American History Hit - The Whiskey Rebellion

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

The Whiskey Tax, imposed in 1791, was the first federal tax on a domestic product by a United States government. It was introduced by Alexander Hamilton to pay the interest on war bonds that had been issued to wealthy backers of the the American Revolution. But many Whiskey distillers in Western Pennsylvania refused to pay a tax that would only benefit a few rich bond holders. Over the course of three years, there were attacks on federal and local tax collectors and the region became a law unto itself. A situation only suppressed, as William Hogeland tells Don, by President George Washington gathering together a militia of 12,000 men and marching to Western Pennsylvania . Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Thomas Ntinas. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long. For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It is July 15, 1794. Federal Marshal David Lennox has been delivering subpoenas to whiskey distillers in Pennsylvania who have refused to pay the whiskey tax, the first domestic product tax imposed by United States government.

Lennox arrives at a farm about 10 miles south of Pittsburgh, accompanied by local tax inspector General John Neville. Suddenly warning shots are fired in their direction, forcing both to flee. Neville returns to his mansion, Bower Hill. Lennox returns to Pittsburgh. The next day, a local militia of around 30 men surround Neville's fortified home and demand the surrender of Lennox, who they believe is hiding inside. Neville shoots one of the men, mortally wounding him. The militia opened fire but are forced to retreat by those defending Neville's home.

But the fight is not over. The militia returned the following day, now 600 men strong. Neville has by now fled the house and is hiding in the nearby ravine. Women and children are allowed to leave the house before both sides begin firing at each other again. By end of day, Neville's house will have been burnt to the ground and its occupants finally surrendered. So ended the Battle of Bower Hill,

one of the flashpoints of what will become known as the Whiskey Rebellion. Good day. I'm Don Wildman and this is American History Hit. Thanks for joining us. Death and taxes, as the old saying goes, are the only sure things in life. Can't do much about death, sadly, But here in America, doing something about taxes is a way of life for many people. It is the rallying point for political parties, fuels campaigns, empowers causes, extremist and otherwise.

It sits at the very center of political discourse in American politics. After all, resisting taxation was the very spark that lit the fire of revolution against the British. And two and a half centuries later, the Tea Party lives on. But of course, a government needs revenue if one means to have a government. a government at all. The question is how much revenue and where's it come from? And what's it going to be used for? And those questions underscored the first really heated debate that began about taxation in the first years of a brand new United States back in the 1790s. It's called the Whiskey Rebellion, and it happened out west when out west was the Appalachian Mountains and

George Washington was the president. And the arguments that arose from this political standoff in the woods of western Pennsylvania would become the stuff of American identity. politics, really for centuries to come. Fortunately, today we have an expert on the subject, the prolific author William Hoagland, who wrote the book on it, The Whiskey Rebellion, which I've enjoyed very much. William Hoagland, great to have you on the show. Oh, thanks for having me on. I love history that is immediately relevant.

And the Whiskey Rebellion seems to be exactly that. Let's set this up. Why whiskey and what's this rebellion we're talking about? Well, it really starts with Alexander Hamilton, who lately people have become more aware of. than they were when I first started working on the subject. And why whiskey to backtrack a little bit to get to that, you know, Hamilton wanted to levy a tax. He was the first Treasury Secretary of the United States,

and his idea was to put the nation on what is routinely called a good financial footing, a good credit footing. What that meant really in practical terms, in the terms of actual sort of like founding finance, was to levy a tax on a whole American people in the sense that a uniform tax in that sense. It would only be applied to, people distilling whiskey, so it's not on the whole people. But it is interstate. That was a new move

to have an interstate tax. This was a critical thing, an interstate domestic tax on a domestic product. This was a huge unifying factor for Hamilton. That's how he kind of thought about unifying the country. And the purpose of the tax would be to basically be earmarked to pay interest on a set of bonds, war bonds that had been issued, especially to a small group of well-off Americans who had invested in the revolution. To get them near 6% interest in a reliable way, an interest, by the way, that wouldn't be subject to tax because no one talked about a tax on interest income in those days. And whiskey, well, for a complicated set of reasons, whiskey was the thing he decided to put this excise tax on. Let's back up just a moment. The ideals and the sort of

mythology of revolution comes down the ages to us as the grand armies marching against each other. But back in the day, you had to pay for this thing, just like everything else. And we're talking about a government that doesn't have any money. So it begins to do what you do when you have no money, you borrow it. And you create bonds that we will be paying off later on down the road. A lot of that was done during the war itself. And that all comes home to roost when Washington becomes president. And this money needs to be paid back.

