The
Whiskey Rebellion by William Hodgeland, 2006, Excerpts
Hamilton’s goal for
the domestic debt remained making reliable payments to creditors and inspiring
confidence in federal bonds as articles of investment and trade. Wealth would
be concentrated in the hands of moneyed investors. Their ambitions would fund
the nation’s ambitions.
In January of 1790,
Hamilton filed his proposed plan, the Report on Public Credit. The product
Hamilton proposed to tax was distilled spirits. Hamilton presented a letter for
the Philadelphia College of Physicians, who said that domestic distilled
spirits, the cheap drink of the laboring classes, had become a ravaging plague
requiring immediate treatment. It was easy to see a federal excise tax on
whiskey as an innocuous luxury tax, easily passed on by distillers to drinkers,
surely nothing to tar and feather anyone over.
March of 1791, the
Whiskey Tax became law. The tax redistributed wealth by working itself deeply
into rural people’s peculiar economic relationship with whiskey. Many of
Hamilton’s congressional opponents wouldn’t have understood that relationship.
Hamilton did. Alexander Hamilton knew that in getting the act passed was a very
smart bomb on a target he’d been softening for years. The secretary of treasury
was celebrating a victory in a long struggle over nothing less than the power
of money in the lives of the American people.
Passed by the first
Congress of the United States in March 1791 heralded the first federal tax on
an American product.
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