Why Pittsfield, New Hampshire Distillers Petitioned Congress in 1862

Neighbors, a New Hampshire stillman can do nothing more dangerous than write a polite letter to Washington. In the summer of 1862 the cider-brandy men of Pittsfield did exactly that. I was in the room, and I kept my name off the paper.

The Summer of '62 in the Suncook Valley

Picture the town as it was. The cotton mill on the Suncook was running short, because the cotton had gone south with the rebellion. Half our young men were in blue with the New Hampshire regiments. Catamount Hill was green and the orchards hung heavy. Between here and Barnstead every second farmer kept a little copper pot in a back shed for turning windfall cider into apple brandy, as his grandfather had done and his grandfather before him. Nobody called that a crime. Here it was called autumn.

Then on the first day of July, 1862, Congress passed and the President signed the Internal Revenue Act. It was the size of a Bible and twice as threatening. It divided the Union into collection districts. Each district got a Collector and an Assessor appointed by the President himself, and under them came assistant assessors, who went town by town like a fever, poking into barns. For the first time in the memory of any man living, distilled spirits carried a federal tax: twenty cents on the gallon.

License, Ledger and the Proof Gallon

The twenty cents was no king's ransom. What made Pittsfield men tear their hair out was the rules. First came the license, bought from the Collector, with the fee graded by how much a man made. The law even gave a cheaper rate to the little apple and peach brandy men, which shows somebody in Washington had met a farmer once, though probably from the window of a railway car. Old Ezra Tilton of the Barnstead road was asked how many barrels he expected to make. He said that depended on the apples, the weather, the Lord and his wife. The clerk wrote down 'uncertain' and charged him as if it were certain.

Second came the books. A licensed distiller had to keep sworn accounts of the fruit or grain that went in and the spirit that came out, and return them to the government. Ezra cannot write his own name. He signs with an X that leans to the left like a drunk on a fence post, and the only accounts he ever kept were notches cut in his door frame.

Third, and worst, the duty was charged by the proof gallon, not the plain gallon. Since a government rule settled in '48, proof spirit in this country has meant spirit that is half alcohol by volume. Strong brandy counts as more than a gallon per gallon. Weak brandy counts as less, but you have still paid for every drop of alcohol in it and saved nothing but water. Hiram Drake never grasped this. He watered his brandy half again to cheat the government and cheated only his customers, a trade he had followed long before Mr. Lincoln. The assistant assessor floated a glass hydrometer in Hiram's barrel, read the stem, and charged him exactly what he would have owed anyway. Fourth, the same Act put stamp duties on deeds, contracts, bank checks and other legal papers. Washington taxed the liquor, then taxed the paper you recorded the liquor on.

A Petition Sealed with a Penny

A wronged Pittsfield man has three remedies. He can fight, and the war had used up our supply of that. He can hide, which is the old remedy and the one I prefer. Or, as a last and desperate measure, he can be polite. The First Amendment guarantees every citizen the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. So that September a dozen orchard men met in the back room of a store near the Turnpike, smelling of pipe smoke, horse and fear, and drew up a petition to Congress. I give it here as I remember it, so take it as true to the spirit and not as sworn record.

The petitioners called themselves loyal men who had sent 'their sons to the war, and their apples to the press, and both with the same full hearts.' They did 'not object to paying for the Union. They object to being made to understand how.' They asked for four things. First, that farm-sized stills run only on the farmer's own fruit be spared the license, or charged a fee proportioned to a washtub and not to a Philadelphia distillery. Second, that the duty be paid at the close of the season, when the brandy was sold. Third, that the assistant assessor shut the gate behind him, wipe his boots and refrain from drinking the evidence. Fourth, that someone explain the proof gallon in plain English, or failing that, with pictures.

Ezra signed with his mark. Hiram signed in a hand like a hen walked through ink. Josiah Batchelder signed, and so did two of the Fosses, who spell their name three different ways between them. At the bottom of the sheet I put no name at all. I pressed a copper large cent into a blob of red sealing wax the size of a silver dollar. Across Liberty's forehead I had stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H.

My reason was this. A petition from distillers is a list: a neat roll of every man in town who owns a still, written in his own hand. Josiah said a free man ought to sign his name to his grievance. I answered that a free man ought to stay free, that a name is a confession, and that no assessor in Merrimack County has yet hanged a coin. Washington did reply, after a fashion: a printed circular sent to every grumbler from Maine to Minnesota, thanking us for our patriotic interest. Josiah framed it. About the same week, a copy of our names reached the assistant assessor for this end of the county. Some clerk in Concord had turned our prayer into a hunting license.

