Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815
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The army had been involved in the Northwest from the beginning; indeed, it alone represented the authority of the United States government in the West during the 1780s. Under the command of Josiah Harmar of Pennsylvania, troops had been sent to the area to build forts and drive off squatters with the hope of avoiding hostilities with the Indians. But in 1790 continued pressure from settlers finally compelled the federal government to authorize a presumably limited punitive expedition against some of the renegade Indians northwest of the Ohio. General Harmar led a force of some three hundred regulars and twelve hundred militia northward from Fort Washington (present-day Cincinnati) to attack Indian villages in the area of what is now Fort Wayne. Although the Americans burned Miami and Shawnee villages and killed two hundred Indians, they lost an equal number of men and were forced to retreat. This show of force by the United States had proved embarrassing, and the administration was determined not to rely on militia to the same extent again.
This initial failure increased the pressure on the government to try once more to convince the Indians of the futility of resistance. In 1791 General Arthur St. Clair, the territorial governor of the Northwest, led a motley and contentious collection of over fourteen hundred regulars, militia, and levies from Fort Washington against the Miami villages. It took St. Clair over a month to move one hundred miles northward, and on November 4, 1791, he and his troops were surprised and overwhelmed by about a thousand Indians from various tribes commanded by Miami chieftain Little Turtle, one of the most impressive Indian leaders of the period. The Americans suffered nearly a thousand casualties, including over six hundred killed. To mock the Americans’ hunger for their land, the Indians stuffed the dead soldiers’ mouths with soil. Because second-in-command General Richard Butler had once told the Indians that “this country belongs to the United States,” they smashed his skull, cut up his heart into pieces for every tribe that had participated in the battle, and left his corpse to be eaten by animals. St. Clair’s defeat was the worst the Indians ever inflicted on the U.S. Army in its entire history.70
This humiliation convinced the administration that partial remedies would no longer work in pacifying the Indians. The government overhauled the War Department, doubled the military budget, and created the professional standing army of five thousand regulars that many Federalists had long wanted. At the same time, the government sought to negotiate a new treaty with the Indians.
Encouraged by the British in Canada, who wanted a neutral barrier state erected in the Northwest, the Indians refused to accept any white settlements north of the Ohio River, which had been the declared boundary of Quebec in 1774, and the negotiations broke down. The Indians told the American negotiators that all they wanted was “a small part of our once great country. . . . Look back, and review the lands from whence we have been driven to this spot. We can retreat no farther, . . . and we have therefore resolved to leave our bones in this small space to which we are now confined.”71 The British continued to supply the Indians with food and arms, rebuilt their old Fort Miami near the rapids of the Maumee River, near what is now Toledo in northwest Ohio, and urged the Indians to resist the Americans with force.
In the meantime the U.S. Army had been reorganized, renamed the Legion, and placed under the command of General Anthony Wayne, a former Revolutionary officer. Because Wayne was noted for his impetuosity (“Brave and nothing else,” said Jefferson, the kind of man who might “run his head against a wall where success was both impossible and useless”), his appointment in 1792 was controversial.72 But “Mad” Anthony Wayne was determined to vindicate President Washington’s faith in him. Over the next two years he trained, disciplined, and inspired his troops and turned them into a battle-ready fighting force. In the summer of 1794 Wayne and his army of two thousand regulars and fifteen hundred Kentucky volunteers moved northward toward the newly constructed British Fort Miami, with instructions from Knox to “dislodge” the British garrison if necessary, but only if “it shall promise complete success.”73 After repulsing several Indian attacks in June 1794, Wayne’s Legionnaires moved northward and on August 20 soundly defeated a force of over a thousand Indians at Fallen Timbers, near present-day Toledo. Although Wayne refrained from attacking Fort Miami, he burned and pillaged Indian towns, crops, and British storehouses around the post. The British, unwilling to provoke a war with the United States, did nothing to aid their Indian allies.