This is the situation we're generally in, in the, the late 1780s coming into the 90s. Am I right? Yes. It seemed critically important to note that the money to fight the revolution, much of it had to be borrowed. And we're often sort of given the impression that this was all borrowed from foreign governments. And of course, there was indeed a foreign debt. The really important debt to Hamilton was the domestic debt, as I've just said, like the debt to wealthy Americans who were kind of in the lending business, an investing class of the day, a small number of people who invested in the war in a patriotic sense, of course, and also as a

money-making opportunity. And one thing I'd modify about what you just said, the only thing I'd really modify, is that Hamilton's goal really, this debt wasn't to him a problem that had to be solved once the revolution was over. It was an opportunity, really, to kind of unify the country and connect this rich class of small, rich class of investors to national aims. So not, really, his goal wasn't really to pay it off, not fast. His goal was to fund it, as we say, the funding plan, it's called that. But what does that mean? It means to sustain the debt, pay it off slowly, pay it principal down slowly, and pay regular interest potentially for, you know, a generation or two to a small, you know, class of people who are doing very well by making this

money and whose interest payments and just general sense of interest, their own personal interest, would be yoked to big federal projects. That was kind of the Hamilton scheme, you know. Amazing how, you know, right from the starting gate of the United States, you have the central argument to what kind of country this will really be. Will it be a federalist society or a Republican society? Will it be Hamilton or Jefferson? That's in the first administration. It never stops, that argument continues to this day. And you're absolutely right to point that out to me. The idea of a national government is something that needs to be fuel. It needs an engine. And the real engine of a national government, ironically, is debt, is this continuing role it plays in the governance

of the nation by assuming the debts under Hamilton's plan to assume the debts of states and the war and the national debt and then begin to finance it. And this becomes an ongoing role the government plays for better or worse, but that's the central idea of this thing. Many people around the country at that time, these former colonies, are in a bit of an uproar about this idea. Taxation in those days was primarily something that happened to imported goods. It wasn't something that was done to individuals. Fair to say? Yes, Hamilton's idea had existed before he took over during the period of the Continental Congress, Hamilton's mentor, the superintendent of finance for the Congress, Morris, a fascinating character in his own right, and really the person from whom Hamilton learned

much about this kind of public finance. And Morris is an amazing guy. I mean, he was a funny person, just a social person, a huge risk taker in his own merchant endeavors, an investor, a financier, really the first banker of the United States, you know, a war profiteer, a mingle public and private funds with impunity and just a fascinating person in his own right. But he was, in terms of Hamilton, he was his mentor. The only real mentor. and finance, Hamilton ever had. So this idea that the way to unify the country would be through a tax, an American sort of interstate tax, came from Morris. But originally, to your point, even Morris was kind of presenting this as a tax on imports, like a federal tax, which would, in that sense, consolidate

the country, but on imports. Morris always told his people, including Hamilton, that once we get this federal tax on imports, well, then we could start pushing toward, like, excise taxes and who knows what taxes on land. We could push from there. But you're right, the original idea of a domestic federal tax was quite startling to a lot of people when Hamilton had it imposed by Congress. Let's just do a sort of basic idea of the geography of this country right now. The Philadelphia is still in the nation's capital. Pennsylvania is sort of the seat of power in this country at that point. But things are developing quickly. When you get West, so-called West, as I said in the introduction. You're not really needing to go further than Ohio. You know, that's kind of the great

Western frontier of this era. How many people are really out there? I mean, how much settlement has been going on in those days? Well, it was sort of spasmodic. The frontier would get pushed back periodically by war with the people who already lived there, the indigenous nations that actually held a lot of that territory and used it and lived in it and so forth. So the frontier was moving to whatever extent that it could. But I would say you mentioned Ohio. That's true. The Ohio country, as was known then, but really even western Pennsylvania, where the Whiskey Rebellion actually sparked, that was considered Wild West by a lot of people in the East. And population was, I mean, white settled population was fairly low, although it also had a history of having been, you know,

settled in that sense by British people and by French people as well during that period. But yeah, there was a divide, let's say, between the East and the West. And the West, you know, as you pointed out in your introduction, we think of the West, of course, as the farther West now. But at the time, you know, western Pennsylvania, western parts of Virginia, western parts of Maryland, cross the Appalachian chain there just across. This was a remote area when it came to politics, finance, and everything else. So this new tax is levied in about what year? 1790, 7091?

