The outcome of
the so-called “Whiskey Rebellion” in 1794 arguably resulted in an assumption of
presidential authority on the part of George Washington similar to that which
would later emerge from the debate surrounding the Jay Treaty in 1795. But
while the implications of the incident in question were quite substantial, the
inciting circumstances were comparatively mundane. Seeking to pay down the
national debt that had recently been consolidated by way of an assumption of
existing state debts – as mandated by the terms of the Funding Act of 1790 –
Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton worked with Congress during the first
half of 1791 to levy a series of taxes on domestic products for the purpose of
raising a federal revenue. The first of these excises – a test balloon, of
sorts – was fixed upon the production of distilled spirits, thought to be an
acceptable target for taxation since the product in question was deemed a
luxury. The resulting bill became law in March 1791, with President Washington
appointing the necessary officials and assigning them to revenue districts the
following November. But while the “Whiskey Tax,” as it became known, had been
uncontroversial enough to achieve affirmative votes in both the House and the
Senate, the people most likely to be affected by its provisions quickly showed
themselves to be nowhere near as sanguine at the prospect of having to pay it.
In Western
Pennsylvania, it turned out, the operation of small stills was a pervasive
means by which grain farmers supplemented their often-meagre incomes. This was particularly
true in the region that lay beyond the Appalachian Mountains, where excess
grain could be turned into whiskey that was much easier to transport to market
in the East. In addition, resulting from pervasive cash shortages, whiskey
often served as a means of exchange. Indeed, some people near the bottom of the
regional economic hierarchy were even paid in whiskey for their labor. A tariff
on distilled spirits in this part of the country would accordingly have
amounted to a restriction on agricultural productivity, a damper on local
economic competitiveness, and even a form of income tax. The result of its
adoption, unsurprisingly, was popular discontent. Angered by what they
perceived to be the federal government’s preferential treatment of large, industrial
distillers located in the East – the substantial incomes of which permitted
them to pay a flat tax of six cents per gallon rather than the piecemeal nine
cents per gallon that smaller private distillers had no choice but to pay – and
already exasperated by the Washington Administration’s outwardly anemic
response to frequent attacks by local native populations, small-scale farmers
joined with laborers and local merchants in resisting the efforts of federal
revenue officials. Tax collectors were threatened and driven off, people who
provided them food or lodging were harassed or even beaten, and the offending
tax itself was roundly denounced. When these actions, alongside formal
petitions seeking the repeal of the excise, failed to garner a response from
the federal government, the tax resistors took the next logical step. Beginning
in July of 1791, they began the process of organizing.
As assembly of
delegates from the surrounding counties first met in Pittsburgh in September of
1791. Doubtless due to the influence of the moderates yet in attendance, plans
for armed resistance were laid aside and further petitions were drafted
requesting aid and relief from both the Pennsylvania Assembly and the House of
Representatives. But while, pursuant to these requests, some degree of respite
was granted in the early spring of 1792 – chiefly in the form of a one-cent
reduction in the cost per gallon – this outcome wholly failed to mollify the
majority of the affected population. Non-violent petitions consequently gave
way to violent resistance over the course of the next several months, with tax
collectors and court officials being subjected to the Revolution-era punishment
of tarring and feathering as the offended populations began to complain that
their plight was no different than that of the American colonists who had
refused to pay the taxes levied by Parliament in the 1760s and 1770s. A second
convention summoned in August of 1792 – also in Pittsburgh – accordingly
dispensed with talk of moderation and conciliation, turning instead to the
prospect of armed resistance. When news of these developments reached the
Washington Administration, the reaction fell somewhere between concern and
embarrassment. Not only were the President and his advisors sensitive of the
need for the newly-minted federal government to offer a firm response to any
threats to its authority – lest it begin to lose the confidence of the American
people – but it was quite naturally a source of mortification that the
rebellion in question was occurring in the same state – i.e. Pennsylvania –
where said government was headquartered. Eager, as ever, to project firmness
and resolve, Treasury Secretary Hamilton penned a proclamation for Washington’s
signature which denounced non-payment of federal taxes and enjoined both court
officials and private citizens to aid in the enforcement of federal laws.
Washington signed the document on September 15, 1792, upon which it was widely
printed in broadsheet form and in a number of prominent newspapers.
