The Whiskey Rebellion

by William Hogeland

  Little indeed could make a more decisive point, on a black and frigid night, than a blazing barn. In January of 1794, men who saw their barns burn weren’t tax collectors, nor had they rented space to tax collectors. Their crime was merely having registered their stills. For large-scale distillers to exploit the advantages Hamilton was giving them, they had to sell whiskey legally. Hamilton and the army had deliberately started buying whiskey from Kentucky and Virginia, hoping to compel Forks distillers to register or suffer, splitting the resistance. But the message of barn burnings was clear. Compliers with the law were now as traitorous as collectors. Stored crops and precious tools and machines, even the animals themselves, could be destroyed in such fires, which spread and caused terrible damage. Soon all compliers met with such treatment: stillhouses were burned, pot stills shot full of holes, barns and gristmills ripped down.

  The gangs called themselves Tom the Tinker’s Men. They huzzaed Tom at gatherings and made victims do the same. While nobody believed Tom existed, everybody knew that he did. His author, some said, was the veteran resister John Holcroft, who had served in the Shays Rebellion—but Tom wasn’t an alias for a person. He was the stark fact that loyal opposition to the resistance was disallowed. Tom was Mingo Creek personified.

  Now the Neville family came under direct attack. A General John Neville made of straw was hoisted and lit on fire that spring at a muster and militia election held just south of Pittsburgh where the Youghiogheny flows into the Monongahela. Presley Neville watched his father’s effigy burn for the delight of an armed and rowdy crowd. One evening not long afterward, the general, Mrs. Neville, and their small granddaughter were riding home from Pittsburgh when they were accosted. The family had pulled up and halted; the general had dismounted to tighten his wife’s saddle girth. Two men came riding by and passed into the woods; then a man and woman rode up and stopped. The man asked the general if he was John Neville. Neville said that he was. The man leaped from his horse and ran at the general, who responded with alacrity, pouncing on the man, wrestling him to the ground, and beating him. Mindful of the riders who had just passed, the general silenced the attacker by throttling him until subdued. The woman, and then the man himself, begged to be allowed to go. Neville let the man up, and as the couple rode quickly away, Neville, dusting himself off, filed away the man’s name: Jacob Long, a German immigrant and subsistence farmer. Back at his mountaintop mansion, the general began planning for a direct attack on his home.

  By May of 1794, liberty poles were rising. Up to a hundred feet tall, these were symbols of the trees under which, most famously in Boston, but in other villages and towns as well, the revolutionary committees of correspondence had organized to resist Great Britain. Where there were no appropriate trees, rebels of the seventies had erected poles. Often the poles had displayed symbols of resistance, the snake saying, “Don’t Tread on Me,” striped flags showing the unity of townships. British occupiers in Boston and New York had cut them down. Patriots had erected them again.

  The appearance of liberty poles in the western country thus had a meaning that was clear to everyone. Rebellion against tyranny was under way. Attacks by blackface gangs had been one thing, but the formal establishment of the Mingo Creek Association, the forced recantings in letters to the Gazette, the extralegal court system, the takeover of the militia, Tom the Tinker’s acts of destruction—these were something else.

  The Revolution of ’76 was breaking out again. Many signs announced that this time it would be completed. At Bower Hill, General Neville armed and drilled his slaves, and as summer approached, he burned candles through the shortening nights.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Hills Give Light to the Vales

  The president was perturbed and indignant. Congress had investigated the treasury secretary; the opposition, always reading Hamilton wrong, had failed to prove he’d used public money for personal gain. But the inquiry had been rushed, and rumors wouldn’t stop, so Hamilton asked for a new investigation, the more comprehensive, he said, the better. A congressional committee responded to that challenge. It asked the secretary under what authority, four years earlier, he’d diverted funds, earmarked by Congress for paying foreign debt, into stabilizing a domestic project, the central bank. Only a direct order from the president could have legitimized such a change.

  The president, Hamilton told the committee, had indeed given authorization, but verbally; no written evidence could be presented. Hamilton offered to give the committee some letters showing the general spirit in which he and Washington normally handled such matters. Then he tried to stall the committee by arguing that the question itself was out of bounds. He needed to speak to the president.

  Washington had meanwhile exploded. He’d received back-channel word that Hamilton was claiming, in a congressional investigation, to possess letters from the president authorizing, as Washington took it, something improper. Washington insisted passionately that no such letters could possibly exist. It was a difficult meeting when Hamilton showed Washington the letters, which turned out to be not very damning, or even germane. They related to authorizations other than the one at issue. Hamilton therefore tried to jog the president’s memory—known in the cabinet as sometimes sluggish—and get him to agree on the nature of specific discussions of four years earlier. Hamilton needed a public letter from Washington saying that the redirection of funds had been authorized verbally.

