Death and Taxes

Shameless Promotion for Old Glory Club’s Mingo Creek Society

My daddy he made whiskey
My granddaddy he did too
We ain’t paid no whiskey tax
Since 1792

We’ll just lay there by the juniper
While the moon is bright
Watch them jugs a-filling
In the pale moonlight
In the pale moonlight

– Bob Dylan, “Copper Kettle,” Self Portrait, 1970

Building a nation from scratch is not easy, especially when every corner of the land is on fire and every institution teeters on implosion from internal strife and demolition from foreign agitation. After gaining independence from the United Kingdom in the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the early American republic had a universe of possibilities to choose from to structure its governing bodies, a plethora of diplomatic treaties to formalize foreign relations, and numerous policy decisions to make with regard to the development of the new nation inside its own borders. The most dire test of the new nation’s fortitude was the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791 to 1794, the largest insurrection against the federal government in American history aside from the Civil War.

The organization that spearheaded the Whiskey Rebellion was the Mingo Creek Association, a shadow-government power-brokering scheme and paramilitary militia of impoverished farmers. The actions of the Mingo Creek Association can be seen, with hindsight, as those of a band of righteous heroes defending the viability of their way of life from foreign antagonists who wished to punish the American frontiersmen for their ardent support of municipal liberties. They can also be seen as bloodthirsty Jacobins and Doomsday cultists who attempted to suffocate the legitimacy of the republic in its crib and derail the American nation-building project championed by George Washington, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. Perhaps the Mingo Creek Association is both.

The Mingo Creek Association’s fascinating history compelled members of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Old Glory Club to name themselves the Mingo Creek Society.¹ The purpose of this text is to illustrate the complexities of navigating practical politics and to honor both sides of the conflict by contextualizing the struggles that brought them to their respective positions.

Original Flag of the Whiskey Rebellion

To Form a More Perfect Union

The federal government of the United States of America was forged in the fires of its expensive war for independence against the United Kingdom. The Revolutionary War was expensive in terms of both lives and dollars.

When the Second Continental Congress ratified the Declaration of Independence in July 1776 in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, the Thirteen Colonies acted as fully independent states with their only unifying institutions being a Continental Army consisting of state militias and a provisional Congress made up of delegates from each state. Although they declared independence together and fought together, the states were not compelled to finance a collective government, nor were they answerable to the Continental Congress. Congress served as an advisory institution and occasionally a body to mediate interstate conflicts. While drafting the Declaration of Independence, a committee of thirteen Congressional delegates led by Penman of the Revolution John Dickinson drafted a document outlining the structure of a formal confederation to unify the states under one body. Dickinson proposed a confederation designed along the lines of Benjamin Franklin’s Albany Plan of 1754.² The mere proposal that the states would become answerable to an external governing body was not acceptable to many Patriots, whether it was a representative body or not. The drafting of the Articles of Confederation was stalled as the minutiae of the roles and responsibilities of a federal government bogged down Dickinson’s committee. The final draft of the Articles of Confederation³ was completed in November 1777. However, the committee was then forced to flee Philadelphia as a British army led by General William Howe occupied the city.⁴

Fighting a war is a complicated matter. Supplying, funding, and implementing a governing structure to supervise a standing army is a leviathan of a task, especially when the entire legal and logistical structure is assembled from scratch. Throughout the American Revolution, the Continental Army was manned by volunteers from individual states, but the soldiers’ salaries were funded by the Second Continental Congress. The Continental Congress did not have the power to levy taxes and, in theory, was entirely reliant on voluntary donations requested from the states. In practice, none of the states funded the Continental Army, and Congress simply printed fiat paper money and IOUs with no way of backing the currency with hard metals or taxes. Congress printed an exorbitant number of Continental dollars, rendering the currency functionally worthless.

In the winter of 1777–1778, General Howe’s British soldiers were comfortably occupying Philadelphia and able to buy food and clothing from local farmers with stable British pounds. Meanwhile, General George Washington, whose army of 12,000 soldiers was camped at Valley Forge, could not buy food or clothing from the locals, as the farmers would not accept payment in worthless Continental dollars. Approximately 2,000 American soldiers died at Valley Forge⁵ that winter, perishing from cold, hunger, and disease caused by Congress’s inability to fund their own army. Suburban Philadelphia was the breadbasket of the Thirteen Colonies with a thriving linen industry, and yet, none of the Continentals had anything to eat, and many had no uniforms on their backs or shoes on their feet. This winter psychologically scarred many of the Continental Army’s officers, including George Washington’s aide-de-camp Alexander Hamilton.

Hardships at Valley Forge

A government consisting of representatives of the citizenry has the right to levy taxes on its citizenry. This right seems elementary, but the Second Continental Congress was not a government so much as an advisory committee that could exclusively engage in foreign diplomacy and print money. Between 1777 and 1783, the quality of the delegates sent to Congress steadily declined as the most skilled statesmen were either sent abroad as diplomats (such as Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson), recalled home to govern their newly independent states, or joined the Continental Army (such as John Dickinson, Thomas Mifflin, and Alexander Hamilton). The skill of the American diplomats abroad and the military success at the Battle of Saratoga enabled Benjamin Franklin to nudge the Kingdom of France into signing the Treaty of Amity and Commerce.⁶ France would support the Americans with the French army, navy, and credit card. The Kingdom of Spain and Dutch Republic would also assist the fledgling Colonies in their Revolutionary War, albeit to a less direct extent. These foreign nations would provide America with loans to fund their war, under the assumption that the independent states would eventually be able to honor their debts after the conclusion of the war.

From 1778 to 1781, the British evacuated from the Mid-Atlantic and shifted their military campaign to the Southern and Western Theaters. General Cornwallis invaded Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia, while Britain’s Indian tribal allies were unleashed on American frontier settlements. Tied down fighting Cornwallis and pinning down General Henry Clinton in New York City, the Continental Army could not support the Western Frontier⁷ west of the Appalachian Mountains with troops. Instead, frontier communities were forced to band together as semi-autonomous governments with militia armies to prosecute the war. In Northeastern Pennsylvania, Iroquois raids on colonial frontier towns forced thousands of settlers to flee the region in the Big Runaway of 1778,⁸ effectively depopulating Wyoming Valley.

Big Runaway of 1778

The Revolutionary War came to a conclusion in the Siege of Yorktown⁹ on October 19, 1781, with General Cornwallis’s army surrendering to the army of General Washington and his French allies. The Continental Army was then encamped in the town of Newburgh, immediately outside of New York City, besieging the last remaining British army, under General Clinton.

Since the publishing of the final draft of the Articles of Confederation in November 1777, states had slowly ratified the Articles, with the final state of Maryland ratifying it on February 2, 1781. Maryland was concerned¹⁰ with her neighbor Virginia’s expansive frontier land claims that could eventually make the state into a continental superpower, overshadowing the smaller states in political influence. Maryland suggested that the frontiers beyond the Appalachian Mountains be made into territory owned jointly by the states until they had sufficient population to organize in their own right. Maryland agreed to kick this can down the road for the sake of organizing a government for the war effort. The Articles of Confederation put into place thirteen concise articles outlining the structure of the federal government. Each state would be represented by a delegate in the Congress of Confederation with a President presiding over the Congress. The Confederation President was a moderator; he could not vote or propose new laws. Many Congressmen saw the election to the Presidency as a demotion and tried to resign as soon as they were elected. How many Presidents of the Confederation¹¹ could you name off the top of your head? The thirteen Articles granted Congress the ability to conduct diplomacy, to take on debts and print banknotes as money, which would be honored by each state, and to maintain an army and navy, but they did not permit them to levy taxes or to regulate interstate commerce. Article 13 permitted the Articles to be amended, but only with the consent of all thirteen state delegates.

The Confederation Congress, at the behest of Benjamin Franklin, appointed Financier of the Revolution Robert Morris as the first Superintendent of Finance. Morris would create the first Bank of North America (BONA)¹² with banknotes exchangeable in gold and silver and credited with loans from Morris himself. For all intents and purposes, the first National Bank was founded around the fortune of one extremely wealthy shipping merchant and his friends. Congress would take out loans from Morris’s private bank on the assumption that one day, Congress would pay Morris back with interest. The desperation of the Confederation’s unsustainable debt cannot be understated. In theory, states were obliged to fund the Confederation in proportion to their population; in practice, they almost entirely neglected to send any funding to the Confederation government. By the end of the War, Morris’s BONA’s credit limit had been reached, and Robert Morris was forced to pay for the supplies of the Continental Army during the Siege of Yorktown with his own finances, issuing IOUs to the Confederation. The Bank of North America would later, through various mergers, become the bank known today as Wells Fargo.

Morris also wrote the Report on Public Credit, meticulously detailing all of the Confederation Congress’s debts. To pay off these debts, Morris suggested amending the Articles to give Congress the right to impose tariffs, recommending a 5% tariff on all foreign goods. A faction within the Confederation Congress quickly developed with the goal of advocating this amendment. This Federalist faction was led by Morris’s protégé Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. The National Import Tax Amendment¹³ had to be supported unanimously by all thirteen states to be ratified. Only one state, Rhode Island, refused to pass the amendment, fearing that its mercantile economy would be disproportionately impacted. The amendment was effectively dead.

In the two years that the Continental Army was stationed at Newburgh, the soldiers and officers of the army fell into debt as Congress was continually unable to pay their wages and pensions. Many disgruntled officers began to discuss the possibility of mutinying until Congress delivered on their promised wages. After the Battle of Yorktown, the officers were aware that the final Peace Treaty that would officially end the war was going to arrive imminently and the Continental Army would likely be disbanded immediately afterwards. A faction of officers, led by General Henry Knox and Alexander McDougall, organized meetings and pleaded with Congress to honor their promises to pay the officers’ wages and lifetime pensions, suspecting that Congress would not honor them if the army was disbanded. The officers’ pleas went unheeded, resulting in McDougall threatening General Knox with a mutiny. The army threatened to refuse to disband until Congress paid the wages the army was promised and agreed to honor the officers’ pensions. Some of the more radical members of the conspiracy suggested that George Washington should be replaced with General Horatio Gates, and that the army should then march on Philadelphia and coup the Confederation Congress. Some historians today believe that the conspirators were tacitly encouraged by Morris and Hamilton to coup the ineffective Confederation Congress.

To deescalate the festering Newburgh Conspiracy,¹⁴ George Washington anonymously distributed a circular letter on March 15, 1783, asking for all of the disgruntled officers to meet that night at a local meeting house. Unexpectedly, Washington snuck in after General Gates opened the meeting, and Washington delivered the “Newburgh Address,” imploring his men not to dishonor the legacy which they had spent years working for. Washington’s address¹⁵ was prefaced with his famous statement: “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in service of my country.” Washington had organized the Siege of Boston at the outbreak of the war, he had starved with his men at Valley Forge, and he had seen the Continental Army to its final victory at Yorktown. The address moved some of his officers to tears and would result in the Continental Army peacefully disbanding following the Treaty of Paris, in spite of the fact that Congress was unable to provide the officers with the backpay they were owed. Robert Morris paid some of this backpay to the veterans out of his own pocket.

To maintain the bonds of brotherhood and to honor the sacrifices made during the Revolution, the Continental Army officers, with the blessing of George Washington, founded the Society of the Cincinnati¹⁶ in May 1783. The hereditary fraternal order was open to all U.S. military officer veterans with a single membership slot being passed down per officer to one of his direct descendants. This fraternity was inferred to be the founding of an American hereditary veteran aristocracy with obvious potential to coordinate and influence interstate politics. The Society was condemned by Founding Fathers of all political persuasions from Benjamin Franklin¹⁷ and John Adams¹⁸ to James Madison¹⁹ and Thomas Jefferson.²⁰ Washington would spend a significant amount of political capital later in his life to maintain the innocent assertion that his fraternity was nothing more than a means of tying his officers together socially in times of civil disorder and division.

Although Washington was able to quash the mutiny fomenting in his camp, a garrison of soldiers from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, mutinied²¹ and joined with the Philadelphia garrison to seize the city’s munitions depot in June 1783. The mutineers forced Congress to relocate to Princeton, New Jersey. The President of Pennsylvania refused to raise their militia, fearing that the unpaid militia would revolt. This forced General Washington to send a detachment of 1,500 soldiers to arrest the mutineers.

The Treaty of Paris²² was signed on September 3, 1783, although the Congress of the Confederation was barely able to maintain a 9/13 quorum to ratify the treaty. True to his word, George Washington peacefully disbanded the Continental Army and returned to his home at Mount Vernon. Washington privately hoped that the veterans would either be given their backpay wages in hard currency or be granted land in the newly acquired Northwest Territory in lieu of pay.

While Washington tended to his plantation, many of his former officers went into state politics, pushing for Federalist policies to strengthen the Confederation government with the right to tax its citizens in order to pay for the veteran pensions and accrued war debts.

In the years following the Treaty of Paris, state economies were in turmoil. On top of the devastation reaped by years of war, the Confederation did not have formal trade relations with foreign countries, and the GDP of the American economy shrank by 30%²³ between 1774 and 1789. Veterans were often indebted from years of absence with their pensions unpaid by a Congress that could not levy taxes. In an act spearheaded by Thomas Jefferson, a vast span of the Northwest Territory was carved out²⁴ of frontier lands west of the Appalachian Mountain range and granted to the national government. To raise funds, the Confederation sold vast swaths²⁵ of the new territory to independent land speculation companies to pay off the interest from the debt to foreign and domestic creditors, accrued from funding the Continental Army. There were two problems with this scheme: 1) the sale of this land did not raise as much money as initially anticipated and 2) the Indian tribes living in the Northwest Territory did not appreciate land speculators sending thousands of pioneers to settle on their ancestral lands.

To pay off their own debts, individual states placed tariffs on interstate trade. State property, excise, and poll taxes increased. International trade was minimal as the highly protectionist British Navigation Acts locked American merchants out of their market, interstate trade was hampered by instate tariffs, income among the working class decreased, and the National Bank’s currency continued to be worthless. Some states paid off their debts privately with state taxes, like Virginia. Others offset the debt publicly by selling their debt as bonds to merchant speculators, like Massachusetts. The creation of the speculative public bond market had the effect of tying the financial elite of the states to the welfare of those states. Perversely, it also made the issuing of state debt valuable, causing the debt and debt interest payments to rise, along with causing the rate of taxation to pay off the debt to rise in tandem. The burden for paying off the interest on the state debts fell regressively onto the poor farmers of Western Massachusetts to subsidize the bonds of the wealthy Federalist Essex Junto.²⁶

This fleecing of the indebted veterans sparked Shay’s Rebellion.²⁷ In August 1786, an angry mob of overtaxed, unemployed, and indebted veterans seized the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts, armed themselves, and marched on various county courthouses. These mobs called themselves Regulators. The Massachusetts state militia was unable to be raised due to a lack of funds, and the Confederation Congress was unable to coordinate a national response to the rebellion. The limits to Morris’s domestic private bank’s credit had been reached, and without the ability to pay its debts, the Confederation could only rely on additional lines of credit from national or international banks to fund its military. This forced a coalition of wealthy Essex Junto Massachusetts merchants to fund a private militia to put down the rebellion themselves.

Under the guise of hashing out interstate tariff and border disputes, delegates from five states met at an Annapolis Convention.²⁸ After receiving news of Shay’s Rebellion, it was decided that a larger convention with delegates from all of the 13 independent states was necessary to amend the toothless Articles of Confederation. This new convention was called by James Madison, who teased that George Washington may come out of retirement to preside. To preface the convention, Madison launched into a tirade,²⁹ listing each of the functional issues present in the Articles of Confederation.

From May to September 1787, a convention was held in Philadelphia to amend the Articles, although the scope of the convention was quickly changed to fully replacing the Articles with a new Constitution. The Constitution would impose a federal government over the state governments to regulate interstate trade, collect tariffs on foreign imports, print a national currency, and mediate interstate legal disputes in federal courts; the federal government would be structured with a legislative Congress to propose laws — consisting of a lower House of Representatives, elected proportionally by population, and an upper house Senate, with two senators elected per state by the state legislatures — and a nationally elected President to pass and execute the legislature’s laws. The United States Constitution³⁰ was a radical shift away from the Articles of Confederation. Rather than having independent states with a toothless Congress whose only abilities were to conduct foreign diplomacy and rack up war debt, the United States was federated with a complex and new central government whose legal scope of power was uncertain and untested. Each state nonetheless ratified the Constitution, with some states devolving into fierce debate within their legislatures over the decision.

Among the most fervent of anti-Constitution political factions, the Scots-Irish settlers of the sparsely inhabited westward frontiers rejected the imposition of any authority beyond their immediate kin group. This group is referred to as Borderers in the book Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer.³¹ According to Fischer:

The backcountry idea of order rested upon an exceptionally strong sense of self-sovereignty. Something of the same principle had also existed in tidewater Virginia, where the gentry were fond of quoting the old English cliché that every man’s home was his castle. But the people of the backcountry went a step farther. A North Carolina proverb declared that “every man should be sheriff on his own hearth.” This idea implied not only individual autonomy, but autarchy. Further, it narrowly circumscribed the role of government, for if man were sheriff on his own hearth, then there was not very much work for a county sheriff to do, except to patrol the roads that lay in between.…

There were official sheriffs and constables throughout that region, but the heaviest work of order-keeping was done by ad hoc groups of self-appointed agents who called themselves regulators in the eighteen century, vigilantes in the nineteenth, and nightriders in the twentieth.

In the backcountry, the militias that fought off Indian raids were not funded with debt; they were manned by poor farmers who banded together in ad hoc posses. The wealthy and populated Atlantic Coast might have funded their fancy standing armies with debt, but the backwoods did not have such sophisticated logistical or financial apparatuses.

The Appalachian Frontier was a hotbed for self-proclaimed Regulator posses and home to dozens of self-proclaimed independent Scots-Irish states, associations, and self-governing communities unaccountable to higher centralized authorities, before and after the American Revolution. In an attempt to self-police communities, vigilante posses occasionally proliferated in an attempt to correct or self-regulate legal injustices imposed on the backcountry by corrupt officials or, on occasion, to reject or nullify laws imposed on communities by faraway authorities.

The largest Regulator posse ever assembled was during the Regulator Movement of 1766 to 1771. Scots-Irish Presbyterian Herman Husband of Cecil County, Maryland, was enraptured by the First Great Awakening revival led by George Whitefield. After receiving Heavenly visions, Husband was convinced that Whitefield was a modern-day prophet who foretold the End of the World, so he converted to Quakerism. In his adult life, Husband joined various companies of Quakers to create a merchant shipping enterprise and invest in various land speculation schemes. While surveying a 10,000-acre property in the British colony of North Carolina for his land speculation company, Husband encountered cases of corruption. He personally uncovered 200 instances of fraud committed by land agent James Carter in Rowen County.

