This is a very compelling book by a very talented writer who is able to explain complicated issues and historically distant attitudes with grace and concision. It is also at times riddled with errors; tendentious beyond belief; and written more for the sake of "story" than for historical understanding. But I'll get to that later.

William Hogeland chose to focus his undeniably keen eye on the Whiskey Rebellion, which as he observes is a much discussed but little understood event in early American history, at least so far as a popular audience is concerned. In all the door-stop biographies of Founding Fathers that have come out of late, the Whiskey Rebellion features as an episode of a few pages, more or less; and since those biographies deal with the men who put down the rebellion, Hogeland observes, they tend to give the Pennsylvania rebels the short end of the stick, if indeed they give them any stick at all. For biographers of Hamilton or Washington or chroniclers of the rise of American government, the rebels are speed bumps on the highway from Confederation to Union.

Hogeland sees them as much more than that. For him, the Whiskey rebels are Americans worthy of respect and understanding. Thus, as he draws the strands of the story together, he introduces such a long list of players that I wish he'd included a dramatis personae just after the Table of Contents. Some of these personae, like George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, need little introduction. But there are a host of others who are undoubtedly new to the reader and indeed to the scholar, and just about all of them are unique personalities in American history.

Tremendously important to Hogeland's story, not least because of the detailed memoirs he left to posterity, is Henry Brackenridge. A College of New Jersey graduate, in the same class and clubs as James Madison, Brackenridge was by 1794 a lawyer perpetually on the make. He had moved to Pittsburgh, then hardly more than a village, because he thought that in the west lay the future of the American Republic, and that Pittsburgh was that future's gateway. Though Hogeland does his best to mitigate this feeling, Brackenridge comes across the reader as an arch, ironic, occasionally smug, out-of-his-depth, Princetonian smart-ass. Brackenridge could find, and advocate, the unpopular side of any issue. As Albert Gallatin (a financial whiz and Geneva native once dandled on Voltaire's knee who emigrated and settled on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border; how did these guys get there?) said of Brackenridge, "He laughs alone." Oh, and did I mention that Brackenridge was endlessly writing the great American novel? (Like most since then, it was published but not really finished.)

Also important to Hogeland's story is Herman Husband, who makes Brackenridge seem a sensible conformist. Born in the Maryland tidewater and raised a semi-devout Anglican slaveowner, Husband had a conversion experience under the preaching of George Whitefield that led him into Presbyterianism and then into the Society of Friends. He was also, it seems, an inveterate buyer of real estate. Husband moved to North Carolina in 1762, where he was soon expelled from the Quaker meeting for advocating the right of members to prophesy. After the expulsion, he turned with deeper attention to the interpretation of biblical writings, particularly the Book of Daniel, which he read as foretelling the founding of an ideal government … in North America. These biblical musings were interrupted—or, perhaps, enhanced—by the Regulator revolt in North Carolina. Husband pled for his backcountry neighbors to the wealthy Whig planters of the Carolina coast, begging for a system of justice, fair taxation, and competent administration. In short, as Hogeland remarks, "Regulators wanted more government, not less." Whatever they wanted, their actions looked like rebellion to the Royal Governor and the Colonial Assembly, and the Regulators were defeated in open battle.

In the aftermath—the ruling order having been unmistakably asserted—many of the protestors' demands were actually met, but by then Herman Husband was on the run, a notorious and very much wanted insurrectionist. He fled to south-central Pennsylvania, soon calling his family to him. There he once again engaged in his familiar avocations: buying land and meditating on the Bible. As the Revolution came and went, Husband became convinced of two things. One, the new United States was nothing other than the New Jerusalem prophesied in the Book of Ezekiel; this he based on both biblical interpretations and measurements made on long surveying trips up and down the Appalachians. Two, by buying up as much land as he could in this new west, the seat of a future divinely ordained empire, Herman Husband could make a lot of money.