The Whiskey Rebel

Joan Maycott

Spring 1791

The following afternoon, Mr. Dalton and Jericho Richmond gathered in the sitting room of Mr. Skye’s house. Our host had prepared a meal of pigeon and dumplings, and though I ate but little I took more than my share of whiskey. Even so, I could not feel its effect. Only a few days before, I had been a grieving widow, a victim who had lost everything. I had, since then, done so much. Why could I not achieve things seemingly impossible? I had done so already.

I was tired, having had so little sleep, and my hand was cramped from writing past the dawn. After leaving the main house I’d gone to find Ruth, who would never again be called Lactilla. She, at my request, gathered together the other slaves. With quill and ink and Tindall’s heavy paper, I’d written out individual false traveling papers, identifying them by names and description as free Negroes. To each I’d given fifty dollars. It was no small portion of the wealth I’d taken from Tindall, but I could hardly have sent them off into the world penniless. I’d taken away their master and, unwilling to bear the burden of sending them off into a horrifying unknown, I had instead taken on the burden of helping to make for each a better life. At least a freer one.

Now, though I had not slept the previous night, I was fully awake with the friends who had helped to shape my life here in the West. The three men could talk about but one thing. Word had spread throughout the settlement, probably throughout the four counties, that Colonel Holt Tindall had hanged himself. No one had yet heard of Phineas’s confession, and perhaps no one had troubled themselves to observe the blow upon Tindall’s skull. I believed there would be discoveries yet to come, but not yet, and I hoped I might use them to advantage.

“It’s hard to believe,” Skye said, “that a man like that would suddenly take upon himself a conscience.” He was bent forward in his chair, holding his glass of whiskey between the palms of both hands, and he struck me as a man hunkered down upon the fringes of a battlefield. Great and cataclysmic things were coming, and some part of him knew it.

“I don’t believe him a man apt to take his own life,” Dalton said. “There must have been something else-a painful illness, perhaps, that would kill him in the end. This might’ve been his way of beating the thing. It would be more like the old bastard.”

“Something will come out,” said Jericho. “You may depend upon it.” And now he looked at me, hard and cold. He knew something, or suspected it, which I did not like. I wished the information to be mine alone to control.

It was time to speak. “Tindall did not hang himself,” I said. “He was executed for what he did to Andrew. I could not depend upon the law, and so I depended upon myself.”

All three men stared at me.

“Come now,” said Dalton. “You don’t expect me to believe a woman was capable of forcing Tindall to put a noose around his neck, let alone hoisting him up over the rafters? I’ll wager you don’t know how to tie a noose.”

I did not know how to tie a noose, but as for the other, I did not know why it was so unthinkable. Phineas was not so much larger than I, and he had done it all. If I were a man, the question would not have been raised. Yet I saw no reason to pursue this now. There might be much to be gained if I could make them see how others liked to aid me. “The boy, Phineas, helped me.”

“Phineas?” Skye said. “I thought he hated you.”

“Phineas is confused. Not yet a man, no longer a child, he’s been through more than anyone should be asked to endure. But, in the end, he knew who his true enemy was.”

“Why is that?” asked Jericho. “Because you told him? You said, Let’s kill Tindall, and he did it? Or did you have to cast your witch’s spell first?” Dalton began to say something to silence him, but Jericho held out a hand in defiance. “And now what? We wait for him to be caught, so he can link you to the murder, and then us?”

Perhaps I ought to have hated being so challenged, but I did not. I liked it. All three of them would have their doubts; better they should be voiced, and better if the questions were asked harshly by Jericho so the others would feel inclined to aid me. Perhaps neither would challenge him. Dalton might prefer to keep an open mind, and Skye might not wish to confront Jericho directly, but it was of no matter. They would counter his arguments in their own minds. They would silently resist him, resent his harshness to a grieving lady, and that, it seemed to me, would make them all the more agreeable.

