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material of rum was better than nothing, Gates distributed the sweet goo among his men without realizing it was a laxative. He ultimately lost to the British.
    Rum soon became a political target. In the middle of the war Congess moved to levy import duties on molasses, but the measure, which required unanimous consent, was blocked by a Rhode Island delegation protecting rum distilleries in the state. That was rum’s last political victory, however. Once the federal government was established at thewar’s end, Congress, which didn’t need unanimous consent anymore, put the rum and molasses duties in place.
    Rum was falling fast, and per capita consumption during the war dropped by more than half. Pushed by necessity to find alternatives, the United States began acquiring a taste for whiskey, a more patriotic alternative made from domestic grain. After patriot troops lost a well-fought battle to the British at Germantown in October 1777, Congress sent the fighters thirty casks of whiskey as a reward. The French, equally impressed by the patriots’ fighting at the battle, as well as at Saratoga, decided to assist the struggling rebellion. Americans repaid the gesture by naming an assortment of frontier areas for French towns and people. These included Bourbon County in present-day Kentucky, which in the following decades would emerge as an important whiskey-producing area.
    As the fighting raged, Washington lobbied Congress for the construction of public distilleries in different states, writing in one letter that “It is necessary, there should always be a Sufficient Quantity of Spirits with the Army.” During the winter at Valley Forge, where vicious bouts of dysentery and typhoid killed around 20 percent of the twelve thousand troops, rum shortages were particularly bad, forcing Washington to constantly reallocate supplies. Eventually, he ordered the switch to whiskey. While ration orders had previously stipulated rum specifically, Washington broadened them to read, “One gill of whiskey or spirits, as or when they are available.”
    America’s transition to whiskey was also sped along by backwoods settlers who became some of Washington’s favorite fighters in the war. Even as combat raged, Americans continued to migrate west, where they often protected the Continental Army’s flank by fighting Indians recruited by the British. The frontier, however, was isolated from shipments of rum or the raw materials needed to make it. In contrast, it was an ideal place for whiskey: water flowed, grain grew, and plenty of wood was available to burn under the stills. Many of the settlers were also skilled at the practice, hailing from a variety of European backgrounds—German, Scottish, Irish, Scotch-Irish—that all had strong legacies of distilling either brandy or grain spirits.
    Of the entire contingent, the Scotch-Irish best embodied the characteristics that proved most useful to Washington in turning the tide of the war. Most had left Europe on bad terms and were intensely patriotic and loyal to the cause of American independence. They hated the British, questioned all authority, and had honed their fighting abilities back in Europe by resisting whiskey taxes levied by an oppressive government. Neither technically Scotch nor Irish, the Scotch-Irish were poor Protestants also known as Ulstermen,
a name given them by King James I starting in 1610 when he sent them to Ulster, a rowdy Catholic region of Ireland, to “tame” the “wild Irish” living there and help spread Protestantism. The move came shortly after the Crown had dragged the remote enclave into submission after a protracted struggle, and the Scotch-Irish became outcasts living among other outcasts as both groups struggled to survive.
    The Scotch-Irish turned to whiskey for income, building their reputation as distillers. The Scotch and Irish whiskey styles for which the British Isles would later become famous, however, were still a long way from their modern