welcome to the second annual special collections author speaker series on behalf of bailey library three, the college liberal arts, the alumni association and the green and white society. i'm judy silva. i'm the university archivist and special librarian here slippery

rock university. i had the pleasure of working with today's speaker brady crytzer when he was a student here, he in the library all four years, and he worked with me his senior year on the rock voices oral history. we had great team of students seven working on the project and even so was a standout because he just this natural to talk to anybody he was not shy or even not scared he was a great interviewer and he had a curiosity about history. even then you could tell. so brady completed his undergraduate degree here in 2008 in secondary ed social studies and his master's correct me if i got anything wrong read his master's in history here in ten.

now he teaches history at robert morris. grady is a specialist in the imperial history of north america. he a narrator and commentator on the cable series into the wild. i love that name. he hosts the cable series battlefield pennsylvania, as well as a weekly podcast. his work has been featured in the washington post, the wall street journal, the journal of the american, pennsylvania heritage and numerous other publications and broadcast media. brady is the winner. multiple awards for his scholarship service in history. and did i mention that he's written seven books, the most recent of which is the whiskey rebellion, a distilled history of an american crisis, which is the topic of today's talk.

so after the talk, there will be a q&a. line up over there and brady is gonna be signing copies of his books in the back at the table, and there will be a drawing for a student winner of an autographed copy of the book. so without further ado, please me. welcome, brady crytzer. good afternoon, everyone. thank you for being here. needless to say, this is a special for me to come back to. a place that was so important for me and really the place where it all began on this journey. i want to talk today about the whiskey. no, we have no free samples to begin out. it's a major event in american

history and it's the single greatest crisis of george washington's presidency. the whiskey rebellion, the second largest domestic in us history, behind only the american civil war. and yet in the last 100 years, there's only been four books written about the event. mine being the latest that last year. why don't we understand the whiskey rebellion more? it's difficult to say. okay, it's difficult to say. but some of it might be because of the way. the way we like history, we like our history need tidy, right. black and white, good and evil. never worries. as historians we have to live in that that gray area. all of the men who participate in the whiskey rebellion were a

revolutionary war. veterans, patriots. and for that we revere them. ten years later, they fight to dismantle same republic. they fought so hard to create. so the whiskey challenges us. i think that's why so few historians dive into it. and why so few americans are aware of it. hopefully, will will shed some light on that subject a little more. the whiskey rebellion will last four years. from 1791 to 1794. but i would argue actually goes back much longer than that of 50 years earlier. in fact to the 1740s, in the 1740s. america was a dynamic place. it was a place of immigrants. it was a place of religious. and ethnic diversity. and no place had more of that than right here in pennsylvania in the 1740s. pennsylvania, a place of french catholics.

it was a place of quakers, west african muslims. it was a place of ashkenazi --. it was a place of scots-irish presbyterians like the people you see on the screen here. people came to pennsylvania because were free to live and worship as they. and that was a very exclusive right in the world of the 18th century. the scots irish are going to be the focus of our story today because they are the focus of the people who participate in the whiskey rebellion. they came in groups like you see on the screen. they are a prolific people, to say the least. 12 to 15 at a time. and they come to the new world for really one purpose. and it was because when they arrived. there was something here for them that would make them the most successful people in the history of their entire family line. and that was the new world gave them the chance to own. the new world success is a very

easy. don't forget it? land equals power. you could have no land in. europe aristocrats, land, kings own land in america. anyone could. and that's why they risk it all to come here in groups like this. and when they to pennsylvania, they land in philadelphia confident in their ability to pass down generational wealth for the land they own to their children and their grandchildren. no one else in their family can say that when got to philadelphia, they saw something was very familiar to them. in the old world they second class citizens, the scots-irish in england they were told they were beneath everyone else when they came philadelphia, they saw a familiar sight, which was a whole lot of english people. and the english told them. you're welcome to pennsylvania. there's lots of free land, but there's none here, at least not for you. you have to go west. philadelphia belongs to the english so they went west. they found a town called lancaster and they saw a lot of

germans there. and lancaster is a neat it was a place where we made things in america in the 18th century and philadelphia, boston, we import and export. in lancaster, we make things conestoga wagons. and what you see there? pennsylvania rifles. well, the germans told the scots irish there's lots of free land. pennsylvania just not this land. lancaster is ours. you go further west and they ultimately went as far west as they could. the foothills of the appalachian mountains. and they said this is our place. it was a vacant land. they built their own city. they called it carlisle. and that was the of the scots irish in pennsylvania. now things were going well for them until the fifties, when war broke out. war between britain, france, the great seven years. war for global domination. and the way france chose to fight that war here in america was through strategic alliances with native peoples of the west,

