The Whiskey Rebellion was an uprising of western Pennsylvanian farmers caused by the excise tax on American manufactured whiskey. Alexander Hamilton, the Secretary of the Treasury, proposed this tax to reduce the debt that the United States had acquired during the Revolutionary War. Hamilton also hoped to reduce the amount of alcohol people drank; in 1791 the average American adult consumed six gallons of hard liquor yearly. Western farmers were not able to sail their crops down the Mississippi River. They found that by distilling their grains into whiskey, their products became easier to send back east by land. However, the excise tax angered farmers because it claimed most of their profits, totaling nearly twenty-five percent of the
