Revenue Act of 1862: How the Tax Man Came to New Hampshire Distillers

Friends of the copper and the flame, there is one visitor no man in the Granite State has ever kept out, not by cellar, not by woodpile, not by marrying well. I write these lines at Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike in Pittsfield. A pot drips in the corner, and Barnaby, my black bear, rattles his chain beneath the window like a great hairy tax-dodger rehearsing his excuses. I am a tooth-puller by trade, a blacksmith by habit, and a philosopher by the grace of a good fire and a better jar. My subject is the day the tax man came to the hill towns.

The Revenue Act of 1862

In the summer of 1862 the Union was bleeding money as a pulled molar bleeds blood, and President Lincoln signed the Revenue Act. It made a new creature, the Bureau of Internal Revenue, with a Commissioner at its head, and it carved the loyal states into collection districts. Each district received two men, and I bid you mark it, for it is cleverer than it sounds.

One man was the assessor and the other was the collector. The assessor counted what you owned and what you did, and the collector came after him with his hat out. The Bureau kept the two offices apart, so that no one fellow might both count your pennies and pocket them. It is the only sensible wall Washington ever built, and they built it between two clerks.

Carriages, Billiard Tables and Tooth-Pullers

You may suppose the tax stopped at whiskey. It did not, for whiskey was only the cherry on the pie. The Act laid licenses on trades and professions: apothecaries, butchers, tavern keepers, pawnbrokers, and dentists. That is where I enter the tale, for a man who pulls teeth is a man the government wishes to know by name.

It taxed manufactured goods, carriages, billiard tables, and gold and silver plate. It demanded little paper stamps on deeds, notes, contracts, playing cards and newspapers. It was said that a deed without its stamp was not worth the ink, and that a court might turn it away. Consider it, you who own a hillside. A man might hold forty acres of Suncook Valley ground and be unable to prove it for want of a postage-sized scrap of coloured paper.

The same Act brought the first federal income tax, a modest slice of a man's yearly earnings above a set exemption. Until that hour he had shared his income only with his wife, his creditors, and the Lord.

The Ledger Comes to the Kitchen

Picture a Pittsfield kitchen. For a hundred years these folk had paid the town, the county and the parson, and they knew each one by face. Now a stranger in a good coat arrives with a ledger. He asks what you earn, what you make, what you own, and whether your wagon has springs.

The neighbours answered as New Englanders always have. Some went quiet and counted twice. Some went loud and counted not at all. Some invited the assessor to supper and served him a very small supper. The assessor, for his part, published his lists, so that your neighbour could read what you owned and you could read what he owned. Nothing in history ever did more to quicken a man's interest in his neighbour's carriage.

If you judged yourself overcharged, you had a short window in which to appeal. A town hall during an appeal hearing had all the calm dignity of a hen house with a fox in the rafters and the farmer holding the shotgun.

Tape-Measures, Brass Scales and a Very Dented Smith

No trade felt the measuring rod more keenly than the coppersmith's. I had the tale of it from Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, master coppersmith and the very man who built the pot now dripping in my corner. He comes from a long line of men who have hammered copper and been counted, measured and taxed for it.

His grandfather kept a shop about the size of a good barn. One spring an assessor came through with a surveyor's tape. He measured the floor from wall to wall and charged the old man for every foot of it as manufacturing space. Then the assessor learned that a corner of that same floor was rented to a harness-maker, and he declared the harness-maker's feet to be the harness-maker's own taxable feet. The grandfather held that the floor was his and the feet were merely borrowed. They argued over whose feet were whose for two winters. At last the town clerk settled the matter with a chalk line down the middle, and the harness-maker was forbidden by law to step across it without leave. Two winters over feet, and I had thought my own arrests tedious.

The second tale is of a find. While mending a wall in an old Concord shop, Silas came upon an assessor's field notebook lodged between two boards. Its leather cover had gone soft as a glove, and the hand within was very tidy. Beside the name of a coppersmith, the assessor had written in the margin, as Silas recalls it: "coppersmith refused to be counted; counted him anyway; he is very dented." The notebook does not say who did the denting, the smith or the assessor. Silas likes to think it was the pot. I hold those words worthy of being carved above the door of every smithy in New England.

The third tale is the finest. A collector once came to the McAllister shop with a brass counter-scale he had carried in his wagon, meaning to weigh the stock of copper and figure the duty. The grandfather lifted the whole scale, set it on the anvil, and struck the pan with a small hammer. It rang like a church bell. He kept on ringing it, steady, until the collector could not hear himself think, much less add. At length the man gave up, took a copper pot lid in lieu of a receipt, and left. That lid hangs framed on the shop wall to this day, with the date scratched on its back. I only wish the Bureau had accepted the same from me.

In the Still-House: Mash, Vapour and the Cuts

What is a tax on spirits to a man who does not know what spirits are? Let us go into the still-house as natural philosophers.

Begin with the mash, which is cooked cracked corn and water, cooled and set to work with yeast. It ferments for several days and gives off carbon dioxide. That gas creeps along the floor of a closed room and has killed careless men, so keep a window open and your lamp high. When the mash has worked down to a low-strength wash of a few percent alcohol, it goes into the pot, and the still concentrates it.

Now the cuts, which are the whole art and the true experiment. First off the still come the foreshots, and then the heads, which carry methanol and harsh volatiles. These are thrown away and never drunk, no matter how thirsty the man or how clever his uncle. Next come the hearts, the sweet centre of the run, which the careful maker keeps. Last come the tails, oily and heavy, which are set aside or sent back through.

Copper does finer work than iron or tin. It reacts with the sulfur compounds in the vapour and holds them back, so the rotten-egg stink stays on the metal and not in the jar. For that reason, scrub your copper bright after every run, and never let the green crust flake into a finished product.

Mind your joints. Use silver solder and honest unions, never lead and never a salvaged radiator, for lead is a poison that will sicken or kill a man. Mind your fire as well. Alcohol vapour is flammable, and a leaking still near an open flame has burned many a still-house to the sills. A still that leaks is a still on its way to being a bonfire.

Let me add this, for the law and for you: what I describe is for history and instruction. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal under United States law. I have been arrested twice for ignoring that law, so take the word of a man who learned the hard way.

Hickory Ashes in the Thump Keg

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, sent word of an uncle who swears the old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Rabbit asks whether there is any truth in it, or whether it is only swamp medicine.

There is a grain of truth in it and a bushel of chaff. Hickory and oak charcoal do adsorb some harsh compounds. A finished spirit run slowly through a bed of good hardwood charcoal may lose a little of its bite, and the old distillers knew it. But raw ashes or green shavings tossed into a boiling thump keg or a pot charge do nothing to strip out methanol.

Methanol comes off in the foreshots and heads, and a man's only protection is to throw those away. The thump keg is a second vessel that redistills the vapour and adds strength. It is not a filter, and it cannot make a bad cut good. The uncle's ashes are like a banker's flower in his lapel: they look respectable and do nothing about the rot beneath.

I knew a fellow in Barnstead who swore by white-oak shavings. He swore by them right up until he went to the doctor with a headache that had lasted a week, and the doctor told him plainly, "sir, it is not the oak."

I have struck G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. onto a copper cent as a seal on that bit of wisdom. Rabbit, my regards to you and the folk of Wilkesboro. Give my regards also to your uncle, whom I have never met and would gladly relieve of his teeth free of charge, and tell him to throw out the heads, not the ashes. Barnaby agrees, and he has never been wrong about a ham. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.