CHAPTER THREE
Soldier
1794–1800
The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 was the greatest threat to national unity between the winning of independence and the outbreak of the Civil War. The North-South split over slavery had nothing to do with it; the struggle pitted West against East.
The precipitate cause was simple enough: a new tax. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton wanted to increase the power and extend the reach of the federal government. In addition, the government needed money. Hamilton therefore laid an excise tax on whiskey, the principal product of the trans-Appalachian region.
Those at the frontier felt neglected, misunderstood, mistreated. There was little or no hard cash around, yet Hamilton demanded a tax paid in currency. A tax on whiskey was a tax on what the frontier made and sold, not on what it purchased—exactly the objection the Founding Fathers had raised against “internal” taxes imposed by England before the revolution. More generally, the frontiersmen complained that the government attempting to collect the tax neglected to provide western settlers with protection from the Indians, failed to build western roads or canals, and favored the rich absentee land speculators, the biggest and most important of whom was President Washington himself, over the simple, hardworking frontiersman who was trying to acquire land and build a home.
The frontier farmers revolted. They refused to pay the tax; they shot at revenue officers; they tarred and feathered revenue officers; they burned down the houses of revenue officers. President Washington, alarmed at these “symptoms of riot and violence,” called out thirteen thousand militiamen from Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland in August 1794 to quell the rebellion.
Washington needed volunteers because the regular army, with an authorized strength of 5,424 officers and men, was in the Ohio country, on an Indian campaign led by Major General Anthony Wayne, launched in response to two successive, humiliating, and costly defeats suffered by the army in Ohio—in 1790 under General Josiah Harmar, and in 1791 under General Arthur St. Clair. Those Indian victories had inspired widespread Indian attacks on frontier settlements, which in turn were among the causes of the Whiskey Rebellion. On the East Coast, men might fear a standing army; in the West, they clamored for one that could protect them.
On August 20, 1794, at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, at the rapids of the Maumee River in northwestern Ohio, Wayne won a decisive victory, thus meeting one of the chief complaints of the western rebels, which was that the army would not or could not provide protection. Word of that victory had not reached Pennsylvania, however, when Washington called out the militia. Nor did westerners know that Chief Justice John Jay was negotiating for a British withdrawal from the posts in the Northwest—another source of unhappiness, for the frontiersmen believed the British encouraged Indian massacres of American pioneers. Jay’s Treaty would be signed in London in November 1794, but news did not reach the United States until March 1795.
There was a certain irony in the Whiskey Rebellion. Washington, Hamilton, and the other heroes of the American Revolution who were determined to put down this rebellion were espousing a policy that they had once risked their lives to oppose—taxation without representation. For there was no question about the truth of the complaints from the frontier, that this excise tax on whiskey was specific to the westerners and that they were not properly represented in the general government that imposed the tax.
Implicit in the rebellion was the idea of secession, a Second American Revolution. The rhetoric of the Whiskey Rebels was all but identical to the rhetoric of Sam and John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Patrick Henry. The logic of the rebellion was the logic of the revolution—just as the ocean that separated England from America dictated that they should be two nations, so did the mountains separate the East from the West and dictate two nations.
But what the West saw as simple political logic, the East saw as riot and rebellion. President Washington had not suffered the rigors of Valley Forge, or come out of retirement to serve as the first president, in order to preside over the dissolution of the nation or lose ownership of the tens of thousands of acres he owned in the West. Rumors of negotiations between rebels and representatives of England and Spain inspired Washington and eastern nationalists with military fervor. So determined was the president to put down the rebels that he took the field to review the troops who answered his call.1
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Among those troops was Meriwether Lewis. He was one of the first to enlist, as a private in the Virginia volunteer corps. Surely a part of his motivation was his lust for adventure and his penchant for roving, but he told himself—and his mother—that he signed on for the campaign in order “to support the glorious cause of Liberty, and my country.” He considered the rebels to be traitors and was delighted that “our leading men are determined entirely to consume every attuum of that turbulent and refractory sperit that exists among the Incergents.”2
He was hardly alone. Thousands of young men from the Middle States volunteered. They had been children during the Revolutionary War. Throughout their teen-age years they had heard war stories from their fathers and uncles. They envied the older generation its adventures and leaped at this chance to experience the camaraderie of the campfire, and the possibility of becoming a hero. They were also well aware that the government had rewarded the Revolutionary War veterans with land warrants in the West.
