Why the Two-Dollar Whiskey Tax Outlived the Civil War

The Bells Ring, and the Ledgers Stay Open

In April of this year, sixty-five, word came up the Suncook Valley Turnpike from Concord that General Lee had given up his sword at Appomattox Court House. The Pittsfield church bell rang so long and so hard that the sexton put his shoulder out, and I set it for him on the meetinghouse steps for a shilling and a hymnal. Men fired muskets into the air, and one deacon got drunk enough to kiss his own mule and was forgiven by both parties. Days later the black crepe went up, for Mr. Lincoln had been shot dead in a theater. A nation does not often get its best news and its worst inside one week.

That spring every jug-maker from the Suncook to the Pemigewasset said the same thing. The war was done, so the war tax would be done too. The two-dollar levy on every gallon would wither like a dead man's thumbnail. Friends, a tax collector is like a tick on a hound: the hunt ends and he stays on for supper. Washington came out of the war owing something near two and three-quarter thousand million dollars, and a government that owes that much does not let go of a good tax. It means to collect that debt one jar at a time from the Suncook Valley.

The Arithmetic of a Two-Dollar Gallon

So the machinery stays. There is a federal collector for the district and a federal assessor, and under them a swarm of assistant assessors crawling from town to town with ledgers and pencils. A lawful distiller must register, give bond, keep his books open, and let these fellows poke about his still-house like a doctor examining a prize bull.

Now work the sum as a man of science would. A gallon of good spirit costs a careful man a fraction of a dollar in grain, wood, water and sweat. The tax upon it is two whole dollars. A two-dollar tax on a quarter-dollar spirit makes a moonshiner of every honest man and an honest man of nobody. Dodging pays so well that what Washington actually collects on spirits comes up short of what the Treasury men figured. Put a ham on a low shelf, tell the dog it is taxed, and see how much ham you have in the morning.

The informer is worse than the assessor, for the revenue laws can pay a man a share of the fines and property seized from his neighbor. The fellow you lent your ox to in the drought of sixty-four may now be counting your woodsmoke from his attic window. Meanwhile the boys are walking home up the turnpike from the cars at Concord. Some come home whole, some come home with an empty sleeve, and some do not come home at all, and I will not joke about that. Those who came back learned in the camps how to scrounge a copper kettle off a burned plantation and how to hate a man with a ledger. The government has trained up an army of first-class tax dodgers, and now it wonders why its receipts are short.

A Gauging Rod, a Tent, and a Bear

In July came Mr. Thaddeus Pruitt, assistant assessor out of Concord, with a neck like a goose pulled through a knothole. He carried a gauging rod, which is a long, skinny stick with a brass ferrule, used for sounding a vessel and figuring how many gallons it holds. I told him my still-house was a smoke-house for hams. He saw copper shining through the log window and, rather than ask to come in like a Christian, poked his rod through it to tap my pot. That is Barnaby's window, and my bear counts anything that comes through it as a gift from Providence.

Barnaby clamped onto the rod. Pruitt would not let go of government property, so the bear took the rod, the sleeve and a fair strip of hide off the forearm. I sat the man on my chopping block, washed the wound with clean water and closed it with silk thread and a darning needle, nine stitches in all. I charged him a dollar, and he wrote it in his ledger as tax collected. It is the only revenue Washington has ever got out of Fort Wilkins. Barnaby swallowed the brass ferrule whole, and on the Thursday it came out the far end, polished brighter than a deacon's conscience. I stamped it G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. It hangs over my door, and Pruitt has never come back for it.

This summer the county posted Deputy Orrin Fogg in a canvas tent across the turnpike, with a spyglass trained on my chimney. I sent him a pie every afternoon. He ate thirty-one of them in three weeks and never found the still. On the twenty-second night Barnaby slipped his collar. A chain does not open itself, and I will say no more before the sheriff. He took the tent down with one swipe and ate a good part of it, pegs and all. Fogg woke in his drawers with four hundred pounds of bear licking a blueberry pie tin clean off his chest, and he ran the six miles to Epsom in the dark.

