The Revenuer Hall of Fame: The Cleverest Tax Men in Whiskey History

A Monument to the Enemy

Tonight I do a thing I swore on my mother's forceps I would never do. I praise the revenue man. Barnaby, my black bear, lies chained beneath the window of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, and he groaned when I said it. His objection is noted. But consider the matter as a natural philosopher would. A dull revenue man is a toothache. A clever one is a game of chess, and your liberty is the pawns. A worthy adversary deserves a monument, so I have opened a Revenuer Hall of Fame. For every man inducted I strike a large cent on my anvil with my own punch, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and hang it on the wall of honour beside my diploma and my bail receipts.

The tax man is older than the still. There was an excise on drink before there was a Pittsfield, and gaugers with their rods have been walking into cellars since Queen Elizabeth was making faces at the Spaniards. Folks hereabouts say "revenooer" as if they were spitting out a bad tooth. Yet some of these fellows were men of genius and men of sand, and two of them were men of letters.

Poets and Pamphleteers in the Excise

The first coin goes to Robert Burns, the ploughman poet of Ayrshire, who gave the world "Auld Lang Syne" to bawl at the New Year. From 1789 until his death in 1796 Burns was a gauger of His Majesty's Excise in the Dumfries district. He rode something like two hundred miles a week and pushed his rod into the casks of tavern keepers who had stood him drinks the night before. While he held that office he wrote "The Deil's Awa wi' th' Exciseman," a song in which the Devil dances off down the road with the exciseman and the whole town cheers. It is the most Scotch piece of bookkeeping ever done on this earth. Give him his due, though. In 1792 the smuggling schooner Rosamond ran aground in the Solway Firth, and Burns was among the officers who waded out waist-deep in cold muck, under the guns of men who would gladly have shot them, and took her. The story goes that he bought some of her little cannon at the auction and tried to ship them to the revolutionaries in France, and the Excise Board had sharp words with him about which side a King's officer belongs on. He was a poet, a gauger and a gunrunner. The coin rang true.

The second coin goes to Thomas Paine, whose "Common Sense" set the colonies afire. He began as an English excise officer, gauging beer and spirits in little towns. In 1765 he was sacked for "stamping," which in the trade means entering in your book an inspection of goods you never laid eyes on. I have been stamping for years, and nobody has sacked me except the county, and they keep handing me back. Paine was taken on again, and in 1772 he wrote "The Case of the Officers of Excise." In it he begged Parliament to raise the gaugers' pay, because a man kept on starvation wages to guard a river of gin will soon hold his hand out to every brewer on his route. Parliament did nothing. In 1774 Paine was dismissed again and sailed for Philadelphia, and King George lost a continent partly because he would not give his tax men a raise.

Tar, Feathers, and a Bureau Built from Nothing

The third coin honours courage rather than cleverness. Robert Johnson was federal collector of the whiskey excise for Washington and Allegheny counties in western Pennsylvania. In September of 1791, as the Whiskey Rebellion was warming up, a gang in women's frocks and lampblack caught him at Pigeon Creek. They cut off his hair, stripped him, tarred and feathered him, and turned him loose in the woods. People suppose the tarring is the punishment. It is not. The punishment is getting it off. Pine tar will not let go of a man, so it must be worked off with turpentine, lard and a dull knife, and the turpentine finds every broken place in the skin and lights it like a fuse. Johnson went back to work anyway. In July of 1794 a mob burned Bower Hill, the fine house of the inspector, General John Neville. These men collected a tax nobody wished to pay, in country where a pistol came cheaper than a lawyer. I do not love the tax, but I tip my hat to their nerve.

When Congress passed the Internal Revenue Act in July of 1862, there was no bureau to run it: no clerks, no forms, not so much as a pencil. The job went to George S. Boutwell of Groton, a former governor of Massachusetts and the first Commissioner of Internal Revenue. Within months he had carved the country into districts, appointed assessors and collectors, printed forms by the ton, and set the whole machine squeezing out money for the war. He built a bureau out of nothing, as I build a spirit out of a bushel of corn, except that his product gives everybody a headache by law. In 1865 the Commissioner's chair went to Edward A. Rollins, a New Hampshire man and once Speaker of our House at Concord. A Granite man collecting from Granite men is a fox auditing a henhouse and finding he is kin to every hen. His coin is struck provisionally, pending his conduct toward me personally.

