Alexander Hamilton (98 page)

Around this time, a mass meeting in Pittsburgh tried to lend a patina of legitimacy to this open lawlessness. The gathering’s clerk was a Swiss-born member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, Albert Gallatin, who had taught French at Harvard and spoke with an unmistakable Gallic accent. A tall, skinny man with a narrow face and hooked nose, Gallatin was a notoriously slovenly character. It was probably Gallatin who drafted a resolution saying the protesters would persist in every “legal measure that may obstruct the operation of the [excise] law until we are able to obtain its total repeal.” In the meantime, tax collectors would be treated with the “contempt they deserve.”
⁴
Gallatin later portrayed his part in this meeting as “my only political sin,” but Hamilton had a long memory for such transgressions.
⁵
Moreover, as we have seen, when sworn in as a U.S. senator in late 1793, Gallatin had quickly emerged as an unremitting Hamilton critic.

Refusing to tolerate illegal behavior and not finding the violent protests as colorful as did some later commentators, Hamilton appealed to Washington for “vigorous and decisive measures,” or else “the spirit of disobedience will naturally extend and the authority of the government will be prostrate.”
⁶
Hamilton was being typically decisive. He worried that federal authority was still suspect in the backcountry and needed to be firmly established—ideally by consent, if necessary by force. He wanted Washington to issue a proclamation warning tax evaders to desist and, if they refused, to send in troops. Washington reacted in a more temperate fashion. He issued a call for obedience to the law, but he regarded using soldiers as a last resort and hesitated to deploy troops against domestic opponents. If he dispatched troops, he told Hamilton, critics would only exclaim, “The cat is let out. We now see for what purpose an army was raised.”
⁷
It was an accurate prediction.

The mostly Scotch-Irish frontiersmen of western Pennsylvania, who regarded liquor as a beloved refreshment, had the highest per-capita concentration of homemade stills in America. In places, whiskey was so ubiquitous that it doubled as money. The rough-hewn backwoods farmers grew abundant wheat that they couldn’t transport over the Allegheny Mountains, which were crossed only by narrow horse paths. They solved the problem by distilling the grain into whiskey, pouring it into kegs, and toting them on horseback across the mountains to eastern markets. Some whiskey was also shipped down the Mississippi. Local farmers believed they unfairly bore the economic brunt of Hamilton’s excise tax and also resented any interference with their recreational consumption of homemade brew.

Trouble flared anew in western Pennsylvania during the summer of 1794 just as Hamilton was bedeviled by family problems. His fifth child, John Church Hamilton, who was almost two, became gravely ill, upsetting the again pregnant Eliza. Although Hamilton scarcely ever took a vacation, he beseeched Washington for “permission to make an excursion into the country for a few days to try the effect of exercise and change of air upon the child.”
⁸
When Eliza and “beloved Johnny” failed to improve after a week, Hamilton extended his leave and escorted them partway to the Schuyler mansion in Albany. The diligent Hamilton apologized to Washington, saying he hoped that “when the delicate state of Mrs Hamilton’s health is taken in connection with that of the child, I trust they will afford a justification of the procrastination.”
⁹
After Maria Reynolds, the guilt-ridden Hamilton continued to be a doting paterfamilias.

While Hamilton nursed his family, whiskey protesters blasted the stills of their neighbors who had honored the tax. They again terrorized Colonel John Neville, the long-suffering whiskey inspector. A Revolutionary War veteran who had served writs on those evading the tax, Neville issued an emergency summons for militia assistance after angry farmers surrounded his house. About a dozen soldiers tried to hold at bay five hundred rebels who fired at Neville’s house for an hour while torching his crops, barn, stables, and fences. They also kidnapped David Lenox, the U.S. marshal for the district, who was released after swearing that he would serve no more papers on tax evaders. Lenox and Neville finally fled the region “by a circuitous route to avoid personal injury, perhaps assassination,” Hamilton told Washington.
¹⁰