The volunteers, thirteen thousand of them, marched into Pennsylvania in two columns. The New Jersey and Pennsylvania troops gathered at Carlisle; the Virginians and Marylanders bivouacked at Cumberland. Washington, magnificently mounted and in his full-dress uniform, reviewed the troops in each camp, and marched with them as far as Bedford.
The roll of the drums, the cadence of the march, the glittering new uniforms, the eager young patriots, the thrilling sight of General/President Washington at the head of the column, was the way artists of the campaign saw it. The reality was different. As Washington bade farewell and Godspeed, the invasion of western Pennsylvania began. Crossing the mountains through rain and mud proved far more difficult than anyone had imagined. Disease, lack of discipline, insufficient rations, and squabbles about rank and command threatened to dissolve the force. Negotiations over rank, command, uniforms—color, design, and accoutrements—occupied far too much of the young officers’ time and energy. Where egos and sartorial tastes went unsatisfied, anger welled up. In historian Thomas Slaughter’s words, “Honor and ambition often supplanted patriotism as the highest priorities of both the resplendent dragoons riding west and those who petulantly stayed behind.”3
Discipline and desertion were major problems, brought on by the vast gap between officers and privates, of which the most important was that officers could resign their commissions and take a walk, whereas the men were in for the duration. The officers got more and better rations, and usually managed to billet themselves in log homes; the men spent the nights in tents or on the open ground. Drunkenness was widespread in the whiskey country, as well as rampant gambling—both punished among the men, ignored among the officers. Each morning, senior officers sent out patrols to round up deserters, then had those who were caught brutally punished with a hundred lashes well laid on.
The men were inadequately clothed and fed. One month into the campaign, many were barefoot. On October 7, Hamilton lamented that “the troops are everywhere ahead of their supplies. Not a shoe, blanket, or ounce of ammunition is yet arrived.” Food shortages led to plundering, which harmed relations with civilians along the army’s path and was met with severe punishment. One of Lewis’s fellow Virginia volunteers was caught taking a beehive. It cost him a hundred lashes. Nevertheless, the desperate men tore down fences for firewood, stole chickens and, when they could find them, cattle and sheep. Slaughter records, “The journals of officers often read like tourist guides to taverns and scenery along the route, while enlisted men’s diaries recounted weeks of hunger and cold.”4
Meriwether Lewis was
an exception. Although only a private, he was a planter, a member of the gentry, welcomed into the company of the junior officers of the Virginia militia, who knew that his rank reflected his age, not his station in life. His letters to his mother read like those tourist guides Slaughter described.
On October 4, 1794, from the initial camp in Winchester, Virginia, Lewis wrote his mother. He had only recently arrived, whereas two regiments had been for ten days “at this school if I may term it so where they have been well equiped, tutured and now cut a moste martial figure.” Lewis’s company, he reported, “shall this day draw all our accutrements and receive our first lesson.”
His first experience in camp was all he had hoped for, and more. “We have mountains of beef and oceans of Whiskey,” he told his mother, “and I feel myself able to share it [with the] heartiest fellow in camp. I had last night the pleasure of suping with all my acquaintances in Capt. Randolphs company, they are all well except himself.”
