What do NASCAR and The Whiskey Rebellion have in common? Why, revenue agents and untaxed liquor, of course. Here's some early history that Brian France doesn’t want you to know.
As a schoolboy, one of the events of post-revolutionary U.S. history that stuck in my mind, and has to this day, was The Whiskey Rebellion. Now was this because of the unusual name, or was it the fact that it was about Revenue Agents and untaxed liquor, some things that sounded familiar to this southern boy?
The Whiskey Rebellion was about the Wild West of its day. The early racers of NASCAR were cowboys of their day; cowboys of the open road and certainly a wild bunch. The more I learned about like the early days of NASCAR, the more it sounded like The Whiskey Rebellion.
The Wild West that Hollywood has burned into our memory is of the mid-continent: wide plains, cattle drives and cowboys. The Wild West of the Post-Revolutionary United States was the Allegheny Mountains and the western lands beyond.
This mountain area was settled by people of mostly English, Scots, Irish, or Scots-Irish origin. These mountain men, like their descendants in the 1940s, were without much cash.
They found that making whiskey, a heritage they brought over from the old country, from the grain they grew made a product that was easier to transport and was worth a lot more on the open market than the raw materials it was made from.
The westerners of 1794 did not want to pay Federal taxes on something that was not only a valuable form of cash in a largely barter society, but something they thought was their God-given right to make.
After all, wasn’t the recently won revolution about “no taxation without representation” and hadn’t their ancestors been in the English Civil War of the 1600s because of farm product taxes?
Their distrust of the government back east was very much like their ancestors’ distrust of the aristocracy in the old country, and was one of the reasons that they had left the old world and settled on the fringes of this new society.
Although the Wild West of America had moved to the center of the continent, and then onto the movie screens, the 1940's ancestors of the Allegheny Mountains settlers of the 1700’s were no longer on the edges of society geographically.
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