Commerce Clause

C. Jarrett Dieterle | 7.4.2024 6:00 AM

In 1791, a proud and hearty band of rabble-rousers in western Pennsylvania protested the first tax ever to be levied on a domestic product by America's new federal government—a tax on the sale of whiskey. Today, the Whiskey Rebellion is primarily remembered as one of the country's first populist uprisings—and one that presaged many future clashes between the American heartland and government elites.

However, debates over whether Alexander Hamilton's whiskey tax was a prudent revenue-raising scheme or an egregious instance of governmental overreach often overlook what was not in dispute during the rebellion. Namely, that Americans have a right to make their own liquor.

Just three years after George Washington was seeking to aggressively enforce his treasury secretary's tax, America's first president opened a distillery on his Mount Vernon estate. Washington would go on to operate one of the largest distilleries in America in his retirement years—and he was far from alone when it came to liquor-making Founding Fathers. Peers such as James Madison and Patrick Henry also operated distilleries on their Virginia plantations.

Home distilling was hardly contained to the slave-holding ruling class. As the Whiskey Rebellion itself showed, homemade liquor was most common on small backwoods farms in the western Appalachian regions of the country. It was nearly impossible for these farmers to get their harvested crops to large urban buying markets before they spoiled. But if they distilled those crops into a high-proof spirit, it not only........

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