December 28, 2015 • 37 mins
Resistance to excise taxes levied against U.S. whiskey distilleries in the 1790s led to violence and rebellion. Tensions finally came to a head on Christmas day in 1794. Read the show notes here.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm Julie Douglas, host of the Stuff of Life, a
podcast that teases apart the tales we tell, because when
we crack open a story and look inside, we see
the seeds of what make our world so maddening, so strange,
and so achingly beautiful. The Stuff of Life is a
podcast about how we're all just getting by, learning and
(00:20):
surviving through the stories that we share. We'll look at
everything from fear and what fuels it, the inconceivability of
death and our desire to become immortal, to the big
universal question in life, why don't men dance? Join me
for the first episode on January. You can find The
Stuff of Life on iTunes or any other podcast provider.
(00:48):
Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from how
stuff Works dot com. Hello and well filmed the podcast.
I'm Trad c V. Wilson and I'm a Holly Fry.
As promised earlier this year, uh now we have an
(01:08):
episode on the Whiskey Rebellion. It is something that we
touched on very briefly in our History of Moonshine back
in October, but just the little bit of detail that
I got while researching that episode made me want to
give it the full episode treatment. American opposition to taxes
has come up pretty frequently on our show, both before
(01:30):
and after the Revolutionary War, but that sentiment didn't spontaneously
arrive on the u s side of the Atlantic as
a response to taxes implemented by the British Crown on
its colonies. Violent opposition to taxes was widespread in Britain
as well. This was particularly true when it came to
excise taxes, which were the taxes on goods that are
(01:52):
made and consumed within the nation's borders, rather than being
imported or exported. There are lots of different words that
have used to describe those sorts of taxes, so taxes
on imports and exports could be contentious too, But excise
taxes were a comparatively new addition to the British economy.
They made their first appearance in the seventeenth century. They
(02:14):
were modeled after taxes that already existed in continental Europe.
Opposition to the very first English excise tax, which was
implemented in sixteen forty three to help fund the English
Civil War, was fierce, and it happened more than a
century before the sounds of liberty. Liberty were dumping tea
into the harbor on the other side of the pond.
(02:34):
At first, England's first excise tax mostly applied to things
like beer and ale, but in sixteen forty four the
list of goods being taxed expanded to things like salt
and beef and rabbits. Violent protests and riots followed, particularly
in rural areas where the items being taxed were staples
that people already had trouble affording. The backlash was so
(02:57):
huge that Parliament had the scale back on the excise tax,
repeal some parts of it entirely, and implement exceptions for
the nation's poorest residents. This tax protest in England had
a lot in common with the Whiskey Rebellion in the
United States, which began when the United States was a
newly independent nation. Both protests were in response to an
(03:18):
excise tax put into place because of the expensive war.
Both of them were violent and widespread, particularly in the
most rural and relatively impoverished areas that were affected by
the tax, and both of them led to tax collectors
being attacked, publicly, ridiculed, robbed, and killed. So, in other words,
(03:38):
as my dad likes to say, when I do something
that has been evidenced elsewhere in my family previously, we
came by it honest. Just as England's first excise tax
was implemented to fund the English Civil War, the United
States first exise tax was implemented to pay off debts
from the Revolutionary War. It wasn't just the costs of
(04:00):
the war itself. Upon becoming an independent nation, the United
States had also taken on all of the debts of
the former colonies. Clearly, the nation needed to deal with
this debt. But even in the face of an obvious
need for revenue, the nation's leaders and its citizens were
deeply divided on the subject of taxes. One faction strongly
(04:22):
believed that internal taxation, or the taxation on goods and
revenue that remained inside the United States, should be kept
out of federal hands entirely, with the federal government able
to tax only imports and exports coming into the country
or leaving it. This would leave internal revenue as a
matter for the states to judge based on their own
needs and the ability for their own citizens to pay.
(04:45):
According to this mindset, a federal government that could apply
taxes unilaterally across all the states, regardless of those states
particular economics was deeply threatening to the concept of liberty
and was just too similar to the days when the
British Crown could tax its American colonies without offering them
representation in the government. In a slippery slope argument, this
(05:06):
would ultimately destroy state governments in the face of federal interference.
The counter argument to this was basically, no, it won't
with a side of well of the federal government as
assuming state debts that has to do something to pay them.
Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton's was one of the
proponents of using excise taxes to settle the US debts.
(05:27):
An excise bill that was brought before Congress in seventeen
ninety was defeated. When another was proposed in seventee, opposition
was fierce, and in spite of this resistance, on March third,
sevente Congress instituted an excise tax on distilled liquors. The
amount of this tax varied based on the size of
(05:47):
the distilling production and where from six to eighteen cents
a gallon, and it was either based on the actual
amount of production or a flat rate based on the
capacity of the still, large distilleries aid on average about
six cents a gallon, and they were allowed to do
so as one annual payment to the government. Small distilleries
were charged again, on average, about nine cents a gallon,
(06:10):
and they had to make smaller payments over the course
of the year. This tax affected small distilleries much differently
than it affected large ones. Payments were to be made
in cash directly to a revenue officer, and many of
the smallest distillers did not have a lot of cash
on hand. They were often paying for the goods and
services they needed by bartering their whiskey. While large distilleries
(06:34):
that were selling their wares could just pass the cost
of the tax onto customers by raising their prices, smaller
distillers who were using their wares to barter had no
comparable way of coming up with extra cash. So, in
addition to the smaller distilleries taxes being larger per gallon,
the methods and timing of payment put a larger burden
on smaller distilleries than on larger ones. Had a genuine
(06:56):
and legitimate question on people's minds was where am I
supposed to get the physical money to give to you
like I'm doing all of my life with barter. I
have no money to hand to you. That's not a
thing that exists really in my corner of the world.
Because the largest distilleries were mostly run like businesses, the
(07:17):
federal government and specifically the Secretary of the Treasury were
a lot more willing to extend them flexibility than they
were too small independent distillers, which a lot of times
were more like home based individual operations. So the distilleries
that had the most money and the most means to
deal with the law also got the most help in
doing so. Over time, the government amended the tax in
(07:40):
response to quote reasonable complaints, but the ones that it
found to be reasonable were mostly the ones that were
brought up by big, relatively prosperous business like distillers. Anyone
who had to appear in court on excise tax matters
had to do so in federal court, not state or
local court. For many people living in remote western counties,
(08:02):
the nearest federal courthouse was hundreds of miles away. So
if you were, for example, one person running your own
still in western Pennsylvania and you were arrested as a
consequence of this excise tax, you would have to appear
in federal court in Philadelphia, approximately three hundred miles away.