Land agents would take money from frontier farmers for land purchases but would not register the deed titles at the colonial land office. Tax collectors were also known to pocket the taxes they collected from frontiersmen and report the farmers’ tax status as unpaid. The corrupt land agents and tax collectors were often in cahoots with colonial administrators and judges who would side with their friends over poor farmers when the fraud cases were presented in court. Husband complained to colonial Governor William Tryon about the instances of fraud he personally witnessed. He was stonewalled. Husband published pamphlets³² concisely condemning the flagrant and unlawful acts committed by public officials against the poor farmers of Rowan County and lamented the lack of responsibility the colonial government took in addressing these injustices.

After years of public advocacy on behalf of the farmers and with the assistance of the Sandy Creek Association, Herman Husband was elected to the North Carolina legislature. Frustrations mounted as public complaints remained unaddressed. In 1770, a mob of Regulators ransacked and burned down the house of William Fanning, the most hated tax collector and insider trader in North Carolina and protégé of Governor Tryon himself. Husband was blamed for the actions of the mob, removed from the legislature, and imprisoned for a year. Governor Tryon neglected to address the frontier tax collection issue and further raised taxes to pay for the construction of a new Palace. The frontier erupted into armed violence as the Sandy Creek Association raised an army of 2,000 Regulators with the intention of threatening the Governor into addressing the obvious taxation issues. Governor Tryon responded by raising an army of militiamen, which he used to fight the Regulators at the Battle of Alamance.³³ Although Herman Husband was a pacifist Quaker who refused to participate in the battle, he was nonetheless blamed for the uprising. Herman Husband fled to the Appalachian Mountains of Western Pennsylvania, where he would later participate in the Whiskey Rebellion.

Many fed-up Regulators and Quakers who refused to take oaths of loyalty to the Governor fled North Carolina for the Appalachian backcountry of present-day Tennessee, beyond the reach of the law. The fiercely independent and self-governing community refused to accept British authority and settled west of the Appalachian Mountains. They declared independence as the Watauga Association in 1772. During the American Revolution, the Watauga Association provided men for the Overmountain Men militia to fight British General Cornwallis’s Southern Campaign. A detachment of Cornwallis’s army was encircled and decisively defeated at the Battle of Kings Mountain in 1780. The Old Glory Club’s Eastern Tennessee chapter³⁴ is currently named after the heroic Overmountain Men. After the Revolutionary War ended, the Watauga Association attempted to form the State of Franklin, independent from the State of North Carolina. The State of Franklin was never officially recognized, but it would eventually become organized as the State of Tennessee.

Many other Regulator movements broke out across the backcountry. In emulation of the North Carolina Regulator Movement, the Liberty Boys of New Jersey intimidated corrupt tax collectors. Other Regulators went beyond internally regulating corruption and ventured into nullification, the rejection of imposed law in favor of English Common Law. The Green Mountain Boys, under the leadership of Ethan Allen, declared their squatter community in upstate New York independent of the control of land speculators, British colonial rule, and the nascent American government. The present-day State of Vermont was unpopulated, but technically owned by large companies of New England land speculators. Squatters argued that the undeveloped and unorganized land was part of the Commons and therefore available to homesteaders to settle freely and self-govern. Another self-governing network of communities was the Transylvania Colony. The squatter settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains were illegally established past the Proclamation Line of 1763 by the Daniel Boone expedition of 1773. The land was technically owned by Cherokee Indians, who fought the settlers in brutal frontier battles and sieges. These communities, far from the authority of the Colony of Virginia, eventually coalesced into the State of Kentucky.

According to Marjoleine Kars³⁵ of the American Revolution Institute, other backcountry Regulators nullified the land claims of speculators. The Scots-Irish Wild Yankee³⁶ squatters of Northern Pennsylvania and Ohio resisted the claims of speculators. The Liberty Men squatter homesteaders of Northeastern Pennsylvania fought off the Great Proprietors of Pennsylvania to retain their free land. Squatters of Northwest Pennsylvania organized less well-documented gang warfare against speculators.

The Regulators of Shay’s Rebellion and Ely’s Rebellion resisted the regressive increase in taxes to fuel wealthy merchant speculation of public debts. Regulators would continue to attempt to nullify state and national encroachments on their ways of life throughout the Confederation government era, seeing the creation of the national government as just another layer of corruption and bloat meant to extract money from the western rural poor.

Against the wishes of Appalachia, the ratified Constitutional government progressed by holding national elections, ascending George Washington to the Presidency. The Washington administration and the ruling pro-administration Federalist faction of Congress passed the Tariff of 1789 only four months after the Constitution was ratified. This tariff was amended in 1790 and increased in the Tariff Act of 1792.

Hamilton’s Federalist goal of paying back the war debt was coming to fruition. With the Federal governing structure solidified, Hamilton published his First Report on the Public Credit,³⁷ advocating for the national government to assume the $25 million in state debts incurred during the Revolution on top of the $40 million owed to private American investors and $12 million owed to French, Spanish, and Dutch banks. Congress took in approximately $30 million in loans from foreign banks, although many of these loans were accepted as gifts from private foreign benefactors, rather than loans that were expected to be paid back. The ratification of the Constitution eliminated the ability of states to impose interstate tariffs, cutting off one of their revenue streams, but in so doing removed the necessity of having interstate tariffs in the first place by nationalizing the state debts. Hamilton’s international tariffs would replace the interstate tariffs. Hamilton further insisted that federal debt securities be used as currency.

In his Second Report on Public Credit, Hamilton advocated the creation of a National Bank. Rather than relying on Morris’s private bank for loans, the federal government would pay off federal loans with a national public bank and also establish a public debt. Using the stable income provided by taxes, the federal government could establish and expand its credit, raising more money for expenditures beyond funding a standing army, navy, and post office. Hamilton envisioned federal infrastructure projects (subsidies for private toll roads and canals) financed with federal loans taken by wealthy private bankers. Congress established the First Bank of the United States³⁸ along Hamilton’s guidelines.

Although Thomas Jefferson was George Washington’s Secretary of State, he led a faction of hardline opponents who argued³⁹ that the creation of a National Bank was both dangerous and unconstitutional. The Southern states steadily paid off their debts while New England expanded it with public speculation. Jefferson said that although a National Bank would be convenient for the purposes of paying off the war debt, its issuing of loans would inevitably show favoritism to wealthy insider creditors. Washington retorted that the creation of a National Bank was an implied power, as it was “necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers and all other Powers vested by the Constitution.” Ironically, Jefferson would use the “necessary and proper” clause in his acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase.⁴⁰ Over a dinner on June 20, 1790, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington negotiated the Compromise of 1790. Jefferson and Madison would use their political pull with Southern representatives to get them to stop resisting the establishment of a National Bank if the future location of the national capital was in the South. The result of this dinner bargain was the Funding Act of 1790, granting the new Department of the Treasury the ability to assume state debts and pay off the total national debt, and the Residence Act of 1790, establishing a permanent seat of the federal government in present-day District of Columbia (conveniently located right next to George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate).

The political faction that opposed the ratification of the Constitution and opposed the encroachment of federal powers on state sovereignty were initially referred to as the anti-administration or anti-Federalist faction. Their opposition to elitist cosmopolitan politics in favor of decentralized, democratic, and personal politics led them to demonize their British former overlords, villainize the tyranny of central banking typified by the Bank of England, and lionize the struggles of French Republican revolutionaries. Rather than installing a National Bank run by New England bankers and managing a national debt to pay for a national standing army, opponents proposed that the national debt be divided and distributed among the individual state banks which would be funded by the sale of western frontier land, necessitating the avaricious acquisition of more frontier land. Rather than having a standing federal army, each state would mobilize its militias to support a military response to a national emergency. This oppositional faction would become the Democratic-Republican Party.

The problems with the Democratic-Republican financial model are obvious, featuring three pertinent pitfalls. What happens when you run out of land? The federal government would have to buy or conquer more land, or seize land from Indian tribes. What if the land is not sold at prices high enough to pay off the massive war debt? Simply acquire and sell more land. If the federal war debts were transferred to the states, won’t an increase in interstate tariffs and property taxes to pay the debts spark more rebellions, similar to Shay’s Rebellion, but worse and in every state? Yes, but don’t worry. The Democratic-Republicans had faith in the strength of state militias staffed by patriotic citizens.

While the National Bank was being chartered, the Northwest Territory erupted into a bloody Indian war. A coalition of Indian tribes under Chief Little Turtle refused to accept treaties signed by some tribes in the Territories, arguing that the land was collectively owned by all Indians and could not be signed away without unanimous tribal consent. Eight forts from Vermont to Michigan were still occupied by British soldiers, in spite of the terms of the Treaty of Paris requiring that they vacate American territory. The British expected the semi-autonomous western American territories to either declare independence, become an independent Indian buffer zone,⁴¹ or be absorbed into Spanish Louisiana soon after the Revolutionary War ended, so they maintained a presence in their old forts. British agents heightened American-Indian tensions by using these frontier forts to supply rebellious Indian tribes with arms and ammunition, with the expectation that they would be used to resist encroaching American pioneers. Several expeditions⁴² were dispatched to put an end to the continuous Indian attacks on American settlers and pioneer forts. The American militia expeditions were defeated, and a national military response was necessary. The United States was required to increase its war debt by raising an army and fighting an Indian War.

According to Hamilton’s First Report, the federal government could raise roughly $2.8 million per year from the current tariff rate. Diplomat John Jay was dispatched to the United Kingdom to negotiate more favorable trade conditions and increase trade, which would have the effect of increasing federal income from tariffs. In the first few years of the Washington administration, the federal budget was around $5 million. Out of the federal budget, roughly 75% was spent on paying off the interest of the national debt; 20% on the war veteran pensions, a standing army, and the construction of coastal forts and a navy of six frigates; and the remaining 5% on the post office, salaries of elected officials, and Barbary pirate ransoms.

Although the federal government had income and could expand its debt, it was still spending significantly more than it was raising. The tariffs imposed were already heavily protectionist. Raising them further would severely harm Hamilton’s base of support, New England merchants. Hamilton suggested a flat property tax on acres of land owned. This levy was both personally intolerable to most landowning representatives of Congress and intrusive to the land speculation market. Hamilton pivoted to proposing an excise tax on luxury goods. This tax would be placed on the distilling of America’s favorite beverage — whiskey.

The Tariff of 1791, or Excise Whiskey Tax of 1791,⁴³ placed a 9¢-per-gallon tax on whiskey producers or a flat tax of $50 per whiskey still. For large whiskey manufacturers, this would be roughly 5¢ per gallon. Revenue agents would be paid to inspect their designated regions’ stills with a 1% commission on the revenue they were able to collect. The tax would be paid by the whiskey producer with hard currency — First Bank of the Unites States banknotes or private banknotes backed with precious metals such as gold or silver. According to Hamilton’s calculations, the Whiskey Excise Tax would raise $800,000 per year in revenue at a minimal cost to consumers.

Following the end of the American Revolution, alcohol consumption habits shifted. According to W.J. Rorabaugh in The Alcoholic Republic:

During the colonial period the annual per capita consumption of hard liquor, mostly rum, reached 3.7 gallons. After the Revolution, because of decreased trade with the West Indies, high import duties on West Indian rum and on the West Indian molasses from which New England rum was made, and a new tax on domestic whiskey, the consumption of distilled liquors declined by one-quarter. But by 1800, prosperity, improved distilling technology, the growing popularity of whiskey together with illicit and therefore untaxed distilled spirits had combined to raise per capita consumption to the 1770 level.⁴⁴

Graph from The Alcoholic Republic by Rorabaugh

British plantations in Jamaica that used to export sugar to New England to distill rum were cut off from the American market. Meanwhile, the vast frontiers west of the Appalachian Mountains were environmentally suited for corn and rye production, the grains used to distill whiskey. The result was a surge in production of Appalachian whiskey to satiate the high demand for alcohol. Between the late 18th century and mid-19th, per capita alcohol consumption was three times what it is today. This concerned many physicians — including Federalist, Social Reformer, and Founding Father Benjamin Rush, who wrote research papers on the effects of consuming hard liquor:

These early works showed a growing hostility to distilled spirits that culminated in Rush’s 1784 essay, An Inquiry into the Effects of Spirituous Liquors. This piece, first published as a newspaper article and then as a pamphlet, combined in compact form the arguments that the doctor had encountered and those he had employed in his long antiliquor crusade. He catalogued liquor’s defects: it protected against neither hot nor cold weather, for on hot days it overstimulated and on cold ones it produced temporary warmth that led to chills; it caused numerous illnesses — stomach sickness, vomiting, hand tremors, dropsy, liver disorders, madness, palsy, apoplexy, and epilepsy. Spirituous liquor, he believed, should be replaced with beer, light wine, weak rum punch, sour milk, or switchel, a drink composed of vinegar, sugar, and water. The pamphlet was a masterpiece. Its rational arguments, logic, and incisive examples made it both the century’s most effective short piece and a model for later temperance publications; by 1850 more than 170,000 copies had been circulated. Even in 1784 its impact was such that enthusiastic readers wrote Rush admiring letters. From frontier Pittsburgh Hugh Henry Brackenridge reported that he had quit drinking spirits…⁴⁵

Hamilton’s Whiskey Excise Tax had the backing of Federalist social reformers such as Benjamin Rush. Rush supported a temperate diet of “nothing but Beer and Cider. These beverages Rush termed ‘those invaluable Federal liquors’ in contract with distilled spirits which were ‘Antifederal,’ the ‘companions of all those vices that are calculated to dishonor and enslave our country.’”

Whiskey was the Antifederalist backwoods staple and the coastal small-scale farmer’s drink of choice. By contrast, New England Yankees like John Adams drank cider. George Washington was an old-fashioned Tidewater Virginian drinker and preferred to drink rum punch. It should be noted that Washington also owned the largest whiskey distillery in the United States when the Excise Tax was passed. Thomas Jefferson was a snob and drank Madeira wine. By contrast, the English of motherland Great Britain preferred to drink gin.

Technically, the Tariff of 1791 was a tax on all alcohol manufacturers. However, cider was only produced seasonally and in small quantities, usually for personal use, New England rum distilleries were producing less alcohol than in previous decades due to England trade restrictions on Jamaican sugar exports, and wine was not grown in large quantities in America. The largest and most commercially available American-made alcohol was whiskey, leading to the tariff being referred to as the Whiskey Excise Tax.

Gin Lane by William Hogarth, 1751

The federal government needed an additional source of extracting revenue. Everyone across the country drank alcohol in excess. Whiskey was the preferred beverage of the wild backcountry and the working class. Taxing whiskey would achieve the aims of paying off the national debt and hopefully lowering the quantity of hard liquors consumed by the public. The presence of revenue inspectors would also demonstrate to the citizens living in the remotest wilderness that the federal government had official representatives who would actively be involved in their business.

Here, as with many historic central planning schemes, Hamilton did not account for the obstinacy of Appalachian whiskey distillers, who not only refused to pay the Excise Tax but went further and threatened to break the Union apart in their rage.

Raising Westsylvania

The peaceable Quakers, well protected in the towns, giving themselves to merchandise; the Dutch cultivating the farms on the borders of the Forests, and subject to the perils from wild beasts and wild men and needing protection from those who had the making and execution of the laws; and the Irish, who were a law unto themselves, going into the forests and welcoming the opportunity to drop a red man as they would drop a wolf, asking no favors and granting none; the Indians learning the habits and characteristics of each and diplomatically trying to meet each on his own ground.

– Edwin MacMinn, On the Frontier with Colonel Antes

The Colony of Pennsylvania was granted to William Penn, Jr., in 1681 by King Charles II in lieu of repaying a substantial sum of money he owed to William Penn, Sr. In the following decades, Penn settled his new colony with thousands of Quakers, a dissenting Protestant faith that espoused pacifism, religious toleration, plain dress, simple and honest speech, and the belief in a universal Inner Light. The first several boatloads of settlers to Pennsylvania were skilled artisans and merchants who had enough money to buy both a townhouse plot of land in downtown Philadelphia and a small farm in the Philadelphia suburbs. It would not take long for insane cultists to arrive, insular Mennonites of the Frankfort Company to build parallel institutions unanswerable to Penn, slums to fester in the narrow alleyways of Philadelphia, and Dutch slavers to import starving Germans to work in their suburban farms. According to a Palatinate German source from the book On the Frontier with Colonel Antes:

Only the misfortunes which I myself endured, and the wicked devices which the Newlanders tried to play upon me, and my family, wakened in me a sense of duty not to conceal that which I knew. The most important object of this statement was the miserable and distressful condition of those who migrate from Germany to this new land, and the inexcusable and remorseless dealings of the Dutch traffickers in human beings, and their man-stealing emissaries, the so-called Newlanders, for they entrap, as it were, the people of Germany by means of all sorts of plausible deceptions, and deliver them in the hands of the great Dutch sellers of souls. The latter derive a large profit from this trade.

Starving German peasants, victims of French scorched-earth military campaigns across their homeland, were swindled onto Dutch ships and sent to Philadelphia, where they were starved at port until they were eventually sold as indentured servants to large landholders.

Pennsylvania Quakers outwardly professed the virtues of plain living, pacifism, and benevolence, but they developed affluent mercantile businesses (owing to their religiously honest business practices), became politically embroiled in violence over territorial expansion and crackdowns on criminality, and engaged in the sale of slaves. Per Albion’s Seed:

A gang of pirates stole a ship in Philadelphia and began to plunder the Delaware Valley, the Quakers quarreled among themselves over the difficult question of how a society which renounced the use of violence could suppress crime in its midst. The leaders of Pennsylvania, after much soul-searching, decided to use force against the pirates. But the contrary-minded George Keith denounced the use of arms, and another angry controversy developed in the Quaker colonies.

George Keith and his followers also published highly personal attacks upon the leaders of Pennsylvania accusing them of “spiritual and carnal whoredoms,” and describing the colony itself as “a strumpet cohabiting in the wilderness.”⁴⁶

Penn’s first colonists landed in October 1682. By 1693, a significant number of the original Quaker colonists, led by firebrand George Keith, converted to Anglicanism out of protest in response to what they considered to be spiritual and material decadence. The proportion of the Pennsylvania population that was ethnically English and spiritually Quaker declined as waves of German, Dutch, and, later, Scots-Irish immigrants populated the west.

William Penn and his successor Thomas Penn were officially given ownership of all land within the colonial proprietary charter. To profit from the colony, the Penns owned and operated their own businesses, exploiting the natural resources of the land, as well as generated revenue from the sale of land. To govern the land, the Penns established a Provincial Council and representative General Assembly. In these governing bodies, the first political party system in the Thirteen Colonies developed.

