In the early morning light of July 16, 1794, retired Brigadier General John Neville, recently named regional tax inspector for the western district of Pennsylvania, found himself surrounded. Several dozen armed men, some former Revolutionary war veterans who were part of the local Mingo Creek militia, demanded that Neville turn over a federal marshal who they suspected he was housing. Unbeknownst to the armed protestors, the U.S. Marshall they were seeking—the same one they believed had been in the area issuing writs to area distillers who had yet to pay their taxes—was not on Neville’s Bower Hill Plantation property. After Neville continued to refuse surrender of himself or his own armed slaves inside his plantation house, shots rang out. As the musket smoke cleared following a brief exchange, Neville and his slaves escaped harm inside the house. Such was not the case for the protestors, however, as five of their number lay broken on Neville’s yard, one mortally. The latter, believed to have possibly been Oliver Miller, Jr., became the first casualty of the Battle of Bower Hill, one of the culminating events of the larger Whiskey Rebellion that had started three years prior. After collecting their wounded, the protestors retreated.
Undeterred and now enraged at the loss of life and limb, the protestors returned the following day in greater numbers and with retribution on their minds. They approached Bower Hill (located slightly southwest of present day Pittsburgh) for the second day in a row with roughly 400 to 800 men (surviving recollections vary greatly). While Neville’s band also managed to receive reinforcement during the night from nearly a dozen U.S. soldiers located at the nearby U.S. arsenal at Fort Pitt, all of Neville’s meager band of men must have quickly recognized the daunting odds before them and fear must have become the prevailing sentiment.
Shouts and shots shattered the quietude of the property. After another brief yet sharp firefight, Neville’s men had been easily routed from the property with a handful of men on each side becoming casualties. While the human toll proved light in lieu of the numbers involved, Neville’s manor house and plantation outbuildings fared much worse. The anti-tax protestors torched Bower Hill’s buildings and the structures burned down to their stone foundations. After the house, barns, and slave quarters had turned to smoldering ash, the Battle of Bower Hill came to a close—a battle that seemed to end as expeditiously as it had started and one that represented the types of protest events that had engulfed the entire American frontier from the New England states to the Carolinas as part of the Whiskey Rebellion.
The so-styled “whiskey insurrection,” of which the Battle of Bower Hill was one of the most significant events, had actually begun three years earlier in 1791 in opposition to the Tariff Act of 1789—the first excise tax passed by the newly created federal government of the United States under its new Constitution (1789). While Congress understandably passed the Act which taxed distilled spirits as a way to raise the necessary revenue to help retire the government’s Revolutionary war debts, the timing and impact of the tax was hardly well thought through.
Many Americans who lived in the western reaches of the majority of the original 13 states experienced shared social frustrations. Frontiersmen generally lacked adequate representation in state assemblies. The few roads that did cut through the dense forests of the interior were generally in very poor repair thus negatively impacting the ability of westerners to travel and trade. Perhaps even most importantly, Americans in the western reaches of most states had a need to distill their surplus grain into whiskey. Not only did distillation prevent the loss of grain crops, it also turned the crops into a marketable commodity with an extended shelf life. In fact, because of the absence of hard currency in circulation among folks from the upcountry, distilled spirits (generally whiskey) actually served as the medium of exchange for them as well. Hindsight aside, the idea of elected officials trying to tax the very livelihood of many former Revolutionary War veterans--many who resided in the western reaches of many states and who had just fought a successful revolution motivated loosely or greatly on the idea of “no taxation without representation"--would seem to have been ill-informed or ill-advised at best, or shown an outright disconnection to their needs at worst.
The “rebellion” would reach its peak in the summer of 1794 in western Pennsylvania where the largest number of U.S. citizens resisted the collection of the new federal taxes. Few protest events throughout the rebellion, however, reached the level of intensity and loss, both in life and property, as the Battle of Bower Hill.
Upon hearing about the battle and ongoing unrest in the Pennsylvania backcountry, President Washington decided to respond immediately. He called on the governors of Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia to supply him with militia in order to put down the rebellion—an army President Washington himself planned to lead (thus becoming the only sitting President in American history to lead an army in the field).
By autumn 1794, Washington and some 12,500 militia reached Carlisle, Pennsylvania and scattered all “rebels” who had organized resistance to the collection of taxes in the area. As word spread that President Washington’s army was determined to enforce the law, all organized opposition further to the west quickly dissolved, to include that of the Mingo Creek men around Bower Hill.
Washington’s swift action at the helm of his hastily assembled army did bring about an end to the Whiskey Rebellion, but it hardly ended popular opposition to the collection of taxes—opposition that would help precipitate the formation of political parties in the new, federal government. While Washington may have demonstrated the authority and will of the newly established, centralized federal government, his actions helped bring about America’s First Party System (circa 1792 – 1824) as two major political parties emerged: the Federalist Party, led by Alexander Hamilton, and the Democratic-Republican Party, led by future presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
DID YOU KNOW:
Whiskey aficionados to arms! Well, to rocks glasses really. Did you know that you may partake in the Whisky Rebellion today from the quiet of your own home? You need only procure yourself one of the four labels of Bower Hill whiskey available on the market today (sold in Single Barrel, Barrel Reserve, Reserve Rye, and Barrel Strength). After all, are not bourbon and books better than bullets and bloodshed? You will, however, have to pay federal tax on any purchase. The latter courtesy of the laws established and enforced by the United States’ First Congress and first President respectively.
Select considerations for further reading:
Boyd, Stephen R., ed. The Whiskey Rebellion: Past and Present Perspectives. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1985.
Clouse, Jerry. “The Whiskey Boys Versus the Watermelon Army.” Pennsylvania Heritage 17 (Spring 1991): 22 – 29.
Krom, Cynthia L. and Stephanie Krom. “The Whiskey Tax of 1791 and the Consequent Insurrection: ‘A Wicked and Happy Tumult.’” Accounting Historians Journal 40 (December 2013): 91 – 114.
Slaughter, Thomas P. The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