particularly the lenni lenape, the delaware, the shawnee and, the mingo peoples who lived in western, those warriors were given weapons, they were given supply, and they were basically told, your job is to cause chaos. the frontier soldiers will handle the fighting you raid. you pillage, you take captives. and those scots, irish learned that when you cross over the mountains, they were the first people in line to be attacked. so the scots irish in 1756 begged for support. it never came because the english who controlled the colony were pacifists. so the scots irish learned to do for themselves. they took up their own common defense, much like a volunteer department would handle its own emergencies. you were a shoemaker or you're a schoolteacher. you're a bricklayer. when the time comes, you pick up a gun and you fight. and that was when the scots irish developed this intense

understanding that they had to do for themselves here in the new world. it should be no surprise that when the american revolution began, these were amongst the first people to volunteer to fight against the british empire. a year before declaration of independence in 1775, the scots irish in westmoreland county town made own hyannis town resolves, saying they would go to war with britain if these things weren't taken care of. if these taxes and these regulations weren't removed. they were no stranger to that. in 1764, when colonel john rebuke the commandant at fort pitt arrived in pittsburgh the capital of the west, his soldiers were spat upon his. soldiers had bottles and rocks thrown at them, he said. and this is a direct quote, he said, pittsburgh was a colony sprung from hell. and so he said and he said that because of the people who lived

here, they had no interest in outsiders intervening in their lives. they were not anti-government, but they were only in support of of government, of their own choosing. so this will take to the sky. alexander hamilton, very popular. right? right now, you'll see him in a lot of different places. alexander hamilton knows, who these people are, he's dealt with them a long time. he knows that they are an integral part of the american story, but he also knows that they not real keen on the federal government. now, this is going to be 1790. alexander hamilton is the first treasury secretary and he will really be president washing right hand man when it comes to america's financial affairs we've had a constitu now for two years i think there a tepid

confidence in it it hasn't really been tested yet and hamilton looks america as something he can engineer regarding finance and the american future. now today the treasury secretary very specific jobs. alexander viewed himself more as prime minister because there really was no example of a secretary before him. america's got a lot of problems. we are saddled with debt in our first ten years. that alone could sink the american republic. we have state debts that he decides maybe to consolidate a national debt. thanks a lot. right. we that now to thank for thank alexander hamilton for. but he really has a keen interest in the west because in west he sees the real strength of america. he sees timber. he sees first. he sees an abundance of natural resources like coal and. he knows in 1790 they can't

harvest them. but one day we can and the world will need that. and that will secure america's future. what he doesn't love about the west, however, are the people that live there. they do like george washington. everyone does, but they're not keen on what the federal government's been doing. intervening in their lives. they don't really pay their taxes much. they're sort of in a separate economy and away from what's going on in the rest of america. in the west, we grew more corn and rye here than, anywhere else in the new world. and because of that, most people who lived here were farmers. they farmed corn and they farmed rye. that's how they made their living. now, if you want to sell corn in the west, that's a difficult proposition because your neighbor is also trying to sell corn in the west. so you're not going to find a great market. so for these people, only option people who lived in western

pennsylvania was to find a way to make their corn and rye easier to move right. more valuable. and the easiest way to do that was whiskey. whiskey for them was the the chief economic engine of here in western pennsylvania. one of the issues they faced here in the west was that they didn't have a lot of money. i mean, hard america did not print own money yet. we did not mean our coins. if you would have found money in philadelphia or boston it was british money or french money or even spanish money, people who lived here in the west rarely saw those coins over the mountains. so they had a barter economy, right? they might help you paint your barn, you give them two or three calves, maybe give them ten chickens, and they'll help you, you know, fix your windows. it was something like that. it was trade based. so it's very important to understand that people in the west had a functionally different and for alexander

hamilton, it was one that didn't really work in his vision of america because the federal government was not to accept goats and sheep in lieu of hard money. right. when it came time to pay taxes. so people were very difficult to tax and very difficult to deal with in. 1790. alexander hamilton will make this big draft for congress. he calls it the report on the public credit. and it is like a classic alexander hamilton document. he's a really guy and he doesn't a lot of patience for people who aren't as smart as him. so he makes this big phone book of a document and it's with charts and figures and factoids and numbers. and he gives it to congress and he says, here is my plan to save america. okay, just pass it. you don't even need to read it. it's all in there. and of course, is not how congress works. and they take their time and they debated. he even asks at one point if he can come in to congress and read

it out loud to everyone. like maybe they need explanation and he is not invited. they say no thank you, we can handle this. and that's going to be something that comes out of hamilton's plan. now for hamilton, something that will be included in that is going to be what is colloquially called the whiskey act. the whiskey act is designed, in hamilton's estimation, to bring the american economy together to include westerners in the larger fabric of american society. he believes taxes is what bind all americans north, south, east and west together. you know, we would view that as well. that's something they mutually despise. but didn't see it that way. he saw taxation as again if money from everywhere is funneling to the federal government that will therefore increase the sovereignty of the federal government.