The Quaker Party, later known as the County Party, represented the moralistic religious colonists and the coastal merchants — the old Quaker elite and German Pietists. Quakers formally abstained from personally participating in electoral politics following the start of the Seven Years War, as they refused to support King George’s colonial wartime funding levy, but many affluent Quaker citizens still backed representatives in the colonial Pennsylvanian government. The County Party was opposed by the Proprietary Party, led by the Penn family. The Penns had an interest in developing and selling the Pennsylvania frontier as much as possible for profit, resulting in the Penns developing a relationship with poor, homesteading Scots-Irish immigrants and urbanite land speculators. The book The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania by Judith Ridner elaborates on the profitable relationship between the Pennsylvania economy and the Scots-Irish:

Philadelphia played a central role in this second, post-1763 migration. Whereas during the 1710s and 1720s, most Ulster immigrants disembarked at New Castle, by the 1760s, Philadelphia was the primary port-of-entry. Philadelphia’s merchants, a sizable number of whom were Irish immigrants themselves by mid-century, maintained extensive trade relationships, and even partnerships with merchants in Ireland. Irish linen was in high demand in Pennsylvania. Ireland was also [a] significant export market for Pennsylvania’s grain, barrel staves, and the flaxseed Ulster’s linen weavers needed to grow flax. Flaxseed was the number one export from the Middle Colonies to Ireland by 1770, and it was the third most important export crop Pennsylvania produced. Sustaining the lucrative flaxseed trade generated a huge seasonal demand for shipping between Philadelphia and northern Irish ports such as Belfast and Londonderry. Most ships departed the Delaware Valley in December, carrying flaxseed and other agricultural products to Ireland; they returned from Ulster to Philadelphia in the spring, summer, and early fall, their hulls filled with Irish dry goods and their decks with immigrants.⁴⁷

Pennsylvania developed textile industries while also importing new pioneers to settle its frontier. Political conflict between County Party elitists and Proprietary Party settlers arose from the voracity in which the Scots-Irish settlers tamed the most dangerous beast on the frontier — savage Indians. Moravian missionaries spent decades converting hundreds of peaceful Indians to the Christian faith. However, in the wake of Pontiac’s War and tit-for-tat raids on Scots-Irish settlements, MacMinn writes:

The feeling on the frontier against the Indians because of the destruction their marauding bands had perpetrated found its counterpart when the white men threw all discrimination aside and looked upon every red man as the mortal enemy of the white race. The Scotch-Irish settlers in Paxton and Donegal townships, Lancaster county, known as the Paxton Boys refused to believe the assertions that some of the Indians were loyal to the white men and suspected them all to be in league with the hostile tribes of the West.⁴⁸

Scots-Irish bands of vigilantes formed to defend their communities against Indian raids and to persecute their foes. A county militia known as the Paxton Boys was under the impression that a Christian settlement of neutral Conestoga Indians was supplying a hostile band of Delaware Indians. In a fit of rage following hostile Indian attacks on their homes, the Paxton Boys scalped and dismembered all 14 of the last living Conestoga Indians. This political conflict highlights the eternal friction between the moralistic peaceful urban Quaker and the backwoods warrior Borderer. The elite Quakers could afford to live life as pacifists, while the frontier Scots-Irish suffered from Indian raids due to the refusal of Quaker politicians to permit the colonial administration to organize a formal colonial militia.

The enforcement of the Penn family’s colonial border claims also fell onto the Scots-Irish. Although William Penn settled his southern border dispute with Maryland, Connecticut claimed to own the relatively uninhabited Wyoming Valley of Northeastern Pennsylvania. This sparked three border wars between the Colonies, known as the Pennamite-Yankee Wars.⁴⁹

In 1754, a group of Connecticut speculators known as the Susquehanna Company bought the Wyoming Valley from Iroquois Indians. In 1769, the company then sent 200 pioneers and 40 militiamen to set up the town of Wilkes-Barre and two forts — Forty Fort (yes, that is what they called it) and Fort Durkee. Connecticut’s colonial charter, signed by King Charles II, extended west to the Pacific Ocean, with the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam technically not counting as a stop to Connecticut’s land claims. The Wyoming Valley was previously purchased in 1768 from the Iroquois by Thomas Penn. The Penn family was given the Wyoming Valley in the Pennsylvania colonial charter, also signed by Charles II. In response, the Penn family sent Amos Ogden and ten Scots-Irish mountain men north to Wyoming Valley to set up a fort of their own (Fort Ogden), dislodge the Yankee militiamen, and send the settlers home. Over the next 30 years and three wars, Yankee speculators and Penn agents fought over the land.

Among the absurd frontier shenanigans of the Yankee-Pennamite Wars was the tale of Ogden’s great escape. In a Yankee counterattack, Fort Ogden was put under siege. Ogden was outnumbered 11 to 60 but, rather than surrender, Ogden opted to escape the fort and get reinforcements from Philadelphia. In a daring feat of bravery or stupidity, Ogden stripped naked, tied his hat to a long rope that was attached to his ankle, and swam in the Susquehanna River at night, around the Yankee encampment. When the Yankees saw him swimming by, they shot at the hat, missing Ogden. Ogden then ran for three days across wooded rolling hills, while nude, all the way to Philadelphia to get reinforcements. For the sake of interstate cooperation during the American Revolution, Pennsylvania and Connecticut settlers agreed to a temporary truce after 1775 to fight their greater enemy⁵⁰ — the British, traitorous Tory loyalists, and their Delaware and Iroquois Indian allies. The war resumed in 1784, only to have the border dispute settled in Congress in 1787. The Connecticut pioneers did not accept Congress’s settlement and instead opted to declare their independent statehood as the State of Westmoreland. The leadership of Westmoreland were imprisoned, and the territory was officially annexed by Pennsylvania in 1799.

Conflicting Land Claims

Throughout most of colonial Pennsylvania’s history, the wild frontier was the eastern ridge of the Appalachian Mountains. However, one tiny outpost of civilization existed over the mountains: Fort Pitt. During the Seven Years War, a French fort called Fort Duquesne was built at the point where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers meet at the mouth of the Ohio River. The Ohio River is the largest tributary of the Mississippi River, which feeds into the port of New Orleans. The Mississippi River Valley is the largest drainage basin in America, an interconnected network of navigable waterways, and the French had their knee on the neck of it. In response to the garrisoning of these frontier forts, the United Kingdom dispatched General Braddock and young Colonel George Washington to seize the fort. This backfired horrifically, with Braddock losing his life at the Battle of the Monongahela.⁵¹ A second expedition was sent, this time led by General John Forbes. Just as Braddock lost to the French garrison and their Indian allies, Forbes lost at the Battle of Fort Duquesne.⁵² Although they successfully fought off waves of British attacks, the French garrison knew that they were still heavily outnumbered, so they lit the fort on fire and escaped under the cover of darkness. Forbes’s army then constructed a new, larger fort on top of the old Fort Duquesne, naming it Fort Pitt after the United Kingdom’s then-Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder. The fort was a five-sided star fort manned with 40 cannons and equipped with enough living space to accommodate 1,000 soldiers in its garrison. However, the fort only realistically housed just over 100 soldiers in peacetime.

Fort Pitt in the late 1760s

The shantytown of army wives and squatters evolved into a hub of commerce. A small town grew around Fort Pitt. A settlement morphed into the mighty city of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh was the most remote protected settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains. This meant that the land was unclaimed, if the humble homesteader did not mind fighting off occasional Iroquois raids.

Indian raids were both common and terrifying. Every member of every household was armed, trained, and drilled on what to do in case of an emergency. Muster points were established, in case a call went out to organize a militia response, and militias were trained monthly to ensure that every man could fire accurately and accept orders from his elected militia captain. On the frontier, elections were held for lower officer militia positions, with local men of status and good reputation investing their own time and money into arming their communal militias.

By the end of the American Revolution, Western Pennsylvania was almost entirely removed of Indians, with the last remnants of hostile tribes being defeated in Lord Dunmore’s War.⁵³ Even after most of the Indian tribes were forced out of their land, the British instigated Indian tribes to attack frontier settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains to enforce the Proclamation Line of 1763⁵⁴ and to harass Patriots during the Revolutionary War. This did not mean that no Indian raids could threaten the region again, as the battles of the Northwest Indian War in present-day Ohio could have spilled over to the Pennsylvania border. In spite of the potential of violence, unclaimed land was unclaimed land. In the post-Revolutionary War economic depression, thousands of settlers fled west of the Appalachian Mountains in search of a new life. A tiny holdout of a few hundred subsistence farmers hugging Fort Pitt for safety was inundated with a deluge of Scots-Irish and Palatinate German pioneers.

By the 1790 census, Western Pennsylvania had a population of around 75,000 people. Pittsburgh had a population of around 1,000, with only 376 full-time residents. Most of the denizens of Pittsburgh were merchants, federal employees, soldiers garrisoning Fort Pitt, and visitors. The economy of Pittsburgh was based around supplying the Fort Pitt garrison of 100–150 soldiers and supplying westward-bound pioneers with food, provisions, and equipment. The layout of Pittsburgh resembled an arrow with the tip being Fort Pitt, the immediate ring around the fort being a mixture of warehouses and slums, and the north and south riversides consisting of taverns and townhouses for visitors, merchants, and the wealthy. Pittsburgh was the most prestigious city of the West, a Federalist tether to the East; but in terms of population it was eclipsed by both Washington and Greensburg, each having a population of over 1,000. Fittingly, the town of Washington was named after General George Washington, and Greensburg was named after Washington’s most trusted general, Nathanael Greene (who is also the namesake of the Old Glory Club’s Nathanael Greene Society⁵⁵ chapter based in North Carolina). Western Pennsylvania was divided into only five counties — Allegheny (centered around Pittsburgh), Washington (centered around the town of Washington), Westmoreland (centered around Greensburg), Fayette, and Bedford. The fastest growing and most populous county in the west was Washington County (population 25,000) in the southwest corner of the state.

Map of Pennsylvania Counties circa 1790

The geographic region west of the Appalachian Mountains developed its own distinct political economy and wild cultural mood, in isolation from the East Coast. As early as 1763, attempts were made to create an independent colony west of the Appalachian Mountains, first as Charlotina⁵⁶ and then as Vandalia.⁵⁷ During the American Revolution, there was a moderate push, led by Philadelphia lawyer Hugh Henry Brackenridge,⁵⁸ to separate Western Pennsylvania, Western Virginia, and the Kentucky Territory from their home states and create a 14th state known as Westsylvania.⁵⁹ In the chaos of the War and state government consolidation process, the legislatures of Pennsylvania and Virginia did not tolerate independence movements within their independence movements.

Just as the Penn family sold land to developers for profit, the post-Revolution Pennsylvania Assembly sold large plots of land to wealthy speculators for pennies per acre. These speculators would then send agents to recruit poor farmers to settle pieces of the plot of land, with the per-acre price of land sold at a profit. The frontier farmers almost never had hard currency on hand to pay the speculators. Some of the more lawless frontiersmen opted to squat on unclaimed land and outright refused to pay speculators for an official deed to the land. Most opted to take out a loan from a bank and to pay off the loan and its interest with profits from the farm. The farm loans were usually fixed at 10–12% interest rates⁶⁰ by coastal merchants who had access to hard currency — federal dollars and banknotes or coins backed with precious metals like gold or silver. Frontiersmen usually structured their farms to produce food for their families’ personal consumption, but to pay off their loans, they turned to whiskey production. Per The Alcoholic Republic:

Americans drank on all occasions. Every social event demanded a drink. When southerners served barbecue, they roasted hogs and provided “plenty of whiskey.” Guests at urban dances and balls were often intoxicated; so were spectators at frontier horse races. Western newlyweds were customarily presented with a bottle of whiskey to be drunk before bedding down for the night. Liquor also entered into money-making and business affairs. When a bargain was negotiated or a contract signed, it was sealed with a drink; auctioneers passed a whiskey bottle to those who made bids. After the harvest, farmers held agricultural fairs that ended with dinners laced with dozens of toasts. Whiskey accompanied traditional communal activities such as house-raising, husking, land clearings, and reaping. It was even served when women gathered to sew, quilt, or pick the seeds out of cotton.

Liquor also flowed at such public events as militia musters, elections, and the quarterly sessions of the courts. Militiamen elected their officers with the expectation that the elected officers would treat. One newly elevated colonel pledged “I can’t make a speech, but what I lack in brains I will try and make up in rum.” Voters demanded and received spirits in exchange for their ballots. Electoral success, explained one Kentucky politico, depended upon understanding that “the way to men’s hearts is down their throats.” At trials the bottle was passed among spectators, attorneys, clients — and to the judge. If the foreman of a jury became mellow in his cups, the defendant stood an excellent chance for acquittal.⁶¹

Corn, rye, and barley thrived in the Appalachian environment, but grains are bulky and require a lot of wagon space to transport them to profitable markets. Instead, 1,200 pounds of grains could be distilled into 160 fluid pounds of whiskey. Barrels are easier to transport than bundles of wheat and sell at higher prices per unit-load. Whiskey was also the ancient preferred beverage of the Scots-Irish in their homeland and in their new frontier homesteads. As Fischer wrote:

The distinctive backcountry beverage was whiskey. “‘Wheyski,’” the Marquis de Chastelleux wrote in backcountry Virginia, “was our only drink, as it was on the three days following. We managed however to make a tolerable towdy (toddy) of it.”

A change of ingredients was made necessary by the new environment. In the back settlements Scotch whiskey (which had been distilled from barley) yielded to Bourbon whiskey (which was made mainly from corn or rye). But there was no other change from the borders, except perhaps in the quantity of consumption. Whiskey became a common table drink in the backcountry. Even little children were served whiskey at the table, with a little sugar to sweeten its bitter taste. Temperance took on a special meaning in this society. Appalachia’s idea of a moderate drinker was the mountain man who limited himself to a single quart at a sitting, explaining that more “might fly to my head.”

Other beverages were regarded with contempt in the backcountry. “Tea and coffee were only slops,” Kercheval remembers, “…they were designated only for persons of quality who did not labor, or the sick. A genuine backwoodsman would have thought himself disgraced by showing a fondness for these slops.”

In Pittsburgh, a gallon of whiskey sold for between 25¢ and 35¢. If transported to Philadelphia over the Appalachian Mountains, whiskey sold for around $1 per gallon. If whiskey could be shipped to New Orleans, a gallon could be sold for slightly more than $1 per gallon. However, transporting barrels of whiskey in a wagon along the Forbes Road, the main artery through the Appalachian Mountains, was significantly more costly than floating those whiskey barrels down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in a keelboat. In terms of per-ton shipping rates, it was more expensive to ship whiskey from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia in a wagon than it would be to ship whiskey from London to Philadelphia. The problem with selling Pittsburgh whiskey in New Orleans was the fact that the United States had not yet formalized trade relations with the Kingdom of Spain. Spanish warehouses refused to buy or store American goods in New Orleans.

Farmers needed cash to pay off the loans they had taken out to buy their land, and the one economically productive lifeline available to most was the sale of whiskey. Approximately one third of Western Pennsylvanian farmers lost their land⁶² between 1783 and 1790 due to bad harvests and bankruptcy. Unaged spicy Monongahela rye white whiskey was considered the best whiskey in North America, but by today’s standards, if tasted, it is worse than the worst bottom-shelf whiskey sold at your local gas station. It is believed that the wooden whiskey casks shaken en route to Philadelphia added flavor to the final product. Although there was a significant amount of demand for the product, high shipping rates made profits very small.

The backwoods economy had very little hard currency available. There was little industry and no banking infrastructure. As a medium of exchange, barrels of whiskey were often used instead of cash payments. What little cash did trickle west came from two sources: federal commissary contracts from Fort Pitt and profits from the sale of whiskey. Whiskey was the beating heart of the frontier economy, resulting in Western Pennsylvania becoming responsible for producing a quarter of the nation’s whiskey supply.

Being a whiskey distiller was a prestigious position to have in the frontier community. The process of distilling whiskey requires a significant amount of capital to invest in the equipment and a knowledgeable distiller to operate it.

18th-century 5-gallon whiskey still setup (Whiskey Rebellion Museum)

The process of making frontier bourbon begins with the malting of the grains. A mixture of corn, rye, and barley is soaked in water and allowed to germinate over a period of several weeks. It is then dried and ground down in a grist mill into a flour. The flour is then boiled until the flour begins to produce sugars chemically in a mash. The mash is then allowed to ferment over time. The yeast consumes the sugars, producing alcohol. The mash grains are then removed, with the liquids being added to a still. The copper still is then heated over a hardwood fire, and the boiling whiskey vapors are sent up through spiraling copper tubes. Whiskey is referred to as a spirit because of the mystical process of heated alcohol vapors floating through the copper tubes into a barrel. The copper tubes are often placed under running water. The water cools the coils and allows for the whiskey vapors to condense into drops. The drops are collected in a barrel, where the final whiskey product is allowed to age. Over a period of several months to several years, the wooden barrel slowly decays, infusing the whiskey with woody notes.

As whiskey is distilled, the first portion of alcohol vapors boiled have the lowest boiling points, highest alcohol-per-volume content, and very little flavor. This first third is referred to as the Heads. The Heads are very undesirable and have the potential to cause temporary blindness if consumed. In my experience, it smells like pure rubbing alcohol. The middle portion is the Hearts. This portion is optimally balanced and drinkable. In modern whiskey distilleries, only the Hearts are sold to the public. The final portion of whiskey are the Tails. When the sediment at the bottom of the still is finally burned off, the grains secrete an oily film. The Tails are drinkable but taste similar to fish oil, which is usually undesirable. In late 18th-century Appalachia, all three portions of whiskey distilled were bottled together and not usually given time to age in a barrel.

In late 18th-century Appalachian Pennsylvanian communities, only one small 5-gallon copper still was owned per five to ten farms, as very few people could afford to buy a still. Whiskey was only distilled seasonally after the end of a harvest. The owner of a still would often distill his neighbors’ grains for them for a small fee. It was a mark of honor to be a well-regarded distiller, as the distiller’s farming community solely relied on him to process the fruits of their labor into cash.

The problems with Alexander Hamilton’s Whiskey Excise Tax are obvious. The entire economy of the backcountry west of the Appalachian Mountains was reliant on whiskey production. Hard currency only flowed into the backcountry with the sale of whiskey. The port of New Orleans was shut down, and shipping rates around the mountains already cut into farmers’ profits. Frontier farmers were already going bankrupt in droves. The excise tax was only payable in hard currency, which no one had access to. The hard currency that did exist in the backcountry would flow right back to Philadelphia. Federal still inspectors were paid on commission and encouraged to overestimate the potential output of whiskey stills. The tax was regressive: the smaller the still the distiller owned, the more he was impacted by the tax. Large eastern distillers like George Washington would feel the pinch of the tax, while small Appalachian homesteaders would become financially insolvent. If the distiller refused to pay the Whiskey Tax, he would be charged in a federal court instead of a state court. The offending distiller would be forced to make a 300-mile trek across the mountains on foot over several weeks at his own expense, just to be charged with a $20 fine in hard currency. The average Western Pennsylvanian farmer only made between $20 and $100 per year in cash.

