The Whiskey Rebellion: A model for our time?

In recent years, Americans have been subjected to a concerted assault upon their national symbols, holidays, and anniversaries. Washington's Birthday has been forgotten, and Christopher Columbus has been denigrated as an evil Euro-White male, while new and obscure anniversary celebrations have been foisted upon us. New heroes have been manufactured to represent "oppressed groups" and paraded before us for our titillation.

There is nothing wrong, however, with the process of uncovering important and buried facts about our past. In particular, there is one widespread group of the oppressed that are still and increasingly denigrated and scorned: the hapless American taxpayer.

This year is the bicentenary of an important American event: the rising up of American taxpayers to refuse payment of a hated tax: in this case, an excise tax on whiskey. The Whiskey Rebellion has long been known to historians, but recent studies have shown that its true nature and importance have been distorted by friend and foe alike.

The Official View of the Whiskey Rebellion is that four counties of western Pennsylvania refused to pay an excise tax on whiskey that had been levied by proposal of the Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton in the Spring of 1791, as part of his excise tax proposal for federal assumption of the public debts of the several states.

Western Pennsylvanians failed to pay the tax, this view says, until protests, demonstrations, and some roughing up of tax collectors in western Pennsylvania caused President Washington to call up a 13,000-man army in the summer and fall of 1794 to suppress the insurrection. A localized but dramatic challenge to federal tax-levying authority had been met and defeated. The forces of federal law and order were safe.

This Official View turns out to be dead wrong. In the first place, we must realize the depth of hatred of Americans for what was called "internal taxation" (in contrast to an "external tax" such as a tariff). Internal taxes meant that the hated tax man would be in your face and on your property, searching, examining your records and your life, and looting and destroying.

The most hated tax imposed by the British had been the Stamp Tax of 1765, on all internal documents and transactions; if the British had kept this detested tax, the American Revolution would have occurred a decade earlier, and enjoyed far greater support than it eventually received.

Americans, furthermore, had inherited hatred of the excise tax from the British opposition; for two centuries, excise taxes in Britain, in particular the hated tax on cider, had provoked riots and demonstrations upholding the slogan, "liberty, property, and no excise!" To the average American, the federal government's assumption of the power to impose excise taxes did not look very different from the levies of the British crown.

The main distortion of the Official View of the Whiskey Rebellion was its alleged confinement to four counties of western Pennsylvania. From recent research, we now know that no one paid the tax on whiskey throughout the American "back-country": that is, the frontier areas of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and the entire state of Kentucky.

President Washington and Secretary Hamilton chose to make a fuss about Western Pennsylvania precisely because in that region there was cadre of wealthy officials who were willing to collect taxes. Such a cadre did not even exist in the other areas of the American frontier; there was no fuss or violence against tax collectors in Kentucky and the rest of the back-country because there was no one willing to be a tax collector.

The whiskey tax was particularly hated in the back-country because whisky production and distilling were widespread; whiskey was not only a home product for most farmers, it was often used as a money, as a medium of exchange for transactions. Furthermore, in keeping with Hamilton's program, the tax bore more heavily on the smaller distilleries. As a result, many large distilleries supported the tax as a means of crippling their smaller and more numerous competitors.

Western Pennsylvania, then, was only the tip of the iceberg. The point is that, in all the other back-country areas, the whiskey tax was never paid. Opposition to the federal excise tax program was one of the causes of the emerging Democrat-Republican Party, and of the Jeffersonian "Revolution" of 1800. Indeed, one of the accomplishments of the first Jefferson term as president was to repeal the entire Federalist excise tax program. In Kentucky, whiskey tax delinquents only paid up when it was clear that the tax itself was going to be repealed.

Rather than the whiskey tax rebellion being localized and swiftly put down, the true story turns out to be very different. The entire American back-country was gripped by a non-violent, civil disobedient refusal to pay the hated tax on whiskey. No local juries could be found to convict tax delinquents. The Whiskey Rebellion was actually widespread and successful, for it eventually forced the federal government to repeal the excise tax.

