Ferrying alone back to town, he saw again the great signal of failure. The southern sky jumped with light. Major Kirkpatrick’s barns were burning.
But the rebels had left the point. No fire was sweeping through town. Morning brought the exhausted citizens only further suspense. Rumor had it that men were waiting nearby to come back to carry out the burning. Word came too that rebel troops, passing Robert Johnson’s house the night before, had threatened to shoot Johnson’s wife. In the country, it was said, David Bradford was triumphant, and anyone who hadn’t been at Braddock’s Field was apologetic and disgraced.
As the committee of twenty-one assembled that evening to consider further contingencies, yet another crisis developed. Major Kirkpatrick was still in town. He hadn’t really left; he was at the fort. Should rebels learn of Kirkpatrick’s presence, they’d take revenge on the town. The committee ordered Presley Neville and Isaac Craig seized and sent down to rebel headquarters in Washington as a forfeit for Kirkpatrick. Craig, hearing he was being sought, fled to the fort, but Presley sent word that he’d turn himself in, and soon he sauntered into the committee room, smoking a cigar. He announced with a smirk that Major Kirkpatrick was willing to leave town if given a protective escort. The committee of twenty-one eagerly assigned a man the job.
Over at the fort, townspeople—not rebels—were gathering. Enraged by Kirkpatrick’s willingness to sacrifice the town to rebel vengeance, they surrounded the fort in hopes of shooting Kirkpatrick or turning him over to the rebels. Moderates were wondering how to handle this new source of mob violence when rain again intervened. Darkness had fallen, and in a downpour, the assigned escort rode up to the fort leading a fresh horse with full saddlebags. He managed to slip past the wet and angry crowd at the gates, and soon he slipped out again, this time with Kirkpatrick riding beside him. A shot was fired after the two men, but they were gone in the night.
• • •
The rebels were almost ready to declare victory. As the town was purged, in the countryside Tom the Tinker blotted out all remaining traces of federal authority. A few hundred armed militiamen returned to the home of Philip Reagan, where Benjamin Wells’s son John had failed to operate the Westmoreland County excise office. Reagan was taken into the woods and given a trial, which the assembled rebels called a court-martial. The verdict was guilty, the sentence tar and feathering, but the sentence was commuted. Instead, Reagan was forced to hand over his papers as a deputy, share whiskey with the rebels, and pledge his commitment to the rebel cause. Then the militia paraded Reagan through the villages. Crossing the Youghiogheny, the triumphant cadre approached Benjamin Wells’s home to the beat of a drum. Nobody was there, but the house was full of plate, pewter, and featherbeds. The rebels stacked three beds in the middle of a room as kindling; lighting that, they threw bedclothes on top, and amid flames and smoke they smashed all crockery and kicked the cookware and pewter into the fire. By morning the house had been leveled to a hot, black pile, studded with melted pewter and potmetal. Reagan escaped that night, but in the morning, as Benjamin and John Wells returned to their flattened home, the rebels apprehended them and rode them away, again showing the prisoners to people on the road. At a mill owned by the father of one of the landless rebels, the Wellses too were tried by court-martial. The sentence was tar and feathering; it was commuted. The Wellses were made to resign their commissions, drink with the rebels, and declare fealty to the cause. They were released without a home and with only the clothes they wore. They had no offices or papers. They’d drunk spirits from the common pot and joined in the pledge of allegiance. To Tom the Tinker they no longer existed, as individuals or as officials.
With his family franchise and all its subsidiaries expunged from the Forks, Benjamin Wells expunged his person too, leaving his family with neighbors and heading for Philadelphia by way of Winchester, Virginia, to give new evidence, in which he would name Herman Husband an instigator of this new mood of regulation. Philip Reagan fled the Forks too, as did John Webster, the collector for Bedford County. Webster had been taken prisoner, held overnight, and forced to watch his haystacks and stables burn. After tearing up and treading on his papers, he found himself standing on a stump, giving three huzzas for Tom the Tinker, drinking toasts as rebels cheered around him.
The situation was more desperate now, moderates thought, than it had been before Braddock’s Field. The blackface attacks had been frightening, but this was revolution almost accomplished. The village on the point had so far been spared, indeed saved, moderates believed, by their ploys, risky and distressing as those ploys were. Yet moderates were under attack from many sides. To embattled members of the Neville Connection still in town, the committee was a rebel instrument; Pittsburgh was controlled by the insurgency. To the townspeople, the committee had risked the burning of the town by helping Kirkpatrick escape rebel rage. To the rebels, Sodom hadn’t yet committed itself to the cause of the new west and might still need to be purified by fire. Flustered, exhausted, with nowhere to hide, moderates kept hoping for calm, but the grand western congress, called by David Bradford and the Mingo church rebels, was still scheduled for August 14. Its agenda was to define a new relationship between the western country and the government of the United States. Five counties of Pennsylvania, as well as Ohio County in Virginia, were sending delegates.
