When the Sheriff Was a Customer: Moonshine and the Law in 1800s New Hampshire

Barnaby, my black bear, is four hundred pounds of bad manners on a chain, and he will not eat a lawman who pays cash. There is a philosophy in that somewhere. I have pulled enough teeth to know that whatever a man keeps behind them goes rotten, so I shall say plainly what the courthouse would sooner I kept back. In the Suncook Valley the county sheriff was very often the best customer a still-house had. First the customary sermon: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and what follows is history and instruction only. Knowing a thing is not the same as doing it.

The Granite State Takes to Its Bed

When New Hampshire went dry in 1855, the law did not make liquor disappear. It made liquor respectable. Every town could appoint a liquor agent, a sober fellow with a ledger, to sell spirits lawfully for medicinal, mechanical and chemical purposes. Overnight the whole state fell ill. Deacons took the rheumatism and selectmen took the gout. One Barnstead man swore his horse had the ague and needed a quart a week, and the agent wrote it down, because the law said medicinal and did not say for whom.

The sheriff and his deputies had the duty of enforcing the dry law against the country stills, and they drew no fat salary for it. They lived largely on fees: so much for serving a writ, so much for an arrest, so much for hauling a debtor before the justice. A man paid in fees is a merchant. He will chase a debtor over three townships for a quarter-dollar writ, yet he will not cross the road to raid a still that sells him a jar for the same quarter. Arithmetic is the only religion that never splits into factions.

Mr. Lincoln's Revenue Act of 1862 put a federal whiskey tax on top of the dry law. Federal men collected that tax, however, and the sheriff owed their ledger nothing. So in 1865 the state said no liquor except for medicine, the federal government said two dollars a gallon, and the sheriff's rheumatism said one quart, Thursday, at the back window.

The Mayor's Cellar and the Sheriff's Quart

New Hampshire was not alone in this. In Portland, Maine, in June of 1855, it came out that Mayor Neal Dow, the father of the Maine Law himself, had a stock of liquor laid by for the city's medicinal agency. A crowd gathered at the agency, the militia fired into it, and a man was killed. Dow was later acquitted of illegally holding the liquor, but every Yankee with a nose learned that even the cathedral of temperance kept a cellar.

I shall call our own high sheriff Crabtree, because his grandchildren are still living and I have pulled teeth from two of them. Every Thursday after dark his buggy stopped on the turnpike a quarter mile short of my gate. He walked the rest of the way, knocked three times on the back shutter, coughed like a goose choking on a button, and told me the wife's rheumatism was something terrible. She needed a quart a week, and she had been lying in the burying ground up the hill for two years. That is devotion to a prescription. I never asked. A doctor has his oath, and a moonshiner has a better one: keep your mouth shut and your jar full.

Barnaby and the Deputy from Epsom

Nobody had told the new deputy from Epsom about the Thursday arrangement. He was green as spring willow and twice as bendy. One drizzly March midnight he raided Fort Wilkins alone, armed with a lantern, a pistol and the brains of a fence post struck by lightning. He came over the north woodpile, which is exactly where Barnaby keeps his bedroom.

From my bed I heard the lantern glass break. Next came a sound like a wet bedsheet tearing lengthwise, which was the trousers. Then came a shorter, juicier tearing, which was a strip of hindquarter as wide as my hand and as long as a cucumber. The pistol went off into my rain barrel. The boy went up the sugar maple by the gate faster than sap in April and stayed there till dawn, calling on his mother, the Lord and the Governor, in that order. Below him Barnaby chewed the trouser seat and spat out the buttons one at a time.

The high sheriff came up the road at sunrise, a day early. He asked for his usual and said he would fetch the young man down once the bear had finished his breakfast. Then he docked the deputy a day's fees for conducting unauthorized business on a Thursday customer's premises. I dressed the wound myself with pine tar and spirits and charged nothing. That deputy never came over my woodpile again.

The sheriff paid in hard coin, and every coin that crossed my anvil got my stamp: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. Those coppers went on to the blacksmith, the grain man and the town tax collector. Come spring, the county treasurer found a double handful of them in the county's own strongbox. In a manner of speaking, Merrimack County has been my business partner since the war. I have written to Concord asking for my share of the dividend, and Concord has not answered.

What the Revenue Man Saw

Captain Donald Vance spent twenty-eight years as a federal revenue officer working out of Manchester, chasing copper through the White Mountains and the Green Mountains. He holds that a revenue man who will not taste the evidence is like a parson who will not read the Book. In his experience, county lawmen hid their thirst about as well as a hog hides in a parlor.

Up one back hollow he found a tidy pot of clean copper. Chalked on the inside of the barn door was a tally of customers, each drawn as a picture: a fish, a hat, a wagon wheel. Under a five-pointed star, which was plainly the sheriff's badge, stood three years of marks with not one paid. When the Captain pointed this out, the old distiller had a ready answer: 'No, Captain, and he hasn't raided me since the war started neither. Cheapest insurance in the county.'