  Uncomfortable with trying to remember, and resenting Hamilton’s importuning tone, Washington retreated to magnificent reserve, giving Hamilton a potentially serious problem. Congress was requiring a written report on the matter. Hamilton wrote it and sent Washington a copy, with a cover letter meant to persuade Washington that the report contained only what they’d discussed in their memory-jogging conversation of a few days earlier. The president, keenly alert now, sent the report to Edmund Randolph for legal reading. Randolph, formerly attorney general, had taken over as secretary of state when Jefferson resigned. He was Jefferson’s relative; the high federalists led by Hamilton saw him as a knee-jerk, if weak-willed, apparatchik of the Jeffersonian opposition. The opposition, for its part, saw Randolph as a spineless idolater of Washington, neither bright nor trustworthy.

  Edmund Randolph was not a forceful man, but he was learned and articulate. He considered issues on their merits and made personal and professional loyalty to the president his first concern. Only Washington, Randolph believed, could wield a balance between Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian extremes. He informed Washington that Hamilton’s report, far from merely suggesting that the president had acquiesced in the secretary’s judgment, seemed to embrace Washington in blame by suggesting that he’d actively rendered an opinion that applying funds to the bank was legal. Washington must refrain from signing on to any of the report’s implications, Randolph urged, yet dispute nothing specific.

  The presidential letter Hamilton had asked for—written, actually, by Randolph—therefore offered no vindication at all. It said only that whatever the secretary had alleged was probably accurate, but that the president couldn’t specifically recall authorizing any particular redirection of funds.

  Hamilton was horrified. He begged Washington to revise the statement. He complained that the president was leaving him vulnerable to ruin and implied that Randolph was turning the president against him. Washington declined to make any changes in the letter. Opposition congressmen at last saw a chance of bringing Hamilton down. James Madison gleefully reported the flap to Jefferson: this only showed, Madison said, how far Hamilton’s wangling had outstripped the president’s ability to direct or even understand what went on in the treasury.

  But the committee soon realized it was stymied. The issue now turned on the quality of the president’s memory, and publicly exploring the quality of the president’s memory was out of the question. With nothing else on Hamilton, Congress took the safe course of fully vindicating him, yet again, and only two weeks later, Hamilton, undaunted, was asking Washing
ton for a new authorization. Now he wanted to apply some of an appropriated three million florins to paying down Dutch debt.

  Washington pounced. People were worrying about his memory and suggesting his command had slipped. He went to his files and discovered that he’d already ordered, at Hamilton’s request, all three million of the appropriation applied to domestic debt, not to Holland. The president shot Hamilton a note demanding clarification. Hamilton replied that he’d simply forgotten all about Washington’s order—he’d had yellow fever—and pointed out that, since the order had never been entered in the treasury’s books, Washington could simply reverse it now and let the money go to Holland. Otherwise, Hamilton added, the United States would experience financial embarrassments.

  No, said Edmund Randolph. Changing this appropriation without Congress’s knowledge would be highly improper; at the very least, the treasury secretary must specify what the supposed financial embarrassments might be. Hamilton, compelled for the first time to justify a finance recommendation, responded instantly, drowning Washington in elaborate rationales full of numbers and concepts that both men knew were beyond Washington’s scope. Washington countered, again on Randolph’s advice, by saying that if paying Holland was really so important, Hamilton had permission to take the whole matter back to Congress.

  Checkmate. Hamilton sent back a list of good reasons for not getting Congress involved and finally, out of options, had no choice but to let the matter drop.

  So Washington did have the focus and consistency, when furious and worried, to regain a kind of control over a project of his bustling treasury secretary. Yet the enormous effort he’d expended had really only exposed the queasy news that Hamilton, in the one case where Washington had looked closely, was relying on presidential forgetfulness and, when that hadn’t worked, had tried to sneak a seedy idea past Washington’s treasured sense of propriety. There was nothing for Washington to do with this awareness. Gone were the days when an irritable general and chafing staffer could snap at each other, split up, and get back together later. In 1794, every consequence was dire.

  Edmund Randolph, meanwhile, was becoming a Hamilton irritant. With Jefferson gone, Hamilton enjoyed unopposable dominance in the cabinet. Henry Knox, secretary of war, was not an energetic politician. William Bradford, who had taken over as attorney general, was becoming a shrewd ally of Hamilton, with a subtler understanding than the treasury secretary’s of the uses of public perception. Randolph posed no concerted threat, but as the only Virginian left in the cabinet, he was increasingly Washington’s adviser, even—to the extent that Washington confided anything—a confidant.

  Hamilton had announced an intention to retire from the treasury as soon as his name had been cleared by Congress, but now he sent Washington two important letters. In the first he withdrew his name from consideration for the job of envoy to England. Washington had already told people that Hamilton was too unpopular for such a sensitive diplomatic assignment; knowing he was out of the running, Hamilton allowed this letter to reflect petulance. (Soon he’d be working on the mission anyway, sending instructions to the envoy that neither the president nor the secretary of state would see.) Staying home had advantages. Hamilton had projects. He wrote another letter, this time telling Washington that he would remain in the cabinet after all.