Notwithstanding
this assertion of federal authority, the tax resistors continued to harass
federal officials, threatened those who offered them aid, and resolutely
refused to pay the offending tax right through to the summer of 1794. It was at
this point that events rather quickly came to a head. Having served a round of
recently-issued federal writs against a number of local distillers who had
persistently refused to pay the excise, local planter and tax official John
Neville (1731-1803) found his home surrounded on the night of July 16th
by a force of some thirty local militiamen. Over the course of the next
twenty-four hours, Neville fired several times at his harassers – wounding at
least one of them – and was reinforced by a small contingent of US Army soldiers
dispatched from Pittsburgh while the militia force swelled to nearly six
hundred men in total, all under the command of Revolutionary War veteran James
McFarlane. Following a round of negotiations resulting in the safe evacuation
of Neville’s family – and the covert departure of Neville himself – another
attempt by McFarlane to discuss terms resulted in his being fatally shot by the
defenders, the effect of which was the final capture of the property by the
militiamen. McFarlane’s funeral, held on July 18th, subsequently
served to rally the majority of the remaining moderates around a course of
resistance to federal power. At Braddock’s Field, just east of Pittsburgh, some
seven thousand people – many of whom did not own distilleries but had harbored economic
grievances against the state and federal governments and eagerly sought an
outlet for their frustrations – gathered on August 1st to discuss
possible plans of action. The French Revolution was spoken of favorably, with
some even calling for the guillotine to be brough to America. Many called for a
march on Pittsburgh, and for the town to be looted and razed. Some even
advocated for the surrounding counties to declare their independence from the
United States and seek aid from Britain or Spain.
Now confronting
by what appeared to be an armed insurrection in Western Pennsylvania, President
Washington finally gave way to the urging of certain members of his cabinet –
Hamilton chief among them – and authorized the use of military force.
Specifically, he called into federal service a force of militia drawn from
Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and New Jersey pursuant to the terms of Article
II, Section 2 of the Constitution – i.e. “The President shall be Commander in
Chief […] of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual
Service of the United States [.]” The Militia Act of 1792 had helpfully
clarified the nature of this authority by stating that the President retained
the right to federalize the state militias,
Whenever the laws of the United
States shall be opposed or the execution thereof obstructed, in any state, by
combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial
proceedings, or by the powers vested in the marshals by this act [.]
All that was
required for the federal government to proceed was the certification of a
Supreme Court Justice that the crisis in question was truly beyond the ability
of local law enforcement to contain. Justice James Wilson (1742-1798) delivered
exactly that on August 4th, 1794, whereupon President Washington
issued a proclamation declaring his intention to call out the state militias to
suppress the ongoing rebellion in Pennsylvania. Amidst a dearth of volunteers,
the deployment of a draft, and a series of anti-draft riots in several of the
affected states, a force of nearly thirteen thousand was raised, with roughly
half dispatched to Carlisle, Pennsylvania before proceeding on to Pittsburgh.
While this selfsame militia force
did meet with some small degree of resistance during its westward march in the
late summer and early autumn of 1794 – several civilians in Carlisle were
killed resisting arrest, another was mortally wounded during an altercation
with a militiaman – the final confrontation anticipated by some and dreaded by
others never actually materialized. Washington travelled to the region
personally to both review the assembled militia and confer with local
representatives but departed before the force reached the affected region.
Placed under the command of Revolutionary War veterans Henry Lee III
(1756-1818) and Daniel Morgan (1736-1802), the federalized troops finally
entered Western Pennsylvania in October 1794, at which point the incipient
rebellion they had been sent to confront more or less evaporated. The leaders
of the pro-resistance faction almost all fled westward into the Northwest
Territory or took refuge in the mountains. Of those that remained, only a
handful – twenty-four in total – were ultimately arrested and brought back to
Philadelphia for trial. These men arrived in the American capital on Christmas
Day amidst a parade by the militia accompanied by the ringing of church bells
and the firing of cannons. In the end, only ten men were tried for treason, and
only two were convicted and sentenced to death. His point having been made –
namely that the federal government was not to be defied in the enforcement of
the laws that it devised – Washington quickly moved to pardon them both.
Seeking to explain his decision to be merciful, the President declared in his
seventh and penultimate State of the Union Address one year later that,
Though I shall always think it a
sacred duty to exercise with firmness and energy the constitutional powers with
which I am vested, yet it appears to me no less consistent with the public good
than it is with my personal feelings to mingle in the operations of Government
every degree of moderation and tenderness which the national justice, dignity,
and safety may permit.
Though the federal
government had thus demonstrated its willingness to enforce the terms of its
own legislation, the Whiskey Tax remained only sparsely collected for the
remainder of the Washington Administration and into the Adams Administration.
It was finally repealed in 1802, pursuant to the guidance of President
Jefferson.
