Ramp Hollow

by Steven Stoll

    6.  Williams, Appalachia, 118–19; Bonsteel Tachau, “The Whiskey Rebellion in Kentucky,” 240; Wiley, History of Monongalia County, West Virginia, chap. X; Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion, 90.

    7.  Keith Tribe uses the term governing economy a little differently. To him it refers to the German school of political economy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See Tribe, Governing Economy, and Hamilton, Report on Manufacturers, 199.

    8.  Smith, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1126. Hamilton is often said to have been deeply influenced by Smith, who wrote in the Wealth of Nations, 1193, “Sugar, rum, and tobacco are commodities which are nowhere necessaries of life, which are become objects of almost universal consumption, and which are therefore extremely proper subjects of taxation.”

    9.  “The Spirit of the Times, Addressing the People of Massachusetts,” Massachusetts Centinel, October 25, 1787. This passage is often quoted and misquoted but rarely attributed to its source. Its author is sometimes cited as “Old Plough Jogger,” but that is incorrect. The unnamed author of the article paraphrases a conversation he had with “an old plough jogger” and a young man.

  10.  Hamilton appears to support an act of the New York Legislature to relieve debtors by releasing them from jail. Hamilton to Hugh Seton (January 1, 1785), The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 3, 592–93.

  11.  Hamilton, Federalist, Nos. 12, 21, 30. He said on a number of occasions that he didn’t really believe in any such thing as a lack of currency. “It is said there is a scarcity of money in the community,” proclaiming before the New York Ratifying Convention in 1788, “I do not believe this scarcity to be so great.” Money might hide away, “it may be retained by its holders,” but “nothing more than stability and confidence in the government is requisite to draw it into circulation.” In 1792, he had “no evidence to satisfy his mind, that a real scarcity of money will be found on experiment a serious impediment to the payment of the tax.” New York Ratifying Convention. Third speech of June 28, 1788 (Francis Childs’s version), Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 5, 114–25. Hamilton to Washington (August 5, 1794), Papers of George Washington, vol. 16, 478–508; “Report on the Difficulties in the Execution of the Act Laying Duties on Distilled Spirits” (March 5, 1792), Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 11, 77–106.

  12.  United States Congress, An Act repealing … duties heretofore laid upon distilled spirits imported from abroad, and laying others in their stead; and also upon Spirits distilled within the United States, and for appropriating the same; Brackenridge, 14; Hamilton, Letter to George Washington (August 2, 1794), in Hamilton, Writings, 823.

  13.  Hamilton to Washington (September 1, 1792) in Works of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 4, 285; Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 468–70; Slaughter, Whiskey Rebellion, 3, 11–13; Brackenridge, Western Insurrection, 6–11; Ferguson, Early Western Pennsylvania Politics, 127.

  14.  Hamilton, Federalist, No. 12; Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States of America, 186. Adam Smith writes in detail about excise, with reference to the Scottish malt tax, in Book 5, chap. 2, of Wealth of Nations, in which he notes, “Fermented liquors brewed, and spirituous liquors distilled, not for sale, but for private use, are not in Great Britain liable to any duties of excise. This exemption, of which the object is to save private families from the odious visit and examination of the tax-gatherer, occasions the burden of those duties to fall frequently much lighter upon the rich than upon the poor.” Wealth of Nations, 1126.

  15.  Schöpf, Travels in the Confederation, 238–39.

  16.  Dunaway, “Speculators and Settler Capitalists,” in Appalachia in the Making, 52–53; Gates, Landlords and Tenants, 17; Washington-Crawford Letters (September 21, 1767).

  17.  This piece of Washington’s western Virginia land lies on the northern side of the river at the present location of Saint Albans, West Virginia (38°22′49″N and 81°49′11″W). Samuel Lewis [the cartographer and perhaps assistant surveyor], Copy of a survey … for George Washington 2950 acres of land … lying in the county of Botetourt on the n.e. side of the Great Kanhaway about a mile and half above the mouth of Cole River … Novemr. 6th, 1774. Williams, Appalachia, 11, 109. Also see Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside.