On top of the problem that Alexander Hamilton made the entire backcountry economy unviable, Hamilton represented all of the politics that Western Pennsylvania opposed. Western Pennsylvania was a hardline Democratic-Republican stronghold, electing William Findley⁶³ to the U.S. House of Representatives. Findley loudly opposed the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, opposed the creation of the National Bank, was opposed to the existence of a standing federal army in favor of state militias, and opposed the Whiskey Tax from its inception. Many frontiersmen argued that the Whiskey Tax was effectively an income tax, which was already forbidden in the Constitution. Western Pennsylvanians had not benefited from the protection of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War; they fought off hordes of Indian raiders themselves. They would not benefit from Hamilton’s proposed infrastructure investments financed with their Whiskey Taxes. The Scots-Irish of the frontier were firebrand, militant New Light Presbyterians who saw the coastal elites as decadent and heretical. Western Pennsylvania governed itself, and the people of the region would not accept being shackled to such an odious tax.

The result of the Whiskey Excise Tax of 1791 was a Western Insurrection. Moderate proposals were drafted by reputable and organized committees to express the grievances of the West. When those pleas were not heeded, mass noncompliance was adopted. When the federal government attempted to break the noncompliance and establish order, thousands of Rebels would rise, and Pittsburgh would almost burn to the ground.

The Western Insurrection

The following narrative I present was assembled from the books The Whiskey Rebellion: A Distilled History of an American Crisis by Brady Crytzer⁶⁴ and The Whiskey Rebellion by William Hogeland,⁶⁵ two interviews,⁶⁶ and three lectures.⁶⁷

Following the signing of the Whiskey Excise Tax in March 1791, news of the tax produced shockwaves across the West. The odiousness of the tax instigated every level of civil society to organize official statements to Congress, expressing the severity to which the frontier’s economy would be impacted.

The first meeting of Western Pennsylvanian delegates was held at the Redstone Old Fort on July 27, 1791. It was organized by Washington County Register James Marshel, a community leader and an appreciator of the French Revolutionary Republican cause (this will come into play later). What was once an old Indian burial ground and militia muster location became the meeting grounds of the first conference to discuss a collective Appalachian response to the Whiskey Tax. The Brownsville Conference, as it would later be called, consisted of representatives from each of the five counties of Western Pennsylvania, the most affluent and powerful men of the region, and elected officials of the Pennsylvania and federal legislatures.

Among the higher-caliber delegates was William Findley, the U.S. Congressman representing the district encompassing the five Western Pennsylvanian counties. Findley had been a vocal opponent to the passage of the Whiskey Tax while it was being debated in Congress, and he would continue to denounce it while it was law. After the events of the Whiskey Rebellion, Findley would write History of the Insurrection: In the Four Western Counties of Pennsylvania in the Year MDCCXCIV, Findley’s personal account of his involvement in the resistance against the tax. Findley’s book would become one of two irreplaceable primary sources on the unfolding conflict.

Many up-and-coming politicians and idealists were present for the conference, including Albert Gallatin.⁶⁸ Born in Geneva, Switzerland, Gallatin emigrated to the United States with the intentions of founding an idyllic republican community, away from Continental European decadence. Gallatin initially migrated to Boston, where he became bored and disillusioned by Massachusetts’s exclusionary and elitist Federalist politics. Gallatin traveled as far west as he could, eventually founding his own town of New Geneva, in remote Fayette County, Pennsylvania. The short but industrious Swiss immigrant build a thriving community of likeminded Swiss and German newcomers. In 1789, Gallatin was elected to the Pennsylvania General Assembly. He was known for inviting young, idealistic aspiring politicians to his house for dinner parties, although he was also known for his thick accent and inhospitable habit of never serving alcohol in the company of guests.

At the conference, erudite speeches were given by the most distinguished men of Western Pennsylvania. This would be the high-water mark of respectability for the Whiskey Rebellion. Further conferences were needed for each individual county to iron out the roles and responsibilities of the delegates and to brainstorm ideas on how to form a detailed and diplomatic response to Congress.

A follow-up conference was held in Washington County on August 23. The conference was hyped up with significant fanfare by the Pittsburgh Gazette newspaper. Unlike the first conference, the less elegant speakers were granted the ability to have their opinions heard. The most outspoken speaker was David Bradford. Bradford was a lawyer who had arrived in Washington County in 1782 in search of work, away from his crowded and competitive hometown of Philadelphia. Bradford was a passionate orator and viciously radical republican advocate of direct democracy. He was known to convey the fury of the poorest, angriest homesteaders demagogically in court while also being able to navigate his way elegantly through high society. Unlike the Brownsville Conference, which advocated using existing political mechanisms to express their displeasure, the speakers of the Washington Conference openly advocated civil disobedience by refusing to comply with federal revenue agents. In today’s modern parlance, it could be said that the Washington Conference had fedposters with bad optics.

Map of major towns in Western Pennsylvania (Whiskey Rebellion Museum)

While the Washington Conference descended into anarchy, the federal government was in the process of hiring supervisors to oversee a small army of revenue inspectors. The individual recruited to oversee the 4th Survey of the District of Pennsylvania (i.e., the five Western Pennsylvanian counties) was Revolutionary War hero John Neville.

John Neville was not like most settlers of the Appalachian backcountry. He was the son of a wealthy Tidewater Virginian Planter dynasty with aristocratic English ancestry. When he was a young man, Neville served with General Braddock and Colonel Washington in the failed Braddock Expedition. At the end of the French and Indian War, rather than head home, he stayed in Pittsburgh to set up a new life for himself on the frontier. Neville would have a legendary military career, bravely leading his local company of militia to fend off Indian attacks in Lord Dunmore’s War and then ascending from the rank of Lieutenant to Brigadier General in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, earning glowing praise from fellow Tidewater Virginian General Washington for his role in the battles of Trenton, Princeton, Germantown, and Monmouth. Neville was taken prisoner after the Siege of Charleston but was able to arrive back in Washington’s camp, where he would then fight valiantly in the Siege of Yorktown. Neville had a glowing reputation among Washington, Hamilton, and the other Federalist veterans who filled the Washington administration. He also had a hero’s welcome when he returned to Pittsburgh.

When Neville returned to Pittsburgh after the war, he built a business empire. Neville’s business interests ranged from industry to agriculture, including ownership of a glassworks, a brick and pottery kiln, an iron forge, and a vast 2,000-acre estate. The estate, called Bower Hill, was a plantation with 18 slaves, a two-story mansion with glass windows and plaster walls (rare and expensive in the backcountry), and a 500-gallon whiskey still.

Conveniently, John Neville’s brother-in-law Major Abraham Kirkpatrick was the commander of Fort Pitt, and his son-in-law Isaac Craig was the fort’s quartermaster. Using his familial connections, Neville was able to secure various federal contracts to supply the fort. Neville was the contractor exclusively responsible for supplying Fort Pitt with whiskey. Any federal dollars that flowed from Philadelphia, over the Appalachian Mountains, went right into John Neville’s pockets. Although this contract seems highly nepotistic (it was), Neville was nonetheless a longstanding pillar of the community, given his personal leadership of the militia, and the fact that his hungry 500-gallon whiskey still consumed more grain than what his Bower Hill plantation could grow. Neville’s whiskey still consumed the corn and rye grown at Bower Hill and dozens of other local farms in order to fulfill Fort Pitt’s whiskey contract requirements. When his grain suppliers were in financial need, Neville would give them personal loans at low interest rates to see them through their bad harvests. Benevolently giving loans is easy when you’re the only person in the area with access to federal dollars.

John Neville was the richest man in Western Pennsylvania, a war hero, a member of Washington’s Society of the Cincinnati, a respected leader of civil society, and as of now he was the region’s federal revenue inspector, paid $450 per year for the position plus commission. Unlike every other federally-commissioned revenue agent west of the Appalachian Mountains, Neville actually took his role seriously. Neville’s obstinacy is, perhaps, the one reason why resistance against the Whiskey Tax was met with any real opposition in the coming years. Neville was the lone Episcopalian Federalist in a sea of Scots-Irish Presbyterian Democratic-Republicans. He was already in over his head in running his many businesses but benefited from the political prestige of being the region’s representative of the federal government. Rather than inspect whiskey stills himself, he deputized several revenue inspectors to work for him, the first of whom was Deputy Revenue Inspector Robert Johnson.

While galloping along the banks of Pigeon Creek at night, Robert Johnson was accosted by a wild posse of vigilantes wielding torches, knives, and guns. The assailants were wearing women’s clothes and had their faces painted black to disguise their faces. The mob grabbed Johnson off his horse, tied him to a nearby tree, violently ripped off his clothes with a razor, and dumped boiling hot pitch and feathers on his exposed skin. Being tarred and feathered would scar Johnson with horrific, disfiguring burns that would remain on his body for the rest of his life. In spite of the pain of the tar, the darkness of the night, and the makeup of his mutilators, Johnson could still identify his assailants, including John and Daniel Hamilton. Who do you call for aid when John Hamilton, town sheriff, is the man attacking you?

Historic recreation of a tarring and feathering

The Hamiltons (no relation to Alexander Hamilton) were proud Scots-Irish small landowners from Washington County who fell on hard times after the Revolutionary War. During the war, John Hamilton served with distinction as the colonel of the Washington County militia. After the war, both John and Daniel were forced to sell portions of their farmland to cover their loans. John continued to maintain his role as elected colonel of the Washington County militia in peacetime, while his charismatic brother Daniel acted as his hot-headed drill sergeant. The brothers’ only remaining lifelines were their successful whiskey distillery business and their elected positions in the local militia. Upon receiving news of the Whiskey Tax, Daniel Hamilton organized a small posse, consisting of members of his militia company, to accost any federal revenue agents who came their way.

The next day, a conference was held at The Sign of the Green Tree Tavern in Pittsburgh for the delegates of Allegheny County. The delegates were made aware of the assault on Robert Johnson, but proceeded with their meeting. The conference was led by the aforementioned Philadelphia lawyer Hugh Henry Brackenridge, who had moved to Pittsburgh in 1781, when the town had fewer than 400 total residents. (While attending Princeton, he befriended his classmate James Madison.) In Pittsburgh, Brackenridge founded several businesses including the Pittsburgh Gazette newspaper (still in business today as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), legally incorporated Allegheny County, and wrote several satirical books, such as Father Bombo’s Pilgrimage to Mecca, in the same literary vein as Mark Twain. He also founded the Pittsburgh Academy, which would become the University of Pittsburgh. Brackenridge was known for being the main political mover and shaker in Pittsburgh, attending the same civil society events as his political rival John Neville, who developed a begrudging admiration for Hugh. Brackenridge was nominally a Federalist, publicly supporting Robert Morris’s financial plan for the National Bank, but he adamantly supported the economic interests of Western Pennsylvania, loudly opposing the Whiskey Excise Tax and gaining notoriety among Democratic-Republicans. Alongside Findley, Brackenridge would write the second autobiographical definitive account of the Whiskey Rebellion in his book Incidents of the Insurrection in the Western Parts of Pennsylvania. At The Sign of the Green Tree Tavern Conference, Brackenridge drafted seven resolutions on behalf of the Allegheny County delegates, concisely expressing the grievances of his constituency.

Upon hearing about the assault on Robert Johnson, John Neville rushed to the injured man’s aid. Neville carefully recorded the names of the assailants and sent a request to Philadelphia for a federal warrant to be issued against the criminals. Fearful that he would be assaulted if they served the subpoenas to the assailants in the assailants’ neighborhoods of Mingo Creek and Pigeon Creek, Washington County, Federal Marshal Joseph Fox deputized an elderly, illiterate, physically disabled man named John Connor to deliver the subpoenas. As expected, as soon as John Connor arrived in Mingo Creek, he was pulled off his horse, whipped with his own horse whip, robbed, tied to a tree, tarred and feathered, and abandoned in the middle of the woods.

Tensions ran high in Mingo Creek. Local farmers closed ranks and organized to defend their posse, fearful of any outsiders being federal agents. In mid-October, a traveling schoolteacher from the east named Robert Wilson traveled through Washington County. While going farm to farm looking for work, the inquisitive and naïve young man inquired about the process of distilling whiskey and asked several of the farmers if he could inspect their equipment. Suspecting Wilson of being a federal spy, Daniel Hamilton organized another black-faced posse to confront the fed. In the middle of the night, the posse ambushed Wilson on the side of the road and tortured him by pressing a hot iron into his stomach. They were not able to extract a confession out of the poor man but nonetheless tarred and feathered him.

As tales of multiple vigilante assaults pulsed across the backcountry, news arrived from the ongoing Northwest Indian War. Little Turtle’s Indian confederacy massacred two-thirds of Arthur St. Clair’s 1,000-man army at the Battle of the Wabash. This humiliating defeat could not have come at a worst time, as tensions were mounting between John Neville and the Mingo Creek Boys.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, Representative William Findley, with the aid of Hugh Henry Brackenridge, articulated their region’s explicit grievances to Congress. Throughout the winter of 1791–1792, Findley worked tirelessly to pull together a coalition of votes, either to repeal the Whiskey Tax or to amend the conditions of the tax to make it as light and tolerable as possible. Alexander Hamilton and his Congressional Federalists agreed to lower the tax from 9¢ per gallon to 8¢. Hamilton further revised the Whiskey Tax by requiring whiskey distillers to register their stills with their regional revenue inspectors. Failure to disclose their stills would incur an absurdly steep fine of $250. The revision was passed into law on May 8, 1792. Ominously, on that same day, Congress passed the Militia Act of 1792, giving the President the authority to mobilize and nationalize state militias in the case of a foreign invasion, Indian raids, and insurrections.

In the words of the Declaration of Independence:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The men of Washington County, Pennsylvania, came to the conclusion that, although Findley earnestly expressed the region’s frustrations, the tax would not be repealed and the federal government was more serious than ever in penalizing tax-dodgers. In emulation of the Sons of Liberty, the Washington County militia met at the Mingo Creek Meetinghouse, the local log-cabin Presbyterian church.

Sketch of the Mingo Creek Meetinghouse

By Washington County law, every able-bodied man from the ages of 18 to 45 was required to participate as an active member of the militia. Every month, the men would conduct marching drills in the morning, practice their marksmanship by shooting at homemade targets, and then settle down in the evening for a communal barbecue dinner served with a barrel of their signature spicy Monongahela rye whiskey. Every man of the militia bonded with his neighbors in these monthly meetings. They were trained on how to respond to Indian raids — how to defend a house, where to meet in case of an emergency, and how a counterattack is to be executed. Most of the men of the militia were battle-hardened war veteran Patriots, with the older settlers having personal experience fighting Mingo Delaware Indians on the wooded frontier during the Revolutionary War and many of the newcomers to the County having more professional military experience fighting for the Continental Army. They were a band of brothers. They were neighbors, brothers in arms, and drinking friends. They were also fed up with the federal government’s Whiskey Tax.

Under the leadership of their colonel John Hamilton, the men of the Washington County militia forged the Mingo Creek Association (MCA), or “Whiskey Boys,” in the monthly meetings of spring 1792. The regiment was already divided into eight companies, representing the eight townships of the county. The MCA decided to organize the men of each company to set up local armed posses that could harass any federal revenue officer who entered their domain.

Each company would also be responsible for enforcing the decisions of municipal courts that would be set up as an extension of the MCA’s power. In the wake of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, a new Pennsylvania Constitution was also ratified. One of the Federalist legal revisions in the new 1790 Pennsylvania Constitution stripped counties of their right to elect municipal judges. Instead, judges were to be appointed by the Governor of Pennsylvania. The Mingo Creek Association would not recognize the legal authority of far-away Philadelphia. The MCA brought back local elections for judges and would enforce the rulings of the judges with the guns of local MCA companies. Legal proceedings would not be heard in county court with a Philadelphia-aligned judge. All legal matters would be handled internally, through the Mingo Creek Association, by people’s courts. Ironically, the guns and ammunition supplied to the Washington County militia were paid for by the Pennsylvania state government. John Hamilton’s power-laundering scheme created a shadow-government that functioned independently from the federal government while being funded by the Pennsylvania state government. Southwest Pennsylvania did not declare de facto independence per se; they simply refused to accept the authority of the federal government.

The first order of business of the Mingo Creek Association, to ensure that federal revenue inspectors could not disturb their domain, was to intimidate anyone who either aspired to become a revenue inspector or agreed to assist revenue inspectors. John Neville received a promotion from simple revenue inspector to the Revenue Supervisor of the 4th Survey of Pennsylvania. As part of this promotion, Neville needed to rent an office and hire revenue inspectors to work for him. No one responded to Neville’s job offer from four out of the five counties, but he was able to recruit one volunteer. Captain William Faulkner was the federal officer in charge of Fort Fayette, a small blockhouse fort in the southeast periphery of Pittsburgh. He was also the owner of a small tavern. Faulkner was not comfortable accepting the position of revenue inspector, fearing harassment from the Mingo Creek Association, but he was willing to rent a room in his tavern and use the space as a still registration office.

Faulkner was right to fear retribution for his collaboration with Neville. While searching for deserters in Pigeon Creek, Faulkner was stopped on the side of a road by local farmer Robert Morrison. Morrison confided in Faulkner that he wished to pay the Whiskey Tax to conduct lawful business but was in fear for his safety if he registered at Faulkner’s tavern. As the two men chatted, local sheriff Benjamin Parkinson interrupted the men. Parkinson pulled out a knife and demanded that he and Faulkner continue their conversation at Parkinson’s nearby homestead. Faulkner, trying to be civil, agreed to come along with Parkinson. The conversation that followed shifted from questions from the farmers about the still registration process to subtle hints that he should stop renting space to Neville. Feeling a hostile change in tone, Faulkner attempted to leave the parlor of Parkinson’s home but was stopped in the doorway by John and Daniel Hamilton. Daniel lunged at Faulkner, pulling the man’s hair while letting out a fierce Indian war cry. In classic good cop/bad cop fashion, good cop Parkinson could not reason with Faulkner, so John Hamilton had to demand that Faulkner disavow John Neville in the Pittsburgh Gazette and evict Neville or else face a visit from the Mingo Creek Association. The federal army officer was then allowed to leave. Faulkner did not heed the MCA’s threats, did not write a post in the newspaper, and did not evict Neville. A month later, approximately 30 Mingo Creek Boys shot Faulkner’s tavern’s sign, busted down the tavern’s door, and then ransacked the building. Faulkner’s precious tavern’s mattresses were upturned, gunshots were fired into the ceiling, all glassware and ceramics were smashed, and the tavern’s supply of alcohol was stolen.