His spirits were soaring. He signed off, “Remember me to all the girls and tell them that they must give me joy today, as I am to be married to the heavest musquit in the Magazun tomorrow.”5
A week later, on the march to Cumberland, he wrote: “I have retired from the hury and confusion of a camp with my constant companion Ensign Walker to write I know not what. . . . I am still blessed with a sufficiency of bodily strength and activity to support the glorious cause of Liberty, and my Country. . . . The lads from our neighbourhood are all harty. . . . Remind Rubin [sic] of the charge entrusted to him. . . . Ever believe me with sincerity your dutiful son.”6
As the columns crossed the mountains and began to converge on Pittsburgh, the leaders of the rebellion fled down the Ohio River, headed for Spanish Louisiana. Two rebels were captured, marched east for trial, and found guilty of treason, but they were subsequently pardoned by President Washington. The show of force had worked; although the whiskey tax never was collected, land taxes, poll taxes, and tariffs on imported products were collected. Thanks to these, the victory at Fallen Timbers, and Jay’s Treaty, the threat of a western secession receded; it did not, however, disappear.
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In late October or early November, Lewis received a commission as an ensign in the Virginia militia. When that militia marched home, he volunteered to stay on with the small occupying force charged with patrolling and policing western Pennsylvania under the command of General Daniel Morgan. The enlistment was for six months. “I am situated on the Mongahale [Monongahela],” he told his mother, “about 15 miles above Pittsburg where we shall be forted in this winter. . . . I am in perfect health. I am quite delighted with a soldier’s life.” He was also feeling the responsibility of being older brother and head of the family: “I would wish Rubin to amuse himself with ucefull books. If he will pay attention he may be adiquate to the task [of running Locust Hill] the ensuing year.”
There was more to his decision to stay in the army than his delight at the soldier’s life. He informed his mother that, come spring and the end of his enlistment, he would “direct my cource down to Kentucky,” where he intended to speculate in lands. He also planned to pay the taxes on “warrant land” his mother had inherited from Captain Marks, part of Marks’s bonus for his service in the Revolutionary War, so as to prevent its forfeiture to the state as vacant or abandoned land.7
Two weeks later, he wrote to ask his mother to send money to pay the taxes on the warrant land, and papers proving ownership. He concluded, “I am in perfect health and constantly employed in building huts to secure us from the clemency of the approaching season. Remember me to all the girls of the neighbourhood . . . your affectionate son.”
On Christmas Eve, 1794, he made his first complaint as an army officer. “I am a more confined overseer here than when at Locust Hill,” he wrote, “having been ever since my last [letter] constantly confined to the huting department. There is no probability of a cessation of axes untill the middle of next month.” He was learning one of the chief responsibilities of being an officer, concern for his men: “The situation of the soldairy is truly deplorable exposed to the inclemency of the winter which is about this time compleatly set in without any shelter more than what eight men can derive from a small tent. Many are sick but fortunately few have died as yet.”
For himself, the best he could do for his Christmas feast was “a little stewed beef,” but “to my great comfort I have this Day been so fortunate as for the price of one dollar to procure a quart of Rum for a chrismas dram.”8
Sometime that winter, Reuben wrote Meriwether to inform him that their mother was uneasy about his long absence. On April 6, 1795, Meriwether wrote his mother to “press you by all the ties of parental affection not to give yurself any uneasiness [about me] as I can assure you I shall not undertake any enterprise more dangerous than being at Locust Hill.” He admitted that “I have had a pretty severe touch of the disorder which has been so prevelent among the Troops,” almost certainly diarrhea, “but have fortunately been restored to my usual state of health.”
He was due to be discharged in mid-May, at which time he would go to Kentucky “to see to your land” and to take advantage of a “great opening for acquiring lands.” Again he had advice and orders for Reuben: “Incourage Rubin to be industrious and be attentive to business. . . . Remember me to Aunt and uncle Thomson and all the girls, and tell them that I shall bring an Insergiant girl to see them next fall bearing the title of Mrs. Lewis.” That last cryptic line had no follow-up to it, but it may have caused Mrs. Marks considerable concern, or perhaps raised her hopes that her boy would soon settle down.9
If so, she was about to be disappointed. Instead of taking his discharge in mid-May and going to Kentucky, then home, on May 1, 1795, Lewis joined the regular army, with the rank of ensign. That same month, he was vaccinated for smallpox. He received a letter from Reuben, who again told him their mother wished his return to Locust Hill. He replied on May 22, in some wonderfully convoluted sentences: “So violently opposed is my governing passion for rambling to the wishes of all my friends that I am led intentionally to err and then have vanity enough to hope for forgiveness. I do not know how to account for this Quixottic disposition of mine in any other manner or its being affliected by any other cause than that of having inherited it [from] the Meriwether Family and it therfore more immediately calls on your charity to forgive those errors into which it may at any time lead me Tho all I shall ask at present is that you will not finally condemn me untill next fall at which time it will be my task personally to plead an excuse for my conduct.”
