Washington proclaims: pay the whiskey tax, or face 13,000 militiamen
By the summer of 1794, western Pennsylvania farmers had been fighting the federal whiskey tax for three years, and in July a mob burned tax inspector John Neville's house to the ground after a shootout at Bower Hill. On August 7, President Washington invoked the Militia Acts of 1792 and called out 13,000 militiamen while also sending peace commissioners to negotiate. It was the first time the new federal government had to prove it could enforce its own laws. By November, General "Light Horse Harry" Lee's force reached western Pennsylvania to find the rebellion had largely evaporated.
This was the young republic's first real test of whether federal law meant anything past the Atlantic coast. Washington rode with the army himself, the only sitting president ever to command troops in the field, establishing that Congress's taxes would be enforced even on the frontier. The standoff also hardened the divide between Hamilton's Federalists and Jefferson's opposition, feeding the two-party system that followed.
QWhy did a Morgantown tax collector disguise himself as a slave to escape a mob?
William McCleery, the tax collector in Morgantown, Virginia, faced a mob of 30 men surrounding his house on August 9, 1794, as retaliation for the whiskey taxes. Fearing for his life, McCleery disguised himself as a slave, fled his home, and swam across the river to safety. The town then endured a three-day siege by outsiders and townspeople, alarming state authorities who worried the unrest would spread and inspire other frontier counties to join the anti-tax movement. The episode shows the rebellion was never confined to Pennsylvania alone; pockets of resistance ran through the western counties of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, with the tax going entirely uncollected in Kentucky.
QHow did large distillers legally pay less tax per gallon than small frontier farmers?
Under Hamilton's excise law, distillers could pay either a flat per-still fee or a per-gallon rate. Big eastern operations ran their stills at full capacity year-round, so the flat fee worked out to as little as 6 cents a gallon. Small frontier farmers lacked the time or surplus grain to run their stills constantly, so they were pushed onto the per-gallon rate, paying 9 cents a gallon instead. Because whiskey also sold for less on the cash-poor western frontier than in the wealthier East, small distillers ended up surrendering a much larger share of their product's value than large distillers did, even before accounting for the rate difference itself. Some historians call this design a deliberate favor to big business; others call it coincidence.
QWhat kept a Vermont militia from being recalled during the War of 1812?
The 1795 Militia Act never settled whether states or the federal government actually controlled militia units once called up. During the War of 1812, the governor of Vermont tried to pull his state's militia back from defending Plattsburgh, arguing it was illegal for them to serve outside Vermont's borders, but the recall failed. New York militiamen made a similar argument, refusing to cross into Canada on the grounds that their duty was only to defend their home state. The confusion left Washington unable to count on militias for national defense, and after 1812 the federal government started raising separate 'volunteer' units instead, a workaround used again in the Mexican War and the Civil War.