News of the Blockaders

Miss Clara Higgins, an herbalist from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, came all that long way to my table. She says the revenue men in her country come thicker than chiggers in July. For four years Confederate officers hunted stills for the army's grain, and now Federal men hunt them for the Federal tax. Her mountain folk had watched the Yankee ships patrol the Southern coast, and so they now call the stuff blockade whiskey and the men who make it blockaders.

Her great-uncle Absalom walked home from Appomattox. Before he kissed his wife he took a spade to the hog lot, where in sixty-one he had buried his still cap to keep it from the officers who were collecting copper. Four years of rooting hogs had left it dented all over and green as a frog. He also kept his cavalry bugle as the hollow's alarm: one call for a revenue man, two for the circuit preacher. The preacher cleared the hollow faster, because he took a collection, a confession and the last of the pie, and he stayed three days.

Her grandmother once buried kegs of apple brandy in the family burying ground under a fieldstone scratched 'Uncle Jubal, Gone to Glory, 1863.' There never was a Jubal. The revenue man, a Northern boy who had seen plenty of fresh graves in the war, took off his hat and prayed over him aloud. When the kegs were dug up that fall, after resting in the cool, dark ground, it was the best brandy she ever made. Another time her cousin Lem handed a revenue man a hard green persimmon. The man's face drew up like a drawstring purse and he could not read his warrant aloud, and his deputy could not read at all. To this day the hollow calls a worthless paper a 'pucker warrant.'

Fruit, Fire and the Cuts

Making spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law of the United States. What follows is history and instruction. Miss Clara's first lesson is that fruit is not grain. Apples, peaches and persimmons are full of pectin, and as fruit ferments that pectin breaks down into more wood spirit than a corn mash will ever give. In her hollow, brandy men who got greedy with their cuts went blind or mad, or went into the ground in earnest.

To run brandy from cider the old New England way, conduct the experiment thus. Press sound apples with no rot or mold, and let the juice work in a clean cask somewhere warm and airy until it stops bubbling and goes dry. That takes weeks, not days, and gives a weak wash of a few parts in a hundred spirit. Charge the pot no more than three-quarters full, or a foaming charge will boil up into the cap and down the arm. If solids are present, keep the fire gentle or stir, or the run will scorch and taste like a burned church. Bring the heat up slowly, and keep the worm tub full of cold water so the vapour does not slip through as an invisible ghost of spirit. Spirit vapour is heavier than air and pools in low places. Keep fire under the pot and nowhere else, keep a wet sack and two buckets of water by the door, and never walk away from a running still.

The cuts are the whole art. The foreshots come first, sharp as solvent and heavy with wood spirit, and they go in the ash bucket, never down a throat. The heads follow, smelling of varnish and green apples. With fruit, throw away more of them than you think you should, and then a little more. Clara's grandmother rubbed a drop on the back of her hand and smelled it once it had dried, and she never tasted the early jars: 'The devil drinks first, and he drinks alone.' Then come the hearts, sweet and round and smelling of the orchard, and those you keep. The tails come last, oily and dull as a wet dog, and they are set aside for the next charge. Copper does its best work where the vapour touches it, so a cap and worm of heavy copper are worth more than a pretty pot with a cheap tin pipe.

Some make applejack by freezing their cider and pulling off the ice. That throws out nothing but water. Every drop of wood spirit and fusel oil stays behind, only more of it per swallow. As Miss Clara put it, 'There ain't no cuts in a frozen barrel.'

Ashes, Red Oak and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg will clean out bad heads. They will not. Wood ash soaked in water makes lye, the caustic a farm wife boils with fat to make soap. Put it in your doubler and the heads boil off the same as before, and any lye that slops over leaves soap in your jar, or worse. Red oak is so porous that no cooper will make a whiskey barrel of it. In a hot doubler its shavings give up tannin, colour and bitterness, which is an old trick for faking cask age, but the heads still come over early. The only cure is your own hand on the jar.

Last comes the blue-flame test, which has killed men. Wood spirit burns with a pale blue flame just as pretty as good spirit, so the saucer cannot tell you which one you have. All it proves is that your spirit is strong enough to burn. The war is over, but the deputies stay. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.