by Carol Berkin
In previous accounts of the Whiskey Rebellion, the focus has often been on whether these rebels were heroes or villains, whether their cause was just, and whether the government that mobilized to crush their revolt was simply eager to flex its muscles. But perhaps this focus obscures more than it illuminates. No matter how historians and their readers judge the whiskey rebels or the government that defeated them, it is important to realize that President George Washington and his allies had good reason to believe these westerners posed a serious threat to the survival of the federal government. To Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, this rebellion, erupting at a moment when the affairs of the national government were not yet firmly established and the domestic enemies of that government were “as inveterate as ever,” had created “a crisis in the affairs of this Country.” Washington, too, believed the rebels’ actions were “dangerous to the very being of government,” and he saw it as his solemn duty “to check [the] daring & unwarrantable spirit” of the citizens of western Pennsylvania. These comments cannot be dismissed as empty political rhetoric, fear mongering, or elitist contempt for the common man; both men were truly devoted to and worried about the survival of the independent republic that had been placed in their care.1
To understand why the president and his secretary of the treasury decided to send troops to suppress the rebellion requires us to consider the context in which they acted. In the early 1790s, the power given to the federal government by the Constitution was still actively contested, challenged by influential former Antifederalist leaders in every state and by the many ordinary Americans, especially in the South, who shared their desire to restore the sovereignty of the individual states. The federal government Washington presided over was an untested experiment in sustaining the unity of a country of diverse economies, demographics, and forms of social organization through laws enacted by elected leaders. Under these fraught circumstances, the refusal to obey a law passed by Congress was, in effect, a denial of the authority and legitimacy of that federal government. To allow the rebels a victory would be to concede that other segments of American society could pick and choose which laws to obey and which laws to ignore. To men like Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, who had labored to forge a nation rather than a loose confederation of sovereign states, this challenge was at once a threat and an opportunity. The defeat of the whiskey rebels would provide dramatic proof of the government’s readiness to enforce its laws. It would reassure its supporters and send a message to those who still opposed this embryonic national government that it would demand respect. In a sense, this crisis, like those that followed, was both a challenge and an opportunity; only by facing down such direct defiance of its authority was the federal government able to demonstrate its effectiveness and win the loyalty of the American public. Without these crises, it ran the risk of being ignored.
1
“The debt of the United States… was the price of liberty.”
—Alexander Hamilton, January 1790
ON FEBRUARY 4, 1789, electors in eleven states cast their votes for the first president of the United States. Following the instructions set down in the Constitution, the state legislatures forwarded the ballots to Congress, where the House of Representatives was to tally the votes. It would be two months, however, before the results were reported, for neither the House nor the Senate had the quorum needed for their session to begin. It was true that winter snows had made travel to New York City, the seat of the new government, difficult, but this was not the sole cause of the delay. Many congressmen simply felt no urgency to leave their homes, plantations, farms, or legal offices to take their seats in a new, untested government that lacked the status of their more established local legislatures. The delay embarrassed those nationalists who hoped the Constitution marked the creation of what they called an “energetic” union of the states and who now found themselves prodding friends and colleagues to do their duty and make their way to New York. As Massachusetts representative Fisher Ames would lament as the delay dragged on, “The public will forget the government before it is born.”2
At last, on April 1, 1789, the first session of the House of Representatives of the First Federal Congress was called to order. Five days later, the ballots for the presidency were at last counted. To no one’s surprise, His Excellency George Washington, Esq., was unanimously elected. The news was greeted with a mixture of relief and delight, although Washington himself seemed more resigned and anxious than elated. He faced a task likely to prove as difficult—or perhaps more so—than the challenge of commanding the Continental Army.
In his April 30 inauguration speech, Washington made no effort to hide his trepidation. Nothing in his life, he declared, had filled him with greater anxieties than being summoned by his country to this new office. He confessed to doubts that he was up to the task ahead. Nature, he said, had given him “inferior endowments” and his experience as a military leader and a plantation owner had left him “unpracticed in the duties of civil administration.” If he lacked confidence in his own skills, he expressed his certainty that the men of Congress would do the people’s business without party animosities or local prejudices. He would soon have cause to revise this view.3
Washington may truly have doubted his own administrative abilities, but he did not doubt the magnitude of the responsibilities he had accepted. He believed the survival of the American experiment in republican government hinged on the success of the federal government. He saw clearly the problems facing him, as its leader: the embarrassing debt, the lingering opposition to the Constitution and to the powers it granted the federal government, and the challenge to demonstrate the legitimacy of a new, sovereign nation to the wider world. Daunting as these problems seemed, the president did not shy away from them. He quickly began to organize the executive branch. For his cabinet, he chose men of established talent and reputation, drawn from all regions of the country. But because he gave little weight to ideological consensus among his appointees, Washington brought the contest between nationalism and state sovereignty into this most intimate setting for decision making. His cabinet meetings would be contentious, and his cabinet members more given to conflict than to cooperation.
