How 1860s Revenue Gaugers Measured Whiskey Barrels and Proof

The War Comes for the Gallon

Picture the summer of 1862. The war is eating money the way my bear Barnaby eats ham, whole and in a hurry. Congress passes the Revenue Act, and for the first time in a generation the federal government wants its hand in every jar of spirit made in this country. At first the tax is twenty cents a gallon, and a man grumbles, pays, and goes home. But the war keeps eating, and they keep raising it, twice in 1864 alone, until by the start of 1865 it stands at two dollars a gallon. That is ten times the bite in under three years. For two dollars a gallon a man should get the whiskey and a wife thrown in, though in fairness the whiskey talks less.

A tax on gallons needs somebody to count the gallons, and that somebody is the gauger. Every one who ever came up the Suncook Valley Turnpike to Fort Wilkins wore a dark coat and carried a satchel, a pocket thermometer, a glass hydrometer in a velvet-lined box like a set of false teeth, a lump of chalk, a stencil plate, and his rod. You could smell him before you saw him: Concord bay rum, with fear-sweat underneath it like a wet sheep under a Sunday blanket. The rod was his pride. Every gauger thinks his rod is longer than it is.

The Arithmetic of a Fat-Bellied Cask

You had better learn the gauger's arithmetic, because the government already has. The American gallon for spirits is the old wine gallon of Queen Anne's day, two hundred thirty-one cubic inches and not a hair more. The gauger must turn an oak cask, which is no simple shape, into cubic inches and divide by that number.

He measures the length inside, head to head, then across the head, then across the bilge, the fat middle where the bung sits. A cask is no straight pipe, so he takes a mean diameter: by the old rule of thumb, the head diameter plus about two-thirds of the difference between bung and head. He squares that mean, multiplies by the length, and multiplies again by 0.0034, and out comes the capacity in gallons. It is a tooth-puller's sort of mathematics: grip it firm, twist once, and the truth comes out bloody.

In a hurry, and a gauger is always in a hurry to reach the tavern, he uses the diagonal rod. He pokes it in at the bung and slides it slantwise until it fetches up against the far lower chime, where the head is let into the staves, and the marks on it give him the gallons for a cask of ordinary build. If the cask is not full, the empty space at the top, which the English call ullage and we Yankees call wantage, is read with a wantage stick dipped straight down through the bung. The wet inches, where the spirit wet the wood, tell him from his tables how many gallons are sloshing within and how many are only air and hope.

Then comes the proof. Since the tariff law of 1848, proof in this country means half alcohol by volume at sixty degrees Fahrenheit, and proof is twice the percentage. The tax falls on the proof gallon: a gallon at a hundred and twenty proof is a gallon and a fifth in the eyes of Washington. The gauger floats his hydrometer, sets in his thermometer, and if the spirit is not at sixty degrees he corrects by his book of tables. A hydrometer uncorrected for temperature is like a tax assessor uncorrected for greed: it will always read in the Treasury's favour.

At last he marks the head: gallons, proof, date, and his name or initials. Chalk for quick work, stencil and black paint for proper work, and on some heads a hot brand that hisses and stinks of burnt hair. Scratch out or doctor one of those marks and the law may take the spirit, the cask, and a fat fine besides. Uncle Sam measures my barrel to a hundredth of an inch and his own promises not at all.

The Day Barnaby Met the Rod

Some summers back a gauger rode up from Concord, a thin, damp fellow with a mustache like two caterpillars that had quarrelled. I shall call him Mr. Pettibone, which was not his name. He came through the yard past the window where Barnaby is chained, a long hickory diagonal rod over his shoulder like a musket, and to a bear a long stick carried toward his house is a declaration of war. Pettibone turned to wave good-day, and the end of that rod passed four inches from Barnaby's nose.

I heard it from the forge: not a growl but a deep wet cough, the sound a bear makes when he has decided something. Barnaby took the rod in his jaws and pulled; Pettibone, being a stubborn federal man, did not let go, and came along like a fish on a line into reach of the chain. One paw on the man's back, gentle as a deacon at a baptism, and with the other four claws through broadcloth, drawers and hide, four red furrows from belt to knee like a plowed field in April. Pettibone crawled under my woodpile howling while Barnaby chewed the rod to splinters, loud as a Methodist eating celery during the sermon, until there were hickory toothpicks from the window to the well.

I laid the man face-down on my tooth chair, washed him with clean hot water, and closed him with twenty-two stitches of the fine silk I use on gums after a hard extraction. He complained more than any patient I ever had. And without his rod he had to gauge my casks by the long arithmetic, in no fit state to sit and do sums.

Small Sins of a Pittsfield Man

I will not say I did these things. I will say a man in Pittsfield did them, and that he looks remarkably like me in a good light.

