Fort Lafayette. General
Anthony Wayne was then selected to command another expedition against
the savages, and he arrived in Pittsburgh in June, 1792. After drilling
his troops and making preparations for two years, in the course of which
he erected several forts in the West, including Fort Defiance and Fort
Wayne, he fought the Indians and crushed their strength and spirit. On
his return a lasting peace was made with them, and there were no further
raids about Pittsburgh.

XI

The whisky insurrection demands a brief reference. Whisky seems to be a
steady concomitant of civilization. As soon as the white settlers had
planted themselves securely at Pittsburgh, they made requisition on
Philadelphia for six thousand kegs of flour and three thousand kegs of
whisky--a disproportion as startling as Falstaff's intolerable deal of
sack to one half-penny-worth of bread. Congress, in 1791, passed an
excise law to assist in paying the war debt. The measure was very
unpopular, and its operation was forcibly resisted, particularly in
Pittsburgh, which was noted then, as now, for the quantity and quality
of its whisky. There were distilleries on nearly every stream emptying
into the Monongahela. The time and circumstances made the tax odious.
The Revolutionary War had just closed, the pioneers were in the midst of
great Indian troubles, and money was scarce, of low value, and very hard
to obtain. The people of the new country were unused to the exercise of
stringent laws. The progress of the French Revolution encouraged the
settlers to account themselves oppressed by similar tyrannies, against
which some of them persuaded themselves similar resistance should be
made. Genet, the French demagogue, was sowing sedition everywhere.
Lafayette's participation in the French Revolution gave it in America,
where he was deservedly beloved, a prestige which it could never have
gained for itself. Distillers who paid the tax were assaulted; some of
them were tarred and feathered; others were taken into the forest and
tied to trees; their houses and barns were burned; their property was
carried away or destroyed. Several thousand insurgents assembled at
Braddock's Field, and marched on Pittsburgh, where the citizens gave
them food and submitted to a reign of terror. Then President Washington
sent an army of fifteen thousand troops against them, and they melted
away, as a mob will ever do when the strong arm of government smites it
without fear