How Internal Revenue Assessors Audited Distillers' Ledgers in 1865

The war is done, neighbours. The boys are coming home up the Suncook Valley Turnpike as thin as fence rails, and Washington has turned to its next battle. I write this from the log walls of Fort Wilkins in Pittsfield with Barnaby, my black bear, lying on the woodpile outside, which is where he keeps his opinions. I can tell you that the most frightening thing to come out of Washington since the war began is not a cannon. It is a pencil. Gentlemen of the copper, every run you make is an experiment in heat and vapour. Tonight I mean to show you how the Government has turned arithmetic on the experimenter.

The Most Dangerous Man in New Hampshire

He is no bushwhacker or horse thief, and no Concord lawyer, though he may be related to all three. He stands five foot six, with ink on his cuff, dyspepsia in his gut and a little book under his arm. He is the assistant assessor, and he walks.

In '62 Congress built itself an engine for squeezing money, the Internal Revenue. A Commissioner sits at the top in Washington, as remote as God and twice as hard to bribe. Under him the country is cut into collection districts. Each district has a collector, who takes the money, and an assessor, who decides how much money there ought to be, which is the more dangerous office. Beneath the assessor walk the assistant assessors, one to a division, with their pencils sharpened like the teeth of a weasel.

A distiller must register, take out his license, keep books and render returns, and he swears to those returns. Since the first of January the tax stands at two dollars on the proof gallon. The Government reckons proof spirit as half alcohol by volume at sixty degrees by the thermometer, so creek water in the barrel cheats nobody. The gauger floats his hydrometer and taxes you on proof gallons all the same. You will only have made worse whiskey and paid the same tax for it, which is a double sin. Through the war the revenue men were short of men and horses and long on territory. Now the clerks and captains are home, the Government owes more than the Devil owes apologies, and the assessors have time to sit down and do sums.

Four Numbers That Must Shake Hands

Here is the arithmetic that hangs men. A bushel of good corn, cracked, cooked and fermented by a man who knows his business, gives near three gallons of proof spirit. A clumsy man gets two and a half, and a blessed one a hair over three. Suppose Ezekiel Somebody of the upper Suncook buys three hundred bushels and swears to four hundred gallons. Three hundred times three is nine hundred, which leaves five hundred gallons gone into the fog. At two dollars that is a thousand dollars. Either Ezekiel runs the worst still in Christendom or he is a liar. The assessor always bets on liar, and he generally wins.

He knows the corn because Ezekiel is not the only man in Merrimack County who keeps a book. The miller keeps a toll book. The cooper keeps a book of barrels sold. Pittsfield has no railroad yet, so every sack of western corn comes up from the Concord depot by wagon, with the teamster's waybill riding under the seat. A whiskey barrel holds forty-odd gallons, and no man buys thirty barrels to hold four hundred gallons unless he is storing his mother-in-law in sections. Then the woodpile is counted in October and again in March, and the neighbour's boy will tell for a penny whether your chimney smokes at two in the morning. That makes four numbers: grain in, wood burned, barrels filled and gallons sworn. They must shake hands. If one pulls back, the assessor smells it the way I smell an abscess before the patient opens his mouth.

The Molar Book

I report only what I have heard at the barbershop and the bottom of a jug. Some men spread their grain buying across Barnstead, Epsom, Chichester and Gilmanton under the names of brothers-in-law, hired men and the dead. My Uncle Asa has bought more corn since his funeral than he ever did alive. Some claim the grain went to the hogs, though one fellow declared eleven hogs and the assessor counted four hogs and a goat. Some raise their own barrels at night from loose staves, or book every barrel as cider. Every return in the county claims great loss to leakage, and barrels in Pittsfield leak more than a deacon's confession. My own blind was honest: I am a blacksmith, and no assessor can say which cord went under the anvil and which under the pot.

Then there was my double ledger. The White Book was for the Government, neat as a Quaker's parlour and sworn before the proper officer. The Molar Book held the truth dressed up as dentistry. 'Widow Pease, lower left first molar, three shillings' meant three bushels of corn bought on the Barnstead side. The upper jaw was grain coming in and the lower jaw was spirits going out. Incisors were barrels and wisdom teeth were cordwood. No assessor alive opens a dentist's book. Yet a sworn return falsely made is perjury, and a second ledger in your own hand is a confession signed in advance. I lay awake over it more nights than over any sheriff.