In addition to affecting small distilleries much more strongly than
(08:24):
it affected big ones, the whiskey tax also disproportionately affected
specific regions of the United States. And we are going
to talk about how after a word from a sponsor.
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That's headspace dot com slash history. Now back to our story.
(11:00):
As we talked about before the break, one of the
main objections to the federal government having the power to
levy internal taxes was that different states had different economic needs.
The whiskey tax turned out to be a stellar example
of why so many people thought this was a problem. Basically,
just like the whiskey tax had a bigger impact on
smaller distillers than had on big ones, it had a
(11:21):
much bigger impact on some states than on others. Unsurprisingly,
the representatives from the states that were the most effective
we're also the ones who most strenuously opposed the tax
in the first place. To get into how the tax
disproportionately affected particular states, we need to talk for a
moment about the Appalachian Mountains. This mountain range runs down
(11:42):
most of the eastern side of the United States and
also into Canada. Many of the colonists who had settled
in and around this range were Scot's Irish and as
we discussed in our Moonshine episode, distilling was for many
of these people a culturally important tradition. The mountains themselves
also did a great job of encouraging distilling, both legally
(12:02):
and otherwise. The terrain itself was full of valleys and
hollers that were great for hiding stills in, but the
ability and need to hide contraband was only one piece
of this puzzle. The mountains themselves made distilling a much
more feasible way for people living in them and west
of them to make a living than simply farming. For
most of the states south of New York, the Appalachian
(12:25):
Mountains formed either a western border or a physical barrier
through the state itself. People living in the mountains or
on their western side had to haul their goods east
to market, using pack animals to go over and through
the mountains. It was safer and even more reliable to
distill grains into alcohol and transport that than it was
to try to move large loads of heavy, perishable product
(12:47):
that was easily damaged by the elements. So not only
was alcohol less perishable than grain, it weighed a whole
lot less than the grain used to make It also, frankly,
more people wanted to buy alcohol than wanted to higrain.
Pennsylvania was a state where these factors combined in the
most dramatic and obvious way. A large area of Pennsylvania
(13:08):
late to the west of the portion of the Appalachian
Rain now as the Alleghanies, and a lot of that
territory had been settled by scott Irish immigrants. Together, this
meant that four counties in western Pennsylvania were the heart
of distilling country at the time of the Whiskey the
Whiskey Rebellion, it was home to about a quarter of
the distilleries in the nation, according to the Alcohol and
(13:30):
Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, So when the government passed
an excise tax on distilled liquors, it disproportionately affected the
people living in western rural parts of several states, many
of which were also comparatively very poor. Many of these
same people were already frustrated with the federal government, feeling
as though it wasn't doing enough to protect the residents
(13:52):
of its western frontier from Native Americans. Western residents also
thought the federal government wasn't doing enough to give the
nation total control of the Mississippi River, which would be
a trading opportunity they could reach without crossing mountain ranges essentially,
and most of the United States from the Appalachian Mountains west.
The situation was primed for an angry backlash to this tax,
(14:14):
which is exactly what happened. At first. Most of the
resistance to the excised tax was nonviolent. People simply refused
to pay it. They organized meetings, demonstrations, and campaigns to
try to have the law repealed. The nation's westernmost residents
trying to figure out how to get the people in
eastern cities, the ones whose representatives had been in favor
(14:35):
of the bill, to understand why this mattered. There was
a lot of not listening and believing they knew better
on the part of the people making the decisions. What
in politics, are you sure so strange? Just a few
months after the tax was enacted, residents of southwestern Pennsylvania
met at Redstone Old Fort to try to figure out
(14:56):
a plan, and that plan was ultimately to form their
own body of elected representatives to pull the people living
in Pennsylvania's western counties and send that elected delegation to Congress.
Because they felt like their own elected senators and representatives
were not actually representing them very well. However, at the
same time, others in western Pennsylvania were taking a far
(15:19):
less reasonable tech. On September eleven, sevent a group of
men disguised themselves as women and attacked an excise collector
named Robert Johnson, cutting off his hair, tarring and feathering him,
and stealing his horse. That was that there was a
lot of cutting off people's hair and then tarring and
feathering them. That was the m O for a lot
(15:40):
of this protest and over the next two years. Although
a lot of the talk about the Whiskey Rebellion happens
in Pennsylvania, every state south of New York saw protests
and violence and unrest directed at the excise tax. In
addition to targeting the government and its tax collectors, these
protests also targeted other people in the community by harassing
(16:01):
and ostracizing people who were in favor of the tax.
Kentucky became a state on June one of sevento and
the entire state just refused to pay it, While virtually
all of the nation's western frontier counties were refusing to
pay taxes, including very heavy resistance in western North Carolina.
Much of the focus of the Whiskey rebellion is on
(16:22):
western Pennsylvania. This is in part because that's where the
federal government put that focus. It was close to the
then capital of Philadelphia, so it would be less expensive
and less hazardous to try to enforce the law there
than it wasn't any of the other places that were rebelling.
In September of seventeen ninety two, Hamilton's drafted a proclamation
(16:43):
content condemning the rebellion and denouncing the meetings that had
been held in Pennsylvania to try to address it. This
proclamation went to George Washington, the President, for his signature,
and it was issued on the fifteenth. It called the
rebellion quote subversive of good order, contrary to the duty
that every citiz and owes his country and to the laws,
and of a nature dangerous to the very being of
(17:06):
a government. Tensions continued to grow through seventeen. About one
hundred people burned excise Inspector John Neville in effigy in
Washington County, Pennsylvania after a militia meeting, and in Fayette County,
a mob broke into the home of collector Benjamin Wells
and harassed his family. A few days later, they returned
(17:27):
armed and demanded his account books at gunpoint. There was
a lot of harassment and threatening behavior against basically all
of the tax officials, but Excise Inspector John Neville was
particularly disliked. He was a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly,
and even though he had voted on a resolution condemning
the tax, he then accepted the post of Excise Inspector,
(17:48):
so people thought he was an unethical hypocrite. He then
went on a tour of western Pennsylvania counties to try
to enforce the tax in the spring of seventeen ninety four,
and when he did this, a mob of citizens followed
after him, talking to everyone he talked to to make
sure nobody had actually paid the tax, and if they did,
they would destroy that person. Still in the summer and
(18:10):
fall of the Whiskey rebellion really hit its peak, although
tensions had been ongoing for years. What happened next is
what a lot of people think of when they think
of the words whiskey rebellion. And we're going to talk
about that in more detail after we have another brief
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had a lot of other things on its mind during
the seventeen nineties, besides this whole tax situation that we're on,
going battles with the nation's Native American population which were
(21:03):
incredibly destructive to the army and the militia. We covered
a lot of that recently in our podcast on St.
