The Gunpowder and Grain Tax Stamp: Forging Revenue Stamps in 1860s New Hampshire
Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains how the adhesive revenue stamps and excise receipts of the Internal Revenue Bureau worked after 1862. He tells how his coin-stamping eye made him a judge of forged paper, why the only stamp he trusts is the one his own steel punch cuts, and how a Concord collector glued a joke Fort Wilkins receipt into his album as the genuine article. Wilkes County runner Junior Vance tells three new tax-stamp stories from the Brushy Mountains, and Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's voicemail about hickory ash and red oak shavings in the thump keg, then knocks down the old blue-flame test.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Settle your carcass down, you great flea-bitten sack of lard! I see you there chewing that envelope. Spit it out. That is a letter from the Collector of Internal Revenue, and I have not finished ignoring it yet.
♦ Bear grunt, wet chewing, a paper wad hitting the ground
Wilkins: Swallowed half. Barnaby, you are the only creature in Merrimack County who has eaten a federal document and not been charged with digesting it.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, rogues, widows, and any Concord deputy holding his ear to the stovepipe. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. The mill wheels on the Suncook have stopped for the night, Catamount Mountain is black against the sky, and I have a jar at my elbow and a punch beside my anvil. Tonight we talk about paper. Gummed paper, little engraved squares of it, with Washington looking out from every one like a man who has just been handed the bill. Revenue stamps, my friends, and the fine art of telling the true ones from the false.
♪ Theme fades under
Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow still, protected by U.S. Patent 10,561,960, is handcrafted in pure copper and waiting for you. See it at moonshinestill.com, or come down to the Fort Wilkins Showroom!
♦ Wax crackle swells, then settles
♪ Short banjo sting
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. The Gunpowder and Grain Tax Stamp.
Wilkins: Before the war a New Hampshire man could sign a deed, take out a mortgage, write a bank check, or sell a bottle of liver pills, and the government never smelled it. Then came 1862. Mr. Lincoln needed money for the Union, and Congress passed the great Revenue Act. It put duties on the whiskey, as we have jawed about before, but that was only the door of the barn. They taxed manufactured goods, gunpowder included. They licensed trades. And they laid on a schedule of stamp duties that reached into every desk drawer in the Republic.
Wilkins: They set up a Bureau of Internal Revenue and put George S. Boutwell of Massachusetts in charge as the first Commissioner. Mr. Boutwell put a stamp on everything but the outhouse, and I expect he has a clerk measuring that.
♦ Laughter from the jar, which is to say a glug
Wilkins: In the autumn of 'sixty-two the adhesive stamps went on sale. Little gummed squares and oblongs, printed by Butler and Carpenter of Philadelphia, most of them with General Washington's head in the middle, running from one penny up to two hundred dollars. Each one has its job printed right on its face. 'Bank Check.' 'Conveyance.' 'Proprietary,' for your patent medicines and matches. 'Playing Cards,' so even the sinners pay their share. 'Inland Exchange,' 'Lease,' 'Mortgage,' 'Express,' and on down the list like a hymnbook of misery.
Wilkins: Soon enough Washington saw that a farmer in Chichester could not tell a Conveyance stamp from a Certificate stamp if you held a pistol to his wife. So they ruled that most any stamp could do the job so long as the sum was right. Put two cents on a check and the bank is satisfied, whatever the little label says.
Wilkins: Now here is the law that matters. When you lick that stamp and press it down, you must cancel it. You write your initials and the date across its face in ink. G. G. W., the fourth of March, 'sixty-five, scrawled right across poor Washington's nose. That way it cannot be peeled up and used again. If a paper the law requires to be stamped goes without, a judge may throw it out as worthless, and they will fine you on top of it. Your deed is no deed. Your note is no note. You might as well have written your mortgage in snow on the Dover Road.
Wilkins: The patent-medicine men got a sweet arrangement. A match maker or a pill seller could pay a Philadelphia engraver to cut his own private die, with his own name and sometimes his own face on the stamp, and the government would knock a little discount off the stamps he bought. So there are stamps going round with some quack's whiskers on them where the President ought to be. I have pulled teeth from two of those men, and I tell you their stamps flatter them.
Wilkins: And the whiskey. A registered distiller deals with the assessor and the collector. A gauger comes with his rod and his book and measures the barrels, and the tax gets paid against receipts, ink and paper and signatures. Where there is paper there is money, and where there is money there is a man in a back room with a pot of paste, a sharp knife, and a pliable conscience. Which brings us to forging.
