Forged Revenue Stamps of the 1860s: Telling True Tax Stamps from False

Mr. Lincoln's Paper

Before the war a New Hampshire man might sign a deed, take out a mortgage, write a bank check or sell a bottle of liver pills, and the government never smelled it. Then came 1862. Mr. Lincoln needed money for the Union, and Congress passed the great Revenue Act. The duty on whiskey was only the door of the barn. They taxed manufactured goods, gunpowder among them. They licensed the trades. And they laid on a schedule of stamp duties that reached into every desk drawer in the Republic. A Bureau of Internal Revenue was set up, with George S. Boutwell of Massachusetts as its first Commissioner. Mr. Boutwell has put a stamp on everything but the outhouse, and I expect he has a clerk measuring that.

In the autumn of 'sixty-two the adhesive stamps went on sale. They are little gummed squares and oblongs printed by Butler and Carpenter of Philadelphia, most with General Washington's head in the middle, and they run from one penny up to two hundred dollars. Each has its job printed on its face: Bank Check, Conveyance, Proprietary for the patent medicines and matches, Playing Cards so that even the sinners pay their share, Inland Exchange, Lease, Mortgage, Express, and on down the list like a hymnbook of misery. Washington soon saw that a farmer in Chichester could not tell a Conveyance stamp from a Certificate stamp if you held a pistol to his wife, so it was ruled that most any stamp would serve if the sum was right.

Here is the law that matters. Once the stamp is licked and pressed down it must be cancelled, with your initials and the date written across its face in ink, so that it cannot be peeled up and used again. A paper the law requires to be stamped that goes without may be thrown out by a judge as worthless, and you will be fined on top of it. You might as well have written your mortgage in snow on the Dover Road. The patent-medicine men got a sweeter arrangement. A pill seller could pay a Philadelphia engraver to cut his own private die, his own name and sometimes his own face upon it, and the government would knock a little off the price of his stamps. I have pulled teeth from two of those gentlemen, and I can tell you their stamps flatter them.

The Forger's Three Tricks

A registered distiller deals with the assessor and the collector. The gauger comes with his rod and his book to measure the barrels, and the tax is paid against receipts: ink, paper and signatures. Where there is paper there is money, and where there is money there is a man in a back room with a pot of paste, a sharp knife and a pliable conscience.

The rogues work three tricks. The first is washing. They soak the cancelling ink out of a used stamp with a little acid, with chloride of lime or with plain patience, dry it on the stove and sell it again as new. It is so common that the Bureau is fretting itself into fits over special inks and papers. The second is the plain counterfeit, printed from a copied plate. The third is the whole false receipt, signature and seal and all. That is a federal crime carrying heavy fines and years in a cell, and the government hunts it harder than it hunts the moonshiner. A moonshiner only cheats the Treasury, but a forger embarrasses it.

I strike my punch, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., into copper cents and silver at my own anvil, and a man who spends his life putting letters into metal learns to read the work of other hands. The engravers at Butler and Carpenter cut a beautiful Washington, with the lines of his cheek fine and even. The border is lathe-work, a tangle of tiny curving lines like frost on a window, made by a geometric lathe that no forger with a graver and a candle can match. A forger's Washington always looks drunk. The eyes wander, the hair looks as if a wet dog lay on it, and the frost-work goes muddy, the lines running together like creek water in a thaw. Look at the paper too. It may be too thick or too white, or the gum may shine like a pond in the sun where honest gum is dull. Look also at the edges. Some genuine stamps of the first printing were cut apart with scissors and some were perforated, because the printers changed horses partway across the river. A forger who punches his holes by hand leaves rows that wander like a drunk crossing the Suncook ice.

This is why I never trust a stamp I did not cut myself. A paper stamp passes through a printer, a clerk, an agent, a storekeeper and perhaps a washerwoman with a bottle of acid. I trust it no more than a molar I did not pull, because I want to know where it has been.

The Agent Who Left a Thumb

Last October a pale stamp agent in a stovepipe hat came up the turnpike from Concord with a satchel of stamps for the storekeepers of Pittsfield and Barnstead. He told me my receipts for jars of tooth tonic wanted stamping and offered to oblige me at a modest commission. He did not see Barnaby. Nobody sees Barnaby. Four hundred pounds of bear lies under my woodpile like a dropped buffalo robe until he decides otherwise. The agent licked his fingers for the gum, which is made partly of dextrine and sugar of a sort and is sweet, and then he leaned on the very post where Barnaby's chain is staked. The bear rose, took the man's hand in his mouth and licked it slowly, like a boy with a molasses spoon. I told the man to hold still and the bear would only take the paste. He yanked his hand away instead, Barnaby bit down, and the end of his thumb came off at the first knuckle like the end of a cigar. I was a dentist before I was anything else, so I sat him on the chopping block, poured raw spirit over the stump, seared it, wrapped it in clean linen and charged him nothing. He bled all over three hundred dollars of the Treasury's paper, which I reckon made it the only tax receipt in New Hampshire ever paid in full. I keep the thumbnail in a tin.

