And this is where we go back to Washington and the two voices that he has in his right and left ear. It was at this moment Hamilton said Washington need to go in with full force and stop the rebellion to show the power of the federal government. His rationale was that if Washington didn’t go, because we were such a new country and our authority was still somewhat question, if we couldn’t even control a skirmish like this, it would weaken the credibility of our country both for our fellow countrymen but also for the nations around the world that were looking on.
Jefferson on the other hand pointed out the hypocrisy of raising an army to go after your own people. After all this is what we’ve been fighting to get rid of just a decade or so ago. We’ve just gone through this, we got out freedom from unjust taxation, are you really going to do this again?
Washington, to his credit, tried to work with many of the leaders that came out against this tax to see if there was a way to peacefully resolve to conflict. But in the end those conversations proved to be unfruitful. The tarring and feathering continued, along with the burning of houses, and Washington ultimately decided to listen to Hamilton. He assembled about 13,000 men that he took out to the western edge of Pennsylvania.
Now thankful…at least I would say thankfully, many of these farmers who organized and swore that they would stay and fight, didn’t really back up their talk, and when Washington showed up with his forces, basically everyone dispersed. We don’t have this large bloody conflict to kick off our nation’s history, which I would say is a really good thing. This is also one of the first defining moments within the whiskey industry that really shifts it from from moonshining and small distillers, having a real sense of power and control to now larger distillers now having that power.
So when we talk about the divide between rural, agricultural interest and urban interest, the whiskey rebellion is one of the first strong examples we have in American history of this divide being so clearly demonstrated.
Marissa: Right, and I think that, surely there was this feeling of um, success after kind of kicking the British out, and feeling like hey, we stuck it to the man, and now there’s like a new man in town. And I’m sure there was a lot of resentment, especially by veterans, who thought, “I fought in this war for freedom and now I’m taxed unfairly just as I was before.”
I know among a lot of Quakers that, who were pacifists anyway- that’s what they said. That this new government is doing the same thing that Brits were doing, so whatever. They thought it was all the same.
So what may have begun as a bunch of unruly, ungovernable country bumpkins defying federal power ended up having a number of really important lasting legacies. First, the frustrated and thwarted frontiersmen of the rebellion picked up stakes and moved further inland, where they could better avoid contact with the federal government. I think, kind of as you both suggested, kind of upping the ante between rural and urban divide. Making themselves even more removed from the center of power. And as they left, in a way, they took the frontier with them – Western PA was no longer the frontier; instead, it moved inland to the Mississippi river region. This had other consequences, of course – the further west white settlers moved, the greater conflicts arose with Native Americans. In some cases, they live in those regions that become places of internal conflict later on in the 19th century: West Virginia, southern Ohio, Kentucky, etc. all places that have populations of poor, non-slaveholding whites and conflicted loyalties when it comes to slavery and support for the federal government. Places that become really interesting during the Civil War and the sectional crisis.
Another factor after the Whiskey Rebellion is that just in its very existence, it brought attention and money to Western PA. In order to have that number of soldiers in the area, the government had no choice but to pay local residents for food