first reached the Forks as a Virginia militia officer under the command of his tidewater neighbor George Washington, in General Braddock’s failed expedition against the French and Shawnee. Later, when the militia got into the border skirmishes with Pennsylvania, John Neville received for his service to Virginia five hundred acres near the Chartiers Creek.

  In the spring of 1775, news of the battles of Lexington and Concord came to the Shenandoah Valley, where Neville was living, quickly followed by orders from the Continental Congress: Captain Neville, known to have experience and property in the western region, was to march one hundred Virginia militiamen to the headwaters of the Ohio and occupy Fort Pitt, abandoned by British troops yet vulnerable to their return from Canada. Neville and his men arrived that fall at the confluence of rivers and took command of the wet, dilapidated fort, with the job of defending the west from natives.

  Pennsylvania partisans weren’t pleased to see the Virginia militia at Fort Pitt, but while Captain Neville negotiated treaties with Indians, he also declined a commission as justice of the purported Virginia county of Yohogania. He would remain a Virginian by sentiment. Yet in that period of flux, he guessed that allying himself too tightly with any state might turn out to be foolish.

  When Congress sent regular troops to relieve him at Fort Pitt, Neville joined the Continental Army as a lieutenant colonel. He commanded the twelfth, eighth, and fourth Virginia regiments and saw action at Trenton, Germantown, Princeton, and Monmouth. He wintered at Valley Forge. He led troops in the southern campaign. He was imprisoned in Charleston. Exchanged in time to serve in the decisive victory at Yorktown, he left the army with the brevet rank of brigadier general. Now he wanted to live in the area where he’d speculated and held brief command. With the border war resolved by the Congress, General Neville believed there was commercial potential across the mountains, as well as a chance for a lavish and domineering lifestyle, harder to come by in settings already civilized.

  He’d married Winifred Oldham, also from a prominent Virginia family and notably game. General and Mrs. Neville, having come to a place where some tidewater planters were loath even to visit, lived large. Like Jefferson at Monticello, they built on a hilltop.

  By the time he received his appointment as revenue inspector, Neville had a ten-thousand-acre plantation, a place not just to inhabit but to develop and profit by. Bower Hill was a diversified commercial farm, nothing like the subsistence smallholdings owned and rented by so many of his neighbors. It had large barns and other farm buildings, fields near and far from the mansion, livestock, transport, complicated deals and contracts—and slaves. Slavery was hardly unknown in Pennsylvania, even in the far west; still, slaveowners stood out. The assembly had instituted a policy of gradual abolition. Quakers and certain Presbyterians vocally opposed the institution. Many people at the Forks were simply not rich enough to own slaves.

  General Neville’s slaves lived in outbuildings set away from his home. The fanciest home in that part of the west, Bower Hill was a showplace where the Nevilles entertained in a style that might have seemed adequate to the Bob Morrises of Philadelphia and would have stunned any visitor expecting rustic simplicity. Two stories high, sheathed in clapboard, the mountaintop home was adjoined by a square log kitchen roofed with shingles and a broad veranda for enjoying the rugged charm of hills, ravines, and sky. When log houses were standard even for comfortable farmers at the Forks, the Neville family walked down halls with plaster walls and ceilings, on wood floors carpeted with rugs. Wallpapered rooms held elegant furniture and framed pictures. There were five feather beds, lots of china plate, silver, and glass; there were a spyglass, books, maps of the world, and advanced novelties like mirrors, a Franklin stove, and an eight-day clock in a mahogany case. As a sportsman, the general stabled many horses—he also kept pistols, swords, and fowling pieces—and Mrs. Neville liked to ride about the country at her husband’s side.

  The general’s son Presley, in his thirties when his father became excise inspector, had attended the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and served in the revolution; around Pittsburgh he was something of a blade. Presley had studied law with Mr. Brackenridge, but he’d given it up as a profession not befitting a gentleman. Mr. Brackenridge regretted losing his student; he considered Presley the one Neville with any potential for usefulness. Presley now owned a large brick townhouse near Mr. Brackenridge’s and a country residence on the banks of the Chartiers, precipitously below his father’s; a swath through steep woods between mansions let father and son use visual signals to communicate up- and downhill.

