Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (25 page)

During the debate over the Constitution the Anti-Federalists had warned that granting the federal government the power to levy such internal taxes would result in hordes of excise men and military enforcement. Indeed, so hated were excise taxes that the first Congress in 1790 voted down Hamilton’s bill. But after a renewed effort in 1791, with physicians endorsing the tax on the grounds that it would cut down on Americans’ excessive drinking of hard liquor, the excise finally passed. Even Madison admitted that he saw no other way of raising the needed revenue.

Since Hamilton in
Federalist
No. 12 had warned “that the genius of the people will ill brook the inquisitive and peremptory spirit of excise laws,” he knew that opposition would be intense. Although he had “long since learned to hold popular opinion of no value,” he could scarcely have predicted the firestorm of controversy the tax aroused.
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One North Carolina congressman simply assumed that the tax would never be enforced in the western counties of his state. Senator Maclay of Pennsylvania was particularly angry at the excise bill’s attempt to organize the collection districts without regard to state lines. Like many other opponents of the Federalists, Maclay believed that Hamilton and his cronies were bent on eventually eliminating the states and the excise tax was a pretext for doing just that. Others thought that excise was simply another device for creating new offices to feed the administration’s patronage machine. Still others believed that the tax was designed to make the obstreperous Scotch-Irish distillers in the backcountry feel the presence of the federal government.

No doubt the allegiance of these Westerners to the federal government, indeed, to any government, was suspect, but with good reason. The frontier settlers were far removed from the centers of government and continually felt that Eastern authorities did not care about protecting them from the Indians or helping them market their crops. Since the Western farmers had difficulty getting their perishable grain to market, they had commonly resorted to distilling that grain into the much more portable and less perishable form of alcohol. Although whiskey produced for home
consumption was exempt from the tax, whiskey had become a necessary form of money for the cash-strapped Western areas.

While some western Pennsylvanians prevented enforcement of the tax by tarring and feathering and terrorizing excise collectors, others channeled their anger into extralegal meetings of protest. They sent petitions to Congress, organized assemblies and committees of correspondence, condemned the excise tax for being as unjust and oppressive as the Stamp Act of 1765, and ostracized everyone who favored or obeyed the excise law. Although many of the leaders of the opposition to the excise tax were themselves wealthy holders of important county or state positions, they certainly felt poorer and less influential than those in the Federalist establishment. Their spokesmen charged that the federal government was dominated by “aristocrats,” “mercenary merchants,” and “moneyed men” who were out to reverse the Revolution and deprive the common farmers of America of their liberty.

Because violence and protests in 1791 and 1792 spread through the frontier areas of every state south of New York, the Federalists in the East thought that all order and authority were being challenged and the integrity of the Union itself was threatened. America now had representative republican governments, the “friends of order” said, and there was no longer any need for extra-legislative popular meetings and protests. The citizens’ role in politics was simply to vote for their rulers and representatives and let those who knew better run the government. Allowing the “rabble” and the “ignorant herd” to exercise authority, the Federalists said, would lead only to disorder and licentiousness. By defying the excise law, the Westerners—those “busy and restless sons of anarchy”—were in fact attempting “to bring us back to those scenes of humiliation and distress from which the new Constitution has so wonderfully extricated us.”
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Because the resistance of the western Pennsylvanians took place “in the state in which is the immediate seat of government,” Hamilton singled out the Pennsylvania backcountry for enforcement of the excise. Besides, it was the only Western region in the country where some officials were trying to enforce the law. In the backcountries of the other states there was no support whatsoever for the tax. In Kentucky President Washington could not even get anyone to accept the position of United States attorney—the officer who would have to prosecute evaders of the law.
⁸²
If a test of national authority had to be made, better that it be made
in Pennsylvania, where the elite was divided. And the Federalists believed that a test was needed. It was “absolutely necessary,” said Hamilton, “that a decided experiment should without delay be made of the energy of the laws, and of the government to put them in execution.”
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Although President Washington was less eager than Hamilton to use force, he agreed to issue a proclamation in September 1792 condemning the Westerners’ challenges to authority and threatening strict enforcement of the excise tax.

