On the worst day of his ultimately unsuccessful 2016 bid to win the Democratic nomination for the US Senate from Pennsylvania, John Fetterman took me on a tour of the Mon Valley. Starting out in Braddock, the dying steel town whose mayor Fetterman has been since 2005, we followed the Monongahela River upstream through Clairton, which still has the largest coke plant—and, not coincidentally, the most toxic air quality—in the country.
At six feet eight inches tall, with a goatee, shaved head, and the build, as he says, “of a professional wrestler rather than a professional politician,” Fetterman would probably stand out in a crowd even without the tattoos: “15104,” Braddock’s ZIP code, is inked across his massive right forearm, while his left bears the dates of each of the nine gun deaths that occurred here since he took office. Rolling down the window so I can smell the stink, Fetterman shakes his head: “The thing is, if the coke works goes, I don’t know what the folks here have left.”
As if in answer we drive through block after block of shuttered storefronts and abandoned houses in McKeesport, stopping briefly to explore the derelict hulk of the First Baptist Church, whose soaring white domed ceiling looks down on a rotting wooden floor strewn with empty bottles, burn-scarred mattresses, and rat droppings. Then we head south to Monessen, another hollowed-out former steel town whose newspaper, the Valley Independent, like McKeesport’s Daily News, was owned by right-wing financier Richard Mellon Scaife, who closed both papers in 2015.
In 2008, when candidate Barack Obama was being hammered for telling the audience at a San Francisco fundraiser that in “some of these small towns in Pennsylvania” the inhabitants, “bitter” about being left behind economically, “cling to guns and religion,” Fetterman was one of the few elected officials who defended him (the overwhelming majority of Pennsylvania’s Democratic office holders supported Hillary Clinton). So it came as a cruel disappointment when Fetterman learned, just before we set off in his pickup, that instead of remaining neutral in the Democratic senatorial primary, the president was about to endorse one of his opponents.
Not that either of us needed any help in darkening the mood. “No one is talking about places like this,” said Fetterman, as we crossed over the river at Charleroi and followed it back to the converted auto showroom in Braddock where Fetterman lives. “I’m so tired of the Democratic Party using the working poor as props,” he said angrily, explaining why the candidate Obama had endorsed, Kathleen McGinty, a state official with extensive ties to the oil and gas industries, would never be elected.
At the time I dismissed Fetterman’s diatribe against corporate Democrats as sour grapes—a bitter rant from a man who, to my mounting disbelief, also argued that Donald Trump would not only win the nomination, but would likely carry the state of Pennsylvania. “Supporting Trump is a way for older, white Americans to give the whole country the finger for breaking its promises and leaving them behind. I can kind of understand that.”
When I came back to see Fetterman a month after the election it was evident that his prescience brought him no joy. McGinty had indeed lost. Hillary Clinton carried Braddock—with its largely African American population—as she had Pittsburgh and the rest of Allegheny County. But in the two other counties we’d driven through back in March—Westmoreland and Washington—Trump piled up a majority of over eighty-one thousand votes in a state where his winning margin was only sixty-eight thousand.
“I was wrong about one thing,” Fetterman reminded me, “when I said no politicians ever come to a place like Monessen.” On June 28, 2016—when the NBC News poll had Clinton ahead by five points, and the Fox News poll had her up by six—Donald Trump came to Monessen to deliver a speech the New York Times described as “an attack on the economic orthodoxy that has dominated the Republican Party since World War II.” Sticking for once to his script, in searing language Trump declared that “the legacy of Pennsylvania steelworkers lives in the bridges, railways and skyscrapers that make up our great American landscape. But our workers’ loyalty was repaid with betrayal.” Quoting George Washington, Alexander Hamilton—and the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute—on the importance of domestic manufacturing, and the disastrous impact of trade deals negotiated during Bill Clinton’s presidency, Trump pledged that under his administration “it will be American steel that will fortify Americans’ crumbling bridges . . . It will be American steel that rebuilds our inner cities. It will be American hands that remake this country, and it will be American energy—mined from American resources—that powers this country.”13
Though he did keep his promise to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, calling it “a death blow for American manufacturing,” most of what Trump said that day in Monessen turned out to be empty rhetoric. But his mere presence, in a region that has long felt abandoned by Washington, was, said Fetterman, a powerful reminder of a time when the eyes of the whole world were on western Pennsylvania.