  18.  Fernow, The Great Timber Belt, 5; Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans, 98.

  19.  For the first written use of squatting, see Winthrop Sargent to Timothy Pickering (March 1, 1800), in Rowland, ed., Mississippi Territorial Archives, vol. 1, 212. In the words of John C. Weaver, “The very idea of a pre-emptive occupation prior to petitioning for a grant or in advance of an organized sale was dismissive of central authority.” Weaver, The Great Land Rush, 264–65. And I learned from Williams, Appalachia, 53, 92, 113; Williams, West Virginia, 13; and Dunaway, “Speculators and Settler Capitalists,” in Appalachia in the Making, 50. The quotation is from Rothert, “John D. Shane’s Interview with Pioneer John Hedge, Bourbon County,” 177–78. On the common uses of private land, Newfont, Blue Ridge Commons, 3.

  20.  An example of case law relating to adverse possession is Lessee of Ewing v. Burnet (1837). On cases of ejectment, see Harper, The Transformation of Western Pennsylvania, 10. One case I read included a number of households, all attempting to acquire farms adversely. McClure v. Maitland, 561.

  21.  Washington, Diary of George Washington (September 1784), 28–31; Achenbach, The Grand Idea, 98–99. The squatter who told the story was a member of the Reed family, either John or David Reed.

  22.  Thomas Smith to George Washington (February 9, 1785), George Washington Papers (www.loc.gov/collections/george-washington-papers/about-this-collection/). Washington offered them a consolation. They could stay if they started to pay him rent, and he would not charge them for twelve years of illegal occupation. The squatters moved on rather than pay him anything. Achenbach, The Grand Idea, 147–50; Harper, The Transformation of Western Pennsylvania, 78. Honor Sachs argues that one reason for resistance to speculators and absentee owners was the threat they posed to male heads of households. The engrossment of land made it more difficult to establish households, which threatened male authority. “Ordinary settlers stood to lose their personal status, their very identities as independent men.” See Home Rule, 30–35.

  23.  People and figures from “Census of Westmoreland County—1783,” in Pennsylvania Archives, vol. 22, 419–30. Only twenty-eight people in the Springhill Township owned nothing, and most of them were unmarried sons who had left, though their names remained on the tax rolls. The assessment described them as “single, gone.” This number is substantially lower than that of the four southeastern counties of western Pennsylvania. See Harper, The Transformation of Western Pennsylvania, 25–28, 248–50.

  24.  Sachs, Home Rule, 45–46.

  25.  One who saw them passing through Illinois said that they “still hold negroes in the utmost contempt; not allowing them to be of the same species of themselves, but look on negers, as they call them, and Indians, as an inferior race of beings, and treat them as such.” Faragher, Sugar Creek, 48–50. Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers, 215. Wood, Two Year’s Residence, 245.

  26.  Jordan and Kaups, American Backwoods Frontier, 100–105. For more on swidden, see Otto, “Forest Fallowing in the Southern Appalachian Mountains”; Conklin, Hanunóo Agriculture; and Dove, The Banana Tree at the Gate.

  27.  Debar, West Virginia Hand-Book, 83–85.

  28.  Jordan and Kaups, American Backwoods Frontier, 114–15; Lorain, Nature and Reason, 332–33. Even still, a twentieth-century researcher described farms in eastern Kentucky as “permanent peninsulas of cultivated land, with changing margins … Everywhere, the forest encroaches on the cultivated fields, in places retreating before the advance of agriculture, again advancing and repossessing the area from which it has been forced to retreat temporarily.” Davis, Geography of the Mountains
of Eastern Kentucky, 61.

  29.  Doddridge, Notes on the Settlement and Indian Wars of the Western Parts of Virginia and Pennsylvania, 84.

  30.  Davis, Geography of the Mountains of Eastern Kentucky, 60–61; Otto, “Forest Fallowing in the Southern Appalachian Mountains,” 56–58; Harper, Transformation, 24–26, 28–29, 42; Boserup, Conditions of Agricultural Growth, 35–36; “Census of Westmoreland County—1783,” in Pennsylvania Archives, vol. 22, 419–30. Data on labor and field size comes from Netting, Smallholder, Householder, 148. It refers to India in the 1970s—certainly far removed in time and space from Appalachia, but the figures are only intended to be suggestive.

