Washington’s military preparations resulted in large part from the increasing violence occurring in western Pennsylvania. Tax collectors in particular faced the wrath of angry farmers and other citizens sympathetic to their plight. In the following letter, Alexander Hamilton relays to Washington reports of the violence that had occurred since the rebellion began. He also offers his own explanation of the types of people responsible for attacking not only government officials but also anyone who offered any support for the whiskey tax.

Sometime in October 1791, an unhappy man of the name of Wilson, a stranger in the county and manifestly disordered in his intellects, imagining himself to be a collector of the revenue, or invested with some trust in relation to it, was so unlucky as to make inquiries concerning distillers who had entered their stills, giving out that he was to travel through the United States to ascertain and report to Congress the number of stills, etc. This man was pursued by a party in disguise, taken out of his bed, carried about five miles back to a smith’s shop, stripped of his clothes, which were afterwards burnt, and having been himself inhumanly burnt in several places with a heated iron, was tarred and feathered and about day-light dismissed naked, wounded and otherwise in a very suffering condition. These particulars are communicated in a letter from the inspector of the revenue of the 17th of November, who declares that he had then himself seen the unfortunate maniac, the abuse of whom, as he expresses it, exceeded description and was sufficient to make human nature shudder. The affair is the more extraordinary as persons of weight and consideration in that county are understood to have been actors in it, and as the symptoms of insanity were, during the whole time of inflicting the punishment, apparent; the unhappy sufferer displaying the heroic fortitude of a man who conceived himself to be a martyr to the discharge of some important duty.

Not long after a person of the name of Roseberry underwent the humiliating punishment of tarring and feathering with some aggravations for having in conversation hazarded the very natural and just but unpalatable remark that the inhabitants of that county could not reasonably expect protection from a government whose laws they so strenuously opposed.

The audacity of the perpetrators of these excesses was so great that an armed banditti ventured to seize and carry off two persons who were witnesses against the rioters in the case of Wilson in order to prevent their giving testimony of the riot to a court then sitting or about to sit.

Designs of personal violence against the inspector of the revenue himself, to force him to a resignation, were repeatedly attempted to be put in execution by armed parties, but, by different circumstances, were frustrated.

Source: Pennsylvania Archives, 2nd ser., 4:21, 88–89.