The Pittsburgh militia played their role perfectly. They marched out and pretended to be on the rebels’ side, then quickly turned around and marched back into Pittsburgh with the rebel army led by Brackenridge. As they passed through, the townspeople served them free, untaxed, whiskey (fully warned that the thirsty rebels were on the way) and gently guided them toward ferries to send them back across the river. They had hit the backwoods army right in their weak spot: free liquor.
Back in Philadelphia, Hamilton was eager to march. The rebels had proved to be beyond control of the power of his prodigious pen, and now they must finally submit to the sword. The governor of Pennsylvania caused trouble by refusing to call out the militia against his own citizens, but this was a trifling inconvenience to Hamilton. He pulled out the Militia Act, found a willing Supreme Court Justice to verify that a rebellion was taking place, without actually conducting an independent investigation, and since Congress was not in session, Hamilton finally had his war.
Secretary of War Henry Knox dutifully called up the militias on August 7 but suddenly found himself with some land problems in Maine, where he had been speculating. Knox faced an important decision: he could leave office and tend to his personal financial situation, or he could lead a large army in attacking fellow Americans in Pennsylvania. At Hamilton’s urging, Knox begged off and Washington let him go. Casting about for a substitute Hamilton found the perfect candidate, himself. Surprise! Hamilton took the job as acting secretary of war and drew up postdated orders for his very own, brand-new army while Washington attempted one last peace gambit — a presidential commission.
The commission (including Washington’s soon-to-be land agent in western Pennsylvania) galloped west over the Alleghenies to negotiate with the congress of 226 rebel delegates and the hundreds of armed men on August 14 at Parkinson’s Ferry. One sight of the armed gathering convinced the commission that their situation was hopeless. They opened negotiations with the rebel leaders and took the hard line Hamilton had laid down, knowing full well that war plans were being drafted back in Philadelphia. They had the rebels up against the wall, although the rebels didn’t realize it. The rebels would escape Hamilton’s wrath only if everyone in the region signed an oath of submission to the law, starting with the standing negotiating committee of sixty rebels.
Brackenridge-the-peacemaker and the other moderate rebels on the committee were eager to cave in to the commission’s demands. They sensed the strength and unalterable determination of the institutional forces gathered by the invisible hand of Hamilton to crush them all should any serious resistance continue. The moderates tried to convince the radical rebel leaders to yield, but they were as divided and ornery as ever. The cockeyed rebels saw it for what it was, total surrender. Bradford was in no mood to surrender. He was out to conquer.
At first, the standing rebel committee of sixty voted to not vote, in a classic example of evasive leadership (all votes in the rebellion had usually been open-vote affairs, the better to intimidate any weak links, of course). But the moderates pressed on, determined to make their final stand, and they convinced the radicals to take a secret vote. The stark choice was between signing an oath of submission and facing treason charges pressed at the point of a bayonet.
The vote was 34 to 23 in favor of capitulation. But even one dissenter was too much for Hamilton, who had ordained that only total submission could forestall the invasion. Despite the charges of imperialism that were already flying from his political foes, who saw this as yet another power-grabbing attempt by the monarchically minded Hamilton, he eagerly pressed on. The army would march. Hamilton would lead.
On September 30 Washington and Hamilton rode out from Philadelphia in a carriage. Four days later they met up with the army at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where Washington reviewed the troops, gravely nodded his approval, and left them in the all-too-eager hands of Hamilton. Militia from Virginia, Maryland, and New Jersey had been added to Pennsylvania militiamen, making a grand total of 13,000 troops. It was an army larger than the American forces at the battle of Yorktown. Hamilton led the northern wing of the army concentrated in eastern Pennsylvania. “Light-Horse” Harry Lee led the southern wing coming up from Maryland. Lee, the father of Robert E., was a stout Federalist and a revolutionary hero from Virginia. He had once lusted after the command of the western army tasked to crush the Native Americans but had been passed over due to his propensity to be an optimistic overreacher, especially in financial matters. He was happy to swing back into the saddle.
And so was Hamilton, finally in his glory at the head of an army, fighting a war completely of his own making. As secretary of war he had ordered the supplies, even down to the details of the uniforms for his troops. He had whipped the eastern populace into a patriotic frenzy, writing under the pseudonym “Tully” in public papers over the summer of 1794 in order to stir patriotism against what he felt was a rebellion — not against the tax but against the entire governmental structure he himself had created. Hamilton, the brilliant young man of the Revolution, only thirty-nine, and a long way from his lowborn roots in the Caribbean, was prepared to sacrifice everything to lead this hastily called-up army, including his own life and that of his pregnant wife and seriously ill child.
When Light-Horse Harry Lee returned from doing his duty leading the troops during the Whiskey Rebellion, he learned he had been relieved of the governorship of Virginia by citizens who viewed his partnership with the Federalist Hamilton in a very different light. Scion of a famous Virginia family, Lee’s revolutionary career never reached the heights of his own ambition, despite a distinguished war record as a leader of his own free-ranging cavalry legion. The Whiskey Rebellion was the beginning of the end for him as the ensuing years saw his encroaching bankruptcy (he was invested in Washington’s ill-fated Potomac Company, and bought some of Washington’s unpromising land as well). In an abortive attempt to defend Federalism on the eve of the war of 1812, he caught a beating by a mob in Baltimore and retired to the Caribbean to nurse his wounds.
Unfortunately, the army he led was barely an army, derisively called the “watermelon army” by its detractors. Once on the march Hamilton was forced to upbraid sentries for their lax behavior and found the general state of the militiamen to be bad enough to cement his opinion that the government needed a standing army. Even the frenetic Hamilton hadn’t been able to work fast enough to entirely provision the bloated force gathered to crush the rebellion. As the long columns strung out over the Alleghenies in the depths of a cold fall season, the supply situation became a problem, and the hungry soldiers were forced to rob local farms, despite a flogging order for anyone caught stealing laid down by Washington.
Hamilton, not about to let the bad supply situation slow his march, countermanded Washington’s flogging order and authorized the quartermaster corps to impress whatever supplies the army needed from the local populace, without restitution. The government’s army was legally stealing from the citizens they were supposedly protecting. The New Jersey horse troop was particularly effective, fitted out in glorious uniforms atop big chargers and intimidating the locals.
The law-abiding citizens of Pennsylvania couldn’t hide from Hamilton’s army, but the rebels could. When Hamilton arrived on the western side of the Alleghenies during the first week of November, there were no rebels to fight. They had simply melted away. There was no rebel army spoiling for a showdown in a field, no revolutionary terror à la France, no peasant uprisings. Nothing. Many leaders who hadn’t signed the amnesty apparently floated away down the Ohio to escape. Of course, the phantom war didn’t stop young officers of Hamilton’s army from comparing their exploits to Hannibal’s crossing the Alps.