What do you believe was the largest impact of the introduction of high potency spirits like whiskey and rum?

Whiskey generated so much income, that when the new nation struggled under the weight of Revolutionary War debt, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton proposed a tax on domestic liquor as a means of paying it off. Congress passed the legislation, but as Loyola University-trained historian Peter Kotowski explains, the tax soon met strident opposition.

To small farmers and distillers on the frontier in western Pennsylvania, whiskey was a means of financial survival, and they weren’t about to share their hard-earned money with the federal government. They refused to pay, and began tarring and feathering tax collectors and seizing their records at gunpoint in what became known as the Whiskey Rebellion.

President Washington—who himself later made whiskey in a distillery at Mount Vernon after he left office—initially tried to quell the uprising with a 1792 proclamation that admonished the farmers to comply. But two years later, after the malcontents set fire to the Pittsburgh home of a tax official, Washington didn’t have much choice but to respond with force.