Throughout the summer of 1791, farmers in Pennsylvania met to discuss and protest the excise tax on whiskey. In September, representatives from several western counties, including the former North Carolina Regulator Herman Husband, met in Pittsburgh (see chapter 5). There they drafted a resolution to be printed in the Pittsburgh Gazette and sent to the U.S. Congress and the Pennsylvania legislature. The following selection highlights the farmers’ objections to the whiskey tax.
Resolved, That the said law is deservedly obnoxious to the feelings and interests of the people in general, as being attended with infringements on liberty, partial in its operations, attended with great expense in the collection, and liable to much abuse. It operates on a domestic manufacture, a manufacture not equal through the States. It is insulting to the feelings of the people to have their vessels marked, houses painted and ransacked, to be subject to informers, gaining by the occasional delinquency of others. It is a bad precedent tending to introduce the excise laws of Great Britain and of countries where the liberty, property, and even the morals of the people are sported with, to gratify particular men in their ambitious and interested measures.
Resolved, That in the opinion of this committee, the duties imposed by the said act on spirits distilled from the produce of the soil of the United States, will eventually discourage agriculture, and a manufacture highly beneficial in the present state of the country, that those duties which fall heavy, especially upon the western parts of the United States, which are, for the most part, newly settled, and where the aggregate of the citizens is of the laborious and poorer class, who have not the means of procuring the wines, spirituous liquors, etc., imported from foreign countries.
Source: Pennsylvania Archives, 2nd Series, 4:21.