Posted on 08/01/2010 3:44:55 PM PDT by mdittmar
Considered as one of the most important events in America's early history, the Whiskey Rebellion began on March 3, 1791, when the U.S. Congress in Philadelphia passed a federal excise tax of seven cents per gallon on whiskey in an effort to pay off debts incurred by the Revolutionary War. While most Americans at that time felt negatively toward taxation, the intrepid farmers of Western Pennsylvania proved outright hostile to the idea.
Why Western Pennsylvania?
Because it was too difficult and costly to transport grain crops over the mountainous roads to larger Eastern markets, many frontier farmers converted their grain to whiskey, thereby increasing its value and marketability. The new excise whiskey tax ignored these necessities of pioneer life, however, leaving farmers with no means to pay the tax at the still long before a sale was made over the mountains to the east.
Resistance to the whiskey tax stretched from Western Pennsylvania, through the western frontiers of Virginia, Kentucky, and the Carolinas, with most farmers believing that a government which played little part in their frontier life had no right to steal money that they themselves had earned.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
And there folks are the roots of NASCAR.
There are historical markers in my Pennsylvania hometown to Whiskey Rebellion events, but none are at Whiskey Cave in the woods where the whiskey was hidden from the feds.
(This term is especially associated with the efforts of the IRS to prevent illegal production and distribution of alcohol during the period of Prohibition in the U.S.)
He was no stranger to frontier insurrection, playing an important role as pamphleteer, among other things, in the Regulator War of North Carolina, preceding the Revolution by a decade. Some noted historians have begun to credit the Regulators with firing the actual first shots of that Revolution during The Battle Of Alamance.
Herman Husband was also a friend and associate of Benjamin Franklin, so his influence has been given unfortunately little credit for so much that we take for granted, that we credit to other individuals.
He didn't deserve to be orphaned by history as he has.
There are lot’s of great Americans that didn’t deserve to be orphaned by history.
Oh, yes. The leadership of the Wautauga Association, for one. They led the Overmountain Men who were instrumental in winning the Battle Of King’s Mountain, which began the downfall of British and Loyalist forces in earnest, compounded further at Guilford Courthouse, and finished well and good at Yorktown.
Or rather, the mad bankers made Jackson act.
Jackson? We claim him as one of our own, born before the Revolution on the NC side of The Waxhaws. I have a certain fondness for him. I wonder if his dislike of bankers began then? He certainly was no friend to banks or bankers as President.
A concise and interesting blog entry on the subject of the Whiskey Rebellion:
After the end of the American Revolution, a set of problem worried the new government. High on that list was the question of how to pay back the war debt. In order to show itself a truly functional government, the United States had to resolve a large debt owed to all manner of creditors, including foreign powers, businesses, bond buyers and war veterans, who in the main had been paid only in scrip. The chosen plan to address the United States’ international financial credibility, was the Bank of the United States, the brainchild of Alexander Hamilton, who enjoyed the blessing of President George Washington, whose favor all but guaranteed its support in Congress.
The bank, however, depended on a special security, bonds sold to bring in capital for the government, yet the government needed capital to pay for those bonds as well. Hamilton’s answer, blessed by President Washington and the Congress, was an excise tax on whiskey. To the mind of Congress, this was a perfect solution, as whiskey was considered not only a luxury, but sinful because of the behavior of many men who drank it. Note also that the Congress chose to target whiskey, not wine or any other spirit likely to be imported from a country where the United States wanted to build a commercial relationship. The tax was assigned to whiskey, specifically whiskey distilled in the western territories.
To the pioneers in western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky, the tax was not only onerous, but an outrage built upon another outrage. Many veterans of the Revolution found that they had lost land and property during the war, and so were ‘paid’ with promissory notes, which the Congress dithered about repaying for more than a decade in some cases. Many of these men ended up selling their notes to speculators for land in the western territories, finding out only later that the land was often neither arable nor valuable, and in some cases the new settler discovered that he had not in fact really bought the land at all. Even where the settlers were able to live on the land they bought, they were offered far less than the notes were worth. For these settlers, it was an outrage that having been fleeced by speculators once, they were to be taxed in a manner aimed directly at them, and them alone.
