A Sovereign People

by Carol Berkin

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  NOTES

  Abbreviations

  AC Annals of Congress

  ASP American State Papers

  FOL Founders Online, National Archives (founders.archives.gov)

  PA Pennsylvania Archives

  PJA Papers of John Adams

  PAH The Papers of Alexander Hamilton

  JMP The Papers of James Madison

  PJM The Papers of John Marshall

  PGW The Papers of George Washington

  PTJ The Papers of Thomas Jefferson

  Part I: The Whiskey Rebellion

  1. Alexander Hamilton to George Washington, July 30–August 3, 1792, PAH, Vol. 12, pp. 137–139; Alexander Hamilton to John Jay, September 3, 1792, PAH, Vol. 12, pp. 316–317; George Washington to Alexander Hamilton, September 7, 1792, PAH, Vol. 12, pp. 331–333.

  1: “The debt of the United States… was the price of liberty.”

  2. Fisher Ames to George R. Minot, March 25, 1789, in Documentary History of the First Federal Congress, 1789–1791, Vol. 15, ed. Charlene Bangs Bickford et al. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 126.

  3. First Inaugural Address: Final Version, April 30, 1789, PGW, Presidential Series, Vol. 2, pp. 173–177.

  4. AC, House, 1st Congress, 2nd Session, Appendix, pp. 2041–2074; Report Relative to a Provision for the Support of Public Credit, January 9, 1790, PAH, Vol. 6, pp. 65–110.

  5. Alexander Hamilton, “Conversation with George Beckwith” [October 1789], PAH, Vol. 5, pp. 482–490.

  2: “There is perhaps nothing so much a subject of national extravagance, as these spirits.”

  6. The Federalist No. 21, “Other Defects of the Present Confederation,” in The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, Vol. 14, ed. Gaspare J. Saladino and John P. Kaminski (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 1983), pp. 414–418. It can also be found online in The Avalon Project, Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy, Yale
Law School.

  7. The Federalist No. 12, “The Utility of the Union in Respect to Revenue,” The Avalon Project. See also Cynthia L. Krom and Stephanie Krom, “The Whiskey Tax of 1791 and the Consequent Insurrection: ‘A Wicked and Happy Tumult,’” Accounting Historians Journal, Vol. 40, No. 2 (December 2013), pp. 91–114, 95.

  8. Ed Crews, “Rattle-Skull, Stonewall, Bogus, Blackstrap, Bombo, Mimbo, Whistle Belly, Syllabub, Sling, Toddy, and Flip: Drinking in Colonial America,” online in Colonial Williamsburg Journal (Holiday 2007).

  9. Ibid.

  10. See Report of the Secretary of the Treasury, Relative to a Provision for the Support of Public Credit, AC, 1st Congress, Appendix, pp. 2065–2066. For the full report, see the Appendix, pp. 2041–2074.

  11. AC, House of Representatives, 1st Congress, 2nd Session, May 25, 1790, p. 1666.

  12. See Hamilton’s December 13, 1790, Report on Public Credit, AC, 1st Congress, Appendix, pp. 2074–2082; see also PAH, Vol. 7, pp. 225–236.

  13. For the debate in the House, see AC, 1st Congress, 3rd Session, House of Representatives, pp. 1890–1934; AC, 1st Congress, 3rd Session, House of Representatives, pp. 1890–1893.

  14. AC, 1st Congress, 3rd Session, House of Representatives, January 24, 1791, p. 1931.

  15. AC, 1st Congress, 3rd Session, House of Representatives, March 3, 1791, p. 2027.

  16. For the act, see The Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America, Vol. 1, ed. Richard Peters, Esq. (Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1850), pp. 199–214.

  3: “The law is deservedly obnoxious to the feelings and interests of the people.”

  17. For the problems facing western farmers and the impact of the excise tax on them, see Krom and Krom, “The Whiskey Tax,” pp. 97–102.

  18. Ibid., pp. 102–105.

  19. See Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau, “The Whiskey Rebellion in Kentucky: A Forgotten Episode of Civil Disobedience,” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Autumn 1982), pp. 239–259.