The Whiskey Rebellion

by William Hogeland

  For Washington, dire personal matters were inseparable from dire national ones. The western land bubble would soon burst for everybody if lands appeared not to be under effective control of the United States. Especially painful was the military vulnerability of the frontier. Diplomatic efforts, as well as the deployment of a small, problematic army, had failed to subdue a confederation of native tribes centered around the lakes. The English, no longer simply failing to vacate western forts, were engaging in military buildup at Detroit and had established a new fort south of the western end of Lake Erie. Spain had been negotiating with Creeks and Cherokees, and Britain and Spain seemed to be developing a joint understanding in which all American settlement west of the mountains might be deemed theirs. Yet what really made both Indians and Europeans so dangerous sprang from a tendency on the part of western Americans to take independent action. Separatist attitudes made both cogent diplomacy and reliable defense impossible. At the headwaters of the Ohio such attitudes were especially destructive. The United States held vast lands beyond the Forks; those lands would be cut off by any permanent disaffection around Pittsburgh. The region was supposed to be serving U.S. military efforts, not obstructing the federal government.

  The whole problem was becoming encapsulated for Washington in the western people’s resistance to the tax law, which hadn’t been enforced anywhere over the mountains, from Kentucky to the Northwest Territory. Failure to collect a national tax imposed an embarrassing limit on the national reach. Tax resistance also had the practical effect of weakening big creditors’ confidence in the financial stability of the United States, which had promised to pay bondholders interest derived from excise revenues. To make up the shortfall, Hamilton had been forced to propose new federal taxes: excises on snuff, sugar, and carriages, as well as stamp taxes and new import duties. Because such taxes shifted burdens back to eastern merchants and creditors, now even high federalists were worried about excessive taxation.

  The awful national weakness, in all its military, legal, financial, and public-relations aspects, had a source, the president was beginning to believe, in the calculations of western opposition radicals, like those of the Washington County democratic society. A display of overwhelming force at the Forks of the Ohio might serve multiple purposes.

  • • •

  Hamilton did not need to believe that prominent men were leading a deluded rabble to violence. Though he endorsed and defended the president’s certainty that democratic societies were to blame, he was eminently capable of seeing the situation the other way round—a resistance movement driven from the bottom up. The Mingo Creek Association too was becoming known to the government: the U.S. attorney for Pennsylvania, William Rawle, was building a file on the group, based on reports from a spy at the Forks. Hamilton called the Mingo Creek Association a democratic society. Yet as he and Robert Morris had complained in the 1780s, politically ambitious elites often weren’t inciting but actually pandering to the organized resistance of ordinary people.

  There was time at last to revive the plans of ’92. This time Hamilton wouldn’t fail to send troops to the Forks. With the help of Attorney General Bradford and U.S. Attorney Rawle, he devised a procedure with more than one original twist. The tax man Benjamin Wells was called, yet again, to Philadelphia to give information on still owners who hadn’t registered; Wells was promised half of the $250 fine to be collected from each defendant. A list of recalcitrant distillers was compiled from Wells’s voluminous papers and from information sent by General Neville and other Pennsylvania inspectors over the past year. On the list were seventy-five violations for Pennsylvania. Only fifteen were for distillers east of the mountains.

  The idea, which appeared straightforward, was to send the federal marshal for Pennsylvania to serve summonses to the people on the list. Hamilton officially described the operation as a means of testing the law’s effectiveness in prosecuting offenders. Its real purpose, however, wasn’t to develop prosecutions. The writs required defendants to appear in court in August; courts were closed then. Attorney General Bradford noted privately that anyone who received a warrant and agreed to register a still on the spot wouldn’t actually be charged. What was being tested was the reaction of people at the Forks to being served warrants. As Hamilton, Bradford, and Rawle knew, people at the Forks, less and less likely to respond peacefully, better and better organized for panregional action, were likely to respond with the kind of violence that would justify a federal military suppression. And with Congress in recess, the president would be empowered by the new militia law to call out the largest possible force on his own discretion.

