The Whiskey Rebels by David Liss

The Barnes & Noble Review

David Liss's new novel, set in an America where financial collapse is imminent, teems with double crosses, political intrigue, concealed identities, blackmail, spies, and sex scandals. The stock market is on a roller-coaster ride, and brokers on the trading floor reek of panic and floppy sweat.

Welcome to 1792.

In his fourth novel, The Whiskey Rebels, Liss moves from the European setting of his previous historical novels to explore a frontier America where determined patriots plot to bring about the collapse of the new Bank of the United States, the brainchild of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. While this attempt to destroy the bank is fictional, the financial panic of 1792 was real, as was a controversial "whiskey tax." A year earlier, Hamilton had convinced Congress to assume the states' debt from the war by approving a tax on distilled spirits.

The whiskey tax had been approved by Congress as a simple means of helping fund the Bank of the United States. What better way to raise revenues, it had been argued, than to tax a luxury, and a harmful one at that, that many enjoyed? Let the men who would waste their time with strong drink pay for the economic growth of the new nation.

The tax eventually led to a full-scale uprising by owners of small distilleries -- mainly in western Pennsylvania -- who felt they were being unfairly assessed a fluctuating fee while larger distillers were only charged a flat rate. Civil protest led to armed rebellion in 1794, and President George Washington invoked martial law to quell the violence.

The Whiskey Rebels focuses not on the bloody events in western Pennsylvania but instead on the equally treacherous financial chaos that played out in Philadelphia and New York two years earlier. In his biography of Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow described the tenuous economic bubble facing the new Republic: "Buoyed by credit, the prices of government and bank securities soared to a peak in late January 1792, exceeding any sane levels of valuation….Then euphoria turned to doubt and doubt to despair as shares began a precipitate five-week slide." Surely, Liss's nostrils flared at the scent of collapsing markets -- this was exactly the kind of scenario made for him.

Liss has a well-earned reputation for writing diligently researched novels that chart the beginnings of our complex and often corrupt financial system. A couple of centuries have done little to change the way greedy bureaucrats try to manipulate the economy. When reading novels like Liss's 1999 A Conspiracy of Paper or The Whiskey Rebels, it's not hard to imagine his characters in Armani suits, screaming into cell phones while gesticulating wildly on the exchange floor. Physically, the Wall Street of today looks nothing like the stock market of yesteryear: "[A]ll real business was transacted in nearby taverns and inns -- the trade in government issues, securities, and bank shares transpired in public houses." Back then, Philadelphia was the center of finance, and trade was conducted in coffeehouses where brawling traders got into shouting (and shoving) matches. Each man, Liss writes, had a clerk at his side whose pen "moved with such rapidity that ink sprayed in the air like a black rain."

This is the world in which Ethan Saunders, a former captain during the Revolutionary War, suddenly finds himself a pawn in the game to destroy Hamilton's bank. Once "the cleverest spy of his day" who worked for Washington during the war, Saunders now lives in disgrace, stumbling from tavern to tavern in Philadelphia. An accusation of treason once besmirched his name and cost him his reputation and his fiancée, Cynthia Pearson. As the novel opens, Saunders is hired to find Cynthia's missing husband, a man who has unwisely invested in inflated securities. He soon finds himself embroiled in a deep and far-reaching intrigue.

Saunders' adventures are intertwined with the story of Joan Maycott, wife of another Revolutionary War hero and aspiring novelist in the vein of Jane Austen. After Joan and her husband move to the wilderness of western Pennsylvania and establish a successful whiskey distillery operation, tragedy strikes, and Joan finds herself caught up in the rebels' cause. Like Saunders, Joan often pauses to inject a dose of moralizing into the plot: "We were a land where cleverness and ingenuity bled quickly into chicanery and fraud. How easily, I thought, in an untamed land did the steady energy of ambition become the twitchy mania of greed."

Likewise, when someone asks Saunders, "What drives a man to a wealth that will crush all others?" he replies, "It is the dark side of liberty."

At times, long paragraphs of dialogue come across like dry pages from a Federalist tract. At other times, history seems to overwhelm the novel, and the action slows for expostulation on early American finance and trade. The history lesson is necessary, however, because the plot -- that of the real Whiskey Rebellion and of the novel -- is thick and tangled. Think of Liss as the kind of history professor who keeps his lectures lively simply by his passion for the primitive history of stocks and bonds.