  From Bower Hill, the general presided over the Neville Connection, a family and business clan that pursued diverse industrial, mercantile, and social interests centered on Pittsburgh. An important member of the Connection was Isaac Craig, a veteran and entrepreneur married to General Neville’s daughter Amelia. Like the general, Craig had first come to the west as an army officer; he’d invested in a glassworks and other large projects, which he was skilled in managing for maximum personal benefit while offering bland assurances of integrity, timeliness, and quality. Major Abraham Kirkpatrick, sometimes hotheaded, was a Pittsburgh investor, creditor, and businessman married to Mrs. Neville’s sister. John Woods, the professional competitor and enemy of Mr. Brackenridge, who attended the Green Tree meeting as a Neville Connection spy, served as Neville family counselor. The Brisons, the Days, the Ormsbys, and other industrialists, speculators, commercial farmers, and merchants ran ironworks and boatyards, grew grain on big spreads, brokered deals, and worked on their seaboard cronies to sew up west-flowing patronage and trade for the Connection.

  The Nevilles were an army family. The Connection, though eager to work any angle, was largely an army-supply operation. The Ohio headwaters remained strategic. In the winter of late 1791 and early ’92, Pittsburgh was becoming the staging area for a military expedition, from which Forks residents hoped to benefit. Forts were slung from Pittsburgh down the Ohio Valley; the army would soon launch itself from the old treaty line on the river and penetrate Indian country. The old fort at the headwaters, soggy and decrepit and never thoughtfully situated, was scrapped. A new fort, Fayette, was under construction in town, east of the point and near the Allegheny side. Soldiers and other personnel were converging on Pittsburgh, some to be garrisoned for fort construction, others to boat downriver to the wilderness forts and the coming Indian war.

  This first martial seriousness on the part of the United States gave the struggling economy at the Forks a reliable local customer for food, drink, horses, tar, iron, blankets, lumber, brick, fodder, boats, and labor. The Neville Connection was eager not only to feed and support the army but also to dominate and control the process of doing so. Eastern patronage was the key. Just before General Neville received his appointment as excise inspector, his son-in-law Isaac Craig became deputy quartermaster for the troops garrisoned at Pittsburgh. Soon the general’s brother-in-law Major Kirkpatrick would run the commissary at the fort; Craig would soon be project-managing construction of a blockhouse that, as far as Secretary of War Henry Knox was concerned, ran infuriatingly over budget and behind schedule. The Neville Connection was gaining control over buying at the garrison to which it sold.

  One of the most important products of army supply was whiskey. General Neville could expect to start outselling his small competitors on a grand scale—if the tax was enforced and illegal whiskey made unconveyable to the army. Meanwhile
, as tax enforcer, he would draw not only a Treasury Department salary of $450 per year but also a 1 percent commission on what he and his deputies, also paid by commission, collected from their neighbors. Neville had railed, at first, against federal excise. Then he’d taken the collection job and changed his mind. Naturally some at the Forks imagined he’d been corrupted by salary and commission.

  Yet the general’s wealth made his salary less important than the way his appointment embodied—even reveled in—what ordinary people saw as yet another wrap in a tightly cinched system. The overarching purpose of federal law seemed to be to funnel money from a growing military establishment into corrupt mercantile cartels. The government enriched eastern bondholders and local entrepreneurs, reducing the struggling people of the Forks to a kind of peonage. If the Washington administration had set out to incite violent resistance, not just to the whiskey tax but to all eastern government and policy, it couldn’t have made a better choice than John Neville for inspector of the fourth survey.

  • • •

  Secretary Hamilton sent all excise inspectors a standard-operating-procedure manual, into which he poured his love of tight process, precise recordkeeping, and diligent follow-through. In the manual, consistency and documentation are everything.

  A survey inspector hires deputies and assigns each deputy a county in the survey. A deputy locates stills in his assigned area and inspects still capacities; he places a mark in a conspicuous place at the still to show that it’s been registered. From distillers paying the flat, still-capacity tax, the deputy collects the single annual payment; from distillers taxed per gallon of whiskey actually produced, the deputy must, before removal of any product from the still, collect the duty, either in cash or by bond. Before a distiller moves product from a still, the deputy gauges the proof in every cask, using a standard-issue treasury hydrometer, and then marks every cask with a unique number, assigned to casks in succession. Also marked on each cask: the name and location of the distiller; the type of beverage (rum, grain whiskey, brandy, etc., per approved abbreviations listed in the manual); the gauged proof; and the actual number of gallons in the cask. Information for each cask is also entered in a ledger kept by the deputy. Having collected the duty or secured the bond, the deputy then issues a certificate stamped with a Treasury Department seal.

 

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