A Familiar Sort of Government
The Whiskey Rebellion
The Whiskey Rebellion
(In the Shadow of Yesterday) - In the late summer of 1794, George Washington did something no American president has done before or since. He put on his uniform, climbed onto a horse, and personally led an army into the American interior to enforce a tax law.
Take a moment with that.
The army numbered around 13,000 men, larger than most of the forces Washington had commanded during the Revolutionary War. The destination was western Pennsylvania.
The enemy was a collection of farmers, distillers, and veterans of that same Revolution who had decided, reasonably enough from their vantage point, that what the new federal government was doing to them looked a great deal like what the old British government had done. So they did what Americans had learned to do. They resisted.
They raised liberty poles. They tarred and feathered tax collectors. They burned the house of a local revenue inspector named John Neville to the ground. They massed thousands of men at a field near Pittsburgh, flew a six-striped flag, and dared the government to answer.
The government answered.
What followed was the Whiskey Rebellion — named for the tax that sparked it — and it is one of the more instructive episodes in American history, not because of…