The 1864 Provost Marshal and Revenue Inspector Visit to Pittsfield, New Hampshire

Two Hands Out of Washington

Friends of the copper, you know the sheriff and the sheriff knows you. I have pulled two of his teeth and sold him the cure for both. But in the summer of 1864 a different sort of visitor came up the Suncook Valley Turnpike to Fort Wilkins in Pittsfield. Washington sent them by way of Concord. To see why their coming put such a fright into Merrimack County, you must know that the Government reached into our county with two separate hands. One wanted your body and the other wanted your money.

The first was the Provost Marshal General's Bureau. Congress passed the Enrollment Act on the third of March, 1863, when volunteering had dried up like a spinster's garden. The law gave a new bureau to Colonel James B. Fry, and he set a provost marshal over every congressional district in the loyal states. Ours reported to Concord. Each provost marshal sat on a Board of Enrollment with a commissioner and a surgeon, and the three of them heard every excuse a man could invent for staying home. Under that board the enrolling officers went door to door from Epsom to Barnstead. They wrote down the name, age, trade and colour of every man from roughly twenty to forty-five. Elsewhere in the North such officers were shot at, stoned and set upon by dogs. In New Hampshire we were more polite. We only lied to them.

A drafted man with money had two ways out. He could hire a substitute, or for a time he could pay three hundred dollars in commutation money, which is more than a Suncook mill girl earned in a year. Folk called it a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. Congress did away with most of the commutation in July of 1864, the very month of my story. One more fact pleases me as a tooth man. The army surgeons turned away any recruit who lacked enough sound front teeth, because a soldier tears his paper cartridge open with them. Many a man came to my door that summer suddenly fond of my forceps, and I sent every one home with his teeth in. I will pull a rotten tooth for any man, but I will not pull a good one to cheat the Union.

The Revenue Man's Pencil

The second hand was the internal revenue. The country was carved into collection districts, each with an assessor to figure what you owed and a collector to fetch it. Below the assessor worked the assistant assessors, each riding his own patch of country with a pencil. Every distiller had to register and take out a licence, and so did every liquor dealer and, mark you, every dentist. Then came the stamp tax. A bank cheque, a deed, a contract, a receipt, a patent medicine bottle and a box of matches each wanted its little adhesive stamp. Leave the stamp off and your paper might not hold up in court, and you might pay a fine besides.

The whiskey tax climbed like a cat up a curtain. It was twenty cents a gallon in '62 and sixty cents by March of '64. It reached a dollar and a half in July of '64, with two dollars to follow from New Year's of '65. So a revenue inspector riding our turnpike that July was not out for his health. He meant to find the men who had made liquor at sixty cents and hoped to sell it at a dollar fifty without telling Washington the difference.

Staging Innocence at Fort Wilkins

It was the second week of July, hot as the hinges of perdition, and the Suncook ran so low a man might cross it without wetting his opinions. Word came up from Chichester that two men were riding from Concord. The first was a clerk of the provost marshal's office, whom I shall call Mr. Ebenezer Tuttle: thin, buttoned-up, ink on his cuffs and the county enrollment lists in his satchel. The second was an inspector of internal revenue, a round Mr. Horace Pettengill, who licked his pencil until his tongue was black. Between them they had already turned up a dozen men in haylofts and three stills under hog pens in Loudon, Epsom and Northwood. I had two days' warning.

Consider innocence as a problem in practical science. A working mash smells as though a brewery had fallen into a bakery, so I fought that vapour with another. I took every drop of oil of cloves I owned, borrowed two more bottles from the Pittsfield druggist, and painted it on the doorframes, the sills and the hot stovepipe. I took the still down, turned the pot over, draped it with a quilt and set my late aunt's Bible on top. The swan neck went into the woodpile and the worm into the root cellar under the potatoes. The jars went down the well on a rope, and Barnaby was chained by the woodpile with a ham bone.

They arrived at ten in the morning. Tuttle asked my age and I told him forty-six, which I have been since about 1858. Pettengill sniffed every doorframe and pronounced it cloves, and I answered that I kept a dental practice. Then I noticed him holding his jaw. His left cheek was swollen as if he carried a crab apple in it. I offered to look, and found the lower left molar black and cracked, with a gum boil at the root the size of a robin's egg. A man with forceps in his mouth asks no questions, and I took my time about it. I lanced the boil, rocked the tooth until the roots let go, and drew out a molar with a root curved like a fishhook and long as a parsnip. By two in the afternoon both men sat on my porch drinking spring water, and I believed I had beaten Washington with cloves, a Bible and a bad tooth.