One county jailer, who had a grand mustache and no ambition below it, seized twelve jars. The strongroom was full of the town's seed corn, so in the night he moved the jars into the prisoner's own cell to guard them more closely. The Captain arrived on Monday and found four jars empty. The jailer and the prisoner had been singing Tenting on the Old Camp Ground until the rooster joined in. His report recorded four jars as evaporated in custody, and the magistrate remarked on how warm the weather was for April.

Another Saturday the Captain put on a gray coat and a farmer's hat and joined a line of buyers at a Green Mountain still. The man in front of him was a United States deputy marshal he knew well, dressed in his Sunday coat, with a gallon jug under his arm and a sprig of mint in his buttonhole. Neither man said a word. The next morning the marshal led the raid himself, and among the suspects his report listed a stranger in a gray coat, of large build and suspicious manner.

The Captain's gravest tale concerns a distiller who patched a leaking worm with lead solder taken off old roof flashing. His best customer was a jolly sheriff, and by Christmas the sheriff was doubled over with cramp. His bowels were locked, he had a taste of tin in his mouth, and his wrists drooped so badly he could scarcely hold the reins. The town doctor called it lead colic, the painter's sickness. The sheriff came to the Captain white as flour. He would not name his seller, but he told him to look at a certain worm in a certain hollow, and there the patch shone like a dollar. The Captain broke that worm with his boot heel. His verdict stands: 'Lead has no business anywhere in a still... It doesn't burn off and it doesn't wash out. It just waits in a man's bones.'

The Sheriff's Jar, from Mash to Hearts

The sheriff never came for my worst jar, so treat every run as an experiment at your own apparatus. The best whiskey starts with the mash: cracked corn cooked in water until it is a thick porridge. Corn is starch, and yeast can no more eat starch than Barnaby can eat a hymnal, so you need malt. Malt is barley that has been sprouted and dried, and its diastase turns the starch to sugar. Let the corn cool to about one hundred fifty degrees, anywhere between one hundred forty-eight and one hundred fifty-eight, then stir in ground malt and keep it covered and warm. In an hour or so the porridge turns thin and sweet. That is conversion. Cool it to blood-warm before you pitch the yeast, or you will kill the yeast dead.

The mash works for three to seven days. Mind your ventilation, because that bubbling is carbonic gas, and in a shut room it will put a man down more quietly than chloroform. The old Kentucky men add backset, the soured spent liquid from the last run. That makes a sour mash, which keeps spoilage off and holds the character steady from batch to batch. When the wash tastes dry and sour it is ready. At that point it is a weak beer of a few parts in a hundred spirit.

Copper is the alchemist's metal because it takes the stinking sulphur out of the vapour wherever the hot vapour touches it: in the cap, in the vapour arm, and above all in the worm. If you run the vapour through an iron pipe, you waste half of your copper's virtue. Keep the copper bright, because a green crust is a lazy man's signature. Keep the fire low, because a hard boil smears the run together. Keep every joint tight, because vapour leaking near an open flame has burned down more New England still-houses than every sheriff put together. Keep water handy and the door open, and never leave a running still alone.

Draw the spirit off in small numbered jars, laid out like teeth on a dentist's tray. The foreshots come first. They smell of varnish and hospitals, and they carry the methanol, the poison that blinds, so throw out every drop. The heads are harsh and fruity, like a pear left in a pocket, and they go out too. Next come the hearts, clean and sweet, with the smell of the grain coming back like an old friend. That jar walked the sheriff a quarter mile in the dark every Thursday for six years. The tails come last, oily and smelling of wet dog. Set them aside to run again with the next batch and never sell them, because a sheriff with a bad belly is a sheriff with a grudge.

Ashes, Oak, and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, sent a talking cylinder with a question. His uncle swears the old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Hickory ash is lye, the stuff of soap and hominy. Put it in a hot thump keg and it boils up into a slimy foam that can puke straight over into the worm and spoil the run. The heads boil off early because of what they are, and no shovel of ash changes that. In Lincoln County, Tennessee, they drip the new spirit slowly through sugar maple charcoal, and that does smooth it some. But that is charcoal used after the still, not ash put in the boiler.

Oak gives flavour, but it does not clean the spirit. Red oak is open-pored all the way through, so spirit weeps out of it like a widow at a will-reading, and that is why coopers make their barrels of white oak. As for the blue-flame test, methanol burns blue as well, with a flame so pale you can hardly see it in daylight. A blue flame tells you the stuff will burn. It does not tell you whether it will blind you. Make your cuts, and save your parlour tricks for the county fair.

The law is made of men, and men get thirsty, and a thirsty man values a clean cut more than a fine sermon. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.