Despite continued violence and protest against the excise in western Pennsylvania, the government did nothing in 1793 to back up the president’s proclamation. But in 1794 the government proposed new excise taxes on snuff and sugar that aroused a renewed interest in the whiskey tax. In February the president reissued a proclamation expressing the government’s determination to enforce the law in the West. The national government was increasingly fearful that settlers in Kentucky and western Pennsylvania were on the verge of breaking up the Union—perhaps with the aid and encouragement of British officials in Canada. Hamilton thought leniency toward the tax evaders had gone on long enough, and he concluded that “there was no choice but to try the efficiency of the laws in prosecuting with vigour delinquents and Offenders.”
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These efforts at enforcement led to more violence and the massing of six thousand men in the Pittsburgh area who put on a threatening display of armed force. In August President Washington responded with yet another proclamation expressing his intention to call out the militia to maintain law and order. It was no longer a matter of putting down riots and mobs; eighteenth-century leaders were used to dealing with temporary outbursts of the people and did not usually panic when confronted with them. But the long-standing resistance to the law by the four counties of western Pennsylvania seemed much more serious. The rebels were invoking the example of revolutionary France, which had recently executed its king and unleashed the dogs of war and terror. These western Pennsylvanians hoisted their own flag, set up mock guillotines, erected their own extralegal courts, and talked of marching on the federal garrison in Pittsburgh to seize weapons. Some frightened gentry thought the rebels were actually going to march on Philadelphia, the nation’s capital. The insurrection, concluded Attorney General William Bradford in August 1794, was part of “a well formed and regular plan for weakening and perhaps overthrowing the General Government.”
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Despite Hamilton’s desire for the immediate use of force, Washington hesitated. Instead, he sent a peace commission to negotiate with the rebels. Only with its failure in late August 1794 did he issue orders for the raising of fifteen thousand militia troops drawn from the states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia—an army larger than any he had commanded during the Revolution. This excessive show of force was essential, the president declared, because “we had given no testimony to the world of being able or willing to support our government and laws.”
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In the face of this large army all resistance in the West collapsed. The army arrested several men and paraded twenty rebels back to Philadelphia. Of these, only two were convicted of treason, and both were pardoned by the president. “An insurrection was announced and proclaimed and armed against, and marched against,” jibed Jefferson, “but could never be found.”
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Still, many Federalists were satisfied with the results. The rebellion was a test of the government’s strength, and the government had been successful. As Hamilton said on behalf of many Federalists, “The insurrection will do us a great deal of good and add to the solidity of every thing in this country.”
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In fact, so much did the rebellion redound to the benefit of the national government that some thought the Federalists were behind the entire uprising. Madison had no doubt that if the rebellion had not been so quickly put down the Federalists would have made “a formidable attempt . . . to establish the principle that a standing army was necessary for
enforcing the laws
.”
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To Washington and other Federalists the rebellion had been a closerun thing. Although it had been suppressed, the threat of upheaval and disunion and the spread of French revolutionary ideas remained. “Certain self-created societies” were stirring up trouble everywhere. The insurrection, the president declared in his angry message to Congress in November 1794, had been “fomented by combinations of men, who careless of consequences . . . have disseminated, from an ignorance or perversions of fact, suspicions, jealousies, and accusations, of the whole Government.” Rarely had the president displayed so much of his infamous
temper publicly before, but he was seriously unsettled by the disorder that seemed linked to the chaos taking place in Revolutionary France. Organized opposition groups calling themselves Republicans or Democratic-Republicans and affirming their fraternal affiliation with atheistic Revolutionary France were challenging governmental authority all over America.
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The Whiskey Rebellion turned out to be among the least of the problems facing the Washington administration.

4
The Emergence of the Jeffersonian Republican Party

Opposition to the Federalist program was slow to develop. Since the only alternative to the new national government seemed to be disunity and anarchy, Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists were initially able to build their system without great difficulty. Besides, no one as yet could conceive of a legitimate opposition to government. Parties were considered a symptom of disease in the body politic, signs of partiality and self-interestedness in opposition to the general good. Republics, which were dedicated to the commonwealth, could have no place for an opposition party.
¹

During the first year of the new government (1789–1790), James Madison acted as congressional leader of those who were eager to counteract Anti-Federalist sentiment. For a time Madison seemed to be everywhere at once, speaking in the Congress, promoting legislation, and writing speeches for both the president and Congress. Because of his trust in Washington, he initially believed in a strong and independent executive. In the Congress he argued for the president’s exclusive power to remove executive officials and worked to create a Treasury Department with a single head rather than a board that some congressmen favored.
²

Hamilton in January 1790 was ready to present his first report to Congress. Fearful of being overawed by Hamilton’s expertise, Congress requested that Hamilton’s Report on the Public Credit be submitted in writing.

Once congressmen began to grasp the implications of the report, opposition quickly arose, especially to Hamilton’s proposed handling of the domestic debt. Hamilton was not surprised. He knew that state and local interests would resist all efforts to strengthen national authority. But he was startled that his severest critic in the House of Representatives was his
longtime ally James Madison. He and Madison had collaborated closely in the 1780s and had even written most of
The Federalist
together. Hamilton had thought that Madison desired a strong national government as much as he did. But now Madison seemed to be changing.

Madison had been a nationalist in the 1780s, but not, it was now becoming apparent, Hamilton’s kind of nationalist. Madison was not opposed to funding the debt. He even suggested to Hamilton several forms of taxation, including an excise on liquor distilleries and a land tax, to supply revenue for extinguishing the debt.
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But he had already emerged as a strong defender of the interests of Virginia and the South, often talking about the need for justice and equality among what he now referred to as a “Confederacy of States.”
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In settling the debt he wanted the government to discriminate somehow between the original and current holders of the government’s bonds. Many of his Virginia constituents had heard stories of Northern speculators buying up the government’s old securities at a fraction of their face value. They were angry that under Hamilton’s funding plan the original purchasers of the securities would receive no compensation at all.

Hamilton wanted nothing to do with any sort of discrimination between original and current bondholders. Not only would administering such a discrimination become a nightmare, but refusing to pay the present holders of the securities their full face value would be a breach of contract and would harm the securities’ capacity to serve as money. The secretary’s views prevailed. On February 22, 1790, Madison’s proposal was easily defeated in the House, thirty-six to thirteen.

The issue of the federal government’s assumption of the states’ debts, however, was not so easily disposed of. Only three states—Massachusetts, Connecticut, and South Carolina—owed nearly half the total state debts and were desperately anxious for assumption. Although some states were indifferent, several states—Virginia, Maryland, and Georgia—had already paid off a large proportion of their own debt and could hardly welcome paying federal taxes to retire the debts of the other states. Debate went on for six months, with some congressmen threatening that without assumption of the state debts there could be no Union. On June 2, 1790, the House of Representatives accepted a funding bill without assumption. The Senate responded by incorporating the assumption of state debts into the House bill. The Congress was deadlocked.