As his other books have shown, Liss's forte is filling his pages with period details that come off the page with the pop of an ember snapping in the hearth. Here, for example, is how Joan describes the first sip of her husband's new recipe for whiskey:

I'd had whiskey before, in quantities I would not have credited in my former life, but here was something entirely different. It was darker, I saw by the light of the fire, amber in color and more viscous. And its flavor -- it was not merely the sickly sweet heat of whiskey, for there was a honey taste to it, perhaps vanilla and maple syrup and even, yes, the lingering tang of dates.

By so effectively transporting us into the past, Liss also brings history forward. Everything old is new again, he seems to be saying, while advising us to keep a nervous eye on the ticker scroll running across CNN. In the end, as one character notes in the novel, the rebels' plot is not about the bank: "It's about averting chaos, riot, and bloodshed and another war of brother against brother. This country is a house of cards, and it will not take much to bring it down." Bellwether words indeed for today's stockbrokers. --David Abrams

David Abrams's stories and essays have appeared in Esquire, Glimmer Train Stories, The Greensboro Review, and The Missouri Review. He's currently at work on a novel based in part on his experiences while deployed to Iraq with the U.S. Army.

From the Publisher

America, 1787. Ethan Saunders, once among General Washington’s most valued spies, is living in disgrace after an accusation of treason cost him his reputation. But an opportunity for redemption comes calling when Saunders’s old enemy, Alexander Hamilton, draws him into a struggle with bitter rival Thomas Jefferson over the creation of the Bank of the United States.

Meanwhile, on the western Pennsylvania frontier, Joan Maycott and her husband, a Revolutionary War veteran, hope for a better life and a chance for prosperity. But the Maycotts’ success on an isolated frontier attracts the brutal attention of men who threaten to destroy them.

As their causes intertwine, Joan and Saunders–both patriots in their own way–find themselves on opposing sides of a plot that could tear apart a fragile new nation.

Publishers Weekly

Set in and around Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and New York City in the years after the Revolutionary War, this clever thriller from Liss (The Ethical Assassin) follows the adventures of Ethan Saunders, once a valiant spy for General Washington, who's fallen on hard times by war's end. Suspected of treason, Ethan has lost the love of his life, Cynthia, who's married the fiendish Jacob Pearson, an entrepreneur who managed to prosper during the British occupation of Philadelphia. At Cynthia's urging, Ethan agrees to go looking for the missing Jacob, prompted in large part by a desire to redeem his reputation. Meanwhile, the so-called whiskey rebels on the western frontier are trying to bring down the hated Alexander Hamilton and his Bank of the United States. The courageous Ethan is a likable rogue, and even though Ethan spends too much time delving into the complications of 18th-century finance, he can be counted on when the chips are down and the odds against him soar. (Oct.)

Douglas Southard - Library Journal

Known for suspenseful novels set in the world of 18th-century finance, e.g., the Edgar Award-winning A Conspiracy of Paper, Liss often portrays hard-drinking yet likable scoundrels who thwart conspiracies as complex and labyrinthine as finance capitalism itself. Fans of those earlier books won't be disappointed by his fifth novel, a fast-paced and complex narrative that reimagines the events surrounding the Panic of 1792. The book's main characters are reliably roguish Ethan Saunders and beautiful widow Joan Maycott, who encounter Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and other famous figures of the era. Events get moving when Saunders sets out to find an ex-lover's husband and uncovers a plan to ruin a wealthy financier. As the plot unfolds, however, it becomes clear that the stakes are much higher than personal revenge. Liss portrays post-Revolutionary Philadelphia and New York more effectively than he does the western Pennsylvania frontier, where the villains are somewhat cartoonish, but this detracts only slightly from a thoroughly enjoyable novel. Recommended for all libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ6/1/08.]

