The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794: Tom the Tinker, Bower Hill and the 1791 Excise

The Excise of 1791 and the Monongahela Farmer

Pull your chair to the stove, reader, and let an old coppersmith call up a ghost that has rattled its chains in the American cellar these seventy years. Barnaby, my black bear, lies chained in the yard grunting at shadows. He has the table manners of a Philadelphia congressman and roughly the same opinion of excise men.

In 1791 a gentleman from New York named Alexander Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury, and he had a problem. The young republic had taken on the war debts of all thirteen states, and the creditors were knocking. Hamilton had a head for figures and a neck for trouble, and the frontier would gladly have measured both. His answer, passed by Congress in March of that year, was the first federal excise upon spirits distilled at home.

Consider the farmer beyond the Allegheny Mountains, in the Monongahela country of western Pennsylvania. He grew rye he could neither eat nor sell, for the nearest market lay over the mountains on a road a goat would refuse. A packhorse could carry only a few bushels of grain over that ridge. Turn the grain into whiskey and the same horse carried the worth of many times as many bushels, sloshing in two kegs. Out there whiskey was not a vice. It was money. Men paid the preacher, the blacksmith and the midwife in it. Taxing that farmer's whiskey was like taxing a Baptist's sweat: he produced it honest and resented every drop you took.

The law was crooked as a cow's hind leg besides. A large distiller could pay by the gallon. The small farm distiller generally paid a yearly rate on the size of his still, whether it ran all winter or sat cold. So the rich man in the city paid less per gallon than the poor man on the ridge. Many of those ridge men were Scots-Irish, whose grandfathers had dodged the Crown's exciseman for generations. Even the poet Robert Burns took a post as an excise officer in Scotland in 1789, so the Scots had their hearts broken and their pockets picked by the same man.

Tar, Feathers and Tom the Tinker

The frontier answered with tar. In September of 1791 a collector named Robert Johnson was caught, stripped, tarred, feathered and turned loose. I have pulled molars from men who howled less. Hot pine tar sets as it cools and takes the hair with it. The feathers lodge in a man's ears, in his eyebrows and in parts no family magazine will name, and he spends the next month plucking himself like a Christmas goose.

Then came a phantom called Tom the Tinker. Nobody was Tom and everybody was Tom. Letters signed with his name were nailed to trees and printed in the Pittsburgh paper, warning any man who registered his still and paid the tax. A man who paid woke to find his copper pot shot through like a colander. They called that tinkering a still.

My foundry man, Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, has handled such work himself. When his grandfather was young, a tin peddler came up the turnpike with a copper pot unlike any New England work, said to come out of a dead man's barn in the Monongahela country. It had three round holes through the shoulder, each plugged with a whittled pine peg that had been driven in wet and had swelled tight. Silas reads such wounds as plainly as print: 'A ball goes in clean on one side and leaves a ragged lip where it pushes the metal outward. You can read which way the shooter stood by the curl.'

Those pine plugs held for better than forty years. They were the work of a man who loved his still more than his life, or, as Silas allows, of a man too poor to buy another. The grandfather cut out the pegs, dressed the lips flat and riveted copper patches over each hole, inside and out. He kept one peg in a snuff tin on the mantel. It is still black with seventy-year-old mash and smells like a rebel's breath.

Bower Hill and General Washington's Still

In July of 1794 the pot boiled over. Armed men marched on Bower Hill, the fine house of General John Neville, the federal inspector. Shots were fired, the rebel leader Major James McFarlane was killed, and the house burned. A few weeks later about seven thousand men gathered at Braddock's Field, put up liberty poles and talked loud of marching on Pittsburgh.

General Washington called out about thirteen thousand militia from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia, and rode with them as far as Carlisle and Bedford, with Hamilton beside him like a tick on a hound. No sitting president has led troops in the field before or since. By the time the army crossed the mountains, the rebellion had melted like a snowbank in March. About twenty prisoners were marched to Philadelphia, two were convicted of treason, and Washington pardoned both. The rebels put up liberty poles all over the Monongahela, and the government answered with a great deal of liberty and very little pole.

Now mark the joke the Almighty played. After he left the presidency, Washington built a commercial distillery at Mount Vernon, and by 1799 it was making about eleven thousand gallons of whiskey a year, one of the biggest in the country. He marched thirteen thousand men over the mountains to collect a tax, then went home and built the biggest still in Virginia, which is the most American thing a man ever did. I would trust him with my country but never with my mash bill. Jefferson's men repealed the excise in 1802, and the ghosts were left to wander.

Why the Granite State Never Forgot

The counting-houses of Portsmouth and Boston were Federalist to the bone, but the New Hampshire hill farmer had his own grudge. In September of 1786 several hundred men surrounded our legislature at Exeter demanding paper money and relief from debt, and General John Sullivan's militia broke them up the next morning. In 1808 Vermont smugglers defied Jefferson's Embargo in the Black Snake affair on the Winooski River. Government men died, and a smuggler named Cyrus Dean was hanged that November. Pittsfield was incorporated in 1782, and the men who cleared these fields along the Suncook remembered every one of those fights. When Washington City came after a man's jug, the Granite State heard Tom the Tinker whispering from the chimney corner.