Yeah, 1791, yeah. It is specific to whiskey because whiskey is a very important product in this part. of the world. Yeah, that's right. Whiskey, surprisingly, maybe, I don't know, whiskey was having a huge boom at that moment. American drinking habits were changing, and Hamilton, you know, was all on top of all of this stuff. He was an incredible, he could work up a subject, you know, like nobody else. He knew the distilling industry inside out, and he realized this potentially a huge industry, because American drinking habits were shifting from rum and so forth to distilled whiskey, meaning, in the case of Western Pennsylvania, distilled from rye. So there's kind of two

prongs of that. There's the fact that Hamilton sees a potential large American industry involved in distilling, and the fact that a lot of that boom, somewhat counterintuitively, maybe, was driven by small, scattered, artisanal, occasional production, so that you have a lot of poor people, especially out in the West, and especially around Ohio River Headwaters and western Pennsylvania, making what, you know, was considered really a lot of places in the East and all the way down in New Orleans, the really good stuff, like the good whiskey. And it's not all being made by big commercial distillers, although they existed too. The small artisanal, occasional farmer is able to compete on price and quality with the bigger, more sort of commercial farmers. And so this was a

huge boon to small operations out west where there was no actual physical money a lot of the time, very much reduced to subsistence-level farming by what they considered, you. you know, regressive policies of the East, but they could get some cash for this product because it was always going to be wanted across the mountains to the East and even farther away than that. It was also a good way of using your bounty. You know, if you had more of you, if you harvested more grain than you could sell or corn, you can make that into something that sticks around easily. That is, well, that preserves itself, which is liquor and then sell that elsewhere. It's another agricultural product in a sense, but it's one that doesn't go bad.

as opposed to grain that ferments and gets moldy and so forth. So the actual tax is called an excise tax, which is being placed on the product itself. I went into the weeds on this because I was so fascinated by the differences in taxes. You hear these words, you don't know what they mean. Exise tax is different because you're actually taxing the product itself. And this was a first time in America that this had happened. Yeah, it was the first time a federal version of an excise had been levied. There had been some state excises, including on whiskey, actually, including in pencil.

But the idea of a federal tax of this kind was new. And yet, it's levied on the product. Hamilton presented this to Congress somewhat innocuous luxury tax because, look, we're just taxing the product, the producer of the product. He pays the tax, or they could be small farming families too, pay the tax at the point of production collected by federal officers. That's true, in cash, up front before moving the product. But he said, you know, the thing about this kind of a tax is the producers just passed.

that cost, the cost of the tax on to the consumer in the form of a higher price. So they just roll it into the price. So what's the problem? It's not a painful tax, despite what all these people out West are saying. What he didn't mention to Congress is that it's true. Everyone had to pass this on in the form of a higher price. But the thing is, he structured the tax to make it very heavily benefit the large commercial type producer and penalize the smaller producer. And the way it was structured, it was actually quite easy for the business. bigger producer because they were more efficient. They had more commercial industrialized operations, the kind of thing Hamilton wanted to encourage throughout America. Well, they were able to actually

cut their per gallon cost of the tax down to pennies, fractions of what the smaller producer was paying. In both sides of this competition, small and big, both have to pass the tax on, the consumer, well, what happened is the smaller producers would have to raise their price and the bigger producers could lower their price. And this was part of Hamilton's idea for the country. And as a whole. He wanted efficient, large, consolidated commercial industry. He didn't want all this kind of labor and financial power scattered around, you know, small artisanal farms and so forth. So he built that into the whiskey tax, and people in the West who were the small artisanal farmers could see that that's what he was doing in a way that Congress wasn't quite as astute about.

And that's what started to make them really mad. I'll be back with more from William Hoagland after this short break. This gets pretty dramatic, pretty quick. I mean, tar and feathers become an issue pretty soon. But before all that happens, there is an actual force. I mean, this becomes a system. We're going to need to go out and monitor these producers. We're going to have to keep track of product.

We're going to have to do all this stuff. We're essentially going to have to invade people's privacy, so to speak, and find out what we can tax and how much is out there. So this whole idea of the government coming in, into your property and finding out what they can tax. This is the world we're used to. You know, I fill out my W-2s. You know, taxes as a normal part of life. And though, of course, I don't like it, I accept it as part of life and the ordinary routine of it all. This is brand new stuff for those frontier Americans. Yeah, a cadre of federal officers. Actually, I mean, the Treasury Department got

huge. It was the biggest cabinet department very quickly. And the service for collecting, you know, this tax created an internal revenue because it wasn't an external tax, like an import tax. Well, the internal revenue service, which of course, as you're saying, we're like, oh, yeah, the IRS. Well, there hadn't been a federal internal revenue service before. And it was, you know, to collect this tax, yes, to your point, these officers have to show up at your farm, your family farm, you know, could be like you have the small still outside your house somewhere. They're there.

And they're checking out its size and they're writing it all down. They're testing your product with a hydrometer to take its. it's alcohol level. And they're collecting money. Once they've collected the money, if you have it, they certify your product to, with a stamp, to go out to market. This is a pervasive system throughout the states. We're focusing on Western Pennsylvania because that's where the rebellion got sparked.

