Article I. Section. 8. The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
True. The Federal Monarchist Alexander Hamilton managed to ram through a 25% excise tax on whiskey in 1791. This collection of this unpopular tax was largely ignored in throughout the American "back-country": that is, the frontier areas of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and the entire state of Kentucky. Only in Western Pennsylvania did there exist a cdre of wealthy officials who were willing to collect the taxes. This led to what is known as the "Whiskey Rebellion" of 1794.
Thomas Jefferson resigned his post of Secretary of State in 1793, in part, in protest because George Washington was agreeing too much with Hamilton and the Federalists. On May 30th, 1794, seventy-five distillers were summoned to Philadelphia on charges of tax evasion. What made the pill more bitter for them to swallow was the suspicion that some of the men had been selected for punishment more for their Jeffersonian views and criticism of Hamilton than for tax evasion. By August 7, 1794, George Washington, with Hamilton by his side, led an army of some 12,950 men into western Pennsylvania and easily "put down" the revolt.
Using an army of nearly 13,000 men, twenty "rebels" were arrested on trumped up charges of treason.
Of the twenty rebels arrested, none were found guilty.
By November 17, 1794 Hamilton wrotes to Washington from western Pennsylvania that "the list of prisoners has been very considerably increased, probably to the amount of 150. . . . Subsequent intelligence shews that there is no regular assemblage of the fugitives . . . only small vagrant parties . . . affording no point of Attack. Every thing is urging for the return of the troops." And on November 19, 1794 Hamilton notified Washington that the army "is generally in motion homeward," leaving behind a regiment to maintain order.
The Whiskey Rebellion was actually widespread and successful, for it eventually forced the federal government to repeal the excise tax. Opposition to the federal excise tax program was one of the causes of the emerging Democrat-Republican Party, and of the Jeffersonian "Revolution" of 1800. Indeed, one of the accomplishments of the first Jefferson term as president was to repeal the entire Federalist excise tax program