now when we talk about the west at this time we not talking about the west of today. we're not about montana, utah, california, colorado. the we of this time. anything over the appalachian. and this story is going to be centered in what was a theime the west that includes pittsburgh right here, allegheny county. pittsburgh, a very small but very growing community. but pittsburgh is really in the 7090s, the federal capital of the west. it's got federal fort fayette. it's got office buildings and federal agencies. it is surrounded, however, by a landscape of people who really don't agree with that. the people we've described earlier, the heart, this story is going to be about 20 miles south of pittsburgh you see highlighted here in red what is today washington, county, pennsylvania. this is going to be the heart beat of the events we will call

the whiskey rebellion. so alexander hamilton's whiskey tax is passed people here in the west are immediate, be put off by. and there's a couple of reasons for it. they would argue the whiskey act was unfair viscerally prejudicial. there were things built into this act that were unnecessarily harmful to them and at worst, they felt maybe hamilton was doing intentionally. big distillers and there were some big distillers in the west. people with 500 gallon whiskey stills would end up paying actually less in taxes than small time distillers. what you have here on the screen is example of a pretty typical spill. here in the west for making whiskey this is a ten gallon steel general john neville a man we'll later. the biggest whiskey distiller in the west for sure had a 500 gallon steel.

john neville was the biggest whiskey distiller in the west. the biggest whiskey distiller in america. anyone now? george washington. okay, so hold on to that for later. so they at this as an unnecessarily prejudicial act. why would a big distiller have to pay less than a small. and the penalties were exorbitant. number one hamilton included in this act. this had to be paid in hard currency, hard coinage. they going to accept anything from a barter based economy for the people of west. they would say this is a tax we. couldn't pay even if we wanted to, because there again, there's no hard currency floating around the west, penalties for not paying and register stills included losing up to four years of income and fines. that would financially ruin anyone. and even worse, something the british never did. they would take your land in lieu of payment. so again, four revolutionary war

veterans losing that driving force that brought you the new world land ownership, right? denying you and your children and their children the right of generational wealth for them was a bridge too far. so what we're going to see, 1791 are really three separate factions emerge here in the west trying to figure out how to with this overreach of federal. you have moderate people people like the congressman william finley. he was the at large delegate for western pennsylvania. he's going to be a moderate. he's going to say these laws are prejudicial and they should be removed. you're going to have radicals. people will meet later from. washington county primarily who look at violence as the way to make a statement. disagreement. right. these the people that were largely behind things like the boston tea party and the stamp act. right.

of the 1760s. these are going to be the prominent voices. but first, the moderates we'll get to in september of 1791, the moderates will meet in these four counties, each of these counties, fayette, westmoreland, washington and allegheny will host its own local will get together. they'll make a list of grievances. here's why whiskey act is wrong. here's why it's prejudicial and here's why it has to go. and then all four of those councils will get together and down town pittsburgh at a place called the sign of the green tree tavern. green tree might sound familiar. and from there they will make a very neat, detailed list. we have a constitution. these are our rights. so it says we feel they're being violated. william findley will take a copy these grievances to philadelphia. that's the nation's. there's a pennsylvania assemblyman at this meeting named albert gallatin will be a

future u.s. senator future treasury secretary. fact, our longest serving treasury secretary. he'll take it the to present it to the pennsylvania assembly. and they will in those chambers make the case for why this law has to go. alexander hamilton knows these these problems are kind of built into the law. he was in its passage. and he'll tell the federalists, his friends, control congress, go ahead and lower the tax. he lowers it by exactly $0.01. so these are people's livelihoods at stake here. a very real sense in the west. and they view this like a great offense as, a result of that lowering of the tax. we see the moderate faction who believe that law and order is the way to deal with this lose ground and we will see the great factions radical factions emerge in washington county. remember the map.