Except during the War of 1812, the federal government never again dared to impose an internal excise tax, until the North transformed the American Constitution by centralizing the nation during the War Between the States. One of the evil fruits of this war was the permanent federal "sin" tax on liquor and tobacco, to say nothing of the federal income tax, an abomination and a tyranny even more oppressive than an excise.

Why didn't previous historians know about this widespread non-violent rebellion? Because both sides engaged in an "open conspiracy" to cover up the facts. Obviously, the rebels didn't want to call a lot of attention to their being in a state of illegality.

Washington, Hamilton, and the Cabinet covered up the extent of the revolution because they didn't want to advertise the extent of their failure. They knew very well that if they tried to enforce, or send an army into, the rest of the back-country, they would have failed. Kentucky and perhaps the other areas would have seceded from the Union then and there. Both contemporary sides were happy to cover up the truth, and historians fell for the deception.

The Whiskey Rebellion, then, considered properly, was a victory for liberty and property rather than for federal taxation. Perhaps this lesson will inspire a later generation of American taxpayers who are so harried and downtrodden as to make the whiskey or stamp taxes of old seem like Paradise.

Note: Those interested in the Whiskey Rebellion should consult Thomas P. Slaughter, "The Whiskey Rebellion" (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Steven R. Boyd, ed., "The Whiskey Rebellion" (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985).

Professor Slaughter notes that some of the opponents of the Hamilton excise in Congress charged that the tax would "let loose a swarm of harpies who, under the denominations of revenue offices, will range through the country, prying into every man's house and affairs, and like Macedonia phalanx bear down all before them." Soon, the opposition predicted, "the time will come when a shirt will not be washed without an excise."

