Lincoln's 1862 Whiskey Tax, Copper Stills, and Making Clean Cuts

The Summer of 1862

Go back with me to the summer of 1862. The war was a year old. Bull Run had been a disgrace and the Peninsula a bloody mess, and the boys of the Fifth, the Seventh and the Ninth New Hampshire were dying of dysentery in Virginia mud faster than the Rebels could shoot them. It takes money to feed an army, to shoe it, to arm it and to bury it. Mr. Lincoln's government had been spending like a drunken sailor in a Portsmouth parlor house, and the Treasury ledger had gone as red as a new bride's cheeks.

So Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1862, and Mr. Lincoln signed it on the first of July. It did two grand things. It created the Bureau of Internal Revenue, a new brood of federal officers whose only purpose on God's earth was to go about the countryside looking into a man's cellar. And it taxed everything that moved and a good many things that did not: incomes, carriages, gold watches, billiard tables, playing cards, and, dearest to my heart, distilled spirits.

Before the war a New Hampshire farmer might press his cider in October, let it work in the barrel, run the hard cider through a kettle in the dead of winter, and sell the brandy at the Pittsfield store without a federal man so much as tipping his hat. The Union had never taxed spirits to any great degree. Then the tax started small and climbed like a nine-year-old boy up a cherry tree, and by 1864 it stood at two dollars a gallon. The whiskey itself sold for not much above that.

How a Deacon Became a Moonshiner

Look at it as a natural philosopher would. Take a man who has made honest rye whiskey in the Suncook Valley for thirty years, as his father did, and his father's father. He raises the rye, malts it and cooks the mash, and his gallon costs him a dollar, perhaps a dollar and a quarter. Now add a gentleman in a blue coat who says the Government requires two dollars on top. The result is as sure as anything on the laboratory bench. Either the man pays and weeps, or he moves his still into the woodshed behind a pile of cordwood and tells the Government to kiss his granite.

So Mr. Lincoln did what no preacher in New England ever managed: he turned the honest Yankee farmer into a criminal overnight. The Congregational church in this very valley kept a still in the sexton's cellar. I will not say whose it was. A Methodist in the next town turned them in, and I believe he did it out of jealousy, not piety. In fairness, I do not call the tax wicked. Our boys needed beans and bullets, and a nation does not fight a war on promises. But I will say that after 1862 not one honest apple in the valley went to the table. Every last one went to the barrel, then to the kettle, then to a jar under the hay.

The collecting fell to assessors and collectors. They were appointed by the district, paid a fraction of what they brought in, and to a man the most despised creatures in New Hampshire. A revenue man's honesty is like a Concord winter: long, cold, and gone the minute somebody offers him a jar. Some were fine fellows, I grant. But the fine ones did not last long in the post, and the ones who lasted had a sleek, well-fed look, like a barn cat with a secret.

Copper on the Anvil

The schoolbooks leave out a second matter. In those same years the country ran short of hard money. Men hid their gold and silver in stockings and under floorboards, the copper cents and silver pieces vanished from the till, and shopkeepers made change with postage stamps and scraps of paper. I am an inventive fellow with an anvil and a punch. I laid good copper large cents and silver pieces on the anvil and struck each one with my mark: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. Every coin went out carrying my name through the barrooms and general stores of Merrimack County. The Government taxed my whiskey, and I stamped the Government's money with my face, so to speak. They have never forgiven me, and I have never asked them to.

The sheriff of Merrimack County has arrested me twice. The first time, I told the magistrate I was a dentist, that the liquid was an anesthetic for pulling teeth, and that I had pulled a molar from his own brother the spring before and heard no complaint about the anesthetic. The magistrate went quite pale. The second time I did not argue. I sat the sheriff in my chair and said I had a tooth I would like to look at. He declined, and I was home by supper.

A Revenue Man's Mercy

Not long ago I had a guest, and my knees knocked to have him. Captain Donald Vance of Manchester is a federal revenue officer, now retired and house-broken, who spent twenty-eight years hunting fellows like me through the mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont. He told every young agent the same thing: respect the old-timers who build clean copper stills, and shut down the radiator outfits soldered with lead, because those put poison in the jar. They are two different animals.

Once, in a Vermont attic, he found a farmer's old coat hanging on a nail. Sewn into the lining was a faded tax receipt from the 1860s, stamped for two dollars: the Lincoln levy itself. Whoever wore that coat was either honest or terrified, which in my experience is the same condition. The Captain put the receipt back in the lining. Some things belong where a man hid them.

