a and Cody suggested. One is the fairly obvious tensions that it reveals: the tensions between the rural and the centers of power, specifically the cities along the east coast; as well as the tension between liberty and order. The conflict between rural and urban, agricultural society and industrialized society, the yeoman farmer and the man of finance, of course reflects the very conflict between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. And indeed, the Whiskey Rebellion actually drove constituents to Jefferson’s Democratic party – it seemed to prove to frontiersmen that the federal government was grasping at too much power, bordering on the tyrannical, making Jefferson’s Democrats or Anti-Federalists more appealing. I mentioned also the conflict between liberty and order – the Whiskey Rebellion brings to a head an internal fissure within the founding fathers’ ideology: they had wanted a society based on independence and liberty, but they also wanted a society that was not ruled by mob-law. If there was one thing the founding fathers were afraid of, it was the “mob.” The Whiskey Rebellion forces that contradiction out into the light. It doesn’t necessarily heal that fissure, but rather reveals that it’s there, lurking under the surface. It does, however, prove that the federal government has the ability – and sets the precedent – to use the military against its own people when it feels that it’s necessary, thereby demonstrating the power of the federal government over its own people.
One of the experts on the Whiskey Rebellion is a historian by the name of Thomas Slaughter. And at the end of his book he leaves with one last point: that the Whiskey Rebellion reveals the level of disillusionment with Revolutionary principles even in the 1790s, not very long at all after the conclusion of that war. Right? A decade? Not even… Here we are in 1794 doing the very same thing that we were doing 20 years prior. As he states, “And yet, they were still fighting about taxes, still burning politicians in effigy, still tarring and feathering tax collectors, planting liberty poles, circulating petitions of protest, and against forming political action societies to defend the cause of liberty against its enemies in government.” So replicating almost exactly the things happening before the American Revolution. If you didn’t know better, you might think this was an episode from before the Revolution, not after. So in a sense, the Whiskey Rebellion is a moment where the founding fathers are forced to face the reality that governing is harder than they might have believed, and that they – when themselves are in positions of power – might recreate the very systems of power that they had railed against during the Revolution.
Marissa: Exactly, yeah. I don’t know.. So I mean Cody wanted us to sort of…
Sarah: Well now it makes it sound like he was cracking the whip…
Marissa: Cody is bossing us around…
Cody: I’m just dropping the hammer guys.
Marissa: Think about that decision to quell the rebellion, to kind of use your own troops against your own countrymen, whether that was worth it, or the right thing to do, or an effective thing to do. I mean it was pretty obvious that it was effective.
Cody: Yeah. If it’s okay Marissa, I kind of want to go back to something that you and Sarah had talked about with the hard cider. I don’t know, do you know how hard cider is made?
Marissa: No, no I don’t.
Cody: What ends up happening when you create any type of alcohol is separate ethanol and water. And the way that’s commonly done today is through heat. And heating up the substance. So alcohol will burn off, water will remain, and you sort of collect that condensation. You can do the same thing at the other end of the spectrum. If you don’t have access to a still and to a heat source, what you do instead is you will take hard cider, set it outside and let it freeze during the winter. The liquid that you’re left with is actually that higher alcohol content that you want. So you end up with these chunks of water, essentially ice, and you ring those out, and then