In his reports, Hamilton somewhat halfheartedly reassured Washington that the big men might still be prosecuted. But he knew that Benjamin Parkinson, John Holcroft, and Alexander Fulton were in hiding, as were many others. And of course there had never been a basis for arresting people like Judge Addison. What Hamilton’s reports to Washington began presenting most energetically was the need to maintain, for the foreseeable future, a military presence to police the region.
Hamilton did spend time prompting detainees to manufacture evidence against two prominent men: William Findley and Albert Gallatin. They were Hamilton’s bitterest western enemies in Congress. They’d both opposed the tax, the finance plan as a whole, and Hamilton’s influence in the administration. Nobody had been more obviously committed than they to calming rebel hostility, though Gallatin was more vulnerable; he’d signed the second, inflammatory Pittsburgh petition. Yet Hamilton saw a chance to identify each of them as the very sort of leader whom Washington believed this expedition had been intended to prosecute. To that end, John Powers, a local moderate, who was hosting General Lee’s headquarters near the confluence of the Youghiogheny and the Monongahela, was summoned to one of Hamilton’s temporary headquarters. Powers appeared promptly, wondering how he could be of service. When Hamilton quizzed him on the role Albert Gallatin had played in the rebellion, Powers had little information to give. Hamilton expressed disappointment and asked whether memory would be improved by Powers’s taking an hour or so in another room. Powers, confused, agreed; then, finding himself thrust at bayonet point into a room full of imprisoned suspects, he understood. He sat there, heart pounding amid the silent, shabby prisoners. The door was guarded by a soldier with a gun. Nobody moved.
An hour later, he was ushered back into Hamilton’s office. Still polite, Hamilton asked whether Powers had remembered anything, and Powers, frightened, said he hadn’t. Hamilton changed. The questioning had been a test, he announced; he already had the evidence he needed on Gallatin. Powers’s refusal to help only showed rebel sympathy. Hamilton called for the guard, and this time it wasn’t a test. John Powers was taken to the lockup at Fort Fayette. His offers of posting bail were declined, as were his demands to know the charge against him. He wasn’t charged, but he stayed in jail until after Hamilton, having failed to find any grounds for arresting Gallatin, had left the area.
Hamilton took a similar approach when John Hamilton, colonel of the Mingo Creek militia and high sheriff of Washington County, decided to turn himself in. Hearing that he was to be arrested, John had time to escape down the river. Yet he chose to suffer interrogation and fight prosecution in court. He thought he had a case. He’d refused to join in the attack on Bower Hill. He’d tried to countermand the order to march on Braddock’s Field. He’d been working for moderation ever since. He didn’t realize that trials weren’t foremost in Alexander Hamilton’s plan. John Hamilton was just prominent enough at the Forks to make a fine example, yet unlike Findley and Gallatin, not so well known in the eastern world that evidence would be needed for imprisoning him indefinitely. Hamilton wrote to Washington. While it wasn’t clear that anything could be proved against John Hamilton, he said, the man was in every other respect an admirable subject.
John Hamilton met with Judge Peters and asked to hear any charges against him. Peters put him off, claiming other business; witnesses were meanwhile brought, one by one, before Peters, Rawle, and Alexander Hamilton and told to testify that John Hamilton had sent his regiment to Bower Hill. He hadn’t, and when the detainees declined to say he had, they were told that their own amnesties would be revoked and they’d be arrested themselves. Each witness was then passed, for a more assertive rendition of that threat, first to the irate General Neville—now serving at the Forks as a unique blend of prosecutor and plaintiff—and finally to an especially intimidating Philadelphia Light Horse officer. Still, none would testify falsely.
Orders went out anyway, and John Hamilton was arrested while waiting to see Judge Peters. He demanded repeatedly to know the charge. He announced again and again that he would submit to Peters for examination. He was sent, with no hearing, to the fort at Pittsburgh, where he awaited removal to Philadelphia with other prisoners.
