Emmy was with him; his eldest son, John, who hadn’t seen his father since Husband’s southern trip fourteen years earlier, came from North Carolina. Pneumonia had settled in Husband’s old lungs, weakened from the long walk over the mountains. He lay slowly failing in the tavern. On June 19, he died. Emmy and John buried him nearby. His grave site is not known.
On the night of his arrest, lying in the Bedford jail, Husband had known he was leaving, perhaps forever, the wild country to which he’d brought settlement, civilization, and trouble. That night, hoping to reassure Emmy, he hastily wrote her a letter. “A prison seems the safest place for one of my age,” he wrote, adding wryly, though without irony, “and profession.” That profession was prophecy. Husband saw another world in America. The beauty of the vision left him, in the end, with nowhere to turn. Nonviolence both sustained and failed him. The abomination of desolation couldn’t be extinguished, he thought, without a last battle for the American soul.
Someone’s barn goes up in flames on a moonless night. Ink runs down an official document soaked in alcohol. A lonely victim jogs, panting and pursued, down a dirt track. Hoisted up a pole, a homemade flag hangs over men who wander through smoke, guns pointing at nothing in particular, firing again and again. Those are not things Herman Husband saw in the Whiskey Rebellion. He wrote, that night in the Bedford jail, to his family, but he had spiritual descendants too. “Make yourselves easy about me,” Husband urged from behind cold iron. “For I am so rejoiced that at times, old as I am, I can scarcely keep from dancing and singing, for which I cannot account.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When this book was nothing but an idea, Suzanne Gluck’s embracing and representing it made all the difference. I’m forever grateful to Suzanne for helping refine my thoughts, ushering me into a process that’s been even more satisfying than I’d hoped, and advising me with such pragmatism and insight along the way.
I feel enormously lucky to have had as my editor Lisa Drew, whose expertise and intelligence blessed my struggles—and whose spot-on understanding of what I’m trying to do has been a source of great comfort and optimism. Thanks also to Samantha Martin and everyone else at Scribner whose diligence, taste, and creativity helped turn a manuscript into a book.
I’m deeply grateful for the contributions of Daniel Bergner and Carol Rawlings Miller, who gave generous critical attention to the manuscript. To put it too briefly, each of these indispensable friends has taken the best kind of care of my work for many years. For more than I can say here, thanks also to Marilyn Sande, and to Holley Atkinson, William Everdell, Ed Finnegan, Kyle Gann, John Gulla, Marc Haefele, Henrietta Hallenborg, Mary Ann Hallenborg, Neil Hallenborg, Bruce Makous, Paul O’Rourke, Steve Plumlee, Sam Sifton, Emily Stone, and Eric Zicklin, who have given a damn for a long time about the ups and downs of getting here. Thanks to Pamela Keogh for advice at a tough early moment; Eric Price for business acumen; Bob Swacker for authorial comradeship; and the whole staff, past and present, of Atelier 06 in Brooklyn.
It’s hard to imagine how I could have told this story without the Humanities Research Library of the New York Public Library, especially the seemingly inexhaustible collection and helpful staff of the Irma and Paul Millstein Division of United States History. Other libraries, archives, and online resources on whose collections and staffs I’ve happily relied: the Library and Archives of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania; the National Archives; the Library of Congress, as well as its “American Memory” Website; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Historical Society of Connecticut; the Historical Society of Bedford County, Pennsylvania; the Historical Society of Washington County, Pennsylvania; the U. Grant Miller Library of Washington and Jefferson College; the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh (main and Braddock branches); the Darlington Library of the University of Pittsburgh; the Saint Ann’s School Library; the New Jersey Historical Society; the University of Virginia Library’s online George Washington Resources.
Jack Ryan, all-around pen-and-ink man, approached my sometimes vague and oddball ideas for maps with creativity and patience, bringing skill, verve, and wit to the world I’m writing about. Thanks to Jack for jumping on a moving train with characteristic fearlessness. (Any errors and fancifulness in the maps are mine, not his.)
In Pittsburgh, the Oliver Miller Homestead Associates are living-history keepers of the Whiskey Rebellion flame. Correspondence with the ever-informative and trenchant Barbara Bockrath, the recording secretary and an OMHA director, was of particular help in orienting me to some lively eighteenth-century realities. Phil Haines kindly welcomed my unannounced appearance at an OMHA event and has been generous with his interest. Lynette Sell informed me of the association’s resources; Bob Barton gave me an impromptu tour of the Oliver Miller home; Charles McCormick was informative on a number of other matters; and Kelly Thakur’s directions got me at last to whiskey cave.
In Uniontown, Nancy and Bill Ross, proprietors of The Inne at Watson’s Choice, kindly offered help and introductions in tracking down Whiskey Rebellion sites. The Coal Baron restaurant happens to be in Uniontown; no matter where it might be located, it would be the right place for bedraggled researchers to have dinner. Sites overseen by the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, including the Laurel Highlands hiking trail and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, enhanced my feeling for the region’s landscape and topography, as did the falls at Ohiopyle State Park. Presentations at Fort Necessity and Jumonville’s Glen in western Pennsylvania, and at the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal near Washington, D.C., brought home the importance of the National Parks Service to preservation and interpretation.
