TRACK SIX: Whiskey Rebels

As John worked alongside the river and tended the orchards around Grant’s Hill, in the early 1790s, and while he pondered his future in the west, what was happening in Pittsburgh and the four counties in the vicinity came close to creating a second rebellion, perhaps another Revolution!

This was Whiskey Rebellion, and it was gathering steam as John arrived in 1792, and in 1794 it was suddenly over when President Washington arrived with a large contingent of soldiers. It was called the Whiskey Rebellion because the dispute concerned the imposition of a tax on whiskey, a product that was made and consumed or sold by nearly every small farmer with any excess grain or corn at the end of the growing season. Compared to harvested corn or grain, whiskey as a commodity was easier to store, to transport, to barter, and to buy and sell. Often, a barrel of whiskey would serve as a form of currency for the payment of debts! Alexander Hamilton, as Secretary of the Treasury, had convinced the President to tax whiskey as a way to bring in revenue to pay off the debts incurred during the war. Small farmers felt that proportionally the tax was a far greater burden on them than it was for the large distilleries in the towns and cities back East. In western Pennsylvania, among the ex-soldiers and their friends and families, the cause of the whiskey rebels erupted in occasions of violence directed at the tax collectors. It also was a larger, more encompassing criticism of how the new government was acting against the interests of the frontier folk.

And here was John, a young man wondering what to make of his life, right in the midst of many neighbors who seemed to be thinking that the time had come for another armed insurrection, this time against corrupt interests in their own country. The feeling was that Hamilton’s bankers and the big commercial interests in Philadelphia and New York and Boston and Williamsburg were making a sham of the Declaration of Independence, and acting as badly and highhandedly as the British had done. And that the promise of the Constitution to “promote the general welfare” and “secure the blessings of liberty” was completely emptied of meaning when the phrase “we the people” became twisted into something on the order of “we the richest people.”

John Chapman attended the meetings of the Whiskey Rebels and sympathized deeply with the complaints they lodged. Many of the local people in the area near Mingo Creek, outside of Pittsburgh, had no more patience for petitioning the leaders in Philadelphia and New York for relief from these unfair taxes. Surely men of his father’s day did not fight in order for the wealthy few to call the shots; they would not be persuaded to accept that the United States become another version of the political and financial corruptions of Great Britain.

John sought an audience with his father’s old Commanding Officer when Washington reached Pennsylvania with his reconstituted army, to quell the Whiskey Rebels. John felt that vigorous democratic protest should be rewarded, and that actual rebellion – and bloodshed – must be avoided. Washington had seen John as a baby, and in deference to his old comrade, admitted John to his tent for a conversation.

Here is a song (that I made up) for the Whiskey Rebels to sing.