The American Revolutionary War Of The United States

Meaning when a tax is placed on a certain item, whiskey, in this demand model the producer, the farmers, would pay most of the tax. At the time the federal government saw whiskey as a luxury and so placed the tax on the distillers, raising the price of production in return decreasing the amount produced. They saw they could pay off their debt, by taxing the whiskey, and the producers of whiskey would pay for the debt for them. Therefore, the National debt incurred during the Revolutionary war and, the supply and the demand of whiskey are related. It was shown that only the distillers who produced less would pay more because of the tradeoff of equity end efficiency, meaning that because of the debt from the war, the government needed a way to pay for the debt and taxed whiskey. Concluding that the supply and demand elasticities of whiskey are completely due to the taxation put on the whiskey to pay for the

Towards the end of the 16th century, the United States government experienced continuous changes in laws(taxes) and several problems(battling and removal of Indians) associated with westward expansion. Conflict was created in response to the rising taxes issued by the government on goods such as whiskey. Most affected by the heavy taxation were the creators and distributors of whiskey - the average poor white farmer. An incident that occurred in 1794 involving enraged farmers in western Pennsylvania, threatened the tax collectors lives as well as the authority of the government. This incident came to be known as the Whiskey Rebellion.

The topic of revolution is extremely subjective. What may appear as an insurrection to some might not be as extreme to others. When talking about the American Revolutionary War, however, the answer is clear. While the War certainly brought about change within the United States, it wasn’t necessarily very revolutionary. The most important aspects of the colonies, such as ideas about government, various types of societal equality, slavery and freed blacks, and the rights of women remained for the most part, unaffected.

From the period of 1754 to 1763, the British engaged in a war with the French within American territory. This war, fought due to both French and Native American hostilities, affected both the Americans view on the British and British treatment of their colonies. Ultimately, the French and Indian war lead to political, economic, and geographical changes for the American colonists and Great Britain.

As the Revolutionary War ended, the United States faced a completely new set of challenges. Now the United States had to shift focus from gaining independence from England to gaining their own financial security. The newly formed country had to figure out a way to pay for the war debt incurred by the colonies. In order to do this, the Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, convinced congress and the president that a tax on whiskey would be able to provide the revenue needed to repay the debts. However, the tax on whiskey was met with heavy resistance. To Hamilton, the tax was only “a few dollars a year for the average small distillery” but for the Frontiersmen it was an attack on their way of life. The resistance to the tax, the

In 1791, under the advisement of Alexander Hamilton, congress passed the whiskey tax. This tax, put a twenty-five percent tax on whiskey. Hamilton created this tax in hopes of the federal government gaining more money to help pay of the nation’s debt. However, in doing so, this angered many people, especially farmers in western Pennsylvania, because they distilled the extra grain they had to make whiskey and sell it to make extra income. These small operations in western Pennsylvania rebelled by erecting liberty poles and taring and feathering tax collectors. George Washington, who was president during this time, saw the outburst and decided to take action against the angered farmers. Washington gathered about 13,000 men from the militia to put an end to this rebellion. In doing so, Washington showed that the government help the power over the citizens. In The Whiskey Rebellion, by Thomas Slaughter, he describes different consequences that arise from the whiskey tax. Slaughter presents three main points, which include conflicts between the east and west, two political systems that begin to develop, and the actual rebellion.

Shortly after Alexander Hamilton created the tax on whiskey which was used to pay off the Revolutionary war debt, some farmers started to cause issue in the wilderness. After the tax was passed a group of farmers went out in the woods they captured a tax collector they , stripped him naked, shaved off his hair, poured hot tar all over his body, covered the tax collector in feathers, and finally strapped him to a tree in the middle of the night which caused the rebellion to start. According to “American History: The Whiskey Rebellion: From the August 2014 Issue”,”A group of armed men accosted whiskey tax collector Robert Johnson in a lonely stretch of forest in western Pennsylvania in 1793. They pulled Johnson off his horse and ordered him to strip, cut off his hair, poured hot tar on his body and dumped chicken feathers over the tar.” Then shortly after the tarring, more farmers were joining the Whiskey Rebellion against the whiskey tax.

