What Happened to the Two Men Convicted of Treason During the Whiskey Rebellion?
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It would not take long after the adoption of the Constitution for the office of the President to exercise its power to pardon. First issued by George Washington on November ii, 1795, the pardon put a public end to the primeval major instance of civic violence in the U.s. since the Constitution's establishment vi years earlier. The presidential action forgave two Pennsylvania men sentenced to hang for treason, simultaneously quelling a nascent uprising and proving the power of the chief executive. The men's crime? Protesting the about sensitive of matters: whiskey.
For years, Washington had disagreed with Alexander Hamilton, his Treasury Secretary, on how to handle the insurrection of farmer distillers on Pennsylvania's southwestern frontier that came to be known as the Whiskey Rebellion. In 1791, Congress had passed an Excise Whiskey Taxation championed past Hamilton, who believed this start taxation on a domestic product would shrink the national debt amassed during the Revolutionary War. Hamilton fifty-fifty established a national revenue collecting arrangement to ensure the success of the tax.
The Treasury Secretary considered liquor a "luxury" item, when in reality the revenue enhancement encumbered the poor farmers on the state'south western and southern frontiers the almost. Rugged roads made shipping any goods costly, but whiskey could be moved more efficiently than grains themselves. The liquor became their master "crop," even being used every bit a currency in some locales.
When the farmers learned that the new law'southward regressive revenue enhancement rate varied based on the size of the stills, not the book of the product – circumstances that favored the wealthy – they refused to acknowledge the tax. Some revenue collectors, afraid of the public outcry, stopped collecting. Those that persisted were met with similar tactics that many of the protestors – largely Scotch-Irish, English and High german immigrants -- had witnessed but years before during the fight against British "revenue enhancement without representation."
On September 6, 1791, Robert Johnson, a revenue enhancement collector, approached Pigeon Creek, an area along the Monongahela River in southwestern Pennsylvania. Responsible for the Alleghany and Washington Counties, Johnson had the chore of visiting whatsoever property in his territory with a notwithstanding and collecting the levies in cash. His territory held especially good production: "Monongahela Rye" was a favorite on wealthy tables further east.
For at least two months, Johnson knew, farmers had gathered at places like Redstone Old Fort, a remnant of the French and Indian War, to voice their discontent, plan protests, and send out instructions to distillers throughout western Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley of Virginia. The message was clear: refrain from helping, communicating with, or above all, paying tax collectors. The Pittsburgh Gazette printed resolutions that labeled officers equally "inimical" forces deserving of antipathy for profiting from an economic injustice.
At Dove Creek, Johnson faced more than refusals. No fewer than 16 men, armed and bearded with soot, bandanas and women's clothing, grabbed him and took his horse. The attackers stripped Johnson, tarred and feathered his body, and cut off his hair. Johnson walked miles to notice aid but lived. The attack on Johnson was i of the primeval detailed in letters betwixt Hamilton and Washington.
Throughout the post-obit year, reports of protests, threats, and isolated fierce acts (rarely deaths) spread through Appalachia from southern New York to due north Georgia. Washington charged Pennsylvania Senator James Ross with negotiating with the rebels, a chore that also fell to members of the state senate, courtroom clerks, local lawyers and police enforcement. The protestors saw the men of authorisation equally complicit in their oppression.
The National Gazette sympathized with farmer distillers, writing on May 17, 1792, "A revenue enhancement at a rate between 24 and thirty percent … produces a degree of oppression that is unknown in any state, which has a claim to freedom, and must necessarily discourage manufacture to an extent beyond adding."
Hamilton saw the acts every bit an barb to the sovereignty of federal government. Repeatedly, he asked Washington to act swiftly earlier the rebellion grew wider. Such a "persevering and fierce opposition to the Constabulary," needed "vigorous & decisive measures on the part of the Government," Hamilton wrote in a letter on September ane, 1792. "My present clear conviction," he stated, "if competent bear witness can be obtained, [is] to exert the total force of the Law against the Offenders."
Washington believed that "forbearance" would settle the conflict. Hamilton saw waiting as a weakening of the national authorities in its first domestic claiming.
"Moderation enough has been shewn: 'tis time to presume a unlike tone," wrote Hamilton. "The well tending office of the community volition begin to call back the Executive wanting in decision and vigour."
"It is my duty to come across the Laws executed," Washington responded, stating that the government could no longer "remain a passive spectator."
On September 9, 1792, just more than a twelvemonth after the attack on Johnson, Hamilton pushed for a presidential announcement that decried the acts. He drafted a alert for farmer distillers to "desist from similar proceedings" or face the law. Washington agreed, issuing 1 based on Hamilton's draft that calendar week.
Secretary Hamilton sent at least one revenue officer cloak-and-dagger into an organizational meeting held in Pittsburgh, hoping to find incriminating evidence. It wasn't easy. The frontier appeared united in protesting the tax or protecting those who did. In his letters to Washington, Hamilton repeated timelines of events, encouraging the president to accept military action. Washington issued more proclamations. Reports of attacks proliferated.
The rebels threatened to burn down the houses of revenue officers on the frontier who did not renounce their offices and plough over paperwork. Ringleaders set many buildings aglow, including the barns of eyewitnesses who talked to local law enforcement. Judges drew up warrants for sheriffs to make arrests, merely the officers were afraid.