  Yet even as Hamilton, Bradford, and Rawle were developing this plan, Congress was busy setting more lenient rules for trials of excise defendants. William Findley had argued for this reform. To people accused of nonregistration of stills or nonpayment of tax, travel over the mountains to federal court in Philadelphia meant many weeks away from work and family, new and overwhelming expense, even the failure of farms. It all seemed punishment in advance of judgment. Court costs were prohibitive enough; the huge fines were designed to be ruinous; nothing had caused deeper bitterness among the people of the Forks, Findley said, than being forced to stand trial in Philadelphia. It was a truism of common law that nobody must be hauled from a vicinage for trial among the strange people of another region. The west’s sense of itself as a distinct region, whose problems were persistently ignored and misunderstood by easterners, amplified passion for this principle.

  So a new tax law, though involving tougher enforcement provisions, would allow the federal judiciary to establish court sessions in the countryside, using local courts to hear federal tax cases, just as William Findley had hoped. This leniency might give people being served warrants a feeling that their government was heeding their most deeply felt grievance. They might be less apt to explode with the kind of violence that would justify a military suppression.

  U.S. Attorney Rawle rushed the warrants into the May 31 docket. He just beat passage of the more flexible law, signed on June 5. The warrants could be served under the old law. They would impose the travel requirement. This masterstroke contrived to deliver the sting that the people considered the nastiest.

  Meanwhile, in the June 7 Pittsburgh Gazette, General Neville took out an ad giving names and addresses of excise officers for each county and calling on all distillers to register stills before the end of June. What happened was predictable. The rebels moved instantly to shut down all tax offices and punish not only officials but also civilian collaborators. Contrary to General Neville’s wishful advertising, Benjamin Wells’s tax office had already been shut down, but in June, Wells’s son and deputy John opened an office for Westmoreland County in the home of Philip Reagan, who was officially subdeputized a tax inspector as well; that house was fired on and stoned almost continuously throughout the month of June. John Wells’s own barn and crops were burned. Reagan and John Wells defended Reagan’s house, shooting back and refusing to close, but they couldn’t operate.

  Meanwhile John Lynn, who ran an inn in a house he rented in Canonsburg, foolishly sublet a room to General Neville for Robert Johnson’s Washington County tax office. A gang of ten or fifteen men in blackface came at night and called to Lynn to come out. He fled to an upper room and barred the door. The gang shouted that unless he came out, they’d burn his house; if he complied, he wouldn’t be hurt. Yet when Lynn came out, the men beat him, tied him up, and took him to the woods, where the usual mixture of whiskey-fueled wildness and ritual deliberation ensued. They chopped off his hair, shaved his head, stripped him naked, and poured the fuming tar on his head and body. Stuck with feathers, Lynn passed the night in the woods, tied to a tree. He was released in the morning.

  John Lynn wasn’t a tax collector. Yet after his tar and feathering, he was shunned with astonishing unanimity. His tavern was empty of customers. After part of the house was torn down, the landlord ordered Lynn off the property; Lynn had to seek refuge at
the home of Robert Johnson, who, facing new threats himself, and not making any money, kept telling General Neville that quitting the tax-collection business might be the only option. By the end of the month, when Neville was supposed to send money and information east, he hadn’t been able even to get reports from some of his embattled deputies. The life of anyone cooperating with Neville could be made unlivable.

  In this volatile environment, Hamilton and Attorney General Bradford introduced the spark. David Lenox, the U.S. marshal for Pennsylvania, left Philadelphia in mid-June to begin issuing summonses to delinquent distillers. After serving his few writs for the eastern counties, Marshal Lenox crossed the mountains in the bright days of early July. On the fourteenth he rode into Pittsburgh in time for a chat with Mr. Brackenridge.

  • • •

  The lawyer insisted on having hope. If everybody listened to reason, processes might be served at the Forks without undue incident. The marshal must behave properly; the people must respect him.

