George Washington stood six feet two inches tall, broad-shouldered, with unusually large hands. His figure was made more distinctive still by his refusal to wear a wig — his reddish-brown hair was his own, tied back and powdered white, framing a face marked by the scars of a smallpox illness from his youth. By this point in his life, most of his teeth were gone. The dentures he relied upon, constructed over the years from various combinations of ivory, metal, and human and animal teeth, fitted poorly and caused him frequent pain. Yet Washington rarely allowed the discomfort to show.

Washington had become known for many things over the years, including his leadership in the American Revolution, his role as the young nation’s first President, and, on a lighter note, his fondness for dancing, which he called “the gentler conflict.” But in the autumn rains of western Pennsylvania in 1794, President Washington, now sixty-two years old and serving his second term in office, found himself in a role he probably believed he had long left behind. Riding at the head of nearly thirteen thousand militia along a muddy frontier road, he wore once again the familiar blue-and-buff uniform of the Continental Army.

It was an extraordinary sight — a sitting President leading an army, the only such moment in American history. Stranger still was the enemy he marched to confront. Washington was not riding against the British or another enemy. He was marching against Americans.

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The trouble began three years earlier, in 1791. The new nation carried significant debt from the Revolution, and federal revenue was sorely needed. Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury, proposed a federal excise tax on distilled spirits. Congress passed the measure into law that March. Hamilton considered the matter settled. Frontier distillers, who were most impacted, considered it an abuse of power, akin in spirit to what they had fought to end in the Revolution. It felt like a declaration of war…

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