From the largest and richest of the southern states, he chose his fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, to serve as secretary of state. It was a risky choice, for Jefferson had not supported the ratification of the Constitution. He had argued that the federal government it proposed was potentially as dangerous to liberty as George III and his Parliament had been, and he had urged his own state’s ratifying convention to reject it. Despite Jefferson’s known preference that power reside in state governments, Washington persuaded him that his diplomatic experience was needed in managing America’s relationships with the other nations of the world. As secretary of war, Washington named the Massachusetts bookseller-turned–artillery expert, Henry Knox, an avowed nationalist, whose friendship the president valued and whose innate military genius he respected. Knox’s primary duties would be establishing domestic law and order and protecting the country’s borders. As attorney general, Washington once again drew on a Virginian, a former aide-de-camp, a distinguished lawyer, and a man with executive experience as governor of the Old Dominion, Edmund Randolph. Despite the fact that Randolph had presented the Virginia Plan at the Constitutional Convention, he fluctuated between a states’ rights position and a commitment to the authority of the national government. But it was the president’s choice of thirty-four-year-old Alexander Hamilton of New York to serve as secretary of the treasury that reflected Washington’s own ardent nationalism. Hamilton was an unabashed nation builder, eager to see the United States gain a seat at the table among the greatest European powers. Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton did not fear that a strong national government would increase the threat of tyranny. Instead, he saw the greatest danger to America’s survival in the jealous protection of the states’ prerogatives. In the years following the Revolution, Hamilton had seen t
he results of political provincialism—the competition among the states that hindered economic recovery, episodes of social unrest and the continuing threat of slave revolts, and the inability to secure the country’s borders. For him, the creation of a strong and active national government was the remedy to America’s ills; state autonomy was the disease.
Washington appointed Hamilton on September 11, 1789. It would fall to him to set the nation’s floundering finances in order and establish its public credit. Anyone who knew the brilliant and brash New Yorker was certain of one thing: he did not lack for confidence in his ability to set the country on the path to fiscal stability. He would soon be given the opportunity to prove himself, for less than two weeks after Hamilton took up his portfolio Congress directed him to evaluate the country’s finances and prepare a plan to pay the country’s staggering debts. No one was certain how great those debts were, to whom the money was actually owed, or, for that matter, which debts were the responsibility of the new government. There were loans outstanding from foreign allies; there were promissory notes, or “Continentals,” given to Americans who had contributed supplies to the army and to soldiers in lieu of pay. Then there were states that had not repaid their Revolutionary War debts. Were these debts to be included in the federal government’s burden? And, finally, where was the revenue to come from that would allow the government to honor its debts?
Hamilton had answers to all these questions. With truly remarkable speed, he completed an exhaustive report on strategies for handling the public credit. The report was Hamilton at his best, relentlessly and closely reasoned, offering several alternative plans for payment of the foreign and domestic debts, every paragraph reflecting the urgency he felt to set the country’s financial reputation aright. There were three key elements of Hamilton’s plan: the federal government would fund its debt, setting aside a specific portion of all revenue to ensure regular payment installments; it would assume responsibility for the remaining Revolutionary War debts of the states; and it would pledge to repay this consolidated domestic debt to current rather than original note holders.4
Hamilton’s proposals created a firestorm within the House of Representatives. The more astute congressmen realized that the secretary’s goal was grander than the establishment of the US public credit. With his Report on Public Credit, and other reports that would quickly follow, Hamilton intended to bolster the importance of the federal government and to set a commercial trajectory for the new nation’s political economy. What came to be known as the Hamiltonian system would give shape to much of the political controversy in the early Republic, and it would spur the emergence of an anti-administration party.
There was much to protest in Hamilton’s report—and members of the House were skilled at protesting. Representatives like Maryland’s Michael Stone saw the assumption of state war debts as a move to tip the balance of power between the states and the federal government in favor of the latter. Like most eighteenth-century men, Stone was well aware that the power to raise revenue and decide its uses was the sine qua non of any government. If the states were relieved of their outstanding war debts, they would have no justification for raising taxes. This was a consequence devoutly desired by a nationalist like Hamilton but just as devoutly opposed by states’ rights men like Stone. At the same time, representatives from states that had retired their war debts balked at shouldering the burden of their less fiscally responsible neighbors.
Representatives from southern states saw other, serious dangers in Hamilton’s report. They opposed his proposal to pay off the domestic debt to current certificate holders rather than to the original creditors. Because the majority of current domestic debt holders were speculators from the northern states, southern representatives were quick to label Hamilton’s plan a brazen move to create a political economy favoring northern businessmen over southern agriculturalists. They were correct about Hamilton’s long-term goals if not his immediate intentions. In October 1789, he would boast to the British ambassador George Beckwith that the United States was “a young and a growing Empire, with much Enterprize and vigour,” but he would also concede that Americans were now “and must be for years, rather an Agricultural, than a manufacturing people.” For Hamilton, the future belonged to manufacturing, trade, and industry—not to farming—and it would take careful planning and government encouragement to move the country in what he believed was the right direction.5
For other representatives, including Hamilton’s old ally, James Madison, Hamilton’s proposal to pay off government certificates to current rather than original holders raised serious moral issues. Many of these certificates had first been issued to soldiers and to private citizens who had supplied the army during the war. But they had changed hands since the peace, as farmers, widows, and veterans grew weary of waiting for repayment and became fearful that the Confederation government would never have the resources to honor its debts. These ordinary citizens had sold their certificates to speculators for whatever they could get. For men like Madison, Hamilton’s willingness to reward speculators was unethical.
