David Bradford House: Birthplace of the Whiskey Rebellion

The handsome stone house on South Main Street in Washington, Pennsylvania, was the finest building in town when David Bradford finished it in seventeen eighty-eight. Its solid mahogany staircase and imported Philadelphia mantelpieces announced the ambitions of a man who intended to be someone in this frontier country. Six years later, those ambitions nearly ignited a second American revolution.

Bradford was the deputy attorney general of Washington County, a lawyer who had built wealth and standing in southwestern Pennsylvania. When Congress passed a federal excise tax on whiskey in seventeen ninety-one, the farmers of this region erupted. For the farmers of the Allegheny foothills, whiskey was not a luxury. It was currency. Corn was too bulky to haul east over the mountains, but distilled into whiskey it became compact, valuable, and tradeable. A tax on whiskey was a tax on survival.

Bradford became the rebellion's most dangerous leader. In the summer of seventeen ninety-four, he marshaled roughly seven thousand armed men at Braddock's Field, eight miles east of Pittsburgh, in the largest armed gathering in America since the Revolution itself. The city of Pittsburgh, fearing a violent occupation, sent a delegation to meet the crowd and expelled three citizens whose private letters had criticized the uprising. The crowd marched through Pittsburgh but broke up without burning it.

President George Washington, alarmed at the direct challenge to federal authority, called out thirteen thousand militia from four states, personally riding partway with the force before handing command to Governor Henry Lee. It was the only time a sitting president led troops in the field. The rebellion collapsed without major fighting.

Bradford fled south to Spanish West Florida, eventually settling in what is now Louisiana. President John Adams pardoned him in seventeen ninety-nine. He never returned to Pennsylvania.

The Bradford House was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen eighty-three. It stands as the best-preserved domestic artifact of a moment when the new nation's taxing authority was tested for the first time.