First, shaving the staves. A hurried gauger measures the outside and takes off an allowance for the wood. Shave the staves thin from within, and the barrel looks the same but holds more than his allowance supposes: the rod says forty, the cask says forty-one and a half. Second, doctoring the hoops. Drive the bilge hoops a hair off true, or swap a heavier hoop in at the bung, and you pinch the very spot he measures, so he reads a slimmer barrel. Third, and craftiest, the weather. Spirit shrinks when cold, and on a forty-gallon cask the swing between a hot August loft and a cold spring-house can be the better part of a gallon. So a certain gentleman's casks were always resting in the spring-house by the brook when the gauger came: cold spirit, low wet inches, low reading. An honest gauger corrected his hydrometer for temperature, but many forgot the volume, and a few were too busy shivering to care.

Let it stand on the record that the law came down hard on all of it with forfeiture and fines, and that this is history, not a lesson in robbing the Treasury.

Rain, Chalk and Words over the Jug

Miss Clara Higgins, a mountain herbalist and scholar of every rude word ever spoken over a jug, came up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia with stories of her own. In Franklin County in the spring of 1866, a fussy gauger in a paper collar chalked every barrel at her great-grandmother's place, took his dinner of cornbread and a good deal of what was in the barrels, and promised to return in the morning to make his book. That night a sideways spring rain washed every mark into a white smear. Granny Higgins re-chalked them all by lamplight from memory, a fine memory but a humble one, for every barrel remembered itself about two gallons lighter. The gauger wrote down what the barrels said and praised her as an honest woman.

Her people called the gauger's rod the tattle-stick, "because it went down in the dark, come up wet, and told on you." Men running stills after the war called themselves blockaders, after the runners slipping cotton out of Wilmington. The rough whiskey went by tanglefoot, bust-head, pop-skull, and forty-rod, said to kill a man at forty rods.

Her great-uncle Asa set a barrel of hard cider on his north porch one bitter January and each morning chipped the ice off the top, leaving something dark as molasses and sweet as sin. That is jacking, and mark it well: freezing only takes off water. Every mean, headachy thing a distiller would cut and throw away stays in, packed tighter. Asa served it to the choir after the Christmas singing, and they had the apple palsy clean through to Easter. Freezing concentrates the poison right along with the pleasure. She told also of Ransom Akers of Floyd County, best cooper in the Blue Ridge, who took his pay in persimmon brandy by the wet inch, gauged with a thumb the size of a turnip.

At Your Own Apparatus

Before there was a barrel there was a run, and a run is honest work or it is poison. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, so take this as history and natural science. The mash in this valley was commonly two parts cracked corn to one of rye, cooked until it gels and smells like a bakery on a Saturday, then cooled to blood-warm before the yeast, for hot mash kills yeast. When it falls quiet and tastes sour rather than sweet, you have a wash of a few percent. The stripping run comes off slow, cloudy and weak, and you take it all.

The spirit run is the true experiment. The foreshots, sharp and solvent-smelling, go on the ground or in the lamp, never in a mouth; do not be stingy with them. The heads, smelling of varnish and glue, are set aside. The hearts, sweet and round, alone are worth barrelling. The tails, oily and wet-dog, end your collecting. Catch the run in a long row of small jars so you may judge each one, what Miss Higgins's people called "the choir," listening to every voice and throwing out the ones singing flat. A man who catches his whole run in one bucket has decided to poison himself on the installment plan.

Alcohol vapour burns and is heavier than air, creeping along the floor like a cat toward an open flame, so keep jars and worm away from the firebox, air the still-house, and never leave a running still alone. Read your hydrometer minding the temperature, as the gauger did; bring hot spirit down with clean water a little at a time, and read again once it settles to the cellar's cool, for the mix warms and shrinks a touch. New white oak, toasted or charred, drinks some spirit into its staves and breathes a little out, so every barrel comes up short in time. Keep your copper bright and your joints of good silver solder or sound brass unions. Lead has no business near a still; I have pulled lead-black teeth and know where they came from.

Ashes, Shavings and Gunpowder

Cletus Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, called Rabbit by his friends, wrote that his uncle swore by hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Hardwood ash is the stuff our asheries boiled into potash for Portsmouth soap boilers and glassmen, lye's first cousin, and it will knock back some sourness in a rank, acid run. But the foreshots boil off and walk right through the keg and down the worm, laughing. Red oak gives colour and tannin, the way paint colours a rotten barn. Tennessee makers dripping finished whiskey through a deep bed of sugar-maple charcoal is another matter entirely. The only cure for a bad head is the knife: cut it off and throw it away. A fresh copper cent stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. went to Wilkesboro to hang over that uncle's thump keg.

As for the gunpowder proof, pouring spirit on powder and putting a flame to it, there is likely something in the story of the word, but as a test it is worthless and dangerous, hanging on how much you pour, how damp the powder, how hot the day, and how near your face. It tells you whether the whiskey is proof and whether you still have eyebrows. The glass hydrometer and thermometer replaced it for good reason. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.