The Whiskey Rebellion by William
Hodgeland, 2006, Excerpts
Washington felt he knew the Forks well. He’d been getting
immensely frustrated with the major project of his life, western land
speculation. In five decades, that speculation had given him a total of sixty
thousand acres across the Appalachians. He’d deployed land scouts with
instructions to break and get around laws limiting tract size. He’d threatened
and bullied people who were eyeballing plots to which, by virtue of having
eyeballed them first, he claimed title. When the royal proclamation of 1763
prohibited land purchases west of the mountains, he told his agent to buy there
anyway. The War of Independence legitimized his titles by overturning royal
injunctions. After the revolution, he showed no patience for illegal
possession: he spent much energy bringing actions against squatters, disdaining
their idea that title – or at least affordable rents – should be offered to
those willing to live on and improve the land.
Making Mount Vernon pay for itself was always a problem. He
needed full rent. He had a constant need for cash. He’d hoped to gain solvency
through collections of western rents and then – when canals and roads were
supported by the government and built by his own company, when Indians were
suppressed by the United States Army, when regional government became what he
called well toned – make a fortune by selling those lands.
But his hopes for the west were growing dreary, his patience
thin. The land was still squatted on; rents were uncollected The absence of
cash in the west was well known to Washington: he had to accept grain and other
barter as rent, which always sold for less than he knew it was worth.
The whole problem was becoming encapsulated for Washington
in the western people’s resistance to the tax law, which hadn’t been enforced
anywhere over the mountains, from Kentucky to the Northwest Territory. Failure
to collect a national tax imposed an embarrassing limit on the national reach.
Tax resistance weakened big creditors’ confidence in the financial stability of
the United States, which had promised to pay bondholders interest derived from
excise revenues. To make up the shortfall, Hamilton had been forced to propose
new federal taxes: excises on snuff, sugar, and carriages, as well as stamp
taxes and new import duties. Because such taxes shifted burdens back to eastern
merchants and creditors, now even federalists were worried about excessive
taxation.
The western land bubble would soon burst for everybody if
lands appeared not to be under effective control of the United States.
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