The Secret Distiller's Ledger: Country Bookkeeping and the 1862 Revenue Act

The Book in the Hymnal

I swore on my granddaddy's forceps that I would never do it, and yet here it lies on my plank table, shedding dust: the book. I keep Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. From there I have practised as dentist, blacksmith, inventor and distiller, and I am the man your mother warned you about while she was buying from me out the back window. Through all those trades I kept one account that I never showed the tax man. Here I open it: who owed me, who paid in coin, who paid in chickens, and who is still running from me with teeth he has not paid for. Some of you are in it.

Barnaby, my black bear, lies chained under the log window as I write. He is four hundred pounds of flea-ridden mutton, and he grunts at the wind as if it were a revenue man. The wind has never owed me a nickel. Barnaby will come into this account presently.

How a Country Tradesman Kept His Books

Young sprouts think a ledger is a Boston bank invention. It is no such thing. A country tradesman kept two books. The first was the daybook, where every sale went in the minute it happened. Tuesday morning: one bicuspid, Ezekiel Huckins, twenty-five cents. Tuesday evening: one jar of medicinal tincture, sold to a gentleman who begged me not to write his name, so I wrote it bigger.

On a rainy day you posted all of it into the ledger proper, where every customer had his own page. The left column was Dr., for debtor, and the right was Cr., for creditor. When the two matched, the man was square. When they did not, and in Pittsfield they never do, you had a man who crossed the street when he saw you coming.

Hardly any of it was hard money. A country account ran on credit all year. It was settled once a year, or twice if the harvest was kind, and it was settled in kind: cordwood, butter, salt pork, a week's haying, homespun wool, and hens. Lord in heaven, the hens. My father kept his books in shillings and pence long after Washington got his face on the dollar. A New England shilling was one-sixth of a dollar, which is sixteen cents and two-thirds, and I have yet to meet the man who could pay me two-thirds of a cent.

Mr. Lincoln's Revenue Act

Then came the war, and Mr. Lincoln's Congress needed money the way a drowning man needs a rope. The Revenue Act of 1862 taxed a man's income at three percent over six hundred dollars and five percent over ten thousand, though nobody on Route 28 has seen ten thousand dollars outside a fever dream. It licensed the trades, distillers and liquor dealers among them. It also stamped the paperwork: a receipt for more than twenty dollars needed a two-cent stamp. I never wrote one, because nobody in Pittsfield has ever paid a debt over twenty dollars.

What curled my whiskers was this. The income lists were public, and the newspapers printed them. Picture my ledger laid open on the store counter for every gossiping hen-wife in Merrimack County to read. I would sooner show my bare backside at the Congregational social.

So I hid it in plain sight, bound inside a Methodist hymnal, because no tax man in New Hampshire has opened a hymnal since his christening. I also kept it in cipher. A gallon is an upper molar, a quart is a lower, and the dregs are wisdom teeth, since nobody wants them. By my books I have pulled four hundred and twelve teeth from forty men. Either my bookkeeping is in code or every man in Pittsfield has ten mouths.

Here are a few pages. Widow Mercy Plunkett, of the hill road above the mill pond, owed for three molars, one pulled with considerable shrieking, and paid six hens. One of those hens crowed every blessed morning at four. I stewed it for insubordination, and it was tougher than a Concord lawyer's conscience. Obadiah Crumb has owed for one bicuspid and two quarts, by my cipher, since 1859, and has paid nothing: not a penny, not a pullet, not a kind word. That is four dollars and thirty-seven cents, seven years running. I have charged him interest in insults, and he is now the most thoroughly insulted man in the Suncook Valley. Hiram Scroggs of Barnstead, my rival in the tincture line, brought me an abscess so foul that a fly dropped dead off the windowsill when I lanced it. He paid me one pig. That pig was in a family way and gave me nine more, so I am the only creditor in New Hampshire ever paid interest by a sow.

The Assessor and the Bear

A hymnal will not keep a secret forever in a town where gossip outruns the Concord stage. In the autumn of 1863 a young assistant assessor named Phineas Gatch came up the turnpike on a swaybacked mare. He carried a satchel, wore a tin inkwell on a string round his neck, and had a face like a parsnip that had just heard bad news. He had heard that I kept a book. I told him my income was mostly chickens and that he could count them in the yard. He did not care for that, and he went sniffing round to the log window. I failed to mention who lived under it.

