![]() So he was relieved to be able to get home at all this spring. Of all dangers to the new nation, Washington was sure that party politics would be the deadliest. Hamilton, still in the cabinet, ever more essential, led the party in power. Now Jefferson had quit to lead the nation’s first opposition party. 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, Washington’s efforts. Indian wars brought carnage but no progress. The British Army declined to evacuate forts on U.S. 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. In black velvet or purple satin, his huge frame, still magnificently straight, could endow any occasion with serenity and seriousness, with grace. ![]() He’d been embodying republican judgment for so long that what might have been oppressive requirements of office-audiences, dinners, dances, teas-seemed to come naturally. Rifling through papers, he looked for proof of things people claimed he’d said, waving off polite reminders from subordinates who, the president could see, were shaken by pinholes in his memory. His inflamed gums endured the pressure of tusk and hinged steel. He kept catching low-grade, lingering fevers. He’d hoped to avoid serving it: at sixty-two, he had begun to feel irretrievably old. He was sixteen months into his second term. President Washington was traveling home to Virginia in June of 1794 when he got hurt. The Whiskey Rebellion PROLOGUE The President, the West, and the Rebellion Focusing on the battle between government and the early-American evangelical movement that advocated western secession, The Whiskey Rebellion is an intense and insightful examination of the roots of federal power and the most fundamental conflicts that ignited-and continue to smolder-in the United States. With an unsparing look at both Hamilton and Washington, journalist and historian William Hogeland offers a provocative, in-depth analysis of this forgotten revolution and suppression. To President Washington, it was the catalyst for the first-ever deployment of a federal army, a military action that would suppress an insurgency against the American government. To Alexander Hamilton, the tax was the key to industrial growth. ![]() To the hard-bitten people of the depressed and violent West, the whiskey tax paralyzed their rural economies, putting money in the coffers of already wealthy creditors and industrialists. In 1791, on the frontier of western Pennsylvania, local gangs of insurgents with blackened faces began to attack federal officials, beating and torturing the tax collectors who attempted to collect the first federal tax ever laid on an American product-whiskey. A gripping and sensational tale of violence, alcohol, and taxes, The Whiskey Rebellion uncovers the radical eighteenth-century people’s movement, long ignored by historians, that contributed decisively to the establishment of federal authority. ![]()
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