As the Mingo Creek Association’s star rose, the respectability of being associated with the violent rubes opposing the Whiskey Tax fell. On August 21, 1792, a Second Washington Conference was held. Far fewer men of good reputation were in attendance. Star delegates from the previous conferences like William Findley and Hugh Henry Brackenridge declined invitations to speak, but radicals like David Bradford made their reappearances. New speakers at the conference included John and Daniel Hamilton, Benjamin Parkinson, and John Canon — George Washington’s land speculation agent for Western Pennsylvania. Albert Gallatin served as the conference’s secretary, taking meeting notes. The notes Gallatin detailed showed a cavalcade of euphemisms, suggesting that delegates actively encouraged their constituents to resist paying the Whiskey Tax. The resolves from the convention included incendiary language such as “we will consider [revenue inspectors] unworthy of our friendship, have no intercourse with them; withdraw from them any assistance, and upon all occasions treat them with the contempt they deserve.”

The Washington administration did not take the Second Washington Conference’s resolves lightly. Most of the coastal regions of the United States fell into reluctant compliance, but virtually the entire Appalachian backcountry failed to register their stills and pay the excise tax. Most disturbingly of all, widespread reports of assaults on revenue inspectors poured in from Kentucky and Western Pennsylvania. One of said reports came from John Neville. Although President Washington was said to have read the Washington County conference’s letter and Neville’s pleas, his priorities were set elsewhere. He commanded Alexander Hamilton to restore order in the West while he attempted to juggle multiple foreign policy threats.

Louis XVI was executed in January 1793, and the Reign of Terror was in full swing. The excesses of the Republican French Revolution’s overthrow of the Bourbon Dynasty saw mass bloodshed and an international response from the Crowned Heads of Europe. Many Americans of the Democratic-Republican persuasion tended to support the French Revolutionaries up until the Reign of Terror. Even after heads started rolling, some Radicals continued to support the Revolutionary cause. Two of the Western Pennsylvanian Francophiles were Whiskey Rebels David Bradford and James Marshel. America, reeling from the financial burden of its own Revolution, sent urgent messages to Europe, emphasizing America’s neutrality in the French Revolutionary Wars, culminating in the Neutrality Proclamation of April 1793. America benefited from an increase in trade with mobilized Europe but suffered from naval impressment (the seizure of ship crewmen of a neutral nation) and merchant harassment from the British and French navies.

Europe was engulfed in the fires of war to America’s east while another war raged in its west. The Northwest Indian War saw horrific massacres inflicted on the side of the American militia expeditionary forces. Empowered by the Militia Act of 1792, Washington busied himself with the creation of a federal army under General “Mad” Anthony Wayne. General Wayne was a hot-blooded war veteran with idealistic visions of creating three corps of professional soldiers based on the organization of Roman Legions. Wayne’s proposals were so absurd to Federalists and offensive to Democratic-Republicans that Washington had to step in and propose the creation of an army organizationally structured along the lines of his Continental Army, to be used exclusively for an expedition against the Northwest Indian Confederation. Washington was able to scrounge together 4,000 enlistments, but functionally only 2,600 men ended up joining the federal expeditionary force. Wayne formed a Legion⁶⁹ which marched west from Philadelphia in the late winter of 1792.

When Wayne’s Legion arrived in Pittsburgh, they found a Fort Pitt in a state of ruination: the fort’s brick walls cracked, the earthworks surrounding the fort slumped over, and a skeleton crew of rowdy, occasionally mutinous, and barely-trained soldiers in the garrison. The locals around Fort Pitt generously obliged Wayne with supplies in exchange for precious federal hard currency, and Wayne magnanimously ignored the petty politics of the region.

General Wayne decided to abandon the ruins of Fort Pitt and construct a smaller, more manageable fort on the northeast corner of Pittsburgh, naming it Fort Lafayette, later shortening it to Fort Fayette. The new fort was constructed from June to November 1792. Wayne did not approve of the social mood of Pittsburgh. The locals provided as much whiskey as the army could drink and all of the women the soldiers could afford. Wayne referred to the city as “Gomorrah.” Once Fort Fayette was completed, the Legion marched to a remote wilderness of hills and open plains 20 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, where they set up a training boot camp away from the booze and whores. In the winter of 1792–1793, Wayne prepared his Legion for a punitive expedition against the Northwest Confederacy while Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton planned punitive actions against the backcountry. After completing their training, Wayne’s Legion marched west, into Ohio.

Alexander Hamilton was frustrated by the backcountry’s stiff resistance to the Whiskey Tax and hurt by the backcountry’s continued hesitation to register their stills, even after the tax rate was cut by a penny per gallon. Western Pennsylvania experienced several attacks on revenue inspectors, but the anarchy and a total lack of federal presence on the North Carolina and Kentucky frontiers called for immediate action. On September 1, 1792, Hamilton wrote a letter to George Washington claiming that “such persevering and violent opposition to the Law seems to call for vigorous & decisive measures on the part of the Government.” Hamilton called for federal agents to be dispatched across the backcountry to take inventory of attacks on federal representatives, assess the level of sedition brewing among the locals, and collect evidence of tax evasion and other seditious crimes. Washington responded on September 7, agreeing to dispatch federal agents and writing: “I have no hesitation in declaring, if the evidence of it is clear and unequivocal, that I shall, however reluctantly I exercise them, exert all the legal powers with which the Executive is invested, to check so daring & unwarrantable a (seditious) spirit.” The federal agent dispatched to Western Pennsylvania was George Clymer, the Head of the Excise Department for the State of Pennsylvania.

George Clymer was a nebbish Federalist politician and protégé of Robert Morris. He had signed both the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution. After touring the Southern states in 1782 in a failed attempt to get them to pay their share of the national budget, he made financial stability the primary goal of his late political career. Clymer was the embodiment of everything the Pennsylvanian backcountry opposed. He was a wealthy Philadelphian banker with a large fortune in securities and thousands of acres of speculatory western foreign land purchased in his name. Worse yet — Clymer didn’t like whiskey; he preferred wine, like an urban snob.

To protect himself from assaults from the Mingo Creek Association, Clymer attempted to disguise himself as various people. On the road, Clymer announced himself as legendary war hero and Secretary of War Henry Knox. Although Knox had never personally visited Appalachian Pennsylvania and no one knew exactly what he looked like, it was generally known that Knox was a tall, obese man. Clymer was rail-thin and “an ill-looking fellow.” No one bought his disguise, so Clymer decided instead to switch places with his manservant and refer to himself as “Smith.” The problem with this strategy was that Clymer was an affluent man of wealth who did not know how to drive a carriage properly, take care of a horse, or behave in the manner of a servant. While stopping by The Sign of the Indian Queen Tavern on the road to Pittsburgh, locals almost immediately saw through the disguise. Clymer was banished from the establishment, and a small group of men gathered outside, preparing to assault him.

When Clymer finally arrived in Pittsburgh, he engaged in a letter-writing campaign to local justices to acquire a list of individuals who had participated in the Second Washington Conference. The one judge who was willing to meet Clymer was Alexander Addison, a district judge nominated by the Pennsylvania legislature. In Addison’s view, he was not obligated to comply with a federal investigation or turn over evidence to the federal government, based on his interpretation of the new U.S. Constitution and Pennsylvania Constitution. Clymer then met with John Neville, who did provide him with valuable testimony. According to Neville, the entirety of Western Pennsylvania was “in a state of actual insurgency against the government that established a dangerous confederacy, composed of almost all the magistrates, other public officers, and clergy.”

Just as Clymer inelegantly fumbled his way across the state to Pittsburgh, he hastily hightailed his way back across the Appalachian Mountains to Philadelphia. Throughout the winter of 1792–1793, Hamilton urged Washington to send a military response to quell the Western Insurgency, using Clymer’s testimony as evidence.

The frozen status quo of the winter thawed, exposing new threats and challenges to the eastern and western sections of Pennsylvania. In the spring of 1793, 2,000 French refugees from the Caribbean colony of Haiti arrived in Philadelphia, fleeing the terror of the Haitian slave uprising. They brought with them few personal belongings but many mosquitos carrying infectious diseases, including the tropical yellow fever virus and malaria. By August 1793, the Haitian mosquitoes proliferated, causing an outbreak of yellow fever. Out of Philadelphia’s approximate population of 50,000 people, 5,000 would perish from yellow fever, and 20,000 denizens would flee the city in the fall of 1793. The U.S. federal government effectively disbanded while the outbreak crippled the city. Under the leadership of Benjamin Rush, temporary hospitals were established, and quarantine measures were taken in Philadelphia’s ports. Alexander Hamilton would catch a fever that fall, and Pennsylvania Governor Thomas Mifflin was confirmed to have caught yellow fever.

When George Washington and Congress returned to the city, Washington was sworn in for his second term as President. Newly elected Congressmen were also welcomed into the capital, such as Albert Gallatin, who was elected U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania. Gallatin ascended from the humble secretary of the seditious Second Washington Conference to one of the most powerful representatives of the Democratic-Republican cause. Gallatin served a whopping three-month term in the U.S. Senate from December 3, 1793, to February 28, 1794, before being unceremoniously disqualified from Congress due to his legal status as a Swiss foreigner who had not yet been a U.S. citizen for more than the required nine years.

As the yellow fever outbreak arrived in Philadelphia in the spring of 1793, John Neville busied himself with finding potential revenue inspectors. He successfully recruited Benjamin Wells, a man with Federalist sympathies who had only recently settled on the frontier. Wells was given the commission of deputy collector for Westmoreland and Fayette Counties, a territory roughly the size of Rhode Island. The unfortunate task given to Wells by Neville was to go farm to farm, taking notes, asking farmers whether they had a still and, if so, asking them to register their stills with Neville’s office. Neville requested that Wells go to farms during hours when farmers were most likely to be working in their fields and snoop around their properties, in search of unregistered and illegal stills.

While snooping around the homestead of James Weigel, Wells was caught by James’s son Philip. Philip Weigel was a hardened veteran from his participation in Revolutionary War frontier battles, but he was not able to secure a loan to buy his own farm. Philip personally blamed his inability to be financially independent on the financial policies of the federal and state government and responded by associating with the Mingo Creek Association. When Philip caught Wells in the act of documenting his family farm’s illegal still, Philip punched Wells in the mouth and tackled Wells to the ground. Wells was able to escape the Weigel homestead, but he was unfortunate enough to have enraged a man of the MCA. The next day, a group of men began intimidating Wells’s neighbors and throwing rocks at Wells’s office in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. The group returned to Wells’s home again, while Wells was away inspecting stills. The irate mob gave Wells’s wife a simple request: hand over Benjamin Wells’s notes and ask her husband to resign as deputy collector, or the household would face retribution. Meanwhile, in the town of Washington, Washington County, an angry mob of around 100 men burned an effigy of John Neville and raised a liberty pole, in solidarity with the international cause of republicanism.

The raising of a liberty pole in Massachusetts circa 1775

The Mingo Creek Association did not make idle threats. On November 22, at around 2:00 AM, a band of Mingo Creek Boys kicked down the door of Wells’s home. The band covered their faces with handkerchiefs and black face paint and brandished flintlock pistols. According to Wells’s later testimony, the men “swore that if he did not produce his said commission and books [field notes] they would instantly put him to death.” The Boys then ransacked Wells’s home, confiscating all of the papers and notes Wells kept at his residence. Wells resigned from his federal commission the next day. The latest attack on Benjamin Wells was recorded by John Neville, who sent a plea to Philadelphia, asking the federal government for some kind of federal response, as he had not received any federal assistance of tangible power up to that point.

Further enflaming tensions, a figure from the Regulator Movement reemerged: Herman Husband. After having his property confiscated by the colony of North Carolina in the wake of his failed Regulator Movement, Husband had been lying low in the Pennsylvania backcountry, calling himself “Tuscape Death.” Being professionally trained as a surveyor, Mr. Death surveyed what is today Bedford County, Pennsylvania, and founded a small settlement on the highway between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, a town that would become Somerset, of PA Turnpike Gas Station fame.

Husband’s existing Evangelical inclinations were compounded by his surveyor observations that the Appalachian Mountains in his new home eerily resembled the site of the final Battle of Armageddon, as prophesied by the Prophet Elijah and the Book of Revelation. During the American Revolution, Husband began writing Millenarian pamphlets praising the new American Confederation as the founding of a New Jerusalem with George Washington as his Prophet. However, after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, Husband’s writings began taking a different tone. Being drip-fed tales of a popular resistance against the federal government, Husband proclaimed Pittsburgh to be the new Sodom and Western Pennsylvania to be the site of Armageddon. Husband would weave his encyclopedic knowledge of Classical Roman literature, Biblical sources, and Democratic-Republican newspaper screeds into rambling anti-government pamphlets. Husband’s New Jerusalem Movement pamphlet attracted many fans, many of whom moved to Somerset. Hugh Brackenridge commented⁷⁰ on the residents of Somerset, calling them “composed, like many others, of the ignorant and the dissembling.” Gallatin referred to Husband as “the Crazy Man of Bedford.” The self-proclaimed “Philosopher of the Alleghenies” poured gasoline on existing militant New Light Presbyterian Scots-Irish Christians. According to Albion’s Seed:

Military metaphors abounded in backcountry sermons and hymns. Prayers were invoked for vengeance and the destruction of enemies. When these Christian warriors were not battling among themselves they fell upon the Indians with the same implacable fury. Their militant faith flourished in the environment of the back settlements, just as it had done on the borders of North Britain for many generations before.⁷¹

While Evangelicals of the backcountry decried the decadence, despotic, and corrupt usury of urban Federalists, the Federalist Evangelicals of New England accused Democratic-Republicans of being godless Jacobin puppets of the Masonic Bavarian Illuminati. The most notable of these Federalist preachers was Jedidiah Morse. As I described in my Substack article “The Owl and The Eye,”⁷² Morse popularized Illuminati conspiracy theories in the United States, accusing 800 elected and unelected public figures, from Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine, of being Illuminati subversives.

Western Pennsylvania was enraptured by the rhetoric of Herman Husband while Philadelphia was saved from total destruction from yellow fever by the cold winds of the winter of 1793–1794. On February 24, 1794, George Washington proclaimed a $200 bounty for each of the assailants of Benjamin Wells. Expectedly, no one came forward to rat out the band of Mingo Creek Boys.

Four days after Washington posted the Wells bounty, the Mingo Creek Association met at the Mingo Creek Meetinghouse to finalize their official shadow-government constitutional bylaws. Transcripts of the bylaws did not survive the Whiskey Rebellion, but the testimony of Hugh Henry Brackenridge and Mingo Creek Association Secretary John McDonald did. According to the witnesses, the Mingo Creek Association carefully weaved the political fabric of Washington County together, from the appointment of people’s court judges to the scriptural lessons of schoolchildren to the process of nominating local representatives to the state legislature. The creation of a formal MCA constitution cemented the shadow government’s presence. Meanwhile, the Mingo Creek Boys found new and devious ways of terrorizing Federalist sympathizers into submission. In previous years, John and Daniel Hamilton led the MCA’s assaults on revenue inspectors. Since then, Mingo Creek Boy John Holcroft took up John Hamilton’s mantle as head of the goon squad.

John Neville successfully found a witness willing to testify in federal court as to the identities of the assailants of schoolteacher Robert Wilson: local farmer William Richmond. Better still, Richmond and farmer Robert Shawn agreed to register their whiskey stills and pay the excise tax. The two had Federalist sympathies and resided on their small homesteads immediately outside of Pittsburgh. In response to the breech in excise tax resistance, the barns of these two farmers were burned down in the middle of the night. This sent a clear message. Anyone who cooperated with the federal government would have his property destroyed.

Throughout the middle of March 1794, John Neville and Robert Johnson tried to find more farmers willing to volunteer to register their stills and break the deafening silence of federal noncooperation. While traveling from farm to farm in Neville’s carriage, a mob of around 60 men began to stalk the two men from behind the roadway tree lines. After hearing several overhead gunshots, the two men hightailed their way back to Pittsburgh, escaping the mob. Two men registered their stills with Neville and Johnson in the registration drive. In retaliation, farmer James Kiddoe’s house was burned to the ground, and farmer William Coughran was assaulted by men in black face paint, gunshots were fired into his still, and his fields were set on fire. Ads were then posted in the Pittsburgh Gazette by Holcroft and company. Anyone who registered his stills with revenue inspectors could expect his stills to be mended by Tom the Tinkerer. This was a sardonic veiled threat. Tom the Tinkerer was the pseudonym for Holcroft’s gang, and his “mending” or “fixing” was code for farmers having holes shot into their stills and barns burned down. To make matters worse, John Neville began to observe stalkers following him wherever he went. While horse riding around his bucolic Bower Hill estate with his wife, John Neville was tackled to the ground by two assailants. Neville was not a man to be trifled with. He was still a hulking distinguished war veteran, despite his middling age. He quickly rolled over and put one of his assailants into a chokehold. The strangled man, who Neville recognized to be German farmer Jacob Long, begged for his life. Neville continued to tighten his grip, but, after the other assailant ran away, Neville let Long go.

The Mingo Creek Association was more organized and becoming more violent. It was the de facto social order of the working man. Meanwhile, the more affluent members of Washington County society founded the Washington County Democratic Society in March 1794. Democratic Societies sprang up all over the United States, from the coasts to the backcountry, emulating the societies responsible for carrying out the French Revolution. Francophiles and wealthy wannabe Jacobins would host lavish dinner parties in which they would toast to the rising virtues of liberty and brotherhood in America and Continental Europe. The Mingo Creek Boys carried out the brutish dirty work of intimidating tax collectors while the Washington Democratic Society wined and dined the county’s elites, in an attempt to gain legitimating support for radical localized nullification of federal authority. The President of the Washington Democratic Society was James Marshel, the man who had previously organized the First Washington Conference. Marshel’s Vice President was radical lawyer David Bradford. The firebrand demagogic advocate of the poor was also the Democratic Society’s primary backroom mover and shaker.

That same month, William Findley found some success in amending the Whiskey Excise Tax in the U.S. Congress. One of the more punitive clauses of the Whiskey Tax required tax dodgers to be tried and fined at federal courts, with the only federal court in Pennsylvania being located in Philadelphia, separated from Pittsburgh by 300 miles and a mountain range. Findley was able to have the excise tax bill changed to allow tax-dodgers to be tried in state district courts by juries of their peers, rather than exclusively federal courts. Congress passed this amendment on June 5, 1794. Only six days before the amendment was signed, U.S. Attorney General William Bedford signed over 60 writs subpoenaing Western Pennsylvanian farmers who had not yet registered their stills. At the behest of Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, the surviving notes of Benjamin Wells were compiled into a list of criminal offenders who were meant to be made examples of, before the Whiskey Tax amendment passed. The subpoenaed farmers were still forced to be tried in federal court in Philadelphia, as a means of maximizing the amount of damage to Western Pennsylvanians’ resolve.

On June 22, 1794, U.S. Marshal David Lenox was dispatched to Pittsburgh to deliver the subpoenas. While Lenox was on the road, Canonsburg tavernkeeper John Lynn made the fateful mistake of renting office space to revenue inspector Robert Johnson. In response, the Mingo Creek Association dispatched a 12-man squad which beat Lynn senseless before tarring and feathering him and tying him to a tree.

