Let’s begin by reviewing the time line of events leading up to the Whiskey rebellion.
1765 Britain enacts the stamp act. The stamp act required all legal instruments such as wills, mortgages, deeds, marriage certificates etc. to be written upon paper stamped with the royal arms of Britain. The paper was produced in London. An official known as the Stamp Master was appointed by the crown to sell them. Thus Britain was able to tax the colonies without their consent. No taxation without representation as the saying goes.
1776 The Colonies declare their independence
1777 The Articles of Confederation are adopted but not ratified by all 13 colonies
1781 The British surrender at Yorktown ending the revolutionary war.
1781 The Articles of Confederation become the law of the land as Maryland became the 13th colony to ratify the Articles nearly three years after the official deadline given by the continental Congress of March 10, 1778. The Articles did not grant Congress the right to levy taxes, Congress it did have authority over foreign affairs and could regulate a national army and declare war. Amendments to the Articles required approval from all 13 states.
1786 – 1787 Shay’s Rebellion. Farmers of Western Massachusetts, primarily people of scotch-Irish stock rebelled against the crushing tax burden placed upon them by Massachusetts to repay the war debt owed to domestic and foreign bankers as well as the merchant class of Boston. Shays’ rebellion gave impetus to the creation of a Federal Government with more power than was allotted under the Articles of Confederation. See the video on Shays rebellion for further details. Link in the description.
1788 US Constitution is ratified.
Bank of the United States, commonly known as the First Bank of the United States, was a national bank, chartered for a term of twenty years, by the United States Congress. The charter was granted on February 25, 1791. It followed the Bank of North America, the nation's first de facto national bank. Establishment of the Bank of the United States was part of a three-part expansion of federal fiscal and monetary power, along with a federal mint and excise taxes, this championed by Alexander Hamilton, first Secretary of the Treasury. Already, just a few short years after the formation of the United States under the Constitution, the forces of national domination by the mercantile and financial classes were being set into motion.
The previous central government under the Articles of Confederation had been unable to levy taxes; it had borrowed money to meet expenses and fund the Revolutionary War. The central government accumulating $54 million in debt. In addition The state governments had amassed an additional $25 million in debt. Yes, Financing war has always been a profitable business. Alexander Hamilton In his Report on Public Credit, proposed a bold financial plan to Congress. He wanted to consolidate all national and state debts and pay them off at face value as quickly as possible. But where would the government get the money?
Almost all revenue that the United States collected came from customs duties on foreign imports. This tax fell on the relatively wealthy merchant class that was predominantly English. Hamilton also wanted to impose an excise tax on products made within the country, specifically on the distilling of whiskey.
The proposed excise tax on whiskey provoked great controversy in Congress. This would be the first time a tax would apply to a product made in the United States. Americans remembered the long history of excise taxes in Britain because tax collectors searched people's homes for taxable items and had the power to impose fines without a trial. In America, the Stamp Act was an excise tax on various documents and helped bring on the American Revolution.
Western representatives in Congress opposed the excise on whiskey, calling it the leading edge of tyranny, and it was. They claimed that the burden of this tax would fall most heavily on the poor frontier settlers who were primarily of Scotch-Irish heritage, and it did. Others charged the whiskey tax was a plot by Hamilton and his Eastern merchant friends to shift taxes from the rich English Merchants to the poor Scotts-Irish farmers. It was.
Whiskey was a popular drink, and farmers often supplemented their incomes by operating small stills.[17] Farmers living west of the Appalachian Mountains distilled their excess grain into whiskey, which was easier and more profitable to transport over the mountains than the more cumbersome grain. A whiskey tax would make western farmers less competitive with eastern grain producers. Further It was required to pay the tax in coin. And, coin cash was always in short supply on the frontier, so whiskey often served as a medium of exchange. For poorer people who were paid in whiskey, the excise tax was essentially an income tax that wealthier easterners did not pay.