Clair's Defeat. A huge yellow fever epidemic struck Philadelphia in
sevente Both of these things combined to mean that increasing
pressures from Britain, France, and Spain seemed particularly threatening to
(21:23):
the United States, especially as word reached the federal government.
The discontented citizens who were unhappy with excise tax had
met with delegates from Britain and Spain. There was some
fear that these meetings about repealing the tax were really
meetings about overthrowing the government. From the federal government's view,
things were becoming much too precarious to have a bunch
(21:44):
of rabble in the West refusing to pay taxes, so
they started cracking down, particularly in Pennsylvania, District Attorney William
Raowel ordered more than sixty distillers to appear in federal court.
John Neville and U. S. Marshal David Lennox began serving
the pre assesses to all the distillers in person on
July fift The response to this from distillers was furious
(22:07):
and immediate. The two men had only served four or
five people when a mob of thirty or forty armed men,
many of whom had heard that they were literally dragging
people back to Philadelphia with them, surrounded them. After learning
that Lennox and Neville were just serving and not actually
abducting people, they let the two men go, although as
(22:28):
they departed somebody fired a shot. Exactly who and for
what reason remains a little unclear. The next day, around dawn,
a mob surrounded Neville's home. He had previously garrisoned his
home and arranged a signal with the enslaved Africans that
he owned should such an event arise. The mob claimed
that they were there to guard him, which he simply
(22:50):
did not believe. He signaled to the slaves, and he,
along with them, opened fire. Several of the mob were injured,
one of them Oliver Miller, mortally, so people then started
to call for revenge for Miller's death. Neville wrote to
judges and sheriffs and nearby militia for help, but they
all refused, and the only aid that he got was
from Major James Kirkpatrick, who brought ten soldiers from Fort
(23:13):
Pitt to Nevill's home. The rebels, on the other hand,
showed up with between three hundred and five hundred men
and laid siege to Neville's home. Kirkpatrick managed to smuggle
Neville and his family away. After a tenth standoff, a
battle began that lasted for about an hour, and in
the midst of it, James McFarlane, an officer of the
militia who were on the side of the rebels, was killed.
(23:36):
Outraged and believing Kirkpatrick had deceived McFarlane into holding his
fire to kill him on purpose, the rebels set fire
to the home and many of the buildings around it,
and the soldiers inside ultimately surrendered. The rebels took Major
Kirkpatrick captive, then found their way to Marshal Lennox, who
they humiliated and injured. With the death of McFarlane, who
(23:58):
had been a local hero during the revolution Snary War,
a number of prominent Pennsylvania citizens who had previously either
stayed out of all this or at least stayed out
of the more rabble rousing side of the rebellion, got involved.
In some cases it was because they perceived this as
the last straw, and sometimes it was because the furor
had grown so large that they felt pressured into doing
(24:19):
something less they faced retaliation among the people who joined
the more violent side of the rebellion. At this point
where Hugh Henry Brackenridge, a lawyer, who started offering them
a legal advice. David Bradford, another lawyer, offered advice on
how to undermine more moderate voices in the Pennsylvania government.
The rural citizens of the western counties started talking about
(24:41):
making an assault on the town of Pittsburgh. By August one,
the number of rebels in western Pennsylvania had grown to
about seven thousand, including recruits from neighboring Virginia counties. They
had a flag with six bars symbolizing the four Pennsylvania
counties and two from Virginia. But they don't have any
defined goals other than to just get rid of the tax.
(25:03):
But they also had no clear plan on how to
do that. At this point, the federal government simultaneously dispatched
negotiators to try to bring a peaceful end to things,
with some of the negotiations actually happening at Redstone Old Fort,
which has been involved in the very start of this
whole thing. At this point, the federal government did two
things basically simultaneously. One was that it dispatched negotiators to
(25:27):
try to bring a peaceful end to things with some
of those negotiations happening at Redstone Old Fort, which had
been one of the meeting sites at the very start
of this whole thing. At the same time, it prepared
a military strategy to bring a less peaceful end to things.
Under the authority of the Militia Act of seventy two,
the government could respond to quote imminent danger with the militia,
(25:47):
provided it got a certification from a Supreme Court justice.
This the government got from Justice James Wilson, so it
was simultaneously negotiating and planning an assault at the same time,
and the result was a twelve thousand, nine man force
made up of militia from New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and
eastern Pennsylvania under the command of Governor Henry Lee of Virginia.
(26:12):
This force was large, but also made primarily of young,
inexperienced men who weren't particularly well provisioned. There was a
huge division between affluent volunteers who had joined the force
for various political and personal reasons, and the men who
had been drafted into it and were generally poor and uneducated.
The rebels consequently nicknamed it the Watermelon Army in spite
(26:33):
of the derision that it got from the rebels. This
huge force moved to the western frontier counties, rounding up rebels,
making examples of them through flogging and humiliation, and sending
them back east to stand trial. The militia force routed
people up through October and November, and then began of
march back to Philadelphia with lots of captives. On November.
(26:55):
They arrived on Christmas Day, when the militia flagged their
hats with white paper to set them apart. From the
men guarding them and marched through Philadelphia to the jail
in shame. That is actually the thing that made me
go I'm gonna do a whole podcast on this, how
we got to the point of taking people through a
shame march to the jail on Christmas Day. In the end,
(27:19):
all but two of the men who were captured were
either acquitted or had their charges dropped, and the two
who were convicted were John were John Mitchell and Philip Wigel,
and they were both later pardoned. This government response to
the rebellion changed very little. It's militia round up didn't
make it possible to enforce the tax. Many of the
(27:39):
people who had been angriest at the government about the
tax simply moved farther west, trying to get out from
under the thumb of the tax man. Having had to
provision such a large force in a relatively remote area
did add measurable but temporary boost to local economies, though
there's probably a valid argument to be made that like
(28:00):
it definitely did bring some cash into places that had
been cash strapped, thanks for needing to buy lots of
crops and things to to feed soldiers. But uh I
read a couple of things that were like, was that
really worth all of this trouble? Regardless? Then in a
ten o two Thomas Jefferson repealed all of the nation's
(28:21):
interior taxes, including the whiskey tax, and as we spoke
about in uh in our episode on Moonshine, the government
sort of left the tax subject regarding distilling alone for
a while. That's the whiskey rebellion. It's it's um I
(28:42):
always envision in when I have heard about it in
the past as involving more I'm embarrassed to admit wacky hijinks.