Kirkus Reviews

Edgar-winning Liss (The Ethical Assassin, 2006, etc.) channels early American history in a thickly plotted tale of conflicts between revolutionary idealism and fiscal skullduggery. Readers of the author's earlier thrillers starring Benjamin Weaver (A Spectacle of Corruption, 2004, etc.) will note resemblances between that amoral adventurer and this novel's Philadelphia vagrant, Ethan Saunders. Once a captain (and spy) under George Washington's command, Saunders has fallen on hard times. His duplicitous skills are solicited by the woman he loved and lost, Cynthia Pearson, whose husband's endangered state is somehow connected to Federalist Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's creation of a national bank, intended to replace a traditional agrarian culture with one rooted in the quicksand of financial speculation. Meanwhile, in a parallel narrative, farm girl Joan Claybrook, an autodidact who reads voraciously and dreams of composing the first truly American novel, marries war veteran Andrew Maycott and travels with him to the "western" territory of Pittsburgh, having exchanged payment owed him for military service for land that's actually uncharted wilderness. Liss's research gives the novel an impressive density, as well as a tendency to bog down in redundant declarations of cross-purposes. Hamilton's threat to the young republic's integrity and his widely loathed tax on whiskey set speculators against patriots and slowly-achingly slowly-connect Joan Maycott's progress from sturdy pioneer to wronged woman to prosperous whiskey merchant to relentless avenger with Saunders' cloak-and-dagger misadventures among the villains he's hired to hunt down. Other characters include Saunders'truculent slave Leonidas ("won" in a game of chance) and such luminaries as the complex and elusive Hamilton, poet Philip Freneau (who produces an influential partisan newspaper) and an aged, exhausted Washington. Uneven, sometimes risibly overstuffed narrative that's nevertheless compulsively readable.

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Reading Group Guide

1. 1. Andrew Maycott believes “The American novel, if it is to be honest, must be about money, not property. Money alone– base, unremarkable, corrupting money” (page 30). Do you agree? By his definition, is The Whiskey Rebels an American novel? Why or why not?

 2. Captain Ethan Saunders implores us, “Look beneath and you may find several things that surprise you” (page 63). If we take Ethan’s advice and look beneath or past his scheming, his impropriety, and his status as a “ruin of a man,” what do we find? How and why are honor and reputation intertwined? 

3. Through her reading, Joan Maycott discovers: “When my empathy for a character led me to weep or laugh or fear for her safety, I spent hours determining by what means the novelist had effected this magic. When I cared nothing for suffering and loss, I dissected the want of craft that engendered such apathy” (page 23). How does David Liss engender empathy or apathy for his characters? Did you sometimes feel both empathy and apathy for the same character? 

4. En route to the Pennsylvania frontier, Phineas tells Joan “The West changes you. . . . I’m what the West made me, and you’ll be what it makes you” (page 84). Is this true? If so, how does the frontier change Joan? Phineas? What does this say about free will and choice in relation to place and circumstance? 

5. Examine the characterizations and the roles of women in The Whiskey Rebels. What similarities do you find? What differences?Are they victims? 

6. Mr. Brackenridge defines himself as a patriot– one who “does not make the principles of his country conform to his own ideas” (page 188). How else is patriotism defined or demonstrated in this book? How would you define patriotism? Who else in The Whiskey Rebels is then a patriot? 

7. Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, William Duer, and Joan Maycott have varied theories on the American economy, the Bank of the United States, and the excise tax. For instance, the Bank is either a great boon for the nation, a terrible disaster for the nation, or an opportunity to be exploited. Talk about their differing perspectives in relation to the events of The Whiskey Rebels. Who do you think is right? Do these debates continue today? 

8. Discuss the principle of justice and its relation to revenge, integrity, inequality, and the law in The Whiskey Rebels. How does Joan Maycott justify her revenge against Alexander Hamilton? 

9. Why does Captain Saunders not allow his slave, Leonidas, to purchase his freedom and later “simply neglect[s] to inform” him that he is a free man? What does liberty mean to Captain Saunders? Joan Maycott? Leonidas? Cynthia Pearson? The newly formed United States? 

10. Lavien believes “It is only in the eyes of one another that inequality lies” (page 94). Who else, besides Lavien, serves as a moral arbiter in the novel? What examples of presumed superiority and/or civility can be found in The Whiskey Rebels? What examples can you find of an impossible tension between greed and civility, wealth and humanity? 

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