A Day in the Whiskey Rebellion, 1794
Time Surfing: Graphic History
Time Surfing: Experience History.
Historical Backdrop
In 1791 the new federal government, deep in Revolutionary War debt, placed an excise tax on distilled spirits. East of the mountains it was an inconvenience. West of the Alleghenies it was ruin. Roads were so bad that a farmer in Washington County, Pennsylvania could not haul bulk rye to market, so he distilled it into whiskey — the only cash crop light enough to carry on a packhorse, and the local currency for salt, iron, and land. Taxing whiskey meant taxing money itself. Worse, the law dragged accused men to federal court in Philadelphia, 300 miles away, a journey that could cost a man his farm. To Scots-Irish frontiersmen who had just fought a war over taxation without local consent, it was tyranny wearing a new hat.
Our subject is William Miller: a Scots-Irish farmer and small distiller of Peters Township, near Mingo Creek, a Revolutionary veteran in his forties who had been planning to sell out and move to Kentucky. On July 15, 1794, U.S. Marshal David Lenox and Inspector of the Revenue General John Neville rode onto Miller’s farm and served him a federal writ. Miller later said he thought the fine would bankrupt him. Harvest hands in his rye field fired shots; the officials fled. The next morning men from the Mingo Creek militia surrounded Neville’s mansion at Bower Hill and one was shot dead. On 17 July 1794, some six hundred armed men marched back.
Date/time and location: 17 July 1794, about 4:40 a.m. — William Miller’s cabin, Peters Township, Washington County, Pennsylvania
You wake before the birds, because you never really slept. The cabin smells of cold ash, bear grease, and the sour breath of four children on a straw tick in the loft. Your wife is already up, blowing the banked coals in the clay-and-stick chimney. You pull on your shirt — the linen is stiff with two weeks of salt. Outside, the fog lies in the hollow like spilled milk. Two days ago a marshal from Philadelphia stood in your dooryard and handed you a paper. Two hundred and fifty dollars. A court three hundred miles east. Yesterday they buried Oliver Miller. You take your rifle down from the pegs over the door, and your wife does not ask where you are going.
Date/time and location: 17 July 1794, about 5:30 a.m. — Miller’s stillhouse, spring hollow below the cabin
You go down to the stillhouse out of habit, the way another man says his prayers. It is a low log shed over the spring, and the smell hits you first: sour mash, wet rye, yeast, and copper. Your still is a hundred-and-ten-gallon pot with a worm coiled in a hollowed-log tub, and it cost you more than your plough team. Six weeks’ work in it. Fifty-four cents on the gallon, or nine cents a gallon a year on the capacity, and either way the money does not exist in this county because there is no money in this county. You lay your hand flat on the cold copper. Then you roll one small keg back behind the mash tubs and pile brush over it, and you feel foolish and furious at the same time.
Date/time and location: 17 July 1794, about 7:15 a.m. — Mingo Creek Presbyterian Meeting House, Washington County
The meeting house sits on a knoll with the graveyard beside it. Two hundred men already, and more coming up the trace in twos and threes with rifles across their saddles. Every third face is one you have known since the war. A drum is being tuned badly. Somebody has nailed a paper to the door. They are saying Oliver Miller is dead, shot from Neville’s window, and that Neville has sent to Pittsburgh for regulars. The word regulars moves through the crowd like cold water. A man in a hunting shirt climbs on a stump and shouts that a soldier of the United States firing on a citizen of Pennsylvania is a soldier making war on the people. Nobody argues.
Date/time and location: 17 July 1794, about 9:00 a.m. — Couch’s Fort, Bethel Township
By nine you are at Couch’s Fort with five or six hundred men, and the ground stinks of horse dung and unwashed wool. They elect officers the old way, by voice and by shouting, and the vote goes to James McFarlane — a major of the 8th Pennsylvania, wounded in the late war, a big steady man in a faded blue regimental coat gone green at the seams. He does not want it. He takes it. He stands on a wagon tongue and asks plainly whether the object is to demand Neville’s commission and papers or to burn him out. Voices go both ways. He says he will not fire the first shot. You believe him. You are less sure about the man behind you.
Date/time and location: 17 July 1794, about 11:30 a.m. — the road toward Chartiers Creek
The column moves at a walk, four and five abreast where the trace allows, strung out half a mile where it does not. The dust is ankle-deep and pale as flour, and it coats your legs, your mouth, the inside of your nose. Nobody marches in step. A boy beats a drum for a while and then gets tired of it. Somebody’s jug goes down the line and you take a pull — raw, hot, unaged, three months out of a worm — and pass it on. Men laugh too loudly. You pass a rye field where the shocks stand cut and waiting, and you think about your own field, and that nobody is in it today.
Date/time and location: 17 July 1794, about 2:15 p.m. — a wooded rise a half mile south of Bower Hill
You halt in the timber to load and to look. Below and ahead, on its ridge above Chartiers Creek, sits Bower Hill. You have heard about it your whole life and never seen it: a frame mansion, painted, with real glass in every window, a barn bigger than your house and your neighbour’s together, an orchard, and a row of low cabins where Neville keeps his eighteen slaves. A man beside you says quietly that the excise on your still would buy those window glasses. You measure your powder into the muzzle by the horn’s tip, spit a patched ball down, ram it, prime the pan. Your hands are steady. That surprises you.
Date/time and location: 17 July 1794, about 4:45 p.m. — the lane and orchard fence, Bower Hill
