The Whiskey Rebellion by William
Hodgeland, 2006, Excerpts
The whiskey rebels weren't against paying taxes. They were
against what they called unequal taxation, which redistributed wealth to a few
holders of federal bonds and kept small farms and businesses commercially
paralyzed. Farmers and artisans, facing daily anxiety over debt foreclosure and
tax imprisonment, feared becoming landless laborers, their businesses bought
cheaply by the very men in whose mills and factories they would then be forced
to toil. They saw resisting the whiskey tax as a last, desperate hope for
justice in a decades-long fight over economic inequality.
Some of the whiskey rebels envisioned stranding the seaboard
cities, vile pits of unrestrained greed, on the far side of the Appalachian
ridge and leaving the coast a vestige. Some imagined a new west, spiritually
redeemed, with perfect democratic and economic justice: small farmers,
artisans, and laborers would thrive, while bankers, big landowners, and lawyers
would be closely regulated, even suppressed. Believing they could wrest their
country back from frontier merchants and creditors, the rebels wanted to banish
big businessmen as traitors to the region even while fending off the distant
federal government in all its growing might.
Alexander Hamilton and his allies saw enforcing the whiskey
tax as a way of resolving that fight in favor of a moneyed class with the power
to spur industrial progress.
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