“Phineas has gone off to the wilderness to kill Indians,” I explained, “but first he left a letter with Mr. Brackenridge confessing to the crime and making himself the sole actor in it. He seems enamored of the idea of being an outlaw.”

“This is fantastical,” Jericho said. “I am sorry, Mrs. Maycott. I know you’ve suffered, but you’ve also sold my home out from under me, and I must speak the truth. How do we even know you were there?”

I set forth on the table what remained of the banknotes Phineas had given me.

Skye picked them up and looked through them. “It looks like she was there,” he said.

“Colonel Tindall thought he was above the law,” I said. “Now he is not.”

“And what about you?” Jericho asked. “Are you above the law?”

“I am in the right, which is much the same thing. Mr. Richmond, you act as though I somehow put you in this situation. I am not the one who passed an excise law or enforced it here with blood and murder. I have been made a sacrifice to the greed of men back east-men like Alexander Hamilton and William Duer, who have turned their backs on the Revolution in order to fill their purses.”

“Listen to you,” he said. “You are putting yourself in the middle of affairs that are not your concern.”

I slapped my hand hard against the table, rattling the dishes. “I believe, sir, I have been thrust into the middle of these affairs, and that makes them my concern. Did not William Duer himself lie to my husband to convince him to trade his war debt for land-land he knew to be useless and debt he knew to be valuable, and yet he told us just the opposite? Someone might object that we ought to have known better, that we should not have been so easily cozened, but he claimed proximity to Hamilton himself. He claimed to speak nearly on behalf of the government.”

“No one doubts his villainy,” Richmond said.

I would not let him continue. “We come here, to this wasteland, and find that Duer’s man Tindall rules over us with a tyrannical fist. And then Hamilton ’s whiskey tax, enforced by Tindall, drives us all to ruin. It is a network of greed and evil and oppression-all we stood against in the war. All the evil we have suffered can be set before those three: Tindall, Duer, and Hamilton most of all. He is the master whom the others serve. It is he who would turn our republic into an oligarchy. Duer and Tindall are but the hands. Hamilton is the mind, and so I hate him above all others.”

“It’s a pretty speech,” Skye said, “and what you say is nothing but truth, but I don’t believe you say these things only for truth’s sake. You obviously have something on your mind. Best you let us hear it now.”

I steeled myself, for what I was about to propose was certainly madness, yet I believed it could be done. “Mr. Brackenridge believes he can make a sale within the next month. Perhaps even sooner. But thanks to Tindall’s generosity, we need not wait before deciding what to do.”

“We will find somewhere else to set up,” said Mr. Dalton. “Buy a new still and begin production once more.”

Mr. Skye spooned a portion of the stew into his mouth and then wiped his lips with a napkin. “I don’t see how. No matter where we go, we will still face the excise. Even if we flee the four counties for Kentucky or Virginia, we will face the whiskey tax and there will be established distillers to resent our intrusion into their business.”

“This money from Tindall is to be split among us. I cannot tell you what to do with your portion,” I said. “I can only tell you that for my part I will use this and what I get for my ground-rent lease to right these wrongs.”

“You mean revenge, don’t you? Revenge against whom?” asked Mr. Skye. “Do you mean to serve Hamilton and Duer as you did Tindall?”

Here was my moment to be careful in how I spoke-careful but commanding. I would need to convince them to follow me, but I would also need to convince them of my boldness, to show them I was determined and capable but not mad.

“It is precisely what I mean.” I spoke with cool determination, the end result of careful deliberation. “It is they who conspired against us and continue to conspire against us. What is more, they conspire against the nation by trying to unmake the principles of the Revolution.”

Mr. Dalton looked upon Mr. Skye with astonishment. Only Jericho Richmond acted as though what I proposed was of no moment. He set down his bowl, poured himself a whiskey, and watched his companions closely.

“You’ve lost your mind, lass,” said Mr. Skye, the harshness of the words belied by his gentle tone. “No one here blames your wanting it, mind, but you can’t take revenge against Alexander Hamilton. How will you do it?”