Wilkins: The crooks worked three tricks. One: washing. You take a used stamp, soak the ink of the cancellation out of it with a little acid, chloride of lime, or plain patience, dry it on the stove, and sell it again as new. That trick is so common the Bureau is fretting itself into fits over special inks and papers. Two: the plain counterfeit, a stamp printed by some rascal from a copied plate. Three: the whole false receipt, signature and seal and all. That is a federal crime, friends, with heavy fines and years in a cell, and the government hunts it harder than it hunts the moonshiner, because a moonshiner only cheats the Treasury, while a forger embarrasses it.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, long and low
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. He has never forged a thing in his life. He simply eats the evidence.
♪ Fiddle transition
♪ Banjo sting
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Legends, Outlaws, and a Stamp Agent Who Lost a Thumb.
Wilkins: Last October a stamp agent came up the turnpike from Concord. He was a pale fellow in a stovepipe hat, carrying a leather satchel of revenue stamps to sell to the storekeepers of Pittsfield and Barnstead. He stopped at Fort Wilkins and announced that my sales receipts for jars of 'tooth tonic' wanted stamping, and he would oblige me at a modest commission. He did not see Barnaby. Nobody sees Barnaby. Four hundred pounds of bear lies under my woodpile like a dropped buffalo robe until he decides otherwise.
Wilkins: This agent licked his fingers to peel a sheet of two-centers, licked them again for the gum, and leaned his hand on the very post where Barnaby's chain is staked. Now that stamp gum is sweet. It is made partly of dextrine and sugar of a sort. Barnaby came up out of the woodpile with a sound like a privy door blown off its hinges, took that man's hand in his mouth, and licked it. Licked it the way a boy licks a molasses spoon, slow, with his eyes half shut. The agent stood there white as a boiled shirt and whispered, 'Doctor. Doctor. Doctor.' And I said, 'Hold still, and he'll only take the paste.'
♦ Bear snort
Wilkins: He did not hold still. He yanked, and Barnaby bit down, and the end of that man's thumb came off clean at the first knuckle, like a fellow biting the end off a cigar. There was a pop, a wet crunch, and a scream that set the hounds howling in Loudon. Blood all over his cuffs, all over his satchel, all over three hundred dollars of the United States Treasury's finest paper. Barnaby chewed thoughtfully and spat out the thumbnail like a cherry stone. I keep it in a tin. I was a dentist before I was anything, so I sat the man down on my chopping block, poured raw spirit over the stump while he hollered, seared it, wrapped it in clean linen, and charged him nothing. He bled into his own satchel, which I reckon made it the only tax receipt in New Hampshire ever paid in full.
Wilkins: Now, why do I know so much about stamps? Because I am a stamper. You know my punch. G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. I strike it into copper cents and silver at this very anvil. When you spend your life putting letters into metal, you learn to read the work of other men's hands. Every engraver has a habit, the way every man has a walk. Mr. Butler and Mr. Carpenter's people cut a beautiful Washington. The lines of his cheek run fine and even. The lathe-work around the border, that tangle of tiny curving lines like frost on a window, is made by a geometric lathe, a machine no forger with a graver and a candle can match by hand.
Wilkins: A forger's Washington always looks drunk. The eyes wander. The hair looks like a wet dog lay on it. The frost-work goes muddy, with lines that run together like creek water in a thaw. The paper is wrong too. Too thick, too white, or with gum that shines like a pond on a sunny day where the honest gum is dull. And look to the edges. Some genuine stamps of that first printing were cut apart with scissors and some were perforated, because the printers changed horses partway across the river. But a forger who punches perforations by hand leaves holes that wander like a drunk walking the Suncook ice. Having met a few forgers, I say the picture is honest about the artist even if it lies about the President.
Wilkins: Folks ask why I never trusted a stamp I did not cut myself. I mean my own punch, the steel I hardened and filed at this forge. When I strike a coin, I know the hand, the heat, the hammer, and the man. A paper stamp passes through a printer, a clerk, an agent, a storekeeper, and maybe a washerwoman with a bottle of acid. I never trust a stamp I did not cut, for the same reason I never trust a molar I did not pull: I want to know where it has been.
