Lincoln's Tax Collectors: The Assessors, Collectors and Gaugers of 1862

How Mr. Lincoln's Revenue Machine Was Built

Of all the creatures turned loose in these hills, none is so hated as the revenue man. He is worse than the catamount and worse than the Methodist circuit rider. I have met a good many of his kind here at Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike in Pittsfield, and I have bandaged a few. Every man who keeps copper at his bench must reckon with them sooner or later, so let us lay the beast upon the table and examine its parts as a natural philosopher would.

On the first of July, 1862, Mr. Lincoln signed a law with a title as long as a Pittsfield winter: An Act to provide Internal Revenue to support the Government and to pay Interest on the Public Debt. The Union was bleeding money faster than a man with a busted molar bleeds into his beard. So Congress taxed nearly everything a Yankee does between rising and lying down. It taxed licenses, carriages, billiard tables, gold watches and patent medicines. It even taxed a man's income, which was a new and unholy idea. And it taxed whiskey.

The spirit tax began on the first of August, 1862, at twenty cents the gallon. That was a pinch and no worse. In March of 1864 it became sixty cents, and in July of 1864 a dollar and a half. On New Year's Day of this present year, 1865, it rose to two dollars, which is more than the whiskey costs to make. When the tax is worth more than the goods, every farmer in the Suncook Valley turns outlaw by plain arithmetic.

Assessors, Collectors and the Gauger's Rod

A tax is only ink on paper until some fellow comes up your road to collect it, so the law raised an army without muskets. The country was cut into collection districts. Each district got an assessor and a collector, both chosen by the President himself, which is to say both were chosen for cheering loud enough at the right convention. Under the assessor came the assistant assessors, who walk the roads and knock on doors. Under the collector came the deputy collectors, who come back later and take your money. Over the whole herd sat the Commissioner of Internal Revenue. The first was Mr. George S. Boutwell, formerly governor of Massachusetts. If you want a man who will squeeze a penny until the eagle screams, hire a Bay Stater.

The assistant assessor came to Merrimack County with a ledger, an inkhorn, and the face of a man who has smelled his own boots and approved. He went house to house from Pittsfield to Epsom to Barnstead, asking how many carriages you owned, whether you sold spirits by the glass, whether you kept a billiard table, and what you earned last year. The devilish part is that the lists were open to the public, and the Concord paper printed them. So every man in the county learned that his neighbor was poorer than he let on and twice as big a liar. One Chichester deacon claimed an income that would not keep a hen in grit, and that same week he bought a new buggy with yellow wheels.

The collector posted a fat bond and was paid mostly by commission, so nothing in New Hampshire grows faster than a revenue man's pocket, not even a pig on spent mash. Then there is the gauger. He carries a long graduated rod, pokes it into a cask, reads the marks and works out the gallons, and you pay on his numbers. A retail liquor dealer must also pay a fee every year for the privilege of being robbed. The act brought in little adhesive revenue stamps besides, for deeds, receipts, and patent and proprietary medicines. I am a dentist and I sell a tooth tincture. I keep a stamp on it so Washington knows it is medicinal, and I keep a bear by the window so Washington knows it is mine.

The Concord Assessor and the Bear

In the fall of 1863 a new assistant assessor rode out from Concord. I shall call him Mr. Hezekiah Plumb, because that is near enough to his name and his mother has suffered enough. He was a pale, long, wet-lipped creature in a high collar. He carried a brass gauging rod, an inkhorn on a string about his neck, and a ledger as thick as a family Bible. He tied his rented mare to my hitching rail and walked round the back of the still-house without so much as a good afternoon.

It was dusk. Barnaby lay under the log window in a heap, black as a stove and twice as warm, and Mr. Plumb took him for a pile of old buffalo robes. Plumb meant to measure my mash tub through the gap in the shutter, so he reached his rod over that heap, and the brass foot came down square on Barnaby's left ear. A bear waking offended makes a sound like a cellar door opening in a storm. Barnaby took the rod in his teeth and bit it in two, and the brass went with a noise like a church bell dropped on a stone step. Mr. Plumb did not run. He announced that he was an officer of the United States. Barnaby did not care. With one paw he took hold of the coattails, the trouser seat, the drawers, and a strip of Plumb hide about the width of a razor strop. Then he pulled.

It sounded like a wet sail tearing off a schooner in a gale, and the yell behind it scared the crows off Catamount Hill. Mr. Plumb went over the woodshed fence and up onto the privy roof. He showed the rising moon a backside as bare and red as a skinned ham, with one new stripe across it bleeding down into his boots. Below him Barnaby chewed the coattails and then found the ledger. He ate the inkhorn's worth of ink and three months of Pittsfield assessments, and his water ran purple for two days. That is the nearest the Bureau has come to making a lasting impression on this town.

Plumb stayed on that roof four hours in a cold rain, crying out first for the sheriff and then for his mother. Near midnight I shut Barnaby in the shed with a ham bone and brought the man down by lantern. I laid him belly-down on my dental table and poured whiskey on the wound, and he made a noise like a goose under a cartwheel. Then I closed him with dental silk: eleven stitches, straight as a fence rail, the finest work of my career. He rode back to Concord and still assessed me, on a billiard table I do not own. I believe the pain confused him. At the Pittsfield mill they now say a man has been plumbed when the assessor has been through his house and found everything.

