William Hogeland - The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty

Praise for The Whiskey Rebellion

For William Hogeland, thinking about history is an act of moral inquiry and high citizenship. A searching and original voice.

Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland

This is the most compelling and dramatically rendered story of the Whiskey Rebellion ever written. It is so riveting that one almost imagines being on the Pennsylvania frontier when the benighted farmers resisted the federal government and tried to cope with the huge army sent west to bludgeon them into submission.Hogeland unravels complex economic issues, shifting political ideologies, and legal maneuverings with uncommon skill.... Every American who values the history of how liberty and authority have stood in dynamic tension throughout the last three centuries should read this luminous book.

Gary B. Nash, professor of history and director of the National Center for History in the Schools, UCLA

A great readand an intelligent, insightful, and bold look at an overlooked but vital incident in American history.

Kevin Baker, author of Strivers Row

Conjures up a lively post-Revolutionary world.

Tara McKelvey, The New York Times Book Review

From the Pennsylvania frontier to Alexander Hamiltons maneuverings at the highest levels of government, Hogeland tells a good tale.... Renderings of Washington and Hamilton, as well as local figures, make the great men seem all too human.

Jon Meacham, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Hogeland captures the drama, danger, and importance of that period in his new fast-paced history.... [He] tells his complicated story clearly and quickly.

Len Barcousky, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A vigorous, revealing look at a forgottenand confusingchapter in American history, one that invites critical reconsideration of a founding father or two.

Kirkus Reviews

Hogelands 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 nations unity.

Publishers Weekly

[A] provocative and interesting chronicle... [Hogeland] knows how to tell an exciting story.

Booklist

Lively.Hogeland gives us vivid characterizations of the major players and evokes the atmosphere around the protestors. The Whiskey Rebellion is important history, carefully researched and written with verve.

BookPage

Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster eBook.

Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster.

C LICK H ERE T O S IGN U P

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

to Gail

P resident Washington was traveling home to Virginia in June of 1794 when he got hurt. He was sixteen months into his second term. Hed hoped to avoid serving it: at sixty-two, he had begun to feel irretrievably old. He kept catching low-grade, lingering fevers. His inflamed gums endured the pressure of tusk and hinged steel. Rifling through papers, he looked for proof of things people claimed hed said, waving off polite reminders from subordinates who, the president could see, were shaken by pinholes in his memory.

Hed been embodying republican judgment for so long that what might have been oppressive requirements of officeaudiences, dinners, dances, teasseemed to come naturally. In black velvet or purple satin, his huge frame, still magnificently straight, could endow any occasion with serenity and seriousness, with grace. Yet what George Washington really had to do all day was apply his enormous capacity for administrative thoroughness to a pile of awful problems that grew more numerous all the time. They were problems of mere survival. The Royal Navy was seizing U.S. ships. The British Army declined to evacuate forts on U.S. soil. Indian wars brought carnage but no progress. Washington had been harried, throughout his first term, by battles within his own cabinet: Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton undermined each other and, inevitably, Washingtons efforts. Yet both men had been essential to him. Now Jefferson had quit to lead the nations first opposition party. Hamilton, still in the cabinet, ever more essential, led the party in power. Of all dangers to the new nation, Washington was sure that party politics would be the deadliest.

So he was relieved to be able to get home at all this spring. The trip would be so brief that Mrs. Washington had remained in Philadelphia, and when traveling without her, Washington liked to push the pace, keeping the journey to five days. Yet the weather was hot, the horses out of shape, and presidential travel a production. The presidents light, long-distance coach went bouncing over ruts, holes, and rocks. Up top sat the driver and a postilion, both in livery. Riding alongside was a secretary; on the other side a friend might ride as bodyguard. Some ways behind, the baggage wagon lumbered; behind the wagon stepped the presidents saddle horse, led by a mounted slave. Overnight stops meant dinners, tours of friends properties, ride-alongs, and side trips. And there was frequent communication with the office.

Washington didnt want rest. What he wanted, the only reason for taking this quick break, was to be working on Mount Vernon, his five farms on eight thousand acres. Hed been trying for most of his life to make Mount Vernon both a self-sufficient manor in the ancient Roman style and a source of wealth through the sale of produce. Such an estate would normally be ancestral home to a dynasty, but while his wife had borne her first husband four children, George Washington had none. On soil made almost barren by tobacco cultivation before hed inherited it, he experimented with common crops like wheat and corn and with exotics like treebox, grapes, horse chestnuts, clover, and gourds. Hed planted five kinds of fruit trees. Hed spent years fighting the encroachment of waste by sprinkling plaster on soil, sowing oats and peas, searching in manure for what he called the first transmutation toward gold: fertility. He bred cattle, mules, hogs, sheep, and horses. Support came from smithies, charcoal burners, carpentry shops, mills, looms, cobblers, breweries, creameries, and a fishery. Voluminous accounts were kept separately for each farm, and more than three hundred people managedmost enslaved, many indentured, some free. At the foot of Mount Vernons lawns, the product of all this hard-won fecundity was loaded from wharves onto boats in the Potomac.

Yet Washington always had great difficulty keeping the place on a paying basis. Each week in Philadelphia he sat at a desk and wrote his farm manager page after page of instructions, caveats, reminders, neatly hand-drawn crop-rotation tables and charts; each week he required an equally detailed report in response. He was sure his managers were incompetent, his workers selling butter on the side, his slaves lazy and poorly managed. Finally he couldnt stand it any longer. With the end of the congressional session, he pushed the cabinet to close executive business, snatched a few weeks from the nation, and started south to give Mount Vernon the personal attention it desperately needed.