The decline goes back decades—by 1978, when the movie The Deer Hunter used Clairton as a symbol of neglect, the town had already lost nearly half its population. McKeesport saw employment at National Tube fall from ten thousand to a few hundred before US Steel, which owned the plant, shut it down in the 1980s. But in 1947, thirteen years before their more famous television face-off, two Navy veterans newly elected to Congress, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, came to McKeesport to debate the implications of the Taft-Hartley Act, with Nixon highlighting the law’s anti-Communist provisions while Kennedy warned the measure would “strangle collective bargaining.”14 President Kennedy returned to McKeesport in 1962, telling the crowd that since his generation had been “beneficiaries of the New Deal,” it was their responsibility to solve “the problem of how to keep our people at work.”15 But the government couldn’t force factory owners to invest in new equipment, and as competition from modern plants in Europe and Asia increased the American steel industry entered its long death spiral.
One of the last two surviving US Steel plants in the Mon Valley, the Edgar Thomson Works, is literally across the street from Fetterman’s front door. Built in 1875 to manufacture rails for the Pennsylvania Railroad, Andrew Carnegie’s first steel mill survived the 1892 Homestead strike, sale to J. P. Morgan, and even, thanks to a 1992 conversion from rails to continuous casting, the collapse of the American steel industry, currently accounting for more a quarter of US Steel’s domestic production.
But the town of Braddock’s claim to significance isn’t just as a rust-belt relic—a living museum of industrial architecture. The ground now occupied by the Thomson Works was the setting for a conflict that shaped American history. During the summer of 1755, in the second year of the French and Indian War, General Edward Braddock, commander in chief of British forces in North America, moved to seize Fort Duquesne, a French outpost at the point where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers meet to form the Ohio. On July 9, 1755, Braddock led some 1,300 troops across the Monongahela where they were met by a combined force of 800 French soldiers and Native American warriors. Despite their superior numbers, the British tactic of attacking in columns left them vulnerable to their opponents, who fired from behind trees on both sides of the road, leading the panicked British regulars to break ranks and run. Attempting to restore discipline Braddock himself was fatally wounded, and it was largely thanks to a detachment of Virginia militia, long accustomed to fighting in the trees, that a total rout was avoided and the survivors were able to stage an orderly retreat. Braddock himself was sufficiently grateful for the Virginians’ efforts to bequeath his ceremonial sash to their twenty-three-year-old commander, Colonel George Washington.
Witnessing that defeat did much to strip away any sense of awe or inferiority the young colonial officer might have felt toward the British Army; the campaign also provided Washington, who two years earlier had personally delivered an ultimatum to the commander of the French garrison in Ohio demanding he withdraw in favor of the British, with a reminder of the vast potential of the western region. Virginia’s colonial governor, Robert Dinwiddie, had promised each of the militia volunteers a share in two hundred thousand acres of land west of the Ohio River. Although the Crown, reluctant to antagonize the Native American inhabitants, explicitly barred colonial settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains, Washington would appoint himself a leader in the fight for the veterans’ promised bounty—while at the same time instructing his own agents to secure title to as much western land as possible.
That, however, was just the prologue. Braddock’s claim as a pivot point in American history arises from the events of August 1794, when seven thousand members of various western Pennsylvania militias assembled on the site of that British defeat—known as “Braddock’s Field,” occupied today by the Thomson Works—in defiance of the new federal government’s proposed tax on whiskey. Within a week the Supreme Court certified that the area was in a state of rebellion, a legal formality authorizing President Washington to take command of state militias. With Washington himself at its head, and the tax’s author, Alexander Hamilton, riding at his side, a force of nearly thirteen thousand men—comparable in size to the entire Continental Army—rode west from Philadelphia to put down the revolt.