But the whole idea Hamilton had, he thought of this as a huge positive. This is in a sense to put the federal government's kind of fingertips everywhere, you know, I mean, in some senses literally on people's farms and so forth. And yes, this was a startling development. to a lot of people. Oh, my hackles are already going up. I mean, the feeling of being out there in the middle of nowhere, many of these people fought in the revolution, which had as its central issue, the taxation from the British. I mean, the issue was well known. And suddenly it's turning around. Suddenly the federal government is asking for money from ordinary people. But the real issue was

not the taxation that they took exception to. They understood that taxes had to be paid. It was who they were paying these taxes too. Am I right? Yeah, it's interesting because the whiskey rebellion is so often seen reasonably enough as the first great American tax revolt, because, you know, it was. But that makes it sound like they objected to taxation sort of on general principles, which they didn't, nor did they even necessarily object to a whiskey tax. The thing is, before they did all the tar and feathering and even sort of concurrent with that and before it turned into a really dramatic fight, they did write petitions. They did get together and organize in a nonviolent way as well. And there was a lot of pointing out on paper to the government.

Like, this doesn't work for us. And one reason it doesn't work for us is that it's not that it's taxation. It's that it's unequal taxation. I mean, they actually used those kinds of terms. They were saying, this tax does not operate in proportion to property. That's pretty close to an exact quote from one of the petitions, which puts these kind of poorer, you know, supposedly less informed farmers and artisans and so forth in remote places a little bit ahead in some ways of the Jefferson

Republican kind of opposition to the federalists, which was a much more rigidly anti-tax ethos. It makes them seem surprisingly sophisticated, I would say, in retrospect, the objectors to the tax, the poorer people, the less educated people. They were kind of calling for the beginnings of something we might call progressive taxation. I still don't understand. Why did they object? I mean, how did they see the unfairness of this taxation? Well, they could see it a couple of levels. One is that they were keenly aware that the tax was structured to benefit the bigger producers and penalize them. But beyond that, they knew that the tax was earmarked to pay interest on those war bonds we were talking about before. The rich Robert Morris's and all

those. Yes, exactly. The Morrises of the world were going to benefit from this tax very directly in cash payments every year and their children and maybe their children's children. All right. They weren't going to pay tax on that income, those rich people, but the Tax was being drawn, ordinary people felt, from ordinary people who couldn't afford it to benefit rich people. I can only imagine the broadsides being made out there in western Pennsylvania and the rallies that started to happen. You mentioned the petitioning. We're talking about a conflict, really, that happens over a period of about four years. When do things really get heated up? I mean, these inspectors start coming out and they get tared and carried around town on their poles. I mean, it's really a thing that happens. It gets quite violent.

It does get violent. And, yeah, first you get these attacks, as you were talking about, which were bad. They were bad. If you're tired and feathered, you know, it's not a prank. It's a very violent act. But that stuff was a little bit, I don't know, more common back then. I mean, certainly the revolution and the lead up to the revolution. There had been enormous amounts of tarring and feathering and so forth.

And those kinds of riots, it was called riot. Weirdly enough, there was sort of a place for that, even in some fairly conservative thinking at the time. Like, this is a safety valve. It's how the people express themselves. We're not going to give them the vote because they don't have enough property. So sometimes they have to riot. It wasn't like anyone liked it, but it didn't necessarily seem outlandish. What starts to happen in the West, that is in the five western counties of Pennsylvania,

is something going well beyond riot because, as you mentioned before, you know, these are now Revolutionary War veterans. They're actually used to being organized in non-riot kind of formations, actually military formations. And you begin to get a kind of takeover, a shadow kind of government starting, to emerge for the five counties based on the militia system, which would became identical with an organization called the Mingo Creek Association in Washington County, which was essentially anti-exise enforcement group that had a lot of people in it and kind of almost like became a replicant of the sanctioned state militia because the ordinary people served in the militia.

And you start to get kind of a takeover of the whole area by an armed, organized, military, government in a sense that isn't really an official government. And that starts to get pretty intense because they start enforcing, you know, they're not just attacking tax collectors. They're also attacking people living in the area who are part of the federalist Hamiltonian system and they're attacking people who comply with the tax and burning down their barns and shooting up their stills and basically enforcing a paramilitary kind of situation throughout the western part of Pennsylvania. And that gets pretty heavy. How does Washington see all this?