Tales from the Coppersmith's Bench

Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, coppersmith at the Fort Wilkins foundry, has a hammer arm like a ship's windlass, and he has met more revenue men across a workbench than I have across a bear. He says that after 1862 a man no longer ordered a still. He ordered something that was not a still. His father built one for a farmer up past Berry Pond. It was a heavy copper kettle with a lid that came off and a neck that unscrewed and fit inside the woodbox. With the neck off, it was as plain a laundry boiler as any in Merrimack County. The assessor came on a Monday, which was wash day. The farmer's wife set the kettle on the fire, filled it with every pair of long underwear the farmer, his three boys and the hired man had worn all winter, and invited the officer in to get warm. His eyes ran like a spring brook. He wrote down one cow and a wagon and left without one question about the copper.

Last spring a deputy collector brought Silas a bowed brass gauging rod. He said a distiller over Epsom way had dropped it in front of him, quite by accident. Running his thumb down the marks, Silas felt something wrong, for a craftsman can feel a sixteenth of an inch the way your tongue finds a bad tooth. Someone had taken a fine file to the foot, and every mark read short by a hair, a few gallons a cask. The distiller had borrowed the rod for an afternoon. Silas showed the bright file marks under the old tarnish through his glass. “Metal does not lie,” he said, “and I will not lie for it.” The deputy went white, then red, then paid double for silence about having lent the rod. Both sides were crooked, and the coppersmith got paid twice.

Some tales are sober. A collector once brought in a still seized near Pembroke to be cut up by the pound. At the first seam Silas found lead solder, slathered on like butter on a church-supper roll. Lead is a poison. It goes into the spirit, then into the man, and there it stays. A tax will empty your pocket, but bad metal will empty your coffin. Silas also tells of a fellow, not of this county, who bored a hole behind the hasp of the government lock on his spirit tub and fitted a quill tap. His white pine sawdust had gone pink with copper filings, plain as blood on snow, and the inspector saw it. Nobody sweeps fine enough to fool copper.

The Grain Run as an Experiment

If the revenue men must count every still, we should at least know what is being counted. Mark this: the law of the United States forbids distilling spirits for drinking without a federal permit, and Mr. Plumb's backside proves the government is in earnest. What follows is history. For the mash, take about eight pounds of cracked corn to five gallons of good water and bring it near one hundred sixty-five degrees, stirring against scorching, until it thickens like porridge. Let it fall to between one hundred forty-eight and one hundred fifty-five degrees and stir in two pounds of crushed malted barley. In that range an unseen ferment in the barley turns the corn's starch to sugar. Hold it covered an hour and a half, then cool it to about eighty degrees before pitching the yeast, for if you pitch hot you cook the little beasts. Let it work five to seven days in a warm room with air moving, until it stops bubbling and tastes sour and dry.

Strain the wash into the pot and raise the heat slowly. Copper does not earn its keep at the bottom of the pot. The sulfur is cleaned out where the vapor touches the metal, in the helmet, the neck, the arm and the worm. As Silas puts it, “I would sooner see a man with a plain kettle and a good copper head and worm than a fine copper pot with a cheap pipe on top.”

Next come the cuts, and here men go blind or die. The foreshots smell of glue and nail varnish and carry much of the poison. Throw them out, and never taste them, sell them or rub them on a sore gum. The heads that follow are harsh and solvent-smelling and bite the nose. Put them out too, or into a jar that will never be drunk. A man who is stingy with his heads is generous with his neighbors' eyesight. The hearts come sweet and clean, like the grain grown up and gone to church. Catch them in a row of small jars and set them in order on the bench by smell. Do not guess. The tails are oily and turbid and smell of wet dog and wet cardboard. Set them aside, and some men run them again with the next batch.

Last, the fire. Spirit vapor is heavier than air. It crawls along the floor like a deputy hunting a dropped coin and pools there, so one spark will send your still-house up like the Fourth of July in Concord. Keep the house aired, keep open flame away from the spout, and check every joint for leaks before you fire up. Never walk away from a running still: not for the privy, not for the bear, not even to stitch an assessor.

Hickory Ash, Red Oak and the Blue Flame

A cylinder came all the way from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, from Mr. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller. His uncle swears the old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Hickory ash is mostly potash, which is lye, the stuff your grandmother boiled with fat for soap. Lye is an alkali and will cut some of the acid in sour backset, so the uncle may well have smelled less vinegar. But methanol is not an acid, and the lye never touches it. All the ash gives you is a lye taste and a scum on the doubler like a washtub on Saturday night.

As for red oak, no honest cooper makes a whiskey barrel of it, because its open pores leak like a deacon's promise, and he uses white oak instead. Red oak shavings give tannin and color, so the spirit looks older than it is. That is a disguise and not a cure, like a Concord lawyer at a church supper, who adds color, takes up room and leaks. The only thing that cleans out bad heads is the cut.

Then there is the tavern trick of lighting a spoonful of spirit and calling a blue flame safe. Methanol burns blue too. A blue flame proves your spirit burns, and that is all it proves. It is the kind of science that works fine until you are blind, and then you cannot see the flame anyway. For his question, three copper cents struck on my anvil, stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., are on their way to Rabbit in a tobacco tin.

I have been taxed on my whiskey, my license, my income and my tooth tincture. The only thing on this property Mr. Lincoln never taxed is Barnaby, because no assessor has come back alive enough to count him. Still, the Union was saved, and a little of the saving came out of Pittsfield jars. I curse the revenue men every quarter-day and tip my hat to the boys in blue every Sunday. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.