How had it come to this? In the original Public Theater version of his mega-hit musical Hamilton, composer Lin-Manuel Miranda depicts the hero as playing second fiddle to his commander in chief, who tells Hamilton “I have a plan, but it’s risky,” explaining, “We know from rebellions / We’re gonna teach ’em / How to stay in line,” with Hamilton then urging the rebels, “Pay your fucking taxes!” Their conspiratorial duet, “One Last Ride,” was cut—along with any mention of the Pennsylvania revolt—before the show reached Broadway.
Yet it was Hamilton who not only gave the incident the derisory name—the “Whiskey Rebellion”—it still bears, but who consciously, deliberately provoked the rebels in order both to justify a display of federal power and to put the new government firmly on the side of wealthy commercial interests. Hamilton the plucky immigrant may be boffo box office; Hamilton the politician was a considerably more complex historical figure, who, having risked his neck in the revolution, had no patience with those who thought they were fighting not just for liberty from Britain, but for freedom from all arbitrary authority.
The roots of the Whiskey Rebellion go back long before the American Revolution, with its radical declaration that “all men are created equal,” all the way to the English Civil War of the previous century. Although in England itself the republican government that executed Charles I, and under Oliver Cromwell ruled over a united “Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland,” was followed by the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, republican ideas retained considerable power. Especially in the North American colonies, many founded by Puritans, Quakers, and other dissenters from the Church of England—some of which even bore the title of “Commonwealth.”
By the time of the Hanoverian succession in 1714 the mainstream of British political thought had repressed the memory of popular sovereignty to the point where “republicanism” signified merely a defense of constitutional monarchy.16 But while few in England would have publicly agreed with the diarist Samuel Pepys’s private avowal that “better things were done, and better managed . . . under a commonwealth” than under a king, the Country Party, which stood against the corruptions of the Georgian court during Robert Walpole’s long ministry, and more especially the group of writers known as “Commonwealth Men,” found avid admirers in the colonies. In Britain John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, publishers of the weekly Independent Whig, remained marginal figures. But according to the historian Bernard Bailyn a copy of their pseudonymous collection Cato’s Letters, defiantly republican and filled with warnings about how quickly arbitrary power turns to tyranny, could be found in half the private libraries of North America.17
If the enlightenment rationalism of John Locke and David Hume, radical Whig thought, and the debates among Cromwell’s New Model Army all helped to shape colonial politics, the religious convulsions known as the First Great Awakening were equally important. Between Jonathan Edwards of Massachusetts, with his grisly depiction of the torments awaiting sinners, and George Whitefield, the British revivalist who made seven trips to the colonies between 1738 and 1770, eighteenth-century Americans were steeped in the doctrine of personal salvation and “New Light” Protestantism’s disdain for hierarchal authority. Even Benjamin Franklin, who described himself as a “thoroughgoing Deist,” got drawn into Whitefield’s orbit, publishing the preacher’s sermons in his Pennsylvania Gazette and donating money to the orphanage Whitefield was building in Georgia. In the decades preceding the revolution “defiance to the highest constituted powers poured from colonial presses and was hurled from half the pulpits in the land . . . Obedience as a principle was only too well known; disobedience as a doctrine was not. It was therefore asserted again and again.”18
But there is also a third strand to the revolutionary braid—though given far less space in the textbooks—and that is the question of property. Just as England’s republican revolution was fertile ground for both Protestant Dissenters and political radicals like John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and Gerrard Winstanley19 (whose followers, known as True Levellers or Diggers, pulled down the fences used by private landlords, planting crops on land they claimed had been stolen from the people), so the rejection of British rule in the colonies inspired many participants to regard any form of hereditary power—political or economic—with suspicion.