Mostly he found stills by smell. A smoking pine-knot fire carries three miles upwind on a November morning. But one winter in the Franconia hills he came on a careful fellow who burned dry hardwood and kept his fire low. So the Captain followed his bootprints. They were green stains in the snow, verdigris the man had picked up from his copper and rubbed off his soles. They led up a ravine to a still hidden behind a frozen waterfall, with a curtain of ice hanging over the door. The distiller was eighty years old. He served the Captain warm gingerbread, then proudly showed him a hand-riveted copper pot with every seam true. The Captain shook his hand, left without writing a citation, and put this in his report: "museum quality, no hazard." The law is the law, he said, but it was never meant to hang a craftsman for his craft.

Mash and Copper

Making spirits to drink without a lawful permit is against the law of the United States. I set these things down as history, the way a naturalist describes the habits of the wolf. Still, no man understands why the tax stung until he understands the labor behind each gallon.

The farmer took rye, corn or orchard apples. Grain he cooked, after malting a portion of it. Malting means sprouting the grain, because the sprouting makes the enzymes that turn starch into sugar. Apples he pressed for cider and let nature do the rest. Yeast, which floats in the air as a gift of Providence, finds the sugar and eats it, and makes alcohol and a great belch of carbonic gas. A good mash works for a week or so, bubbling and stinking, and to those who love it, a working mash in a cold cellar smells like home.

The apparatus is a copper pot, a head, a worm or condenser, and a fire. I will say this once and plainly, because it is the difference between a craftsman and a corpse. Copper is the metal, joined with good tin or silver-bearing solder, never lead. Lead leaches into the spirit and settles in the blood, the bones and the brain, and it sickens and kills. Desperate men built stills from salvaged radiators soldered with lead, and their whiskey blinded, crippled and killed their customers. That sin does not belong at the door of honest copper.

Copper also works a bit of alchemy. As the vapor rises through it, the metal binds the sulfur compounds, the rotten-egg stinks of the fermenting mash that would make the whiskey taste like a swamp, and the spirit comes out sweeter for it. Copper is not decoration. It is a working part of the machine, a catalyst, and it wears with use. A man who knows his trade knows when to clean his copper and when to replace it.

The Cuts and the Fire

The cuts are the heart of the craft, and the part that kills the careless. First out of the still come the foreshots. These boil at the lowest heat and carry methanol, or wood alcohol, along with other harsh compounds that blind and kill. Throw them away. Never drink them, never sell them, never give them to a dog. Next come the heads, sharp and solventy with acetone and the like. They smell of nail varnish and bring the worst sort of headache, so set them aside. Then come the hearts, the clean, sweet middle of the run and the part worth keeping. Last come the tails, oily and heavy and tasting of wet cardboard and wet dog. Set those aside too, and save them if you like to run again with the next batch.

The whole art is knowing where to stop and where to start. A good distiller uses his nose, his tongue and his thermometer, and he does not rush. A bad one keeps it all and sells it, and his customers learn the lesson the worst way. I have pulled more teeth from men who drank bad whiskey than I care to count, and I have buried a few whose teeth I could not save.

Mind the fire. A still is a vessel full of flammable vapor. A leaking seam, a cracked joint or a careless spark will turn a woodshed into a funeral pyre. Keep the fire low, the joints tight and the room aired, and never leave a still unattended. I have seen a barn go up in an instant with a man inside who thought he could step out for a smoke. My bear, Barnaby, has never lost a barn, though he has certainly eaten several.

Ashes in the Thump Keg

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, wrote to me with a question: "My uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?" There is a kernel of truth in it, Rabbit, with a great deal of swamp medicine wrapped around it.

The thump keg, or doubler, is a second vessel the vapor passes through on its way to the condenser. It does a second distillation of a sort and sharpens the spirit. Men put many things in it: a bit of the mash for flavor, water to temper the vapor, and yes, charcoal, ash or wood shavings, hoping to filter the spirit as it passed.

Charcoal does have a real use. Activated charcoal made from good hardwood adsorbs certain compounds, and filtering whiskey through charcoal is an old and honorable practice in Tennessee and elsewhere. It mellows the spirit and removes some of the harsher congeners. But charcoal is a filter, not a thump keg additive, and it works best on cool spirit passing slowly, not on hot vapor bubbling through a keg. Hickory ashes are lye: alkaline, caustic, and likely to react with the vapor in ways no prudent man should invite. Red oak shavings carry tannins and the oils of the wood. They will color and flavor the spirit, but they will not clean out the heads.

The heads are volatile solvents, and the only way to get rid of them is to cut them off the run, with a thermometer, a good nose and a patient hand. The heads must be cut, not covered. A man who hides them under a pinch of ash gets a headache for his trouble and sells a worse one to his neighbor. So Rabbit's uncle is a fine old gentleman, partly right and mostly mistaken, and he should keep his ashes in the stove where they belong. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.