The Whiskey Rebels

David Liss's 2008 historical novel THE WHISKEY REBELS weaves together three events in the early American Republic. These are the chartering of the first Bank of the United States in 1791, the financial panic of 1792 and the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. Widowed Joan Maycott, who wishes to write the first great American novel, believes that by persuading Congress to impose an excise tax on the making of whiskey, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton is responsible for the violent death near Pittsburgh of her whiskey distilling husband, Andrew. Step by step the handsome, brilliant Joan wins allies and builds a network of whiskey boys to do her bidding with an eye to toppling Hamilton and making themselves rich. ***

The second major fictional player in THE WHISKEY REBELS is Ethan Saunders, a onetime star in George Washington's Revolutionary War spy network. Ten years earlier, just before Yorktown, Saunders was asked by Colonel Alexander Hamilton to resign from the Continental army under suspicion of selling minor secrets to the British (a charge eventually proven false). From initial hater of Hamilton, Saunders slowly comes to admire and defend him. This puts him on a collision course with the conspirators around Mrs Maycott, though it is years before they discover each other and she tries to make him a pawn in her schemes to ruin Hamilton. ***

I will not spill many more words on a book far too long and tedious. The historical underpinnings are too undramatic and technical (6% bonds, 4% bonds, the usual greed and fear of stock markets, political jockeying by Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, etc., etc.) to justify the ungainly, rambling narrative structure. As a morality tale THE WHISKEY REBELS is not without attraction. Its thesis is that civilization is a very thin veneer. Transport well read, Christian men and women to a frontier wilderness (in this case the environs of Pittsburgh) and they will become nasty, unkempt, murderous and self-absorbed. David Liss provides some good local color in the lovingly recreated taverns of late 18th Century Philadelphia and New York. Otherwise, forget this book. -OOO-