In his Second Treatise on Civil Government (1690) Locke had argued both that all property rights begin with a person’s ownership of his or her own body, and that any further property rights are only gained through the addition, or “mixing in,” of labor. Locke also held that such “appropriation” is only valid if “there is enough, and as good, left in common for others”—a position that found ready acceptance among the settlers of the American frontier. Though it would take another generation before the logical force of Locke’s implicit critique of slavery* gained political pertinence, the consequences of his view of the earth as a common inheritance became apparent the moment British authority, and British institutions, were nullified. Primogeniture and entail, for example, the two legal devices by which the British aristocracy consolidated and maintained their lands and fortunes, were abolished by all of the new America states in the decades immediately following the revolution.
Arguing that such arrangements operated to give certain wealthy families “an unequal and undue influence in a republic,” the North Carolina legislature said that banning them would “tend to promote that equality of property which is of the spirit and principle of a genuine republic.”20 North Carolina was also the state that had given birth to the Regulators, armed rural irregulars who, a decade before Lexington and Concord, banded together to enforce “people’s justice” against colonial officials, preventing evictions and the seizure of farms for unpaid taxes. In their petitions the Regulators called for nothing less than an economic revolution, demanding a land bank to provide affordable credit to farmers, provision for taxes to be paid in paper currency, public access to tax records, and land titles granted only to those who improve, or work, the land—not absentee landlords. “Most radically of all, they wanted taxes proportional to wealth.”21 Colonial Governor William Tryon’s response was to crush the movement, and hang its leaders.
After the revolution, matters were supposed to be different. In Leviathan Thomas Hobbes had argued that only an all-powerful state could restrain the “war of all against all.” But the revolutionaries knew from personal experience that wasn’t true. “In one colony after another the old political institutions lost their authority and new ones—committees of safety and correspondence, provincial conventions—took power.” As Thomas Paine observed, “For upward of two years from the commencement of the American War, and to a longer period in several of the American states, there were no established forms of government. The old governments had been abolished, and the country was too much occupied in defense, to employ its attention in establishing new governments; yet during this interval, order and harmony were preserved as inviolate as in any country in Europe.”22
How far might this new spirit of equality go? The answer varied considerably. In plantation economies like the Virginia Tidewater, or trading centers such as New York and Boston, the wealthy maintained and even extended their privileges after the revolution. Vermont, admitted to the union in 1791, was the first state to grant universal suffrage to all male inhabitants, regardless of property ownership. But then property ownership in America, where two-thirds of the white colonial population owned land, was already of a different order than in England, where some four hundred families owned a fifth of all the land in the country—and where, even after the 1832 Reform Act, property requirements restricted the franchise to a mere 18 percent of the adult male population.23 In most American states land was cheap enough, and the property qualification low enough, to allow about 80 percent of the male inhabitants to vote for that state’s lower house of the legislature—and thus to be eligible to vote for members of the House of Representatives.24
Historians still disagree about the extent to which radical American praxis drew on radical English theory—just as they still differ over whether the American Revolution was a social, as well as a political, revolution. But there is no argument at all about where, during the revolution and immediately afterward, radical ideas about equality were most fully enacted into law. Written under the influence of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776—published in January of that year—was by far the most democratic charter produced by any of the former colonies. Although the draft language proposed by the Committee of Privates arguing that “an enormous Proportion of Property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the Rights, and destructive of the Common Happiness, of Mankind,” and should therefore be discouraged by law, never made it into the Declaration of Rights, the final version did provide for a unicameral legislature, whose members served one-year terms, and the elimination of property qualifications to vote or hold office.
“In the Pennsylvania press of 1776,” writes Gordon S. Wood, “the typical Whig outbursts against Tories and Crown were overshadowed by expressions of . . . social hostility. In fact, to judge solely from the literature the Revolution in Pennsylvania had become a class war . . . between the common people and the privileged few.”25 For both the radical artisans of urban Philadelphia and their rural counterparts a prime focus of this hostility was Robert Morris, wealthiest merchant in the state, richest man in the country, leader of the Federalists— and George Washington’s Philadelphia landlord.
