Federal Liquor Dealer Licenses Under the 1862 Revenue Act in Dry New Hampshire

The Paper Washington Would Have on Your Wall

Neighbors and brother experimenters, I set aside the worm and the helmet this month to speak of a scrap of paper. It is no bank note and no love letter. It is the federal liquor license, the yearly receipt Washington wants hung on your wall, where any inspector with a squint and a pencil may read it. Before I go on, I owe you the same warning I owe every reader: making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and all that follows is history and education. Two sheriffs, one magistrate, and a judge with gout have explained this to me. The judge shouted it from a chair with his foot in a bucket.

In the summer of 1862 the Union was losing money faster than a stuck hog loses blood, and Congress went looking for a vein. On the first of July Mr. Lincoln signed the Internal Revenue Act, the widest net Washington ever threw over the American shopkeeper. It taxed whiskey, and I have cursed that tax often enough. The other half of the trap was the license. In certain trades a man could not simply open shop. He had to buy a federal license each year first. Lawyers, auctioneers, billiard-hall keepers, peddlers, brokers and horse dealers all needed one, and a horse dealer is a man who ought to need two.

Twenty Dollars, a Hundred, and a Jug

The liquor trade was carved finest of all, the way a butcher carves a hog he means to sell by the ounce. A retail liquor dealer paid twenty dollars a year. A wholesale dealer paid a hundred. A rectifier, the man who takes raw spirit and runs it again or doctors it with flavours, also paid a hundred. Distillers had a license of their own, and so did brewers. Hotels, inns and eating houses each had a separate one. The apothecary paid ten dollars, and that ten dollars let him sell spirit as medicine and in no other way. A jug settled whether you were retail or wholesale: under three gallons at one time was retail, and over it was wholesale.

In March of 1863 Congress went back in and patched the thing, because it leaked like a cheap worm. They tightened the language, adjusted the rates, and sent their assessors into every valley in the Union, each with a ledger and the cheerful manner of a man come to collect on a funeral. I hear the gentlemen in Washington now mean to stop calling it a license and call it a special tax. That makes it sound less like permission and more like robbery, which is at least honest.

The license was made out to a man and a place. It named his trade and his premises, and the collector's men wanted it in plain view, where the assistant assessor could walk in and see your name, your trade and your twenty dollars looking back at him from above the cracker barrel.

A Federal License in a Dry State

Here is what made every Pittsfield storekeeper chew his whiskers. New Hampshire has been dry on paper since 1855. Each town appoints a liquor agent, who may sell spirits for medicinal, mechanical and sacramental purposes and for nothing else. A Pittsfield man who buys a federal retail license is therefore paying Washington twenty dollars to do what Concord says he may not. The federal paper says plainly that it grants no permission under state law. Washington takes your money and gives you no protection, the way my uncle Ezra treated his marriage. Nailing up such a license is like nailing up your own wanted poster to save the sheriff the trouble. It proves two things: Washington knows where you live, and so does every sheriff who can read.

The town liquor agent was a dried-apple man in spectacles who would bless his own breakfast twice if he thought it would pass inspection. He bought his license promptly and hung it square and level. By his ledger of jars marked 'medicinal,' every man in Pittsfield had a bad back, two bad knees, and a sick aunt in Barnstead. The hotel keeper by the depot road bought the hotel license and swore he served nothing stronger than switchel. His porch smelled like a Saint Patrick's wake in a rum cask, and the assessor wrote 'switchel' with the face of a man swallowing a bee.

The Battle of the Cracker Barrel

At the general store the real fighting began. The proprietor, whom I shall call Hosea, sold molasses, nails, calico, tobacco and cider. Cider that sits by the woodstove from Thanksgiving to Candlemas does what God and yeast intend. Hosea had never bought a license, because, he said, he sold no liquor, only apples that had had an experience. Asked how he sold it, he said by the jug. Three gallons? Thereabouts. So Hosea's whole standing before Washington came down to whether that jug ran a cup over or a cup short.