You know, it's a pretty direct violence kind of situation.
It's not so much like, Yeah, the closest thing to
wacky hijinks is some of the events in which a
(29:02):
mob of people would gang up on a tax collector,
like some of them you read the accounts of, and
then they went into the tax collector's home and forced
him to tear up his papers and jump up and
down on them. And like, there's an element that comes
off as kind of comedic, like that a mob was
literally forcing him to tear up his tax papers and
then jump up and down on them like that. That
(29:26):
there were hijinks like that was the closest thing to
wacky hijinks. But at the same time, a lot of
times like that was just a person trying to do
his job. There were definitely people who were tax collectors
who were jerks about it, but you know a lot
of them were just folks trying to get their lives
together too, So yeah, yeah, and then all the towering
(29:48):
and feathering, that's a lot that's not nearly as wacky
as now you have to tear up your papers. Now
you have to jump up and down on them. That
was the one with one of the ones that I read,
And then I was I said, seriously out out, you
seriously made him tear up his papers and then jump
on them, Like yeah, Well, and anytime we get to
tarring and feathering in any sort of historical event, there's
(30:10):
just this part of me that's like, how do you
get that divorced from your humanity where you're like, this
is a thing we should absolutely do. It seems so
cruel and horrifying. But and that that came up again
and again as I was reading this, like then then
they would cut off their hair and tar and better
than feather them. Yeah, do you have less humanity stripping
(30:32):
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comments in response to our listener mail following our Gallipoli
episode in which we talked about segregation in Nevada, and
the letter writer had written in to say that the
mascot of of the of U n l V is
(30:53):
a rebel and so we had two different people on Facebook.
First person was Tony, and Tony said, hello you wonderful
ladies at Incredible Stuffy missed in History Class is a
great podcast. During your listener mail, a listener from Nevada
said that U n l v's mascot is a Confederate symbol.
As a proud Las Vegan, I am happy to say
that isn't true. Thank you once again for the expansive
(31:13):
knowledge every week. Um. He paced an end a link
to an article that was called U n l V
Diversity Chief Hey red mascot rebel nickname not tied to
Confederacy uh. And then Chelsea replied on the same thread
and said, thank you for sharing the same article I
was going to post. I was shocked to hear a
fellow Nevada and perpetuate an untruth. Un l V began
(31:34):
as a satellite campus of un R and later became
a separate institution. There was a rivalry between the North
and South universities since the idea of being a rebel.
There is still a rivalry and many other arenas between
the North and South of Nevada politically, culturally, etcetera. Twenty
eight thousand, six hundred students call un l V home
for the spall semester. The two hundred plus students demonstrating
(31:57):
constitute less than one percent of the student population that
the survey conducted campus wide in which folks could indicate
their perception of our mascot. So I read this article
and then I also looked into some things about the
UNLB mascot. So yeah, there's definitely an article from the
UNLB diversity chief saying that the hey red mascot and
the rebel nickname are not tied the Confederacy. But then
(32:19):
if you go and look at the u n l
V website, the mascot of u n l V was
originally a wolf named Beauregard who was wearing a Confederate uniform.
And there there's a little cause and effects, Like there's
some arguments to be made that maybe they were calling
themselves the rebels before they applied Confederate imagery to the
(32:40):
idea of rebels. But then there was definitely a whole
period of years in which the rebel mascot was definitely
a Confederate soldier. There was literally a Confederate battle flag
on the masthead of the school newspaper, and people reasonably
(33:02):
uh in this like late sixties early seventies time frame,
said hey, this is not cool. This specifically, there were
several black athletes who were like, I don't think I'm
comfortable having this mascot that is the Confederate soldier. And
so the school reevaluated the uh the mascot that sort
of redesigned it to be a nevada um like a
(33:25):
pathfinder and not tied to Confederate imagery. Um and the
and like took the battle flag off of the school
newspaper mass head um and the actual wording on the
U n l V website says, well, it was a
decision based in rivalry and fun. The choice of a
Confederate themed mascot was nonetheless an unfortunate one. And then
(33:48):
later on the same page, which is a page about
the history of the mascot says V and l V
and acknowledges that its first generation of students opted for
a great name in Rebels, but chose to surround it
with imagery and some als that fell short of giving
the name of giving that name the honor it deserved.
So yes, definitely today, the Hey reb character that's sort
(34:10):
of the mascot of U n l V is specifically
designed to not be tied to Confederate imagery. But there's
a multiple decade tradition in which it specifically was Confederate imagery.
So I don't think it is um invalid at all
(34:31):
for people to point that out. Uh. It kind of
reminds me of the conversations you and I had in
our recent episodes about about the holiday characters from other cultures, uh,
and the attempts to kind of walk back Varta Pete
so there so that he's not so tied to like
racist black face and slavery. Um. I think it's personally,
(34:53):
I think it's awesome for U n LV to have
reevaluated their mascot and not have it be specifically a
Confederate soldier. It's specially since black student athletes found it
offensive to be on a team whose mascot was somebody
who fought on behalf of slavery. But that, like that
doesn't then erase all of those decades of time when
the mascot was literally a Confederate soldier. Yeah. So you know,
(35:18):
it's one of those things that evolved. I mean, the
history is evolving, like our we talked about all the
time how views evolved, and they change things and you
still have to acknowledge what came before even when you
have evolved. Yeah. Well, the well, the article that was
that was linked on our Facebook and I'll put a
link to it in our show notes. UM includes this
(35:39):
sixty page analysis of the history and the like the
diversity officer. Officer has come to the conclusion that in
its current iteration it is not a Confederate image, but
at the same time, like, at the same time, it
calls out specifically all of these other aspects from previous
years and not even that long ago previous years when
it definitely was in better imagery. So to clarify all that. Uh,
(36:05):
if you would like to write to us, we're a
history podcast at how Stuff Works dot com. We're also
on Facebook at Facebook dot com. Slash miss in history
and on Twitter at miss in History, are tumbler is
missed in History dot tumbler dot com, or on pinterest
at pentest dot com slash missed in History. If you
want to learn more about what we talked about today,
come to our parent company's website, which is how stuff
Works dot com and put the word moonshine in the
search bar. You will find an article about how moonshine works.
(36:29):
You can also come to our website, which is missed
in History dot com, or we have show notes. We
have an archive of everything that we've ever talked about
on the podcast. I'm gonna put in our show notes
a link to this article about un l V and
the other stuff from the u n LB website that
I've referred to, so you can see that for yourself.
You can do all that in a whole lot more
at how stuff works dot com or missed in History
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics.