In 1786, when westerners in the Pennsylvania General Assembly argued that “a democratic government like ours admits of no superiority,” Morris scornfully replied, “Is it insisted that there is no distinction of character?” But William Findley, an Irish-born weaver elected from Westmoreland County, held firm, allowing that while the rich might have “more money than their neighbors,” in America “no man has a greater claim of special privilege for his £100,000 than I have for my £5.”26 (An echo, whether conscious or not, of the Leveller spokesman Thomas Rainsborough’s claim in the Putney Debates that “the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he.”)
So it was no accident at all that, Congress having enacted a much-resented, widely disregarded tax on domestic whiskey production, Alexander Hamilton would apply the full might of the new government to western Pennsylvania. Because if he had only been looking to enforce the law, Hamilton could have turned to western Massachusetts, western Maryland, the frontier areas of Virginia, Georgia, the Carolinas—all hotbeds of resistance to the new tax. Or the entire state of Kentucky, which failed to appoint a single tax collector— probably because prospective candidates were reliably informed the job would be hazardous to their continued health. When a hapless federal prosecutor eventually did bring charges, Kentucky juries consistently refused to convict.27
Why was the tax so fiercely resisted? Partly because it was, in the shared language of English Whigs and American revolutionaries, what was known as an “excise” or “internal tax.” Unlike customs duties, which raised money by a tariff on imported goods, paid as they came into the country, excise taxes were regarded as both an imposition and an irresistible temptation for corrupt officials. Long before the Stamp Tax and the Townshend Acts stirred passions in the colonies, violent protests by British taxpayers in the 1730s forced Walpole’s government to withdraw an excise on salt. A similar fate befell a proposed tax on cider in 1763, with riots in the West Country leading the prime minister, Lord Bute, to resign. “When the Excise Man’s Deputy comes,” an opposition pamphleteer predicted, “if he likes the poor Man’s Wife, he will not like his Account.”28 In 1775 the Continental Congress tried to persuade the people of Quebec to join their revolution by noting that Canadians had been subjected “to the imposition of excise, the borrower of all free states, thus wresting your property from you by the most odious of taxes.”29 Indeed it was the long history of abuse by British excise collectors that eventually led to the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
Mainly though, the tax was hated because of the unique role of whiskey in the frontier economy. Unlike farmers along the seaboard, who had access both to markets and to money, settlers in the interior had great difficulty in selling their crops. The Mississippi belonged to Spain, which refused to allow Americans navigation rights. (The federal government’s apparent lack of interest in negotiating a treaty with Spain was a constant source of vexation to westerners—especially when contrasted with the Federalists’ obvious eagerness to agree to terms with Britain.) A western farmer might harvest twenty-four bushels of rye, but it would take three animals to haul the grain over the Alleghenies—at a cost far higher than the six dollars he might get when he sold it. Distilled into whiskey, however, that same grain would yield sixteen gallons—which, when split between two kegs, needed only a single animal to reach market, where (freed from worry over spoilage) the farmer might get as much as sixteen dollars.30
Of course not all western whiskey went to market. The chronic shortage of hard currency, and the absence of local banks on the frontier, made whiskey an ideal medium of exchange for farmers, artisans, and local merchants. With Americans drinking an average of five gallons a year—more than any European nation at the time— demand, and prices, remained high.31
Nor was Hamilton’s tax equally applied. Big eastern distillers, located mainly in cities and towns where their production could be more readily monitored, were allowed to pay a nine cents per gallon tax on what they actually distilled. Small producers, or those located in rural areas, were taxed on the capacity of their stills—at a rate that assumed year-round production at full capacity, often amounting to as much as twenty-five cents a gallon. Producers were also offered a discount if they paid their tax in cash—an option not available in the countryside, where cash was scarce. “In every configuration, at every level, Hamilton had designed the law to charge small producers who could least afford it a higher tax . . . Small producers would have to raise prices. Big producers could lower prices, sharply underselling the small distillers, ultimately driving small producers out of business . . . The whiskey tax pushed self-employed farmers and artisans into the factories of their creditors.”32
For western farmers and mechanics who’d endured long years of fighting—on the most meager rations, their pay often in arrears—the excise on whiskey added insult to injury. Because while the burden of the tax fell chiefly on men like themselves, the funds collected would go to pay off the government’s creditors—wealthy merchants like Robert Morris and his friends in New York and Philadelphia. Throughout the war Congress had issued paper money whose value depreciated so rapidly it gave rise to the expression “not worth a Continental.” Yet there was no refusing armed procurement officers. Suppliers who complied willingly got chits or IOUs—sometimes from Congress, sometimes from the states. Like the Continental dollar, these chits were considered practically worthless—sold to speculators for pennies on the dollar. Now Hamilton and Morris wanted to exchange all this paper for bonds—at face value—to be paid by the federal government, creating a huge windfall for speculators, or anyone with advance knowledge of the arrangement.