A Joke Under Glass in Concord

Stamp collecting is the newest madness. The French have named it philately, a word Monsieur Herpin made up only last year, and the newspapers call the craze timbromania. There is a collector in Concord whom I shall call Mr. Thorne, because that is what he is. One evening I wrote a receipt for an Epsom man who had bought two jars, and for a lark I made it grand: received two dollars, being the Internal Revenue of the Interior of Dr. Wilkins's Stomach, Fort Wilkins District. In place of a gummed stamp I struck my punch into the paper so deep you could read it with your thumb. A coin punch makes a handsome embossing on good rag paper.

The receipt went from the Epsom man to his brother-in-law, from him to a tavern in Concord, and from there into the soft pink hands of Mr. Thorne. He pasted it into his album between a genuine Bank Check and a Playing Cards stamp, labelled it a rare Western district variety, and came up Route 28 offering three dollars apiece for more. I told him it was no revenue stamp but a joke with a hole punched in it. He decided I was protecting the value. In the end he paid me a dollar to sign the back. I sold the man a joke, and he bought it as history.

Tales from the Brushy Mountains

Junior Vance, a hauler of mountain spirit from Wilkes County, North Carolina, sat on my nail keg at a careful distance from the bear and told me how things go down there. The legal bottle wears a thin strip stamp across the cap, so breaking the cap breaks the stamp. A buyer in Charlotte took empty tax-paid bottles from a hotel bar, filled them with corn liquor and stuck the broken strips back down with sorghum molasses because he was too cheap to buy glue. A warm spell came, and a tax man who had stopped in to buy cigars watched a column of little black ants march up the wall and onto every one of the forty doctored bottles. They never touched an honest one. "Friend, I don't need a warrant," said the revenue man, "I got witnesses." The ants made better revenue men than the whole Bureau, and they worked for molasses.

Another fellow, up past Moravian Falls, licked a three-cent postage stamp onto every jar and told the deputy his goods were under the protection of the United States Post Office. The deputy announced that he was the post office that night and took every jar to deliver himself. Junior himself was once stopped by a game warden who was hunting a deer-shiner and asked whether he had a receipt for his load. Junior tore the back off a feed sack and wrote with a carpenter's pencil: "Paid in full, one load of sweet feed. Signed, Uncle Sam, by his nephew." The warden laughed until he had to set his lantern down, and he sent Junior home without looking in the back. That is the real secret of forged paper. It is never the ink. It is the nerve of the man who hands it over.

At the Apparatus: Proof, Copper and the Cuts

The old men say proof was tested by pouring spirit over gunpowder and putting a match to it. If the powder caught, the spirit was proved strong. If it was so watery that the powder would not burn, the seller was a cheat. Our Treasury reckons proof spirit as half alcohol by volume at sixty degrees. I set down what follows as the history of this valley. Making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law.

For every bushel of corn, cracked coarse as chicken feed, the old Pittsfield men added a good peck of malted barley, whose enzymes turn the starch of cooked corn into sugar. Cook the corn to a porridge, cool it to the malt's working heat, stir in the malt and let it sweeten. Then cool it to blood-warm before pitching the yeast, or you will cook the yeast like a lobster. When the cap has fallen and the wash tastes sour and dry, strain off the solids, for thick grain scorches. Copper carries heat about five times better than iron, so the pot heats evenly and the worm condenses quickly. Keep cold water flowing through the worm tub. If it warms, the vapour comes out as an invisible fog that will burn, and that is how still-houses explode. Never seal the still tight, because a still is a kettle and not a cannon.

Methanol boils at about a hundred and forty-eight degrees, our good spirit at about a hundred and seventy-three and water at two hundred and twelve, but in a pot everything comes over mixed, so no thermometer can make your cuts. Run slowly on a low fire into twenty or thirty numbered jars. Throw away the foreshots generously. The heads smell sharp, like lamp spirit or the glue pot. The hearts smell clean and sweet of grain. The tails go flat, like wet wool and cardboard, with an oily slick on top. Air the jars overnight under a cloth and smell them again in the morning, because a tired nose lies.

Ashes, Oak and the Blue Flame

Cletus Miller of Wilkesboro wrote to ask whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads. Ash water is lye, the same caustic this state once boiled into potash and pearl ash, and in a thumper it gets you halfway to soap. Oak gives colour and bite only in a barrel over months and years. Ten minutes in a thumper makes bitter sawdust tea. A few apples or peaches season the run but do not make it safe. As for the tavern test, methanol burns with a pale blue flame of its own, so a blue flame proves nothing. Your nose and your cuts are the only test that counts.