Reading the 1862 Internal Revenue Act: Liquor Licenses, Stamps and Loopholes

On my workbench at Fort Wilkins, pinned under a horseshoe and a jar of something clear enough to read through, lies a federal license. I mean to read it the way a lawyer reads: slowly, suspiciously, and with an eye to billing somebody for the trouble. Outside, Barnaby, my black bear, sulks against the log wall like a widow at a will-reading. He is sure every gust of wind is a revenue man. The wind pays no taxes either, so the two of them ought to get along.

The Act of the First of July, 1862

On the first day of July, 1862, with the Union bleeding money faster than a stuck hog bleeds into a scalding barrel, President Lincoln signed the Internal Revenue Act. It made a new office, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, and the first man to hold it was George S. Boutwell of Massachusetts. Setting a Massachusetts man over the revenue is like hiring a fox to count hens and then charging the hens for his lantern oil.

The Act carved the country into collection districts and turned loose a pack of assessors and collectors. Each carried a pencil, a ledger, and a nose like a hound's for any dollar a man had not confessed. Their business was selling licenses and collecting duties, and they went at both the way a tooth-key goes at a molar: twist till something gives.

Every Trade on One Page

The license section reads like a roll-call of every trade that ever made an honest dollar, and several that never did. Bankers, auctioneers and apothecaries. Brewers, rectifiers and distillers. Retail and wholesale dealers in liquor. Horse dealers, billiard rooms, bowling alleys, peddlers, jugglers and circuses. And in that same company stand physicians, surgeons and dentists, at ten dollars a head. I take offense at being printed on the same page as the juggler, for the juggler drops less.

Peddlers were licensed in classes by how they travelled: on foot, with one horse, or with two horses or more, and the fee rose with the horses. I asked the assessor what class would suit a peddler who travelled with one bear. He asked what the bear pulled. Mostly deputies, I said. He would not license Barnaby as a horse, observing that no horse he ever met had eaten a harness and the man holding it. I told him he had not met the right horses.

Liquor dealers were divided by how much they sold at one time. By my reading, retail meant under three gallons, and the wholesale license cost a good deal more. So the lawyer in me asks: what of a man who sells exactly three gallons and not a thimble less? Any customer who wants less may bring a friend with a thirst. I am a merchant, not a nursemaid.

A distiller paid for his license and then paid the duty on every gallon he made, and the first duty under the Act was twenty cents a gallon. From the first of October, 1862, stamp duties also fell on paper and goods: two cents on a bank check, and stamps on deeds, on playing cards, and on every bottle of patent medicine. Here a lawyer licks his lips. A paper that needed a stamp and lacked one could be declared invalid and kept out of evidence in court. A paper without a stamp is like a husband without a ring: the courts won't recognize him and his creditors won't leave him alone.

The License, the Shingle and the Bear

A man who traded without his license owed a fine on top of the tax, and for some offenses the Act allowed prison. The license itself was a narrow thing. It covered the person named on it, at the place named on it, for one year. It was no passport to sell up and down the turnpike like a tinker. When the assessor asked my place of business, I said Fort Wilkins. When he asked how far Fort Wilkins extended, I said as far as it needs to: the shop, the still-house, the woodlot, both sides of the brook, and any spot where I happen to be standing with a jug. He wrote "Pittsfield" and underlined it twice. There is a man with no poetry in him.

The law said a license must be posted where an inspector could see it. So I nailed mine to a cedar shingle and hung the shingle on Barnaby's collar. I never promised an inspector could read it and keep all ten fingers.

Last spring a deputy assessor's clerk came up from Concord to see that posted license. He was a narrow little stamp-licker with spectacles and a mustache like a dead caterpillar. I pointed at the bear. He went pale as a boiled turnip, but being a man of the law he crept up and reached out, very dainty, to tilt the shingle toward the light. Barnaby lay asleep in the mud the way a stone sleeps in a field. He opened one eye, turned his head as quick as a man swats a horsefly, and took the clerk's first two fingers the way a boy takes a candy stick. It sounded like a green radish pulled out of wet ground, only wetter, with a squeal on top like a pig through a gate. The clerk sat down hard in the slush, sprayed the snow pink for three yards, and fainted onto his own ledger.

I packed the stumps with lint and cobweb and a splash of my best, tied them off with waxed thread from my tooth kit, and poured the rest of the jar into him till he stopped hollering for his mother. A government ring is still somewhere in Barnaby's innards, and I have looked for it in places a man ought not to look. The clerk left with eight fingers and a new respect for posted notices. He reported that my license was properly displayed, and so it was.

Two Licenses, or None

Why should a dentist with a still hold two licenses, or in my case arguably none? The plain reader says two at the least: ten dollars as a dentist and the distiller's license on top, plus a retail paper if he sells a dram over the counter. Read it like a lawyer, though, and the ground goes soft. The license is for a man carrying on a business, and a business means receipts. My dental fees come in eggs, bear grease, one-legged chickens, and copper cents I stamped at my own anvil. If those cents are money, I am a mint. If they are advertising, I am a newspaper. The government taxes both, damn their thoroughness.