Despite Hamilton’s propaganda, the whiskey rebels weren’t against taxes, regularly proposing levies on land, or increased tariffs on imported crops, to finance the new government. But Hamilton considered property taxes an extreme measure only justified during wartime. Higher tariffs, he wrote, could not be imposed “without contravening the sense of the body of the merchants.” The rebels only refused “what they called unequal taxation, which redistributed wealth to a few holders of federal bonds and kept small farms and businesses commercially paralyzed . . . [F]acing daily anxiety over debt foreclosure and tax imprisonment, [they] feared becoming landless laborers, their businesses bought cheaply by the very men in whose mills and factories they would then be forced to toil.”33
Such fears were far from groundless. General John Neville, in 1791 the newly appointed revenue inspector for western Pennsylvania, was a commercial farmer whose plantation, Bower Hill, also housed a commercial distillery. For three years Neville tried—and failed—to persuade his neighbors to pay the tax. Those who initially registered found their stills perforated by bullets; after the first few collectors—or even anyone foolish enough to rent office space to a collector—were tarred and feathered, local enforcement efforts were abandoned. In Pennsylvania, as elsewhere throughout the west, liberty poles—tall wooden flagstaffs bearing the legends “Don’t Tread on Me,” “Equality of Rights—No Excise,” and other insurrectionary slogans—began sprouting in a profusion not seen since the summer of ’76. In Pennsylvania, as in Maryland, local militias had begun to assemble.
By the summer of 1794 Hamilton had had enough, dispatching US marshal David Lenox to Pennsylvania to serve writs on delinquent taxpayers. On July 15, Lenox, accompanied by Neville, attempted to deliver a writ to William Miller, a farmer in Allegheny County about twelve miles south of Pittsburgh, demanding payment of a ruinous $250 fine for failing to register his still. The summons also required Miller, who was in the middle of harvesting his crops, to travel to Philadelphia to appear in court. A group of Miller’s neighbors assembled, firing warning shots to disrupt the proceedings. Lenox escaped to Pittsburgh, but when Neville withdrew, the group followed him to Bower Hill.
The next morning the angry crowd outside Neville’s house was bolstered by local militiamen. When they demanded Neville deliver Lenox, whom they mistakenly believed was sheltering inside, Neville ordered them to “stand off” and then fired, fatally wounding Miller’s young nephew Oliver. The militia withdrew, but returned the following morning, July 17, with a force of five hundred men, led by James McFarlane, a major in the Pennsylvania militia and, like Neville, a hero of the revolution. Neville also had reinforcements—a small detachment of federal troops under the command of his brother-in-law, Major Abraham Kirkpatrick.