Lenox was met with no resistance in the first three counties he visited: Bedford, Fayette, and Allegheny Counties. However, on July 14, he was warned by Hugh Henry Brackenridge to bring bodyguards with him while serving subpoenas in Washington County, the heart of the resistance. John Neville decided to escort Lenox through Washington County himself.

On the fateful day of July 15, Lenox and Neville arrived at the homestead of William Miller to serve Miller his subpoena at around 11:00 AM. William Miller was understandably irate, as he was not only an outspoken Federalist advocate of Neville’s, but he was also Neville’s cousin-in-law. Miller was confused and came up with what Lenox described as “all manner of business and excuses.” Miller refused to accept his subpoena; he knew that accepting the $250 would financially ruin him and justified his refusal by saying that he planned to move to Kentucky that fall so that he could live in a more law-abiding region that paid their federal excise taxes. This was an obvious lie, as Kentucky was significantly more lawless than Western Pennsylvania. Neville and Lenox left the homestead disappointed and continued walking to their next visit.

Shortly after leaving the Miller farm, Neville noticed some shadows moving in the tree line behind them. Neville correctly assessed that he was being stalked again. Neville and Lenox continued along the road when they heard the sound of a loud rifle break the relative silence of their walk. The men were right to be afraid; they were being tailed by 50 armed Mingo Creek Boys. Conveniently, that same day, a Mingo Creek Association meeting was in session, deliberating on what to do in the case that General Wayne’s expeditionary force returned to Pittsburgh and persecuted the Association. The MCA knew that, at some point, there would be a clash between the federal army and the MCA militia. One of Miller’s neighbors arrived at the meeting and warned the men that a federal agent was in the area, erroneously reporting that the agent was arresting noncompliant farmers. The MCA also did not know that Neville was escorting Lenox. A contingent of Mingo Creek Boys was dispatched to arrest Lenox and try him at a people’s court, while MCA riders were sent to the other counties of Western Pennsylvania to figure out what their next move should be. Neville and Lenox fled as fast as their horses could gallop, with Lenox fleeing to Fort Fayette and Neville returning home to Bower Hill.

The Mingo Creek Boys decided to follow Neville home, nominating John “Tom the Tinkerer” Holcroft as the posse’s leader. Some of the Boys either returned home or deserted, leaving the Mingo Creek Boys with a force of 37 men. At around midnight, Holcroft’s men surrounded Neville’s mansion, putting it under siege. The Mingo Creek Association trained their militia on how to fire accurately and how to resist Indian raids by fortifying one’s household. The militia was not trained, however, on how to put enemy fortifications under siege. The Bower Hill estate was a mansion, two stories tall with many windows and slave quarters flanking the building. Several weeks earlier, Neville armed his 18 slaves with firearms in case of Mingo Creek Association reprisals on his household. Bower Hill was host to John Neville himself, his wife Winifred, his granddaughter Harriet, and one of Harriet’s friends. Neville instructed all of the occupants of his home to load muskets and place them at various windows throughout the house, in case a firefight broke out.

Woodsville Plantation, farm on the former Bower Hill Plantation

At dawn, the Mingo Creek Boys closed their circle around the mansion and let out loud Indian yells. Holcroft lied, shouting to Neville that his men were there to protect him from an Indian raid. Neville responded by firing a musket at the tree line. In an incredibly lucky shot, Neville’s musket accurately shot William Miller’s nephew Oliver Miller in the head, killing him instantly. Over the next 20 minutes, the Mingo Creek Boys fired at the house while John Neville and his slaves fired back. The tree line was at a considerable distance from the mansion, and the Mingo Creek Boys were firing farther than the effective range of contemporary rifles. Neville was an expert marksman, and, fed with muskets charged by his wife and granddaughter, he claimed to have killed or wounded a dozen out of the hundred or so Rebels. In reality, the only fatality caused by Neville was Oliver Miller.

The Mingo Creek Boys feared that Neville had an artillery piece somewhere in the mansion. After suffering several casualties and fearing the potential of Neville unleashing his cannon, the Boys fled Bower Hill and regrouped at Couch’s Fort. Old Couch’s Fort was a dilapidated blockhouse, located four miles south of Bower Hill and used as a muster point for the militia. Throughout the day, the Mingo Creek Association rallied the full force of its militia and requested assistance from the militias of the neighboring counties. Hundreds of Minute Men from the region gathered. The men who assaulted Bower Hill wanted vengeance for the death of Oliver Miller. The more reasonable officers of the MCA talked them down, resolving to return to Bower Hill to demand the resignation of John Neville from his federal commission and the trial of Neville by an MCA people’s court. David Bradford arrived at Couch’s Fort that afternoon, lecturing on about the grievous injustices of the federal government and the necessity of an armed response against Neville and all future federal interlopers. The militia initially proposed that Colonel John Hamilton act as negotiator and leader of the response force. Hamilton refused, saying that trying Neville was a mistake. The second candidate was Benjamin Parkinson, Hamilton’s muscle. Parkinson declined. Eventually, the militia convinced timid Revolutionary War hero Major James McFarlane to lead the next siege.

After the Mingo Creek Boys broke their siege, Neville dispatched his slaves to deliver letters to the federal garrison at Fort Fayette and various justices, demanding reinforcements from the garrison and county militias. The skeleton crew of Fort Fayette sent 17 soldiers to reinforce Bower Hill, led by Major Abraham Kirkpatrick, Neville’s brother-in-law. Five out of the 17 soldiers deserted after hearing that they would have to fight the Mingo Creek Association. Hugh Henry Brackenridge and two justices rushed from Pittsburgh to Couch’s Fort to attempt to talk down the militia. On his way south, Brackenridge ran into John Neville’s son Presley Neville, who was hastily riding to Bower Hill to help his father. Presley was accompanied by Presley’s brother-in-law and Fort Fayette quartermaster Isaac Craig and U.S. Marshal David Lenox. Brackenridge told Presley not to bring firearms with him, as he would only incite a more violent response from the militia. Presley responded by saying, “We are not all born orators. We are going to fight, you to speak.”

Hamilton waves a flag of truce.

A column of 600 Mingo Creek Association men was led out of Couch’s Fort by Major McFarlane, including a band of drummers and flutists and flag standards, representing the anti-federal cause. Most of the militiamen carried frontier rifles, but many also carried axes, pitchforks, and pikes. The defenders at Bower Hill heard the Mingo Creek army approaching, so Kirkpatrick ordered John Neville to flee and hide in a nearby ravine. At 5:00 PM on July 17, the army surrounded Bower Hill. No shots were fired, and a white flag of truce was raised. David Hamilton of the MCA met Major Kirkpatrick on the lawn outside of the Bower Hill mansion. Hamilton presented the MCA’s terms. Neville was to resign and hand himself over to the militia. Kirkpatrick responded by claiming that Neville wasn’t home. Confused, Hamilton went back to the MCA war council. A second flag of truce was raised. Accounts of the second negotiation differ, but the women and children inside the mansion were permitted to leave the estate. A third round of negotiations was held. This time, the MCA demanded that all men inside the mansion were to surrender to the militia. Kirkpatrick refused. During the third round of negotiations, shots were heard coming from the mansion. Hamilton and Kirkpatrick ran to their respective sides. Just as the firefight began to break out, Presley Neville and Lenox arrived outside of the siege’s perimeter. David Lenox, Presley Neville, and Presley’s brother-in-law Isaac Craig were quickly taken hostage.

After an hour of back-and-forth gunfire, a fourth flag of truce was raised by MCA Major James McFarlane. McFarlane slowly walked past the trees when he was suddenly struck by a bullet in his thigh. McFarlane bled to death as the fighting continued. Enraged, the Mingo Creek Boys lit a bonfire and began lighting torches. The militiamen first lit Neville’s barns and warehouses on fire, at the periphery of his property. They then lit some of the slave quarters cabins on fire, near the mansion. Eventually, the mansion caught fire, forcing all of the federal soldiers to flee. Major Kirkpatrick was captured by the militia after trying to escape through the woods. Neville’s home was ransacked, his valuables and liquor supply stolen, his horses shot in the head, and the entire property burned. According to Brackenridge, concerning the buildings of the estate:

All were consumed; one small building excepted; to which fire was not put, but a guard set over it, at the suggestion of the negros, that it contained their bacon.

The Burning of Bower Hill

The Mingo Creek Association had done it. They had instigated and won a fight with the federal government, but the Minute Men were still scouring the region, looking to arrest John Neville. A dignified funeral service was held in honor of Major McFarlane. Afterwards, liberty poles were erected across all five counties of Western Pennsylvania in support of the insurrection. On the evening of July 17, the Mingo Creek Association and Democratic Society delegates worked out what exactly they wanted to do with the captured feds. Lenox’s remaining subpoenas were burned. Lenox was then permitted to leave. David Hamilton, cousin of John and Daniel Hamilton, stepped up as the MCA’s lead negotiator. David covertly let Major Kirkpatrick escape, in an attempt to get some goodwill from the federal government whenever the feds decided to retaliate. Lenox and the Nevilles escaped to Fort Fayette, where they boarded a ferry, floated down the Ohio River to Virginia, and eventually made their way to Philadelphia.

Throughout the following week, the Mingo Creek Association and Democratic Society convened at the Mingo Creek Meetinghouse. Everyone from the previous conferences was in attendance: Brackenridge, Bradford, Marshel, Gallatin, Herman Husband, John Canon, etc. An initial round of toasts sponsored by Bradford subsided when Brackenridge brought up the Militia Act of 1792. Brackenridge assessed that the federal government would not tolerate such flagrant attacks on federal troops. The entire backcountry harassed revenue inspectors, but no one had been bold enough to fight federal soldiers. Brackenridge predicted that the Executive would have no choice but to raise a militia army and declare martial law in Western Pennsylvania. The delegation then resolved to reconvene in future conferences to decide how the counties were to respond. While the counties internally discussed their positions going forward, David Bradford and a posse of Mingo Creek Boys raided the Greensburg post office. Bradford personally read the correspondence of Governor Mifflin, Secretary of War Knox, and Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton. As far as he could tell, word had not yet gotten out that the MCA battled with federal troops. Bradford then used his posse to continue to ensure that no more letters were sent east while he worked on his greatest triumph yet: the conquest of Pittsburgh.

Bradford sent letters from upstate New York to present-day West Virginia requesting that all available militia units converge at Braddock’s Field, a meadow eight miles southeast of Pittsburgh’s city limits, on August 1. Bradford’s audacious plan was to use the energy of the successful Battle of Bower Hill to march on Fort Fayette, not only demanding its immediate surrender, but also requiring that the garrison join the rebellion. If the federal garrison refused to surrender, the militia army would storm it themselves. Bradford also made a list of collaborators and federal agents, using his intercepted letters as a reference. The feds were to be exiled from Western Pennsylvania and their property confiscated. On July 31, 1,500 militia men converged east of Pittsburgh. By August 1, that number swelled to 7,000.

Bradford’s posse grew from a few men raiding a post office to the entire radical wing of the MCA and Democratic Society, backed by all of the most revolutionary Whiskey Rebellion leaders. Fueled by tales of French Revolutionaries overthrowing the yoke of centralized aristocracy and the passion of Herman Husband’s fire-and-brimstone Evangelical declarations, David Bradford ascended from being a moderately successful lawyer to the self-declared Robespierre of the West. Many of the Francophile poor farmers wished to confiscate the wealth of the Pittsburgh merchants and redistribute their property. Other farmers from Husband’s Bedford County wished to burn Pittsburgh, their incarnation of Sodom, to the ground out of religious fervor. Bradford united these two grievances into one revolutionary column. Bradford styled himself as the Appalachian Napoleon, riding on an elaborately braided white horse and wearing a homemade white Napoleonic general’s uniform and homemade medallions.

The dreams of David Bradford would not come to fruition. In the week prior to Bradford’s march on Fort Fayette, Hugh Henry Brackenridge was in Pittsburgh foiling the plan. Brackenridge went door to door informing the public that an angry mob was coming. Rather than resisting the mob, Brackenridge’s plan was to placate them. Brackenridge told the townsfolk to lay baskets of fresh food and free alcohol on their doorsteps. He then had the townsfolk assemble banquet tables with barrels of whiskey but no food at Braddock’s Field. Brackenridge personally supplied Braddock’s Field with three large barrels of his own whiskey. Brackenridge also commissioned the services of local ferry companies to provide transportation from Braddock’s Field to the other side of the Monongahela River.

The March on Pittsburgh began exactly as planned. On August 2, Bradford’s army of 7,000 strong marched eight miles from the muster point and into the city. After marching into the city, instead of turning right in the direction of Fort Fayette, they marched left, in the direction of The Sign of the Green Tree Tavern, and then turned the column left again, towards Braddock’s Field, where barrels of whiskey were waiting for the mob.

Marching route of the Whiskey Rebels

On paper, Bradford’s mob consisted of the most violent and revolutionary men west of the Appalachian Mountains. The men leading the front of the column were the Bloody Battalion, the 600 Mingo Creek men who had fought in the Battle of Bower Hill. Also in attendance were the followers of the New Jerusalem movement. Herman Husband’s sermons fabricated a schizophrenic concept that the final Battle of the Apocalypse would only be fought if the unrighteous city of Pittsburgh was cleansed by the righteous subscribers of his monthly pamphlets. In practice, the Mountain Men were pacified by hunger and generous servings of hard liquor. The men had just marched for over 16 miles in the hot and humid August heat with only hard liquor to drink. Bradford had asked for the militiamen to supply themselves with four days of rations. Most of the mob had already burned through their food supply. The supermajority of the marchers were not particularly enthusiastic about launching an armed rebellion against a federal fort anyway. According to Brackenridge, the supermajority of the marchers weren’t even still owners at all; they were angry landless laborers and poor farmers, an army of the destitute. Most of Bradford’s army drank their fill and then proceeded to take Brackenridge’s ferries across the Monongahela River and walked home to Washington County. Brackenridge saved Pittsburgh from being burned by Bradford’s Bloody Battalion.

The night of August 2, a conference was held at Whiskey Point in Braddock’s Field. Bradford was convinced that he needed to assemble a council of war and seize Fort Fayette. When the conference representatives were asked whether they thought the rabble could take Fort Fayette with force, Brackenridge said it could easily be taken, but not before “not above a thousand killed, and five hundred mortally wounded.” A drunk rabble with no leadership structure and no food supplies was not going to take on 100 federal soldiers armed with 40 heavy cannons. What was even the point of seizing the fort? There was significant disagreement within the conference as to whether the purpose of the ongoing rebellion was to secede from the union, to guillotine the rich and burn down Sodom, or simply to continue to nullify the federal excise tax. In a muddled mess of confused priorities, the high-water mark of the Whiskey Rebellion fizzled out.

The Hangover

In the coming weeks, Bradford dispatched dozens of letters and embassies requesting additional coordination in resisting the federal government. The only counties outside of Pennsylvania that responded to Bradford’s requests were two counties in present-day West Virginia. On August 9, a posse of 30 Pennsylvanian Whiskey Rebels besieged the town of Morgantown, Virginia (in present-day West Virginia). Rather than putting up a fight like John Neville, revenue inspector William McCleery disguised himself as a slave, escaped the house, and swam across the wide Monongahela River to safety. The town fell after a three-day siege. The five rebelling Pennsylvania counties joined with the two Virginian counties to rebel against… something. Benjamin Parkinson created the unofficial Rebellion flag, which featured seven stars and seven stripes representing the seven rebelling counties. Were they rebelling against the Excise Tax? Were they rebelling against the U.S. Constitution? Were they rebelling against the new state constitutions? Were they nullifying the debts the farmers owed to the coastal elite? Were they revolting against the unholy decadence of living in a town of more than a thousand people? All of these questions can be responded to with both yes and no. Yes, those were all instigating motivations. No, no unified speaker or political could answer the question of collective goals in the affirmative.

Recreation of the Flag of the Whiskey Rebellion (Whiskey Rebellion Museum)

Although Bradford put a stop to post office activities, the Whiskey Rebels were not able to prevent the federal government from finding out about the Battle of Bower Hill and the March on Pittsburgh. Within the Washington administration, Secretary of War Henry Knox and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton advocated an immediate military response, while Secretary of State Edmund Randolph advocated that the federal government send diplomats to assess the situation on the ground and potentially negotiate a settlement with the Rebels. Hamilton conspiratorially blamed the Francophile Democratic Societies. Washington decided that enough was enough and agreed to implement both strategies. On August 6, Washington dispatched a commission consisting of Attorney General William Bradford (the man who vindictively sent Lenox’s subpoenas), U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania James Ross, and Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Jasper Yates to negotiate with the Rebels. Washington’s conditions were clear: swear an oath of loyalty to the federal government or else be persecuted with the full force of the U.S. military. That same day, Washington told Knox to begin rallying the militias of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia, and Maryland.

On August 7, Washington invoked the Militia Act of 1792, nationalizing the four state militias into a federal expeditionary army with the purpose of dismantling anti-federal resistance in Western Pennsylvania, exactly as Brackenridge predicted. On August 8, he proclaimed a state of emergency in Western Pennsylvania and declared that “it shall be lawful for the President of the United States to call forth the militia to suppress such combinations and to cause the laws to be duly executed.” On September 25, Washington formally called the state militias to muster. The federal force would consist of 4,500 Pennsylvanians, 1,500 New Jerseyans, 2,000 Marylanders, and 3,000 Virginians, as well as 1,100 cavalry and 300 pieces of artillery. The force would be split into two armies. The Virginians and Marylanders would be led by Virginia Governor Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee (the father of Confederate General Robert E. Lee), General David Morgan, and Maryland Governor Thomas Lee. The Pennsylvania/New Jersey force would be led by Commander-in-Chief George Washington, accompanied by Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Pennsylvania Governor Thomas Mifflin, and New Jersey Governor Richard Howell. The U.S. Executive position of the Presidency was still unclear, although President Washington accepted the role of leading a federal army into battle against the backcountry Rebels, dragging his Continental Army veteran companions Thomas Mifflin and Henry Lee with him.

Several draft protests erupted across the four states. In Hagerstown, Maryland, news of the militia draft caused a full-blown riot in which a liberty pole was erected in the town square and a posse of militiamen began scheming to seize the federal arms depot. Governor Lee was forced to raise additional militia units to quell the rioters.

Back in Pittsburgh, a conference was held at Whiskey Point, also known as Parkinson’s Ferry, on August 14. Respectable men with real political careers, such as William Findley, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and Albert Gallatin, knew that the federal government was going to retaliate against the entire region. This moderate faction proposed that the delegates resolve to try to mediate the conflict peacefully. The raging radicals Bradford and Marshel proposed the opposite route: escalation. In a fiery speech, Bradford insisted that the counties should band together and create a consolidated Committee of Public Safety in emulation of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. All available militiamen and militia resources were to be mobilized posthaste to repel the incoming federal response. Gallatin retorted with: “What reasons have we to suppose that hostile attempts will be made against our rights? And why, therefore prepare to resist them? Riots have taken place, which may be the subject of judiciary cognizance; but we are not to support a military force the part of the government.” Brackenridge flip-flopped on his position. He theorized that if a federal response was coming, it would be better if Western Pennsylvania could flex the full force of its own militia as a counter to whatever the armies the federal government was able to muster in a show of force. Brackenridge reasoned that a show of force by an armed and organized militia could negotiate better terms of surrender with the federal government than an unarmed committee.