The Whiskey Rebellion was created from many issues, not just the excise tax on whiskey. Farmers in western Pennsylvania blocked roads to prevent tax collectors from reaching them and to show their disdain for the taxes placed on the farmers that they

During the Whiskey Rebellion, which was caused by the tax placed on whiskey, George Washington personally led his troops to go stop the rebellion. This was the first realization of the need for a stronger central government. Although many Americans did not like the strong central government style of leading because it reminded them of their past rulership, it was needed for America to become stable. Washington's response to the uproar helped build relations between people and the tax collectors, which

Alexander Hamilton, a Federalist, was the first Secretary of the Treasury for the United States, needed to find a way to pay off the $54,000,000 in national debt from the fight for independence from England. Tariffs on imported goods were not enough to pay down the nation's debt so Hamilton came up with the nation's first ever excise tax, which is a tax on domestic goods.

The Whiskey Excise Tax hit rural farmers especially hard, and they started crying foul almost immediately after passage. It was criticized for being an “unreasonable economic hardship and as an ominous intrusion by central authorities into local affairs” (Gould, 1996, 405). These “westerners” felt as if they were being unjustly victimized by this tax. Most farmers during this period in American history worked extremely hard just to make ends meet, so operating a whiskey distillery offered them a source of extra income. In the minds of these western farmers this tax left them at a competitive disadvantage with eastern farmers. Western small-time farmers generally had small whiskey distillers. These frontier distillers could not run as efficiently as the larger distillers in the east, so their tax burden was much greater. For this reason many of the western farmers felt that Secretary Hamilton had set up a system that was giving tax-breaks to the larger eastern-based distillers. This sentiment is often echoed in today’s world- that the federal government promotes “big business” (Holt, 2004, 30). The cause of much of this rile and frustration, however, stems from the age-old

In the United States beginning in 1791, the Whiskey Rebellion was one of the challenges during the presidency of George Washington. People refused to pay tax on whiskey in Western PA, and the first tax imposed was called the Whiskey Tax. George Washington was the president during this challenge and in 1794 Washington took charge and sent 12,000 troops and rebellion dissolved. This was the first time ever that force was used to dissolve problems. The Whiskey Rebellion was the first serious problem to federal authority and it started with a tax on whiskey. The rebellion fell apart, when Washington called out the militia. This event occurred after the Revolution and this rebellion was significant in the early days of the new government. As a result, there were financial problems such as debt and Hamilton’s 4 Part Plan was to pay of debt and one of his examples was the Whiskey

To small farmers, whiskey is equal to money; even priests occasionally get paid in whiskey. The tax is not on drinking whiskey but on making whiskey from the grains farmers grow. In July, 1794, all the issues come to a head in western Pennsylvania. Farmers gather holding weapons and form a mob, attacking tax collectors and burning buildings to the ground. George Washington and his advisors must make a hard decision: should they use force to put silence the firebrands?

A motivating force behind the revolution was the American embrace of a political ideology called "republicanism", which was dominant in the colonies by 1775. The "country party" in Britain, whose critique of British government emphasized that corruption was to be feared, influenced American politicians. The commitment of most Americans to republican values and to their rights, helped bring about the American Revolution, as Britain was increasingly seen as hopelessly corrupt and hostile to American interests; it seemed to threaten to the established liberties that Americans enjoyed. The greatest threat to liberty was depicted as corruption. The colonists associated it with luxury and, especially, inherited aristocracy, which they condemned.

With the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, the revolutionary war was over, and the United States began the arduous task of rebuilding an economy held back by colonialism and destroyed by war. From the 1780s up until the 1810s, the economy was slowly growing and diversifying, the War of 1812 halted much of those advanced. The war ruined the United States economy once again, but it allowed it to grow and develop to new heights and become stronger than before the war.