This is a subject that is filled with history and lore. It was a historical event that was mutated with a lot of legend and lore. I thought I might write a few thoughts on the subject this Saturday morning while I am working the library at the Filson.
There really was a "Whiskey Rebellion" and despite the legend, it was not just in western Pennsylvania. The event started because the new Federal government needed income to pay its debts. Part of the campaign to get the new constitution passed was a promise for the Federal government to assume the debts from the states to pay for the revolutionary war. This meant it needed to tax something to raise money to pay these debts. It was decided to tax whiskey. The tax would be levied right off the still and based upon the proof gallon as determined by a "Dycas' Hydrometer". The tax would be paid in specie. This last part is what really caused the turmoil in the west.
Hard currency was hard to come by in this new nation, but especially hard on the frontier. Whiskey was a form of barter currency for these farmers in the western United States. When the tax collectors came to gather the tax, they could not be paid in whiskey so the distillers could not pay the tax. They complained to no avail and finally tarred and feathered a few tax collectors to protest this unfair situation. Did they really want to "rebell" against the government? Not really. Most of them eventually paid the taxes. The show of force by the government was not really necessary to get them to pay their taxes, but was important as an example for the government to show its willingness to enforce its laws. One of my favorite quotes comes from Thomas Jefferson about the rebellion. It goes something like this "A rebellion was declared, armed for, marched against, but never found". Indeed there were only three people arrested by this grand army and two of them were acquitted and the other found to be mentally deficient.
Legend has it that the rebellion led Pennsylvania distillers to Kentucky to escape the tax. I have never seen any real proof of this happening. First of all there was resitance to the tax in Kentucky as well as Pennsylvania. Mary K. Tachau wrote a book about the early Kentucky court system and the Whiskey Rebellion was one of the main subjects of the book. She points out that the Federal government knew of the resistance in Kentucky but chose not to send troops for two reasons. The first was they did not think they could get an army over the mountains into Kentucky. The second was that if they did they they would then drive the western people out of the United States and into the arms of Spain, who controled Louisiana at the time. They chose instead to send a very patient judge to Kentucky who would work with the people through the courts to collect the taxes. It worked here and probably would have worked in western Pennsylvania.
There was other areas where the tax was also resisted. Here at the Filson I was reading a letter in the Arthur Campbell papers the other day. In this letter, the author was writing Campbell and discussing the "rebellion in Pennsylvania and Virginia". This was in 1794 so Kentucky was already a state and the author was writing from the "state of Franklin". (Any guesses as to where the State of Franklin was located? At least on member of this forum should know.) Distillers in Virginia resisted the tax. I suspect, but have not seen written evidence yet, that North Carolina was another place where tha tax was resisted. These are all places with frontier lands where specie was hard to come by for the distillers.
The rebellion was quickly "put down" and the distillers eventually paid their taxes. When Thomas Jefferson was elected President, part of his campaign included a pledge to balance the Federal budget and repeal the whiskey tax. He kept this promise and the tax was repealed in 1802. There was not a tax on spirits again until 1812 when the United States again had a war to pay for, but that is another story in itself, so to speak.
Mike Veach