but the red county, there's a creek called pigeon creek. a tax collector named robert johnson. and this is just one day. one day before the very moderate response we talked about a tax collector named robert johnson will be traveling by horseback. the road will be blocked as night falls. it'll be blocked by people dressed as native american, some of them wearing women's dresses right with makeup and their hair spiked bandanas covering their face as trying to look maniacal. they take robert johnson off of his horse and he was neighbor. he wasn't from somewhere else. they would shave his head with a straight razor and not carefully to scalping like. like you'd see an indian warrior produced. and then they poured boiling hot tar over his body and they left him for dead. johnson did not die. he was found the next day and he was told, you need to report

this to the authorities. someone attacked you. he said the person that attacked me was the sheriff of this region. the man's name was john hamilton. he'll be the leader of the radical movement. no relation to alexander. scots-irish stock. all the same. john hamilton was not just the chief law enforcement officer of the region. he was also the head of the state militia of the region. so he is involved in charge of arresting the people who did this and leading a military response, anything that might come out of it. he was appointed by the governor, by the way. that's a very bad problem, that synchronicity there. the incestuous nature of this event. and that will become a major problem for president washington in the future as well. a year later, a very similar circumstance occurs. a man named robert williams shows up in the scots-irish communities. he says he's a traveling teacher. he needs students as around. right. he can teach them and that actually happens. back then but then he begins

asking strange questions. questions like, do you know anyone who hasn't paid their taxes. who hasn't registered? they're still so obviously these very suspicious people believe he is a spy for the treasury department. so they drag him into the woods this time. they take him into a blacksmith shop. the bellows are fired right? going. they tar him they they burn his body with hot tar and they take hot out of the out of the forge and they drive them into the stomach. these are not, he said he actually survives that. but these are not cute, offensive. these are not civil. disobey ants are acts of civil disobedience. these are real bodily assaults on people. and unfortunately for both of those men, they took the symbolic brunt, the people's anger with the federal government. as it turns out from my research no. one in the treasury department had ever heard this guy.

this this robert williams. he was not a teacher. he wasn't working for the government. he was just an individual with what is, in my opinion, a terrible hobby, which was, you know, inquiring into people's taxation statuses. and he the price for it here. by 1792, though, we see some pretty important details emerge. and one of them is that alexander hamilton is already petition ing president washington to use to go into the west and put this movement down. the attorney general, edmund randolph, washington, consult him. he'll look at this and say, i don't see a cause for it yet. but hamilton's already lobbying for that, and it leads a sense that perhaps hamilton did design this law as more than a tax, maybe an intentionally heavy effort to bring into the fold of federal authority to make them

bend the knee right to. bring them to heel. he's always going to be the voice advocating for extreme response. and fortunately for america president, washington has a lot of voices in his ear at the same time to kind of keep him at bay, at least for a while. 1793 will be a year for america for a lot of reasons. one of them is that a lot of these whiskey farmers begin writing letters to their congressmen, to their governors, to their senators in philadelphia. and these letters are laying out very real cases why this law needs to go and these letters get to philadelphia and they begin to pile up with response. now, reason this is happening and they don't know this is because in 1793, something else happening in philadelphia, it's yellow fever epidemic. and unfortunately, we know something. pandemics in our world and how frightening it can be in philadelphia in 1793.

yellow fever yellow fever killed one out of ten philadelphians. it was it was a nightmare. george washington fled the capital. congress fled the capital. the pennsylvania assembly fled the capital because the stay there was really pti your life at in a very real sense. so even though these these farmers are writinghese letters and making their case. no one's even there to read them. but for them, they feel th're simply being ignored. one of the ways the washington administration tries really get this whiskey act in is by finding people they can trust, who well-liked in the community. now it's met with different levels of resistance, different parts of the country. western north carolina. there weren't that many whiskey distillers. most people paid, kentucky, it was deemed because kentucky too far away and, the people were

probably least likely to accept. but western pennsylvania, because its proximity to the capital and the amount of people there became central to the washington administration. in george washington appointed a man named john neville as the chief inspector revenue for western pennsylvania. and john neville was an interesting choice. he fought with george washington, the revolution. he was with him a valley forge. he fought with him in new jersey. he was taken captive in charleston, south carolina. as a result of the conflict. neville was given a huge piece of land just south of pittsburgh to make his own. neville called this land power. bower hills. a good scotts irish name, and he had upwards of 90 enslaved peoples on that piece of land. he tried to almost make miniature virginia, which is where he was from like washington. here in pittsburgh. that's an important point here.