We've talked about Hamilton and the profiteers and all that. Where does Washington fall? I mean, this is a man who is a farmer. Plus, he's very familiar with Western Pennsylvania itself. Washington was more familiar with Western Pennsylvania than many of his colleagues in the East because he'd been out there a fair amount in his younger days and even not in his very young days. But the thing is about that is that's sort of interesting is Washington himself was a major sort of player in the land speculation game, the Western land speculation game. His own property out there, he had a lot of property out there,

which he was trying to profit from. And while today we see these kinds of things of like, oh, I don't know, doing business from within the Oval Office, doing your private business from within the Oval Office as fundamentally corrupt, he didn't really see it that way. It wasn't the Oval Office yet. But he was running his own businesses at the same time he was being president. And his own interests out there were very much allied with the larger interests of what he saw the interests of the country, which is we have to have sovereignty in the West. We have to have orderly process. We have to have an orderly procedure for transferring property. And he saw both the indigenous people of the West and these white people, these poor white people of the West, for whom, I have to say, unfortunately,

he had very little sympathy as a type of people. He had been out there a lot, and he felt he knew these people pretty well. And he didn't really see, he saw them as largely kind of low-life squatters and not his kind of people. And so, no, there really wasn't a lot of sympathy there, actually. And he was very concerned to establish U.S. hegemony within its borders, including all the way out throughout, in fact, the whole Northwest Territory past Pittsburgh, where the indigenous people were also putting up some resistance. So he was very eager to suppress this movement of the people who became whiskey rebels. In many ways, American governance is set up in the Constitution as to check the violence of the mob. I mean, the Electoral College, for example,

and so forth. Many things baked into the American governance is about keeping control of things like the Whiskey Rebellion. Was this the first organized militia push against the feds? Yeah, I think it was. I mean, there had been many pushes here and there before, and certainly one of the sparks to create the national government, to create the Constitution, was the famous Shea's Rebellion of Western Massachusetts, which was very similar. It was also based very much on objecting to these finance that what poor farmers and artisan class in Western Massachusetts had seen in the 1780s as a regressive set of policies that was coming down on them for the benefit of those same few rich people, bondholders. So that had happened in the 1780s, but of course the

federal government didn't exist then. And it came into existence in large part to create an ability to suppress just such events. So this is really the first test of that. And Washington takes up this opportunity. Tell me about the organization of his response and how that transpired. Washington decided that using the very new U.S. Army, the first army created in the national context, would be a bad idea for this to suppress the Western uprising, partly because that army was small and was very involved in trying to suppress the indigenous nations further west, so it was busy.

He also felt that it would look politically bad. if the brand new army that had been created against a lot of pushback in Congress was suddenly used to suppress American people, he said, they're just going to say, this is why we got the army. So that's not a good look, you know. So instead of using the U.S. Army, the new U.S. Army, Anthony Wayne's Legion, he raised 12,000 troops from militia in the east. 12,000 is more than had beaten the British at the Battle of Yorktown to effectively win the War of Independence. It was a major move against really quite a small number of citizens

in the Far West. So they raised largely a photo op kind of level of like, look, this is American might. We can put down revolution, rebellion, insurrection within our borders. And then, I mean, that organizational process, Hamilton basically took over as kind of a shadow secretary of war, because Henry Knox, who was secretary of war, was off busy doing some of his own, checking into some of his own properties in Maine, Hamilton took that opportunity happily to become kind of a secretary of treasury and war. And he really did a lot of the administration of raising those forces, which was hugely challenging. Where did they come from? He put the call out to the governors, right? Yeah, New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia and Pennsylvania, certainly in the eastern

parts, mainly from the cities. But yeah, put calls out to some of the governors, yes. So they would have been collecting militia. I'm just curious about the dynamics of this kind of thing, mechanics of it. These days you have National Guard and so forth, but these kinds of are loose militia in these states that suddenly get called up, or are these guys actually registered in some way? Oh, well, the entire able-bodied adult male population really kind of was militia. That was the idea. So yes, they were registered. I mean, you know, you were supposed to show up at musters. It was an obligation of citizenship, basically. So the militia and the public are kind of, a certain aspect of the public element in the public are kind of considered.

identical in a way. This mission appealed to a lot of young men, some of whom had missed the revolution and were looking for some sort of cheap glory. And there was a lot of fighting about like uniforms and who was going to get to wear what uniforms. And the officer class was a lot of it was sort of upscale young guys from the cities. And the rank and file was what often happened in these kinds of situations. There was a kind of backdoor draft. I mean, people with no other options were often sort of Shanghai into taking up the real like, you know, grunt soldier roles in these things. And there was, you know, as they developed, as they started going west and so forth, I mean, there were huge desertion problems. And some of the soldiers would have been sort of sympathetic

