How to Spot a Revenue Man: Boots, Mud, Apples and the 1862 Revenue Act

Neighbours, I write this from Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike in Pittsfield. Barnaby, my black bear, lies belly to the sky on the woodpile beneath my window, and a slow drip of clear distillate falls into a glass jar at my elbow. Every man who works copper and fire in this valley does experiments the government would dearly like a piece of. He ought to be able to spot a federal deputy coming up his lane before the deputy knows which barn to look in. So here is my field guide. Read the stranger as you would read your own apparatus: by his heat, his vapour, and the marks he leaves behind.

The Men the Act of 1862 Sent

In the summer of 1862 Mr. Lincoln signed the Revenue Act to pay for the war. Every man in this valley has cursed the tax in his sleep, so I will not wear out that subject. My concern is the men the Act sent. The law cut the whole country into collection districts. Each district had an assessor and a collector, and those two gentlemen hired assistant assessors and deputies to go into the hills and count our jugs. The first Commissioner over all of it was George S. Boutwell of Massachusetts. Putting a Massachusetts man in charge of counting New Hampshire's liquor is like putting a fox in charge of counting hens.

Many of those deputy posts went by patronage. A man got the post because he voted right and shook the right hands, not because he knew a still from a sap kettle. The collectors were chosen for loyalty, not brains, and I am pleased to report the Union got exactly what it paid for. That is good news for us, because a man who does not know his business cannot hide his business either. And his business begins at his feet.

Reading the Boot and the Mud

Consider the boot. It is black calfskin, blacked within an inch of its life. The sole is fastened with little wooden pegs in neat rows, the uppers are stitched tight and even by machine, and the heel is still square. Such a boot came off a bench in Lynn, Massachusetts, where they make more shoes than the Lord made feet. A Suncook Valley farmer wears his boots till the toes laugh at him. He mends them himself with harness leather and a cobbler's awl, and the heel goes round as a pumpkin from walking stone walls. When a man comes up your lane in boots so shiny you could pull a molar by their reflection, he did not buy them selling eggs.

There is a sadder boot to watch for: the army brogan, which the Union called the Jefferson bootee. It laces at the ankle and is worn rough side out, and thousands of boys came home from Virginia still wearing it. Most of them are honest farmers again. A few found the farm gone to burdock and took a government post because it paid in silver. So when you see brogans, do not spit. Look at the man's eyes. If he looks at your apple trees like a hungry man, he is a neighbour. If he looks at your woodshed like a tax ledger, he is a deputy.

Then read his mud, which you can read like a Bible if you were raised on it. The Concord road leaves a reddish-brown crust that dries like scabs. By the Suncook mill dams the muck is black and stinks of rotten leaves and fish. On the flanks of Catamount Mountain the clay is gray and greasy and sticks to the heel like a debt. A man who says he has come up from Barnstead to buy a heifer, with Concord red on his boots and not a speck of Barnstead anything, is a liar. A man who lies about his mud will lie about his whole business.

The Livery Horse, the Hydrometer and the Apple

A government man owns no horse. He hires one from a Concord livery, and a livery horse gives itself away. Its shoes are new and ring on the turnpike like church bells. It is fat on oats nobody worked for, and its feet are softer than a Portsmouth banker's. The moment it gets wind of Barnaby it rears, squeals, and tries to climb into the rider's lap. A Pittsfield horse has smelled Barnaby since it was a foal, and it only sighs and goes on chewing.

Watch the coat as well. A gauger carries a hydrometer, a glass float with a scale inside for measuring the strength of spirits. He keeps it in his inside pocket wrapped in flannel so it will not break. A man so burdened walks like a fellow hiding a second wife in the woodshed. He is stiff on the left side, keeps a hand on his chest, and will not sit down hard.

The surest sign of all is a sudden, lovesick interest in apples. He will ride forty miles to ask about your Baldwins and could not tell a Baldwin from a Baptist. The Baldwin is a good apple, by the way. It came out of Wilmington, Massachusetts, and was named for Colonel Loammi Baldwin. The old Roxbury Russet is one of the oldest named apples in this country. Every New England farm has had a cider press since the Pilgrims got thirsty, and cider has been the Yankee table drink longer than coffee or tea. A man may press his cider and drink it hard, and the government barely blinks. But run that cider through a copper worm and it becomes apple brandy, which the federal law calls distilled spirits, taxed by the gallon. So when a stranger in Lynn boots leans on your fence and asks how many bushels you pressed this fall, he is not asking for his health. He wants to know how many gallons he can bill you for.

The Gauger Thrupp and the Bear

Two autumns back a gauger named Thrupp came up from Nashua. He was a long, damp, sniffing fellow with whiskers like a wet squirrel and boots so black you could see the sky in them. His livery horse took one look at Barnaby and rolled its eyes back far enough to see its own breakfast. Being a city man, Thrupp thought a chain meant safety. He stepped up to my still-house window and planted his left boot one inch inside Barnaby's circle.