washington believed neville was someone he could trust. and neville was the biggest whiskey distiller in the west. people in pittsburgh knew as the wealthiest man in the region. and they generally liked him because of his service in the american revolution. unfortunely for neville that doesn't go as smoothly as as he george washington because people begin making effigy as a sort of quick homeme scarecrows neville setting them on fire in the middle the street. right. he becomes the focus of all this anti federal government anxiety. and he writes about how much it bothers him because people he knew and people he trusted. these people all know each other to a degree or condemning him for his service and and naming him as the enemy. i will add, because he was inspector of revenue john neville, the richest man in the west, was entitled to 1% of all taxes collected. so poor farmers who have very

little view, the richest man they know, putting money of theirs directly in his pocket. it was a bad look and it really was. but that was part of the part of, the whiskey act. so john neville did have that working against him. here we have an advertisement from the pittsburgh gazette. the pittsburgh is that was the biggest newspaper of the west, the first newspaper ever west of the appalachian mountains. and in this, john neville, a good pro-government pro federalist man, lists for everyone read. here are the collectors in yr counties. here's where you can find them and here's where you can bring your taxes. what he was real doing was people, if you want to, burn in attack a tax collector, here's where you find them. every single person here you can see john webster on stoney creek in bedford county. philip reagan in westmoreland county. john in canonsburg, washington county.

benjamin wells at stuarts crossing in fayette county. every single one of them had their homes destroyed and some of them were even taken captive as this rebellion went on. this was simply a tax collector doing his job. but he really put a target on these people's bks because he wasn't aware of just how much he had lost control of this region. okay. this story really comes to a head in 1794. in 1794, we begin to see subpoenas go out for the arrest of people who did not their taxes. they subpoenas were mandated to have people appear in court not in pittsburgh, which was totally possible, but in philadelphia. again, we could talked about the fact that westerners viewed themselves as fundamentally different here in, america. we are entitled to a jury of, our peers, people in this region did not view themselves as being peers, those in philadelphia. so this subpoenas even

themselves, which hamilton keenly interested in, by the way, are unnecessarily prejudice. these subpoenas were handed out by general john neville himself. he joined by a us marshal named lennox. they began may of 1794 in pittsburgh and they made their way south. they handed out 60 subpoenas that day. farmers were angry when they received them. the last place they visited that day was this building you see here. this is th home of one william miller. today,his is in south park, allegheny county, and as they were passing out subpoenas one at a time, again, neville believed his presence there would be enough to sort of keep the tempers down. they were being followed by a group of farmers. they didn't realize were there when they to miller's home. he stuck rifle out his window,

told them to get off of his property, and he fired. has gone into the air and even though it was not aimed at them, we say these are the first shots of what we call the whiskey rebellion today. this is in bethel park, pennsylvania. it's part of south park, ran by allegheny county park service. so you visit us any time. i's a wonderful site. when that gun was fired, 40 farmers who were following general neville and marshall lennox came from the woods. they surrounded the two men. it was a very scary scene. neville was able to calm it down, but he told lennox, go back to pittsburgh, i'm going to go back to my home. bower hill and. we're going to regroup before this gets any more out of control. this will lead us to what is really the big flash point of the whiskey rebellion, what we call the battle of bauer hill. when john neville goes back to his big mansion plantation home

at bower hill, he will met by about 300 armed rebels. they demand that he turn over any records that they of who paid their taxes and didn't and the thought process was, of course if you destroy those records, everybody is off scot free. it doesn't really work that way. but that's what they were going for. this was all occur in july 1794. john never will stick his gun out. the window. he'll tell the people to back away. they won't listen. he'll fire into the crowd. and it's really just a random shot. but neville will ll teenage boy named oliver miller. oliver miller was the nephew of the man that had just shot at them earlier that day here. when happens, the rebels will from bower hill. they will regroup and more than double their numbers. and they'll back the next day.

this time with more weapons. and many people who were formerly revolutionary war soldiers prepared to fight. on the second day of the events at bower, the us federal troops will move into the mansion in preparation for this. there will be exchange of fire during a flag of truce. a local revolutionary war hero, a legend named james mcfarland, will die this conflict. when mcfarland dies, the rebels run to the house and set the entire thing on fire. and for that reason, when you visit bower hill today, there's nothing there because they burned it to the ground. this was an incredible early, powerful moment in the history of the rebellion because. this was the moment when violence seemed to be the recourse at hand and the radical faction completely took over over. as the radical faction takes over, radical leadership takes over and.