possibly to some of the aims of the ordinary people out west. Others were really geared up to just loot, plunder, and, you know, have a ball. So it was a weird army to raise. We're five years out from ratification of the Constitution, roughly speaking. This is a brand-new country that many of these young people would have been very excited about. As you say, they could fall on either side of that spectrum. But there's something to fight for that is still very new. And these people who are rebelling against, just to be clear, there was even a secession movement within the Western Pennsylvania groups to create its own little land. I mean, it got real serious. Yeah, that's right. I don't think we should underestimate the seriousness. As I was just saying,

you know, before, I didn't really, you're right. It's key to bring that up, the secession aspect of this. I mean, once you have this kind of shadow government, I don't know what you want to call it, taking over the five Western counties with its paramilitary arm and so forth, you begin to get a sense that like, you know, what are we doing subject to these people from across the mountains who've never cared about us anyway, have never given us what we want or are suppressing us with these horrible tax and finance moves for the benefit of a bunch of rich Easterners and bankers. Let's just have our own country out here.

They can't get to us, you know. We're marksmen. We can defend the mountain passes. And there was a move, definitely, that came out of the Whiskey Rebellion, and it was part and parcel of it, to create a different kind of country out there in the West. Did they have a president? I mean, did they have a leader, a Jefferson Davis, if you will? No, not really. That's one of the interesting issues.

They didn't really have that. A few people kind of set themselves up that way to a degree. But no, one of the things that went on that's sort of interesting is as these poorer local people began to actually organize, what they wanted was for the better. off people in that same area to serve in a way as leaders. And they pressured better off people to kind of commit themselves to this cause, renounce the federal government, and take leadership roles because leadership roles were then still as sort of small de-radically democratic as some of these people were. They still wanted the upscale kind of at the front to lead in that sense. And that created some serious tensions on the scene as well as tensions with the federal government.

So this marching 12,000 men across Pennsylvania, so let me set this scene. It's 1794. George Washington is back on his steed in front of a huge amount of people. 12,000 men are marching towards Western Pennsylvania. That in itself speaks volumes as to how serious this whole effort was considered. What was happening in Western Pennsylvania was one of the building blocks on which this nation was going to be built. the idea of taxing in new and different and creative fashions. So the stakes are very high. Does he expect a battle? Yeah, what the expectation would have been is interesting.

They had a lot of intelligence the federal government did about what was going on out there because they had had a whole long process of negotiation, which failed. It was kind of the same way Washington used a kind of sham negotiation process with the indigenous people further west. He used the same idea with the rebels. A deal was offered to the rebels by the federal government. If everyone in this region signs a kind of loyalty oath and stands down and so forth, we won't bring the troops. And that negotiation was said by the federal government to have failed,

although actually most people signed the loyalty oath and stood down because it was too scary. I mean, the idea of this kind of force coming against your neighborhood and so forth was quite scary. Yeah. But it was very important to Washington and Hamilton to move those troops anyway. And so I don't think by the end, I mean, by the time they marched, I guess I would say, I don't think they were expecting necessarily a big battle. Maybe some of the officer class who were kind of looking for a big battle were hoping for one and may have been disappointed in the end. But I don't think Washington and Hamilton necessarily did expect any kind of big battle, no. And did they arrive at the field of battle and there is no opposition?

Yeah, it was more like they didn't really arrive so much at the field of battle as, you know, I mean, there were wings of this army. Some had to come up from Virginia, so forth. Washington rallied them in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. And then Washington turned back, actually, at Bedford, PA, and turned the whole thing over to Hamilton and Henry Lee, the governor of Virginia, who kind of took over. And as Washington got further and further away from the action as he headed back to Philadelphia, it wasn't so much they arrived at the field of battle. It was more like an occupying army showing up, pretty much taking over the region. and not really expecting to fight so much as to just put the boot down on the whole region, which they did with great force. For the first time in the United States, young days of this country, the federal government brings the hammer down.

They show the strength of resolve that is this nation's purpose. Interesting sidebar, this is the only time that an American president leads forces within the nation at the front of this marching 12,000. Yeah, that's right. The upshot of this moment in time is that there's a tipping point, isn't there? The beginning of federalism really takes place outside of the Capitol. To that point, I think to riff on that a little bit, I think it's kind of interesting what happens with the opposition between the federalists on the one hand and the kind of what are called the Democratic Republicans, the Jeffersonian crowd on the other during this moment. there had been great opposition by the opposition party, by the Jeffersonians, to the tax, the whiskey tax. They saw it as overreach. They were more kind of rigidly anti-tax than even the people who became whiskey rebels were, as I've said. But what's really interesting is as the whiskey rebellion turned into a real rebellion and as those secessionist activities really started to take off.

