Exeter Court Docket: New Hampshire Liquor and Revenue Cases After the War

The Paper Road to Exeter

Many a man in this state believes that a liquor case begins with a deputy and ends in a jail cell. It does not. It begins with a jealous neighbour and ends with a clerk taking a nap. Between the two lies a heap of paper, and I mean to walk the reader over every inky foot of it, as carefully as he would follow vapour from his pot to his worm.

First you must know where the paper goes. When Congress set up the federal courts in 1789, it ruled that the District Court for New Hampshire should sit at Portsmouth and at Exeter. So a revenue case, meaning a case of cheating Mr. Lincoln's tax collectors, may begin in a cow pasture in Pittsfield and finish forty miles off in Exeter, by the Squamscott River, where the Academy boys sit on the fence and laugh at the farmers coming in to be fined. Exeter is the Rockingham shire town as well, so county justice and federal justice live in the one town, like two dogs sharing a sausage.

Cases under our own dry law mostly stay in the county court, which for us Merrimack folk means Concord. Federal matters go to the federal bench: unlicensed distilling, not paying the tax, and rolling barrels past the gauger. Since sixty-six that bench has belonged to Judge Daniel Clark. He sat in the United States Senate before they gave him a gavel, so he had already spent years hearing men lie under a dome and call it business. He came to us well prepared.

Informers, Grand Juries and Bonds

The first step is the complaint. Somebody squeals, and here is the poison in the pudding. Under the moiety system an informer may collect a share of the fines and forfeitures, so the man who reports your still may walk off with a slice of your punishment. One fellow over Chichester way informed on three stills in a single spring and was paid for it. By midsummer every dog in town bit him on sight, and some of those dogs had been trained to it on Sunday afternoons.

The second step is the grand jury. It is twenty-three men shut in a room to decide whether a neighbour should be punished for selling them the very thing they drank at lunch. If enough of them nod, the bill is true and you are indicted. The clerk then writes it out in a hand so fine you would think he was courting it.

The third step is the bond. They seldom put you in a cell to wait. You are "recognized," as the lawyers say: you give bond to appear and bring sureties, neighbours who sign that they will forfeit good money if you run off to the Canadas. Your sureties are your friends, and often your customers. When I gave bond, mine were a blacksmith, a deacon and a widow. The widow was the only one who ever paid what she promised.

What the Law Threatened and What Men Paid

Lay three crimes side by side, like teeth on a tray. Running an unlicensed still can bring heavy fines in the hundreds and thousands of dollars, a jail term, and forfeiture of the still, the spirits and anything else the marshal can carry off. Dodging the tax on spirits already made brings more fines and more forfeiture. Then there is the big bear in the woods, counterfeiting coin. Under the Crimes Act of 1825, false gold or silver coin can bring ten years at hard labour and a fine of five thousand dollars. In July of sixty-five the Treasury set up the Secret Service for the single purpose of chasing false notes and bad coin. In Pittsfield they would starve, because nobody here has enough real money to bother faking it.

Some readers know that I strike my name on coins at my anvil. That is advertising, not forgery. The coin remains the government's true metal. The counterfeiter makes a lie; I only sign the truth, like a man carving his initials in a church pew.

So why did most liquor cases end in a small fine and a long dinner? There are five reasons, and I pull them like molars. The first is the jury: juries are drawn from the towns, and the towns drink. The second is the witnesses, because the government's best witness is commonly a customer, and on the stand he cannot recall the day, the barn, the jar or his own middle name. The third is money: a jail costs board and firewood, while a fine fills the till. The fourth is the quiet settlement, since the revenue law now lets the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, with the Treasury Secretary's approval, settle a case for a payment instead of trying it. The fifth is pure New England. The case is "placed on file," which means it is neither tried nor dismissed but tucked in the clerk's drawer, to be woken if you misbehave, like a mother-in-law in the spare room.

Then came the sum that changed everything. The two-dollar tax made rogues of so many that in July of sixty-eight Congress dropped the spirits tax to fifty cents a proof gallon and tightened the distillery rules at the same time. When a law makes a liar of every farmer, even Washington notices the smell at last.

My own trial turned on a single stone jug. The foreman asked leave for the jury to taste the evidence and learn its character. The judge, a merciful man and a thirsty one, allowed it. By suppertime the evidence had no character left, and the jury would not convict a man on an empty jug.

A Coppersmith in the Witness Box

Silas "Hacksaw" McAllister is the best copper hand in this valley. In sixty-eight he was called to the federal court at Exeter after the marshal seized a copper vessel off a farm in Epsom, which the farmer's lawyer swore was a maple sap evaporator. Silas would not perjure himself over a pot. He showed the jury the vapour collar on the cap and the hole where the arm comes off for the worm. A sap pan, he said, is wide and shallow so that the steam can get away, but this vessel had a domed head built to catch the steam. "Gentlemen, nobody pipes off maple steam to save it. That's a still."

When the lawyer asked whether a man of his skill could be mistaken, Silas swore he could not, because the seams were the finest in the district: cleanly lapped, true-riveted, and without a drop of lead. The farmer was fined and lost his pot, then shook Silas's hand. By spring he had orders for three pots "for sap" and was charging double.

A condemned still is sold by the marshal as copper by the pound. Silas bought a forty-gallon Barnstead pot for scrap, and its owner bought it back from him with a dollar for his trouble. It was condemned three times and sold four, until the deputy no longer troubled to describe it on the papers. The government profited each time, Silas profited each time, and the farmer made whiskey each time.

Silas patches with a diamond, point up, with four rivets. At one Rockingham trial an old Nottingham juror squinted at the evidence on the table and said, "That's McAllister's diamond. He put the very same patch on mine the same week." The whole jury was dismissed, and I do not believe the case was ever called again.

Mash, Copper and the Cuts

I set down the method as history and schooling only. Making spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law of the United States. Scald a bushel of cracked corn to porridge. When it cools a little, stir in a good peck of malted barley, whose ferments turn the starch to sugar. Cool it to blood-warm, pitch the yeast, and let it work under a cloth in a warm, airy place until the bubbling quits. Run this wash fast and rough for the stripping run, then run the low wine slowly for the spirit run, which is where the cuts are made.

Silas holds that copper does its sulphur work where the vapour touches it, in the head, swan neck, arm and worm, and not at the pot bottom. Each run eats a whisker of the metal, which is why old necks wear thin. Copper is therefore no mere catalyst, for it gives of itself.

The foreshots come first off the worm, sharp and hot. The heads follow and smell of a varnish shop. Then come the sweet hearts, and last the oily tails, which are saved to run again. Wood spirit boils lower than good spirit, but it does not all leave at the front door, so cut generously; better to pour a little whiskey on the ground than your eyesight. Fruit mash makes more wood spirit than corn does, because pectin breaks down to it, so the apple brandy man must be twice as stern with his heads. Alcohol vapour is heavier than air and creeps along the floor to the firebox. Keep a draught moving, keep your joints tight and your flame low, use no lead solder, and never leave a running still.

Ashes, Oak Shavings and the Blue Flame

Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, writes that his uncle threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Wood ash gives potash, which is alkaline and may tame some acid from a soured mash. Heads are not acid, however, and wood spirit walks past lye like a deacon past a beggar, while the lye adds soapy off-flavours of its own. Red oak has open pores, which is why coopers use white oak for barrels. Its shavings lend colour and tannin but clean nothing, like rouge on a hog.

Last, the blue flame. Wood spirit burns pale blue as well, so the spoon tells you only that the spirit is strong, not that it is safe. Trust the cut, not the match.