In other words, it was all her fault. He signed off, “Your ever sincere tho wandering Son.”10
Seldom would he spend more than a winter at one place for the rest of his life.
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With the end of the Whiskey Rebellion, the ratification of Jay’s Treaty and resulting better relations with the British, and the victory at Fallen Timbers, the army of 5,424 officers and men of 1794 was cut back to 3,359. Thus Lewis received his commission in the regular army at a time when that army was undergoing a sharp reduction, strong evidence that he had made a good impression on his seniors. Of course, they would have known his stepfather, and probably his father, and his lineage generally, which didn’t hurt. The army he entered had many officers who were tied by blood or marriage to distinguished families. More than a third were sons of officers in the Continental Army or in the militia during the revolution.
The army’s role was primarily to serve as a frontier constabulary, which caused it to be dispersed into small, isolated garrisons, most with fewer than a hundred officers and men. Historian William Skelton, in his authoritative An American Profession of Arms: The Army Officer Corps, 1784–1861, calls these tiny garrisons west of the Appalachian Mountains “an archipelago of tiny islets strung along thousands of miles of remote frontier.”11
Discipline was imposed with shocking severity on the enlisted men. Flogging was commonplace; branding somewhat less so but stil
l used as a disciplinary measure. A court-martial at Fort Defiance, in northwestern Ohio, found two soldiers guilty of laying their muskets aside and sitting down while on guard duty. They were sentenced to one hundred lashes well laid on. Theft of a blanket brought fifty lashes; striking a noncommissioned officer was a hundred-lash offense.
Desertion was a major problem, both because so many men gave in to the temptation to run off and lose themselves on the frontier, where they could establish squatters’ rights and escape the harsh punishments common to eighteenth-century soldiers, and because the loss of just two or three men in the small garrisons would badly reduce fighting efficiency in the event of an Indian attack. So desertion was severely punished. When a private ran off from Fort Defiance in the fall of 1795, the officers offered two Shawnee Indians a reward of ten dollars for bringing him back alive and twenty dollars for his scalp. One of the warriors returned the following day with the soldier’s scalp and collected the reward, along with “many compliments from the officers.”12
On paper, the officer corps was also tightly disciplined. It was governed by Baron von Steuben’s Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States, usually called the Baron and the Rules and Articles of War. Among other things, officers were forbidden to use profanity, express disrespect for their commanding officer or federal or state officials, be drunk on duty or absent without leave, or in any way participate in duels. They were subject to dismissal if convicted of “behaving in a scandalous and infamous manner, such as is unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.” They were further forbidden to keep mistresses, a habit “repugnant to the rules of society—burthensome to the service—ever pregnant with discord—always disgraceful and frequently destructive to men of merit.”13
Most officers cultivated a flamboyant style of life, featuring heavy drinking and wenching. They were allowed at least one soldier from the line as a personal servant, or a slave maintained at the expense of the army. Second lieutenants were paid $402 in annual salary, with additional compensation for special assignments, but they had to purchase their uniforms, which were terrifically expensive on the frontier. Skelton comments: “Lower-ranking officers had only a precarious grip on middle-class respectability.”14 Many officers supplemented their pay by speculating in land, taking advantage of their location in the West; they speculated primarily in the bounty-land warrants issued to revolutionary veterans.