When the United States government put a federal tax on liquor, there were protests and riots throughout the country. This rebellion was called the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. It was the first federal tax of the U.S. Government and the catalyst was rumored to be Alexander Hamilton. The uprising that followed gave the new U.S. government the opportunity to establish federal authority using the military means at their disposal (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica 2018). It was originally a tax, but it became a true law in 1791 (Hoover 2014). The tax may have been effective had people not been intensely aggressive in their protests. These “whiskey rebels” sparked a protest that refused to let the law stand as is. They choose to pass this into law because of Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton, who was the secretary of the treasury at the time, was faced with the task of paying off the U.S. war debt (Scanlon 2018). Hamilton realized there was a lot of alcohol circling around the U.S. at the time that was being both imported and created here that could be taxed. Hamilton stated that there would be millions of gallons imported into New York that would potentially give the government enough money to …show more content…
They protested against tax collectors broke out in many areas of western Pennsylvania. This was the beginning of the whiskey rebellion. The actual whiskey rebellion began in Pittsburgh during October 1791 when a group of angry farmers kidnapped a federal tax collector, and carried him five miles to a blacksmith shop where they stripped him of his clothes, and burned him with a hot metal rod. Over the next three years more of the tax collectors were kidnapped, had their homes destroyed, and humiliated. Even the home and plantation of John Neville, the chief tax collector for southwestern Pennsylvania, were both burned to the ground (Kyff 1994). No tax collector was safe during this