t the deep south, we’re talking about Appalachia – Kentucky, southern Ohio, West Virginia. Corn whiskeys are 80% corn, with a birth of rye and barley. It was usually aged in oak barrels. These early corn whiskeys were easily eclipsed in popularity by bourbon (named after Bourbon county in KY), which used a smaller volume of corn and took on a dark color as it was stored in charred oak barrels. Kentucky found a niche in bourbon production and is still the bourbon capital of the world today. They have lots of Kentucky bourbon tours I hear.
America’s’ new love affair with whiskey meant that it became a lucrative commodity during and after the war. But in some areas, such as western Pennsylvania, still a sparsely populated frontier at the end of the war, distillers were struggling to eke out a living.
Cody: Awesome, thank you Marissa for kind of setting this up. I’m going to come back to a few of the points that Marissa made earlier but for now I’m going to dive a little bit into the history of the actual conflict itself.
Now, in 1790, just like what we have today, the United States had two major political parties. They were the Federalist party and the Republican Party. Now even though one of them is called the Republican Party there’s some big differences between that republican party and the Republican Party we have today, and the Federalist party has some big differences with what we would consider the Democratic Party today. But generally speaking the federalists were in favor of a more centralized government and more federally funded programs, while Republicans looked for more local, and state lead initiatives, so in that sense there are some similarities.
And again, the same as it is today, there are certainly more than two voices that represented each of these parties but for this discussion we’re going to focus on one voice from each side. One of these individuals has been made rather famous by a recent musical, Alexander Hamilton, and he’ll be the voice for the Federalist. The other will be Thomas Jefferson, representing the Republicans, and in the middle we have George Washington. Okay it’s 1790, at this point in our history the United States is in a lot of debt, which we had collected in order to pay for the revolutionary war. And one of the first big needs for our country was to figure out a way to balance the budget.
Hamilton debated a few different tax initiatives but ultimately proposed what he called a whiskey tax. The tax would start off at $.11 per gallon of whiskey, which was nothing even by the standards of the time, and he believed this tax would pay off the $45 million dollars worth of debt that we had. The fact that a tax that small was going to pay off a debt that large said something about how much whiskey we were drinking as a country, but Hamilton was hoping that this would fund other projects that he had in mind as well. Canals, roads, and the big one, a central bank. Ironically Hamilton borrows this plan, in most part, from England. To explain what I mean I’m going to quote a book called, “Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of American Whiskey.” Quote:
“Hamilton ironically took his blueprints for the whiskey tax from England, where small distilleries and government had long clashed, moonshining thrived, and big distilleries help the British government write tax laws. In return, Parliament offered commercial distillers tax rebates and banded stills under a certain size. This sort of arrangement had given the small island nation the kind of mighty industrial power and efficiency Hamilton wanted for America. He could only imagine what America, a land with much greater natural wealth could become if its resources were utilized in the same fashion.”
Ironic might be a bit of an understatement there, but nonetheless, Hamilton’s whiskey tax was really the first of its kind, that actually taxed an American made product and really supported larger organizations over smaller, individual operations just because of how the taxes collected. In cities distillers only paid taxes on how much spirits they produc