  When Lenox confided relief at having encountered no trouble, so far, in serving processes, even in the west, Mr. Brackenridge expressed surprise that the marshal was so relieved: people here might attack a tax man, but surely they would accept the authority of a sheriff or marshal. He chose not to mention the mobilizing of militias by the Mingo Creek Association, the closings of all tax offices, the liberty-pole raisings that recalled and presaged revolution. Getting reason to prevail meant emphasizing the prevalence of reason.

  The marshal had only a few more writs to serve, but they were for southern Allegheny County, not far from the Mingo Creek headquarters. Mr. Brackenridge advised the marshal that people’s anger had been focused on General Neville and suggested that leaving the general at home might avoid confrontation. Lenox didn’t take the advice, and the next morning, with dawn breaking, the marshal and the general left Bower Hill, rode down through the woods, and started south along the Washington pike. It was harvesttime. Men, women, and animals were in the fields; scythes were swinging. People shared whiskey, and the presence of Neville and a federal marshal on the high road excited comment.

  The two officers visited four farms as the day warmed. Lenox read out his summonses while General Neville looked on from the saddle. By noon it had already been a long day. Lenox was no hysterical Clymer but a brave, upwardly mobile hero of the revolution. Yet he was shocked: each of the people to whom he read a writ expressed loud contempt for the government he represented. One man had to be found out in a field, working with other sweaty reapers, who stood listening with menacing hostility to words that meant not only fines and legal fees, which could never be afforded, but also the crushing expense and insult to liberty of being carried away to stand trial among strangers. News of the marshal’s presence traveled through the forests and farms. A hastily gathered posse of thirty or forty militiamen began tracking the two federal officers, at a distance.

  Around noon Lenox and Neville rode up the lane of William Miller’s farm and stopped in the dooryard of the log house. Miller was supervising about twenty men who were working his harvest; interrupted, he stood and listened as the marshal, who had dismounted, stood before him and read out the summons. As insects hummed in the noonday sun, Miller found himself desperate. He wasn’t a rebel. He’d supported the Neville Connection; he was a war veteran who had fought Indians near the Forks throughout the revolution; he was a cousin of the general’s brother-in-law, Abraham Kirkpatrick, with whom he’d done business. But he wasn’t rich, and he couldn’t believe what was happening to him. All his hopes had lain in selling his farm, right after this harvest, and moving to Kentucky. Now he was required not only to pay an impossible $250 but also to spend more money and time traveling to court in Philadelphia in order to pay it. The fine and the trip killed his move to Kentucky. Miller considered the fact that General Neville, still atop his fine mount, had deliberately piloted the marshal to Miller’s door. Every time Neville had run for office, Miller had voted for him.

  “William Miller, you are to put aside any manner of work and excuses . . .” But Miller was lost in a heart-pounding heat of rage and desperation and refused to accept the writ. He began cursing the marshal. Lenox, stung by an outright display of emotion—the day had been harder than any other on his overlong journey—responded by giving Miller an angry lecture. The two men were arguing when General Neville called out to Lenox to hurry: the shadowing posse, leaving the screen of woods, was advancing across a field toward the main road, where it would cut off Lenox and Neville and trap them in Miller’s lane. Mounting up, Lenox left Miller in his doorway and caught up with Neville. Reaching the road ahead of the posse, the two men began riding away toward Bower Hill. The snap of rifle shots made them pull up, wheel, and face the posse, at whom they shouted angrily. The posse stopped too. Black smoke drifted. It wasn’t clear to Lenox whether the shots had been meant to hit or only to frighten. Neville, who knew that these men could have hit the left eye of a squirrel at long distance if they’d wanted to, warned Lenox that confrontation was not advisable. Lenox did loudly warn the gang against interfering with federal officers. The gang shouted back in accents that Lenox found incomprehensible. Neville and Lenox, turning to ride again, agreed that Neville should head for Bower Hill, not far away, and already fortified; Lenox would ride to relative safety in Pittsburgh.

  Meanwhile, at the Mingo Creek church, another group of militiamen had been meeting to respond to the call for soldiers for the army’s expedition against Indians; the brigade inspector had been hearing appeals for exemptions from this service. Evening was falling, and the meeting was breaking up, when a man rushed into the church with news of the marshal’s errand in the region and the confrontation at the Miller farm. Business was instantly suspended. Tactics were debated. The men arrived at a plan to arrest the federal marshal. They would bring him back to Mingo Creek, question and try him—the Mingo Creek Association being also a court—and what they did after that would depend on the marshal’s testimony.