BY AUTHORITY

By the president of the United States of America

A PROCLAMATION

Whereas, combinations to defeat the execution of the laws laying duties upon spirits distilled within the United States and upon stills have from the time of the commencement of those laws existed in some of the western parts of Pennsylvania.
And whereas, the said combinations, proceeding in a manner subversive equally of the just authority of government and of the rights of individuals, have hitherto effected their dangerous and criminal purpose by the influence of certain irregular meetings whose proceedings have tended to encourage and uphold the spirit of opposition by misrepresentations of the laws calculated to render them odious; by endeavors to deter those who might be so disposed from accepting offices under them through fear of public resentment and of injury to person and property, and to compel those who had accepted such offices by actual violence to surrender or forbear the execution of them; by circulation vindictive menaces against all those who should otherwise, directly or indirectly, aid in the execution of the said laws, or who, yielding to the dictates of conscience and to a sense of obligation, should themselves comply therewith; by actually injuring and destroying the property of persons who were understood to have so complied; by inflicting cruel and humiliating punishments upon private citizens for no other cause than that of appearing to be the friends of the laws; by intercepting the public officers on the highways, abusing, assaulting, and otherwise ill treating them; by going into their houses in the night, gaining admittance by force, taking away their papers, and committing other outrages, employing for these unwarrantable purposes the agency of armed banditti disguised in such manner as for the most part to escape discovery;
And whereas, the endeavors of the legislature to obviate objections to the said laws by lowering the duties and by other alterations conducive to the convenience of those whom they immediately affect (though they have given satisfaction in other quarters), and the endeavors of the executive officers to conciliate a compliance with the laws by explanations, by forbearance, and even by particular accommodations founded on the suggestion of local considerations, have been disappointed of their effect by the machinations of persons whose industry to excite resistance has increased with every appearance of a disposition among the people to relax in their opposition and to acquiesce in the laws, insomuch that many persons in the said western parts of Pennsylvania have at length been hardy enough to perpetrate acts, which I am advised amount to treason, being overt acts of levying war against the United States, the said persons having on the 16th and 17th of July last past proceeded in arms (on the second day amounting to several hundreds) to the house of John Neville, inspector of the revenue for the fourth survey of the district of Pennsylvania; having repeatedly attacked the said house with the persons therein, wounding some of them; having seized David Lenox, marshal of the district of Pennsylvania, who previous thereto had been fired upon while in the execution of his duty by a party of armed men, detaining him for some time prisoner, till, for the preservation of his life and the obtaining of his liberty, he found it necessary to enter into stipulations to forbear the execution of certain official duties touching processes issuing out of a court of the United States; and having finally obliged the said inspector of the revenue and the said marshal from considerations of personal safety to fly from that part of the country, in order, by a circuitous route, to proceed to the seat of government, avowing as the motives of these outrageous proceedings an intention to prevent by force of arms the execution of the said laws, to oblige the said inspector of the revenue to renounce his said office, to withstand by open violence the lawful authority of the government of the United States, and to compel thereby an alteration in the measures of the legislature and a repeal of the laws aforesaid;
And whereas, by a law of the United States entitled "An act to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions," it is enacted that whenever the laws of the United States shall be opposed or the execution thereof obstructed in any state by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings or by the powers vested in the marshals by that act, the same being notified by an associate justice or the district judge, it shall be lawful for the President of the United States to call forth the militia of such state to suppress such combinations and to cause the laws to be duly executed. And if the militia of a state, when such combinations may happen, shall refuse or be insufficient to suppress the same, it shall be lawful for the President, if the legislature of the United States shall not be in session, to call forth and employ such numbers of the militia of any other state or states most convenient thereto as may be necessary; and the use of the militia so to be called forth may be continued, if necessary, until the expiration of thirty days after the commencement of the of the ensuing session; Provided always, that, whenever it may be necessary in the judgment of the President to use the military force hereby directed to be called forth, the President shall forthwith, and previous thereto, by proclamation, command such insurgents to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes within a limited time;
And whereas, James Wilson, an associate justice, on the 4th instant, by writing under his hand, did from evidence which had been laid before him notify to me that "in the counties of Washington and Allegany, in Pennsylvania, laws of the United States are opposed and the execution thereof obstructed by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings or by the powers vested in the marshal of that district";
And whereas, it is in my judgment necessary under the circumstances of the case to take measures for calling forth the militia in order to suppress the combinations aforesaid, and to cause the laws to be duly executed; and I have accordingly determined so to do, feeling the deepest regret for the occasion, but withal the most solemn conviction that the essential interests of the Union demand it, that the very existence of government and the fundamental principles of social order are materially involved in the issue, and that the patriotism and firmness of all good citizens are seriously called upon, as occasions may require, to aid in the effectual suppression of so fatal a spirit;
Therefore, and in pursuance of the proviso above recited, I. George Washington, President of the United States, do hereby command all persons, being insurgents, as aforesaid, and all others whom it may concern, on or before the 1st day of September next to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes. And I do moreover warn all persons whomsoever against aiding, abetting, or comforting the perpetrators of the aforesaid treasonable acts; and do require all officers and other citizens, according to their respective duties and the laws of the land, to exert their utmost endeavors to prevent and suppress such dangerous proceedings.
In testimony whereof I have caused the seal of the United States of America to be affixed to these presents, and signed the same with my hand. Done at the city of Philadelphia the seventh day of August, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-four, and of the independence of the United States of America the nineteenth.
G. WASHINGTON,
By the President,
Edm. Randolph
Source: Claypoole's Daily Advertiser, August 11, 1794

Our first president was a jack booted thug and an anti-liberty statist! /sarcasm

***The subject of author "Boston T. Party's" next novel is a rebellion against federal authority in libertarian-dominated Wyoming in the near future.

The book is called "Molon Labe" (or "Come and take them, as in guns).

The book is due to be released in a few weeks. Information is available at BT Party's website www.javelinpress.com.
***

Teaser:

Natrona County, Wyoming March 2006:

"Good morning, sir. Here are last night's figures. We have sufficient numbers for five, and almost six."

