Posted on 06/26/2006 7:26:57 PM PDT by Copernicus
The perpetrators were the toughest and hardest of westerners: farmers, laborers, hunters, and Indian fighters; most were disillusioned war veterans. Expert woodsmen and marksmen, adept not only in musket drill but also in rifle sharpshooting, they were organized in disciplined militias and comfortable with danger. The president's decision to suppress the rebellion, in which he deployed the first federal force of any significant size -- and led it as commander in chief -- became a test of the fragile new nation's viability, the biggest news of the day. Triggered by the tax on domestic whiskey, with which the prodigiously energetic Alexander Hamilton was realizing his visions of high finance and commercial empire, the rebellion brought to a climax an ongoing struggle not over taxation but over the meaning and purpose of the American Revolution itself.
That struggle had financial, political, and spiritual aspects. In the most literal sense it was about paying the revolution's debt. The whiskey rebels weren't against taxes. They were against what they called unequal taxation, which redistributed wealth to a few holders of federal bonds and kept small farms and businesses commercially paralyzed. Farmers and artisans, facing daily anxiety over debt foreclosure and tax imprisonment, feared becoming landless laborers, their businesses bought cheaply by the very men in whose mills and factories they would then be forced to toil. They saw resisting the whiskey tax as a last, desperate hope for justice in a decades-long fight over economic inequality. Alexander Hamilton and his allies, meanwhile, whose dreams had long been obstructed by ordinary people's tactics -- crude, violent, sometimes effective -- for influencing public finance policy, saw enforcing the whiskey tax as a way of resolving that fight in favor of a moneyed class with the power to spur industrial progress.
Contemporary Americans will find the conflict hauntingly familar
Best regards to all
When Washington marched at the head of the army to put down the Whiskey Rebellion, it was larger that any that he had lead against the Brits. Think about it for a minute.
What the article didn't say was that the whiskey was much easier to transport from the frontier to the market that the grain that it was made from.
A fascinating episode in our history. One of MANY tax rebellions we had. Too bad we don't have them any longer. A few taxes NEED to be warred over.
It was just liquid grain.
history has a tendency to repeat itself.
Precarious beginning of the Republic.
This was probably our second Civil War. The first was in the South during the American Revolution. Georgia furnished more men to fight for the Crown than they did against it. The Tory rate in most of the Southern States were high.
The Whiskey Rebellion was actually a form of a civil war since a portion of country was fighting another protion of the country. We would have been much better off if they had won and annexed the rest of the United States and made whiskey cheap. Had this happened, the future would have meant that no one would really worry that much over future problems.
Reading the history is fascinating - corn liquor or whiskey was de facto money in that it was portable, much more so than a few wagonloads of grain, and divisible, fungible etc., just absolutely perfect. It stores well and is always in demand. Compare and contrast with some clown in another state who issues paper promising that there really are kegs of bullion in their bank, and that at some future date they would still be exchangeable for dry goods and such. Hard money was no-where to be found in those days, esp. in remote areas. In those days, the government merely minted coins out of bullion that citizens took in, they would make whatever you wanted - dimes, half-dollars, dollars, &c &c
I've been thinking of it myself.
People need to be reminded.
Well George did have to eliminate the competition, what else did you expect him to do? Hamilton legacy bump
There was good and bad on both sides.
Bump
And before that let's not forget Shay's Rebellion
Daniel Shays (1747?-1825, born Hopkinton, MA), a former Revolutionary Army captain, led a rebellion by farmers against unsettled economic conditions and against politicians and laws which were grossly unfair to farmers and working people in general. They protested against excessive taxes on property, polling taxes which preented the poor from voting, unfair actions by the court of common pleas, the high cost of lawsuits,......
Excerpt from:
Shays' Rebellion
http://www.shaysnet.com/dshays.html
Sounds familiar don’t it.
History just keeps repeating.
bump
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.