This March an assessor came to my door with his jaw swollen like a pumpkin from an abscessed lower molar. While I warmed the forceps he took the Molar Book down from the shelf, read through March, and observed that he had boarded with Widow Pease in '58 and she had not had a tooth in her head since Polk was President. I pulled his tooth before he could finish the thought. He fainted, and while he lay there I fed March to the forge and pumped the bellows until the spring of 1865 went up the chimney. He has never been sure since whether he dreamed it. I have been sure ever since that I am an idiot who owns a very clever system.

As for the assistant assessor who came last autumn with a dark lantern and a nail keg to count my barrels through the still-house window, he took Barnaby for a pile of old buffalo robes. Barnaby took the seat of his trousers and a piece of him about the size of a pork chop. I put eleven silk stitches into him free of charge, and his return for my division read, so rumour says, 'records lost to an animal.'

What the Captain Found in the Untidy Places

Captain Donald Vance spent twenty-eight years following copper through the White Mountains and the Green, and he holds that honest books are messy. A man falls sick, the corn comes late and the yeast sulks. At Bethlehem he found a man who swore to forty-one gallons every week for two years, including nine days of great blizzard when no team moved north of Plymouth. Nature is never that tidy. Near Woodstock a ledger ran from June to December in the same unfaded brown ink with the same split nib, and on the page for the fourteenth of December lay a pressed June horsefly. Its keeper sat down on his porch step and said, "Well, Captain, he must have been doing what I was doing, which is lying."

At Haverhill on the Connecticut a wife's egg-and-butter account at the village store recorded sixty bushels more corn than her husband had ever sworn to. She set it on the barrelhead and said, "Captain, I have been carrying that corn on my butter for a year and I am done carrying it." In the Green Mountains a man swore his vanished woodpile went to boiling sap. In his sugar-house the Captain found cobwebs thick as horse blankets and no ash in the firebox. In the sap pan a mouse had raised three litters. The Captain's verdict on two books is that a man cannot remember which lie he told to which. He also respected a clean copper pot run with careful cuts, and lost sleep only over soldered junk that sold poison to boys.

The Gallons That Ought Not Be Counted

Here is the joke in all of it. The assessor says three gallons to the bushel, but a careful distiller who throws away what ought to be thrown away will come up short on paper. A man needs a federal permit to distill spirits for drinking, so take what follows as history, the way a schoolmaster teaches Bunker Hill without handing you a musket.

Cook the cracked corn in hot water with a little malted grain until the starch gives up its sweetness. Cool it to blood-warm before pitching the yeast. Yeast that is cooked too hot or starved gives off a rotten-egg stink, which is hydrogen sulphide, so feed him like a good hired man. The wash goes into the copper for a fast stripping run to low wine. Never run the pot dry, and never bring a flame near a joint weeping vapour. I saw a still-house on the Gilmanton road go up like a haystack because a man held his candle up to find the smell. On the spirit run, bring her up slow. Throw out the foreshots. The heads smell like cobbler's cement, and you should discard them generously, because you cannot taste the poison in them for certain. Keep the sweet hearts, and set the oily tails aside for the next run. Read your proof at sixty degrees, because warm spirit lies like a horse trader. Scrub the dark sulphur film from your copper after every run. Write down your discarded foreshots and heads by the quart and the date, so your book can explain its own shortfall.

Ashes, Shavings and the Flame at the Anvil

Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro asks whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads. Wood ash is potash and an alkali, so it will soften a soured mash, but it does nothing to the poison in a bad head, which is neutral spirit and cares not a fig for lye. Oak shavings lend tannin, colour and a woody roundness, which only dresses the liquor for church. Barrels are white oak because its pores are plugged inside, while red oak's pores run open end to end. Only the cut cleans a bad head.

Last comes the flame test: 'lead burns red and makes you dead.' The colour of the flame depends on strength, the spoon, the soot and whether the cat sneezed. The poison from a careless head burns pale blue like good spirit, and dissolved lead from a soldered pipe will turn nothing red you can trust your life to. Clean copper, no lead and generous cuts make the only test there is, and it is done before the jar is ever filled. Keep your fire low.