Welcome to the March 2008 Edition of Patriot Music News!

	Matt Fitzgibbons

In 1791, Alexander Hamilton persuaded Congress to enact a heavy tax on distilled spirits. Known as the "Whiskey Tax", his two arguments were that the law would be both a measure of social discipline, and a means to help pay down the national debt, but he confessed privately that his main goal was to advance the power of the Federal Government. Farmers in the western frontiers of upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and the Ohio Valley already sided with Jefferson (anti-Federalists) against Hamilton (Federalists) in the earliest stages of the two political parties over how much Federal power the Constitution enumerated. Without the financial means to get their crops to market across poor roadways, they often distilled their harvests into spirits to make them more portable. Adding insult to injury, farmers in these regions often used their corn crops as their primary currency, in place of cash. In what amounted to a 25% tax for smaller producers, larger producers could pay a flat fee, leaving smaller distillers to pay by the gallon.

With tensions already high because of what the anti-Federalists perceived as encroachments on their liberties by Hamilton's rapidly growing Federal government, riots had broken out by the summer of 1794 in many States and had begun to turn violent. The "Whiskey Rebels" shut courts down, attacked tax collectors, and threatened to invade Pittsburgh. President George Washington declared martial law and sent 13,000 militiamen from several States to round up the rebels (an army larger than the Continental Army). Only one of two times in United States' history that a President commanded the military in the field, several hundred men were rounded up by the end of the year and charged with sedition and treason.

The Whiskey Tax was repealed in 1803 and in his final day of office, with several of the Whiskey Rebellion's leaders having been convicted of treason and sentenced to death by hanging, Washington granted them all the first presidential pardons.^1.

1. A Patriot's History of the United States by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen
2. Special thanks to Jurist (Legal News and Research) for the list of Presidential pardons. (Political parties added.)