"The prevailing spirit of those Officers," wrote Hamilton, "has been either hostile or lukewarm to the execution of those laws."
The Whiskey Rebellion culminated during the summertime of 1794, when General John Neville, a war veteran and Inspector of the Revenue, received word on July 16 that a crowd would soon arrive at his domicile with their demands.
Neville armed his slaves and a group numbering almost 100 arrived. Neville fired the offset shot, killing an opposition leader. The following twenty-four hour period, betwixt 400 and 500 men returned. Anticipating a 2nd fight, Neville had asked local magistrates for militia aid but was told "very few could be gotten who were not of the party of the Rioters." Nigh a dozen came to stand up with him against the several hundred rioters.
Property a truce flag, a group of protestors approached the house, asked General Neville to footstep exterior, renounce his office and manus over his accounting. A negative response led to gunfire between the ii groups, and afterwards the opposition set burn to surrounding buildings and finally Neville'south home, his campsite surrendered.
The increased number of rioters forced Washington'due south hand. Aware of rumors that the opposition spoke of torching Pittsburgh, Washington gave the rebellion one terminal chance to peacefully desist. Throughout August of 1794, a government commission met with resistance leaders yet failed to strike an agreement.
Hugh H. Brackenridge, a local lawyer, served as a mediator betwixt the federal government and the farmers from the outset of the rebellion. On August 8, 1794, Brackenridge warned Tench Coxe, Hamilton's banana secretary of the Treasury, against sending the militia to quell the protestation. Years later, Brackenridge's son included his father's memoirs in a book nigh the insurrection.
"Should an attempt exist fabricated to suppress these people," Brackenridge told Coxe, "I am afraid the question will non be whether you volition march to Pittsburgh, but whether they will march to Philadelphia, accumulating in their course, and swelling over the banks of the Susquehanna like a torrent – irresistible, and devouring in its progress."
Washington authorized military intervention in a argument on September 25, 1794, saying that militia forces from New Bailiwick of jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia had responded with "patriotic alacrity in obeying the call of the present, though painful, however commanding necessity." Washington himself would pb the troops, approximately 1300 stiff. The number, the president said, was adequate "according to every reasonable expectation."
Before long after arriving in central Pennsylvania, Washington realized that rumors and reports had inflated the opposition'due south confidence. In his diary, he wrote of coming together with insurgent leaders in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on October ix, 1794. The men said that "they had got alarmed" at news of the militia'south advance. They committed to accepting the governance of ceremonious authorization.
Recognizing that his men would not be met with resistance, Washington presently left and Hamilton helped to pb the troops for two months.
The attack on Neville'due south house, all the same, would non go unanswered. On November 14, in what would later be labeled as "the dreadful night", the Hamilton-led militia spread through southwestern Pennsylvania, invading homes in the early morn and absorbing boys and men they believed to accept taken part in the Neville raid. The militia secured 150 suspects, merely due to a lack of prove or eyewitness testimony, just most x fabricated it to trial. Only two men, John Mitchell and Philip Weigel, were convicted and sentenced to hanging, unfortunate enough to take eyewitness testimony place them at Neville'south business firm. Twice, Washington issued stays of execution, and his pardon came on November two, 1795.
One month later, in his seventh State of the Matrimony Address, Washington explained his conclusion to pardon Mitchell and Weigel. Hamilton and John Jay drafted the address, equally they had others, before Washington made the final edit.
"The misled take abandoned their errors," he stated. "For though I shall always call back it a sacred duty to do with firmness and free energy the constitutional powers with which I am vested, however it appears to me no less consistent with the public good than information technology is with my personal feelings to mingle in the operations of Government every degree of moderation and tenderness which the national justice, dignity, and rubber may allow."
With these words, Washington justified his approach to civic unrest: to await to do his "sacred duty" until he could understand the state of affairs well enough to employ "every degree of moderation and tenderness" that it would allow.
Hamilton's letters don't reveal his personal response to the pardon, but seven years before, in Federalist No. 74, he had advocated for the president'southward correct to extend pardons, fifty-fifty in the case of treason. The position disagreed with founders such as George Mason, who thought the power of a pardon belonged to Congress, non a solitary human being with his own political agenda.
"It is non to be doubted," wrote Hamilton, "that a single man of prudence and good sense is better fitted, in frail conjunctures, to residual the motives which may plead for and against the remission of the punishment, than any numerous body any."
History has conceded the public end to the Whiskey Rebellion equally an immediate victory for Hamilton and his Federalist vision. Although the militia did not have to fight, it had acted on a president's defense of the Constitution, enforcing the needs of the federal regime over localized protests and regional needs. In 1802, President Jefferson, an anti-Federalist, repealed all directly revenue enhancement, including the Excise Whiskey Tax. Unlike Hamilton, Jefferson saw tariffs as enemies to the constituents of a costless democracy, limiting the worker's ability to do good fully from his labor.
While the pardons showed the power of the presidency, Jefferson's repeal proved the power of American democracy. Even though the farmers lost the rebellion, they succeeded in checking the federal regime's early attain into civic liberties. That legacy of the grappling between government authority and private liberty would go equally much, if not more, a part of the American story as the pardon itself.
Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/first-presidential-pardon-pitted-hamilton-against-george-washington-180964659/
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