And as Washington and Hamilton sort of, Hamilton wrote anonymous pamphlets that sort of propagandized the whole East kind of in opposition. to the opposition, to the idea that, you know, these people are going up against the American government. There was huge sort of patriotic fervor to put down this rebellion. Well, it's really interesting how the Jeffersonians just kind of settled down and quieted down during that period. They just didn't have a particular position on the whiskey rebellion. They were not supportive of it. They couldn't really afford to be. I mean, politically, it was just kind of a non-starter. So you get this moment where actually there's this kind of that huge conflict that existed then between the Federalists and the Jeffersonians, gets really muted during the suppression of the

Whiskey Rebellion. And I find that a really interesting moment in the early period of the country. It becomes a slippery slope that has many chapters to come, obviously. The development of this relationship between the federal government and us, the people, taxation remains an enormous part of that conversation. But it goes further. There are benefits and disadvantages to everything. And so we set out on this road. This is one of those incidents that the average American doesn't think very much about, but once they understand, they get a foothold in how this evolution takes place, which is my personal mission in life is to back people up.

And I know you've been doing that in a much more educated and sophisticated fashion with fantastic books that you've written on this. This is just one of them, the Whiskey Rebellion. William Holgland, you write in an accessible fashion about American history that spells it all out. And I really invite people to peruse your lists and get to work on these really interesting subjects. Thank you so much for joining us, William Hogland. I hope we do it again on another one of your books.

Thanks very much, Don. It was really fun. Hey, thanks so much to our guest today, William Hogland. If you like what you heard, please don't forget to review and subscribe to American History Hit. And today, we've got something extra for you. We're so glad to bring you a preview of another podcast we enjoy. It's called The Last Archive. On The Last Archive, journalist and Harvard historian Jill Lepoor investigates the history of truth or the lack thereof. It's about how we've arrived at the current fake news moment, and it's about how we know what we know and why it seems these days as if we can't agree on anything at all.

And like we do here on American History yet, the Last Archive looks at how the past informs how we understand our country today. This season, Jill's telling stories about common knowledge, from high school juries ruling on the truthfulness of political ads, to the revolutionary cloud scientist who predicted the future of weather. In this preview today, she explores one of the roots of human knowledge, the encyclopedia. Jill looks at the history of an improbable enlightenment idea, tracing it from Encyclopedia Britannica to Wikipedia and beyond. Okay, here's the clip. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. You can hear the full episode and more from the last archive wherever you get your podcasts.

Imagine there's a place in our world where the known things go. A corridor of the mind. Lined with shelves, cluttered with clues, stocked with books. I haven't been here in a while. I was looking for my copy of Five Acres in Independence. It's got to be somewhere. Hmm. Glad to see my collection of 18th century.

Almanacs is still here. Uh, mid-20th century political posters. Damn, it's getting dusty, though. Out of the cupboard of board games. Weird. What's the stack of twigs doing here? Jeez. Hello? Good afternoon, ma'am. Have you ever wished you own the sum of human knowledge?

The library that never closes. Oh, I already have a library. This is a library. This is the last archive. Didn't you see the Big Breast sign? side? I don't get it. What are you selling anyway? 29 volumes. 28,150 pages. 44 million words of text. When in doubt, look it up. Oh, okay. Really sorry. Thanks, but... Seems so cruel, but Mr. I've already got one. Right here. I've had it for a very long time. Step across the threshold to my family's front door. In 1916.

the day the encyclopedia arrived. I was six. Up till then, I'd experienced only a few exciting deliveries. Remember, there was no Amazon then. Not much got dropped off by truck. At least not at our house. Once we got a new refrigerator, a truck pulled up. Two guys rolled it off on a little rolling cart,

wheeled it into our yellow kitchen. Mostly, I remember using the cardboard box that the fridge had come in to build a fort. That was pretty fantastic. But the encyclopedia was even better than the fridge. My mother unpacked the volumes from brown boxes and lined them up on a shelf in the living room. 22 big, fat, important-looking, very serious books.

That would look like leather binding, cream-colored. And gold-leaf-edged pages like a Bible. Color photographs, maps. And the thrill didn't end there. Every year we'd get another shipment. Updates. You were supposed to go back into the original volumes and insert new pages.

Sometimes the updates came with stickers that you were supposed to place over the outdated information. My family didn't have a lot of books. That encyclopedia set really was the superstar of our family library. I loved everything about it. The smell, the fanciness,

the way they lined up like a regiment of soldiers. All there, on a shelf in the living room next to our stack of board games. Monopoly, sorry, clue. The encyclopedia? It was like this box with no box. bottom. Endless knowledge. Encyclopedias for decades were sold one by one door to door.