In addition Few owned their own land and instead rented it, often in exchange for part of whatever they grew on it. Failure to do so would result in eviction or possibly even arrest, creating a system that somewhat resembled the feudalism of the Middle Ages. This fact didn’t seem to bother Hamilton or the Congress.
Small-scale farmers also protested that Hamilton's excise tax effectively gave unfair tax breaks to large distillers, most of whom were based in the east. There were two methods of paying the whiskey excise: paying a flat fee or paying by the gallon. Large distillers produced whiskey in volume and could afford the flat fee. The more efficient they became, the less tax per gallon they would pay (as low as 6 cents, according to Hamilton). Western farmers who owned small stills did not usually operate them year-round at full capacity, so they ended up paying a higher tax per gallon, that being (9 cents), which made them less competitive.[20] The regressive nature of the tax was further compounded by an additional factor: whiskey sold for considerably less on the cash-poor Western frontier than in the wealthier and more populous East. This meant that, even if all distillers had been required to pay the same amount of tax per gallon, the small-scale frontier distillers would still have to remit a considerably larger proportion of their product's value than larger Eastern distillers. The Small-scale distillers believed that Hamilton deliberately designed the tax to ruin them and promote big business, a not unreasonable assumption.
In 1791, with the National Bank ready to do its part, the first Congress of the United States passed an excise tax on spirits distilled in the United States, the first tax ever levied by the United States on a domestic product. Hamilton and his banker buddies were ecstatic, they stood to make a bundle.
Many meetings among the Western farmers took place to discuss what to do, and secession from Pennsylvania — which would give the frontier-folk representation Congress — was discussed. Many also threw out the idea of seceding from the United States as a whole, making the West its own country or even a territory of either Great Britain or Spain (Spain at the time, controlled the territory west of the Mississippi).
That these options were even on the table demonstrates how disconnected the people of the West felt from the rest of the country. Sound familiar.
Minimal violence ensued after the Whiskey Tax was enacted but it was also clear to George Washington that nothing short of repealing the tax would work. So, given the anger and unfairness of the tax, why not repeal it? Well, then as now, follow the money. And since allowing the frontier to secede would cripple the United States — mainly by proving its weakness to the other European powers in the area and by blocking the wealthy Eastern merchant and financial classes from direct access to the bountiful resources of the Western frontier. Yes follow the money. George Washington chose to listen to the advice Alexander (follow the money) Hamilton had been giving him for years.
He summoned the United States Army and set it on the people for the first time in American history.
In September of 1794, Washington with a large organized militia of 13,000 men began marching west, pursuing rebels and arresting them when they were caught.
Seeing such a large force of federal troops, many of the rebels scattered throughout Western Pennsylvania began dispersing into the hills, fleeing arrest and an impending trial in Philadelphia.
The Whiskey Rebellion trickled to a halt without much bloodshed. There were only two fatalities in western Pennsylvania, both of them supposedly accidental—one boy was shot by a soldier whose gun went off supposedly accidentally, and a drunken rebel supporter was stabbed with a bayonet while resisting arrest.
A total of twenty people were caught during this march, and they were tried for treason. Just two were convicted, but they were later pardoned by President Washington — it was widely known these convicts had nothing to do with the Whiskey rebellion, but the government needed to make an example of someone.
As was the case with Shays’ rebellion the Whiskey rebellion can be looked on as the point where the monied wing of the revolution crushes its former allies and continues to consolidate its power as the new ruling class.
When the colonies rebelled against British taxation, it was give me liberty or give me death patriotism. When the poor Scotts-Irish farmers of the Western frontier protest crippling taxes, it is treasonous insurrection. Shays’ Rebellion, The Whiskey Rebellion, a history lesson for our time.
References:
https://historycooperative.org/whiskey-rebellion/
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/duel-whiskey-rebellion/
https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-23-3-a-the-whiskey-rebellion-and-the-new-american-republic.html
https://www.history.com/topics/early-us/whiskey-rebellion