The dark-haired man behind his desk nods and smiles. He is distinguished like an executive, but also tanned and rugged like a rancher. Little wonder. He is both a rancher and an executive. "Great news, Tom. Five will work. Five is all we need for Phase 1a."

"What about the overflow from number six?" asks the assistant.

"Let's spread half into the first five and reserve the remaining half until September for any surprises."

"Yes, sir. That was my thought, too," agrees Tom.

The rancher executive turns to his computer keyboard and briskly composes a short message, which he PGP encrypts with the public key of a colleague in Phoenix. This he pastes into an email composition window. Above the encrypted message he adds some curious text which looks like a simple computer language and includes several e-remailers' addresses. The entire email was then again PGP encrypted, but with "To's" public key. An envelope within an envelope. Only the email's header (i.e., From, To, Subject) was in plaintext. The Subject line read one question.

He sits back for several moments of calm satisfaction. Then he looks up at his assistant and says, "You've put enormous work into this, Tom. We couldn't have done it without you. Would you do the honors?"

"Yes, sir! Thank you!" Tom steps behind the man's desk, places his hand on the mouse, moves the cursor to the "Send" icon, pauses, and clicks the mouse button. At the speed of light, through two dozen nodes, the email is instantly enroute.

"Iacta alea est," says the man.

"The die is cast," echoes Tom.

The exclamation was attributed to Julius Caesar upon his crossing of the river Rubicon in 49 B.C. against the Senate's orders to lay down his military command. By invading central Italy from the Roman province of Cisalpine Gaul (what is now northern Italy), Caesar kicked off a civil war with his former ally Pompey, a Roman general whose rule extended to Syria and Palestine. Caesar defeated Pompey the next year at Pharsalus and pursued him to Alexandria in Egypt (where he was assassinated). Two years later in 46 B.C., Caesar defeated the remaining Pompeian force in Africa at Thapsus.

"Not that you aspire to become Caesar," Tom qualifies.

"No," sighs the man, "but they will accuse me of it all the same."

*******

Before the two men had finished speaking, the email had already crossed the Atlantic. "To" is a covert e-remailer in Berlin used by only several dozen international libertarians for urgent business. "To" picked up his web-based email from several different public terminals which required no ID or sign-up to log in. Always with Karl Heinz Kolb was his powerful laptop, loaded with virtually every encryption program in existence. It had built-in software and hardware security devices to foil any third-party attempt at usage or data downloading. His friends joked that it would probably convert any snoop into argon gas. Kolb was quietly revered for how seriously he took his computer privacy. There was none his crafty equal in all of Berlin.
Sipping his chai tea at the Potsdamer Platz CyberCafé, he sits down at a terminal, logs onto his Yahoo! account, opens his Inbox, and clicks on the waiting email from aglet@mail.com. Once, Kolb thought aglet was an odd name and so he looked it up. He was surprised to learn that it wasn't a name, but a thing. It is the plastic end of shoelaces that allows you to thread them through the eyeholes. Without aglets, we'd all be wearing sandals or loafers. Whoever aglet was, he evidently appreciated the small, overlooked things which made bigger things not only possible, but common.

The email is a PGP message, which he saves on a floppy. He knows that it had been encrypted with one of his public keys. The "one" in the Subject line's one question means Priority One.

Most public terminals do not have PGP installed, so the 31 year old Berliner must use his laptop. This is really the only downside to web-based email from public computers. Kolb doesn't mind–in fact, he considers it a vital part of the process as he has no intention of sending email from the same terminal he received it. Not even from different accounts, as the IP address would still be the same. Physically breaking up the email chain by using different computers is what makes Kolb's remailing service so solid. His laptop is the only link between them.

Analyzing Kolb's Yahoo! anonymous account would reveal only log- ons from public terminals and the receipt of encrypted remails. Kolb never emailed anyone from that account. Thus, the vaunted Kripos–the Kriminal Polizei–could not learn from Yahoo! who he was, what he was receiving, or from whom.