The next morning, Benjamin Parkinson raised a liberty pole with the unofficial Whiskey Rebellion flag attached. The morning of August 15 was filled by an absurd and out-of-touch sermon given by Herman Husband, who waxed poetic, pondering the Book of Ezekiel while the federal government prepared to eradicate all anti-excise tax resistance. Brackenridge and Husband then talked the radicals down from instituting a tyrannical Committee of Public Safety for the purpose of beheading fed spies to forming a Standing Committee of affluent and moderate delegates to negotiate a stand-down with the federal government.

On August 16, delegates of the Standing Committee met at The Sign of General Butler Tavern in Pittsburgh to discuss the conditional surrender of the Whiskey Rebels. The Committee was derailed by Bradford, who continued to advocate armed resistance against the federal government. Four days later, the Committee received George Washington’s terms of surrender. The delegates of the counties were, once again, assembled at Parkinson’s Ferry, where they deliberated on Washington’s ultimatum. Gallatin observed that many moderate Committee delegates felt pressured into continuing to advocate rebellion by the implied threat of retaliation from the Mingo Creek Association. Gallatin suggested that the delegates anonymously vote yea or nay on accepting the conditions. The majority of delegates voted to take oaths of loyalty to the federal government. Radicals Bradford and Marshel objected, suggesting that a referendum should be conducted among the five counties as to whether or not the people accepted Washington’s terms. The delegates of the Committee acquiesced.

On September 11, 1794, the Standing Committee opened public polls for a referendum on whether or not the five counties were peacefully going to accept the oath of loyalty to the federal government. The referendum was rife with shenanigans, as the Mingo Creek Boys intimidated voters at the polling stations and even went as far as stealing a ballot box and assaulting a local judge in Nottingham Township, Washington County. No matter how hard the radicals tried, when the votes were tallied, the yeas won out, and the rebellion democratically ended.

On the same day as the referendum, a Democratic-Republican mob congregated in the town square of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a town immediately east of the Appalachian Mountains. The mob raised a liberty pole in support of the Whiskey Rebellion’s cause and searched the town for federal agents, with the intention of tarring and feathering them.

The Washington peace negotiation commission arrived in Pittsburgh on September 24. They accepted the Parkinson delegate vote and referendum results as evidence that the region was pacified but suspected that the radicals would not honestly and peacefully let federal revenue inspectors do their jobs. The negotiation termed the ongoing state of chaos in the backcountry the “Western Insurrection,” a name by which almost all media outlets and politicians began to refer to the rebellion.

On September 30, George Washington’s expeditionary forces began their march to Pittsburgh. The Pennsylvania/New Jersey forces planned to march west on Forbes Road directly to Pittsburgh, while the Virginia/Maryland forces planned to march southwest to Morgantown and then swing north to Pittsburgh. Washington and Hamilton rode in a carriage because Washington was beginning to suffer from back pains in his old age and could not ride on horseback for long durations.

The once-brave Minute Men of the Bloody Battalion were reduced to mere propagandists. A political cartoon was mockingly posted in the Pittsburgh Gazette by “Captain Whiskey” with text reading: “Brothers, you must not think to frighten us with fine arranged lists of infantry, cavalry, and artillery, composed of your watermelon armies from the Jersey shores; they would cut a much better figure in warring with the crabs and oysters about the Capes of Delaware.” The Mingo Creek Boys were fierce Indian-fighting veterans, while the draftees of Washington’s army were doughy children whose military acumen would be best served by playing pretend soldier in a watermelon field.

On October 2, another meeting was hosted at Parkinson’s Ferry to facilitate a collective response to the federal peace commission. U.S. Representative William Findley was sent to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to meet with Washington and Hamilton and deliver the Standing Committee’s agreement to take the oaths. The more radical delegates panicked because they believed that the Mingo Creek Boys would retaliate if they swore oaths of loyalty to the federal government, an admission of guilt. David Bradford lost his nerve and finally conceded to the pro-peace faction, against the wishes of James Marshel and the other MCA and Democratic Society hardliners. When news of the incoming federal 12,000-man army reached Western Pennsylvania, most of the resolve of the former Washington County shadow-government evaporated into mere bluster.

George Washington’s column marched steadily across Pennsylvania. The light horse regiments screened the road a day’s march ahead, searching for armed resistance. As a show of his own resolve, Washington personally crossed the Susquehanna River on horseback — a frigid river that was a mile wide — biting his tongue as he struggled through his back pain. Washington camped at Harrisburg that night, hosting a wine party in which he entertained the next generation of new army officers, his successors. Washington’s army arrived at Carlisle the next day. Carlisle was the last major settlement on the road west before traversing the Appalachian Mountains. Washington decided to rest and reconsolidate his forces while also investigating potentially treasonous activities. While camped in Carlisle, tensions ran high. The Pennsylvanian militia were reported to have bullied the New Jersey militia as Governor Mifflin drunkenly encouraged his militia to patrol both their own regiments and New Jersey’s regiments for deserters. The militia harassed locals, raided bars, and arrested town drunks known for spewing anti-government rhetoric.

Several days later, William Findley arrived in Carlisle. The federal army expected wild Mountain Men to represent the rebellious region west of the Appalachians. Instead, they found an erudite politician presenting peace terms. Findley and his escort dined with Washington, exchanging pleasantries. Findley attempted to demonstrate that the rebellion was over and peace was achieved at the mere threat of a real federal army occupation. Washington retorted that only total submission to the federal government would be accepted. The army would continue west, in spite of Findley’s overtures. The army proceeded to march across the Appalachians.

On October 18, Washington received a letter from Fort Fayette, confirming that the region was alarmed by the incoming militia armies but warned that they would not genuinely pay their taxes and accept federal authority unless they were coerced. Washington resolved to continue marching, with his back pain increasing with every bump in the road and senility getting steadily worse. When the army arrived at Bedford, the seat of the rebellious Bedford County, they did not find any armed resistance. Instead, they found a populace grateful to have an armed federal force to restore order and pacify the crazed Doomsday zealots. Expecting the rest of the campaign to be as timid as the occupation of Bedford, George Washington entrusted Alexander Hamilton to lead the expedition while he rode east, back to the capital. Hamilton took sadistic glee in punishing the Whiskey Rebels, starting with Bedford County’s Herman Husband, whom Hamilton had arrested, imprisoned, and sent to Philadelphia in chains to await a trial for his alleged seditious propagandizing.

Washington bidding his expeditionary force farewell

Henry Lee’s southern expeditionary force fared worse than Washington’s, comparing their trek to Hannibal’s march across the Alps. Lee noted that the homesteads of Appalachia were primitive and fragile, owing to the tiny streams of water and tiny plots of cultivated fields, but rich in potential. Lee’s forces eventually were able to get to Uniontown in Fayette County just as Mifflin’s Pennsylvanians fanned out across Bedford County. Hamilton assumed federal control, coordinating both armies. Rather than searching for alleged Rebels who refused to take an oath of loyalty to the federal government and a limited list of Wells’s tax-dodgers whom Washington intended to prosecute, Hamilton wanted to arrest as many potentially treasonous individuals as possible, regardless of their willingness to take loyalty oaths, just to make an example out of the region. The federal government spent too much time sending out fruitless federal agent probes over too many years and the federal government was spending too much money raising a 12,000-man army simply to get whiskey distillers to pay their taxes. The Rebels must suffer the consequences of besieging federal soldiers and threatening to burn down a federal city.

A third and final conference was held at Parkinson’s Ferry, before the federal armies arrived. Findley assured the conference delegates that President Washington had promised that all of the Western Pennsylvanians who swore oaths of loyalty would be spared prosecution. The delegates resolved to comply fully with federal law enforcement, to refuse to protect individuals who did not submit to law enforcement, and to allow for revenue inspectors to collect the excise tax without fear of reprisals.

David Bradford sent letters to Governor Mifflin, requesting amnesty by promising to take an oath of loyalty. Bradford had done too much to inflame the West against the federal government, even instigating frontiersmen to resist taking oaths of loyalty. Rather than risk being captured by federal troops and potentially hanged for treason, Bradford fled west, taking a canoe and paddling down the Ohio River with all of the valuables a small watercraft could carry. Other prominent Mingo Creek Association members, such as John Holcroft, Benjamin Parkinson, and Daniel Hamilton, as well as around 2,000 Rebels, fled west, beyond the reach of civilized law, into the Ohio frontier. A significant number of whiskey distillers fled, under the assumption that they would be burdened with the impossible $250 excise noncompliance fine. Colonel John Hamilton and David Hamilton submitted to the authority of the federal troops.

The Parkinson’s Ferry delegates were finally joined by Alexander Hamilton and an escort of federal soldiers on October 31, followed by Governor Lee the next day. Lee encamped his army at Parkinson’s Ferry, deep in Mingo Creek Association territory, while Hamilton stationed his army in Rostraver Township, Westmoreland County. Over the next two weeks, Lee’s Virginians and Marylanders inspected Washington County, searching for witnesses and prosecutable traitors involved in the assaults of federal revenue inspectors, members and officers of the Mingo Creek Association, participants in the attacks on Bower Hill, the posse that opened federal post office mail, participants in the March to Braddock’s Field, and participants in the various protests, liberty pole raisings, and property lootings. Lee was careful only to target the most prosecutable leaders and most violent offenders. Meanwhile, Alexander Hamilton gathered intelligence from the five counties, preparing a vast list of Rebellious individuals and their homes locations, as well as a list of publicly elected Democratic-Republicans officials whom he wanted to target. Hamilton believed that a slow, broad investigation would give the ringleaders of the Whiskey Rebellion ample time to escape custody. Instead, he wanted to show the precise might, speed, and efficiency of his federal government. Hundreds of temporary holding cells were prepared, justices were alerted, and arrest orders were sent to the militias. Hamilton planned to arrest every known Whiskey Rebel in one night.

The Dreadful Night, November 13, 1794, is the reason why portraits of Alexander Hamilton are hung upside-down in Pittsburgh bars to this day. Starting at 11:00 PM, the 12,000-man federal expeditionary force fanned out across the five counties of Western Pennsylvania. From the federal muster point at Braddock’s Field, a squadron of Pennsylvania cavalry led by General John Gibson rode out, followed by a squadron of Virginia cavalry led by legendary war hero General Daniel Morgan who was accompanied by Presley Neville. The cavalry units dispersed outwards, to the more distant targets, while companies of infantry, coordinated by General William Irvine, stormed the nearer ones.

That snowy night, the federal army knocked down their targets’ doors, raided their homes, and dragged out the suspects in chains at gunpoint without giving their targets time to put any winter clothes on top of their pajamas. Dogs barked, children cried, and wives begged. Alexander Hamilton’s lists were both broad and thorough. The businesses owned by suspected Whiskey Rebels and taverns frequented by suspects were raided as well, just for good measure. The primary targets were the Mingo Creek Association’s leadership, delegates and speakers of the various conferences, and elected officials who publicly opposed his Federalist policy agenda. The secondary targets were rioters, militia members, and eyewitnesses. The tertiary targets were illegal and unregistered stills, particularly stills belonging to the primary targets. Over 150 suspects were rounded up across five counties in one night. Many of the prized targets already fled, but some had not. John “Tom the Tinker” Holcroft and Benjamin Parkinson were not found at their homesteads, but their stills were identified and paraded around the federal army barracks in Braddock’s Field.

The local county jails had very little space, so Hamilton had to get creative in requisitioning holding cells. The suspects were stashed in fort warehouses, latrines, and tavern cellars. One particularly sadistic General Anthony “Blackbeard” White of the New Jersey militia personally arrested 30 alleged members of the Mingo Creek Association and jailed them in a cold tavern basement without fire for warmth, food, or water for five days. Many of the suspects were so obviously innocent of treason that local townspeople petitioned for their immediate release. One such case was Baptist Reverend John Corbly of Washington County. Corbly was an old man who lost his wife and three out of five of his children in an Indian raid. Rather than seek vengeance, Corbly turned to God, became a Baptist evangelist, and founded over 30 Baptist churches across the frontier. His only crime was publicly verbalizing support for the MCA shadow-government.

Among the more bizarre instances of confrontations between the federal militia and the suspects was the arrest of David Hamilton. David was one of the primary targets, due to his involvement as MCA hostage negotiator for the federal soldiers captured at Bower Hill. Revenue inspector Robert Johnson and a squadron of federal militia trudged through a snowstorm to the remote homestead of David Hamilton late in the afternoon of November 14. They were exhausted by their long night and day of work, but exhilarated by the prospect of capturing a high-priority target. Even though the feds unceremoniously kicked down his door, David did not resist arrest. Instead, he asked the troops to prop the door back up and join him in waiting out the storm. David was enjoying cocktails of whiskey and ginger beer, so he offered his persecutors refreshments. Johnson knew David Hamilton wouldn’t be able to escape from over a dozen soldiers while a snowstorm raged, and he had heard of how David let Major Kirkpatrick escape. Johnson was confident in the integrity of David Hamilton. The men then proceeded to drink to their hearts’ content, soon passing out from a mixture of intoxication and exhaustion. When the feds awoke the next morning, David Hamilton was gone, never to be heard from again.

The 150 or so suspects were processed by federal judge Richard Peters. The arduous task of sorting through a mountain of evidence for charges of treason for a rabble of mostly poor, barely literate farmers was almost impossible to complete with any certainty. For the vast majority of the suspects, there was little or no tangible evidence that could be convincingly used to prosecute a treason case. On top of the heavy load of paperwork and testimony to sift through, Peters was constantly interrupted by the moans of crying women and children stationed outside his office, pleading to have their men freed. Rather than carefully examining each case and having most of the cases either tossed out or lost, Peters decided to send only the 24 cases with the most tangible amount of evidence to Philadelphia. Most of the suspects rounded up during the Dreadful Night were let free. The 17 suspects whom judge Peters deemed prosecutable and the seven suspects against whom Hamilton personally held grudges were then thawed out, shackled, and marched 300 miles east to Philadelphia.

With the prosecutable targets either en route for trial in Philadelphia or escaped, Hamilton cast a wider net in an attempt to catch what John Neville referred to as the “big fish” of the Rebellion: Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Albert Gallatin, and William Findley. Hamilton needed to make an example of Rebel leaders, not two dozen poor farmers. Judge Peters subpoenaed the three men on November 18. Brackenridge was interviewed first by Judge Peters, with Alexander Hamilton observing. Rather than wanting to fry his “big fish” and indict Brackenridge on treason charges, Hamilton privately wrote to Brackenridge, saying:

Mr. Brackenridge, in the course of yesterday I had uneasy feeling. I am concerned for you as a man of talents. My impressions were unfavorable. You may have observed it. I now think it is my duty to inform you that not a single one remains. Had we listened to some people, I do not know what we might have done. There is a side to your account; your conduct has been horribly misrepresented, owing to misconception. I will announce you in this point of view to Governor Lee, who represents the Executive. You are in no personal danger. You will not be troubled even by a simple inquisition by the judge; what may be due to yourself with the public is another question.

Albert Gallatin was in New York fraternizing with Democratic-Republican politicians during the Dreadful Night, but was quickly informed that Hamilton intended to prosecute him. Since he could not apprehend Gallatin himself, Hamilton questioned district judges on Gallatin’s character. In his interviews with Westmoreland justices William Jack, Abraham Baird, and John Powers, Hamilton discovered that Gallatin was not a bloodthirsty Jacobin. Sure, Gallatin’s reputation was that of a man possessed by the spirit of republican idealism, but Gallatin himself was never treasonous. In their testimony, Gallatin was described as a man of moderation in a time of chaos, attempting to make peace with the federal government at every conference. Gallatin’s subpoena was thrown out before it was even issued.

Hamilton’s final “big fish” was William Findley, a sitting U.S. Congressman. Findley was clever enough to have avoided every conference in which radicals spoke about violently resisting federal laws. Hamilton could find no real evidence of treason. Findley, being a well-seasoned politician, spun Hamilton’s inquiry into a blatant, corrupt, and unwarranted attack on his political opposition. Hamilton had no choice but to let his last fish off the hook.

The pacification of Western Pennsylvania was complete. The will of the frontier was broken at the mere presence of an occupying federal force. Most of the army began marching home on November 19, leaving behind an occupying contingent of 1,500 militiamen led by General Daniel Morgan. New revenue inspectors were recruited and provided with federal militia escorts on their excise tax collection visitations. Rather than persecute and obliterate the old Mingo Creek Boys, Morgan decided to form four companies of Washington County militia, train them, and use them to garrison Fort Fayette, patrol the countryside, and enforce federal, state, and county laws. Morgan wanted to assimilate the rogue MCA militia into the national militia and encourage interstate camaraderie. Although Morgan’s army extracted heavy fines from distillers in the region, the army injected tens of thousands of dollars into the local economy each month, buying supplies from the same farmers they fined. The region economically bounced back relatively quickly, but the region’s animosity toward the Federalists and, in particular, Alexander Hamilton would persist for centuries.

Morgan’s region was healing while Hamilton’s 24 prisoners were marched to Philadelphia. Among the prisoners were Colonel John Hamilton, Herman Husband, and Reverend Corbly. The prisoners were prodded by General “Blackbeard” White, who taunted and abused the poor men.

On November 29, President George Washington issued the first Executive pardon in American history. Washington proclaimed that anyone in Western Pennsylvania “guilty of treason or misprision of treason against the United States” was pardoned of his crimes — with the exception of the prisoners en route to Philadelphia and a list of 28 traitors still on the run from the law whose crimes were so heinous that they could not be excused. This list included David Bradford, Benjamin Parkinson, John Holcroft, and David Hamilton.

The prisoners arrived in Philadelphia on Christmas Day 1794. A crowd of 20,000 Philadelphians greeted the hated backcountry Rebels with jeers and scorn, but somehow the legendary vigilantes of the Wild West did not live up to expectations. Instead of burly Mountain Men, the prisoners were shoeless and emaciated after suffering through a freezing monthlong trek across the state. The prisoners were then marched to the Walnut Street Prison, where they were held in solitary confinement, with no food or water, for the rest of the night.