(36:56):
Is that how stuff works dot com. In Jen
I'm Julie Douglas, host of the Stuff of Life, a
podcast that teases apart the tales we tell, because when
we crack open a story and look inside, we see
the seeds of what make our world so maddening, so strange,
and so achingly beautiful. The Stuff of Life is a
podcast about how we're all just getting by, learning and
(00:20):
surviving through the stories that we share. We'll look at
everything from fear and what fuels it, the inconceivability of
death and our desire to become immortal, to the big
universal question in life, why don't men dance? Join me
for the first episode on January. You can find The
Stuff of Life on iTunes or any other podcast provider.
(00:48):
Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from how
stuff Works dot com. Hello and well filmed the podcast.
I'm Trad c V. Wilson and I'm a Holly Fry.
As promised earlier this year, uh now we have an
(01:08):
episode on the Whiskey Rebellion. It is something that we
touched on very briefly in our History of Moonshine back
in October, but just the little bit of detail that
I got while researching that episode made me want to
give it the full episode treatment. American opposition to taxes
has come up pretty frequently on our show, both before
(01:30):
and after the Revolutionary War, but that sentiment didn't spontaneously
arrive on the u s side of the Atlantic as
a response to taxes implemented by the British Crown on
its colonies. Violent opposition to taxes was widespread in Britain
as well. This was particularly true when it came to
excise taxes, which were the taxes on goods that are
(01:52):
made and consumed within the nation's borders, rather than being
imported or exported. There are lots of different words that
have used to describe those sorts of taxes, so taxes
on imports and exports could be contentious too, But excise
taxes were a comparatively new addition to the British economy.
They made their first appearance in the seventeenth century. They
(02:14):
were modeled after taxes that already existed in continental Europe.
Opposition to the very first English excise tax, which was
implemented in sixteen forty three to help fund the English
Civil War, was fierce, and it happened more than a
century before the sounds of liberty. Liberty were dumping tea
into the harbor on the other side of the pond.
(02:34):
At first, England's first excise tax mostly applied to things
like beer and ale, but in sixteen forty four the
list of goods being taxed expanded to things like salt
and beef and rabbits. Violent protests and riots followed, particularly
in rural areas where the items being taxed were staples
that people already had trouble affording. The backlash was so
(02:57):
huge that Parliament had the scale back on the excise tax,
repeal some parts of it entirely, and implement exceptions for
the nation's poorest residents. This tax protest in England had
a lot in common with the Whiskey Rebellion in the
United States, which began when the United States was a
newly independent nation. Both protests were in response to an
(03:18):
excise tax put into place because of the expensive war.
Both of them were violent and widespread, particularly in the
most rural and relatively impoverished areas that were affected by
the tax, and both of them led to tax collectors
being attacked, publicly, ridiculed, robbed, and killed. So, in other words,
(03:38):
as my dad likes to say, when I do something
that has been evidenced elsewhere in my family previously, we
came by it honest. Just as England's first excise tax
was implemented to fund the English Civil War, the United
States first exise tax was implemented to pay off debts
from the Revolutionary War. It wasn't just the costs of
(04:00):
the war itself. Upon becoming an independent nation, the United
States had also taken on all of the debts of
the former colonies. Clearly, the nation needed to deal with
this debt. But even in the face of an obvious
need for revenue, the nation's leaders and its citizens were
deeply divided on the subject of taxes. One faction strongly
(04:22):
believed that internal taxation, or the taxation on goods and
revenue that remained inside the United States, should be kept
out of federal hands entirely, with the federal government able
to tax only imports and exports coming into the country
or leaving it. This would leave internal revenue as a
matter for the states to judge based on their own
needs and the ability for their own citizens to pay.
(04:45):
According to this mindset, a federal government that could apply
taxes unilaterally across all the states, regardless of those states
particular economics was deeply threatening to the concept of liberty
and was just too similar to the days when the
British Crown could tax its American colonies without offering them
representation in the government. In a slippery slope argument, this
(05:06):
would ultimately destroy state governments in the face of federal interference.
The counter argument to this was basically, no, it won't
with a side of well of the federal government as
assuming state debts that has to do something to pay them.
Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton's was one of the
proponents of using excise taxes to settle the US debts.
(05:27):
An excise bill that was brought before Congress in seventeen
ninety was defeated. When another was proposed in seventee, opposition
was fierce, and in spite of this resistance, on March third,
sevente Congress instituted an excise tax on distilled liquors. The
amount of this tax varied based on the size of
(05:47):
the distilling production and where from six to eighteen cents
a gallon, and it was either based on the actual
amount of production or a flat rate based on the
capacity of the still, large distilleries aid on average about
six cents a gallon, and they were allowed to do
so as one annual payment to the government. Small distilleries
were charged again, on average, about nine cents a gallon,
(06:10):
and they had to make smaller payments over the course
of the year. This tax affected small distilleries much differently
than it affected large ones. Payments were to be made
in cash directly to a revenue officer, and many of
the smallest distillers did not have a lot of cash
on hand. They were often paying for the goods and
services they needed by bartering their whiskey. While large distilleries
(06:34):
that were selling their wares could just pass the cost
of the tax onto customers by raising their prices, smaller
distillers who were using their wares to barter had no
comparable way of coming up with extra cash. So, in
addition to the smaller distilleries taxes being larger per gallon,
the methods and timing of payment put a larger burden
on smaller distilleries than on larger ones. Had a genuine
(06:56):
and legitimate question on people's minds was where am I
supposed to get the physical money to give to you
like I'm doing all of my life with barter. I
have no money to hand to you. That's not a
thing that exists really in my corner of the world.
Because the largest distilleries were mostly run like businesses, the
(07:17):
federal government and specifically the Secretary of the Treasury were
a lot more willing to extend them flexibility than they
were too small independent distillers, which a lot of times
were more like home based individual operations. So the distilleries
that had the most money and the most means to
deal with the law also got the most help in
doing so. Over time, the government amended the tax in
(07:40):
response to quote reasonable complaints, but the ones that it
found to be reasonable were mostly the ones that were
brought up by big, relatively prosperous business like distillers. Anyone
who had to appear in court on excise tax matters
had to do so in federal court, not state or
local court. For many people living in remote western counties,
(08:02):
the nearest federal courthouse was hundreds of miles away. So
if you were, for example, one person running your own
still in western Pennsylvania and you were arrested as a
consequence of this excise tax, you would have to appear
in federal court in Philadelphia, approximately three hundred miles away.
In addition to affecting small distilleries much more strongly than
(08:24):
it affected big ones, the whiskey tax also disproportionately affected
specific regions of the United States. And we are going
to talk about how after a word from a sponsor.