Barnaby came off his straw like a landslide in a fur coat. He took the satchel first and shook it the way a terrier shakes a rat, and the government's papers went up like a snowstorm. Then he took the inkwell, with Mr. Gatch still on the end of the string, and swung him round twice like a church bell before the string broke. Gatch landed in my manure pile like a wet sack of meal falling off a hay wagon. Barnaby swallowed the inkwell whole and took the man's hat, along with a patch of scalp. As Gatch went over the rail fence, Barnaby peeled off the seat of his trousers, long underwear and all, and Merrimack County got its first look at an honest government accounting. It is the only time the government ever paid me. Barnaby had a blue tongue for a week.

Hacksaw McAllister's Foundry Books

A coppersmith gets paid in as much trash as a dentist does. Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, master coppersmith of the Fort Wilkins foundry, has the family books to prove it. When Silas was a boy, a man brought his father a polished kettle that he swore was copper, and asked to have it weighed and set down as credit on a new pot. The elder McAllister drew a file once across the bottom, and it showed yellow underneath: brass. He turned it over and found the seams patched with dull gray stuff, soft as cheese under his thumbnail. It was lead. He handed the kettle back and said he would not write poison in his book or put it in any man's vessel.

Silas keeps that rule in a scrap ledger. Every pound of copper brought in for credit is weighed, scratched with the file, and written down with where it came from. Metal he cannot vouch for may become a weathervane, but it does not become a pot. A fellow from Gilmanton Iron Works once paid for a swan-neck repair with a sack of white cents, which are eighty-eight parts copper and twelve parts nickel, expecting Silas to melt them down by the pound. Silas refused. The old large cents were near pure copper and these were not, and he would not put an alloy into a vessel without knowing how it would behave in the seam. He took the coins at face value and spent them on a new leather apron.

Another debtor paid with a laying hen, and the hen got loose in the foundry the same day. Weeks later Silas warmed a coiled cooling worm from the high shelf by the rafters to check its joints, and out came a smell that would have stopped a funeral. She had laid right in the first turn. He flushed and scrubbed the worm three times. Silas also told me of a dented pot his grandmother sold to a tinker, which she saw years later in a Concord tavern kitchen, re-hammered smooth and still bearing his grandfather's mark under the rim. "Copper that's honestly made never really dies," Silas said. "It just changes hands."

The Still Keeps Its Own Ledger

The oldest ledger on this property is the still itself, and it keeps honest books whether you like it or not. Read your apparatus as a natural philosopher reads his. The foreshots are the debt you never collect, the hearts are cash in hand, and the tails are a cousin who promises to pay you Tuesday. Mind that this is history and alchemy, not a lesson for your woodshed.

There are three reasons for copper. First, it is soft and willing: a good smith can raise a pot from a flat sheet with a stake, a hammer and patience, and patch it for three generations after. Second, it carries heat the way gossip carries scandal, quick and even. Third, and this is the alchemy of it, copper keeps the stink out. The foul sulfur vapours that make bad liquor smell like a tannery privy meet the bright copper and stay behind on it, and the copper takes a dark crust for its trouble. A man who lets his pot go green and black throws away the very virtue he paid for.

The first part off the still, and the heads after it, carry the wood-spirit that blinds and kills. An honest man pours them out on the ground and lets no drop go down any throat. A man who sells his foreshots would pull the wrong tooth to save the time of finding the right one. Alcohol vapour is heavier than air and creeps along a floor toward a lantern the way Obadiah Crumb creeps toward a free supper. Half the still-houses in the Suncook Valley that burned in my lifetime burned that way. Keep your flame away from the vapour, keep your doors open to the wind, and trust no metal you cannot vouch for.

Ashes, Shavings and the Blue Flame

A letter came from the Carolina hills, from Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro: "My uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads." Rabbit, I expect your uncle is a fine man and a terrible chemist. Every New England grandmother leaches ash in a barrel, gets potash lye from it, and boils that with tallow to make soap. Ash is a strong alkali. Put it in a thump keg and you will get a run that tastes like the laundry tub, and it will not touch the poison. Oak does give liquor its color and bite, but only after long months in a barrel. A fistful of shavings in a hot keg just stains the run a muddy tea color, like rouge on a dead deacon.

Here is the true thing. The wood-spirit comes mostly from pectin, which lives in fruit skins and pulp. A man running apple pomace or peach peelings therefore makes far more of it than a man running grain, and he has the most reason of all to throw out his foreshots and heads. As for the spoon set alight: the wood-spirit burns with a pale blue flame too. The blue-flame test tells you whether your liquor will burn, and nothing about whether you will.

Mind the law of your own day: distilling spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.