The Whiskey Rebel

Yet, for all that, New York was a city on the rise. Though the dominant argument in the air was whether or not the new Constitution would receive ratification by the states, many New Yorkers were so convinced that they were to be the center of a new imperial experiment that they had already come to think of their city as the “empire city,” their state as the “empire state.” Everywhere, decayed streets metamorphosed into rows of charming brick houses with tiled roofs. Great boulevards of shopping-Wall Street, the Broad Way, and Greenwich Street -became almost daily more refined. In the distance to the north were quaint villages and farmland and, beyond that, sublime outcroppings of mountain and forest. We walked the cobbled streets of the new imperial capital, the rivers filled with forests of merchant-ship masts, yet we were surrounded by the untouched sublimity of nature. There could be nothing more American.

Though I lived in this city of commerce, I continued to have trouble writing my novel, principally because I still did not know what I wished to say. I sat, when I could find the time, with my books on finance: Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, Thomas Mortimer’s Every Man His Own Broker, Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and a thousand bone-dry pamphlets arguing on all matters from free trade to taxes to tariffs to pricing. Somewhere in all that reading, I was certain, was a novel.

Though women were not welcome, on a few occasions I made my way to the Merchant’s Coffeehouse on Wall Street, where commodities, bank issues, and government loans were traded in a kind of organized frenzy. Men shouted out prices, while others attempted to buy to advantage or sell before the price further declined. Here I thought was something else uniquely American. In England, jobbers traded their issues in London; in France, they traded in Paris; but in America, we traded in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston. What effect did a decentralized market have upon prices and upon a trader’s ability to profit? It seemed to me, even then, that an unscrupulous jobber with a few fast riders in his employ could exploit the system and profit handsomely. This too seemed to me fundamentally American, for we were a land where cleverness and ingenuity bled quickly into chicanery and fraud. How easily, I thought, in an untamed land did the steady energy of ambition become the twitchy mania of greed.

T hat we had no child also lay heavily upon me. I became pregnant three times in the five years we lived in New York, but always I miscarried before the fourth month. The surgeons and midwives gave me all ma

I wish to make it clear that Andrew was perfectly capable as a carpenter and equally so as a man of business. He was thrifty and hard-working, skillful and exacting, and could we have afforded to establish ourselves upon a better street, I have no doubt he would have risen to prominence, but we were trapped in the horrible cycle of poverty made inevitable by our neighborhood. Andrew offered his services cheap, and we had business enough, but once we were done paying our rents and our bills, there was little left. Some months we earned less than we spent, and after years of trying to make the carpentry business pay, Andrew began to wonder if it would not be better if we gave it up and attempted something new, though what this would be, neither of us could yet say.

Like many soldiers, Andrew found that after his service the Continental government had no funds with which to pay him, but he had long held on to his promissory notes rather than, as had many others, sell them to speculators at a fraction of their face value. Then late in 1788, Andrew came home one evening in a thoughtful mood. After a spare meal, he told me he had something of great importance to discuss. He had met a man named William Duer, an influential merchant in the city and an associate of Alexander Hamilton, who was rumored to be the new Treasury Secretary when General Washington took office as the first president in April.

No one knew what future, if any, there might be for war debt held by the various states. Some said the federal government pla

I knew nothing promising or inviting of western Pe

I always believed Andrew to be more i

Duer was a small man in build and stature, in his forties, well groomed, with delicate features that made him look vaguely girlish but not effeminate. He was too fussy for that, like a squirrel worrying a nut. His pale brown eyes darted rapidly but lingered on nothing for long. Andrew and I sat on a cushioned bench, while Mr. Duer sat in a finely crafted chair-Andrew had made it himself-across from us, sipping tea and smiling with a small mouth full of very small teeth. With the cup in his hand, he rocked slightly with what I supposed was enthusiasm or an excess of energy. “It is a considerable undertaking,” he said. His voice was slightly high-pitched, slightly whiny. It cracked upon long vowel sounds. “You must decide if you will move to western Pe

“If the land has value and the notes do not, why do you propose such a trade?” I asked.

He raised his teacup to Andrew in salute. I noticed the cuffs of his sleeves were u

“And yet you have not answered her question,” said Andrew.

“My own wife, Lady Kitty, is also such a woman, and cousins, you know, with the wife of Colonel Hamilton.”

“You clearly have an excellent domestic arrangement,” I offered.

“Yes, thank you. Most excellent. Now, you see, Mr. Maycott, western land is fertile, but cheap because it is so plentiful; there is far more land than there are people to settle upon it. The land is cheap for me to buy, but for those who wish to live, to farm, to have a life of plenty away from the city, it is of real value, for the land will grow nearly anything and livestock will thrive. Winters there are mild; summers are long and pleasant, without being oppressive and unwholesome as they can be here.”

He handed Andrew a pamphlet entitled “An Account of the Lands of Western Pe