the radical leader was a man named david bradford out of washington county. david bradford was a frontiersman, but he was an immigrant from maryland, from a very wealthy family. he was well-to-do, he was well-educated. he kept on affairs going on in france. it was the french revolution at the time. and david bradford's radical leadership is what's going to make the whiskey rebellion escalate not into a rebellion over taxes, but a separatist movement. he launches campaigns against mail, leaving pittsburgh. he wants to know what people are saying about him rebel steal the mail and open are bradford create a flag for the whiskey rebels. it'll have stripes on it. one for every county involved. bradford even talks about reaching out to the spanish empire to see if western pennsylvania could secede and join the spanish empire. he takes this to level.

bradford's big moment comes when he plans on capturing the city of pittsburgh. maybe he'll keep it as a hostage situation. maybe he'll destroy it. but remember pittsburgh, is the federal capital of the west, and he will get what he claims be 7000 men lined up on 1755 battlefield of braddock's defeat, which is today. braddock, pennsylvania realistically, because he exaggerates everything, it's probably more like 1500 men. and he's going to move on the city of pittsburgh. fortunately for pittsburgh, cooler heads prevailed. it was safe. and when the women of pittsburgh met the oncoming whiskey rebels with plates of bacon and cheese and barrels, beard, whiskey. this is i mean, you know, the rebels partook in all of that. then the women politely moved them across the river and back to where they came from. but pittsburgh was but the important thing for us is that it's to president washington,

right. that things have gotten out control. george washington, we'll call upon the states of new jersey maryland, pennsylvania and virginia to accrue 15,000 men. he'll only 13,000 because 2000 of them were supposed to come from western pennsylvania. obviously, they weren't going to join his cause, but he'll accrue army of 13,000. these are not federal troops. this is state militias. and washington will reading the constitution lead them into battle, as it were, himself. the constitution says he's commander in chief. it is the and only time in american history that a of the united states led troops into the field of combat himself. barring joe biden an f-16 any time soon. i don't think we're going to see it. so it's a pretty unique moment for george washington, the

really important players in this, however, were the governor of virginia. virginia's governor was light. harry lee, hero of the revolution. and he will be really the one that's the true military of this expedition. george washington will lead troops into the west himself, has a bad back, so he rides in a carriage. and of course, alexander hamilton is right there at his side. but he has this belief that if he got to the city of bedford, pennsylvania, and bedford was still loyal to the united states, the rebellion was probably and he was correct. bedford had a federal washington was welcome as a hero. the whiskey rebels denounced and it seemed like this was a uniquely western phenomenon. so here is president washington in bedford leading the troops overseeing the troops aside from only a few instances the revolution 13,000 men was one of

the largest forces george washington had ever led in the field of battle. one of the reasons we don't talk a lot about the whiskey rebellion or have a good sense of it, is because there was no great showdown as a result when those 13,000 men barreled down into the region of pittsburg. the leadership of the whiskey rebellion more or less melted. the resistance fled. and i say my book this became one of the largest police actions in american history in locals call the dreadful night of washington. troops kicked in doors dragged men out of their homes, in their pajamas kept them in basements for days summarily arrested them on the spot, denied them food and water, made them walk creek beds in the middle of winter. it was a it was a real sense of punishment for participating in this rebellion. in the end most of those 200

people were arrested, were set free. women were approaching government troops with. big pregnant bellies paraded pillows tucked under their shirt saying, please let my husband go. we need him. and they didn't have a lot of evidence against these people. so about 30 will go back to philadelphia. they'll have to march behind federal troops barefoot from pittsburgh to philadelphia. and when they arrived in the city, were pelted with tomatoes and horse manure and paraded through the city. one newspaper account says that the procession stopped at george washington's home and the president looked on. quote, smiling approvingly. these men would sit in walnut street prison next to independence hall for a year. and one by one, they were released. there was no evidence against. there was no one to testify against them. in the end, three people were sentenced to hang for their role in the whiskey rebellion.

one was david bradford, the rebel leader. but he was nowhere to be found. he abandoned his wife and his child and he escaped to live his life on a on a slave called the today myrtles plantation in what is outside of today, new orleans, louisiana another who was sentenced to die was named philip weigel. really unfortunate. he was a teenager. punched out a tax collector who came onto his father's farm. he didn't know who he was. weigel was not a rebel, but that tax collector did testify against him. and the third man sentenced to hang was one of the men who opened the mail of pittsburgh, who raided the letters. and they were going to hang the quakers of philadelphia in very impassioned letters, begged george washington to free and exonerate these. and at the last moment, washington did. one of the interesting points about the whiskey rebellion, i think, really needed to be made is the fact that in its own