Ghosts communicating with a ghost.

Kolb deletes the email from his Inbox, empties the Trash, shreds (he had installed Eraser on the server) Today's History from the computer, and logs out. He pays the 5 Euros, leaves the café and disappears down the U-Bahn stairwell a block down the street. Twenty-three minutes later he is at a university library which also has public terminals. He boots up his laptop, inserts the floppy, and decrypts the email with his secret key. Following the enclosed forwarding instructions he prepares to send the remaining PGP message kernel down the remailing chain. The first recipient is a Copenhagen partner of the Berlin operation, so the message is encrypted on Kolb's laptop with the Dane's PGP public key. Thus, what Kolb sends is different from what he had received, in case the two emails were ever somehow compared with each other. The two remailers' public PGP keys were known to precisely 37 people, all trusted libertarians.

From Copenhagen the kernel will skip through Helsinki, Krakow, and Tacoma before landing in Phoenix.

Four hours later the final recipient has it. Its Wyoming origin simply cannot be discerned from backtracking the IP packet flow. Physically, the trail went stone cold at Terminal #14 in the Berlin Technische Universität library, and that's assuming investigators could backtrack all the way to Copenhagen–and then to Berlin. Learning even that useless dead-end would require an expensive and prolonged multinational intelligence effort. The Subject line read Lose 24lbs. In Just 5 Weeks!! Most people would have immediately deleted such an apparent spam, but the man in Phoenix had been awaiting precisely this email.

Not that he was overweight. The message was a grain of sand hiding on a beach. The "24lbs." meant that he had to proceed within 24 hours. The "5" told him the scope of the operation–5 counties. Hands shaking with anticipation, he uses his PGP secret key to decrypt the message.

It reads:

The thunderbolt falls before the noise of it is heard in the skies, prayers are says before the bell is rung for them; he receives the blow that thinks he himself is giving it, he suffers who never expected it, and he dies that look'd upon himself to be the most secure: all is done in the Night and Obscurity, amongst Storms and Confusion.

It was a quote from Gabriel Naudé, a 17th century Paris political author. The Phoenix man smiles, and then laughs out loud to himself. Four years of planning and work! It was actually going to happen! He grabs his laptop, kisses his wife good-bye and says that he'll be back in a few hours. He drives to the main downtown library on Central Avenue, walks up to the second floor where the public terminals are, signs on with an alias as a guest, and begins to work. Within an hour, 9,816 people across the Southwest are notified by an encrypted group email. The message is simple:

Solivitur ambulando. It is solved by walking.

The problem is settled by action–the theoretical by the practical.

*******

Cheyenne, Wyoming
Wyoming Department of Administration and Information Division of Economic Analysis, Emerson Building
October 2006

"Huh! Now, this is odd," observes a data analyst.

"What's odd?" asks his colleague friend in the adjoining cubicle.

"These new resident numbers for this year. Five counties show increases of over 20%."

The analysts work for the Wyoming State Data Center (WSDC) which publishes a monthly bulletin of economic conditions, housing figures, sales tax collections, cost of living indices, etc. Their second floor cubicles had a view of northern Cheyenne. It was a slate and pewter autumn day. A winter storm coming.

"Over 20%? Which five counties?"

"Niobrara, Hot Springs, Johnson, Crook, and Sublette."

"Not Teton or Albany?"

"Nope, it's five economically stagnant counties with very low population bases and–hey, wait a minute!"

"What now?"

"They're not just sparsely populated, they're the five least populated counties! That can't be coincidence!"

"Hmmm. That is weird! Hot Springs has Thermop, Johnson has Buffalo, Crook has Sundance, and Sublette has Pinedale–and those are all nice little towns, but who the hell would move to Lusk? It's a tumbleweed gas stop on the way to nowhere."

"You got that right."

"Intrastate relocation?"

"Hold on, I'm accessing migration flows. Nope, very few intrastate movers. Most came from...California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Arizona, and Texas."

