"Copper Kettle" (also known as "Get you a Copper Kettle", "In the pale moonlight") is a song composed by Albert Frank Beddoe and made popular by Joan Baez. Pete Seeger's account dates the song to 1946, mentioning its probable folk origin, while in a 1962 Time readers column A. F. Beddoe says that the song was written by him in 1953 as part of the folk opera Go Lightly, Stranger. The song praises the good aspects of moonshining as told to the listener by a man whose "daddy made whiskey, and granddaddy did too". The line "We ain't paid no whiskey tax since 1792" alludes to an unpopular tax imposed...

The Whiskey Rebellion, or Whiskey Insurrection, was a tax protest in the United States beginning in 1791, during the presidency of George Washington. The rebellion was provoked by the imposition of an excise tax on distilled spirits. Although the tax applied to all distilled spirits, whiskey was by far the most popular distilled beverage in 18th-century America so the excise became widely known as a "whiskey tax." The new excise was a part of treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton's program to fund war debt incurred during the Revolutionary War. The tax was resisted by farmers in the western frontier...