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When farmers of today speak of marketing their corn, they could mean selling the grain itself on the open market. Or they could mean they're going to feed their corn to hogs or cattle and market it as meat.
Colonial farmers also had a means of marketing their grains as something else. But their something else was whiskey. It should be pointed out that while the colonists had many sterling qualities, temperance was not one of them. Whiskey flowed in veritable rivers from the stills on an incredible number of farms. This firey liquor was the almost universal drink of men, women and children, who had little or no religious or moral sentiment against its use.
Some farmers kept no cows, but always kept whiskey in their homes, alleging that a barrel of whiskey was more valuable to a family than a cow.
Before 1800 and the coming of good roads, whiskey was about the only farm product that could possibly bear the cost of transportation to market. A pack-horse could carry 24 bushels of rye in the form of whiskey. Only four bushels of actual grain could be loaded on a single horse. So by transforming his grain into whiskey, the farmer could effect a six-fold increase in the amount of grain he could get to market with a pack-horse. Usually, farmers in one area would send their produce to market on a pack train of 30 or 40 horses.
In the Appalachians and beyond, distilling was almost as widespread as milking is today. And the product of the stills was used probably more for barter than for consumption. It occupied a place in the frontier economy similar to the place that wampum had occupied in the Indian economy.
Southwestern Pennsylvania, particularly, was a flourishing center of distilling, and almost every fifth or sixth farm had its copper kettle. There was a time when whiskey was the one commodity that had a standard value and all the mediums of barter - such as corn, salt, tobacco - were valued according to the amount of whiskey they would bring.
After the Revolution, a farmer needed access to a still almost as much as a grist mill because coins were virtually unknown and paper money was worthless.
In 1756, the General Assembly imposed an excise tax on all distilled spirits, but this created such an uproar that it was soon repealed. In 1791, seeking to reduce the federal debt, Congress imposed a modest tax on all distilled spirits. Nearly all of the distillers accepted the imposition of the tax, perhaps not with total equanimity, but at least with no open hostility.
But the young government found itself faced with a raging tempest in Washington County, Pennsylvania. The farmerdistillers there, many of whom had come from Scotland and Ireland to be rid of taxes such as this, refused to pay. And Thomas Mifflin, the governor of the state, refused to do anything to make them pay. Although to many, it might have seemed a minor insurrection, President Washington and his treasury secretary accepted this challenge as a test of whether or not the federal government could really enforce the law without the help of the states.
In August of 1794, President Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Generals Daniel Morgan and Henry Lee, along with 15,000 miltiamen, marched on Washington County.
While the Washington County farmers were indeed rebellious, they were not stupid. When they saw what they were up against, they laid down their rifles, picked up their jugs and went home.
By 1840, most of the distillers were out of business. Roads had improved, and with access to markets it became profitable to turn grain into milk, pork and beef. But the men of the Whiskey Rebellion had provided one of the most colorful highlights in the history of American agriculture.