Politics and Elections
The presidential campaign of 1840 surpassed in excitement and intensity of feeling all which had preceded it. Delegations to the whig conventions carried banners and often had a small log cabin mounted on wheels in which was a barrel of hard cider, the beverage of the campaign. Early in Harrison's campaign comments were made on the elegant style of living in the White House during Van Buren's administration. Van Buren was charged with being an aristocrat and a monarchist while the masses toiled and suffered to pay for his luxurious living. A Richmond newspaper observed derisively of Harrison, "Give him a barrel of hard cider and a pension of two thousand dollars and our word for it he will sit for the remainder of his days contented in a log cabin." Log cabins and hard cider thus became the symbols of a popular crusade. The log cabins were decked in frontier style with coonskins, bunches of corn, strings of peppers and dried apples and the like, and were set up in cities and villages. Inside these cabins copious supplies of cider were on tap to be drunk with gourds. The appropriateness of the symbol came from the fact that Harrison had formerly resided in a western log cabin, and the cider was meant to typify western hospitality. The result was that young and old drank the cider freely and the whig meetings often degenerated into mere drunken carousals, the example of which was especially injurious to the rising generation.
There are men still alive who claim that a single glass of wine drunk by Herschel V. Johnson was responsible for the wreck of the democratic party in 1860 by unfitting him to reply to the speech of Howell Cobb in favor of separate democratic nominations at the Georgia democratic state convention. The Count de Paris says of the vigilance committees that terrorized the South into secession: "The bar-room was generally the place of their meetings. Around the counter on which gin and whiskey circulated freely a few frantic individuals pronounced judgment upon their fellow citizens, whether present or absent."
In one of the Lincoln-Douglas joint debates Douglas described his own father as an excellent cooper. Lincoln said he did not doubt the truth of the statement for he knew of one very good whisky cask he had made. As Douglas was short and thick-set and a heavy drinker the joke was enjoyed.
On another occasion, Douglas said that when he first knew Lincoln, Lincoln was a good bar-tender. Lincoln in admitting that he had sold whisky said Douglas was one of his best customers, adding that he had left his side of the counter but Douglas had stuck to the other side.
Early Defiance of Law
In the last decade of the eighteenth century the Whiskey Rebellion arose from the refusal of the Scotch-Irish whiskey distillers of Pennsylvania to pay the excise on whiskey. If a collector came among them he was attacked, his books and papers taken, his commission torn up, and a solemn promise exacted that he would publish his resignation in the Pittsburgh Gazette. If a farmer gave information as to where the stills could be found, his barns were burned. If a distiller entered his stills as the law required, he was sure to be visited by a masked mob. Sometimes his grist-mill was made useless, sometimes his stills destroyed, or a piece of his saw-mill carried away, and a command laid upon him to publish what had been done to him in the Gazette. One unhappy man, who had rented his house to a collector, was visited at the dead of night by a mob of blackened and disguised men. He was seized, carried to the woods, shorn of his hair, tarred, feathered, and bound to a tree. They next formed associations of those who, in the language of the district, were ready to "forbear" entering their stills. They ended by working themselves into a fury and calling a meeting of distillers for the 27th of July, at Restone, Old Fort, a town on which the inhabitants have since bestowed the humbler name of Brownsville. From this gathering went out a call for two conventions. One was to meet on the 23d of August at Washington, in Pennsylvania. The date chosen for the meeting of the second was September 7th, and the place Pittsburgh. Both were held. That at Washington denounced the law and called on all good people to treat every man taking office under it with contempt, and withhold from him all comfort, aid, and support. That at Pittsburgh complained bitterly of the salaries of the federal officers, of the rate of interest on the national debt, of the Funding System, of the Bank, and of the tax on whiskey. Meantime the collector for the counties of Washington and Alleghany was set upon. On the day before the Pittsburgh meeting a party of armed men waylaid him at a lonely spot on Pigeon creek, stripped, tarred, and feathered him, cut off his hair, and took away his horse. They were disguised, but he recognized three of the band, and swore out warrants against them in the district court at Philadelphia. These were sent to the marshal; but the marshal was a prudent man, and gave them to his deputy, who, early in October, went down into Alleghany to serve them. He hid his errand, and as he rode along, beheld such signs of the angry mood of the people, and heard such threats, that he came back with the writs in his pocket unserved. And now he determined to send them under cover of private letters, and selected for the bearer a poor, half-witted cow-driver. The messenger knew not what he bore; but when the people found out that he was delivering writs, he was seized, robbed of his horse and money, whipped till he could scarcely stand, tarred, feathered, blindfolded, and tied to a tree in the woods.
In 1794 a process went out from the district court at Philadelphia against seventy-five distillers who had disobeyed the law. Fifty were in the five counties of Fayette, Bedford, Alleghany, Washington, and Westmoreland. Each writ was dated the 13th of May, and each was entered in the docket as issued on the 31st. But the officials were so tardy that it was July when the marshal rode west to serve them. He arrived in the hurry of harvest, when liquor circulated most freely and drunkenness was most prevalent. Yet he served his writs without harm till but one was left. It was drawn against a distiller named Miller, whose house was fourteen miles from Pittsburgh, on the road to Washington. On the morning of July 15th the marshal set out from Pittsburgh to serve it. He found Miller in a harvest field surrounded by a body of reapers. All went well till he was about to return, when one of them gave the alarm. While some threw down their scythes and followed him, others ran back to the house of the brigade inspector near by. There the Mingo creek regiment had gathered to make a select corps of militia as its quota of the eighty thousand minute men required by Congress. All had drunk deeply, and as the messengers came up shouting "The federal sheriff is taking away men to Philadelphia," they flew to arms. Though it was then night many set off at once, and gathering strength as they went, drew up the next morning, thirty-seven strong, before the house of Revenue Inspector Neville, near Pittsburgh. At the head of them was John Holcroft who whitened half the trees in the four counties with the effusions of Tom the Tinker. The inspector demanded what they wished. They answered evasively. He fired upon them. They returned the shot, and were instantly opened on by a band of negroes posted in a neighboring house. At this the mob scattered, leaving six wounded and one dead. Tom the Tinker was a nom-de-guerre which originated from the house of an obnoxious official being pulled to pieces by a mob whose members gave out that they were "mending it." Mending and tinkering being interchangeable terms, the members dubbed themselves "tinkers," and "Tom the Tinker was shortly evolved as the popular watchword of the first rebellion against the United States government."