• • •
Mr. Brackenridge, high on the list, should have been used to feeling horrible anxiety, given his many months of living under rebel threat, but his current situation surpassed anything he’d known even at the height of rebellion. Members of the Neville Connection, who had started the “skewering” campaign while traveling with the army, assured Alexander Hamilton that Brackenridge had been playing a double game all along and was the chief rebel leader. Even David Bradford, they said, had been a pawn of mastermind Brackenridge. The Nevilles persistently depicted Brackenridge, Findley, and Gallatin as brothers in a treasonous junta. Brackenridge was far more evidently culpable than the other two and had little political support. Really, he was the perfect subject for hanging.
The Nevilles manufactured documentary evidence too. Before David Bradford’s flight, Isaac Craig asked Bradford to contradict in writing Mr. Brackenridge’s claim of having argued, at Braddock’s Field, against Craig’s expulsion from Pittsburgh. The Nevilles added facts to the file. Brackenridge had advised against calling out the militia to protect Bower Hill; he’d told Presley and other exiles that they’d be better off out of Pittsburgh; most damning of all, he’d addressed the meeting at the Mingo Creek church, where David Bradford had called upon the people of the western country to overthrow the government. The Nevilles didn’t mention that Presley had pressured Mr. Brackenridge, as a personal favor, to attend that meeting.
Hamilton had no problem crediting these characterizations. Mr. Brackenridge’s letter to the treasury had seemed to threaten an attack on Philadelphia even as it castigated the plan of national finance. In 1792, Brackenridge had written the National Gazette article urging repeal of the whiskey tax. As the best-educated, best-known person at the Forks, with a modest national reputation to boot, Brackenridge would make an ideal example, just the kind of self-interested opposition politician President Washington was looking for. The lawyer was fair game too, having been a day late in signing the submission that guaranteed amnesty. The only potential problem, Hamilton wrote to Washington, was that the commissioners had legitimized the lawyer by dealing with him during the negotiation phase.
Mr. Brackenridge was incredulous. People brought him stories every day of what the Nevilles were saying. While he’d disparaged the Neville Connection for years, he’d also worked tirelessly to prevent disasters from befalling Isaac Craig and Presley; he’d helped save Kirkpatrick’s house and get Kirkpatrick himself safely out of town. Somehow it was he—he wasn’t sure he could bear it—who had been singled out as a target for vengeance from the nation he’d hoped to devote his talents to glorifying and expanding. He could not credit Presley or General Neville, or even Craig or Kirkpatrick, despite their faults, with so vociferously desiring his utter downfall and death. His terrified musings focused on John Woods, the Nevilles’ lawyer and family counselor, now helping General Neville identify and interrogate suspects. Mr. Brackenridge deduced that Woods was leading the campaign to kill and defame him.
He flailed wildly over what to do, for everything he’d done so far had gone wrong. When the army had been mustering east of the mountains, he’d written another letter, this time to President Washington, but there had seemed no point in sending it: Findley’s partner, Redick, back from the interview at Carlisle, told Brackenridge that the president, when told Brackenridge wasn’t a rebel, had maintained stony silence. Sickened by news that the troops planned to execute him, Brackenridge next decided to take his case straight to the soldiers. He published handbills explaining his conduct; he gave them to Findley and Redick to take on their second trip, for distribution to officers and men. Militia commanders responded with impatience or weak assurances of safety, and when Redick passed the handbills out to the troops, a new chapter was added to the story of
the scoundrel Brackenridge’s shamelessness: now the traitor was polluting the pure, avenging army of union.
As troops drew near the Forks, Mr. Brackenridge thought constantly of running, this time not from Tom the Tinker but from the government. He could go down the Mississippi, like David Bradford. There were the Spanish, or the British. Desperation kept pushing his imaginings toward Indians, up in the great wilderness across the Allegheny. He’d disdained their ways, but he might have a chance with them. He’d defended the drunk Mamachtaga, “Trees Blown Around by a Storm,” who refused to tell self-serving lies in the courtroom and had been abandoned, in the end, even by his own tribe. Mr. Brackenridge knew a hunter who could take him into the woods. . . .
