A spirited rebellion

As anyone with a hangover on April 15 knows, taxes and whiskey have never mixed. George Washington learned this lesson the hard way when facing off against the largest organized resistance to federal authority between the Revolution and the Civil War: the Whiskey Rebellion.

In the years after Yankee victory at Yorktown, the nascent United States became shackled to a foe far more tyrannical than a British monarch: budgetary imbalance.

By 1791, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton proposed to tax "spirits distilled within the United States, and for appropriating the same," in an effort to sober up federal coffers intoxicated with wartime debt. Congress levied the excise - the nation's first internal revenue tax - despite the opposition of Thomas Jefferson and other Anti-Federalists.

Small-scale farmers in South Carolina, Kentucky, and western Pennsylvania couldn't swallow the stuff. Their grievance was not humbug. Whiskey, for most farmers living on the frontier, acted as ersatz currency in their local specie-starved economies - especially Monongahela Rye. Many viewed the government's tax on their distilled grains as the work of despotic city-slicking elites.

The course of the farmers' protest-cum-rebellion mirrored the darker effects of whiskey itself. Over the next few years, initially peaceful protests became belligerent. Tax officials collected little else than tar, feathers, and bruises, while "Whiskey Rebels" disguised in housedresses heckled government supporters and burnt their crops.

In May 1794, William Rawle, a federal district attorney, issued subpoenas for more than 60 Pennsylvania distillers who had not paid the tax.

In the summer of that year, rebels set fire to the home of John Neville, the western Pennsylvania tax supervisor. Five thousand farmers gathered just outside Pittsburgh, fabricating fake guillotines and taunting President Washington to remove them if he dared.

Washington found himself pickled. Less than two decades separated the rebellion against burdensome taxes from that other successful tax-sparked insurgency - which he himself had led. Still, people must pay taxes; rules must be followed. His hand was forced.

The "insurgents" threatened to "shake the government to its foundation," and so must be put down, the president confided in a letter to Virginia Gov. Henry Lee.

A militia of nearly 13,000 troops from Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, and Virginia soon mustered. Under the command of taxman Hamilton and Lee, the avant garde of federal force marched toward western Pennsylvania.

Clearer heads prevailed before any large skirmishes, with the rebellion dissolving before troops arrived in force. Hundreds of alleged rebels were nonetheless arrested, with 10 suspects tried in court. Two were convicted, the first federal treason convictions in the United States.

Washington, having reinforced the loose union he helped stitch, pardoned both.