Wilkins: Which brings me to the Concord collector. There is a gentleman in Concord, and I will call him Mr. Thorne because that is what he is. He collects stamps. It is the newest madness. The French have given it a name, 'philately,' made up just last year by a Monsieur Herpin, and the newspapers call the craze 'timbromania.' Mr. Thorne keeps his stamps under glass, his wife under lock, and his good sense in a drawer he has mislaid.
Wilkins: Now one evening I wrote out a receipt for a gentleman from Epsom who bought two jars, and for a lark I made it grand. 'Received of the bearer, two dollars, being the Internal Revenue of the Interior of Dr. Wilkins's Stomach, Fort Wilkins District.' I signed it with a flourish, and in place of a gummed stamp I struck my own punch right into the paper, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., pressed so deep you could read it with your thumb. A coin punch makes a handsome embossing on good rag paper.
Wilkins: That receipt passed from the Epsom man to his brother-in-law, from the brother-in-law to a tavern in Concord, and from the tavern into the soft pink hands of Mr. Thorne. He pasted it into his album between a genuine Bank Check and a Playing Cards stamp, and he wrote under it in his best copperplate, 'Embossed revenue impression, rare Western district variety.' He came all the way up Route 28 to ask if I had more, and he offered three dollars apiece.
♦ Wilkins slaps the bench
Wilkins: I told him, sir, that is not a revenue stamp, it is a joke with a hole punched in it. And he would not believe me! He said a man as clever as me must be protecting the value. So I told him the truth, the whole truth, and he paid me a dollar anyway to sign the back. A gentleman who will show you his stamp collection without being asked is the same breed as a man who drops his trousers to show you his hernia scar. I sold the man a joke, and he bought it as history.
♪ Fiddle sting
Wilkins: Now I have a guest tonight, come up the long road from the Brushy Mountains of North Carolina, a man who knows about tax-paid paper from the wrong side of it. He is a hauler of mountain spirit, the fastest hand on a crooked road. Junior Vance, pull up the nail keg and do not mind the bear.
Junior: Doctor, I've been chased by the law, by dogs, and by a preacher's wife with a shotgun, but I ain't never sat this close to a bear that was lookin' at me like a ham.
Wilkins: He is not looking at you like a ham, Junior. He is looking at your fingers like a stamp agent's. Tell me. Down in Wilkes County, does the law care about the little paper on the bottle?
Junior: Doctor, down home the legal bottle wears a strip stamp across the cap, a skinny little paper that says the tax got paid. Break the cap, you break the stamp. So the strip is everything. A bottle without it, the law figures it's ours. A bottle with it, they let it ride.
Wilkins: So a clever devil would want to keep that strip whole.
Junior: Yessir. There was a buyer in Charlotte, I won't say his name 'cause his mama's still alive, who'd take empty tax-paid bottles from a hotel bar, fill 'em with our corn, and glue the broke strips back down. Now he was cheap, so he didn't buy glue. He used sorghum molasses.
Wilkins: Oh no.
Junior: Oh yes. He had a whole shelf in the back of his store, forty bottles, lookin' legal as a Sunday hat. Then come a warm spell. A tax man walks in to buy cigars, and he sees a line of little black ants, Doctor, a column of 'em like Lee's army, marchin' up the wall, across the shelf, and onto every bottle that man had doctored. Didn't touch one honest bottle. Went straight for the sorghum.
Wilkins: The ants were better revenue men than the whole Bureau, and they worked for molasses.
Junior: That tax man said, 'Friend, I don't need a warrant, I got witnesses,' and he pointed at the ants.
♦ Wilkins guffaws, Barnaby grunts
Wilkins: Give me another. You have the look of a man with a sack full.
Junior: There was an old boy up past Moravian Falls who figured any stamp was a stamp. He went to the post office, bought him a sheet of three-cent postage stamps, and licked one on every jar. Deputy stops him, holds up a jar, says, 'What's this?' Old boy says, 'That's mailed, Deputy. It's got a federal stamp. It's under the protection of the United States Post Office.'
Wilkins: Bold as a rooster in a henhouse.
Junior: The deputy studied on it, nodded real slow, and said, 'Well, then I reckon I'm the post office tonight,' and he took every jar and said he'd deliver 'em himself. Never did say where.
Wilkins: A three-cent stamp on a jar of corn liquor is the most honest thing ever sent by mail. It promised to go somewhere, and it surely did. Down the deputy's throat.
