General John Neville (1731-1803), a Virginia-born patrician and Revolutionary war veteran, was hired by the Federal Government to supervise the collection of taxes in western Pennsylvania. While authorities in most other areas soon opted not to enforce the excise, officials in Pennsylvania redoubled their efforts in 1794. Holes were shot in the stills of those who merely complied with the tax.ДЄ tax collector being tarred and feathered. For the next few years, anyone collecting the tax or assisting tax collectors was similarly punished with violence and humiliation by disgruntled mobs of local farmers. Johnson was lucky to live through the ordeal. He was beaten, stripped, shaved, tarred and feathered, and then forced to denounce the United States Government and rip up his records. In the fall of 1791, Robert Johnson, a tax collector, was assaulted by a group of 16 men dressed as women. In Pennsylvania, as in other frontier regions, initial attempts to enforce the tax were met with stark and violent resistance. Many on the frontier also saw the tax as favoring larger whiskey producers based in the east to the detriment of the small western farmers who would not be able to afford it. As money was scarce in this area, whiskey was often traded for other important resources in a bartering system.

The only profitable method for small farmers to transport grain over the mountainous regions of western Pennsylvania was in the form of whiskey. While the tax was justified as a luxury tax, whiskey was more than just a luxury item on the frontier. The 25% excise tax on distilled whiskey, drawn up primarily by Alexander Hamilton, was passed by Congress on March 3, 1791.

In his 1994 study of the Rebellion, historian Jerry Clouse asserted that вЂњdistrust of an unresponsive government pervaded the frontier political identity.вЂќ Additionally there was a festering resentment of social and political elites, who locals perceived to be flourishing as they struggled desperately to survive. The frontiersmen, essentially those living west of the Appalachian Mountains, fiercely defended their autonomy and felt unrepresented by state and national governments. Pennsylvania was a microcosm of the increasing political differences between those in the вЂsettledвЂ™ eastern part of the United States and those on the вЂwildвЂ™ frontier during the late eighteenth-century. It provided President George Washington and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton with an opportunity to test principles of Federalism and was also an impetus for the formation of the Democratic Republicans, the first opposition party in American history. This episode was significant in bringing to the fore many unresolved ideological issues and social tensions in early American society. During this period, Bradford was involved in the Whiskey Rebellion, when tensions over the refusal of citizens in Allegheny, Washington, Fayette, and Westmoreland counties to pay a federal excise tax on whiskey almost escalated to civil war. Completed in 1788 and restored to its original eighteenth-century style in 1963, this was the first stone house built in Washington and was occupied by David Bradford, the Deputy Attorney General of Washington County, and his family from 1788 until 1794. The Bradford House in Washington, Washington County is imbued with architectural and historical significance.

Whiskey rebellion