If you've ever had the thought that some Southerners are a little bit too obsessed with the Civil War, try visiting rural Western Pennsylvania. It's a beautiful place, but that's just the icing on the cake. If you ask around you'll probably find someone who's still obsessed with the Whiskey Rebellion!

This rebellion occurred just after the end of the American Revolution, and it proved that some Americans were still inclined to rebel- and the new government was already ready to meet any attempted rebellion with force. George Washington himself led the force that dispersed the rebels, after a handful of minor skirmishes and a few fatalities.

If anyone ever tried to do anything bad to whiskey, I would lead the rebellion myself, but the Whiskey Rebellion was not fought in defense of whiskey as such. It was actually fought in opposition to a whiskey tax which had angered the Pennsylvania corn farmers. If you were a corn farmer in that time period, turning your corn crop into whiskey was a good way to make a profit from it, and the whiskey tax threatened that.

Even though the Whiskey Rebellion was defeated, opposition to paying a tax on whiskey remains strong to this day in some parts of Appalachia. That's the whole reason for moonshining, after all, and for the moonshiners' eternal enmity for the government “revenooer.” On my own visit to Western Pennsylvania, I heard the following conversation over dinner:

“You know, you can legally make the stuff at home now.”

“Yeah, if you wanna get a permit from the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT!!!”

The spirit of the Whiskey Rebellion lives on!