Wayne’s victory broke Indian resistance in the Northwest and destroyed British influence over the Indians, at least until the eve of the War of 1812. The Indians had no alternative but to seek peace, and in August 1795 in the Treaty of Greenville they ceded to the United States their lands in what is now southern and eastern Ohio, together with a strip of southeastern Indiana. Even within the lands the Indians retained, the Americans gained the rights to erect posts and to pass freely. The Indians in the Northwest acknowledged that they were to be dependent on “no other power whatever” except the United States, which the Wyandot Tarhe said they must from now on call “our father.” As children, Tarhe told his fellow Indians, they were to be “obedient to our father; ever listen to him when he speaks to you, and follow his advice.” But of course the father had patriarchal obligations as well: “Should any of your children come to you crying and in distress, have pity on them, and relieve their wants.” By bestowing the name of “father” on the United States, some of the Indians assumed that the Americans were taking on the paternalistic role that the French and British had played. In this respect the Indians were no freer of illusions than America’s white leaders.74
The outcome at Fallen Timbers made inevitable the British evacuation of the Northwest posts they had been occupying since the Revolution. In the treaty negotiated by John Jay in 1794 and ratified in 1795 Britain finally agreed to get out of American territory. The sending of Jay to England in turn frightened the Spanish with the possibility that the British and the Americans might collaborate to threaten Spanish possessions in the New World. Consequently, Spain suddenly decided to reach a long-delayed agreement with the United States. Washington sent to Spain Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina, who was serving as the American minister to Great Britain. In the treaty that Pinckney signed at San Lorenzo on October 27, 1794, Spain finally recognized American claims to the Florida boundary of the United States at the 31st parallel and to the free navigation of the Mississippi, including the right of Americans to deposit their goods at New Orleans. Both the controversial Jay’s Treaty and Pinckney’s Treaty thus secured the territorial integrity of the United States in a way the diplomacy of the Confederation had been unable to do. At the same time, the new federal government’s actions strengthened the national loyalties of a region of the country that was intensely localist in outlook and that earlier had flirted with separation from the United States.
The Treaty of Greenville
These achievements were the result in no small measure of the willingness of the Federalist government to create an army in the Northwest and to use it against the Indians. Not only did the U.S. Army’s presence help to defend American settlements in the area, but it also contributed greatly to the process of integrating these Northwestern settlements into the nation. The army secured American land claims, protected new towns, developed communication and transportation networks, and provided cash and a reliable local market for the settlers’ produce in the Northwest—all in all acting as an effective agent for an expansive new American empire that remained loyal to the national government in the East.75
That the U.S. Army was not similarly established in the Southwest profoundly affected the different development and loyalties of that region. Although the governor of the Southwest Territory, William Blount, pleaded with the national government for troops to deal with the Creeks and Cherokees, support was minimal. Whereas the Northwest had nearly three thousand regular federal troops by 1794, the Southwest possessed only two U.S. posts with seventy-five soldiers. With federal troops busy trying to put down the Indians
in the Northwest, Secretary of War Knox advised Blount to negotiate treaties and pursue a strictly defensive policy toward the Southern Indians. But the settlers kept encroaching on the Indians’ lands, usually in violation of treaties, and the Indians fought back. Settlers in Tennessee like Andrew Jackson were bitter at the federal government’s neglect and its constant harping on the need to negotiate treaties with the Indians. “Treaties,” declared Jackson in 1794, “answer No other Purpose than opening an Easy door for the Indians to pass through to Butcher our citizens.” He warned that unless the federal government gave more aid to the Southwest the region would eventually have to separate “or seek a protection from some other Source than the present.” Even after Tennessee was admitted to the Union in 1796, bitterness against the United States remained.76
ANTHONY WAYNE HAD TOLD James Madison as early as 1789 that there was no substitute for military victory in establishing the “Dignity, wealth, and Power” of the United States government, and events since that time had convinced many Federalists that Wayne was absolutely right. If only the United States had defeated the Indians earlier, said Judge Rufus Putnam in August 1794, it “would have given a weight and dignity to the Federal Government that would have tended to check the licentiousness and opposition to Government unfavorable in this country.”77 It might even have prevented the events that became known as the Whiskey Rebellion.
