You know that expression about how life is what happens while you're making other plans? That was my experience trying to get this blog updated! This month has been more than a little topsy-turvy thus far, what with an erratic work schedule, a (thankfully short-lived) stomach bug, my birthday, and a whole lot of other things. I've had to keep quite a few balls in the air, and I'm really not good at juggling. But I'm trying, I promise.
Before I get into this week's topic, for those of you who didn't see it in this month's newsletter, I will be signing copies of Laury's Island at the Laurys Station Volunteer Fire Company's annual Community Day on Saturday, September 21st. The event runs from noon to 8 p.m. and will include a ton of activities for kids, plus food vendors, crafters, local non-profits, live music, and more. If you're within driving distance of the Lehigh Valley and this sounds like it might interest you, check out this Facebook page for more information, including the address of the fire station.
Meanwhile, this week we're trekking back to Westmoreland County. This is the last marker I have from what I collected there during my trip with my sister last October, which to my mind sounds like a great excuse to take another one, but time will tell. This gentleman had a lot to say on the subject of the Whiskey Rebellion, and his account of the situation was rather at odds with the one issued by Alexander Hamilton.
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| The marker stands by the intersection of Main and Depot Streets, at the entrance to the Carl O. Dalton Fitness Path. |
The facts of William's own life are relatively straightforward, but there is some confusion about the mothers of his children. He married his first wife, Margot Russell, in Ulster in 1758, and they immigrated to the Colonies in 1763, but it's unclear how many children they brought with them. Alexander was then about four or five years old, and William and Martha appear to have been twins born in 1762. I say 'appear' because Martha has a specific birthdate on her tombstone, according to the Find A Grave website, while William was simply born "about" 1762. However, some sources claim that Martha's mother was her father's second wife, which makes no sense if 1762 was indeed her birth year.
In any case, the little family arrived at the port of Philadelphia and settled first in the Cumberland Valley, where William found work as a weaver. Margot didn't get to enjoy life in her new home for very long, unfortunately; she was only in her early twenties when she passed away in 1765. Three years later, William purchased a farm, and in 1769 he married his second wife, Mary Elizabeth Cochran. They added several more children to the family - David, Elizabeth, John, Eleanor, and Mary - though the two youngest weren't born until after that little kerfuffle called the American Revolution.
William joined the rebel cause and rose to the rank of captain in an outfit called the Cumberland County Associators. This was a volunteer militia broken into battalions; William served in the Seventh Company of the Eighth Battalion. A few years after the war ended, in 1783, the Findleys left their Cumberland Valley farm and headed west, settling in Westmoreland County; William built his family a log cabin in what today is the community of Latrobe. He was quickly elected to the local Council of Censors, which eventually rewrote the Constitution of Pennsylvania, and over the next few decades he held a number of public offices. These include seats on the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, which oversaw the commonwealth until it was replaced by a single governor, and in the Pennsylvania General Assembly.
He was more outspoken than many of his contemporaries in politics, being among the first American politicians to openly assert their opinions and interests. This endeared him to the citizens, who saw him as honest and sincere, but not so much to some of his fellows. He was a critic of the Bank of North America, the country's first central bank, and of Robert Morris, the former Superintendent of Finance for the Continental Congress, whom he claimed used the bank to grow personally rich. When legislator Hugh Henry Brackenridge made the statement that "the people are fools" for opposing the bank and also Robert Morris, William made sure that everyone knew about it, and Brackenridge lost his bid for re-election. He also brought the receipts, as kids would say these days, when some of his detractors tried to claim he was uneducated; he made a comment about jury trials in Sweden and was mocked for it, until he came back a few days later with documentation which proved he was absolutely right.
(If you were wondering, the Bank of North America still exists - well, sort of. It experienced a series of mergers over the next two centuries, eventually becoming one of the institutions absorbed into today's Wells Fargo.)
