The Whiskey Rebellion: Why you should know about it

If you’re reading this, I’d like to thank you for choosing to do so. I’d also like to encourage you to do your own research on the facts that I’m about to present to you so that you can draw your own educated conclusions about an event which happened shortly after the formation of the US government which I believe clearly illustrates the manner in which even people with the best of intentions abuse the power of government.

The Whiskey Rebellion, for those of you unfamiliar with it, was an uprising that was initiated and carried out by the people on the Western frontier on the fledgling United States of America which was at the time Western Pennsylvania. The frontier was a quite rural place, with most people who chose to live there possessing a common spirit of independence. These people were also as a rule quite self sufficient, as the lack of well maintained roads to the East making it quite difficult to transport goods. Consequently, the farmers of the frontier who grew grains found it quite difficult and not financially beneficial to attempt to send their surplus grain East to market. As an alternative to wasting their surplus, they produced whiskey with it. Whiskey, as you can imagine, had value. Whiskey was and still is far more shelf stable than grain and it was used for barter. And it was also good for drinking. Making whiskey with your surplus grain was a no brainer for a farmer on the early frontier. It just made sense.

Enter the US federal government. In 1791, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton convinced the Congress to levy a tax on the production of whiskey. This tax, he claimed, was necessary to pay of the debt that the states had incurred during the Revolutionary War. But as is often the case with government rules, this tax had a greater impact on some than it did on others. In this case, the tax was 50% greater for small producers of whiskey than it was for large ones. It was not only the fact that the tax was a greater burden on the small producers of whiskey that drove them to organize and rebel against the government however. It was that the government essentially dictated to those people on the frontier that they somehow had a legitimate claim on what didn’t belong to them, and that government demanded that they pay up, or else.

From the time the news of the newly created tax reached the frontier until the summer of 1794 tensions worsened. Many farmers and small distillers refused to register their stills and pay the tax. Tax collectors were treated poorly to say the very least. Finally, the inevitable happened and the first shots of the rebellion were fired. In response, the federal government under the direct supervision of George Washington demanded the presence of the tax protesters in court, declared Martial Law in August of 1794. This enabled him to summon the militias of Pennsylvania and Virginia as well as men from other states and march on to Western PA to face the protesters in October of that same year.

In what was truly a sign of the acts the people of government will commit to impose their will, especially when they’re not spending their own money, Washington’s march on the rebellion was an epic failure. He had mustered nearly 13,000 troops to take against the tax protesters, yet they could find no more than a couple dozen protesters to arrest. There were no epic battles, only a few arrests. And less than a decade later, in 1803, the tax was repealed.

So what should we learn from this episode in US history? Well, for starters, how much money was wasted do you suppose? I’d be willing to bet far more was spent flexing the muscle of the new US government than they would have collected in taxes from those farmers that dared oppose the dictates of the government, even if they had collected those same taxes for a hundred years. There is speculation that Washington, together with Alexander Hamilton, chose to use the self proclaimed powers against the rebels as a test of their newly formed government’s power. I believe that may probably be true, but I’ll leave you to form your own opinion as that was not ever established as fact. In any event, the choice to muster and take troops against the very people that the federal government was allegedly formed to protect in order to collect a tax, spending wildly in excess of the potential tax itself to do so was both illogical and ineffective. But, logic never applies when dealing with brutes who want what isn’t theirs now, does it?

You’re here on the DP hopefully because you want more liberty. I hope you’ll come to realize that true liberty means that you have no claim on what isn’t yours, and that all governments, no matter how principled, stake a claim on what is not theirs. That is why the Whiskey Rebellion is important, and that is why I wanted to share it with you.

Thanks for reading.