The Whiskey Rebellion by William Hogeland

Author:William Hogeland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2017-08-18T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

A New Sodom

No calm followed that storm. Four days after the general and the marshal flushed themselves down the west’s biggest drain, Mr. Brackenridge was standing before a grim crowd in the Mingo Creek church. The meeting, called by the committee that had overseen the attack on Bower Hill, was turning into a tribunal, at which the people put a direct question to the rich and educated.

Benjamin Parkinson, tall and red-haired, stood before the crowd. “You know what has been done,” he cried. Mr. Brackenridge heard a kind of anguish in his voice. “We wish to know,” Parkinson said, “whether what has been done is right or wrong.”

Not to attend this meeting: that had been the lawyer’s fondest hope. After the escape of Lenox and Neville, rebels had been saying that prominent men who failed to support the rebellion would be treated in the same way as the general. The eyes of the rebellion were on Mr. Brackenridge. Tom the Tinker, suspicious of the lawyer’s commitment to the rebel cause, wanted him in the front ranks. Isaac Craig and others in the besieged Neville Connection, for their part, wanted the town to take a stand against insurgency; at times it seemed as if they didn’t care if the town burned. Craig had insisted on keeping the Pittsburgh excise office open as a signal of defiance. Mr. Brackenridge started a rumor that five hundred militiamen were coming to close down the office, and Craig took down the sign with a degree of haste that the lawyer, for all his apprehensiveness, found satisfying. The Neville Connection were eyeing Mr. Brackenridge with suspicion too.

Yet it was at the urgent, personal request of Presley Neville that Mr. Brackenridge had come to the Mingo church meeting. A written invitation had been delivered to Mr. Brackenridge’s office from David Hamilton, the gloomy moderate of the rebel side, who seemed to think the lawyer might help the rebels succeed without excessive violence. Frightened now of anything connecting him with the insurgency, Mr. Brackenridge tore the invitation in pieces and tossed them into the chaos of an armoire. But Presley came into the office and asked the lawyer to go to the meeting, pressing it as a personal favor. Presley, Mr. Brackenridge remembered, had been the guarantee against the marshal’s leaving town. Mr. Brackenridge insisted on taking witnesses who could vouch for his reasons for attending the meeting, and Presley gratefully agreed to vouch for him too.

When the Pittsburghers arrived at the church, they were distressed to find not the small committee they’d expected but a mass gathering. A narrow road dropped steeply from forested heights and passed the church on the Mingo. Dozens of men were already outside, dozens more were arriving; and across the road was the tilted graveyard, with James McFarlane’s grave freshly dug. Among the waiting attendees was James’s brother, Andrew, silent and drawn, with a black band on his arm.

Country people observed the arriving Pittsburgh contingent with subdued rage. Nobody spoke as they waited for the meeting to begin.

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