In the year 1791, when the new United States government was just coming together,

Alexander Hamilton, George Washingtons Secretary of Treasury and right hand man, proposed
an excise tax on distilled spirits such as whiskey. This tax was put on the grain that farmers used
in the distilled whiskey and supposedly, it was the first tax set by the official government that
imposed on a domestic product. The reason behind this tax, was due to the debt crisis that was
during the revolutionary war. By 1791, the estimated federal debt was about $77.1 Million.1 In
order to pay off the debt they had over the war and for other countries who helped, they needed
to establish a strong central government that had the power to put a national tax over the country.
In Western Frontier Pennsylvania, citizens became furious when they found out about the tax.
The people who would be mostly affected by the tax were small farm owners. They believed it
was another unfair policy towards the people that relied on their crops to make a living for
themselves.2 The people of Pennsylvania refused to pay the tax and in 1792, George Washington
tried to resolve the dispute by establishing a national proclamation that would try to control the
resistance.
Washingtons Proclamation on Whiskey Rebellion on August 7, 1794
by endeavors to deter those who might be so disposed from accepting offices under
them through fear of public resentment and of injury to person and property, and to compel those
who had accepted such offices by actual violence to surrender or forbear the execution of them;
by circulating vindictive menaces against all those who should otherwhise, directly or indirectly,
who, yielding to the dictates of conscience and to a sense of obligation, should themselves
comply with; by acutally injuring and destroying the property of persons3
George Washingtons Proclamation basically asked rebels in Pennsylvania to stop causing
a problem and to just get with the program of paying the tax. This just made things worse and by
1794, The Whiskey Rebels of Pennsylvania became a forced to recon with.
1 Peter Kotowski, Whiskey Rebellion, The Digital Encyclopedia of George Washington,
November 15, 2016, http://www.mountvernon.org/digital-encyclopedia/article/whiskeyrebellion/
2 Peter Kotowski, Whiskey Rebellion, The Digital Encyclopedia of George Washington
3 Richardson, ed. Messages and Papers, Vol. 1, P. 158