One of the more interesting events in the War Department’s history during the Washington Presidency was the tax rebellion nicknamed the Whiskey Rebellion. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton helped push through an excise tax on whiskey, which was a part of Hamilton’s extensive plan of finding a way to pay the bondholders that the national debt was owed to, and centralizing the power of the national government in 1791.

Hamilton believed the tax on whiskey to be a “luxury tax,” even though whiskey was consumed by many lower-income laborers and farmers, especially on the frontier. Whiskey even served as a medium of exchange in some areas of the frontier where money was scarce, and opponents of the new tax rightly argued that it targeted the poor while relieving wealthier easterners from taxation. Whiskey was a way to relax after a hard day’s work, and the rebels rightly questioned why it had been acceptable for them to resist British taxation, yet unacceptable to resist a similar mode of taxation from an already-unpopular …show more content…
As these efforts floundered, however, the westerners became more restless. A whiskey tax collector was tarred and feathered, anti-tax groups organized local militias, local courts refused to indict violators, and anti-tax sentiment soon spread to the surrounding states of Maryland, Virginia, and even as far south as the Carolinas and Georgia. By 1794 there was a full-on insurrection when a federal judge ordered “illegal” distillers to appear in court. By summer 1794 radical leaders began urging violent resistance against a national government that they believed had become as illegitimate as the former British government. Some rebels even began drawing parallels to their movement and the French