In 1794 angry farmers in four counties of western Pennsylvania defied a federal excise tax on whiskey, terrorized the excise officers, robbed the mail, and closed the federal courts. Before everything was over, not only had some seven thousand western Pennsylvanians marched against the town of Pittsburgh and threatened its residents and the federal arsenal there, but rioting against the excise tax on whiskey had spread to the back-countries of Virginia and Maryland.
This so-called Whiskey Rebellion was the most serious domestic crisis the Washington administration had to face. It came at a frightening time. With the French Revolution creating havoc all over Europe and even threatening to spread to America, the Federalists came to fear that this insurrection in the West might actually lead to the overturning of America’s government and the destruction of the Union. Although it was the largest incident of armed resistance to federal authority between the adoption of the Constitution and the Civil War, it was not the only such incident of rural insurgency; indeed, in the two decades following the Revolution the backcountry of states up and down the continent repeatedly erupted in protest, usually over shortages of money and credit among commercially minded farmers who needed both in order to carry on trade.78
The immediate sources of the uprising of 1794 lay in the decision of the Washington administration in 1790 to levy an excise tax on spirits distilled within the United States. Hamilton calculated that duties on foreign imports alone would not be sufficient to cover the revenue needs of his financial program and that some sort of additional tax would be necessary. The Constitution granted the federal government the authority to levy excise taxes, but many Americans bitterly resented such internal taxes, especially one levied by a far-removed central government. Customs duties were one thing; excise taxes were quite another. Customs duties were indirect taxes, paid at the ports on imported goods, often on luxuries. Most consumers were scarcely aware they were paying such taxes, blended as they were in the price of the goods. But payers of excise taxes knew only too well the burden of the tax. British on both sides of the Atlantic had long resisted what the Continental Congress in 1775 called “the most odious of taxes.”79
During the debate over the Constitution the Anti-Federalists had warned that granting the federal government the power to levy such internal taxes would result in hordes of excise men and military enforcement. Indeed, so hated were excise taxes that the first Congress in 1790 voted down Hamilton’s bill. But after a renewed effort in 1791, with physicians endorsing the tax on the grounds that it would cut down on Americans’ excessive drinking of hard liquor, the excise finally passed. Even Madison admitted that he saw no other way of raising the needed revenue.
Since Hamilton in Federalist No. 12 had warned “that the genius of the people will ill brook the inquisitive and peremptory spirit of excise laws,” he knew that opposition would be intense. Although he had “long since learned to hold popular opinion of no value,” he could scarcely have predicted the firestorm of controversy the tax aroused.80 One North Carolina congressman simply assumed that the tax would never be enforced in the western counties of his state. Senator Maclay of Pennsylvania was particularly angry at the excise bill’s attempt to organize the collection districts without regard to state lines. Like many other opponents of the Federalists, Maclay believed that Hamilton and his cronies were bent on eventually eliminating the states and the excise tax was a pretext for doing just that. Others thought that excise was simply another device for creating new offices to feed the administration’s patronage machine. Still others believed that the tax was designed to make the obstreperous Scotch-Irish distillers in the backcountry feel the presence of the federal government.
No doubt the allegiance of these Westerners to the federal government, indeed, to any government, was suspect, but with good reason. The frontier settlers were far removed from the centers of government and continually felt that Eastern authorities did not care about protecting them from the Indians or helping them market their crops. Since the Western farmers had difficulty getting their perishable grain to market, they had commonly resorted to distilling that grain into the much more portable and less perishable form of alcohol. Although whiskey produced for home consumption was exempt from the tax, whiskey had become a necessary form of money for the cash-strapped Western areas.