As with the events which spiraled
out of the Jay Treaty debate in 1795, the circumstances and the outcome of the
Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 served to demonstrate the inclination of George
Washington as President of the United States to interpret certain of the more equivocal
aspects of the Constitution as lending his office specific and significant
practical power. The Constitution, remember, only stated that, “The President
shall be Commander in Chief […] of the Militia of the several States, when
called into the actual Service of the United States [.]” It was accordingly
left ambiguous exactly when this might be the case, or how such a transfer of
authority might function, or whether any other branches of the federal or state
governments might exercise some degree of oversight. The aforementioned Militia
Act of 1792 – passed, it bears mentioning, by a Federalist majority in Congress
– cleared up these vagaries by laying out the circumstances within which the
President could legally assume command of the state militias, but it
nonetheless remained from some occupant of that selfsame office to assert the
concomitant authority according to their own rationale. This, of course, is
exactly what Washington did. Responding to what appeared to be an armed
rebellion on the American republic’s western frontier – and urged on at length
by advisors like Alexander Hamilton – President Washington determined that the
situation warranted calling the state militias into federal service and sending
them to enforce the laws that were then being flouted. The result was not
particularly tidy – there were deaths, as aforementioned, and draft riots, and
pitiful scenes of American militiamen leading their fellow citizens through the
streets of the capital in irons – but it was at the very least outwardly
successful. Washington had ensured that the federal government would not be
trifled with, and that the kinds of post-Revolutionary agitations that had led
to the likes of Shays Rebellion (1786) would no longer be tolerated.
In an era following the American
Civil War (1861-1865) – during which time the Lincoln Administration mobilized
hundreds of thousands of troops and oversaw the slaughter of over half a
million Americans, all with the stated intent of enforcing federal law – Washington’s
almost entirely bloodless deployment of a mere thirteen thousand militiamen to
Western Pennsylvania may not seem like much of an assertion of power.
Notwithstanding the relatively infinitesimal number of casualties involved,
however, it very much was. Washington may not have overseen the destruction of
thousands of American lives in the name of law and order, but he did make a
number of assumptions about that nature of the power at his disposal as
President that had serious implications for the future of the American
republic. Consider, by way of example, the circumstances which resulted in the
passage of the aforementioned Militia Act. Far from seeking to enable the
President of the United States to respond to potential civil disturbances, the
intended purpose of the legislation in question was to empower the federal
government to bring the military resources of the various states to bear in the
event that the native peoples then successfully fighting off American
settlement in the Great Lakes region ever decided to go on the offensive. It
was only a year prior, in 1791, that General Arthur St. Clair (1737-1818) had
led a contingent of the much-downsized American Army to one of the worst
defeats in its history at the Battle of the Wabash in present-day Ohio, and the
Washington Administration was in something of a panic to prevent the situation
on the frontier from deteriorating any further. The result, in addition to a
dramatic enlargement of the peace-time military of the United States of America
– the final result of which was the defeat of the relevant native confederacy
in 1794 and the seizure, by treaty, of most of what would become the state of
Ohio – was the aforementioned legal clarification of the authority of the
President to summon and command the various state militias.
Bearing these circumstances in mind,
Washington’s invocation of the Militia Act in response to the events of the
Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 constituted something other than what the law was
designed and intended to accomplish. The threat (presumably) facing the United
States at the time of the Militia Act’s passage was a confederacy of native
tribes empowered by their victory over Arthur St. Clair to potentially invade
settled areas of Pennsylvania and Virginia. The threat that led to its actual
invocation was a campaign of civil resistance on the part of a group of
disgruntled residents of Western Pennsylvania who felt as though their economic
and political rights were being consistently ignored. The resulting leap of
logic was both pragmatic and precedential. Desirous of some means to confront
what appeared to be an increasingly organized insurrection on the Western
frontier, Washington and his Federalist advisors seized upon the one passage of
the Constitution and the one piece of federal legislation which between them
seemed to offer a viable solution. Most assuredly, neither the relevant section
of Article II nor the Militia Act of 1792 were intended by their authors to
enable the President of the United States to draft the state militias into
federal service for the purpose of enforcing federal law. Then again, there was
nothing in either of the selfsame texts explicitly prohibiting exactly that
usage. What it came down to, in the end, was a question of interpretation. Unsurprisingly,
the Washington Administration opted to read the law literally rather than
adhere to some uncodified understanding of how and why a given power was
supposed to be exercised. A looming crisis was at hand, and it doubtless seemed
to matter very little to the likes of Washington and his cabinet that some of
the tools at their disposal were intended for other uses.