Junior: And one more, Doctor, since it's about receipts. I got stopped one night on a dirt road below the Brushies, not by a sheriff but by a game warden, of all things. He was huntin' a man shinin' deer with a lantern, and he found me with a load and no story. He shines his light in and says, 'Son, you got a receipt for all this?' And I said, 'Yessir, I surely do.' Reached under the seat, pulled out a feed sack, tore off the back, and wrote right there on the steering wheel with a carpenter's pencil: 'Paid in full, one load of sweet feed. Signed, Uncle Sam, by his nephew.'
Wilkins: You did not.
Junior: Handed it to him. He read it twice, and he laughed so hard he had to set his lantern down and hold on to the fender. Said, 'Get on home, nephew, and tell your uncle I said hey.' Never looked in the back.
Wilkins: Junior, I have known Uncle Sam's real nephews. Some of them came up this turnpike with badges. You are better looking than any of them, and your handwriting is likely better too. That is the real secret of forged paper, friends. It is never the ink. It is the nerve of the man who hands it over.
Junior: Doctor, a straight face'll carry more liquor than a truck spring.
Wilkins: Write that on a feed sack and I will frame it. Junior Vance, thank you, and keep your fingers on your side of the chain.
Junior: Yessir. All ten of 'em, and I aim to keep it that way.
♦ Chain clinks, Barnaby huffs, disappointed
♪ Banjo bridge into ad
♪ Brisk medicine-show fanfare, tambourine and cornet
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♪ Fanfare button
Announcer: Moonshine Stills reminds you that distilling spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law. Mind your permits, and mind your fire.
♪ Fiddle returns, slow and warm
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the Craft. Gunpowder, Proof, and the Honest Cut.
Wilkins: Since we have spoken of gunpowder all night, let me tell you where 'proof' comes from, or where the old men say it comes from. They took a little gunpowder, poured the spirit over it, and put a match to it. If the powder still caught and burned, the spirit was 'proved' strong. If the spirit was so watery that it soaked the powder and it would not burn, the seller was a cheat and likely got a kick in the breeches. Our Treasury reckons proof spirit as half alcohol by volume, measured at sixty degrees by the thermometer. Gunpowder and whiskey taxed by the same law! That is fair, since in Barnstead on a Saturday night they produce the same result.
Wilkins: Now, the work. I am telling you how it was done in this valley, as history, and I will tell it straight, because a half-told recipe kills more men than a whole one. And remember, friends, making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law.
Wilkins: First the mash. Take cracked corn, coarse as chicken feed. For every bushel, the old Pittsfield men would add a good peck of malted barley, barley that has been sprouted and dried. The malt carries the enzymes that turn the starch in cooked corn into sugar the yeast can eat. Cook the corn in water until it goes thick as porridge. Let it cool down to the malt's working heat, stir in the malt, and let it stand and sweeten. Then cool it further, down to blood-warm, about the warmth of your wrist, before you pitch the yeast. Too hot, and you cook the yeast like a lobster in a pot, and you wait three days for a fermentation that died at birth.
Wilkins: When the working has stopped, the cap has fallen, the bubbling has gone quiet, and the wash tastes sour and dry instead of sweet, it is ready for copper. Strain the solids off if you are wise. Thick grain scorches on the bottom of the pot, and scorched mash tastes like a burnt church.
Wilkins: Why copper? Besides what we said in past evenings about copper eating up the stink, copper carries heat about five times better than iron. That heat runs through the pot bottom quick and even, without hot spots that scorch. And it runs out of the worm quick too, so your vapor turns back to liquid fast.
Wilkins: That worm, the coil sitting in a tub of water, must have cold water coming steady. If your worm tub warms up and you are dozing on the stool, the vapor goes straight through without condensing and comes out the end as an invisible, flammable fog drifting toward your firebox. That is how still-houses explode. Keep cold water flowing, keep your eye on the tub, and keep your fire well away from the spout.
Wilkins: And never, ever seal the thing tight. A still is a kettle, not a cannon. If the worm clogs with mash or ice and the pressure has nowhere to go, the pot will burst, scald you with boiling wash, and throw copper through the wall. I have seen a still lid knock a man's front teeth out, and I am the man who pulled what was left.
♦ Clink of small glass jars being lined up on a plank
Wilkins: Now, the cuts. Methanol, the wood spirit, the blinding poison, boils at about a hundred forty-eight degrees. Our good ethyl spirit boils at about a hundred seventy-three, and water at two hundred twelve. A fool hears those numbers and thinks he can read a thermometer and make his cuts by it. He cannot. In a pot everything comes over mixed, a little of each all through the run, the bad crowding up front. So you use your nose, your tongue on a few drops cut with water, and a generous hand with throwing out.
