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Zusatztext “For William Hogeland! thinking about history is an act of moral inquiry and high citizenship. A searching and original voice.” —Rick Perlstein! author of Nixonland Informationen zum Autor William Hogeland has published in numerous print and online periodicals, including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, and Slate. He lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York. Klappentext The story of the 1791 rebellion that pitted President Washington and Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton against poor farmers and settlers. The Whiskey Rebellion PROLOGUE The President, the West, and the Rebellion President Washington was traveling home to Virginia in June of 1794 when he got hurt. He was sixteen months into his second term. He’d hoped to avoid serving it: at sixty-two, he had begun to feel irretrievably old. He kept catching low-grade, lingering fevers. His inflamed gums endured the pressure of tusk and hinged steel. 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. 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. In black velvet or purple satin, his huge frame, still magnificently straight, could endow any occasion with serenity and seriousness, with grace. 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. They were problems of mere survival. The Royal Navy was seizing U.S. ships. The British Army declined to evacuate forts on U.S. soil. Indian wars brought carnage but no progress. 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. Yet both men had been essential to him. Now Jefferson had quit to lead the nation’s first opposition party. Hamilton, still in the cabinet, ever more essential, led the party in power. Of all dangers to the new nation, Washington was sure that party politics would be the deadliest. So he was relieved to be able to get home at all this spring. The trip would be so brief that Mrs. Washington had remained in Philadelphia, and when traveling without her, Washington liked to push the pace, keeping the journey to five days. Yet the weather was hot, the horses out of shape, and presidential travel a production. The president’s light, long-distance coach went bouncing over ruts, holes, and rocks. Up top sat the driver and a postilion, both in livery. Riding alongside was a secretary; on the other side a friend might ride as bodyguard. Some ways behind, the baggage wagon lumbered; behind the wagon stepped the president’s saddle horse, led by a mounted slave. Overnight stops meant dinners, tours of friends’ properties, ride-alongs, and side trips. And there was frequent communication with the office. Washington didn’t want rest. What he wanted, the only reason for taking this quick break, was to be working on Mount Vernon, his five farms on eight thousand acres. He’d been trying for most of his life to make Mount Vernon both a self-sufficient manor in the ancient Roman style and a source of wealth through the sale of produce. Such an estate would normally be ancestral home to a dynasty, but while his wife had borne her first husband four children, George Washington had none. On soil made almost barren by tobacco cultivation before he’d inherited it, he experimented with common crops like wheat and corn and w...