"That's strange. California and Colorado is typical, but we always lose people to Oregon, Arizona, and Texas. This makes no sense. Besides the oil boom in the early 1980s, when did we ever have a net inflow from Texas? What the hell is going on?"

"Hold on, lemme run some of these new addresses. I wanna see if they're urban or rural." A few mouse clicks later, he exclaims, "You wouldn't believe how many common addresses are popping up!"

"Common addresses? Really?"

"Yeah, common. And all of them rural. Take Crook County, for example. I'm showing a September increase of 1,346 new residents, and guess how many of them listed their address as 2075 Highway 112?"

"How many?"

"217."

"217! At the same address?"

"Yeah, 217. That's 16% of the county's new residents. One in six."

"What's at that address?"

"Hold on, I'm checking. A trailerpark and campground just north of Hulett. Bastiat Trailer Estates. Built this year. It's got...hold on...60 mobile home lots."

"Four residents per trailer; that comes to a capacity of 240. So, yeah, it would easily hold 217 people. Even more."

"Hey, here's another one–384 people show their new residence as the Galtson Mobile Home Park on Highway 111 just south of Aladdin."

"Galtson? That's a funny name."

"Yeah, I thought so, too. And, hey, there's one more trailerpark, the Rothbard Trailer Court on Highway 585 south of Sundance. 316 new residents there."

"Those two trailerparks account for...let's see...over two-thirds of the new people. Where are the rest?"

"The rest–429 to be precise–seem spread out amongst 35 addresses. It's like 35 families just up and decided to take in a dozen refugees in their homes."

"This is the weirdest damn thing I've ever seen. How 'bout you?"

"Oh, by far! Hey! Guess what their voter registration is?"

"What?"

"Republican."

"All of them?"

"Yep. Every last adult. No Democrats. No Libertarians. No Natural Law. No Independents."

"Whaddaya bet same thing's goin' on in those other counties?"

"I'm already on it."

Within an hour, a fairly detailed abstract has been made of the numbers, which shows identical patterns in Niobrara, Hot Springs, Johnson, and Sublette counties. New community housings, trailerparks, and apartment complexes had sprung up there in the past year to be totally filled by new residents relocating from generally six other states. This relocation appears to have begun in the sparsest county of Niobrara, and then in order to the next sparsest counties of Hot Springs, Sublette, Crook, and lastly Johnson–like water filling up an ice tray. This shows design, direction, and coordination.

Purpose.

If the sudden concentration of this orchestrated immigration was suspicious, the timing was alarming. Nearly ten thousand Americans had descended on five sparse Wyoming counties just weeks before a general election. Within the counties, all the political officers were up for election. Clerks, Assessors, County Attorneys, District Attorneys, Sheriffs, Commissioners, Treasurers, Coroners, Judges, everyone.

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"Who wouldn't be–those five counties are facing a coup d'état!"

"Shit! Who are these people?"

"Beats me, man. Hey, it's 5:30. Let's get outta here and grab a few beers. Get a game plan going before we tell the SecState about this!"

"Sounds good. We'll take all this stuff with us and work on it at down at Muldoons." After several hours at their usual tavern, the two computer analysts are well and truly plastered. An early winter storm had hit southeast Wyoming that evening, and the roads were sheeted in black ice. Driving home, the carpooling pair careen off a mild curve in the road, go down a thirty foot embankment and flip. One is knocked unconscious; the other his neck broken. Their car's fuel line had been ripped away by the dense underbrush, and raw gasoline spilled onto the red-hot exhaust manifold. Only the blaze gave notice of the lonely accident, and by the time the fire trucks had arrived the car was a black, smoking shell. Bits of burning computer printouts floated about like Dante's snowflakes.

The curious fattening of five Wyoming counties goes unnoticed by the replacement analysts at the WSDC. The general election of 2006 is just twelve days away.

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BY AUTHORITY By the president of the United States of America A PROCLAMATION

BY AUTHORITY

By the president of the United States of America

A PROCLAMATION