Cash was scarce in the new territories, so barter and various mediums of exchange came into use. While some settlers were successful farmers, because no highways had been built, there was no way to ship produce to the East, and the Spanish who controlled the Mississippi River barred the settlers from shipping goods on it. After some time, the settlers discovered that whiskey was a valuable commodity. Unused grain and fruit would spoil and become worthless very soon, but whiskey could be stored, and in fact gained value as it aged. The whiskey tax, therefore, targeted the principal means of the settlers’ commerce.
Worse, the tax had to be paid in hard currency, and worse still, the tax was not based on cash sales or even proportion of inventory, but on the tax collectors’ estimates of whiskey production. A tax collector could assign literally any dollar amount on a whiskey producer, and many did so because their enforcement rights allowed them to seize property and land. Given that many of the settlers had fought in the war against unfair taxation, this was unconscionable on its face. Protests rose up in short order in many places, including the South where landowners saw the Tax as a prelude to government takeover of anyone in its way. Armed rebellion began in 1794 near Pittsburgh, but no one was killed - the rebels made it a point to voice their anger but stop short of lethal force.
President Washington, under the authority of the Militia Law passed in 1792, called up a military force larger than the entire Continental Army used in the Revolutionary War, and set it under the command of Virginia Governor Harry “Light Horse” Lee, whose grandson, Robert E. Lee, would surpass him. Lee considered the post unsuitable and handed control over to his civilian advisor appointed by President Washington - Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton drove his army into and all about Western Pennsylvania, but the rebel forces refused to give him a target and melted away into the mountains and hills. What’s more, the local citizens were hostile to the government forces - the army was commonly asked why they were unwilling to protect the settlers from attacks by Indians, but were so quick to hunt down veterans of the Revolution, patriots who merely opposed an unfair and discriminatory tax that any free man would find abhorrent - so the army eventually drew up charges - on dubious evidence - against twenty men, two were convicted (but not in Western Pennsylvania), and seeing the futility of the move, President Washington pardoned those two and called the matter closed.
The tax remained fiercely unpopular, helped bolster the fortunes of the young Democratic-Republican Party and Thomas Jefferson, and was repealed in 1803.
Since History is not a popular course these days, either with students or the mostly PC school districts, the lessons of the Whiskey Rebellion are not commonly discussed, much less considered in the light to today’s conditions and events. But men who deem themselves better than the common man, who imagine that their solution will be painless for all just because it benefits them personally, would do well to consider the one notable blunder in Washington’s terms as President, which consequences altered not only political history but the character of American finance - it should be remembered that the Bank of the United States failed, not once but twice - and the lessons of how anyone, when pushed far enough, will push back.
Oh, sorry, the link: http://wizbangblog.com/content/2010/04/10/the-whiskey-boys.php
One of the twenty arrested and one of the two convicted was Herman Husband, age 73, he fell ill on his way home after pardon and release from prison, and died.
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I live about a mile from the Bradford House, it's been beautifully restored and is open to the public.
Thanks,I will see it if I ever get out that way.
Watch them jugs a-filling in the pale moonlight.
Build you a fire with hickory, hickory, ash and oak Don't use no green or rotten wood, they'll get you by the smoke You'll just lay there by the juniper while the moon is bright
Watch them jugs a-filling in the pale moonlight.
My daddy he made whiskey, my granddaddy he did too We ain't paid no whiskey tax since 1792 You'll just lay there by the juniper while the moon is bright
Watch them jugs a-filling in the pale moonlight.
Those ignoramouses west of the Alleghenies took a successfully rebelious, disoriented, reluctant seaboard colonial folk and forced them to create the greatest of all world powers in history.
I believe the Whiskey Rebellion was the first national conscription. They used the Militia Law of 1792 to raise troops to “execute the laws of the union, (and) suppress insurrections...” It was also the first time that troops raised in several states were used to enforce laws in another state.
He'd buy a hundred pounds of yeast and some copper line
Everybody knew that he made moonshine
Now the revenue man wanted Grandaddy bad
He headed up the holler with everything he had
It's before my time but I've been told
He never came back from Copperhead Road
Now Daddy ran the whiskey in a big block Dodge
Bought it at an auction at the Mason's Lodge
Johnson County Sheriff painted on the side
Just shot a coat of primer then he looked inside
Well him and my uncle tore that engine down
I still remember that rumblin' sound
Well the sheriff came around in the middle of the night
Heard mama cryin', knew something wasn't right
He was headed down to Knoxville with the weekly load
You could smell the whiskey burnin' down Copperhead Road
so far...
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