The Whiskey Rebellion often falls into the background of the Federalist Era, overshadowed by the rise of a divisive two-party political system. This armed uprising in 1794, over taxation by the fledgling new government, threatened to destroy the new union within six years of the Constitution’s ratification. Regardless of the outcome of the military confrontation, public support for the rebels’ cause or indignation over President George Washington’s response could have escalated into another revolution like the one that occurred in France. Yet this never materialized. Was the short life of this rebellion natural or artificial? Did public response to the excise differ by location or politics? How did the public react to Washington’s response and why did the public respond in the way it did? An examination of press records indicates change in the general level of interest in the rebellion, but not of opinion, with the South far less interested than New England and the Middle States. Furthermore, the violently divergent opinions expressed in the press prior to open rebellion morphed abruptly into full support of the federal government and praise for both Congress and Washington in their handling of the crisis. This change arose primarily from existing opinions of Washington and the nation, aided by a lack of argumentation reaching the public sphere from the rebels.
Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton’s initial imposition of a federal excise on whiskey in 1792 provoked predictable reactions across the United States divided roughly along partisan lines.[1] Federalist newspapers reliably printed defenses of the excise as justified, with Philadelphia’s Gazette of the United States on June 2 rationalizing that “not one Member of the Senate or representative body thought fit to move for the repeal of the law when the subject was reconsidered by Congress . . . This is never the case with a bad or dangerous law.”[2] The Federalist-leaning Columbian Centinel republished this article in Boston on June 13.[3] One of the few contemporaneous views from the Pittsburgh Gazette, the nearest newspaper to the burgeoning rebellion’s locus to survive in a digitized archive, downplayed the opponents of the excise as an inconsequential, if vocal, minority.[4] Other papers, such as Boston’s Argus and Baltimore’s Baltimore Evening Post, presented both arguments in successive issues: Argus printed both an article mocking “Sydney and the Whiskey Drinkers”[5] and an article from “A REAL FEDERALIST”[6] subtly inciting rebellion over the excise, while the Baltimore Evening Post balanced an assertion that “to resist the Excise law, under the pretense of liberty, is inconsistent and absurd”[7] with calls to abolish the Senate as useless.[8] Thus, the Federalist-aligned papers generally, but not exclusively, supported the excise.