The students in my early American republic course are reading Thomas Slaughter’s The Whiskey Rebellion: A Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution. The book is now over twenty years old, but it is still the best, and most undergraduate accessible, study of the Whiskey Rebellion. I have been using it for about seven years now and find it to be a wonderful window into the early years of the Federalist period.
I love teaching Chapter Five, “George Washington and the Western Country.” Slaughter warns his readers early in this chapter that he is going to offer an “understanding of this heroic figure as a very human person.” He certainly delivers. He reminds us that Washington owned large tracts of land on the Pennsylvania and Virginia frontier, the main region where the whiskey rebellers lived. Washington harbored a disdain for the settlers of the west, particularly those who squatted on his property. Though he loved the land, and saw its rivers as vital to the economic transformation of the United States in accordance with the plan that Alexander Hamilton, his treasury secretary, had proposed, he had little toleration for the common settlers and probably used his office as a means of gaining more land in the area.
Slaughter pulls no punches:
“His mixture of public and private affairs included solicitation of a custom collector’s aid in selling some tobacco and wheat, an attempt to convince the commissioners of the District of Columbia to purchase rocks from his quarry and the enlistment of a U.S. Senator to sell land in western Pennsylvania.
Could you imagine, I asked my students, if a contemporary president were to mix “public and private affairs” in this way. Can you say impeachment?
In the end, Slaughter agrees with Washington biographer James Thomas Flexner that “Washington had ‘a personal economic stake’ in the outcome of the Whiskey Rebellion.”
I often wonder how my students, some of whom are political and cultural conservatives, will react to this chapter. This year I was surprised to find that virtually none of the students had any beef with Slaughter’s interpretation of Washington. A few thought he may have “piled on” a bit at the end of the chapter, but all of them thought that this view of Washington was historically plausible. Since many of my students are Christians who believe that human sin is a powerful force in human history, they could relate to Slaughter’s attempt to “humanize” Washington.
“Founders Chic” has not yet made its way to Messiah College!
The “Founders Chic” article you referenced was really interesting and provides a good overview. You should think about assigning it for our class.
Fascinating. I’ve not read anything specifically on Washington before, so this is all news to me.
Chris: Thanks for posting. I hope you visit us more often.