Mr. Brackenridge kept being stunned by displays of irrationality. Some of the remaining Neville Connection had left town within the agreed-upon eight-day period, but Presley Neville was being obstinate. First Presley met with the committee of twenty-one and demanded a passport and an escort out of town. The committee gave him a pair of passports, one to get him through rebel territory, the other to explain his situation to the federal and state governments. But Presley hung around for days and then met with Mr. Brackenridge—whom he now insisted on treating as the rebel warlord—to demand that his status be reviewed, as an official order of business, at the upcoming regionwide congress. Presley wanted his banishment formally repealed.
Mr. Brackenridge couldn’t believe it. Disasters multiplied while people contested fine points of nonexistent laws and the official resolutions of kangaroo assemblies. Again the lawyer explained the reality to Presley, this time with asperity: the young man’s own person and property would be far safer if he simply removed himself for a time and let Mr. Brackenridge and others work for resolution. Presley did at last agree to leave, but grudgingly. He believed Mr. Brackenridge was forcing him out, and he planned a triumphant return.
Wanting to stay in town seemed absurd to the lawyer, who had been dreaming about running since before Braddock’s Field. He was still a target for assassination and had never believed in displays of courage. With Wilkins, Jr., he’d discussed not only good destinations but also good excuses, as flight would be deemed treason by rebels patrolling the roads. Wilkins favored going up the Allegheny, into the deep woods, on the pretext of surveying. The lawyer dreamed only of Philadelphia.
Now he had an idea. The town should appoint him to travel to the president and explain Pittsburgh’s situation. But Wilkins, Jr., objected. He’d come to believe that all moderates had a duty to stay and work for peace; more important, he didn’t want to be left alone, the last reasonable man in town. Stuck, Mr. Brackenridge hoped to stay away from the upcoming six-county congress. His experience at the Mingo church told him that he and other prominent men would be called on to speak, to propose resolutions, and to stand up and vote, committing themselves to treason or risking assassination. He suggested to fellow moderates that the most prominent among them try to keep out of the congress. But they prevailed on him. Senator James Ross, Wilkinses Jr. and Sr., and Albert Gallatin all believed the best known of the moderates had a duty to get elected to the congress as delegates. They must capture the congress. They must try, one more time, to bring about submission and beg the government for amnesty.
So Mr. Brackenridge was elected a delegate from Pittsburgh. But he also decided to write personally to Ten
ch Coxe, Secretary Hamilton’s chief deputy, to explain the sensitivity of the moderates’ situation at the Forks and beg for the understanding and forbearance of the federal government. As he began writing, he realized that the rebels were not above reading people’s mail. So he employed his literary talents in writing for two audiences. For rebel readers, he couched his pleas for governmental understanding in what he hoped the rebels would mistake for fist-shaking rhetoric. It remained part of his strategy for peace to perform his best imitation, whenever rebels might be around, of a firebrand radical.
• • •
Neither moderates nor radicals could have predicted the event that, at the August 14 congress, turned the insurrection in a new direction. The congress was held at Parkinson’s Ferry, hardly a neutral place: On a wide bend of the Monongahela River, well to the south of the village on the point, it had been named for a ferry, tavern, and store run by the brother of Benjamin Parkinson of the association; it was too close, geographically and emotionally, to Mingo Creek for moderates’ comfort. The congress came to order high on a bluff, where a field full of stumps and fallen trees overlooked the river and hills. The size of the crowd made the outdoor setting necessary. From all townships in five Pennsylvania counties, and from Ohio County in Virginia, came 226 delegates, supported and monitored by 250 armed men, who acted as a kind of gallery.
The delegates were almost all radicals, menacingly supported by the gallery, which talked only of war. Herman Husband himself was present as a delegate from Bedford. As on the eve of the Battle of Alamance thirty years earlier, Husband was now counseling peace. Yet the people were talking less of the repeal of the excise tax than of a complete restructuring of society along the lines of Husband’s sermons. They seemed more than ready to stare down every horn of the Beast to get it. Liberty poles announced that the whole area was in defiance of government. Some slogans on poles attacked the excise, but others called for something far more radical: equal taxation. Some promised death to cowards and traitors; some revived the all-purpose image of independence, a snake, now cut in segments representing the separate counties, warning, “Don’t Tread on Me.”
The western country had its own flag now too. Six stripes, alternating red and white, stood for the unified six counties of western Pennsylvania and northwestern Virginia. In conversations with spectators and delegates, it became clear to Mr. Brackenridge that people saw the whiskey tax only as a symbol. They wanted repeal, but they were also talking about a redistribution of wealth, especially of land, with rules for access to land and rewards for improvement. As the flag flew above the high bluff on the river, the moderates’ task seemed impossible.
Then the congress was brought up short. On the morning of the fifteenth, the delegates received a message that came, amazing all assembled, from representatives of the president of the United States. Even more amazing, these representatives were in a house only four miles away. They’d just arrived; they’d been traveling hard and fast for days, hoping to forestall the worst.
The United States hadn’t sent an army. It was just what Mr. Brackenridge and the moderates had been hoping for. George Washington was offering to negotiate for peace with the people of the western country.