  31.  Zohary and Hopf, Domestication of Plants in the Old World, 64–73. On the hardiness of rye and wheat compared to corn, see Lorain, Nature and Reason, 284, 343. Rye’s fate was to fade away as a relic. Total U.S. imports of rye for the year ending May 1, 2007, came to zero. The nation exported 49,500 metric tons of wheat. http://www.fas.usda.gov/export-sales/myfimay.htm. By the 1950s rye had been industrialized into a series of new strains developed by experiment stations in the 1940s. The old rye held on mostly as a hay and silage crop. USDA, Growing Rye, Farmers’ Bulletin No. 2145, 1–9, and Leighty, “The Place of Rye in American Agriculture,” 169–84.

  32.  Wiley, History of Monongalia County, www.wvculture.org/history/settlement/whiskeyrebellion01.html; Strickland, Observations on the Agriculture of the United States of America, 47; Victor, History of American Conspiracies, 204–205.

  33.  The quotation in the previous paragraph is from Bouton, “A Road Closed,” 858. Soltow, “Distribution of Income in the United States in 1798,” 181–85.

  34.  Buck and Buck, The Planting of Civilization in Western Pennsylvania, 248; Humphrey, “Barter and Economic Disintegration,” 48.

  35.  Marshall, Practical Introduction to Arithmetic, 38. James Steuart was right when he wrote, “When reciprocal wants are supplied by barter, there is not the smallest occasion for money.” Steuart, Principles of Political Economy, vol. 1, 177.

  36.  Nimrod Warden daybook (January 24, 1806), Warden Ledger Collection, SC# 5023, James Madison University, Special Collections. 1,200 shillings = £60; Lucy Kennerly Gump, “Amis Ledger D (1794–1801), Interpretive Transcription of an East Tennessee Business Record Book,” manuscript (1997). Such transactions did not result in profit. Braudel cites a passage in Clavière and Brissot, De la France et des Etats-Unis, that indicates the conversion into coin to make up for a discrepancy after a barter exchange, calling this the “eulogy of barter,” but this is how people had exchanged for centuries. See Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, 447.

  37.  One economist came up with the nonsensical notion that bartering takes more time than using money. He writes, “The movement from a barter to a money economy therefore frees up some of the transaction time, which people can use in other ways.” But there is no actual comparison in this foolish assertion. Exchanges in currency took time, too, and maybe even more time, since the value of currencies from different states or counties needed to be evaluated and agreed upon. The economist thought of none of these things, though; he simply wanted to call barter primitive, or what is the same thing for most economists, inefficient. Arnold, Economics, 272. I also consulted Toulmin, The Western Country in 1793, 114, 124; Perkins, “The Consumer Frontier,” 488–92; Martin, Buying into the World of Goods, 2–3; Buck and Buck, The Planting of Civilization in Western Pennsylvania, 248.

  38.  Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy, vol. 2, 147.

  39.  For Hamilton’s reliance on James Steuart, see his 1791 Report on the Establishment of a Mint. I found this introductory note especially helpful, “Introductory Note: Report on the Establishment of a Mint [January 28, 1791],” Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 7, 462–73, founders.archives.gov. For quotations from Steuart, see Principles of Political Economy, vol. 1, 11, 178, 225, 395, 508.

  40.  Hamilton, “Communicated to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, at Philadelphia” (March 6, 1792), quoted in Whitten, “An Economic Inquiry into the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794,” 496–98. Whitten made a comprehensive study of whiskey prices, rye harvests, and the onset of the tax. He concluded that whiskey prices spiked in 1792 when distillers passed on the cost of the tax to buyers, rising 16.4 cents per gallon over pretax prices. Prices fell in 1793, possibly the effect of a strong rye crop or an increase in production as new distillers tried to profit from high prices. The insurrection followed, causing prices to spike again—17 cents over pretax prices. This time, the increase probably came from a pullback in supply, as distillers called off the business for a little while. They might not have planted as much rye as they had in previous years, or they might have diverted it to other uses. Whiskey production returned to something like normal in 1796. Whitten concludes that a “cash-loss burden” did not cause the Whiskey Rebellion. Whitten isolates whiskey’s price at market without considering it as part of household economy in the backcountry. Whitten, “Economic Inquiry,” 500–504.

  41.  Jardine, Letter from Pennsylvania to a Friend in England, 21; Asbury, Journal of the Rev. Francis Asbury (July 10, 1788), 36.