And without the roadside historical marker at a suburban McDonald’s, shaken by truck and commuter traffic, where the rebel fallback at Couch’s Fort once stood, certain ironies of the story would have been fuzzier in my imagination.
I began looking for historical markers—and for narrative history—long ago, from the sometimes turbulent backseats of family cars. Thanks to my brothers: David loaned some research materials, as well as much supportive interest; and I benefited mightily from discussion of themes and context with Webster, as well as from his astute and encouraging comments on the manuscript. Throughout my research and writing I was keenly aware of the absence (and sometimes also the presence) of my late father, whose namesake I am; thanks also to my stepmother, Brigid Hogeland. My mother, Elizabeth Hogeland, died while I was writing this book. She took pride in and gave essential support to the endeavor until the end.
Above all: Thanks to my wife, Gail, and my stepdaughter, Barbara, for—among other things!—many years of smart, loving reading.
WH
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NOTES
Following the general essay below, brief chapter essays provide sources and, where possibly useful, discussion of key events and ideas. Full citations are given in “Sources”—which I’ve limited to listing only the works mentioned here.
I don’t give references for readily acquired, noncontroversial information drawn from many cited sources. Alexander Hamilton was born on a Caribbean island. Every biography says so, in words more or less to that effect; I don’t try to prove or give credit for it. I cite sources for facts not generally known and from which I’ve drawn ideas and analyses. I also point out discrepancies in the record; explain, when I depart from other interpretations, my bases for doing so; and suggest further reading.
There is much to know about the Whiskey Rebellion that does not appear in this book. Where I’m sending you, I’ve been; I hope these essays will aid students of the rebellion in their own digging and sorting.
WRITERS ON THE WHISKEY REBELLION
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p; So many of the rebellion’s actors were also writers, whose accounts played roles in the drama itself, that the historiography of the rebellion begins with the rebellion in progress. The earliest attempt at a comprehensive overview is Alexander Hamilton’s official “Report on Opposition to Internal Duties,” August 5, 1794. Many events in the report had been described, immediately after their happening, in letters to superiors and friends from the tax inspector John Neville and the quartermaster Isaac Craig, as well as by victims of attacks who gave depositions. Other contemporaneous accounts include statements made by rebel participants and journals kept by soldiers sent to suppress the rebellion. Claims on Congress made by the tax collector Benjamin Wells are a rich source of eyewitness accounts. A long letter from the participant Alexander Fulton to President Washington relates some key events from an unusual perspective. Letters from the presidential commissioners to the cabinet narrate events of fall 1794 on a day-to-day basis.
Those eyewitness accounts vary in purpose, emphasis, and tone and differ on brute fact. When participants began publishing, dispute became overt. William Findley’s History of the Insurrection replies indignantly to Hamilton’s report, making fine distinctions meant largely to show that there really was no organized rebellion at all. (The man who started the fire at Bower Hill wasn’t acting on orders, for example; the book contains dozens of similar remarks.) Findley was the first to accuse Hamilton publicly and cogently of having deliberately provoked the rebellion in order to create an excuse for suppressing it, a strategy Findley calls “a refinement in cruelty.” While often ponderous and self-contradictory, the book is especially good on the suppression. Findley is also interesting as an early exponent of a frontier republicanism that would become common in rhetoric of the Jackson era.
Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Incidents of the Insurrection was intended to clear its author’s name: Brackenridge had been accused of being a rebel leader. Brackenridge’s book includes letters and depositions from participants; his narrative covers his own actions on a day-to-day and even minute-to-minute basis; his work has therefore always been invaluable for later writers. The modern Whiskey Rebellion scholars discussed below rely at times on Brackenridge yet are careful to give context for his points of view. The importance of Brackenridge’s account to this book is probably obvious.
In the next generation, arguing over the rebellion became a sport in the Pittsburgh area. Neville Craig, a son of Isaac Craig and grandson of John Neville, published his History of Pittsburgh in 1851, glorifying his genitors’ actions in the rebellion and attacking Brackenridge as instigator; in 1859, Brackenridge’s son Henry Marie responded with History of the Western Insurrection in Western Pennsylvania, largely restating his father’s position and attacking Neville Craig, Nevilles in general, and their friends. (Craig in turn published Exposure of a Few of the Many Misstatements in H. M. Brackenridge’s History of the Whiskey Insurrection.) The younger Brackenridge does glorify the elder Brackenridge as an embattled republican sage; still, his book is intelligently and compellingly written and includes important primary material. Publishing while north-south sectional conflict was coming to crisis, H. M. Brackenridge was the first writer to place what were then half-century-old events in a later political context. Craig’s book is highly derivative of the Hildreth work mentioned below.
For a time, professional historians and biographers battled over the rebellion’s meaning too. Early critics of federalism took Findley’s point of view, minimizing rebel violence, describing rebels as loyal, and sympathizing with rebel plight; in the other camp, Richard Hildreth, in his History of the United States (1849), epitomized a tradition, begun by John Marshall in his Life of George Washington, of presenting the rebels as wild Scots-Irish drunks, geared up by treasonous antifederalist leaders, and Hamilton and Washington as patient saviors regretfully forced, after perhaps too many shows of leniency, to act.
