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To: Cincinatus' Wife
Coincidently I was reading up on the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 yesterday and the Hamilton/Jefferson debate was at the center of that unfortunate episode.

Hamilton was the proponent of a strong centralized government and was the father of the excise tax that instigated the unrest. He was also the proponent of calling in the state militias to smash it and in fact led the operation in the field.

27 posted on 07/26/2011 5:41:14 AM PDT by Pietro
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To: Pietro
Hamilton was the proponent of a strong centralized government and was the father of the excise tax that instigated the unrest. He was also the proponent of calling in the state militias to smash it and in fact led the operation in the field.

Actually, he didn't -- Washington did. It was the first and last time a President of the United States put on his old military uniform, climbed into a saddle, and led troops into the field in person.

The rebellion was quelled more than crushed, certain guilty parties were punished, and Hamilton, who accompanied the Militia Washington had called out, was politically rebuffed. His excise measure was quietly taken down and not reimposed in the form he had intended.

Hamilton's "don't tax you and don't tax me; let's tax that fellow there under that tree" measure was actually an industrialist's tax on agrarian crops, disguised as a tax on distilled spirits, and therefore a foreshadowing of the NewYorky-grabby, chiseling impulses that produced, eventually, the American Civil War.

Having no ready access to markets for their surplus, the trans-Appalachian farmers had taken to distilling their grain into a more-transportable, value-added form and barging it down to the river towns in the Mississippi Valley. It was a good solution for a low-infrastructure situation. Hamilton's tax was an attempt to rob out the fruits of their ingenuity, labor, and risk-taking and appropriate them for his Treasury. Heard anything like that lately?

29 posted on 07/26/2011 12:30:44 PM PDT by lentulusgracchus (Concealed carry is a pro-life position.)
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