On August 1, six thousand rebels converged on Braddock’s field outside Pittsburgh as extemporaneous violence took on a more systematic character. An organizer named Bradford, having feasted on news of the French Revolution in the
Pittsburgh Gazette,
touted Robespierre as a splendid model for the crowd. He urged creation of a “committee of public safety” along Jacobin lines and several weeks later exhorted his comrades to erect guillotines. To obtain weapons, the rebels decided to attack the government garrison at Pittsburgh, with Bradford boasting, “We will defeat the first army that comes over the mountains and take their arms and baggage.”
¹¹

Always haunted by the hobgoblins of disorder, Hamilton saw more than mass disobedience: he saw signs of treasonous plots against the government. The man who seldom wavered sent Washington a 7,500-word account, reviewing the thuggish punishments meted out to revenue officers since the excise tax was introduced. Hamilton wished to strip these violations of any veneer of acceptable “civil disobedience” and showed they had been massive, vicious, and premeditated. He was not alone in perceiving a more general threat. Attorney General William Bradford regarded the western upheaval as a “formed and regular plan for weakening and perhaps overthrowing the general government,” while Secretary of War Knox wanted to combat the unrest with “a superabundant force.”
¹²
Regarding the uprising as a direct threat to constitutional order, Washington asked Supreme Court Justice James Wilson to declare a state of anarchy around Pittsburgh.

When it came to law enforcement, Hamilton believed that an overwhelming show of force often obviated the need to employ it: “Whenever the government appears in arms, it ought to appear like a
Hercules
and inspire respect by the display of strength. The consideration of expence is of no moment compared with the advantages of energy.”
¹³
Meeting with state officials on a blazing day in early August, Hamilton advised them to send troops to the western part of the state. He recommended that Washington assemble a multistate militia of twelve thousand men to suppress an uprising estimated at seven thousand armed men. Secretary of State Edmund Randolph advised against sending troops, fearing it would only unify the protesters, and called instead for a “spirit of reconciliation”—a position echoed by Pennsylvania officials.
¹⁴

Washington contrived a statesmanlike compromise between Hamilton’s truculence and Randolph’s civility. He issued a proclamation telling the insurgents to desist by September 1, or the government would send in a militia. At the same time, he announced that a three-man commission would confer with citizens. William Bradford was picked as one of the three commissioners, and before the attorney general headed west Hamilton, later accused of lusting for a showdown with the rioters, told him that he was prepared to enact “any reasonable alterations” to make the excise tax more palatable. “For in truth,” he told Bradford, “every admissible accommodation in this way would accord with the wishes of this department.”
¹⁵
This lenient approach, unfortunately, only emboldened the rebels. On August 17, the three commissioners met with concerned Pittsburgh residents, who contended that extremists both “numerous and violent” had resolved to resist the excise tax “at all hazards.” The commissioners reluctantly concluded that enforcing compliance with the law would require “the physical strength of the nation.”
¹⁶

As the use of force loomed, Knox told Washington that he had to go to Maine to deal with some pressing real-estate problems, though he said he could postpone the trip if necessary. Remarkably enough, Washington let Knox go at this critical moment, which meant that temporary responsibility for the War Department fell upon Hamilton’s slim shoulders. This once more provided emphatic proof of Washington’s faith in Hamilton’s varied abilities and of Hamilton’s perennial eagerness to exercise power.

Hamilton found himself in an agonizing predicament. He was immersed in urgent business—“I have scarcely a moment to spare,” he had told Eliza—as he assigned contracts to military vendors for a possible operation in western Pennsylvania.
¹⁷
He was ordering horses, tents, and other military stores and did not feel he could vacate his post. But the news he received from Eliza in Albany made him heartsick: little Johnny, despite treatment with laudanum and limewater, was losing ground, and Eliza’s pregnancy was precarious. As he tore open each letter, Hamilton trembled that it might announce his son’s death. “Alas my charmer, great are my fears, poignant my distress,” he told Eliza. “I feel every day more and more how dear this child is to me and I cease not to pray heaven for his recovery.”
¹⁸
Hamilton’s letters show both love for his family and an encyclopedic medical knowledge. He gave Eliza minute instructions on what to do if the baby’s situation worsened:

If he is worse, abandon the laudanum and try the cold bath—that is, abandon the laudanum by degrees, giving it overnight but not in the morning, and then leaving it off altogether. Let the water be put in the kitchen overnight and in the morning let the child be dipped in it head foremost, wrapping up his head well and taking him again immediately out, put in flannel and rubbed dry with towels. Immediately upon his being taken out, let him have two teaspoons full of brandy, mixed with just enough water to prevent its taking away his breath. Observe well his lips. If a glow succeeds, continue the bath. If a chill takes place, forbear it.
¹⁹

This sounds like more than book knowledge. Somewhere along the way, possibly as a boy or in the army, he had learned a considerable amount about nursing the sick and did so with a touching solicitude. By the end of the month, John Church Hamilton had started to recover, and Hamilton sent his wife and child to New York City, where they remained under the watchful care of Nicholas Fish and Elisha Boudinot. All the while, events in western Pennsylvania lurched toward an open confrontation with the government.

On the morning of August 23, 1794, subscribers to the
American Daily Advertiser
of Philadelphia read an impassioned warning from a writer called “Tully.” For this apprehensive author, the tumult in western Pennsylvania was a thinly veiled pretext for tearing down the constitutional order. The foes of the federal government were too cunning to attack it directly, he argued, so they feigned moderation and exploited issues such as the excise tax. Despite ailing health, Hamilton wrote three more “Tully” letters during the next nine days. As always, his easily alarmed mind dwelled on dire outcomes: “There is no road to
despotism
more sure or more to be dreaded than that which begins at
anarchy.
”
²⁰
In Hamilton’s opinion, the most sacred duty of government was an “inviolable respect for the Constitution and laws.”
²¹
He believed the supreme test of the new government’s strength was at hand.

Scarcely had “Tully” spoken than the three commissioners returned from western Pennsylvania and offered Washington’s cabinet a bleak assessment. During a marathon eight-hour session, Washington, Hamilton, and Randolph decided to call up Virginia’s militia under Governor Henry Lee and muster an additional force of up to fifteen thousand troops for possible action. After the meeting, Hamilton swung into action to line up additional supplies.

Like Hamilton, Washington feared that a disruptive faction wanted to pull down the government, and he was prepared to defend the Constitution at all costs. Still, with his finely honed instincts, he delayed dispatching troops. The more assertive Hamilton gave Washington evidence of militia colonels who had abetted the rioters and of judges who had defended resistance to the tax. There had not been a single instance, he alleged, where a Pennsylvania official had punished someone for flouting the whiskey tax. Especially upsetting was the fear that the upheaval might be spreading to other states. When Maryland summoned its militia to enforce the tax, soldiers turned on their officers and set up a liberty pole in the courthouse square. Rumor claimed that the rebels were about to pillage the state armory for weapons.

By September 9, Washington had had enough. “If the laws are to be trampled upon with impunity,” he said, “and a minority is to dictate to the majority, there is an end put at one stroke to republican government.”
²²
Worried about the advent of cold weather, he ordered troops to march to western Pennsylvania. Since Pennsylvania had been reluctant to quash the insurrection, militias from New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia were recruited instead. Hamilton was in constant motion as he bore the burdens of both the Treasury and War Departments. With his inexhaustible capacity for work, he outfitted an entire army, ordering shoes, blankets, shirts, coats, medicine chests, kettles, rifles, and muskets. As was his wont, he specified everything in great detail, especially when it came to uniforms. “The jackets ought to be made of some of the stuffs of which sailors jackets are usually made,” he ordered, “and, like them, without skirts, but of sufficient length of body to protect well the bowels. The trousers, or rather overalls, ought also to be of some strong coarse cheap woolen stuff.”
²³