As insurrections go, the Whiskey Rebellion was mild in spite of the importance accorded it by history and a rather grand turnout at the end. There were lives lost, but only a few, and by the time the whole thing was over, everybody involved walked away with a pardon.

The first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, looked to whiskey as a source of revenue for paying off the national debt accumulated during the Revolution. Whiskey was an obvious candidate for generating tax dollars because of the high volume of production. Home distilling in newly settled areas was common enough that it was said of western Pennsylvania that one couldn’t stand anywhere in the settled country and look around without seeing the smoke of a distiller’s chimney. Distilled spirits were used for dad’s scythe cut, junior’s cough and mom’s fatigue, not to mention making guests welcome. ‘Internal, external and eternal’ was a popular sentiment.

On March 3, 1791 an excise tax on distilled spirits was passed into law. Distillers could choose to pay an annual levy on their still’s capacity or a gallonage tax ranging from nine to eleven cents on actual production. The farmers in southwestern Pennsylvania were particularly indignant. They saw no reason for paying taxes on their corn if they drank it when no taxes were required if they ate it. Lying closer to the heart of the matter was the fact that most of their whiskey wasn’t distilled to be sold, but to be consumed by the distiller and his family or bartered for other goods. It was family provisions, so to speak, for every family kept a jug of whiskey and used it for many things, including a form of currency. What couldn’t be grown or killed was bartered for, a practice that held on for decades so that in 1816, public record shows that Abraham Lincoln’s father sold his Knob Creek, Kentucky, farm for twenty dollars and ten barrels of whiskey. Knob Creek, a small batch bourbon made by Jim Beam Distilleries, is named for the same Lincoln homestead where young Abe is reported to have almost drowned after falling into the creek.

There was so little currency circulating among these southwestern Pennsylvania settlers because the Allegheny Mountains isolated them from the commerce of the eastern cities, making transportation of goods to be sold difficult. This meant that most farmer/distillers had no money with which to pay the tax. And they were unconvinced that their representatives in Philadelphia understood how hard life was in the settlements, where they lived in log cabins and slept on dirt floors. In truth, the men passing laws in Philadelphia were more concerned with establishing primacy of the new federal government and keeping it solvent. The farmers and the lawmakers were at loggerheads. 

In 1792, legislators sought to appease the angry distillers by amending the excise tax law, but the farmers of southwestern Pennsylvania wanted nothing short of repeal and continued their protest rallies and attacks. After three years of minor skirmishes, the insurrection picked up considerably in May of 1794, when sixty farmers who had publicly refused to register their stills were summoned to a district court appearance in Philadelphia and a United States marshal was sent to deliver the writs. An unpopular local tax inspector named John Neville offered to accompany the marshal on his delivery rounds and on the fifteenth of July as they were serving one of the writs, a band of insurgents fired on them, missing everyone and hurting no one. 

Neville returned to his home to find it surrounded, and a fire fight followed that left four whiskey rebels wounded and one dead. The following day another was killed and the inspector’s home was burned to the ground.

In the meantime, a United States Post rider delivering the circuit between Washington and Pittsburgh was robbed of the mail he carried. The robbing committee read the contents of the mail pouch and reported that the contents were hostile to their interests. It was time for action. 

Between five and seven thousand whiskey rebels responded to the call and on the first day of August they began gathering outside Pittsburgh, which they claimed was harboring inspectors and collectors. David Bradford was the primary leader and reportedly had ambitions of his own, namely to establish an independent territory with himself as head of state. The mob elected him Major General and Bradford bandied about on his horse, flashing his sword and whipping the troops into a frenzy. They marched toward Pittsburgh, strung out over two and a half miles, with occupation in mind. Intentions within the ranks were apparently mixed, however, for one rebel was reported to have predicted as he marched along twirling his raggedy hat on the end of his rifle that he expected to have a better hat by tomorrow. 

The troops marched into Pittsburgh to find a nervous but resourceful reception committee waiting for them with a spread of bear meat, ham, venison and four barrels of Monongahela rye whiskey. The citizens agreed to banish certain residents and damage was limited to the burning of only one building. The rebels marched on and Pittsburgh was spared in what surely must be one of the stranger scenarios recorded in the annals of battle strategy: flank ’em with a picnic, get ’em drunk, and get ’em out of town.

In Philadelphia, an angry President Washington considered the march on Pittsburgh a crisis point and initiated plans to round up the rebel leaders. According to Gerald Carson in The Social History of Bourbon the President requisitioned 15,000 militia from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia and Maryland, and 13,000 actually showed up. The critical question at hand was whether citizens of one state would take up arms against citizens of another in defense of federal law. The federal troops set out marching toward Harrisburg. 

Carson writes: “The troops moved in two columns under the command of General Henry (Light Horse Harry) Lee, Governor of Virginia. Old Dan Morgan was there and young Meriwether Lewis, five nephews of President Washington, the governors of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, too, and many a veteran blooded in Revolutionary fighting, including the extraordinary German, Captain John Fries of the Bucks County militia and his remarkable dog to which the Captain gave the name of a beverage he occasionally enjoyed—Whiskey.” 

President Washington and Secretary Hamilton joined the militia in Bedford, Pennsylvania, on October 19, and from that point the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 neatly unfolded to its end. Washington returned to Philadelphia, leaving Light Horse Harry in command. George Washington is still the only United States president ever to physically lead troops into the field as Commander-in-Chief while in office. 

On the night of November 13, federal troops arrested 200 citizens whom they called “the whiskey pole gentry.” Most were pardoned by General Lee after a few days, but 20 were set for trial in Philadelphia. A volunteer force was left to stay the winter in Pennsylvania while the rest of the army marched the prisoners across the mountains, arriving in Philadelphia on Christmas Day. Of these, only two went to trial, one for robbing the U.S. Mail and the other for arson, and both were sentenced to hang. But in July 1795, and before the sentences could be carried out, President Washington issued a proclamation pardoning all except ringleader David Bradford, who had fled to Spanish Louisiana but was later pardoned by President Adams. 

Thomas Jefferson repealed the hated tax during his first administration and distillers remained mostly free of a government whiskey bill until Congress needed money to pay for another war, this one a war between the states. 

Alexander Hamilton and the Whiskey Boys began a debate between distillers and government that continues today as the two argue for opposing ideas about what constitutes fair taxation. Distilled spirits are taxed at a higher rate than wine and beer and distillers think this is unfair while the government thinks otherwise. 

“The Whiskey Rebellion,” writes Carson, “established the reality of a federal union whose law was not a suggestion but a command.” The principle of federalism was fundamental to the United States and its structure provided a way to deal with the diversity that was Colonial America. Indians remained the only ones who had not come here from somewhere else. The new states wanted local independence but they also wanted and needed a strong union — e pluribus unum.

The union triumphed for the common good in that first test of primacy, a test that rose from whiskey and taxation and then bound the two together forever, for the common good is in constant need of revenue. 

The federal troops that remained in southwestern Pennsylvania that winter survived in apparent good spirits, for Meriwether Lewis wrote to his mother about “mountains of beef and oceans of whiskey.” In a simple twist of fate, the hard currency that had been so scarce to the region was suddenly abundant, for the army turned out to be the largest consumer of whiskey in the west. Daily military rations included one gill of whiskey, or about a quarter of a pint a day for every soldier, a custom that remained in place until 1830.