Join CJ as he discusses:

• Slavery as a solution to the labor shortages in the New World once enslaved Indians and white indentured servants proved to be inadequate for the purposes of large-scale staple crop agriculture
• The evolution of slavery in different parts of colonial North America, including the Chesapeake colonies, South Carolina & Georgia, French Louisiana, and the Northern colonies
• The evolution of the slave trade into the 18th century
• The evolution of slavery in British North America in the years leading up to the American Revolution

Support the Dangerous History Podcast via Patreon

External Links (Youtube videos about various products of black & white cultural interaction in Southern history)

• A video about the origins of Southern cuisine
• Another video on the same topic
• A video about the history of the banjo
• A video about the origins of rock & roll 

Today we cover the last blow in the American Revolution’s Thermidor:  the Whiskey Rebellion of the early 1790s.

Join CJ as he discusses:

• Raising more questions about what history really is and what most historians really do, using Bentley Little’s short story “The Washingtonians” (which was also adapted into an episode of the TV series Masters of Horror), a story that CJ thinks has direct relevance to the Dangerous History Podcast in general, and to this episode in particular
• The long history of anti-excise sentiment in the Anglo-American world
• The origin of Alexander Hamilton’s excise tax on whiskey
• The grievances that many Westerners had regarding this tax, and a variety of other issues
• Anger on the part of many Westerners (especially the poor), culminating in rebellion
• The crackdown in Western Pennsylvania
• The troubling & somewhat ambiguous aftermath & legacy of this rebellion, and how it fits into the Revolution/Thermidor framework outlined last episode

Internal Links

• DHP Episode 0057:  Banksters & Control Freaks
• DHP Episode 0065:  Revolutionary Aftershocks Part I:  Shays’ Rebellion

External Links

• A great piece at ZeroGov about the links between mountainous terrain and liberty – it’s no coincidence that resistance to the Whiskey Tax was mostly in highland areas
• Stefan Molyneux’s “The Truth About George Washington”

Every revolution produces people (generally of the lower ranks within the revolutionary faction) who take the rhetoric & supposed ideology of the revolution at face value and expect that rhetoric & ideology to actually apply to them.  But every revolution also produces people (generally of the elite within the revolutionary faction) who really just want to be the “new boss” and, as a result, are often willing to blatantly violate the stated ideals of the revolution they were ostensibly leading.

Here we see this phenomenon in regards to the aftermath of the American Revolution, and two oft-overlooked ‘rebellions’ in early post-Independence History — Shays’ Rebellion of the 1780s and the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s.  This episode will cover Shays’ Rebellion, and next episode will cover the Whiskey Rebellion.

Join CJ as he discusses:

• The concept of Thermidor and how the things we’re talking about in this episode (plus the writing & ratification of the Constitution, which we’re not getting into in great detail here, & the Whiskey a Rebellion we’re covering next time) constituted Thermidor for the (partial as it was) American Revolution
• Shays’ Rebellion, from its origins through its suppression and aftermath
• How the Rebellion added impetus to those pushing for a bigger, stronger federal government (eventually called “Federalists”) and how the Federalists’ victory with the US Constitution set the stage for the next Revolutionary Aftershock, the Whiskey Rebellion, which we’ll cover next episode

External Links

• Thomas Jefferson’s 1787 letter to William Smith from which we get the famous “tree of liberty” quote

This concise DHP episode features CJ’s segment on Bacon’s Rebellion from Episode 67 of Daniele Bolelli’s History on Fire podcast.

Join CJ as he discusses Bacon’s Rebellion and its impact on American history down to the present era.

Support the Dangerous History Podcast via Patreon, SubscribeStar, or Bitbacker.

CJ’s official DHP Amazon Wish List

Other ways to support the show

The Dangerous History Podcast is a member of the Recorded History Podcast Network, the Dark Myths Podcast Collective & LRN.fm’s podcast roster.

External Links

• History on Fire Ep. 67 (if you want to hear the whole HoF episode and catch the other 4 ‘Ripples of History’ segments aside from CJ’s)
• Luminary Podcast Network

CJ’s Picks: Amazon Affiliate Links

American Slavery, American Freedom by Edmund Morgan

Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America (New Narratives in American History) by James D. Rice