David Liss's website can be found at http://davidliss.com. His biography states he was born in New Jersey and raised in Florida, and was a one-time encyclopedia salesman. He received his B.A. from Syracuse University, an M.A. from Georgia State Universty and his M.Phil from Columbia University, where he left his dissertation unfinished to pursue his writing career. David lives in San Antonio with his wife and children.
THE WHISKEY REBELS went on sale September 30 of this year and is already in its second printing.
Today, also, I thought I'd look up what exactly the Whiskey Rebellion was. In a nutshell, here's the scoop from wikipedia.com:
The Whiskey Rebellion was a popular uprising that had its beginnings in 1791 and culminated in an insurrection in 1794 in the locality of Washington, Pennsylvania, in the Monongahela Valley. The rebellion occurred shortly after the Articles of Confederation had been replaced by a stronger federal government under the American Constitution in 1789.
The new federal government, at the urging of the first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, assumed the states' debt from the American Revolutionary War. In 1791 Hamilton convinced Congress to approve taxes on distilled spirits and carriages. Hamilton's principal reason for the tax was that he wanted to pay down the national debt, but he justified the tax "more as a measure of social discipline than as a source of revenue." But most importantly, Hamilton "wanted the tax imposed to advance and secure the power of the new federal government."
Congress designed the tax so smaller distillers would pay by the gallon, while larger distillers (who could produce in volume) could take advantage of a flat fee. The net result was to affect smaller producers more than larger ones. By the summer of 1794, tensions reached a fevered pitch all along the western frontier as the settlers' primary marketable commodity was threatened by the federal taxation measures. Finally, the civil protests became an armed rebellion. As word of the rebellion spread across the frontier, a whole series of loosely organized resistance measures were taken, including robbing the mail, stopping court proceedings, and the threat of an assault on Pittsburgh. George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, remembering Shays' Rebellion from just eight years before, decided to make Pennsylvania a testing ground for federal authority. Washington ordered federal marshals to serve court orders requiring the tax protesters to appear in federal district court.
This marked the first time under the new United States Constitution that the federal government used military force to exert authority over the nation's citizens. The military suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion set a precedent that U.S. citizens who wished to change the law had to do so peacefully through constitutional means; otherwise, the government would meet any threats to disturb the status quo with force.
The hated whiskey tax was repealed in 1803, having been largely unenforceable outside of Western Pennsylvania, and even there never having been collected with much success.
I love history. There's a biography of Alexander Hamilton that came out not too long ago I seem to remember that painted him as a hero of banking, etc. I've read/watched other things that depicted him as being hated. He hasn't shown up in THE WHISKEY REBELS as a character though his name is bandied about quite a bit and not favorably.
Happy reading,
PK the Bookeemonster
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