CHAPTER NINE
Talking
The president had been nursing pain and frustration at Mount Vernon, victim of the injury he’d sustained on horseback at the Potomac’s lower falls, when Marshal Lenox had begun serving writs on noncomplying distillers in Pennsylvania. When the shooting started on William Miller’s farm, Washington, still in pain, had been back at work for about a week. It was not until ten days later, on July 25, that Henry Knox received word from Isaac Craig of the burning of Bower Hill. In the next few days, the administration received reports of the robbing of the U.S. mail, the march on Braddock’s Field, the expulsion of the Neville Connection, and the scheduling of the Parkinson’s Ferry congress.
The burning of Bower Hill was more than enough. The day that news arrived, Washington resumed what he and Hamilton had launched in the spring. Process of law in western Pennsylvania, the president said, had broken down. He called an emergency cabinet meeting to consider ways of using federal force to subdue the western counties. Timing the process service for June had been effective: Congress had closed its session right after passing the new excise-enforcement law, and with Congress in recess, the president had personal discretion to create the largest possible force. To invoke his powers under the Militia Act he needed only the certification of a justice of the Supreme Court that law enforcement had truly failed at the Forks.
Hamilton began gathering documentation for James Wilson, now a court justice, an old fellow nationalist in the confederation Congress, and old ally of Robert Morris in the Pennsylvania assembly. It was Wilson who had almost single-handedly revised the radical Pennsylvania constitution in favor of creditors. Always desperately in debt, he was still an investor in increasingly irrational land and industrial schemes; he’d always been unabashed in connecting the need for federal strength with the importance of paying creditor interest. He required some hastily assembled documentation of the breakdown of law in the west, but on August 4, having made no independent investigation, Wilson certified the call for troops.
Thomas Mifflin, governor of Pennsylvania, posed a problem. An ally of the Jeffersonian opposition, Mifflin was an old states-rights man and had been a personal enemy of Washington since the early days of the revolution. Mifflin and the administration were in the midst of a clash over federal and state jurisdiction in Presque Isle, on Lake Erie, and Mifflin’s subordinates had gotten in the habit of writing passionately challenging letters to the president. The governor had long been adept at handing out favors and appointments on all sides, using patronage to blur lines between opposing parties: a hard-drinking, glad-handing clubhouse politician, he’d been unscatheable for years in general elections, and the Washington administration badly needed a show of his wholehearted support to stifle political opposition to using troops. On August 2, the president and his cabinet met with Mifflin and other Pennsylvania officials. The meeting did not go smoothly.
The president asked Mifflin, as a show of cooperation, to call out the Pennsylvania militia against the rebels—a quick, preliminary measure, Washington told Mifflin, not dependent on Supreme Court certification. The Pennsylvania authorities objected. While federal enforcement might have failed, they said, the state’s hadn’t: noncompliance with the excise law was a federal, not a state, crime, so opportunity for state enforcement had arisen only with the attack on General Neville’s home, which might involve both state and federal charges. As no state enforcement had yet been tried, calling out the militia would be as illegal as anything the rebels were doing. The Pennsylvanians went further: should the president require the governor to call out the militia, jurisdictional tensions would be such that Mifflin would have to take up the issue with his legislature before complying.
To the cabinet, this position was infuriating. When the Pennsylvanians cited the opinion of District Judge Addison that force would only promote resistance at the Forks, Hamilton replied that Addison’s opinion showed that justice in the western counties was run by the insurgency. Acrimony intensified. The minutes broke off. A daunting conflict was shaping up between two executive branches over the legitimacy of using military power against the citizenry.
On the federal side, the most complete argument for the legitimacy—indeed, necessity—of sending troops to western Pennsylvania came, not surprisingly, from Alexander Hamilton, in an official report made on August 5 at the president’s request, in which Hamilton summed up his long-standing views. He placed rebel violence in a military, not a criminal, light, focusing on the area’s populace as a whole, not on individual attackers. He reminded Washington that Clymer had discovered at the Forks something far worse than mere opposition to excise: hatred of the United States had long been brewing there. He cited the two Pittsburgh conventions, where complaints had gone far beyond excise. Loc
al law enforcement’s failure either to arrest the Wellses’ attackers or to call out the militia to defend Bower Hill were further examples of the regional quality of the insurrection. Mincing with his usual onrush of delicacy around the desire to smash with force (here he called it “what is in such cases the ultimate resort”), Hamilton noted that all milder means—sending Clymer, serving the writs—had now been tried without success.
The report was a triumph for being indisputable, in a context of crisis that Hamilton had hoped to create. He cited a resolution of the second antiexcise convention at Pittsburgh, which called for using “all legal means to obstruct the execution of the law.” How can there be legal means, Hamilton asked—unanswerably—of obstructing the execution of a law? In a republic, the people vote for legislators. The legal means of repealing a law is to vote for new legislators. Noncompliance is bad enough, but obstruction of the federal law is by every definition destructive of the republic.
The report was unanswerable in a more profound way as well. Nobody would have agreed more heartily than the rebels themselves that they were engaged not in committing crimes, nor in opposing mere excise, but in a regionwide mobilization against the government by people loyal first and foremost to local leaders, disciplined by passion for their cause, or, where passion was lacking, by coercion. The people’s movement described itself just as Hamilton did: a collective and univocal entity.
The Whiskey Rebellion Page 20