time, it was never called the whiskey rebellion. it was much more called the western insurrection, because whiskey is not what this rebellion's about this rebellion was really about sovereignty. does the government have the right to rule over its people or not? or can you pick and choose the laws that you want to follow based on whether you like them or not? when thomas jefferson ran for president in 1796 and in 1800, he used the whiskey rebellion as evidence that the washington administration, the adams administration later were out of control, too powerful, too intrusive in people's lives. and alexander hamilton, to minimize the. all right. he tried to make seem less important than it was he said that wasn't western. he called it a little whiskey rebellion. and we still use that phrase today. that's that's politics, right? that's political spin to the greatest degree. so the whiskey rebellion is a

challenging event. it's one that i think needs to be studied more. and it was a to write this book. and i everyone enjoys it. so thank you very much. yeah. if you have questions, please go round to the microphone here. yeah. yeah. the folks in the mikes right over here folks. yeah, we're there. yeah. that's all. i think the question. yes. recipe. yeah okay. did the scotch irish bring the recipe from the old world or did

they concoct it in? so he a little bit of both, though. the way made it was from the old world but the the the raw materials of it were here. i want to impress this upon you about the whiskey they made. they based it on the grain that was most available. we call monongahela awry. part of it was corn. but it makes a very spicy whiskey. the whiskey they drank would have been what we call today moonshine. white lightning. it was white whiskey. we didn't start barrel aging whiskey till long after this. i also want to stress that, if you would have took the whiskey they and you would have sampled it, it would be far worse than the lowest grade swill you find in the liquor store today because it really it would have been because, again when you when you make whiskey, the first bit of the runoff is. that's why people would say you'll go blind.

right. if you drink that it's it's not drinkable. the call it the hands. the first part of my book is called heads. for that reason, the middle part of the run is called the hearts. and that's what you to drink. and the last part's called the tails. it's not bad for, but it's not really going to do much for either. these people made whiskey in volume. they were selling by volume, couldn't afford to dump out much anything. so they just bottled it all again because that was money for them. that was by weight. that was money for them. so they would have drank white whiskey that was particular bad. but that being said, it was considered amongst the best whiskey in america. so that should tell you something about the other quality overall, i think. yeah. yeah. the question. so besides, obviously the people in western pennsylvania, was there any other areas that had some level of agreement with them or at least to the extent they said, i understand they're there rebelling in such a way? or did everyone else in the country just side with washington and the federal

government say, i don't know why they're doing this? most it was very east versus west. the big cities in the east were, almost universally against the rebels. again, it was called the western insurrection. most westerners were in favor to some degree of them. again, north carolina had some anti whiskey act people, western virginia was right on fighting alongside the western pennsylvanians to the point where the city of morgan was actually besieged by whiskey rebels. now think about this. when david bradford made that new flag, he had flag a stripe on the flag for every county in pennsylvania that was a member of the rebellion, plus one western virginia county or today the state of west virginia. morgantown was not in favor of. and that's not that far away. and the whiskey rebels tried to besiege and surround it. and the people of morgantown actually chased them out. they fought them off themselves. so you can have a pretty clear

of where support for this began and ended. it was, again, most of the resistance was everywhere in the west, but it most violent here in pennsylvania. hi there. so i was having a conversation with my 12 year old son recently. we're discussing books, what he was into. and i said, well, what genre fiction are you into? and he said, i'm interested in history. but then he specifically said, i'm interested american history. and i drew a blank about recommendations, authors or books to recommend to kind of a pre-teen generation. do you have any recommendations for someone interested in american history? what i would say is a lot there's like there's like a real i use this word carefully revolution in young adult fiction. you know, i have a ten year old at home. there's there's a lot of people who use history, a way of telling a story. i couldn't recommend someone off the top of my head, but i don't

think you would have to look too far before you found some interesting ones. and if not, you know, visit a library, because i promise you, a librarian would help. yeah. yes, sir. when was in elementary school learning american history? somewhere around. 1955, we were told that the whiskey rebellion was that the new federal government under the could handle better than the articles of confetti. oration. hadn't they had expected you to mention something about that in your talk? yeah. okay. so there was a rebellion. this was sort of an age of rebellion. remember the french revolutions happening at the same time? this is there was a rebellion in 1785. in 1786, in massachusetts, a shays rebellion. and it was a rebellion of farmers against a state government they believed to be oppressive. that certainly sounds familiar, right. from what we just talked about.