“I know precisely how,” I said. “It was the subject of my novel. I wrote of how a man sought revenge against speculators, and I believe the principles I worked upon in my novel can apply in actuality.”

“But it is pointless,” said Mr. Dalton. “Even if it were possible to hurt these men in any significant way, what should we gain by doing it?”

“Let me explain to you,” I said. “Listen carefully, for you will need to convince at least some of your whiskey boys to sign on. And why should they not? We are all hurt by this tax. If we can take just three or four more men with us, we shall be able to avenge ourselves and maybe even preserve the ideals of the Revolution. We can save our country from its own government.”

Mr. Skye, the only one present who was familiar with the machinations of my lost novel, slowly nodded his head. “When you told me of your fictive story, I thought it remarkable in how very plausible it was. The scheme was audacious, yet it might actually have worked. But when you speak of saving the country, I am far more skeptical. If this thing were to be done, you might destroy the country in saving it.”

“What of it?” I asked. “If this is our country-if it has become nothing but a haven for callous rich men and the lapdogs who would enforce their policies of greed-why should we not risk its destruction?”

“Because we’re all of us patriots,” said Richmond. “Does that answer your question?”

“What does it mean to be a patriot?” I asked. “You love the America in your head and your heart, but is that the same America that takes from poor men money they don’t have so rich men can have a corrupt bank? Is that why you fought in the war? Is that why Andrew fought? Is that why your friends died? They died for liberty, not so that oppression might spring from nearer tyrants. Hamilton ’s bank is not just the newest incarnation of their greed, it is a beast that threatens to destroy everything we believe in.”

“But would you really wish to see the nation brought to its knees, reeling in chaos?” asked Skye.

“We all of us here believe in liberty and freedom and republican government,” I said, “but does that mean we must obey any government that claims to uphold those principles while, at the same time, openly and brazenly pursuing a course of subjugation? Less than ten years after the Revolution, and look at what we have wrought: greed, oligarchy, corruption, and slavery. It is better this nation be crushed, better we destroy this false beginning and begin anew in the hopes of doing things properly. Is that not preferable to permitting something rotten and insidious to dress itself up as glorious and just? If we do nothing, if we take our little share of wealth and turn our backs now, in future generations, when rank corruption masquerades as liberty, it will be upon our shoulders. True patriots will then ask why we who were there to witness our nation at the crossroads did nothing.”

I had not planned to make so impassioned a speech, but now that the words had come out, I knew they were true. And from the looks upon their faces, I knew my friends believed them too.

Dalton said nothing for a long time. Then, at last, he looked at Skye. “You think it possible we can do this thing she speaks of? Not that it ought to be done, but that it can be-that the four of us and a few more, so small a number, can do it?”

“I do,” said Skye. “It won’t be easy, but why can we not do whatever we wish? Why can we not do whatever our minds conceive of?”

These men had changed the world once before. They had fought in the most important revolution in human history and redrawn the boundaries of government power for all time. Who was to say they could not do as much again?

Jericho Richmond set down his glass. “The two of you are under her spell. If this woman tells you to ride your horse off a cliff, will you do it?”

“Mr. Richmond, what have I done that you would speak to me so?” I demanded. “I thought we were friends.”

“We are,” he answered, “but I will not throw myself into the maw of your madness for no better reason than revenge.”

I poured myself a fresh mug of whiskey. “No, I suppose not. But will you throw yourself into the maw of my madness if doing so would make you very wealthy?”

I now had his attention. “Perhaps. If you convince me your plan might work.”

I began to speak, explaining to them the plan I had constructed, its dangers and nuances, and how it should leave us avenged, the country righted, and our efforts rewarded with great wealth. I spoke at length, at first fearing I’d said too much and not parsed out the information slowly or gently enough, but questions soon began to arise, from both Dalton and Skye and then even from Jericho. I made certain the whiskey continued to pour. By the end of the evening, my scheme had turned from an idea to a rebellion.