Whiskey Insurrection II: The People vs. George Washington

A Buried History Newly Excavated

By Michael Hoffman

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Reading time: approximately 60 minutes

Farming, not banking or the lawyer’s craft, was the economic lifeblood among the predominately white yeomanry of western Pennsylvania in the last decade of the eighteenth century. As we saw in Part One of this study, on the frontier currency was as rare as hen’s teeth. Money in that time and place took the form of whiskey. Trading their prized “Monongahela Rye” for livestock, wagons, tools, iron, lumber and dry goods, among other necessities of life, was the difference between a farmer-patriarch surviving on the family farm or becoming a landless wage slave. For these sons of toil, the soil was their source of wealth, rather than trapping cash in a usury bank or accumulating vast tracts of real estate.

President George Washington chose Alexander Hamilton as America’s first Secretary of the Treasury. To keep the herd of yeomen in line Hamilton devised a taxing system that favored large distillers over small ones, and land monopolies structured so developers could market large swaths of a frontier which musket-toting American farmers were making safe from the American Indian massacres which were being funded and incited by the British Crown. These ended with the decisive victory of Maj. General Anthony Wayne’s regulars (known as “the Legion”) and allied Kentucky militia, over Native warriors in August, 1794 at the Battle of Fallen Timbers near present-day Toledo, Ohio.

Aspiring land owners among the poor, rural, frontier tenant farmers and laborers who could only afford small parcels of acreage, were being deliberately priced out of the market.

Right wing histories of the early American Republic skate over these facts, when they are mentioned at all. The war of rich whites against their poor Christian kinsmen is rarely noted. In these “histories” there isn’t a ragged, bankrupt farmer in sight. The issues “Conservative” history texts most often raise are those which studiously ignore the usury banking which, for example, led the farmers of western Massachusetts to rise in armed revolt a decade earlier in Shays’ Rebellion.

They take little note of the contempt of the wealthy American ruling class for the impecunious whites engaged in the most back-breaking of pioneer settlement—land clearing and swamp-draining with hand tools. In western Pennsylvania this nascent ruling class (the Nevilles, the Craigs, the Kirkpatricks, Benjamin and John Wells), “expressed little respect for the poor and less for their opinions…’ They asserted that ‘It is by force alone…that an ignorant herd can be governed. The United States must beware to educate its lower orders to duty and obedience, lest America suffer the horrors of the Birmingham riots in England… the multitude must be led…The leaders of society should not cater to the passions of the poor.” (Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion [Oxford University Press, 1986], p. 135).

The fear of white revolution dwarfed concerns over black slave revolts.  Black people, it was argued, could be subdued by the lash and allowed to live. White rebels however, could only be killed: “Not the strap or belt, as in the family, or the whip used to discipline recalcitrant slaves, but the sword would be necessary to reassert the authority of the national government over its citizens” (Ibid., p. 136).