That ghost still walks, after a fashion. Some winters past a Concord assessor, whom I shall call Mister Pruitt for his mother's sake, came moaning across my yard at midnight in his wife's best linen bedsheet and bid me confess my still. He forgot that Barnaby does not believe in ghosts. Barnaby believes in meat. The bear took the sheet, the seat of the breeches, a fair strip of wool drawers and a palm-sized piece of the assessor himself, who fled down Route 28 toward Epsom with his white backside shining like a Shaker's conscience. Barnaby ate the bedsheet entire. It was the only haunting in Merrimack County ever ended by digestion.

Ghosts in the Copper

An Epsom farmer once came to Silas white as flour, swearing that a Whiskey Rebel moaned in his barn loft every night the north wind blew, sent to punish him for paying a tax once in 1863. Silas went up with a lantern and found the swan neck cracked along a seam that someone had worked too cold. The wind came through a knothole in the gable and blew across that crack like a boy blowing across a jug, and the ghost moaned in B-flat, the only rebel in New England who stayed in tune. Silas brazed the seam and the ghost quit. The farmer's wife was sorry, for the ghost had been the only thing that kept her husband home of a night.

Silas's family also tells of a great-grandfather whose still had a springy belly. He could tap the sides in with a mallet so it measured smaller when the gauger came with his rod and tape, then pop it out again once the man rode off. Silas gives the natural philosopher's objection: copper work-hardens. Every bend makes it stiffer and more brittle until it is annealed in the fire. Pop a belly in and out a few times in a season and it would crack like a February puddle. Family poetry, he calls it, not family metalwork.

Over his forge door he hangs a still cap, green as a frog, that he dug from the char of a burned cellar hole near Catamount Hill. It is old work with square rivets, perhaps from the seventeen-nineties, and a notch shaped like a liberty pole is filed into its rim. His apprentice will not walk under it after dark.

Rye Mash and the Cuts

First the plain law: making distilled spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law of these United States. What follows is history and education.

The work begins in the barrel. For a ten-gallon rye mash, take about fifteen pounds of rye meal and three pounds of malted barley. The rye supplies the starch, and the malt supplies the enzymes that turn it to sugar. Stir the rye slowly into hot water, and keep stirring, for rye turns gummy. Once it is cooked, let it fall to about one hundred fifty degrees by a Fahrenheit glass, somewhere between a hundred forty-eight and a hundred fifty-eight. Then stir in the malt and hold it there an hour or more. To test it, drip a little mash on a white saucer and add a drop of tincture of iodine. Blue-black means starch remains. Brownish means it is converted. Cool to about eighty degrees, pitch your yeast, cover it loosely so it breathes, and give it four days to a week.

Most men run twice: a quick stripping run down to low wines, then a slow spirit run where the cuts are made. Keep the fire low. Never seal a still, or the pot will burst and throw burning spirit across the room. Keep the cooling water cold, keep open flame away from any leaking joint, and never leave a running still unattended.

Methanol boils near a hundred forty-eight degrees and ethanol near a hundred seventy-three, so the foreshots come first. They do not come in one tidy squirt, though, and a thermometer alone will not tell you when they are finished. Pour away at least a good half pint per five gallons of wash, for foreshots can blind you and kill you. The heads follow, smelling like a cobbler's glue pot; catch them in a row of small numbered jars. Then come the hearts, sweet and round with no burn behind them. Last come the tails, oily and smelling of wet dog. Set the jars out overnight under a cloth and smell each one by morning light. Pour out the sharp jars and save the wet-dog jars for the next run. When you run fruit, be more generous still on the heads, for fruit carries pectin, and pectin is where methanol comes from.

Copper takes the sulfur stink out of the vapour and holds it on the metal, so long as it is kept bright. Put copper in the cap, the neck and the first turns of the worm, where the vapour touches longest, and use heavy-gauge metal you can scrub for twenty years.

Hickory Ash, Red Oak and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether hickory ash or red oak in the thump keg will clean out bad heads, as his uncle swears. Wood ash is potash, an alkaline salt and the backbone of lye. It can knock down some of the sour acid in a rough wash, but it does not touch methanol. Only discarding the foreshots and heads does that. Red oak gives tannin, colour and woody flavour, but flavour is not safety. Oak is like rouge on a widow: it improves her complexion but does not change her age.

The blue-flame test is horse apples. Methanol burns with a pale blue flame, as clean-looking as good spirit, and a flame is no honest test for lead either. I once lit a spoonful of my heads before a Gilmanton man. It burned blue and pretty as a bishop's eye, and it would have blinded him all the same. Every tax collector has been outlived by the jug he came for. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.