Yet when the exiled Nevilles returned to Pittsburgh, with a flashy escort from their ancestral Virginia, Mr. Brackenridge was still in town. He’d made up his mind to die on his own hearth. Decision didn’t calm his anguish. He watched the conquering army ride past his house and thought the soldiers looked up at his window and laughed. The grand entrance inspired festivities appropriate to the restoration of a military and commercial dynasty. As the Nevilles led what appeared to be their personal army down the muddy streets, flags flew, horns squawked, and cannon shook the ground. Pittsburgh’s social round instantly rebloomed. Eastern officers would soon be amazed to find such deluxe balls and teas in the wilderness.
Mr. Brackenridge, gazing on the happy return, felt his own assassination near, and that very night a contingent of soldiers came to his house, making clear their intention to execute him. General and Presley Neville appeared too, running from Presley’s townhouse down the street. They placed themselves between the troops and the door. The Nevilles harangued the men. Brackenridge, they said, had stood his ground. He hadn’t run. Now it was time for the judiciary to deal with him. He must not be assassinated.
As the troops dispersed, Mr. Brackenridge saw that the Nevilles had a better idea than murder. They were saving him for the utter disgrace of trial and hanging. Interrogators were said to be releasing suspects—some of them guilty—who agreed to manufacture evidence against Gallatin, Findley, and Brackenridge. While mental habit forced him to note the irony—he could barely be civil to Findley—mental habit could no longer console him. Under constant barrages of panic and indignation, his sense of self was teetering.
Being realistic hadn’t been realistic. Waiting with mounting horror for arrest and interrogation, the death he feared now was one brought on by madness.
Then things got worse. The quartermaster corps selected Mr. Brackenridge’s house, as the biggest in town, for the Pittsburgh headquarters of General Lee, who was moving up from the Youghiogheny. As dragoons stomped in, the lawyer moved his family to a single room. He determined not to leave it until arrested. The awful thing was that Henry Lee and Hugh Henry Brackenridge had been at Princeton together. The upperclassman Brackenridge had tutored young Lee. Now the lawyer, forced to welcome Lee into the house, could barely shake hands with the general. Lee seemed embarrassed too. It must be awkward, Brackenridge reflected, to take the cold hand of one who had once seemed promising, now disgraced as a traitor, soon to be a corpse.
At night he lay fully clothed on a couch in the crowded room. Arrests usually came at night; he wanted to be ready. Between tense naps he read Plutarch’s Lives. Once he’d hoped to inspire a national culture that might give the United States its own Plutarch. Returning now to the story of Solon, Athenian democracy’s lawgiver, Mr. Brackenridge began to wonder, for the first time, just what he’d been doing these past months. Under Solon’s law, a moderate may not remain neutral during a civil war. Neutrality, in fact, is punishable by death; moderates are forced to take a side, for moderation, Solon believed, must be dispersed throughout the ranks of each extreme to lessen civil conflict. This had been Brackenridge’s own plan: infect rebel extremists with his own moderation. His motive, he reflected, had been laudable. His actions, however, had been hazardous, and he hadn’t been able to see how hazardous till now. Solon’s had been a small republic. The United States was too big, Pittsburgh too remote from the seat of government. Solon’s moderates, Mr. Brackenridge thought, would have known one another, could have explained themselves. They would have understood one another.
Finally the Neville counselor John Woods, having compiled much evidence against Brackenridge, turned up the pièce de résistance. This was a letter, containing evidence, Woods announced, that made successful prosecution certain. General Neville and Woods were so excited that they took time out from interrogating and threatening prisoners to show the letter to Alexander Hamilton. Subordinates and others gathered in Hamilton’s office to peruse a document that might condemn to death Pittsburgh’s best-known, most eccentric citizen.