This outcome is
made especially significant when one considers the attitude broadly held by the
members of the Founding Generation towards the very concept of a standing army.
Central to many of the petitions issued by various individuals and
organizations in the Thirteen Colonies during the 1760s and 1770s, after all,
was the assertion that Britain’s ongoing deployment of professional troops in
its American possessions represented an incipient threat to American liberty.
As many of these remonstrances pointed out, the English Bill of Rights (1689) –
one of the cornerstones of contemporary British constitutional law – stated explicitly
that, “The raising or keeping [of] a standing army within the kingdom in time
of peace, unless it be with consent of Parliament, is against law [.]”
Parliament may have approved the relevant distribution of British soldiers in
America, but the legislatures of the various colonies had not. Britain’s
actions thus constituted a violation of the spirit of the Bill of Rights, if
not the letter. No laws had been broken, but the original purpose of the law
had been flagrantly ignored. A free people should not have had to live in fear
of armed men residing in their midst whose loyalty was owed to some distant
government rather than to their fellow citizens. Successive British governments
ignored these complaints, of course, eager as they were to both maintain law
and order in America amidst their ongoing attempts to levy unpopular taxes and
to continue to employ the sons, brothers, nephews, and cousins of influential
families. Consequent to this obstinance, and the resulting association in the
American popular imagination between standing armies and tyrannical
governments, many people in the United States continued to view the concept of
a peacetime standing army with acute and abiding suspicion even decades after
the end of the Revolutionary War.
The effects of
this attitude on American foreign and domestic policy during the immediate
post-Revolutionary era could at times be rather severe. Eager to live up to the
principles by which it had justified its resistance to British authority and
ultimately prosecuted a war for independence – and keen, also, to cut as many
costs as possible in light of the sizeable debts it had accrued in the process
– the Continental Congress set about downsizing the army it had first raised in
1775 almost as soon as peace with Britain was finalized in 1783. From a high of
eighty thousand men, the Continental Army was reduced in 1784 to a bare of
seven hundred divided between a series of garrisons on the Western frontier and
a permanent artillery contingent at West Point, New York. But while this course
of action was certainly both economical and philosophically consistent –
placing what little remained of the American republic’s peacetime military at a
significant remove from most of the settled population – it also proved to be
more than a little problematic. On the one hand, the thousands of officers and
enlisted men discharged as a result of the almost complete liquidation of the
American armed forces didn’t just disappear. Not only did these men now need to
seek new employment, thus exerting pressure on the already fragile post-war
American economy, but the need to pay the back wages which they were owed
became an ongoing challenge for both the anemic Confederation government and
that which was later erected under the terms of the Constitution. Some of these
former soldiers became destitute, resorted to crime, or became itinerant
laborers. Others – particularly the farmers among them whose livelihoods suffered
as a result of the sluggish economy – fixed their resentment on the political
status quo and began to organize politically. The aforementioned Shays
Rebellion (1786), during which farmers in Western Massachusetts led by
Continental Army veteran Daniel Shays (1747-1825) attempted to overthrow the
state government in protest over heavy-handed tax policies, was one such
outcome.
And on the other
hand, there was the rapidly apparent fact that the United States of American
did sometimes need more than just a token army. The terms of the Treaty of
Paris (1783) may have legally ceded to the United States a vast swath of
territory in the Great Lakes region formerly allocated by British authorities
to the area’s various native inhabitants, but attempts to actually settle the
same between the years 1785 and 1795 effectively proved that such a massive
transfer of sovereignty was more easily said than done. The garrisons stationed
in the newly-established Northwest Territory pursuant to the aforementioned
plan by Congress to downsize the American military after the end of the
Revolutionary War very quickly showed themselves to be completely inadequate to
the task of either protecting existing American settlements or enlarging the
land area under practical American jurisdiction. Settlers were killed,
communities destroyed, and the official response was anemic at best. In 1790,
General Josiah Harmar (1753-1813) suffered a series of defeats in engagements
between his force of regular and militia troops and the various war parties of
the Western Confederacy. The following year, the Governor of the Northwest
Territory – the aforementioned Arthur St. Clair – led a second major expedition
to an even larger defeat, with over six hundred of his one thousand-strong
force killed and some two hundred and sixty wounded. This understandably sent the
Washington Administration into something of a panic and prompted the passage of
the aforementioned Militia Act in the spring of 1792. In the event that the
newly-enlarged professional army, which Congress had also authorized, either
took too long to recruit, train, and deploy or else failed in its duties once
it was deployed, the President would thereafter retain the authority to call
the state militias into federal service upon the certification of a
duly-informed Supreme Court Justice.
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