As for the still, I told the assessor its first duty is medical. A man about to lose a molar wants courage, and I make the courage. He held that making it was distilling and pouring it into a patient was retailing. I said that putting it in his mouth was dentistry. He wrote me down for both licenses. I wrote him down for a tooth that will ache by Thanksgiving, and I am never wrong about teeth.

Blockade Country

Miss Clara Higgins, an herbalist and a historian of the old mountain words for liquor, came up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia to tell me what these papers miss. In '62 not one Union assessor rode into her mountains. It was Confederate country, and the Act could not touch it till the shooting stopped. Her people were free as a bird in a cookpot, though. The Confederate legislatures, Virginia among them, clamped down on distilling grain because they needed every ear of corn for soldiers and for supper. And Confederate agents went hunting copper for cannon and percussion caps. A mountain still is a mighty lot of copper sitting by a creek.

So her great-great-uncle Absalom of Patrick County carried his pot up to the family burying ground in the dark of the moon, dug it a proper grave, and set over it a whittled marker: "Here Lies Old Faithful, Taken Too Soon." His own mother was never told what Old Faithful was, and for three years she carried laurel and wild violets up the hill every Sunday. The copper agents rode past with their hats off. When the federal men arrived in '66, Absalom dug up the pot to brew the assessor a peace offering of persimmon brandy. He found it let out to a family of ground squirrels, fat as butter, nesting in corn shucks with his granny's lost thimble. He told the assessor the pot was a boarding house and should be taxed as one, and the man laughed so hard he forgot to write anything down.

The word her grandmother loved best was "blockade." It came from Mr. Lincoln's ships shutting up the southern ports. Anything sneaked past the law became blockade goods, and in the mountains the word stuck to untaxed whiskey like a tick on a hound. So the Union Navy named Virginia's moonshine, which is the first useful thing the Navy ever did for a mountain man. Tanglefoot, Oh-be-joyful and forty-rod were soldiers' words on both sides of the line, while bust-head and who-hit-John told you which ridge a family came from.

Best of all was Aunt Tildy, a Floyd County widow as sharp as a briar. A federal assessor warned her that if she sold one more drop of persimmon brandy without a retail license, he would fine her into the poorhouse. So she quit selling it. Instead she hung a tin dipper on a nail by her spring and charged five cents for the rent of the dipper. The brandy she gave away free, from a crock under the springhouse floor. When the assessor came back steaming, she told him, as Clara has it: "Sir, I sell no liquor. I rent a cup. If the United States has a tax on cups, show me the page." He searched the book from front to back and found no such page. He paid his five cents, drank his free brandy, and came back every month after. Over in Franklin County, a cousin posted his license behind the hymnals of the Primitive Baptist church. The preacher found it and said nothing, but from then on he took one jug in ten as a tithe.

At the Copper, and Against the Old Wives

First, the law of your own day: making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is unlawful. What follows is history and instruction only, so buy your permits. A still makes no liquor. It only finds the liquor already hiding in the mash, as my forceps find the tooth. Cook cracked corn and water till the starch swells soft as porridge. Yeast will no more eat starch than Barnaby will eat a hymnal, so cool the mash to about a hundred fifty degrees and stir in malted barley, whose enzymes cut starch into sugar. Hold it there while it sweetens. Cool it again till it is no warmer than a milking pail, pitch the yeast, and keep the room aired, for a working mash breathes out a heavy gas that quietly smothers a fool. What you get is a wash: a thin, sour beer a few parts in a hundred alcohol that tastes like a wet barn.

Fire it gentle. Methanol boils at about a hundred forty-eight degrees and ethanol at about a hundred seventy-three, so the poison crowds toward the front of the run. Throw out the foreshots: for a small pot, the first good cupful from every five gallons of wash, and more if you have any doubt. Doubt is cheaper than blindness. The heads come next, sharp and solvent-smelling, loud as a Concord politician, and they belong in the bucket. After them come the hearts, which smell of the grain the way warm bread smells of the field. Those you keep. The tails follow, oily and flat with a wet-dog stink, and you set them aside for another run. Change jars often and judge by nose and by a drop rubbed between the palms, never by a swallow. Copper earns its place by taking hold of the sulfur in the vapour, and it does its best work where the vapour touches it, up in the head, neck and worm. A copper pot with an iron head is a bishop with no Bible. Never walk away from a running still, and keep a bucket of water and a bucket of sand by the door.

A cylinder came by post from Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro, whose uncle swears that hickory ash or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads. They do not. Hardwood ash soaked in water makes lye, which is good for soap and hominy. In a thumper it raises a scum and turns the spirit soapy. The heads do not care a fig, because they come over early by their boiling point, and only your own hand can send them to the bucket. Clara's granny, who made hominy with ash lye every fall, said "lye was for corn and for sinners' souls, not for a still." Red oak is so open-pored that a man can blow pipe smoke through a stave, which is why coopers use tight white oak. Any oak lends a spirit some colour and tannin, but that is flavour, not cleansing. You cannot paint a rotten tooth white and call it sound.

Last comes the blue-flame test. Methanol, the very poison in the foreshots, burns a pale blue of its own. Flame colour is no honest test for lead sweated from solder, and a blue flame proves only that the stuff is burning. The bead measures strength, not safety. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.