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That's headspace dot com slash history. Now back to our story.
(11:00):
As we talked about before the break, one of the
main objections to the federal government having the power to
levy internal taxes was that different states had different economic needs.
The whiskey tax turned out to be a stellar example
of why so many people thought this was a problem. Basically,
just like the whiskey tax had a bigger impact on
smaller distillers than had on big ones, it had a
(11:21):
much bigger impact on some states than on others. Unsurprisingly,
the representatives from the states that were the most effective
we're also the ones who most strenuously opposed the tax
in the first place. To get into how the tax
disproportionately affected particular states, we need to talk for a
moment about the Appalachian Mountains. This mountain range runs down
(11:42):
most of the eastern side of the United States and
also into Canada. Many of the colonists who had settled
in and around this range were Scot's Irish and as
we discussed in our Moonshine episode, distilling was for many
of these people a culturally important tradition. The mountains themselves
also did a great job of encouraging distilling, both legally
(12:02):
and otherwise. The terrain itself was full of valleys and
hollers that were great for hiding stills in, but the
ability and need to hide contraband was only one piece
of this puzzle. The mountains themselves made distilling a much
more feasible way for people living in them and west
of them to make a living than simply farming. For
most of the states south of New York, the Appalachian
(12:25):
Mountains formed either a western border or a physical barrier
through the state itself. People living in the mountains or
on their western side had to haul their goods east
to market, using pack animals to go over and through
the mountains. It was safer and even more reliable to
distill grains into alcohol and transport that than it was
to try to move large loads of heavy, perishable product
(12:47):
that was easily damaged by the elements. So not only
was alcohol less perishable than grain, it weighed a whole
lot less than the grain used to make It also, frankly,
more people wanted to buy alcohol than wanted to higrain.
Pennsylvania was a state where these factors combined in the
most dramatic and obvious way. A large area of Pennsylvania
(13:08):
late to the west of the portion of the Appalachian
Rain now as the Alleghanies, and a lot of that
territory had been settled by scott Irish immigrants. Together, this
meant that four counties in western Pennsylvania were the heart
of distilling country at the time of the Whiskey the
Whiskey Rebellion, it was home to about a quarter of
the distilleries in the nation, according to the Alcohol and
(13:30):
Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, So when the government passed
an excise tax on distilled liquors, it disproportionately affected the
people living in western rural parts of several states, many
of which were also comparatively very poor. Many of these
same people were already frustrated with the federal government, feeling
as though it wasn't doing enough to protect the residents
(13:52):
of its western frontier from Native Americans. Western residents also
thought the federal government wasn't doing enough to give the
nation total control of the Mississippi River, which would be
a trading opportunity they could reach without crossing mountain ranges essentially,
and most of the United States from the Appalachian Mountains west.
The situation was primed for an angry backlash to this tax,
(14:14):
which is exactly what happened. At first. Most of the
resistance to the excised tax was nonviolent. People simply refused
to pay it. They organized meetings, demonstrations, and campaigns to
try to have the law repealed. The nation's westernmost residents
trying to figure out how to get the people in
eastern cities, the ones whose representatives had been in favor
(14:35):
of the bill, to understand why this mattered. There was
a lot of not listening and believing they knew better
on the part of the people making the decisions. What
in politics, are you sure so strange? Just a few
months after the tax was enacted, residents of southwestern Pennsylvania
met at Redstone Old Fort to try to figure out
(14:56):
a plan, and that plan was ultimately to form their
own body of elected representatives to pull the people living
in Pennsylvania's western counties and send that elected delegation to Congress.
Because they felt like their own elected senators and representatives
were not actually representing them very well. However, at the
same time, others in western Pennsylvania were taking a far
(15:19):
less reasonable tech. On September eleven, sevent a group of
men disguised themselves as women and attacked an excise collector
named Robert Johnson, cutting off his hair, tarring and feathering him,
and stealing his horse. That was that there was a
lot of cutting off people's hair and then tarring and
feathering them. That was the m O for a lot
(15:40):
of this protest and over the next two years. Although
a lot of the talk about the Whiskey Rebellion happens
in Pennsylvania, every state south of New York saw protests
and violence and unrest directed at the excise tax. In
addition to targeting the government and its tax collectors, these
protests also targeted other people in the community by harassing
(16:01):
and ostracizing people who were in favor of the tax.
Kentucky became a state on June one of sevento and
the entire state just refused to pay it, While virtually
all of the nation's western frontier counties were refusing to
pay taxes, including very heavy resistance in western North Carolina.
Much of the focus of the Whiskey rebellion is on
(16:22):
western Pennsylvania. This is in part because that's where the
federal government put that focus. It was close to the
then capital of Philadelphia, so it would be less expensive
and less hazardous to try to enforce the law there
than it wasn't any of the other places that were rebelling.
In September of seventeen ninety two, Hamilton's drafted a proclamation
(16:43):
content condemning the rebellion and denouncing the meetings that had
been held in Pennsylvania to try to address it. This
proclamation went to George Washington, the President, for his signature,
and it was issued on the fifteenth. It called the
rebellion quote subversive of good order, contrary to the duty
that every citiz and owes his country and to the laws,
and of a nature dangerous to the very being of
(17:06):
a government. Tensions continued to grow through seventeen. About one
hundred people burned excise Inspector John Neville in effigy in
Washington County, Pennsylvania after a militia meeting, and in Fayette County,
a mob broke into the home of collector Benjamin Wells
and harassed his family. A few days later, they returned
(17:27):
armed and demanded his account books at gunpoint. There was
a lot of harassment and threatening behavior against basically all
of the tax officials, but Excise Inspector John Neville was
particularly disliked. He was a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly,
and even though he had voted on a resolution condemning
the tax, he then accepted the post of Excise Inspector,
(17:48):
so people thought he was an unethical hypocrite. He then
went on a tour of western Pennsylvania counties to try
to enforce the tax in the spring of seventeen ninety four,
and when he did this, a mob of citizens followed
after him, talking to everyone he talked to to make
sure nobody had actually paid the tax, and if they did,
they would destroy that person. Still in the summer and
(18:10):
fall of the Whiskey rebellion really hit its peak, although
tensions had been ongoing for years. What happened next is
what a lot of people think of when they think
of the words whiskey rebellion. And we're going to talk
about that in more detail after we have another brief
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get into texture dot com slash history. The United States
had a lot of other things on its mind during
the seventeen nineties, besides this whole tax situation that we're on,
going battles with the nation's Native American population which were
(21:03):
incredibly destructive to the army and the militia. We covered
a lot of that recently in our podcast on St.