Senator James Ross came in too, worried. He’d been trying to counter the Nevilles’ anti-Brackenridge campaign. As the president’s friend and an ardent federalist, he’d been arguing with Hamilton for Brackenridge’s reputation and life. But Ross knew that if this letter turned out to be what the Nevilles said it was, his case was weak.
The letter had been written by Brackenridge, Woods explained, to the chief insurgent David Bradford, and it proved the existence of a conspiratorial relationship between the two. Ross had been claiming for days that there had been no written intercourse between Brackenridge and Bradford. But this note, Woods said, reflected frequent, ongoing communication between them and showed a shared commitment to carrying out the insurgency. It had been written in August; in it, Brackenridge asked Bradford—in a way that does imply a steady collaboration—to send new copies of some papers, which Brackenridge had mislaid, and which were essential to carrying forth “the business.”
Neville and Woods waited eagerly as Hamilton read the note. Certainly it disproved Ross’s idea that the two suspects hadn’t communicated. “What do you make of this?” Hamilton challenged Ross. “Is that not”—he made the senator look at the letter—“the handwriting of Brackenridge?”
Ross knew Brackenridge’s handwriting, which was famously terrible. He read the letter carefully. After a moment Ross said, “It is the handwriting.” The Nevilles prepared to pounce, but after a moment Ross went on. “There is only one small matter,” he said. “It is addressed to William Bradford, Attorney General of the United States.”
Hamilton, visibly startled, looked again. General Neville seemed slowly to freeze. Brackenridge had indeed addressed the letter not to the chief insurgent, now fugitive, David Bradford, but unmistakably to William Bradford, leader of the presidential commission. This innocuous thing must have passed between them during the peace negotiations. Neville and Woods had brought Hamilton something that damned not Mr. Brackenridge but themselves, and potentially the entire operation, for hastiness and overreaching.
It was worse than nothing. Proceeding against Brackenridge on the basis of this evidence would have caused Hamilton—and the president—political disaster.
For the first time since May, when he’d begun taking steps that brought an army to the Forks of the Ohio, Alexander Hamilton took a long pause. He gazed at Neville and Woods, who stood as if mortified. Apparently they’d thought they could use the secretary of the treasury of the United States—for that matter, encourage bringing to the Forks a highly controversial, thirteen-thousand-man federal militia—to pursue what amounted to a vapid local vendetta. The silence grew oppressive. General Neville, onlookers thought, might not ever speak again. Hamilton did at last say something: “Gentlemen.” But only monosyllables followed. “You are too fast,” he said. “This will not do.”
• • •
When Mr. Brackenridge was finally served a subpoena to appear for questioning, he was relieved only to have been spared being hustled out of his home by soldiers. The day before he was to turn himself in, he dined with General Lee, who had insisted on the lawyer’s joining the officers’ mess in Brackenridge’s house. The meal felt to Mr. Brackenridge like the last eaten by a condemned man. Shaky and exhausted, he surren
dered himself the next morning. Alexander Hamilton and Hugh Henry Brackenridge sat face-to-face.
Unexpectedly, Hamilton’s mood was hard to assess. The secretary seemed to think Brackenridge would and should be hanged and also seemed, somehow, to regret thinking it. The lawyer humbly asked permission to narrate his story from the beginning. Hamilton agreed. Mr. Brackenridge began speaking. Hamilton began writing. The narration went on for many hours. At one point Hamilton stopped writing. Brackenridge had just been describing David Bradford’s stepping forth as a leader when the people had demanded it—meaning that Bradford had at first been pushed forward, and had only later made rebel leadership his own. The lawyer was exhibiting a tendency, Hamilton said, to excuse major participants, and this tendency was unwise. Mr. Brackenridge wasn’t under the amnesty. He was vulnerable to arrest. His story, Hamilton advised him, would determine his fate.
The Whiskey Rebellion Page 25