District Attorney William Rawle reviewed the 24 cases brought to him. Over the next several months, 12 cases were dismissed due to a lack of evidence. Out of the 12 cases prosecuted, only two men were found guilty of treason. John Hamilton and Reverend Colby were let free. Herman Husband’s health deteriorated over the six months he spent in jail; although he was acquitted, he died only a month after being freed. The two guilty men were Philip Weigel (who punched Benjamin Wells in the face, and a witness placed him at the Battle of Bower Hill) and John Mitchell (who ransacked the Canonsburg post office with Bradford). The two men were sentenced to be hanged on June 17, 1795. The public turned on the courts, seeing the trials as unnecessary for the relatively minor crimes committed and the military expedition as absurdly wasteful. It also became apparent to the trial witnesses that John Mitchell had an obvious mental disability and speech impediment. Hanging the two men would be a miscarriage of justice. President Washington issued stays of execution on June 16 and finally pardoned Weigel and Mitchell on November 2, 1795.

Renewal and Vindication

In 1794, Western Pennsylvania was a stockpile of kindling, assembled piece by piece out of a thousand minor infractions, before being set alight. The result was a bonfire that raged for a little more than a month before it was snuffed out.

Democratic-Republican opposition to the Whiskey Tax was significantly bolstered by the public relations fiasco that was the Dreadful Night and Philadelphia Trials. Thomas Jefferson resigned from his position as Secretary of State for the Washington administration as a result of the growing ideological divide between the two factions, partially driven by the Whiskey Excise Tax. As Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison on the topic of the Whiskey Tax on December 28, 1794:

The first error was to admit it by the constitution. The 2d. to act on that admission. The 3d. and last will be to make it the instrument of dismembering the Union, and setting us all afloat to chuse which part of it we will adhere to. The information of our militia returned from the Westward is uniform, that tho the people there let them pass quietly, they were objects of their laughter, not of their fear, that 100 men could have cut off their whole force in a thousand places of the Alleganey, that their detestation of the excise law is universal, and has now associated to it a detestation of the government, and that separation which perhaps was a very distant and problematical event, is now near, and certain and determined in the mind of every man.⁷³

Alexander Hamilton did damage control, branding the “Western Insurrection” as a minor, localized “Whiskey Rebellion.” The name “Whiskey Rebellion” eventually became synonymous with the event, as opposed to the contemporary title of “Western Insurrection.”

No sooner did the Whiskey Rebellion flame itself out, than news from the Northwest Indian War was received in Pittsburgh. General “Mad” Anthony Wayne won the Battle of Fallen Timbers on August 20, 1794. The federal expedition decisively defeated the Northwest Indian Confederacy. Jay’s Treaty of November 19, 1794, forced the remaining British garrisons to evacuate into Canada, loosened Britain’s mercantilist trade restrictions, and delineated America’s northwestern borders. These victories opened the Ohio Territory up for settlement by pioneers and investment from speculators, and also boosted America’s international trade. Pittsburgh was the city in which westbound settlers acquired their provisions before entering the untamed wilds. According to Brady Crytzer, real estate values in Western Pennsylvania and the Ohio Territory “increased by 50%” in a two-year span following the end of the Northwest Indian War. Pinckney’s Treaty⁷⁴ of October 27, 1795, also formalized U.S.-Spanish trade relations. This provided Americans living along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers with the ability to float riverboats, loaded with whiskey barrels, cheaply downstream where they could be sold at exorbitant markups. This kicked off the Golden Age of the Keelboat and folk heroes such as Mike Fink, King of the River.⁷⁵

Early 19th-century flatboat

The backcountry whiskey industry evolved in the wake of the Whiskey Rebellion. Market demand for whiskey skyrocketed as access to New Orleans was established. However, the military occupation of Western Pennsylvania and threat of federal expeditions against the other regions of the backcountry ensured that the Whiskey Excise Tax was paid. The persecution of Whiskey Tax dodgers incentivized more isolated frontier homesteaders to hide their stills in the woods, becoming moonshiners.⁷⁶ The western whiskey industry was slowly consolidated into fewer and fewer companies as hundreds of thousands of souls pioneered west.

President George Washington handed over the position of Executive to John Adams in March 1797. While the Washington administration was overtly Federalist in its policies, his administration attempted to make pragmatic compromises to appeal to both proud Southern planters and shrewd Yankee bankers. The Adams administration, like Adams himself, was blunt, cutting, and unlikable. In response to mounting European hostilities with unending cases of British and French naval harassment of American shipping and the diplomatic scandal of the XYZ Affair, the Adams administration oversaw a military buildup, increasing army and fortification spending from $3 million to $5.8 million and naval spending from $0.7 million to $2.6 million between 1797 and 1800. The dramatic increase in military spending increased the national debt by 23%.

To pay for the enlarged military, Congress passed the Federal Direct Tax of 1798.⁷⁷ This was a progressive tax on homes, a flat tax on slaves, and a flat tax on owned land acreage. Hamilton’s similar land tax had been shot down before it was even introduced to Congress in 1791, but Adams was able to get it passed into law. The Whiskey Excise Tax was devastating to the backcountry, but one could argue that it was a tax on a luxury good rather than a necessity. The land tax struck the wallet of virtually every man of means, from the lowest farmer to the highest land speculator. In addition to the hated property taxes, Adams passed the Alien and Sedition Acts,⁷⁸ banning inflammatory dissent against the federal government. This sparked another Regulator revolt, this time in the counties just north of Philadelphia. Palatinate German settlers around present-day Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, were fed up with the extortionately high property taxes levied on them from largely Quaker tax collectors. While the German settlers both bought land to set up modest farms and valiantly fought in the American Revolution, the urban pacifist Quakers sat out the War and then had the gall to tax every window and chimney on their property. Fries’s Rebellion⁷⁹ was an uprising of the German settlers north of Philadelphia who nullified their responsibility to pay federal taxes, opting to harass tax collectors in the same fashion as the Whiskey Rebels. The unpopularity of the Federalists reached new lows. All of the Democratic-Republican faction’s wildest criticisms of the Federalists were coming true. As the Democratic-Republicans asserted, the Federalists founded institutions that enthroned a plutocratic financial elite which extracted ever-increasing tax revenue from the poor in order to fund a standing army to put down any dissenters and finance boondoggle infrastructure projects. Some of the Southern Madisonians and other moderate Federalists joined in coalition with the Democratic-Republicans to create a political juggernaut.

The Democratic-Republicans handily won in the Election of 1800, securing the Presidency under Thomas Jefferson, winning the supermajority of U.S. House races, and making significant gains in the U.S. Senate. Among Jefferson’s new crop of appointees was Albert Gallatin, who was named Secretary of the Treasury. Under Jefferson, Gallatin repealed the Whiskey Excise Tax and Property Tax in 1802, axed Hamilton’s infrastructure projects, slashed the military budget in half, reallocated naval spending away from heavy frigate construction and into the development of a modest coast guard, and paid off a significant portion of the national debt. Although Jefferson hated naval spending, a military-industrial complex primarily located in northern Federalist ports, he would use the U.S. Navy to invade the African coast in the Barbary Wars.⁸⁰ Jefferson was not entirely opposed to all federal government spending. In 1803, Jefferson’s diplomats were authorized to buy the port of New Orleans from Napoleonic France for $10 million. Instead, a deal was brokered to buy the entire Mississippi watershed for $15 million in a Constitutionally questionable purchase.⁸¹ Jefferson’s faith in state militias over a professional standing army and well-funded navy came at a cost. In the War of 1812, the woefully undersupplied and undisciplined militia armies suffered embarrassing defeats, particularly in the Invasion of Canada,⁸² and only the frigates⁸³ funded in the two Federalist administrations put up any real nautical resistance⁸⁴ of strategic value.

Among the Whiskey Rebellion alumni, Albert Gallatin had the most prestigious career. Gallatin would become the longest-serving Secretary of the Treasury in American history, going on to serve in the James Madison and James Monroe administrations. Gallatin’s political career would continue as Minister to France, and later to the United Kingdom. Out of his entire career, Gallatin would say that his participation in the Whiskey Rebellion was his “only political sin.”

William Findley would serve about 20 more years as Western Pennsylvania’s Representative in the U.S. House after the Whiskey Rebellion.

Hugh Henry Brackenridge turned to his old hobby of writing satirical novels when he was not busy acting as public defender for Pittsburgh citizens who had been “physically abused and robbed by General Daniel Morgan’s raucous troops.” Brackenridge is buried in Carlisle, next to the grave of Molly Pitcher.⁸⁵

David Bradford was officially pardoned by the Jefferson administration, but he chose to lie low. Tales vary on the escape of Bradford, but his final resting place is well known. He built a new life for himself in Spanish West Florida, present-day Louisiana, where he constructed Myrtles Plantation, one of the most haunted buildings in America. He lived at the plantation with his wife and five children in exile for the rest of his life.

Philip Weigel went back to working at his family farm after he was pardoned by President Washington. The popular Wigle Whiskey⁸⁶ brand is named after the Mingo Creek Boy. I personally recommend the American rye.⁸⁷

Many of the leaders of the Mingo Creek Association are buried in Mingo Creek Cemetery,⁸⁸ vindicated by presidential pardons and 24 years of Democratic-Republican rule of federal government.

Grave location guide at Mingo Creek Cemetery

On the other side of the political aisle, John Neville abandoned Bower Hill, living instead in his Pittsburgh townhouse. He continued to take federal garrison supply contracts and pursue various business ventures across Western Pennsylvania. In 1799, Neville bought Montour Island off of one of his business associates. He built a second estate on the island and named it after himself. John Neville would live on Neville Island⁸⁹ until his death in 1803. Neville’s Bower Hill estate is honored by the Bower Hill Bourbon Whiskey⁹⁰ brand. In my opinion, their bourbon is overpriced and tastes mediocre, but the glass bottles have excellent branding.

Legacy of the Mingo Creek Association and Whiskey Rebellion

When I first began researching the Whiskey Rebellion, I had two goals. My first goal was to identify locations around Pittsburgh that have unappreciated stories to tell. My second goal was to tell the story of these people and places in a humanizing, sympathetic way in order to allow the reader to have a more well-rounded, less ideological outlook on the events I wanted to describe.

In local Pittsburgh history museums, tour guides like to play up Alexander Hamilton as a villain whose sole intent was to destroy the lives of his rowdy Appalachian pioneer political foes, conveniently forgetting that Hamilton froze at Valley Forge due to the Second Continental Congress’s woefully inadequate financial system. I also hear Mises Institute libertarians condemn⁹¹ the exhilarating ad hoc dealings that barely kept this country together as base cronyism while simultaneously underplaying the violence and civil strife that radicals and rebels caused in the early Republic. Frankly, I find it offensive to condemn all of the federal contractors who supplied the Continental Army with supplies as “cronies”; worse yet, to condemn Robert Morris’s private loans to the fledgling U.S. government as “cronyism” when no state or other lenders were willing to pay for the final Siege of Yorktown or pay the officers’ promised pensions. From the research I have conducted, it is my opinion that the ratification of the U.S. Constitution was necessary, and the creation of the National Bank with assumed state debts was the only thing keeping the states from shattering into utter anarchy. The nation needed a National Bank and national revenues collected.

Alternatively, I cannot help but find the tales of masked vigilante hijinks to be entertaining. There is a natural masculine desire to protect one’s home and kin from outside aggression. The post-Revolutionary frontier was littered with a plethora of semi-independent redneck republics. The frontier mythos enables modern-day office drones to envision themselves as lone homesteaders fighting off waves of Injun raids or leading a posse to overthrow the corrupt sheriff. In my depiction of the rise and fall of the Mingo Creek Association, I described how rough-and-tumble wrestling, hard-drinking, frontier-justice moonshiners thought they could punch Uncle Sam in his jaw over and over again and get away with it. These are juvenile fantasies, but I find reading testimony from the Whiskey Rebels strangely dignifying. The men of the west were not mere squatters that found land; they had business models, social networks, and political economies that they had to navigate. These men had loans to worry about, streams of income being cut off, and real threats of physical violence stalking them, and these pioneers did what they thought was right. The Mingo Creek Association rose to fight for the livelihood of their communities by nullifying federal law, harassing feds, and forging their own way forward. They also knew when they jumped the shark. I could feel tensions rise with every revenue inspector attack, and I could experience the rush as the Battle of Bower Hill kicked off a temporary rush of radical possibilities. I then felt the high wear off, just as I supposed it wore off for the Mingo Creek Boys. Most of them knew that what they did was wrong. Some men, like David Bradford, were exposed for what they really were. Petty demagogues. Others, like John Hamilton and Hugh Henry Brackenridge, revealed themselves to be men of principle. When the federal authorities came, they accepted their fates and let their juries exonerate them.

The Mingo Creek Boys were both heroes, whose livelihoods were being cynically taken from them by a system that was not working, and antagonists, who threatened to invalidate and derail the early Republic before it even had the chance to gain traction. It is in finding this nuance that I honor my ancestors. They were not simple black-and-white heroes or villains at all. The long-dead actors in the Western Insurrection were conflicted men who experienced the rush of history and the eternal glory of vindication.

1. The Mingo Creek Society’s chapter page on the OGC website.

2. Benjamin Franklin, “Albany Plan of Union,” June–July 1754.

3. Final draft of the Articles of Confederation.

4. “Philadelphia Campaign,” Wikipedia.

5. “What Happened at Valley Forge,” Valley Forge National Historical Park General Management Plan, National Park Service, 2007.

6. “Treaty of Amity and Commerce (France–United States),” Wikipedia.

7. “Western Theater of the American Revolutionary War,” Wikipedia.

8. Edwin MacMinn, On the Frontier With Colonel Antes: Or the Struggle for Supremacy of the Red and White Races in Pennsylvania (Camden: S. Chew & Sons, 1900).

9. “Siege of Yorktown,” Wikipedia.

10. United States Continental Congress, “Extract from minutes re: Maryland ratifying the Articles of Confederation.”

11. “Presidents Who Served,” ConstitutionFacts.com.

12. “Bank of North America,” Wikipedia.

13. “The proposed Federal Impost of 1781,” Statutes and Stories, September 5, 2021.

14. Michael Hattem, “Newburgh Conspiracy,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon.

15. George Washington, “Newburgh Address,” March 15, 1783.

16. “Society of the Cincinnati,” Wikipedia.

17. “Benjamin Franklin and the Society of the Cincinnati,” The Society of the Cincinnati, 2015.

18. “History,” The Society of the Cincinnati in the State of Connecticut.

19. “To James Madison from Thomas Jefferson, 28 December 1794,” Founders Online, National Archives.

20. “To Thomas Jefferson from George Washington, 8 April 1794,” Founders Online, National Archives.

21. “Pennsylvania Mutiny of 1783,” Wikipedia.

22. “Treaty of Paris (1783),” National Archives.

23. “Ten Facts About the American Economy in the 18th Century,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon.

24. “Northwest Ordinance,” Wikipedia.

25. “Ohio Company of Associates,” Wikipedia.

26. “Essex Junto,” Wikipedia.

27. “Shay’s Rebellion,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon.

28. “Annapolis Convention (1786),” Wikipedia.

29. James Madison, “Vices of the Political System of the United States [April 1787] ,” Founders Online, National Archives.

30. “The Constitution of the United States: A Transcription,” America’s Founding Documents, National Archives.

31. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford University Press, 1989).

32. Herman Husband, “Shew Yourselves to be Freemen,” September 14, 1769.

33. “Herman Husband & The North Carolina Regulators,” Piedmont Trails, March 14, 2024.

34. The Overmountain Men of Tennessee Valley’s chapter page on the OGC website.

35. Marjoleine Kars, “The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina,” American Revolution Institute, August 31, 2021.

36. Paul B. Moyer, Wild Yankees: The Struggle for Independence Along Pennsylvania’s Revolutionary Frontier (Cornell University Press, 2007).

37. Alexander Hamilton, “Report Relative to a Provision for the Support of Public Credit [January 9, 1790],” Founders Online, National Archives.

38. “First Bank of the United States,” Wikipedia.

39. “To George Washington from Thomas Jefferson, 15 February 1791,” Founders Online, National Archives.

40. “The Louisiana Purchase: Treaty Between the United States of America and the French Republic [April 30, 1803],” National Archives.

41. “Indian Barrier State,” Wikipedia.

42. “Skirmishes around Vincennes (1786): Clark’s Wabash Expedition,” Wikipedia; “Logan’s Raid,” Wikipedia.

43. 1st United States Congress, “Excise Whiskey Tax of 1791,” signed March 3, 1791. I refer to it hereafter as the “Whiskey Excise Tax.”

44. W.J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1979).

45. Ibid.

46. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford University Press, 1989).

47. Judith Ridner, The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania: A Varied People (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018).

48. Edwin MacMinn, On the Frontier With Colonel Antes: Or the Struggle for Supremacy of the Red and White Races in Pennsylvania (Camden: S. Chew & Sons, 1900).

49. “Pennamite–Yankee War,” Wikipedia.

50. “Battle of Wyoming,” Wikipedia.

51. “Battle of the Monongahela,” Wikipedia.

52. “Battle of Fort Duquesne,” Wikipedia.

53. “Lord Dunmore’s War,” Wikipedia.

54. “Royal Proclamation of 1763,” Wikipedia.

55. The Nathanael Greene Society’s chapter page on the OGC website.

56. “Charlotina,” Wikipedia.

57. “Vandalia (Colony),” Wikipedia.

58. “Hugh Henry Brackenridge,” Wikipedia.

59. “Westsylvania,” Wikipedia.

60. Todd DePastino, “PTPL presents ‘The Story of the Whiskey Rebellion,’” Peters Township Public Library, April 9, 2020.

61. W.J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1979).

62. Todd DePastino: “One third of all farmers in Western Pennsylvanian lost their land between the end of the American Revolution and the beginning of the Whiskey Rebellion…”

63. “William Findley,” Wikipedia.

64. Brady J. Crytzer, The Whiskey Rebellion: A Distilled History of an American Crisis (Westholme Publishing, 2023).

65. William Hogeland, The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty (Simon & Schuster, 2006).

66. “GEORGE WASHINGTON’S GREATEST CRISIS! The Whiskey Rebellion After the American Revolution,” Historian Brady Crytzer Official, March 3, 2022; “‘The Whiskey Rebellion’ with Brady Crytzer,” PA Books, PCNTV, August 11, 2024.

67. Todd DePastino, “PTPL presents ‘The Story of the Whiskey Rebellion,’” Peters Township Public Library, April 9, 2020; “The Whiskey Rebellion with Todd DePastino,” Peters Township Public Library, July 9, 2024; Marjoleine Kars, “The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina,” American Revolution Institute, August 31, 2021.

68. “Albert Gallatin,” Wikipedia.

69. “Legion of the United States,” Wikipedia.

70. Paul B. Moyer, Wild Yankees: The Struggle for Independence Along Pennsylvania’s Revolutionary Frontier (Cornell University Press, 2007).

71. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford University Press, 1989).

72. Clossington, “The Owl and The Eye, Old Glory Club, May 1, 2023.

73. “Letter from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison on the Whiskey Rebellion [December 28, 1794],” Oxford Learning Link.

74. “Pinckney’s Treaty,” Wikipedia.

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