Knowledge doesn't often travel in quite that way anymore, hand-selling a knock on the door. How did that start? How did it work? Why did it end? It seemed important to understanding how we gain access to knowledge today. So I asked a world-class expert, a wizard at the art of selling a walking library. And I would just knock on their door and I'd have the little card with me and I'd say, hi, this is Myron Taxman from Encyclopedia Britannica. You sent in for some information and I was in the area here, so I thought I'd stop by and show you what we have. Myron Taxman started selling encyclopedias in Chicago in the 1960s when he was 22. He sold encyclopedias for nearly 30 years. He lives in Florida now. I bet a lot of ex-encyclopedia salesmen live there.

But back in Chicago, in his heyday, Taxman loved his work. He adored it. Myron Taxman, he's like a character in a short story by John Updike or maybe Kurt Vonnegut. Except you cannot make this guy up. You know, if I had a call Sunday night, why not? So you go out for an hour and make a sale. Taxman is so good at selling that after talking to him for a while, I should confess that I was pretty sure I'd buy just about anything from this guy. but you can't sell something you don't believe in. And he believed in encyclopedias. He believed in bringing the sum of human knowledge to American households,

door by door by door. We would bring out what we call the giant broadside. Well, the giant broadside was a life-size picture of the whole full set of books, and you threw that out right in front of them, right under their feet, so they couldn't even move their feet. I picture the giant broadside as a folded-up cardboard display, oh, the size of a dining room table. The tax one would unfold like an accordion and lay out on the floor like a magic carpet.

And then the real coup d'etat was you brought out a nice leather-bound gold-filled sample of Britannica. And then you did a little presentation with that. You put it in their hands so they could hold it and play with it. that feeling. It made my mouthwater just hearing textmen talk about it, the feeling of holding that sum of human knowledge in your hand, playing with it. I want that feeling back. Welcome to the third season of The Last Archive,

the show about how we know what we know, and why it seems lately as if we don't know anything at all. I'm Jill Lepore. The first season of the Last Archive was a who-done-it, who killed Truth. I went back over the last century. to look at forces that undermine people's ability to get the facts and to get to the bottom of things. The second season uncovered the history of doubt from rational skepticism to mindless

conspiracy theories. I met frauds and hucksters and fakes, people peddling nonsense. So for two seasons, the first two years of the pandemic, mind you, I told a lot of stories about the origins of a lot of problems. That got to be a little depressing. This season is the antidote, my Survey of Solutions. This season is all about common knowledge. Common in the sense of ordinary, ordinary knowledge held by ordinary people, ordinary things that people agree on, and common in the sense of communal, shared, held in community, as a public good. Is that kind of knowledge still possible? Knowledge that we all have, knowledge that we all agree upon? That feeling of holding an encyclopedia in your hands? It's priceless.

Encyclopedias are very old. They've been around for thousands of years. For all but the last few centuries, they existed only in manuscript, copied by hand, and they were for scholars, a tiny number of philosophers. Encyclopedia Britannica had been first published in Scotland in 1768, a product of the Enlightenment with its faith in education and reason and the diffusion of knowledge.

Think of all the other projects that got started then. Libraries, public schools, self-government. All these years later, it's still called Encyclopedia Britannica. But really, it ought to be called Encyclopedia Americana. By the end of the 19th century, most of its sales were coming from the United States, where striving, self-made Americans really loved its democratic ethos, knowledge for all. Eventually, the company itself moved to the U.S. It's one thing to compile knowledge.

It's another to spread it, to take that knowledge stored up in universities, and make it common, make it ordinary. Britannica came up with a very American way of diffusing knowledge, peddling it house by house. This is the part that really fascinates me. Even before most Americans had telephones or electricity, you could get, in a way, hooked up to this huge network of information. Encyclopedia companies, though, they didn't invent this method of door-to-door sales. Bible salesmen did. The Bible runs as little as 49.95. And we have three plans on it.

Cash, COD, and also they have a little Catholic on a plan. Which parent plan would be the best for you? The A, B, or C? It was awfully easy for selling encyclopedias to fit right into this niche, evangelical capitalism. In the 1920s and 1930s, Britannica was owned by Sears Roebuck, the department store company with a giant mail order catalog. Sears trained a sales force that would grow to more than 2,000 strong to sell encyclopedias door to door. How salesmen symbolizes in a way the function of all salesmen, which is to bring goods

or services to the attention of the consumer and to help the consumer buy. Like Bible salesman, Britannica salesman worked from scripts. Mostly, they learned these scripts from each other and from the best salesman. They learned those scripts from Myron Taxman. That's him in an old Britannica training video. Encyclopedia salesmen, like Bible salesmen, knocked on the doors of families they've gotten leads on. A lead is the name or address or phone number of someone who might likely buy the stuff you're selling.

That was a preview of The Last Archive from Pushkin Industries. Hear more from The Last Archive, wherever you get your podcasts.