Wilkins: Here is the old way. Line up a row of small jars on a plank, twenty or thirty of them, numbered. Run slow on a low fire. Throw the first spill away, the foreshots, all of it, and be more generous than your purse wants. Then fill your jars one by one. The early ones smell sharp, like lamp spirit or the glue pot. That is heads, and it goes. The middle jars smell clean and sweet, and a drop rubbed between your palms smells of the grain. Those are the hearts. Then the smell turns. It goes flat, like wet wool and wet cardboard, and an oily slick shows on the surface. Those are the tails. Set them aside. Heads smell like the glue pot, tails smell like a wet dog in a Baptist's wool coat, and hearts smell like the reason a man keeps going to church to repent.
Wilkins: Let the jars air overnight with a cloth over them, and in the morning smell them again. You will move your cut a jar or two, because the nose lies when it is tired. That is honest work. Low fire, cold worm, a row of jars, and a man willing to pour some of his labor on the ground.
♪ Fiddle bridge
♪ Banjo sting
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, Slang, and the Call-In Line. We have a wax tape from a listener way down in Carolina. Let's play it.
♦ Telephone-cylinder hiss, needle drop
Cletus: Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Needle lifts, crackle
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller, from Wilkesboro, North Carolina! A fine name for a man whose uncle is chasing ashes. Hold on, Rabbit. I think better with a hammer.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There's a cent for you, Rabbit, stamped fresh. Now. Hickory ashes. Up here in New Hampshire, when my grandfather was young, this whole state ran on ashes. Men cleared the forest, burned the hardwood, soaked the ashes in water, and boiled the liquor down to potash and pearl ash, and they shipped it off to make soap and glass. That ash water is lye, Rabbit. Lye! It is caustic. It will eat the skin off your knuckles. Throw a shovel of hickory ash into a boiling thump keg and you are not cleaning out bad heads, you are halfway to making soap. And from what I hear of Wilkesboro, that would be no bad thing.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Second, red oak shavings. Here your uncle is standing near a true thing and pointing at the wrong end of it. Oak gives whiskey its color and its vanilla and its bite, yes. But it does that in a barrel, over months and years, the spirit soaking slowly in and out of the wood as summer heats and winter cools. Ten minutes in a boiling thumper gives you a little bitter sawdust tea and nothing else. Red oak shavings in a thump keg for ten minutes is like a Concord boy spending ten minutes in Sunday school and calling himself a bishop.
Wilkins: To give your uncle his due, some old hands did put a few apples or peaches into the thump keg for the flavor. That's seasoning, Rabbit, not doctoring. It changes the taste. It does not make a bad run safe. The heads come out the front, and the only thing that cleans them out is your hand pulling those jars away and pouring them on the ground.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now, while the anvil is warm, here is another myth: the blue flame. Every tavern loafer from here to the Merrimack will pour a spoonful of liquor on the bar, light it, and say, 'Burns blue, it's safe.' Pure moonshine on a spoon! Methanol, the very wood spirit that blinds a man, burns with a pale blue flame of its own, as pretty as a June sky. So the flame tells you nothing about whether the jar will kill you. The blue flame is a liar dressed in church colors. Your nose and your cuts are the only test that counts. And I have pulled teeth that told more truth about a man's drinking than any blue flame ever did.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Rabbit Miller, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, thank you for the call. I have struck four cents in your honor and I'm keeping three for postage. Tell your uncle to keep his ashes for the soap kettle and his oak for the barrel, and give him my regards and a slap on the back of the head.
♦ Barnaby grunts in what sounds like agreement
♪ Banjo tag
Announcer: A quick word before we close! The Flame-Flow still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, hammered in heavy-gauge pure copper. Order yours at moonshinestill.com, or see it shine at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28!
♪ Slow fiddle, theme warming in
Wilkins: That is our evening, neighbors. We have had stamps and forgers, a thumb in a tin, a column of Carolina ants doing the government's work, and a Concord gentleman with my joke glued in his album. If you want to learn the craft the honest way, the history and the copper, the cuts and the cautions and the law, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I teach it the way I pull a molar: quick, thorough, and with no nonsense about it not hurting. Ask at the Fort or write to me care of Pittsfield, and Barnaby will see your letter is not eaten. Mostly.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle deepens
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme closes with antique warmth, crackle fades out