Neville and McFarlane had both endured the hardships of Valley Forge, and fought together at Germantown and Monmouth.34 But while Neville, a Virginian who’d served in Braddock’s failed expedition then moved to the area, bringing his slaves with him, had amassed a ten-thousand-acre estate, McFarlane’s prosperity was not of the sort to set him apart from his neighbors, who elected him to his position in the militia. Demanding that Neville resign from his office, McFarlane was informed the general was not home. Both sides then began shooting, until McFarlane, believing he’d seen a white flag, ordered his men to hold their fire. As he stepped from behind cover McFarlane was killed by a shot fired from the house, which his enraged troops then proceeded to burn to the ground, along with Neville’s barns, fences, crops, and storehouses. Only the slave quarters and the smokehouse, where the slaves’ food was kept, were spared.35
It was as a response to these events that the combined western Pennsylvania militias mustered at Braddock’s Field two weeks later. And it was in response to that show of force—the rebels were only narrowly diverted from burning Pittsburgh—that Washington and Hamilton led what the locals called their “watermelon army” (owing to the practice of seizing provisions en route) over the Alleghenies.
Militarily the denouement was predictable: by the time the troops reached western Pennsylvania the rebels had already dispersed. Washington, who’d accompanied the army as far as Carlisle, left Hamilton in charge, and on November 13, 1794—known in Pittsburgh lore as “Dreadful Night”—hundreds of men were dragged out of bed and marched at bayonet point through snow-covered streets while their families were told they were going to be hanged. In the end, only a couple of dozen prisoners were taken east; of those, ten were tried for high treason—and only two were convicted and sentenced to be hanged.
Washington pardoned them both, supposedly finding one of the men to be “a simpleton” and the other “insane.” But Washington’s clemency might also have been influenced by the knowledge that, with federal authority over the West now firmly established, his own vast holdings in the area—amounting to nearly twenty thousand acres in western Pennsylvania alone—had now increased in value by some 50 percent. Washington also set up a still at Mount Vernon, and continued to take a close interest in the management of his western lands by his new agent, Presley Neville—John Neville’s son.36
The immediate practical consequence of the Whiskey Rebellion was the military occupation of western Pennsylvania, and the apparent confirmation of both federal authority and Alexander Hamilton’s influence. Despite his failure to secure a conviction against his archenemy, the Swiss-born Albert Gallatin, who as congressman from western Pennsylvania had opposed the whiskey tax, Hamilton’s triumph over his political opponents appeared secure. But while armed resistance had been crushed, the whiskey tax remained a fiscal disappointment, widely disregarded throughout the backcountry until it was finally repealed in 1802—by Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin.37
Politically, however, the reversal of Federalist policies signaled by the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800 was just the most obvious legacy of the Whiskey Rebellion. Beyond the oscillations of party politics, the rebels’ democratic vision of a government not merely in the public interest, nor simply responsive to the popular will, but genuinely of, by, and for the people, would retain its radical appeal long after the rebels—and their persecutors—were in the grave. Far from disappearing, the liberty poles returned to service by the rebels would continue to proliferate—in even greater numbers—to protest the Alien and Sedition Acts passed during John Adams’s presidency (aimed, in part, at émigrés like Gallatin).38
More significant, in my view, was the dilemma first exposed by the whiskey rebels—namely how to confront the unjust laws and oppressive actions of an elected government. Although not one of the many accounts of the rebellion mention it, the height of the battle over the excise also saw the passage of the first Fugitive Slave Act (1793), which allowed escaped slaves to be hunted down even in states that had abolished slavery—and aimed to compel local authorities to assist in their capture.
At the time, the links between the mythology of white supremacy and the sanctity of private property were far from clear (though the militia at Bower Hill seemed to have noticed the connection). Americans would have to wait another half century—until the publication of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience in 1849—before the practice, once so widespread in western Pennsylvania, would be dignified by a theory. In the end it would be Lincoln, not Jefferson, who, by confiscating $2 billion worth of slaves without compensation, took the argument to its logical, radical conclusion.39 But that would be getting ahead of our story . . .
*Less implicitly, Locke famously begins his Two Treatises of Government with a defense of slavery—albeit in the context of penal servitude. He also drafted the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which gave “every freeman of Carolina . . . absolute power and authority over his negro slaves,” and was himself a beneficiary of the British slave trade as a shareholder in the Royal African Company.