According to Thomas Slaughter (whose work is discussed below), by the end of the nineteenth century the Civil War had pushed the rebellion off the screen for many readers of history. In the twentieth century, it seems to me, textbook writers, federal-era overviewers, and Hamilton and Washington biographers—writers, that is, not specializing in the rebellion yet forced to acknowledge its existence—have tended to ignore its implications and misunderstand its causes and effects. To many otherwise well-informed readers of American history, the rebellion is now remembered, if at all, as a sidebar about a dustup.
Of recent works not devoted to the rebellion, the fairest and most detailed discussion of the subject appears in Chapter Ten of Elkins and McKitrick’s The Age of Federalism, the essential synthesis—at once magisterial and page-turning—of the politics of the period. Still, Elkins and McKitrick are more interested in delineating the role of the democratic societies than in tracing other, to me more salient, influences on the rebellion. Recent, widely read biographies of Alexander Hamilton by Richard Brookhiser and Ron Chernow, who rely on The Age of Federalism for many matters, largely ignore its analysis of the rebellion, typifying a long line of popular Hamilton biographers—including Broadus Mitchell and John C. Miller—in presenting the rebellion largely as Hamilton hoped it would be presented.
Forrest McDonald’s Alexander Hamilton typifies recent Hamilton biographies in adhering to the view of the Rebellion, and of Hamilton’s behavior in response to it, presented by Jacob E. Cooke, an editor of Hamilton’s papers, in his essay “The Whiskey Rebellion: A Re-Evaluation,” vigorously defending Hamilton’s activities in 1794. Larger context for the Rebellion is missing from Cooke’s argument and from most books on Hamilton.
Thus the few modern, full-length works devoted solely to the rebellion have great value. Leland Baldwin’s long-out-of-print Whiskey Rebels, published in 1939 and lightly revised in 1968, is the only full-length work (before this one) written in a narrative style for nonspecialist readers while relying on close attention to the full primary and secondary record. Limited by the unavailability in its day of certain important sources, marred by patronizing attitudes toward aspects of its subject, Baldwin’s work nevertheless succeeds as a lively and accurate chronological history, a sturdy raft from which to delve in darker waters.
Thomas Slaughter’s The Whiskey Rebellion, published in 1986, is the only academic work on the rebellion in print; Dorothy Fennell’s From Rebelliousness to Insurrection (1981) and Terry Bouton’s Tying Up the Revolution (1996) are unpublished doctoral dissertations. All three studies are crucial. Slaughter descries a key east-west sectional conflict too often overlooked by historians in favor of north-south division; he grounds the rebellion in a long tradition of excise protest, radical republicanism, and regional strife, focusing on what he sees as an overreaction by Hamilton, Washington, and other “friends of order” largely to meetings, assemblies, and petitions. While my departures from Slaughter—especially from his emphasis on the importance of country-party and republican ideology—are noted in some of the chapter essays below, his text and notes remain the major academic apparatus through which a personal understanding of the rebellion can be developed. Slaughter’s explorations of Washington’s western land speculations are especially valuable, as is his exhaustive primary research on the federal militia that suppressed the rebellion.
Dorothy Fennell’s original and highly informative dissertation, which Slaughter also cites, is a work of progressive history, focusing on social and economic issues to which the rebels were responding and placing the rebellion in a context of abrupt local shifts in labor and production. Relying in part on Robert Eugene Harper’s dissertation, The Class Structure of Western Pennsylvania, Fennell studies property ownership and other economic factors, persuasively defining the victims of rebel attacks as those monopolizing local trade. She closely analyzes the economics of distilling; she places blackface attacks in a long history of economic and social regulation. Three other aspects of Fennell’s work have particular importance: her discovery of the Benjamin Wells Claims as a detailed primary record;
her identification of a moment in 1794 when the rebellion shifted from traditional blackface attacks to undisguised, organized militia action; and her discussion of Herman Husband as an underacknowledged inspiration for that shift.
Terry Bouton marshals, with provocative and illuminating effect, the economic and financial matters—federal, state, and local—that for him make the rebellion not a discrete event but the climax of a series of actions, ongoing in western Pennsylvania from at least as early as the mid-1780s, related to paper and land-bank finance as mechanisms of populism, as well as to the efforts of Robert Morris, in both the confederation Congress and the Pennsylvania assembly, to crush popular finance and promote the interests of bondholders at all costs. Reviving and developing The Power of the Purse, the benchmark work of E. J. Ferguson on the domestic debt, Bouton is working toward a new understanding of founding finance, a subject many historians and biographers (especially those of its author, Hamilton) decline to lead their readers realistically through. Bouton relies at times on Fennell—and follows her on Husband—but he also criticizes tendencies he sees in fellow progressives to romanticize the agrarian. He presents the rebels not as dismayed by the shift to a mercantile and industrial economy but as frustrated by state and federal policies that blocked their benefiting from that shift.
The Whiskey Rebellion Page 27