The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution

by Thomas P. Slaughter

Book Overview

When President George Washington ordered an army of about 13,000 men to march west in 1794 to crush a tax rebellion among frontier farmers, he established a range of precedents that continue to define... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195051912
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 300 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 5.5" x 0.8" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

The Whiskey Rebellion

I was curious about this little known event and thought that the book would be a good primer. To my pleasure the book is in great depth, well annotated, and from what crosschecking I have done quite accurate. This offers a picture window sized view of both the events and culture in the late 18th C particularly at the western edge of the new United States. The author offers insight into the the motives and thinking of both the "more primative frontier settlers" and their sophisticated Eastern countrymen. The politics of access to the Mississippi River, the Indian conflicts, the advent of the C & O canal and the sense that the west felt poorly represented in Philadelphia are all well addressed. The politics and history offered here are very relevant today, and serve as a primer on taxation and representation. This should be included in any early American history course particularly at the High school level. This is not a quick read, but is very well worth an arm chair and several cups of tea.

Excellent book on a fascinating topic, very fresh, insightful writing

"The Whiskey Rebellion" by Thomas Slaughter is an excellent book about a truly seminal event in early US history otherwise not well explained in numerous other books I have read covering the same time period. Chernow's book on Alexander Hamilton and Peterson's book on Thomas Jefferson, both absolutely first rate gold standard books, have barely a single page each on the topic. The United State had just come together under a new Constitution. The Federal government had just assumed huge wartime debts of the states, and in order to pay these debts, the government enacted an excise tax on whiskey, which the entire western section of the country refused to pay. It wasn't just western Pennsylvania, as Slaughter points out, it was the entire rural western US at the time. Slaughter points out and explains how the tax wasn't fair to the westerners and how the struggle over the tax, more than anything else, caused a division in government leading to the formation of the Federalist and Republican political parties....Big stuff! The book itself started out as Slaughter's PhD thesis at Princeton (my alma mater, too!) and was condensed (!) into this book. The book reads on the slower side, but I had a hard time putting it down because it contained so much fascinating insight. Slaughter does a great job of using primary source quotes to show the westerner's perspective, thankfully picking out the most juicy quotes and facts instead of asking the reader to wade through paragraphs of antiquated language. Slaughter also shows that by time Hamilton convinced Washington to send in the troops, the "Rebellion" was a lot more civil than many in the East had been lead to believe. In fact, future Secretary of the US Treasury (for Thomas Jefferson) Albert Gallatin was one of the leaders of the rebellion. In summary, this is a very fine book that covers a critical period in US history from a refreshingly different perspective. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in early US history, though I would also be reluctant to recommend it to those just beginning to read on this topic. I would also highly recommend the book on Shays's (spelling is correct, three "s"'s) Rebellion by Leonard Richards.

A Brief But Important Part of Early US History

Slaughter's book is the definitive treatment of the Whiskey Rebellion. The Whiskey Rebellion arose in 1794 along the frontier and especially in western Pennsylvania in reaction to a federal excise tax on whiskey. Western farmers relied on whiskey as a crucial cash crop and even as a medium of exchange. An internal tax on this item was greatly resented as an imposition by a distant Eastern government that could not even protect the farmers from Indian attacks. A rebellion of sorts began when federal tax collectors attempted to enforce the law. The west saw the entire episode as a challenge to the liberty so recently won while the east saw it as a challenge to the very notion of ordered liberty. Slaughter relates that the unrest reflected a strong and potentially significant rift between the eastern and western US. Westerners considered that the eastern leaders simply did not care about western problems. In the midst of the debate over the excise tax, St. Clair's Indian expedition met with disaster in the Ohio country - the most complete defeat of the US Army ever. As Slaughter tells it this defeat confirmed for westerners the inability of the central government to protect their interests. By the time Washington marched his troops (derisively called the Watermelon Army) west, the rebellion had already moved from violence to a political phase but Washington wanted to make a point about central authority. Washington, a major absentee landowner, put down what was left of the rebellion with few casualties. Only a handful of rebels were taken into custody, fewer still were charged. The few that were convicted of treason were pardoned by Washington. Washington did not need to be punitive as he had already made his point with his army. Highly recommended.

A Battle for the Meaning of the American Revolution

In October of 1794, President Washington sent an army nearly 13,000 strong across the Allegheny Mountains into the frontier regions of Western Pennsylvania to suppress a popular uprising against the federal government. This event marked the greatest internal crisis of Washington's administration, and the most significant crisis of disunion to the United States prior to the Civil War. This significance of this event, both at the time, and to the continuing debate about the meaning of America, has often been overlooked or forgotten in popular histories. Thomas Slaughter's book goes a long way toward correcting that oversight. The Whiskey Rebellion was a reaction against an excise tax place on spirits, and shared much in common with the similar tax revolt against the Stamp Act that ignited the flames of the American Revolution. Indeed, the Whiskey rebels saw themselves as upholding the spirit of the Revolution, and believed that the leaders of the federal government had abandoned those principles in favor of personal gain. Slaughter does an outstanding job of telling each side of the story without a strong bias toward either side. He paints the rebellion as a massive failure to communicate between the parties involved. The conflict illustrated a deep divide between the East and the West of the country, setting urban against rural interests, localist ideologies against nationalist, and of course, all the familiar divisions that are inherent in class and economic differences. Slaughter describes the federal government and its supporters as having "generally shared a Hobbesian-type fear of anarchy as the starting point for their consideration," while he says that the Whiskey Rebels and their friends "took a more Lockeian-type stance," believing "that protection of liberty, not the maintenance of order, was the principal task of government." The federal government emphasized the power of the Constitution, while the Whiskey Rebels emphasized the much more radical Declaration of Independence. The Whiskey Rebellion was a turning point in America's history. It showed the central government's willingness and ability to enforce its laws even at great distance from it center of power. It was a midwife to the birth of true political parties that emerged in the following years. And it set the parameters of the great political debate of just what the meaning of the American Revolution and what it means to be an American really is, a debate that continues along remarkably similar lines to this day. This book will be of particular interest to those interested in the early Republic and the Washington Administration, the career of Alexander Hamilton, the Federalist - Anti-Federalist question, or the early American frontier. It is well written, well reasoned, and highly recommended. Theo Logos

An excellent portrayal of the events of the rebellion.

This book was well documented and portrayed wonderfully the life of the frontiersmen and how they viewed the "oppression" of the Easterners. However, it equally balances the view of the Easterners toward their perceptions and interpretations of the actions of the frontiersmen. It offers the student of history a very balanced view of what took place two hundred years ago on the western Pennsylvania frontier in a very readable form. Slaughter always manages to give both sides to each issue and interprets the events thusly. Unfortunately, the one issue the author failed to cover was the impact of the frontier church in the shaping of events. Surely with the 2nd Great Awakening on the frontier's horizon this would have implications. The final compliment to the author is that I truly appreciated his stories that started each chapter. These real-life events vividly portray life as it was on the frontier; a hard and sometimes terrifying life. It is this strug! gle of life that we owe our forefathers respect that is deserving of applause. Slaughter did this for these people.