Bower Hill and the Whiskey Rebellion

Here stood Bower Hill, the mansion of General John Neville, and in July of seventeen ninety-four it became the flashpoint of the most serious domestic insurrection the young United States had yet faced.

Neville was the federal tax inspector for western Pennsylvania, enforcing Washington's excise tax on whiskey, a tax that frontier farmers considered both unjust and ruinous. On July sixteenth and seventeenth, more than five hundred armed rebels surrounded Bower Hill. Neville, defended by a small federal detachment and joined by enslaved workers, held out for two days. Two rebels, Oliver Miller on the sixteenth and Major James McFarlane on the seventeenth, were killed. The mansion was burned to the ground.

President Washington personally led troops to suppress the rebellion, the only time a sitting American president commanded an army in the field. The Whiskey Rebellion forced a national reckoning over federal authority, taxation, and the limits of popular resistance.