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These writs demanded that the individuals who were served appear before a Federal court in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Neville had been assisting Federal Marshal David Lenox in serving writs to still owners in the region who had not paid the excise tax. Threats against tax collectors became a terrifying reality when an armed and angry mob marched on the home of John Neville, the local tax collector.
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In Western Pennsylvania, opposition to the excise tax was particularly violent. Even farmers who paid the tax were not safe, as their stills were often damaged or destroyed by neighbors who were incensed at their compliance. Tax collectors who were brave enough to establish offices in the western counties faced threats and even public humiliations such as being tarred and feathered. Reactions to the passage of the tax were swift and ranged from simple refusal to pay to outright violence against the tax collectors tasked with inspecting stills and collecting payments.
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Taken together with feelings that the government in the east was not doing enough to resolve problems with Native Americans, who would soundly defeat an American army at the Battle of the Wabash in the fall of 1791, in addition to the issue of free navigation on the Mississippi River, which had been closed by Spain in 1784, the excise tax fueled an already growing fire of animosity between the frontier counties throughout states. These small-scale farmers did not have ready cash to be able to pay the tax and were unable to easily pass on the burden to their customers, like the operators of large distilleries in the east. Unfortunately, this tax on production adversely impacted farmers on the western frontier. The 1791 passage of the whiskey excise tax was an attempt to begin paying down that debt through a direct tax on the distillation of alcohol. These findings suggest a distinction between interpretations of crisis that thematize central structural tensions and interpretations that displace anxieties created by those tensions on to a fetishized interpretation of crisis.In 1790, in order to solve a congressional deadlock over the permanent placement of the new nation’s capital, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison reached a compromise that would result in an eventual shift of the capital to a location on the border of Maryland and Virginia, as well a promise that the federal government would assume the Revolutionary War debts of the thirteen states.
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A crisis comes to have focus and meaning when interpretations construe the boundaries of a crisis, select certain key elements of social struggle, and develop specific speech genres that actors use to talk about a crisis. The article examines the Whiskey Rebellion (1794) with reference to the Salem Witch Trials (1692) and, in particular, struggles between interpretations of the events that emerged as they unfolded. This article provides some conceptual tools to think about such struggle and its implications for understanding political crisis. Between institutional degradations and structural sources of breakdown, on the one hand, and actions that emerge within times of uncertainty, on the other, lies an essential but undertheorized dimension of political crisis: the struggle over interpretation.