A gripping and sensational tale of violence, alcohol, and taxes, The Whiskey Rebellion uncovers the radical eighteenth-century people’s movement, long ignored by historians, that contributed decisively to the establishment of federal authority.
In 1791, on the frontier of western Pennsylvania, local gangs of insurgents with blackened faces began to attack federal officials, beating and torturing the tax collectors who attempted to collect the first federal tax ever laid on an American product—whiskey. To the hard-bitten people of the depressed and violent West, the whiskey tax paralyzed their rural economies, putting money in the coffers of already wealthy creditors and industrialists. To Alexander Hamilton, the tax was the key to industrial growth. To President Washington, it was the catalyst for the first-ever deployment of a federal army, a military action that would suppress an insurgency against the American government.
With an unsparing look at both Hamilton and Washington, journalist and historian William Hogeland offers a provocative, in-depth analysis of this forgotten revolution and suppression. Focusing on the battle between government and the early-American evangelical movement that advocated western secession, The Whiskey Rebellion is an intense and insightful examination of the roots of federal power and the most fundamental conflicts that ignited—and continue to smolder—in the United States.
Soft Cover.
About the author:
Born in Virginia and raised in Brooklyn, New York, William Hogeland is the author of the Wild Early Republic trilogy: The Whiskey Rebellion (Simon and Schuster), Declaration (S&S), and Autumn of the Black Snake (FSG). He is also the author of Founding Finance (University of Texas Press), as well as a collection of essays, Inventing American History (Boston Review Books/MIT Press). Hogeland has written about history, music, and politics for The Atlantic, AlterNet, Salon, The New York Times, Boston Review, The Huffington Post, and others. He contributed the chapter on insurrections to A Blackwell Companion to American Military History. His essay American Dreamers appears in Da Capo's Best Music Writing 2009, edited by Greil Marcus.