  The men elected John Holcroft, of Tom the Tinker fame, to command. Holcroft selected a cadre, many armed with rifles and muskets, others only with clubs. This unit would go to Bower Hill, where the militia was betting the marshal would be. A separate party was dispatched toward Pittsburgh, to station itself on the high southern ridge overlooking the river and the village and, should the marshal be there, pen him in. “Fire if fired upon” was the order. Destroy all impediments. At all costs take the marshal.

  It was midnight when Holcroft’s men left Mingo Creek and moved through the dark woods toward the promontory of Bower Hill, about ten miles from the church. They climbed through the rocky woods high above Chartiers Creek and reached the mountaintop in the gray predawn of midsummer, emerging on Neville’s wet lawn and surrounding the quiet house. Only now did they see that the house had been barricaded. There were thick planks nailed over the expensive glass windows.

  General Neville had just awakened. In the house were Mrs. Neville, the Nevilles’ small granddaughter, and a young female friend of Mrs. Neville. Though the general had drilled his slaves for defense of Bower Hill, summer work began in the dark, and slaves were already away on distant fields.

  Neville called out to the men, demanding that they identify themselves. Holcroft, assuming Neville was the marshal, shouted an offer: the marshal should avail himself of the protection of this guard from Washington County. “Stand off” was Neville’s reply. Then he fired. His ball hit William Miller’s young nephew Oliver. The boy went down. The wound would be fatal.

  Fired upon, Holcroft’s company followed orders. Rebel balls ripped the planks on the windows and lodged in the wood frame. Neville had left the front door open, but Holcroft, noting the quality of fortification, decided against a massed charge: the door might be commanded from inside by a cannon. For twenty-five minutes, therefore, the men pounded the house with gunfire. Inside, the general was relying with confidence on his position, his fortification, and his own ranks. The Nevilles’ granddaught
er lay on the parlor floor. Mrs. Neville and her friend rapidly loaded guns. The general fired from posts at various windows, passed a gun back for reloading, took a newly loaded one, fired again. He didn’t need to send out a barrage. He selected targets. He thought he wounded four more of the men who were firing in ranks on his lawn.

  In the brightening morning, Holcroft realized that his men were making no headway. Neville’s castle apparently held plenty of powder and shot. The rebels had perforated the frame building, but Neville had the position, the skill, and the apparent willingness to pick them off one by one. They’d already taken a terrible loss in young Oliver Miller; now they had four other casualties.

  Holcroft called retreat. The men went down the mountain, falling back to Couch’s Fort, an abandoned redoubt of the French and Indian War, nestled partway down a long, gentle slope about four miles from Bower Hill. Only twenty-four hours had passed since Marshal Lenox and General Neville had left Bower Hill to serve writs. Everything had changed.

  • • •

  In his office, Mr. Brackenridge found himself trying hard to get General Neville’s son Presley to exercise some judgment. Presley was demanding the support of the Pittsburgh militia: he had a note from his father saying that a more concerted attack on Bower Hill must be imminent. The rebels, Presley was afraid, expected the general to deliver up his commission as tax inspector.

  “Deliver it, then!” was Mr. Brackenridge’s advice. The bitterness Mr. Brackenridge felt for the rest of the Neville Connection didn’t extend to his former law student. Now that the worst had actually happened, he tried to reason with Presley. If the weak Pittsburgh militia would come out at all—and it might not—rebels would trounce it and sack and burn Pittsburgh, or put the town under siege and starve it, or take Fort Fayette. When a federal army marched in response, as it must, the situation would be civil war, which would lay the region to waste and wound, perhaps fatally, the entire Union. With things like that at stake, the lawyer tried to explain, handing over some papers meant nothing. Once an outbreak had been avoided, and the situation was back in hand, let sheriffs and courts deal with wrongdoers.