A bear that means business never roars. Barnaby reached out lazily, as you might reach for a biscuit, hooked the boot heel in his teeth, and leaned back. The leather creaked like a barn door in January, Thrupp screamed like a teakettle, and the boot came off with a pop like a cork from a jug of cordial. Thrupp went over backward into the burdock with one bare white foot in the air. Its toenails were long, yellow, and curled like ram's horns. Barnaby took one whiff, dropped the boot, and gagged. This is a bear that eats skunk cabbage and dead woodchucks, and he wiped his tongue on the grass for a quarter of an hour. Thrupp limped back to Concord on one boot. I kept the other as an exhibit, the only honest thing he ever brought into Merrimack County.

I keep another custom as well. Every revenue man who leaves Fort Wilkins with both boots still on his feet gets a copper cent from me. I strike it on my anvil, stamping G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. across Lady Liberty's forehead. I have saved a great deal of copper that way.

Lessons from the Brushy Mountains

Junior Vance, a retired runner out of the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina, sat by my stove lately. His country is apple country too, and every fall some fellow in a clean hat turned up calling himself an apple buyer. One walked old Mr. Absher's rows of Limbertwigs, Winesaps and Rusty Coats with a little notebook and announced, “Fine crop of Lumbertwigs you have.” Then he bit a Winesap in August, when it is hard as a doorknob, and his face folded up like a pocketbook. Mr. Absher sweetly sent him up the hollow past the second branch, where there was nothing but rattlesnakes, briars and a mean hog. The buyer came back two days later with his britches torn and his notebook gone.

Junior's Aunt Pearlie read a stranger's heel as he sat crossed-legged in her rocker. It was worn flat and even all the way across, with none of the crooked outside wear a man gets from sidehilling a mountain. She poured him thick buttermilk and told him about her cousin's goiter for the better part of an hour. Meanwhile cousin Dwight slipped up the ridge, and every still within three miles turned into a woodpile. Another deputy came disguised in new bib overalls, unwashed, with store creases sharp enough to slice bread and the paper tag still flapping from the bib button. Each stiff step went shick, shick, and the young ones followed him calling “Creases!” Then there was Sudie, a bluetick hound who ignored kin, peddlers and preachers but howled like the Judgment at boot blacking. Once she licked a deputy's shoe down to bare leather and was sick on the other one. Down there they call a maker a blockader and the other side revenooers.

From Meal Sack to Jar

Mind that making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States. What follows is for history and education. Corn is starch, and yeast cannot eat starch, so you need malt. That is barley, or corn, sprouted in a warm wet sack till the little tails poke out, then dried and ground. Cook the cracked meal to a thick porridge. Cool it till you can hold your hand in it without cussing, stir in the malt, and keep it warm while it sweetens. Cool it again to blood-warm, pitch the yeast, and cover against flies. The mountain men keep back some soured slop from the last run, the backset, to sour the new mash so the yeast thrive and the wild beasties do not. That sour smell is just what a gauger's nose hunts, so never dump slop in the brook where his livery horse drinks. In three, four or five days the bubbling quits and the cap falls. Then the wash is ready, no stronger than hard cider, and by Junior's granddaddy's reckoning you have about a day before the vinegar flies find it.

Leave a good hand's width of headroom in the pot, more if the wash foams, or it will puke into the vapour line, block the worm, and build pressure with nowhere to go. The copper does its sweetening work in the vapour, catching the sulfur in the cap, the arm and the worm. That is why poorer men built the pot of something else but kept the cap and worm of copper. Heat low and slow. Pure spirit boils at about 173 degrees by Fahrenheit, water at 212, so the strongest spirit comes first. The cuts are your conscience. The foreshots stink like a lamp and are poison, so pour them on the ground. The heads smell of varnish and glue and go out or into a jar marked for burning. The hearts are sweet and clean. The oily, wet-dog tails you set aside. Catch the run in a long row of small numbered jars, then sniff each one and rub a drop between your palms. One bad jar ruins one jar, not the batch. Last, remember that spirit vapour is heavier than air. It creeps along the floorboards to your firebox and goes up all at once. Keep air moving, keep flame from the collecting end and the jars far from the fire, keep a water barrel and a wet blanket at hand, and never walk away from a running still.

Swamp Medicine and the Gunpowder Proof

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro sent word by the Barnstead stage. He asked: “My uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads.” Ask any cooper why he makes liquor barrels of white oak, never red. White oak's pores are plugged inside, while red oak's are open end to end, so you could blow pipe smoke through a stave. Red oak shavings lend a little colour and a tannin bite, like oak-bark tea, but they clean no heads. Run water through hardwood ash and you get lye, the same lye a farm wife leaches for soap. New England farmers once boiled their ash to potash and sold it by the barrel. Hickory ash in a thump keg makes the water bitter, slick and alkaline. It starts a soap works, not a cure. You cannot put something in the keg to take the bad out. You take it out by the cuts.

The gunpowder proof deserves a blow of the hammer too. The British did pour spirit on powder and fire it, and the liquor was 'proved' if the powder still caught. But it was never exact. The result hung on how much you poured, how coarse the powder was, and how damp the day. That is why the British threw it out in 1816 and made the Sikes hydrometer the law, the same glass float our revenue man carries in flannel against his heart. So when a stranger in shiny Lynn boots leans on your fence and asks how your Baldwins did, tell him they did fine, and point him up the second hollow past the branch. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.