so the articles of confederation, the precursor, the constitution were in place at that point, but the articles were extremely limiting in what you could do. it didn't even allow for the creation of a federal army. i mean, the articles of confederation were inadequate shays rebellion in 85 and 86. kind shook everybody up in a way. it made them. it made them that we need more concrete. a constitution that allows for taxation of all states and allows for a federal and a federal navy. so the articles were inadequate. and a lot of ways, you know, the whiskey rebellion was one of the first real tests of the constitution. and i might add, i think it stood pretty well. sorry, start answer this, but who would they barter or sell this whiskey to. so they're market was it was the east. it was philadel. it was it was new york. it was to a degree the new

england states as well. here's the challenge, that it was cheaper. listen closely to this. it was cheaper to ship something from philadelphia to london than it was from pittsburgh to philadelphia. you imagine that people in the west felt like america was undergoing this big commercial revolution, right? trading england, trading with europe. people in the west felt left out. so why did they do that? there were a couple of reasons for that. but one, the spanish still controlled the mississippi river and they not allow american commerce on the waters. number two, there was a native american rebellion in the west, which was greatly destabilizing to the overall economy, the west. and number three, there were british forts in places like ohio and michigan, illinois, that still had british troops in them, even though the land was technically and the revolution was over. so all of these things sort of add to the pressure in the pressure cooker that i think led to the whiskey rebellion.

because here's the amazing thing. one year after the whiskey rebellion, 1795, the washington administration signs three treaties. in 1795, they signed the treaty. greenville, which ends the native american uprising in the west. they signed the treaty, the treaty which removes british troops from western forts. and most importantly, they signed the treaty of madrid, which opened the mississippi river to trade. now, westerners, the ohio river, their lifeline. the ohio goes to the and the mississippi goes to the world. it goes to the atlantic ocean. and if any one of those treaties had been done two years sooner, there is no whiskey rebellion. right. because westerners feel like they finally have free and fair access to the larger atlantic markets that their eastern counterparts do. so they were forced to sell it to eastern cities. but getting it there and getting it over those mountains was was so cost prohibitive, it made it extremely for question.

yeah. so something interesting. so they had them wearing right now. it was actually from my uncle's bar. he and his friends named their bar rebellion after the whiskey rebellion, which is cool. okay. cool. my question, what is it like one thing from this spot, this new book, the you wrote. what's one thing that maybe you found that was really interesting or really challenging? oh, boy. what's one thing i found? you know know, for as important as it is, there isn't a great of it. and i think it's because it's difficult. that's that's the thing i think is so interesting to me. the way we like to think about the people involved being revolutionary war heroes and then turning on the turning the rebellion. this this book changed my life in a lot of ways. it got national attention in a number newspapers. the washington post, the wall

street journal. and an interesting pattern developed. the republicans who read it believed i was on their side. and the democrats who read it believed i was on their side. in truth, i'm not really a political person. but but they saw something in it. and and with the events of january 6th sort of coming right and going living in the aftermath of it, it reinforces something i've always believed. i've always believed that history is best when we use it like a mirror to reflect on our own world and and for people to read, book and care about it and to do just that feel is is the most i could have ever asked for for this book. so the modern response to it, the way readers respond to it, that's what i think is, is most interesting because that's all anyone ever tries for. yeah, you're you're answer just about addressed my question but been said that if we don't learn from history we're doomed to repeat it. and so i like what you said

about looking in the mirror, but if my question is, what's the transfer of of what can we take of this circumstance that challenged our nation and try to embrace and advance that cause of preservation and unity. boy, this is not going to be the answer everyone wants, but i think whatever you take from it is what it is. okay. in history know, no one gets the final say. no one gets the last word. you interpret it the way you want to interpret it. and you're not wrong no matter what you come up with. that's the beauty of history, right? you're you're always right. you have to back it up with. evidence. but for me, you know, what i take from it is number one, if not for george, we all have different passports. i completely believe that it's difficult to time he as he had in the revolution as a battlefield commander. he was so essential in our earliest period. but it also shows that, you

know, there wasn't. big battle as a result of this conflict. the system worked. we a constitution, we followed it and the system worked. we didn't unravel we didn't come apart. i know things seem bad right now, but i challenge you to name a really great time in american history politically when we all felt good about right. the system works. we've been through these kind of things before. we've been through wars before. it'll never be as bad as it was from 1861 to 1865. and the civil war. that doesn't happen anymore. okay. because we have a system and if we keep our collective faith in the sovereignty of the government, i think it'll i think it'll it'll work for us. all right thank you, guys. yeah.

please welcome ann thornton vice provost and university librarian. good evening. it's.