Barnaby Makes His Entrance

I had not reckoned on what a bear does with a ham bone and nothing else to do. He digs. Barnaby dug under the woodpile and clean through the back wall of the root cellar. He scorned the potatoes, got my copper worm tangled round his neck, and drank, ate and waded through the half-barrel of sour mash I had left fermenting there. That made four hundred pounds of bear holding twenty gallons of working corn mash on the hottest day of July.

He came round the woodpile just as Tuttle stepped off the porch, wearing my worm like a bishop's collar. He spewed a bushel of hot, frothing mash over the clerk's boots, then went for the satchel. Tuttle held on loyally, and Barnaby's claw caught his trousers instead and tore them from belt to knee. Merrimack County saw a moon rise at two in the afternoon. Tuttle let go of the satchel to cover his dignity, and the bear sat down in the dooryard and ate the three Pittsfield pages of the enrollment list.

My salvation was the grateful Mr. Pettengill. Through a mouthful of lint he wrote in his notebook: 'Proprietor keeps a bear. Bear observed to be fermenting internally. Copper object about the bear's neck, believed to be a collar. No further inquiry advised.' I sewed up Tuttle's trousers with dental silk and dabbed his scratch with strong spirit. Pittsfield had a mighty short enrollment that month. The following week I bought my dental licence, with a stamp on the receipt. A man ought to pay for the things he is actually caught at.

The McAllister Family Ledger

Silas McAllister, called Hacksaw, our master coppersmith, comes of a family with long practice at hiding copper. In the summer of '63 an enrolling officer called at his grandmother's place in Loudon while the swan neck lay on her kitchen table half scrubbed. She handed it to her deaf father-in-law, narrow end to his ear, as though it were his ear trumpet. The bend threw his own voice back at him, and he bellowed 'WHAT?' fourteen times until the officer wrote the household down as infirm and left.

His great-uncle Abner of Epsom once straightened a revenue gauger's bent hydrometer and checked it against water. He noticed the man's pocket flask had a dull grey seam of lead solder, so he cleaned it to bright metal and ran it again in silver, without charge. Silas can hear lead at arm's length. Well-planished copper with silver or riveted seams rings like a distant bell when rapped, while a lead seam thuds like a wet log. At a Concord estate sale four pots sang and two thudded. The two had lead under their shine, and he told the auctioneer they were fit only for flowerpots.

Copper in the Vapour's Road

Now to the apparatus, for history and education, remembering that the federal law wants a permit for making spirits to drink. Take two parts cracked corn, one part rye and about a fifth of the whole in malted barley. Cook the corn soft, then cool it until you can just bear a finger in it for a count of five, about a hundred and fifty degrees. Stir in the rye and malt and hold it an hour, until the taste turns from floury to sweet. Cool it to about eighty degrees, pitch your yeast, and let it work in a covered, airy tub for four days to a week, until it tastes sour and dry. Keep the ferment happy, for a hot or starved yeast gives off a rotten-egg stink that doubles your copper's labour. Silas puts the principle plainly: 'The sulfur is in the vapour, so you put your copper in the vapour's road.' That means the head, the swan neck and the top of the column.

Strip first, then run the low wines a second time slowly over a low, steady fire. Methanol boils at about a hundred and forty-eight degrees, against a hundred and seventy-three for good spirit. Throw out the foreshots, a good gill and a bit for every five gallons of wash in a small pot, and more when in doubt. Set the sharp, solvent-smelling heads aside, keep the sweet hearts, and catch the oily tails separately. Brandy makers, take note: the pectin in apple pomace, grape skins and pears breaks down into methanol, so be at least as careful as any corn man. Never leave a running still. Keep a pail of water and a wet sack by the door, for a spirit fire burns pale and is hard to see by day.

Ashes, Red Oak and the Burning Spoon

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg will clean out bad heads. Hardwood ash is lye-maker's stuff, potash and lime. It might dull a little sharpness, it may leave a soapy taint and a crust, and it will never remove the poison in the heads. Red oak is open-grained, which is why coopers will not make whiskey barrels of it. White oak has natural stoppers called tyloses in its grain, and red oak has none. Red oak shavings flavour the spirit. They do not clean it.

As for 'lead burns red and makes you dead,' that is bunkum. A yellow tinge in a burning spoon may come from salt, dirt, ash or the spoon itself, while methanol burns with a pale blue flame much like good spirit. Your protection is copper with no lead in its seams and honest cuts with the foreshots and heads thrown away. Keep your copper clean and your fire low.