ed, what they were actually put out for sale. It was relatively easy for tax collectors to monitor the output in cities and collect according, but in the rural countryside, distillers were paying according to their still capacity and it was assumed that the stills were running at full production, all the time. And that was the major problem, because most of these farmers weren’t running their stills anywhere close to full time. As Marissa mentioned, they would take some of their crop and turn it into whiskey. The reason for this was that the whiskey was easier to transport and it was much less likely that a bottle of whiskey was going to get damaged versus a bushel of wheat or rye. The trip to the city was a multiple day journey before farmers could try and sell their product so it’s much safer if you take at least some grains and know that you can make some profit. They also were able to make better margins on whiskey, which is another incentive for them to distill versus just selling the grains.
The other component with this is that many farmers were using whiskey to pay for different goods and services that they needed because they didn’t have a lot of cash on hand. It wasn’t like they could go to ATM just withdraw whatever they needed. So whiskey, over time, actually became a means of exchange. When the whiskey tax went into effect in 1791 it was met with some harsh criticism, and between 1791 and 1794 things escalated pretty quickly.
Now I wish I could say that at this moment that the angry farmers decided to let cooler heads prevail and went to the local officials and wrote letters to their congressman and that ultimately this work got this tax repealed. Unfortunately that’s not how this went down. So, when tax collectors would come out to the western parts of the US, they were usually tarred and feathered, their homes were burned down, sometimes with them still inside. Or some times they were beaten just because they were tax collectors and leading into 1794 things were really starting to get out of hand.
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 histo