Clair's Defeat. A huge yellow fever epidemic struck Philadelphia in
sevente Both of these things combined to mean that increasing
pressures from Britain, France, and Spain seemed particularly threatening to
(21:23):
the United States, especially as word reached the federal government.
The discontented citizens who were unhappy with excise tax had
met with delegates from Britain and Spain. There was some
fear that these meetings about repealing the tax were really
meetings about overthrowing the government. From the federal government's view,
things were becoming much too precarious to have a bunch
(21:44):
of rabble in the West refusing to pay taxes, so
they started cracking down, particularly in Pennsylvania, District Attorney William
Raowel ordered more than sixty distillers to appear in federal court.
John Neville and U. S. Marshal David Lennox began serving
the pre assesses to all the distillers in person on
July fift The response to this from distillers was furious
(22:07):
and immediate. The two men had only served four or
five people when a mob of thirty or forty armed men,
many of whom had heard that they were literally dragging
people back to Philadelphia with them, surrounded them. After learning
that Lennox and Neville were just serving and not actually
abducting people, they let the two men go, although as
(22:28):
they departed somebody fired a shot. Exactly who and for
what reason remains a little unclear. The next day, around dawn,
a mob surrounded Neville's home. He had previously garrisoned his
home and arranged a signal with the enslaved Africans that
he owned should such an event arise. The mob claimed
that they were there to guard him, which he simply
(22:50):
did not believe. He signaled to the slaves, and he,
along with them, opened fire. Several of the mob were injured,
one of them Oliver Miller, mortally, so people then started
to call for revenge for Miller's death. Neville wrote to
judges and sheriffs and nearby militia for help, but they
all refused, and the only aid that he got was
from Major James Kirkpatrick, who brought ten soldiers from Fort
(23:13):
Pitt to Nevill's home. The rebels, on the other hand,
showed up with between three hundred and five hundred men
and laid siege to Neville's home. Kirkpatrick managed to smuggle
Neville and his family away. After a tenth standoff, a
battle began that lasted for about an hour, and in
the midst of it, James McFarlane, an officer of the
militia who were on the side of the rebels, was killed.
(23:36):
Outraged and believing Kirkpatrick had deceived McFarlane into holding his
fire to kill him on purpose, the rebels set fire
to the home and many of the buildings around it,
and the soldiers inside ultimately surrendered. The rebels took Major
Kirkpatrick captive, then found their way to Marshal Lennox, who
they humiliated and injured. With the death of McFarlane, who
(23:58):
had been a local hero during the revolution Snary War,
a number of prominent Pennsylvania citizens who had previously either
stayed out of all this or at least stayed out
of the more rabble rousing side of the rebellion, got involved.
In some cases it was because they perceived this as
the last straw, and sometimes it was because the furor
had grown so large that they felt pressured into doing
(24:19):
something less they faced retaliation among the people who joined
the more violent side of the rebellion. At this point
where Hugh Henry Brackenridge, a lawyer, who started offering them
a legal advice. David Bradford, another lawyer, offered advice on
how to undermine more moderate voices in the Pennsylvania government.
The rural citizens of the western counties started talking about
(24:41):
making an assault on the town of Pittsburgh. By August one,
the number of rebels in western Pennsylvania had grown to
about seven thousand, including recruits from neighboring Virginia counties. They
had a flag with six bars symbolizing the four Pennsylvania
counties and two from Virginia. But they don't have any
defined goals other than to just get rid of the tax.
(25:03):
But they also had no clear plan on how to
do that. At this point, the federal government simultaneously dispatched
negotiators to try to bring a peaceful end to things,
with some of the negotiations actually happening at Redstone Old Fort,
which has been involved in the very start of this
whole thing. At this point, the federal government did two
things basically simultaneously. One was that it dispatched negotiators to
(25:27):
try to bring a peaceful end to things with some
of those negotiations happening at Redstone Old Fort, which had
been one of the meeting sites at the very start
of this whole thing. At the same time, it prepared
a military strategy to bring a less peaceful end to things.
Under the authority of the Militia Act of seventy two,
the government could respond to quote imminent danger with the militia,
(25:47):
provided it got a certification from a Supreme Court justice.
This the government got from Justice James Wilson, so it
was simultaneously negotiating and planning an assault at the same time,
and the result was a twelve thousand, nine man force
made up of militia from New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and
eastern Pennsylvania under the command of Governor Henry Lee of Virginia.
(26:12):
This force was large, but also made primarily of young,
inexperienced men who weren't particularly well provisioned. There was a
huge division between affluent volunteers who had joined the force
for various political and personal reasons, and the men who
had been drafted into it and were generally poor and uneducated.
The rebels consequently nicknamed it the Watermelon Army in spite
(26:33):
of the derision that it got from the rebels. This
huge force moved to the western frontier counties, rounding up rebels,
making examples of them through flogging and humiliation, and sending
them back east to stand trial. The militia force routed
people up through October and November, and then began of
march back to Philadelphia with lots of captives. On November.
(26:55):
They arrived on Christmas Day, when the militia flagged their
hats with white paper to set them apart. From the
men guarding them and marched through Philadelphia to the jail
in shame. That is actually the thing that made me
go I'm gonna do a whole podcast on this, how
we got to the point of taking people through a
shame march to the jail on Christmas Day. In the end,
(27:19):
all but two of the men who were captured were
either acquitted or had their charges dropped, and the two
who were convicted were John were John Mitchell and Philip Wigel,
and they were both later pardoned. This government response to
the rebellion changed very little. It's militia round up didn't
make it possible to enforce the tax. Many of the
(27:39):
people who had been angriest at the government about the
tax simply moved farther west, trying to get out from
under the thumb of the tax man. Having had to
provision such a large force in a relatively remote area
did add measurable but temporary boost to local economies, though
there's probably a valid argument to be made that like
(28:00):
it definitely did bring some cash into places that had
been cash strapped, thanks for needing to buy lots of
crops and things to to feed soldiers. But uh I
read a couple of things that were like, was that
really worth all of this trouble? Regardless? Then in a
ten o two Thomas Jefferson repealed all of the nation's
(28:21):
interior taxes, including the whiskey tax, and as we spoke
about in uh in our episode on Moonshine, the government
sort of left the tax subject regarding distilling alone for
a while. That's the whiskey rebellion. It's it's um I
(28:42):
always envision in when I have heard about it in
the past as involving more I'm embarrassed to admit wacky hijinks.
You know, it's a pretty direct violence kind of situation.
