After reading Part III of Slaughter\u2019s The Whiskey Rebellion, despite his eloquent narration of arguably every event leading up to and culminating in the Whiskey Rebellion, I was left largely unsatisfied by the conclusions he made, or for that matter failed to make, with regards to the event he considers an overlooked turning point of American culture. While successfully revealing the complexity of the rebellion through his analysis of the conflict through the eyes of both the frontiersmen of the West and policymakers of the East, Slaughter ends his book weakly. As discussed in class, he ultimately rests the book on a hesitant claim that the \u201cliberty-order paradigm\u201d is the most effective method of summarizing the Whiskey Rebellion. In addition, on pages 182-183 Slaughter writes off a list of how events that led up to the Whiskey Rebellion could have transpired differently and potentially eliminated conflict. However, amidst his string of \u201cwhat if\u201d musings, Slaughters misses an opportunity to answers questions about why the \u201cstring of tragic ironies and coincidences\u201d did occur (183). For example, what might have been the motivations behind summoning the indicted distillers to Philadelphia? Or, why did the Mingo Creek militia feel the need to capture the federal marshal summoning the distillers to court? Slaughter, in his attempt to forge an extraordinarily thorough commentary on the Whiskey Rebellion, misses the mark in several facets and leaves many interesting historical questions unanswered.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, after reading Linebaugh and Rediker\u2019s article \u201cThe Many Headed Hydra,\u201d I found a handful of broader questions about the motivations and implications of eighteenth century uprisings, like the Whiskey Rebellion, have been answered. In a convincing piece, Linebaugh and Rediker demonstrate that revolutionary motivation and discourse had been fostered since the 1740s with the Knowles Riot (225). More importantly for discussing the Whiskey Rebellion, however, is their Linebaugh and Rediker\u2019s assertion of a \u201cmany-sided struggle against confinement\u201d as an organizing theme in popular revolt of the eighteenth century (244). This argument is further supported in The Whiskey Rebellion through the paradigms that Slaughter generously provides in his book. In illustrating the Whiskey Rebellion as a conflict of East versus West, upper class versus lower class, Federalist versus Antifederalist, and the like we see that the rebellion was in many ways a struggle from many sides. Moreover, it is well documented throughout Slaughter\u2019s book that the frontiersmen felt their rights were being encroached upon with the excise tax on whiskey, fostering a feeling of confinement. Linebaugh and Rediker\u2019s conclusions are further reinforced when taking into account the ethnic tensions of the Whiskey Rebellion as frontiersmen often constituted diverse groups of both white Americans and immigrants, emphasizing the multi-ethnic movements that pervaded rebellion in the eighteenth century (225).<\/p>\n
With this in mind, I would challenge AJ\u2019s claim that Washington and Hamilton could have averted crisis had they set aside their personal grudges with the West. Could doing this have settled some tensions? Undoubtedly it could have. On the other hand, as portrayed in Linebaugh and Rediker, revolts like the Whiskey Rebellion were many-sided affairs. Slaughter\u2019s book supports this as his reluctance to definitively choose a \u201cbest\u201d framework in which to view the Whiskey Rebellion emphasizes the complexity of the layered tensions in the affair. While a struggle of liberty versus order may have ceased with the retreat of Washington or Hamilton, frontiersmen would still have held their grievances, and several other paradigms of conflict would have remained unresolved. While the obstinacy of Washington and Hamilton definitely facilitated the materialization of the Whiskey Rebellion, the struggle to mend relations with the central government had endured for so long that the confinement felt by the frontiersmen would likely have come to its tipping point regardless of the actions taken by the President and his Secretary of the Treasury.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After reading Part III of Slaughter\u2019s The Whiskey Rebellion, despite his eloquent narration of arguably every event leading up to and culminating in the Whiskey Rebellion, I was left largely unsatisfied by the conclusions he made, or for that matter failed to make, with regards to the event he considers an overlooked turning point of … <\/p>\n