  42.  Harper, The Transformation of Western Pennsylvania, 10–15, 55; Perkins, “Consumer Frontier,” 488–92. In no case did the poor own more than 2 percent of the wealth throughout the region. Ninety percent of the non-landowning set owned no more than two horses and three head of cattle. Pennsylvania had an inconsistent state property tax. One author maintains that the tax was not collected during the 1790s. Howe, “Historical Evolution of State and Local Tax Systems,” 6.

  43.  “Petition of the Inhabitants of Westmoreland County—Excise on Liquors—1790,” in Pennsylvania Archives, vol. 11, 671; Harper, The Transformation of Western Pennsylvania, 248, n22; Kulikoff, British Peasants, 205–206.

  44.  Pennsylvania Archives, 2nd ser., vol. 4, 20–22; Gudeman, Anthropology of Economy, 128–29.

  45.  Victor, History of American Conspiracies, 204–205; Bouton, “A Road Closed,” 855.

  46.  Anderson, Imagined Communities, 19. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 10–11.

  47.  Madison uses the word empire in Federalist, No. 19, but in reference to Germany, not the United States. See Hamilton, No. 13.

  48.  Peter Onuf, quoted in Slaughter, Whiskey Rebellion, 34. For Hamilton on sovereignty, see New York Ratifying Convention, third speech of June 28, 1788 (Francis Childs’s version), Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 5, 114–25. For yeoman farmers, writes Allan Kulikoff, the phrase “sovereignty of the people” “suggested a democracy of property holders in which their views would be paramount.” If legislatures ignored their interests, “yeomen could resort to other means to assert their will.” Kulikoff, Agrarian Origins of Capitalism, 136.

  49.  Thompson, “Moral Economy of the English Crowd”; Tilly, “Food Riot as a Form of Political Conflict in France”; Scott, Moral Economy of the Peasant, 14. Scott makes reference to Chayanov on the relationship between crafts and trades and available land.

  50.  Hamilton to Washington (September 1, 1792), in Works of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 4, 285; “Spirits, Foreign and Domestic” (March 6, 1992), in Works of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 3, 305.

  51.  Rush, Essays, 201–25, 227.

  52.  Hamilton, “Communicated to the House of Representatives, March 6, 1792,” in Works of Hamilton, vol. 3, 304–306; Hamilton, Report on Manufactures, in Works of Hamilton, vol. 3, 193–96; Hamilton, “Tully No. III,” in Hamilton Writings (Library of America), 831. In Federalist, No. 12, he wrote, “The often-agitated question between agriculture and commerce has, from indubitable experience, received a decision which has silenced the rivalship that once subsisted between them, and has proved, to the satisfaction of their friends, that their interests are intimately blended and interwoven.” Hamilton, Federalist, Nos. 12, 21, 30, and 31. Hamilton thought like Adam Smith that every factor
of production generated money in characteristic form. In Smith’s words, “Whoever derives his revenue from a fund which is his own, must draw it either from his labour, from his stock, or from his land … All taxes, and all the revenue which is founded upon them … are ultimately derived from some one or other of those three original sources of revenue.” Smith further said in the same paragraph, “To him [the farmer], land is only the instrument which enables him to earn the wages of this labour, and to make the profits of this stock.” Wealth of Nations, 75. Also see Steuart, Principles of Political Economy, vol. 1, 50.

  53.  These two paragraphs owe a debt to Graeber’s Debt, 50–51. The head tax is also known as a poll tax. Some assume that poll refers to voting, but poll is a Middle English word that means “head.” Polling really means “head count.” Colonial officials imposed direct taxes in Natal, South Africa, 1848; Nyasaland, 1891; Gambia and Sierra Leone, 1890s; and Nyanza Province, Kenya, 1900. In Kenya, the occupier of each hut paid two or three rupees per year. Direct taxes, by hut and later by head, created colonies as independent economic entities, less dependent on London. Evidence suggests that rural Kenyans paid a higher rate of their incomes than urban workers and sought wage labor in order to obtain the currency to pay that tax. Gardner, Taxing Colonial Africa, 50–57. Forstater, “Taxation and Primitive Accumulation,” 57–60. Another French governor, of Ivory Coast, said “the payment of taxation … would stimulate them to produce for export,” quoted in Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States, 70.