The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America's Newfound Sovereignty (Hardcover)

by William Hogeland (Author)
Key Phrases: blackface attacks, whiskey tax, small distillers, General Neville, Bower Hill, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Soon after Americans ousted inequitable British taxation, Secretary of Finance Alexander Hamilton, hatched a plan to put the new nation on steady financial footing by imposing the first American excise tax, on whiskey makers. The tax favored large distillers over small farmers with stills in the mountains of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, and the farmers fomented their own new revolution—a challenge to the sovereignty of the new government and the power of the wealthy eastern seaboard. In a fast-paced, blow-by-blow account of this "primal national drama," journalist Hogeland energetically chronicles the skirmishes that made the Whiskey Rebellion from 1791 to 1795 a symbol of the conflict between republican ideals and capitalist values. The rebels engaged in civil disobedience, violence against the tax collectors and threatened to secede from the new republic. Eventually Washington led federal troops to quell the rebellion, arresting leaders such as Herman Husband, a hollow-eyed evangelist who believed that the rebellion would usher in the New Jerusalem. Hogeland's judicious, spirited study offers a lucid window into a mostly forgotten episode in American history and a perceptive parable about the pursuit of political plans no matter what the cost to the nation's unity. (Apr.)
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From Booklist
Most general U.S. history texts gloss over the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 as a minor, spasmodic outburst of violence by disgruntled farmers in western Pennsylvania. Not so, says Hogeland. In this uneven but provocative and interesting chronicle, he weaves in themes of class conflict, easterner versus westerner, and local control versus the newly strengthened federal government. This is not a scholarly tome. Hogeland is not a professional historian, and he takes unwarranted liberties by imagining the mental states of characters, including George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. He views the rebellion as the culmination of a "people's movement" in which debtors struggled against creditors and poor farmers struggled against a merchant elite and their allies--land speculators. Of course, this is the economic determinism of Charles Beard in the form of a nonfiction novel. Although Hogeland's analysis is short on verifiable data, he knows how to tell an exciting story, and some of his assertions are worthy of consideration by serious historians. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (April 11, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743254902
• ISBN-13: 978-0743254908
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #106,952 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars People, Power, and Politics in Pennsylvania, July 25, 2006

By	Charles S. Houser (Binghamton, NY) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I am starting to lose patience with history writing that interprets historical events through the lens of the personal character of the key players involved. (Such history writing usually leaves me wondering how accurate the author's take on his/her subject's psyche is, or, whether things would have been different if the subject had had a good hair day or started off their day with a solid breakfast.) Hogeland's account of the Whiskey Rebellion seems to have struck a good balance between narratology (understanding characters' motives) and analysis of objective, provable facts (in this case economics and politics).

Hogeland is a gifted writer. His description of whiskey making (pp. 64-66) is beautiful, almost poetic; his depictions of the frontier practice of tarring and feathering one's perceived enemies (pp. 20-23; 143-44) is chilling. His discussion of the economics of the early years of US nationhood is precise and convinciing without overwhelming the reader with theoretical concepts. In the end, Hogeland leaves the reader with a number of questions that continue to be relevant today: What rights should government have in controlling mob violence? free speech? How do national economic policies get shaped and implemented? What assurance do the poor have that government officials won't enact policies that benefit only themselves and their cronies? What moral standards should the military be held to and what are the ramifications when they fail to do so? How can individual rights be protected in the shadow of popular movements? What constitutes fair taxation? Clearly many Bill-of-Rights sorts of issues were being tested in this early conflict between one group of US citizens and their government. Hogeland does a good job of presenting this often-overlooked event in American history in a way that is both engaging and though-provoking. (The endnotes are also worth reading; they do a good job of identifying sources and making the author's case for his particular interpretations. Excellent bibliography.)

36 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Living History, April 25, 2006

By	Theo Logos (Pittsburgh, PA) - See all my reviews

The Whiskey Rebellion, which came to a head in 1794 on the frontier of Western Pennsylvania, provides a great microcosm for viewing the early American republic. It encapsulates the stories of the nation's transformation into a centralized, commercial power, along with the expansion of the nation westward, which often presented challenges to that centralized power. It shows the demise of the radical populism of the Revolution and the rise of the conservative power of the creditor class. Alexander Hamilton, that machiavellian genius who was the architect of the emerging power of the commercial creditor class, plays a central role, as does George Washington, aging and nearly ready to exit the world stage. To understand the Whiskey Rebellion is to understand the formation and development of our early republic.

