Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, early October 1794, there is a push to quell a series of uprisings that had been brewing.

I apologize, the brewing, I know, sorry.

Uprisings had been brewing in Western Pennsylvania by farmers and distillers.

This was in response to the country's first nationwide internal revenue tax which had been

implemented a few years earlier it was an excise tax on distilled spirits so the

door for liquor puns is now open because we are talking about distilled spirits. Look, farmers

and distillers were fighting back against this tax. Tax collectors were

being harassed local authorities, a little overwhelmed in this moment.

President Washington is like we need to send in the federal authorities, a little overwhelmed in this moment.

President Washington is like,

we need to send in the federal troops.

It becomes a whole thing.

And actually, it would go well beyond just the taxing of whiskey.

This really planted the seeds in many ways for a movement and an ideology that would

eventually come to dominate the ascendant Republican Party. Not to mention this was a really big

test for a new government's ability to implement taxes and you know govern so we've

got Washington and Hamilton's involved and there's booze and there's farmers why wasn't this in the

musical was this in the musical I don't it got a line where Jefferson says you know we get frisky if you try to tax our whiskey.

I'm not seeing the musical as people know, but anyway it wasn't a musical but we are

gonna do more than just one line on the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 here to do that

...