The Assessor and the Bear

He went down that list like a fox down a henhouse roost. He licensed, gauged and wrote up every man on it, and drank a sample at every farm. At four in the afternoon he came up the Turnpike in a hired gig, carrying his ledger and a brass gauging rod near five feet long, marked off in inches. He said he suspected whoever owned the stamped cent. I told him a suspicion is not a signature. He stepped toward the woodpile and toward a black shape in the shade that he took for a heap of old buffalo robes. It was Barnaby, my bear.

The assessor swung the rod like a sword. Barnaby took it in his jaws as a gift and left four tooth marks clean through the brass. One swipe took the seat out of the man's britches, and he left down the Turnpike showing all of Pittsfield the moon in broad daylight. Barnaby ate the first nine pages of the dropped ledger, which were the Pittsfield pages. The government wanted my books kept under oath. I keep mine under the bear. Barnaby is a tall tale of this valley, and I want no letters from readers who chain bears to their woodsheds on my account.

Junior Vance on Paper and the Law

Mr. Junior Vance of Wilkes County, North Carolina, a runner in the Brushy Mountains, has had his own dealings with paper. In his country the preacher got up a petition to have a bad road surfaced. The runners signed it and so did two federal men, alternating down the page like a checkerboard. When the new road was laid, both sides cursed it, and nobody was pleased except the preacher and the man who sold the gravel. His mother once wrote her congressman asking that the revenue men be taught to shut a gate. She got back a printed letter and a signed picture of the congressman, which she hung in the privy. Junior also knew a man who nailed a federal liquor stamp to his still and thought it made him legal. The agents told him the stamp said he could sell liquor, not make it, and took their axes to his pot. When Junior was fined two hundred dollars, he paid it in eight hundred quarters, and the clerk had to count them by lamplight. As Junior put it, 'a man can't put you in jail for paying too honest.'

Apple Brandy at the Apparatus: Cider, Runs and Cuts

First, the plain law. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and what follows is history and education only. With that said, here is how the orchard men made the brandy they petitioned for, and how you, as a natural scientist at your copper, can understand it. Press the apples, windfalls included, but throw out the rotten ones. Put the sweet cider in clean barrels with the bung left loose or a cloth tied over it, because fermenting cider gives off gas and a sealed barrel can burst. Wild yeast will do the work, though a careful man adds a dose from a good batch. In about three weeks in a cool cellar you will have hard cider, a few parts in a hundred alcohol, sour and dry.

For the stripping run, fill the pot no more than three parts full so the cider cannot foam into the cap. Run it once, quickly, over a low fire, and catch everything that comes over. That is low wines: weak, cloudy and stinking. For the spirit run, put the low wines in a clean pot and run them slowly. The first trickle is the foreshots, which smell like a varnish shop on fire. Methanol, the wood spirit that blinds and kills, is thickest there. It boils at about one hundred and forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, against about one hundred and seventy-three for good spirit. It does not all come off at once, though. It smears on into the run behind, so throw away a generous measure of foreshots. Next come the heads, still sharp and smelling of solvent. Set them aside and never drink them. When the smell sweetens and the apple comes through, you are in the hearts. Catch them in a row of small jars so that a misjudged cut spoils a pint and not a gallon. Last come the tails, oily and smelling of wet dog. Keep them for the next run or throw them out. The foreshots never go back in.

Why copper? Cider vapour carries sulfur, and grain mash carries worse. Hot copper pulls that sulfur out of the vapour and holds it on its own surface, so what comes out of the worm smells sweet. The metal is changed so the spirit can come out clean, which is the nearest thing to true alchemy in my shop. That is why you keep the copper bright and scoured. Three commandments for safety. Never seal a still, or it will let go like a cannon. Use no lead anywhere. Keep your fire low and watch it, because more still-houses in this valley have burnt than were ever raided.

Hickory Ash, Oak Shavings and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro asked whether old-timers really 'used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads.' The oak shavings are half sense. Hot spirit in the doubler will pull tannin, colour and a woody flavour out of oak, a quick and crude version of what a barrel does in a year. But if bad heads went into the jar, they are still there, only wearing an oak coat. The hickory ash is plain foolishness. Hardwood ash leached with rainwater makes lye for soap, and putting it in the doubler is soap-making, not distilling. The only cure for bad heads is the cut.

Last, the blue-flame test. Tavern-keepers will light a spoonful of spirit and tell you a blue flame proves it pure. Wood spirit burns with a pale blue flame just as pretty as good spirit does, so the colour of the flame tells you nothing about safety. The word 'proof' itself, by one tale, comes from sailors and soldiers who wet gunpowder with their spirit ration and touched fire to it. If it lit, the spirit was proved; if it fizzled, the quartermaster had watered it. I offer that as a tale, not a sworn deposition.

The men of Pittsfield were wrong to sign their names and right to say their piece, and the law has changed many times since. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.