On January 28, 1790, as Congress began to discuss the report, the hotheaded, combative Georgian James Jackson expressed his disgust that the mere rumor of this proposal to pay current creditors had ignited “a spirit of havoc, speculation, and ruin.” His soul, Jackson declared, “rises indignant at the avaricious and immoral turpitude which so vile a conduct displays.” No one in the House doubted that the targets of Jackson’s indignation were northern speculators and businessmen. Although less given to dramatic declarations than was his fellow southerner, Madison shared Jackson’s concern about the consequences of Hamilton’s proposal. The only moral path, Madison concluded, was to seek out the original creditors and to discriminate in their favor when payments were determined. Hamilton considered this an impractical, if not impossible, demand. It was beyond the resources of the federal government to follow the trail of sale and resale back to the original certificate holders. This profound disagreement between Hamilton and Madison, between the practical and the moral path, severed the alliance between two men who had, together, orchestrated the Constitutional Convention. Perhaps nothing reflected the emerging divisions between entrepreneur and planter, commerce and agriculture, North and South more than the abrupt move by Madison into the anti-administration camp.
2
“There is perhaps nothing so much a subject of national extravagance, as these spirits.”
—Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 12
ALTHOUGH ASSUMPTION, FUNDING, and the payment to current debt holders were the key elements of the report, they were not the only proposals to spark controversy. Hamilton had stressed that the costs of establishing public credit could not be covered by duties on imports alone. There was a limit to how much these could be raised without strangling American trade. Thus, some form of domestic taxation was necessary. Hamilton knew that no one in Congress would dare support direct taxation; the only option therefore was an excise tax. He proposed to lay that tax on wines, spirits, including those distilled within the United States, teas, and coffee.
Anyone who had read Hamilton’s Federalist 12 and 21 would not have been surprised at this suggestion—or of his recommendation that the tax should fall on alcohol. He had pointed out the merits of taxing consumable commodities in Federalist 21: “It is a signal advantage of taxes on articles of consumption that they contain in their own nature a security against excess.” In other words, consumption would simply decline if the rates were set too high. To ensure against this decline, and to guarantee that the revenue collected was adequate, the government would be careful not to set an unreasonable or oppressive rate.6
In Federalist 12, Hamilton had pointed to the advantages of sizeable duties on imported alcohol. First, consumption of foreign spirits was high enough to ensure solid revenue. “The whole quantity imported into the United States,” he wrote, “may be estimated at four millions of Gallons; which at a shilling per gallon would p
roduce two hundred thousand pounds.” Second, a tax on the purchase of alcohol promised to have social and moral value as well, for “if it should tend to diminish the consumption of it, such an effect would be equally favorable to the agriculture, to the economy, to the morals and to the health of the society. There is perhaps nothing so much a subject of national extravagance, as these spirits.”7
He made these moral and health arguments in his January report on public credit, confident that no one could deny that eighteenth-century Americans did consume a troubling amount of alcohol. On the eve of the Revolution, New York City boasted more taverns than churches, and drunkenness was common enough that Benjamin Franklin once amused himself by collecting more than two hundred terms for excessive drinking, ranging from “addled” and “afflicted” to “boozy,” “cracked,” and, a local Massachusetts phrase, “halfway to Concord.” Wealthy drinkers preferred imported products—French wines, Portuguese Madeira, port, and Caribbean rums. But domestic breweries turned out their share of beer, cider, and rum for the ordinary American’s consumption. By 1770 there were more than 140 rum distilleries in the colonies, producing about 4.8 million gallons each year. Domestic rum was so cheap that the average adult male may have consumed three pints each week. And, after the Revolution, the production of domestic whiskey soared. Altogether, it is estimated that by the 1790s an average white American over the age of fifteen drank almost six gallons of absolute alcohol each year.8 (In 2015, the World Health Organization declared that the United States ranked twenty-fourth in national consumption of alcohol, with an estimated 2.43 gallons a year.)
HAMILTON WAS NOT alone in worrying about his fellow countrymen’s drinking habits, especially the consumption of hard liquor, or “ardent spirits.” Before independence, John Adams had denounced the many colonial taverns serving hard liquor as “dens of iniquity.” And in 1774, the Philadelphia Quaker Anthony Benezet had published a damning critique of Americans’ excessive drinking. In his The Mighty Destroyer Displayed, Benezet condemned distilled liquor as unhealthy, degrading, and immoral. By 1784, Methodists were urging their congregations to abstain entirely from hard liquor. That same year, the respected Philadelphia revolutionary Dr. Benjamin Rush published An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits on the Human Mind and Body. In it, he asserted that liquor could be addictive and could lead to death.9