Farmers during the colonization of the US were very big in to fermenting and distilling their crops.  It made sense, when farmers distilled their produce into whiskey they didn’t have crop spoilage, the load to take to market was much smaller and to top it all they gained a much higher profit.  Farmers were able to receive 10 times more by selling whiskey compared to selling their unprocessed grain.

After the United States won the revolutionary war, it became very apparent that the war was extremely costly and sank the US into a lot of debt.  The total cost of the war was $52 million and trying to pay that off in a newly established country would not be easy.  Alexander Hamilton devised the plan to tax whiskey based on the idea that whiskey was a type of luxury item and taxing the production of it seemed natural.

The tax on whiskey was 9 cents/gallon for small distillers and 6 cents/gallon.  Farmers with less efficiency took the burden of this tax while larger distillers (such as George Washington) were able to mass produce their liquor without a large financial struggle.  Smaller distillers opposed this tax bitterly.  In 1794 opposition was at its highest when protests turned to fully fledged rebellions where the opposition wrote threatening letters, robbed mail carriers, stopped court hearings and in one case tarred and feathered a tax collector.

George Washington and Alexander Hamilton thought this was a great time to impose the authority of the new American government and Washington personally commanded 12,950 troops to Pennsylvania to bring order to the area.  Not much fighting happened and most ran away.  Some minor charges were brought to a few rowdy rebels but in the end no one died from the altercation between the rebels and the militia.  The whiskey rebellion was never largely enforced outside of western Pennsylvania and the tax was repealed in 1803 after a great deal of failure.