  • • •

  That was in the spring of 1794. In April the president received a remonstrance from a group calling itself the Democratic Society of the County of Washington in Pennsylvania, which drew the cabinet’s attention abruptly back to matters at the Forks. Washington had already been giving much worried consideration to the political clubs that had formed up and down the seaboard in excitement about the French Revolution’s culmination in terror and beheadings. Self-styled “democratic societies” denounced monarchical tendencies in the federal government; in smoky taverns they wrote letters to editors and addresses celebrating égalité, fraternité, liberté. Washington called the clubs self-created, in that they tampered extralegally with the only legitimate popular expression, elections; he saw them as gatherings of anti-federalist politicians trying to inflame ordinary people to mob violence and sedition with loose talk about guillotining aristos.

  The Washington County democratic society’s officers included the wealthy lawyer David Bradford and his business partner James Marshall. The remonstrance they sent the president, which actually originated in Kentucky, complained mainly of unfairness to westerners. When it appeared in Philadelphia, the remonstrance was reviewed and abominated by everyone in the cabinet: Not only was this the latest example, the cabinet inferred, of a disturbing craze for all things French; it was also the worst imaginable example of that trend. General Neville had been reporting attacks on tax collectors and tax compliers. Those attacks now seemed to be explained by an inflammatory society in Washington County.

  Had the president envisioned the real situation at the Forks, he would have discredited it as a garish nightmare. He was correct in believing that the bug for glorifying French violence had infected the west as everywhere else. The Washington County society was indeed a gentlemen’s club, like the societies in eastern cities, for political discussion, petitioning, and electioneering, and David Bradford and James Marshall, having flirted with radicalism for years, were exactly the sort of ambitious opposition politicians the president had in mind for censure. In the Pittsburgh Gazette too, writers proffered the guillotine as a political solution. Even Mr. Brackenridge, member of no society, had in a fit of republican flamboyance published a piece titled “Louis Capet Has Lost His Caput,” exploiting for comedy and shock value the decapitation of the king of France. The national fad for French terror mixed easily in the west with regional grievances and old-fashioned reverence for natural English liberties.

  But the Washington County democratic society wasn’t directing the attacks General Neville had been reporting. It met only twice. The Mingo Creek Association inspired and led those attacks, and the association was something President Washington couldn’t imagine. Its roots were in actions and attitudes that predated not only French fever but the French Revolution itself. The association met regularly, it wasn’t a club, and it wasn’t self-created, exactly, but something far more destabilizing, having taken over a state-created body, the militia. The association was forcing prominent men, especially supposed radicals like David Bradford, to confront the growth of a radicalism not literary but militant, not French but American, not controlled from above by opposition politicians but originating among small farmers and landless laborers.

  Ordinary people, operating an extralegal court, regulating an entire region, challenging the prominent on the nature of their commitments: this picture didn’t coincide with Washington’s experience of ordinary people, especially those of the Forks. Washington felt he knew the Forks well. He’d been getting immensely frustrated with the major project of his life, western land speculation. In five decades, that speculation had given him a total of sixty thousand acres across the Appalachians. His efficiency and commitment had been unremitting. As Virginia’s young militia commander, he’d stalled petitioning the governor to make good on land claims to militiamen, buying the claims from soldiers whom he led to believe the governor’s promise would never be kept. He’d deployed land scouts with instructions to break and get around laws limiting tract size. He’d threatened and bullied people who were eyeballing plots to which, by virtue of having eyeballed them first, he claimed title. When the royal proclamation of 1763 prohibited land purchases west of the mountains, he told his agent to buy there anyway. The War of Independence legitimized his titles by overturning royal injunctions. After the revolution, he showed no patience for illegal possession: he spent much energy bringing actions against squatters, disdaining their idea that title—or at least affordable rents—should be offered to those willing to live on and improve the land.

  He needed full rent. He had a constant need for cash. Making Mount Vernon pay for itself was always a problem, and his
late mother had been a carping, ungrateful drain on his slim cash resources. He’d hoped to gain solvency through collection of western rents and then—when canals and roads were supported by the government and built by his own company, when Indians were suppressed by the United States Army, when regional government became what he called well toned—make a fortune by selling those lands, which would, in the meantime, have become extraordinarily valuable.

  But his hopes for the west were growing dreary, his patience thin. The land was still squatted on; rents went uncollected. The absence of cash in the west—for all of Hamilton’s skepticism about it—was well known to Washington: he had to accept grain and other barter as rent, which always sold, through his agents in the west, for less than he knew it was worth. The sluggishness of his agent at the Forks in sending cash, and even in responding to Washington’s voluminous questions—the agent didn’t answer letters for up to a year, sometimes claiming lamely not to have received them—suggested that it might not be realistic to expect consistent rent collection at the Forks. Government there was anything but well toned, and the irresponsibility, disregard for law, and disaffection with the east that Washington saw as inherent in the character of western people were turning his land into an actual drain.

  He planned on replacing his agent—he had in mind General Neville’s son Presley—but really he was considering giving up his dream. The land wouldn’t fetch, now, a fraction of what it someday might when canals, roads, and governmental authority linked west to east. Still, he needed income, not outgo. Recently he’d been writing his friend James Ross, in Washington County, about finding buyers for his land.