Whiskey, Rebellion, and the Religious Left

48 T I K K U N W W W. T I K K U N . O R G J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS Whiskey,Rebellion, and the Religious Left by William Hogeland I n the early 1790s, farmers, artisans, and laborers attempted an insurrection against the newly formed government of the United States. Coalescing in what was then the Wild West—the headwaters of the Ohio River, in western Pennsylvania—the rebellion embraced and drew energy from settlers in northwestern Virginia, westernMaryland,andKentucky.By1794,whenthefederalgovernmentactedtosuppressthem ,thousandsofmen weremarching in militia discipline. They flew the flag of a new trans-Appalachiancountry.Secessionwasunderway.TheUnion wasinturmoil.AtissueweretheessentialvaluesoftheAmerican people. “The Whiskey Rebellion” was Alexander Hamilton’s dismissive term for those events. The first Secretary of the Treasury, author of the programs the rebels were dedicated to resisting, Hamiltonhopedthetermwouldconsignbothhisopponentsand thecomplexityoftheirvisiontohistoricaloblivion.Itworked.For generations the Whiskey Rebellion has been taught as a dustup on the broad highway to national consensus. In fact, the rebellion brought to a climax longstanding struggles among Americans over money, credit, and economic justice. It consumed Hamilton’s prodigious talents and energies. It led President Washington, in suppressing it, to abrogate civil liberties ,givinglaterexecutive-branchaggressionstrongprecedentin thefoundingadministration.Yet,totheextentthatwerecallanythingaboutthatbreakpointmoment ,wemoreorlessrecallsome hillbillies getting hot over a beloved beverage. And if we remember that the rebellion’s trigger wasafederaltax,we’relikelytomistakethewhiskeyrebelsfortheforebearsofthosewhoabominate all taxes. The rebels were not against taxes, as they explained in a series of published resolutions—cogent products of delegated meetings, not the work of spontaneous drunks. They rejected what they described as taxes not in proportion to property—what we call regressive taxes. And “regressive ” would be a mild term for Hamilton’s tax on whiskey. Whiskey and finance had a complex relationship in eighteenth century rural economies, counterintuitive to us but well understood by Hamilton, which enabled his whiskey tax to draw cash from ordinary people and pass it, in the form of reliable interest payments, to a small group of wealthy bondholders, the financiers and merchants who speculated in public debt. The idea was to consolidate enormous wealth in the hands of those who could fund large projects and build the United States into a commercial empire. The whiskey rebels opposed policies that consolidated wealth and opportunity. They wantedlawsthatmadethepoliticalprocessdemocratic ,gaveordinarypeopleaccesstoeconomicde7Politics_final .qxd 6/5/07 11:54 AM Page 48 RARE BOOKS DIVISION, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS velopment, and dispersed wealth and credit more or less fairly among American citizens. They wanted a kind of equality. Some readers will no doubt think it a wishful anachronism to ascribe to ordinary people, living in the eighteenth-century American countryside, a critique of elite financeandaradicalvisionofeconomicfairness —avisionthatwentsofarastopromotelandless and otherwise unpropertied laborers. The real anachronism is the pervasive denial, in certain history circles, of that viewpoint’s centrality to our founding struggles. The radicalism of the people’smovementwascertainlynosecrettoHamiltonandhispeers,whowenttogreatlengths to disable it. And there’s another element of the founding story that today’s readers—especially those in polar opposition, on the secular left and the religious right—may find even stranger. The inspiration for those founding populists’ radical vision of America’s future came from evangelical Protestantism’s hopes for Christian millennium. It came, that is, from the religious left. It’softenassumedthat,towhateverextenttheAmericanRevolutionhadreligiousaffiliations at all, that they were with rationalist Anglican liberalism, with deism, with the apparent agnosticism of certain famous founders—that is, with the Enlightenment’s impact on Christianity. Samuel Adams’s retro Puritanism does get a nod, but it’s Paine’s “Age of Reason” that rings the bell. Often overlooked by historians are evangelicals, illiberal in their religious fervor, proponents of the eighteenth century radical populism that remains so little known. Evangelicals’ central importance to our founding struggles was by no means obscure at the time. History texts often give the movement known as the Great Awakening short shrift, listing a quick set of associations—Great Awakening/Jonathan Edwards/Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God—and hastily moving on. The prevailing impression is of fire-and-brimstone thunderingagainstvice .What’simportanttorememberabouttheAwakeningistheemphasisitsexponents placed on vices they called “waste,” “luxury,” and “greed.” Puritans had viewed the pursuit of wealth as a sign of potential...