, lodging, and other necessities. Ironically, this influx of cash boosted the local economy – which I think is so bizarre and fascinating; this conflict arises over the refusal of these frontiersmen to pay the whiskey tax, and then in order to force them to pay, the army has no choice but to pay *them.*
Marissa: To patronize them, their villages.
Sarah: Right, and another interesting aspect of this who came out to quell the rebellion fell in love with the rolling hills of Western PA, bought tracts of land, and moved to the area to settle. So as a result of this bitter conflict, the population of the area increased and economy improved. So there were these unexpected consequences.
Marissa: Right but at the same time they were still growing apart. These kind of rural areas- I read a lot about 1790s Philadelphia and I know that they were pissed that Philadelphians had to leave in 1794, what was it June? And head out and kind of take care of these backwoods “a-holes.” They were kind of like, really resentful of that.
Sarah: Right, so the locals, now having cash in hand, used it to invest in more land; land prices went up by 50% after 1794. This had one beneficiary in particular and that is George Washington himself, who had extensive land holdings in Western PA, that he’d had for a long long time. I don’t want to venture what the actual number was but the land he owned around modern Pittsburg was really enormous. He had decided just before the rebellion itself to start selling off this land and his plans were placed on hold by the rebellion – afterwards this idea became even more lucrative. He held on to his land until 1796, when he began to sell most of it off, partly because of the market, and partly because he was so frustrated with his irritating Western PA tenants! Which is an ironic twist is that George Washington ends up profiting off of this land boom that happens after the Whiskey Rebellion. So there are some really strange things happening here.
The event also had larger consequences. I think as both Marissa 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 