The Whiskey Rebellion

Book Review

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The 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 Washington's 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 Slaughter's 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 America's history that demonstrated the central government's 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 Walpole's 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