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    The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America's Newfound Sovereignty
    The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America's Newfound Sovereignty
    The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America's Newfound Sovereignty
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America's Newfound Sovereignty

    Written by William Hogeland

    Narrated by Simon Vance

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A gripping and provocative tale of violence, alcohol, and taxes, The Whiskey Rebellion pits President George Washington and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton against angry, armed settlers across the Appalachians. Unearthing a pungent segment of early American history long ignored by historians, William Hogeland brings to startling life the rebellion that decisively contributed to the establishment of federal authority.

    In 1791, at the frontier headwaters of the Ohio River, gangs with blackened faces began to attack federal officials, beating and torturing the collectors who plagued them with the first federal tax ever laid on an American product - whiskey. In only a few years, those attacks snowballed into an organized regional movement dedicated to resisting the fledgling government's power and threatening secession, even civil war.

    With an unsparing look at both Hamilton and Washington - and at lesser-known, equally determined frontier leaders such as Herman Husband and Hugh Henry Brackenridge - journalist and popular historian William Hogeland offers an insightful, fast-paced account of the remarkable characters who perpetrated this forgotten revolution, and those who suppressed it. To Hamilton, the whiskey tax was key to industrial growth and could not be permitted to fail. To hard-bitten people in what was then the wild West, the tax paralyzed their economies while swelling the coffers of greedy creditors and industrialists. To President Washington, the settlers' resistance catalyzed the first-ever deployment of a huge federal army, led by the president himself, a military strike to suppress citizens who threatened American sovereignty.

    Daring, finely crafted, by turns funny and darkly poignant, The Whiskey Rebellion promises a surprising trip for readers unfamiliar with this primal national drama - whose climax is not the issue of mere taxation but the very meaning and purpose of the American Revolution.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJun 5, 2006
    ISBN9781400172474
    The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America's Newfound Sovereignty
    Author

    William Hogeland

    William Hogeland has published in numerous print and online periodicals, including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, and Slate. He lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York.

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    Reviews for The Whiskey Rebellion

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    • 4/5
      This is a detailed look at an often-overlooked episode in the early history of the American republic, the Whiskey Rebellion.

      We now take for granted the success of the new United States of America after the American War for Independence, but it was far from a foregone conclusion. Under the initial Articles of Confederation, adopted in 1781 when formal ratification by all thirteen original states was completed. The Articles contained a fatal flaw: the Congress had no power to tax and could only request funding from the states. This meant, effectively, that it could make all the decisions it wanted, but it had no power to implement them. The Congress could not manage or prevent conflicts between states, could not take effective action without unanimous support of the states, and was generally unable to provide any of the benefits of a national government. Because of this, the early USA was in danger of coming apart, with some states even making overtures to Britain.

      The Constitutional Convention was convened to revise the Articles to correct these problems. In fact, the delegates, or important leaders among them, including James Madison and George Washington, recognized that the Articles were essentially unfixable. Creating a functional government required abandoning them and starting from scratch. The result was the US Constitution as we now know it (minus all the amendments, of course), which after ratification took effect in 1789, with George Washington elected as the first President essentially unopposed. (In fact, the Constitution would not have been ratified if Washington, truly the most respected and trusted man in the country, had not agreed to serve in that capacity.)

      But that makes everything sound too simple, clean, and easy. In fact there was a significant body of political opposition to a strong central government. The Federalist Papers were written to address that opposition and get the Constitution ratified, but in the longer run, the fundamental disagreement about how the United States of America should be governed, and even how it should be understood, remained.

      One of the critical powers gained under the Constitution was the power of direct taxation, so that the federal government was no longer dependent on the voluntary financial contributions of the states. Initially, that power was exercised only in tariffs on imported goods. This wasn't sufficient to deal with the debt incurred, both nationally and by the individual states, during the Revolution, however, and in 1791, at the urging of Alexander Hamilton, Congress passed an excise tax on domestically distilled whiskey.

      This was far more politically explosive than we would expect today. It became a major expression of the conflict between the Federalists (Hamilton and his political allies) and the Anti-Federalists, America's first opposition political party, of which Thomas Jefferson emerged as a major leader.

      It also became a major expression of the conflict between the relatively urban, developed, and prosperous coastal populations, and the rural, much less prosperous western fringes of the new country. Particularly in western Pennsylvania, where whiskey production was a source of critical extra income, the excise tax on whiskey was deeply unpopular, and provoked violent resistance. This in turn provoked, eventually, military action, led by President George Washington, to suppress the rebellion and enforce the tax.

      This extremely well-written and well-researched book is, essentially, the Anti-Federalist viewpoint on that conflict. Hogeland has a very negative view of Alexander Hamilton, and does not concede or even mention the critical ways in which the assumption of the states' debt and the commitment to paying the entire debt at face value benefited the fledgling United States and continues to do so.

      That said, precisely because of that viewpoint, Hogeland gives us a detailed, thoroughly researched, look at a part of early America that's often overlooked, the lives of the ordinary people outside the major population centers of the new country. It's sometimes frustrating, but a useful and interesting contribution.

      Recommended.

      I borrowed this book from the library.
    • 4/5
      As a Pittsburgh transplant, I love finding new historical bits about my adopted hometown. I first heard of the Whiskey Rebellion during a tour at a local whiskey distillery, Wigle Whiskey (totally necessary product placement), which is named after one of the accused rebels. The Whiskey Rebellion is the only time in The history of the United States that a sitting president has led troops against his own citizens. Fascinating stuff.Long story short, in order to pay our country’s debts from the Revolutionary War, Alexander Hamilton (yes, the one from the musical) lobbied for a tax on whiskey production. Unfortunately, this tax was designed to disproportionately affect small, independent stills, and not the larger corporate enterprises (deja vu, anyone?). Citizens of Western Pennsylvania were especially hard hit, and a (sometimes violent) grassroots resistance formed to fight the whiskey tax.Hogeland does a good job of balancing the drier, dates-and-names portion of the tale with the utter insanity of the times. The book is definitely meant for more serious historians, but I think that even the average reader will find the subject matter fascinating. The Whiskey Rebellion is an important part of United States history, and the story has many parallels with events today.
    • 4/5
      The best book I have found so far on this subject.
    • 4/5
      An amazingly dense, minute-by-minute account of the Whiskey Rebellion which took place west of the Alleghenies in frontier Pittsburgh and environs. You are introduced to John Neville, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Isaac Craig -- very famous names in the Pittsburgh region. There is a Neville Island in the Ohio just downstream from the city, and my sister once lived on Craig street in the Oakland region.What is most surprising is the view of Alexander Hamilton and his role in all this. He seemed to precipitate it by trying to raise revenue for the new nation. Unfortunately he tried to raise it by taxing whiskey, the finished product of grain distillation. Of course the grain wasn't taxed, but the farmers couldn't ship that across the mountains to the east and make any profit. They could on whiskey. Hence the rebellion. I can see now why Burr shot Hamilton; he would have met the same fate in western Pa.
    • 4/5
      Very informative book. When I first began it, I thought it was going to be a little light. Turned out that was definetly not the case. Very good. Once again to understand where we are look to wence we came.