While some western Pennsylvanians prevented enforcement of the tax by tarring and feathering and terrorizing excise collectors, others channeled their anger into extralegal meetings of protest. They sent petitions to Congress, organized assemblies and committees of correspondence, condemned the excise tax for being as unjust and oppressive as the Stamp Act of 1765, and ostracized everyone who favored or obeyed the excise law. Although many of the leaders of the opposition to the excise tax were themselves wealthy holders of important county or state positions, they certainly felt poorer and less influential than those in the Federalist establishment. Their spokesmen charged that the federal government was dominated by “aristocrats,” “mercenary merchants,” and “moneyed men” who were out to reverse the Revolution and deprive the common farmers of America of their liberty.
Because violence and protests in 1791 and 1792 spread through the frontier areas of every state south of New York, the Federalists in the East thought that all order and authority were being challenged and the integrity of the Union itself was threatened. America now had representative republican governments, the “friends of order” said, and there was no longer any need for extra-legislative popular meetings and protests. The citizens’ role in politics was simply to vote for their rulers and representatives and let those who knew better run the government. Allowing the “rabble” and the “ignorant herd” to exercise authority, the Federalists said, would lead only to disorder and licentiousness. By defying the excise law, the Westerners—those “busy and restless sons of anarchy”—were in fact attempting “to bring us back to those scenes of humiliation and distress from which the new Constitution has so wonderfully extricated us.”81
Because the resistance of the western Pennsylvanians took place “in the state in which is the immediate seat of government,” Hamilton singled out the Pennsylvania backcountry for enforcement of the excise. Besides, it was the only Western region in the country where some officials were trying to enforce the law. In the backcountries of the other states there was no support whatsoever for the tax. In Kentucky President Washington could not even get anyone to accept the position of United States attorney—the officer who would have to prosecute evaders of the law.82 If a test of national authority had to be made, better that it be made in Pennsylvania, where the
elite was divided. And the Federalists believed that a test was needed. It was “absolutely necessary,” said Hamilton, “that a decided experiment should without delay be made of the energy of the laws, and of the government to put them in execution.”83 Although President Washington was less eager than Hamilton to use force, he agreed to issue a proclamation in September 1792 condemning the Westerners’ challenges to authority and threatening strict enforcement of the excise tax.
Despite continued violence and protest against the excise in western Pennsylvania, the government did nothing in 1793 to back up the president’s proclamation. But in 1794 the government proposed new excise taxes on snuff and sugar that aroused a renewed interest in the whiskey tax. In February the president reissued a proclamation expressing the government’s determination to enforce the law in the West. The national government was increasingly fearful that settlers in Kentucky and western Pennsylvania were on the verge of breaking up the Union—perhaps with the aid and encouragement of British officials in Canada. Hamilton thought leniency toward the tax evaders had gone on long enough, and he concluded that “there was no choice but to try the efficiency of the laws in prosecuting with vigour delinquents and Offenders.”84
These efforts at enforcement led to more violence and the massing of six thousand men in the Pittsburgh area who put on a threatening display of armed force. In August President Washington responded with yet another proclamation expressing his intention to call out the militia to maintain law and order. It was no longer a matter of putting down riots and mobs; eighteenth-century leaders were used to dealing with temporary outbursts of the people and did not usually panic when confronted with them. But the long-standing resistance to the law by the four counties of western Pennsylvania seemed much more serious. The rebels were invoking the example of revolutionary France, which had recently executed its king and unleashed the dogs of war and terror. These western Pennsylvanians hoisted their own flag, set up mock guillotines, erected their own extralegal courts, and talked of marching on the federal garrison in Pittsburgh to seize weapons. Some frightened gentry thought the rebels were actually going to march on Philadelphia, the nation’s capital. The insurrection, concluded Attorney General William Bradford in August 1794, was part of “a well formed and regular plan for weakening and perhaps overthrowing the General Government.”85