Four Regional Cultures in Washington’s Presidency: The Constitutional Coalition vs. the Backcountry, 1789-97

During the first years of George Washington’s administration (1789-93), regional elites in New England, the Delaware Valley and the coastal south strongly supported the new federal government. The unanimity of Washington’s election was produced not by his personal popularity alone, but by a fundamental consensus on the frame of government among the leaders of three major regions.

These groups did not agree in every respect. Intense regional conflicts arose over the location of the national capital, and the regulation of foreign trade. Major differences also developed from the fiscal policies of Alexander Hamilton, a native West Indian, naturalized New Yorker and extreme nationalist who had no roots in any regional culture.¹

These questions were full of trouble for the ruling coalition through the First and Second Congresses (1789-93). But the major cultural regions were able to resolve most of their differences. In a complex series of regional compromises, a home was found for the national capital, a fiscal policy was agreed upon, a foreign policy was adopted and foreign trade was regulated in a manner acceptable to leaders from three regions.

The fourth region, however, remained stubbornly opposed to this coalition. The backcountry did not support the federal government. Throughout the interior parts of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas, hostility to the new regime grew stronger as it began to function. In 1794, after a federal excise tax was enacted, the backcountry rose in an armed insurrection which has been miscalled the Whiskey Rebellion—a label which has trivialized a regional movement of high seriousness and danger to the republic.²

The rebellion broke out in mountain counties of Pennsylvania (Allegheny, Cumberland, Westmoreland, Washington) which had been settled by British borderers. It was much more than merely a protest against a whiskey tax. Behind it lay a culture which felt its ideal of natural liberty to be deeply threatened by the new Federal system. One North Carolinian expressed his feeling in cadences that called to mind the border poets of North Britain, and many earlier conflicts in the American backcountry:

The country’s a’ in a greetin mood

An some are like to rin wud blud:

Some chaps whom freedom’s spirit warms

Are threatening hard to take up arms …

Their liberty they will maintain.

They fought for’t, and they’ll fight again.³

The violent acts of the backcountry rebels were similar to risings in North Britain. Federal officers (themselves often borderers with names such as Graham, Johnson, Boyd, Wilson and Connor) were brutally beaten, tortured, and mutilated just as many a North British exciseman had been.

The rising spread swiftly throughout the back settlements of Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, Kentucky and Tennessee. Backcountry leaders approached the governments of Britain and Spain, with plans for their own separate republic. Only President Washington’s instant application of overwhelming force prevented a major crisis which might have ended in disaster for the new republic. The backcountry rebellion ended in scenes that were also reminiscent of North Britain: marching armies, fortified houses, small skirmishes, and hundreds of ragged, barefoot captives held at bayonet-point by uniformed troops from other regions.

Separatist movements continued to flourish in the back settlements—the Blount conspiracy, Wilkinson’s intrigue and the Burr affair. These were not marginal movements; many leading figures of the backcountry Ascendancy were involved. The restlessness of the back settlements was alarming to contemporaries, who feared that the separatist spirit might spread throughout America, and every region would become a nation. The balkanization of British North America (as happened in Latin America) would have been catastrophe for the cause of freedom in the modern world.