After his time in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, William was elected to Congress, and served in the Second through Fifth Congresses. He often butted heads with Alexander Hamilton. It was during this time that his moderate temperament helped to defuse some of the worst parts of the Whiskey Rebellion, or Whiskey Insurrection, which lasted from 1791 to 1794. The Whiskey Tax was a brainchild of Hamilton's, as he was trying to find a way to pay the war debt incurred during the Revolution, and he had the bright idea to place a tax on domestically produced alcohol. His logic, which was not unsound, was that it would basically be a luxury tax of sorts, and arguably the least objectionable tax the government could levy. The whiskey excise act became law in March 1791.
What Hamilton didn't anticipate was the angry reaction the tax would receive from people living in Appalachia, particularly western Pennsylvania. They felt that the tax targeted them specifically, since many of the poorer farmers in the region would supplement their incomes through the products of their homemade stills; by turning their extra grain into whiskey, they could turn a profit since the whiskey was a lot easier to transport over the mountains. It didn't help that cash was often in short supply on the western side of the Appalachian Mountains, so whiskey would be used as a sort of informal substitute for cash when paying various debts. Even worse, the whiskey excise act specified that the tax had to be paid in cash, and they could not use whiskey to pay their whiskey tax, for some strange reason.
There were other objections to the tax as well. For one thing, many of the farmers couldn't read, so they worried about being cheated by unscrupulous tax collectors. In Pennsylvania specifically, the western half of the commonwealth was generally much poorer than the eastern half, which meant that the tax would hit them a lot harder and take away a larger chunk of their income. More than a few small-time distillers suspected that Hamilton was genuinely out to get them, in the sense that the various dictates of the law would ruin them financially while supporting the interests of larger-scale operations. (Some historians think this may in fact have been the case.)
Into the middle of this mess came William - the moderate voice of reason, trusted by his constituents, sympathetic to their concerns. He first tried to mitigate the disastrous effect of the tax by proposing a reduction of one cent, which in those days was a decent amount of money, but this wasn't enough to prevent the affected farmers from rebelling. Many of them were veterans of the war, and saw the new tax as being exactly what they had opposed - taxation without representation. For the better part of three years they resisted with varying degrees of violence, doing things like threatening tax collectors and even burning some Congressmen in effigy.
Finally, in 1794, things came to a head. William was able to convince his fellows in Congress to modify the law, allowing those arrested for whiskey tax evasion to be tried locally (instead of having to travel to far-off places like Philadelphia for federal court), but not before Hamilton issued arrest warrants for many of the rebels. The insurrection ultimately collapsed in October of that year, when the army marched westward to quell it. Those who could be captured were tried for treason, though only two were convicted and sentenced to hang and they were both pardoned by President Washington. It wasn't until seven years later, after Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams to become our third President, that the excise law was at last repealed.
And yes, if you remember my post about the Fries Rebellion, that was related to this, somewhat indirectly.
William did return to the national Congress after a few years, serving in the Eighth through Fourteenth sessions. His fellows nicknamed him "the Venerable Findley," and by 1811 he had spent more time in the House of Representatives than any other individual at that point. In recognition of his long years of service, he became the first man in the United States to receive the honorary title of "Father of the House." (This title no longer exists here, although it's used in many other countries; instead, the longest-serving Representative is known by the gender-neutral equivalent "Dean of the House.")
He finally stepped down to retire from public service in 1817. After almost five years of comfortable living in his log home, William died on April 5, 1821, at the age of 80. He's buried in Latrobe's Unity Cemetery, where his tombstone remembers his nickname of "the Venerable." Mary, who died in 1825, is buried beside him; Mary Elizabeth is buried in the same cemetery as well, although her grave is confirmed to be unmarked.
Although he's a notable figure in the early years of our country, William is not nearly as well remembered as many of his contemporaries, particularly his frequent opponent Hamilton. He doesn't even seem to be a character in many of the fictionalized accounts of the time, like 1776 or the musical Hamilton. But it's in part because of him that the Whiskey Rebellion taught citizens to create change by voting for lawmakers they could trust - like William.
Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.
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