It's not so much like, Yeah, the closest thing to
wacky hijinks is some of the events in which a
(29:02):
mob of people would gang up on a tax collector,
like some of them you read the accounts of, and
then they went into the tax collector's home and forced
him to tear up his papers and jump up and
down on them. And like, there's an element that comes
off as kind of comedic, like that a mob was
literally forcing him to tear up his tax papers and
then jump up and down on them like that. That
(29:26):
there were hijinks like that was the closest thing to
wacky hijinks. But at the same time, a lot of
times like that was just a person trying to do
his job. There were definitely people who were tax collectors
who were jerks about it, but you know a lot
of them were just folks trying to get their lives
together too, So yeah, yeah, and then all the towering
(29:48):
and feathering, that's a lot that's not nearly as wacky
as now you have to tear up your papers. Now
you have to jump up and down on them. That
was the one with one of the ones that I read,
And then I was I said, seriously out out, you
seriously made him tear up his papers and then jump
on them, Like yeah, Well, and anytime we get to
tarring and feathering in any sort of historical event, there's
(30:10):
just this part of me that's like, how do you
get that divorced from your humanity where you're like, this
is a thing we should absolutely do. It seems so
cruel and horrifying. But and that that came up again
and again as I was reading this, like then then
they would cut off their hair and tar and better
than feather them. Yeah, do you have less humanity stripping
(30:32):
listener mail for us I know exactly to listener Facebook
comments in response to our listener mail following our Gallipoli
episode in which we talked about segregation in Nevada, and
the letter writer had written in to say that the
mascot of of the of U n l V is
(30:53):
a rebel and so we had two different people on Facebook.
First person was Tony, and Tony said, hello you wonderful
ladies at Incredible Stuffy missed in History Class is a
great podcast. During your listener mail, a listener from Nevada
said that U n l v's mascot is a Confederate symbol.
As a proud Las Vegan, I am happy to say
that isn't true. Thank you once again for the expansive
(31:13):
knowledge every week. Um. He paced an end a link
to an article that was called U n l V
Diversity Chief Hey red mascot rebel nickname not tied to
Confederacy uh. And then Chelsea replied on the same thread
and said, thank you for sharing the same article I
was going to post. I was shocked to hear a
fellow Nevada and perpetuate an untruth. Un l V began
(31:34):
as a satellite campus of un R and later became
a separate institution. There was a rivalry between the North
and South universities since the idea of being a rebel.
There is still a rivalry and many other arenas between
the North and South of Nevada politically, culturally, etcetera. Twenty
eight thousand, six hundred students call un l V home
for the spall semester. The two hundred plus students demonstrating
(31:57):
constitute less than one percent of the student population that
the survey conducted campus wide in which folks could indicate
their perception of our mascot. So I read this article
and then I also looked into some things about the
UNLB mascot. So yeah, there's definitely an article from the
UNLB diversity chief saying that the hey red mascot and
the rebel nickname are not tied the Confederacy. But then
(32:19):
if you go and look at the u n l
V website, the mascot of u n l V was
originally a wolf named Beauregard who was wearing a Confederate uniform.
And there there's a little cause and effects, Like there's
some arguments to be made that maybe they were calling
themselves the rebels before they applied Confederate imagery to the
(32:40):
idea of rebels. But then there was definitely a whole
period of years in which the rebel mascot was definitely
a Confederate soldier. There was literally a Confederate battle flag
on the masthead of the school newspaper, and people reasonably
(33:02):
uh in this like late sixties early seventies time frame,
said hey, this is not cool. This specifically, there were
several black athletes who were like, I don't think I'm
comfortable having this mascot that is the Confederate soldier. And
so the school reevaluated the uh the mascot that sort
of redesigned it to be a nevada um like a
(33:25):
pathfinder and not tied to Confederate imagery. Um and the
and like took the battle flag off of the school
newspaper mass head um and the actual wording on the
U n l V website says, well, it was a
decision based in rivalry and fun. The choice of a
Confederate themed mascot was nonetheless an unfortunate one. And then
(33:48):
later on the same page, which is a page about
the history of the mascot says V and l V
and acknowledges that its first generation of students opted for
a great name in Rebels, but chose to surround it
with imagery and some als that fell short of giving
the name of giving that name the honor it deserved.
So yes, definitely today, the Hey reb character that's sort
(34:10):
of the mascot of U n l V is specifically
designed to not be tied to Confederate imagery. But there's
a multiple decade tradition in which it specifically was Confederate imagery.
So I don't think it is um invalid at all
(34:31):
for people to point that out. Uh. It kind of
reminds me of the conversations you and I had in
our recent episodes about about the holiday characters from other cultures, uh,
and the attempts to kind of walk back Varta Pete
so there so that he's not so tied to like
racist black face and slavery. Um. I think it's personally,
(34:53):
I think it's awesome for U n LV to have
reevaluated their mascot and not have it be specifically a
Confederate soldier. It's specially since black student athletes found it
offensive to be on a team whose mascot was somebody
who fought on behalf of slavery. But that, like that
doesn't then erase all of those decades of time when
the mascot was literally a Confederate soldier. Yeah. So you know,
(35:18):
it's one of those things that evolved. I mean, the
history is evolving, like our we talked about all the
time how views evolved, and they change things and you
still have to acknowledge what came before even when you
have evolved. Yeah. Well, the well, the article that was
that was linked on our Facebook and I'll put a
link to it in our show notes. UM includes this
(35:39):
sixty page analysis of the history and the like the
diversity officer. Officer has come to the conclusion that in
its current iteration it is not a Confederate image, but
at the same time, like, at the same time, it
calls out specifically all of these other aspects from previous
years and not even that long ago previous years when
it definitely was in better imagery. So to clarify all that. Uh,
(36:05):
if you would like to write to us, we're a
history podcast at how Stuff Works dot com. We're also
on Facebook at Facebook dot com. Slash miss in history
and on Twitter at miss in History, are tumbler is
missed in History dot tumbler dot com, or on pinterest
at pentest dot com slash missed in History. If you
want to learn more about what we talked about today,
come to our parent company's website, which is how stuff
Works dot com and put the word moonshine in the
search bar. You will find an article about how moonshine works.
(36:29):
You can also come to our website, which is missed
in History dot com, or we have show notes. We
have an archive of everything that we've ever talked about
on the podcast. I'm gonna put in our show notes
a link to this article about un l V and
the other stuff from the u n LB website that
I've referred to, so you can see that for yourself.
You can do all that in a whole lot more
at how stuff works dot com or missed in History
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics.
(36:56):
Is that how stuff works dot com. In Jen
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