Deacon Pettengill, from his nail keg, held that the jug was half full when it left the store and so was retail. Hosea said half empty meant empty, and nobody pays tax on an empty jug. The blacksmith's boy said the jug's belly made it wholesale, said the same of his own mother, and took three cuffs on the ear for it. A drover from Gilmanton argued that cider drunk on the steps made the place a tavern needing a hotel license. Hosea said the steps belonged to the town. The drover said the town had no license either. The assessor stood among them with his pencil raised like a drowning man's hand. In this republic, the difference between a merchant and a scoundrel is about one good swallow. In the end Hosea sold two-gallon jugs in pairs and swore on his mother's grave that they were separate sales. His mother was alive in the back room shelling peas, and she did not care for the oath.

The penalty was no joke. A man caught in a licensed trade without his license still owed the license money, and on conviction he faced a fine that could climb into the hundreds of dollars, with a cell for the stubborn. To a hill farmer that is a year of potatoes, a cow, and his dignity.

My Own License, and the Seat of Mr. Crump's Trousers

I bought the apothecary license myself, ten dollars, for I am a medical man and every spirit I sell is medicine, for the patient or for me after he leaves. I paid in large coppers stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. The collector counted them on my bench until midnight. I framed the license in hammered copper with rivet heads round it like a ship's porthole and hung it exactly where the law asked, in plain view beside the log window. The law did not say whose view. Outside that window, on twelve feet of chain, sleeps Barnaby, four hundred pounds of black bear.

That October an assistant assessor I shall call Mr. Crump, a narrow man with a waxed mustache and a coat cut tight behind, insisted on reading the license through the window. The print was small and the date smudged. He leaned in until his boots left the ground and his belly lay on the sill, his coat stretched over his hindquarters like a drumhead. Barnaby woke up. With a sound like a wet sail tearing, coat tails, trousers and drawers came away in one bite, and a friendly swipe laid four red furrows across his left cheek, neat as rows for spring peas. He came through the window headfirst. I put eleven stitches in him with dental silk on the chair where I pull molars, and he rode home sitting sideways. His report found my license posted 'conspicuously and in good order.' No man in New Hampshire had seen it closer.

Stamps in the Carolina Hills

Junior Vance of Wilkes County, North Carolina, a runner from a strange far season, tells me his country had the same federal stamp, paid every July, in counties as dry as a sermon. His great-aunt Ludie poured shots in jelly glasses beneath her stamp in a gilt frame, between her church pin for perfect attendance and a portrait of her late husband Vernon. When the federal man called her square with the United States, she told him she was square with the Lord as well, since she had the pin. The danger was that the stamp lists were public. One spring a sheriff drove the county with that list in his lap, and he tore a feed-store man's place apart. That fellow had bought the stamp only to look respectable. The sheriff found forty sacks of laying mash and a cat. Junior once showed a stamp made out to his cousin's place of business and was told it was good for one place only. His answer was, "at ninety miles an hour she's three counties at once."

At the Apparatus: Mash, Copper, Cuts and the Thump Keg

The old valley mash works like this. Cook a bushel of cracked corn soft, cool it to bath-warm, and stir in a peck of malted barley or rye malt, whose ferments turn starch to sugar. Rest it, cool it to blood-warm, pitch the yeast, and leave it loosely covered for four to seven days, until the cap falls. That mash breathes out a heavy, choking air that settles low. Keep the room open, and never climb into a closed vat after a ladle. In the still, copper catches the sulphurous stinks as a black crust. Scrub it bright after each run with vinegar and salt, rinse it again and again, and keep the green crust out of anything you mean to keep. Use silver solder or well-fitted joints, and no lead. Fill the pot no more than three-quarters full, keep the fire low, never leave a running still, keep water and sand by the door, and keep your lantern away from any leak.

Discard the foreshots, a full gill or more for every five gallons of wash, because wood spirit, which the French chemists named in 1834, smears through the whole front of the run. Set the varnishy heads aside, keep the sweet hearts, and set aside the oily tails, smelling each small jar as it comes. A Wilkesboro correspondent, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller, asks whether old-timers "used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads." Ash makes lye. It gives you soap scum, a possible scald, and no protection at all. Oak gives tannin and flavour, which is seasoning, not cleaning. As for the blue flame on a spoon, wood spirit itself burns a faint blue. The test only proves you have set fire to a spoon. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.