William Hogeland's new book is a first rate popular history of the Whiskey Rebellion with a definite point of view. With great clarity, he carefully explains both the machinations of Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, which created the conditions that sparked the rebellion, and the economic and cultural situation in Western Pennsylvania, where the effects of Hamilton's maneuvering to create a centralized commercial power were so devastating as to cause such a violent uprising. Step by step, he shows how the clash of the interests between classes and regions led to this most serious of popular rebellions against federal authority - how it happened, and how it was crushed.

More impressive even than Mr. Hogeland's clear, explanatory prose is his ability to animate the actors in this drama. He brings to life the people who inhabit his history, an ability more often found in fiction than in historical writings. I came away from reading his book feeling not just that I had learned about Alexander Hamilton, but that I actually knew him. Hugh Henry Brackenridge, the eccentric Pittsburgh lawyer who was swept up in the action of the rebellion, springs off the page full of quirky, nervous energy, and resonates as an off-beat, enigmatic tragic hero rather than just another obscure name and historical footnote, which is how many histories have treated him. Hogeland enlivens all the players in his history in this way, and that is the quality which sets his book apart as unique and extrordinary.

Read this book together with Thomas Slaughter's `Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution', and you should have everything you need to know about the Whiskey Rebellion short of doing a dissertation on it. If you are only going to read one book on the subject, Mr. Hogeland's is more accessible to the general reader and is livelier by far. This book is highly recommended for anyone interested in the career of Alexander Hamilton, the early republic, the early frontier, or the history of populist conflicts in America.

Theo Logos

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Detailed Account, November 4, 2006

By	Erika Mitchell (E. Calais, VT USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This book provides an in-depth report of the Whiskey Rebellion, the first major domestic challenge to the federal authority of the United States. Hogeland details the history from the tax revolt, to the march of federal troops to quell disturbances in the region, to the eventual trials of the rebel ringleaders. Hogeland also describes some of the major players and their views, from Herman Husband to Alexander Hamilton, from the Nevilles to Hugh Brackenridge. The book is written in a style that is easily accessible to general readers. References to source materials are provided through extensive endnotes, cited by topic rather than number so as not to interrupt the flow of the main text. In researching material for this book, Hogeland relied on many first-hand narratives found in private and public collections throughout Western Pennsylvania, as well as consulting some of the standard previously published accounts of the rebellion.

Hogeland goes to great pains to discuss Hamilton's political motives behind imposing the tax on whiskey. He also presents some of Husband's unique vision of the American West as the New Jerusalem. He traces Brackenridge's actions in detail, depicting him as the hero of the rebellion because of his constant attempts to bring both sides together, to minimize property damage perpetrated by the rebels, while seeking to get the federal forces to moderate their response. If there is a hero in the story, of course, there must be villains, played by Presley Neville and Alexander Hamilton in this account.

Reading this book provided me with much more information about the Whiskey Rebellion than I had ever heard before. However, it still left me a bit dissatisfied. I would like to have found more in the book about the economic consequences of the whiskey tax for Western Pennsylvania farmers--more about why the tax enraged them enough to make them want to secede from the Union. I grew up in Washington, Pennsylvania, where we were frequently told the story of the Whiskey Rebellion in school. Our teachers would explain to us how local farmers felt the tax was extremely unfair because the only viable way for the farmers to get their grain over the Allegheny mountains to markets in the East was in the form of whiskey. Since farmers in the East could sell grain without having to convert it to whiskey or pay the whiskey tax, Western Pennsylvanians felt the tax was laid specifically on them, and thus David Bradford was considered a hero for leading the rebel forces against the evil feds. Although Hogeland describes why Hamilton wanted money, he doesn't go into why Hamilton chose a tax specifically on whiskey, or why he refused to back down on the decision when the Western Pennsylvania farmers complained. In general, Hogeland goes into great detail describing the motivations of moderates like Brackenridge, as well as the Nevilles and Hamilton, but he does not explore in such detail what was driving the rebel leaders. Perhaps this was an artifact of the historical materials that were available--Brackenridge, Hamilton, and the Nevilles all left behind written documents of their actions during the Rebellion, and the rebel leaders did not. Of the rebel leaders, he tells Husband's story in detail as if he were a major player. While Husband may have been the only major leader to land in jail, the traditional historical accounts from the area don't give him the emphasis that Hogeland does in this book. Thus, it seems like Hogeland's balance in telling of the tale may be overly influenced by the quantity of materials available.