a pardon for willie
Four hundred million Continentals weighed down the pockets of US revolutionary war soldiers who had just beaten the largest standing army in the world. The pockets that carried the Continentals were more valuable than the currency because the new republic had no way to honor them. The First Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, believed that a national bank and taxes to pay off the war debt was the answer for the young republic to be taken seriously by lenders. The new republic owed $50 million half of which to the Dutch through Barings Bank. The States owed another $100 million.
Hamilton proposed and formed the First National Bank of the United States in 1791. The government could not pay for its twenty percent share of the 10 million capital and gave a paper promise to pay in the future. These were the first of pay in-kind, in further promises not coin, securities that were later used in the junk bond market of the 1980's when Rudy Guiliani prosecuted Michael Milken and recommend that Milken be pardoned by President Trump forty years later.
In 1790 the republic produced 190 million dollars a year in known commerce, the gross domestic product, $65 billion today, and over half of the commerce was related to trade. The first tax raised was on imported goods, wine from Spain, tea from India and China, but the second tax, on the domestic production of whisky, was a challenge.
Seventeen thousand Scots-Irish immigrants settled west of the Appalachians because their habits were displeasing to those that preceded them. The Protestants built churches while the Scots built stills for whisky using excess grain from subsistence farming for fermentation and the whisky that was not consumed as a currency of greater value than the printed Continental. The Protestants prayed while the Scots drank, fought, stored value in their grain, and sought the next authority to challenge.
The wait was not long. Mr Hamilton dispatched whisky tax collectors who were greeted with the finest tar, choicest feathers, and hung by the nearest post. In time thirteen thousand federal troops were sent to restore order to the Whisky Rebellion. One hundred fifty of the rebels were transported for trial east, ten stood trial, two were convicted and pardoned by President Washington in 1795. President Jefferson would repeal the Whisky Tax in 1802 in part because he was occupied with the Louisiana Purchase completed in 1803.
Jean Baptiste Neicaisse a French Canadian married a local gal in 1745 and claimed a Spanish Land Grant in what would come to be known as Kiln, Mississippi after Napoleon sold Louisiana in 1803. Two hundred years later offspring of Jean Baptiste's genetic gifts, Willie Necaisse Jr was born, and seventy-five years after that Willie was arrested with 2,200 gallons of mash, a two hundred gallon stainless steel cooker, two hundred pounds of sugar, and a 1990 Ford F 250 pick up truck. The mash, cooker, and sugar were ingredients for Neicasse moonshine and the truck, well, to make the supply chain efficient.
Willie ran the family business that sustained Neicasse generations and Kiln since Prohibition and the Great Depression. The business had been so successful that the population of Kiln had doubled from 1000 to over 2,400 counting among its residents the Favre family that started the Jourdan River Lumber Company in 1859, a saw mill. One hundred ten years later the Favre family of Kiln produced Brett Favre the pride of the University of Southern Mississippi and quarterback of the Green Bay Packers who would lead his team to win its first Super Bowl in twenty-nine years.
Willie at the age of seventy-seven had a posse of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms chasing him through Hancock County, Mississippi because his distillery was popular and because they calculated he owed at least $1 million in taxes. According to the federal agents' Willie had bought at least 570,000 pounds of sugar over time, propane gas in the summer, and transported the merchandise from Slidell, Louisiana which made the Neicasse business a federal offense.
The federal government claimed $900,000 in taxes and the state government $300,000. The $1.2 million in 2020 dollars is less than a fraction of one percent of the 1790 dollars pay in kind capitalization of the First Bank of the United States and less than one percent of the $130 million Favre made in his playing career.
Thinking Brett pays the taxes and the President issues the pardon.
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