The Man Who Gauged My Woodpile

The cleverest revenue man ever to trouble Fort Wilkins never once got past my bear. Moses Ladd was a deputy collector out of Gilmanton, lean, bespectacled, with a cough, and built like a hay rake with a conscience. Most deputies swagger up the turnpike with a warrant, meet Barnaby, then meet the Suncook River, and that ends the investigation. Ladd instead sat in a buggy across the road every Tuesday for eleven weeks, eating a cold biscuit and counting my cordwood. He knew how much a tooth-pulling parlour and a forge ought to burn. Then he asked the miller down by the river how much cracked corn Dr. Wilkins was buying, and he did the sums. By his reckoning I was burning a cord and a half more than any dentist had business burning and buying corn enough to fatten every hog in Merrimack County, with not one hog to be seen. Either I kept a still or I kept the hungriest bear in the Republic. I told him I kept both, and he wrote it down. I learned that day that arithmetic is crueller than any bear.

My hall also has a cellar, the Hall of Shame, which is reserved for paid informers. Its sole tenant is Ziba Hutchins, who came over my back fence at two in the morning for the informer's reward and stepped on the end of Barnaby's chain. He left without his lantern and short about a pound of himself. I stitched his hindquarters on my kitchen table with waxed harness thread and a sail needle while he sang "Rock of Ages" in three keys, none of them the Lord's. He took eleven stitches and carries a scar shaped like Lake Winnipesaukee, and he never informed on a soul again. I struck no coin for him. I would not waste good copper.

Hogs, Peddlers, and a Bowl of Pudding

Miss Clara Higgins, a mountain herbalist from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, brought three stories from her hills. The first was about Absalom Trigg, a gauger in Rockbridge County who never went looking for a still. He watched for hogs. Spent mash goes to the hogs after a run, and a sow that came down out of the laurel walking like a sailor home from port led him straight back up her trail to the copper. Mr. Trigg called the hogs "the only honest witnesses in the county." When folks penned their hogs, he followed the chickens. Her granny called a revenue man near at hand a "cold-supper man," because no one in the cove dared light a cookstove while he sat on the ridge watching for smoke.

The second was about a deputy who came through as a tin peddler and wrote down every woman who bought a two-gallon funnel "for peaches." A month later he returned with a warrant and took up two of Miss Higgins's cousins. Still, his funnel strained milk in her mother's kitchen for forty years.

The third was about her great-great-grandmother, widowed at Petersburg and burned out, who in 1866 kept her children in shoes with persimmon brandy from a little copper pot. The collector who came up her lane was a Union man who had lost his left arm at Antietam. She met him in the doorway with a churn dasher, and he told her plainly, "Ma'am, I don't want your pot. I want your name in my book." He sat at her table and showed her how to register, keep the gauge, and pay the tax, and he told her that a legal pot cannot be taken from her by anybody. She ran that still lawfully for years and made him pudding every time he came to gauge. I struck his coin without a joke. The hills forgot his name, but the pudding remembers him.

The Gauger's Lessons at the Apparatus

A good revenue man knows the art better than half the men he catches, so let us study it as he would. First, plainly: federal law forbids distilling spirits for drinking without a permit. A lawful distiller registers his still and keeps his books, as that widow did. Cook cracked corn or rye in water and cool it to blood-warm before pitching the yeast, because hot mash kills yeast as surely as water kills a match. The bubbling is carbon dioxide, which creeps along the floor and pools in low places, so keep the room aired. Many old hands run twice: a quick stripping run for low wines, then a slow spirit run, where the craft lies. Keep the fire low and steady, every joint tight, and no open flame where a leak might find it. Copper carries heat about five times better than iron and spreads it evenly, where iron would scorch the mash to the taste of a burnt boot.

The cuts are a matter of life and death. Methanol boils at about one hundred and forty-nine degrees, ethanol at about one hundred and seventy-three, and water at two hundred and twelve. The foreshots come first, carrying methanol, and every drop of them goes out. The heads, smelling of glue and nail varnish, go out too or into a separate jar for judgement. The hearts follow, and last come the oily tails. Catch the run in small numbered jars and cut by nose and patience, never by greed. I have seen a greedy cut blind a man. Measure proof with a hydrometer and correct it with a thermometer. Keep the copper bright, and never let lead solder near a still.

Ashes, Oak, and the Spoon of Fire

Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro asks whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads. His uncle is half right. Ash is potash, alkaline, and it takes the vinegar edge off a soured charge. Oak adds tannin, colour and a woody taste. Neither touches the methanol, which only an honest nose and a row of jars can remove. An old fellow on the Barnstead road once shovelled in so much ash that his keg foamed, blew its cap, and plastered his barn with grey mud.

The spoon test is no better. Methanol and ethanol both burn with a pale blue flame, so you cannot see poison in the fire, and a red flame proves nothing about lead. The bead tells you rough proof and nothing more. Use a hydrometer for proof, clean metal for safety, and honest cuts for life. Keep your copper clean and your fire low.