The Tax Man Cometh
Dr. Wilkins explains how the Revenue Act of 1862 sent assessors and collectors with ledgers into rural Granite State towns, taxing everything from carriages to billiard tables, and how neighbors answered a government that suddenly wanted an accounting of their trades. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells three new tales of assessors and their tape-measures and brass scales, and Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's call-in question about hickory ashes in the thump keg with true stories, coin-stamping, and a roast of the uncle.
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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: Settle down, Barnaby, you great hairy tax-dodger. Settle, I say. Mind your chain and mind your manners, there are listeners present and one of them may be a Methodist.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, good evening, and welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I am your host, a tooth-puller by trade, a blacksmith by habit, and a philosopher by the grace of a good fire and a better jar. Tonight we speak of the one thing no man in the Granite State could escape, not by cellar, not by woodpile, not by marrying well: the tax man cometh.
Announcer: A quick word, friends! If you appreciate honest American craftsmanship, you want the Flame-Flow still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, hand-built of heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper. Visit moonshinestill.com, that is moonshinestill.com, or stop by the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield. Built for essential oils, herbal tinctures, and demonstration of the distiller's art!
♦ Wooden stool scraping on log floor, a ledger book slapped onto a table
Wilkins: Segment one, the history, and I will give it to you straight with the sharp edges left on. In the summer of 1862, with the Union bleeding money like a pulled molar bleeds blood, President Lincoln signed the Revenue Act. It created a brand-new creature called the Bureau of Internal Revenue, with a Commissioner at the top, and it carved the loyal states into collection districts. Each district got two men. Mark that, because it is cleverer than it sounds. One man was the assessor and one was the collector. The assessor counted what you owned and what you did. The collector came after with his hat out. The Bureau kept the offices apart so that no one fellow got to both count your pennies and pocket them. It is the only sensible wall Washington ever built, and they built it between two clerks.
♦ Pipe knocked against a boot heel
Wilkins: Now, you may think the tax stopped at whiskey. Friends, whiskey was the cherry on the pie. The Act reached into everything. It laid licenses on trades and professions, apothecaries, butchers, tavern keepers, pawnbrokers, and yes, dentists, which is where I came in, for a man who pulls teeth is a man the government wishes to know by name. It taxed manufactured goods, carriages, billiard tables, gold and silver plate, and it demanded little paper stamps on deeds, notes, contracts, playing cards, and newspapers. A deed without its stamp was not worth the ink, they said, and a court could turn it away. Imagine that. A man could own forty acres of Suncook Valley hillside and not prove it for want of a postage-sized scrap of colored paper. And there came, with the same Act, the first federal income tax, a modest slice of any man's yearly earnings over a set exemption. A man's income, mind you, which until then he had shared with his wife, his creditors, and the Lord.
♦ Heavy boots crossing a plank floor, a door creaking
Wilkins: Now picture the reaction in a Pittsfield kitchen. For a hundred years these folk had paid the town, the county, and the parson, and knew each by face. Suddenly a stranger in a good coat arrives with a ledger and asks what you earn, what you make, what you own, and whether your wagon has springs. Neighbors reacted as New Englanders always have. Some went quiet and counted twice. Some went loud and counted not at all. Some invited the assessor to supper and served him a very small supper. And the assessor published his lists, mind, so your neighbor could read what you owned, and you could read his, and nothing ever did more to improve a man's interest in his neighbor's carriage. If you thought yourself overcharged, you had a short window to appeal, and a town hall during an appeal hearing had all the calm dignity of a hen house with a fox in the rafters and the farmer holding the shotgun.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle swells, a bell chimes twice
Wilkins: Segment two, the legends and the runners, and we have a guest who knows the metal side of this tale better than any man living. He built the pot you hear dripping in the corner. Silas McAllister, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Silas: Glad to be here, Doctor. Mind the bear's chain on my way in, if you don't mind.
Wilkins: Barnaby minds nobody's chain but mine. Silas, you come from a long line of men who hammer copper and have been counted, measured, and taxed for it. Give us the first story.
Silas: Well, my grandfather had a shop about the size of a good barn, and an assessor came through one spring with a surveyor's tape. He measured that shop floor from wall to wall and charged the old man for every foot of it as manufacturing space. Then he found out Grandfather had rented a corner of that same floor to a harness-maker, and the assessor said the harness-maker's feet were his own taxable feet, and Grandfather said the floor was his and the feet were borrowed. They argued over whose feet were whose for two winters, Doctor. In the end the town clerk settled it by drawing a chalk line down the middle, and the harness-maker was forbidden by law to step over it without leave.
Wilkins: Two winters of arguing over feet. And I thought my arrests were tedious.
♦ Laughter, a stool creaks
Silas: Second story. Years back, I was repairing a wall in an old Concord shop, and between two boards I found an assessor's field notebook, leather cover gone soft as a glove. Tidy handwriting. And in the margin beside the name of a coppersmith, he had written, and I am quoting from memory, 'coppersmith refused to be counted; counted him anyway; he is very dented.'
Wilkins: He is very dented. That should be carved over the door of every smithy in New England.
Silas: The man did not say who dented him, nor whether it was the smith or the assessor who did the denting. I like to think it was the pot.
Wilkins: Third and last, and make it a good one.
Silas: A collector once came to our shop to weigh the stock of copper on a brass counter-scale he had carried in his wagon, to figure the duty. My grandfather picked up that whole scale, set it on the anvil, and struck the pan with a small hammer. It rang like a church bell. He kept ringing it, steady, until the collector could not hear himself think, much less add. The man finally gave up, took a copper pot lid in lieu of a receipt, and left. That lid hangs on the wall of the shop to this day, framed, with the date scratched on the back.
Wilkins: A pot lid for a receipt. If only the Bureau had accepted the same from me. Silas McAllister, ladies and gentlemen, hammered and honest.
♦ Stool scraping, a short round of applause on a wooden floor
♪ Banjo sting, bright and brassy
Announcer: Gather round, gentlemen and gentlewomen, and hear the news of the age! Have you a kitchen, a barn, a workshop, a wish for pure copper craftsmanship that will outlast the Republic? Then step right up to meet the Flame-Flow still from Moonshine Stills, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! Hand-built from heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, with precision CNC-machined brass unions, engineered to maximize convective circulation and deliver unmatched purity for essential oils, herbal tinctures, and traditional distillation demonstrations! No scrap radiators, no lead solder, no shortcuts, only honest copper that conducts heat like a prayer! Stop by the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, run your thumb over the seams, and see for yourself! Or order direct at moonshinestill.com, that is moonshinestill.com! The Flame-Flow still, nine hundred ninety-nine... no, friends, eight hundred ninety-nine dollars, and not a dollar more! Remember, moonshinestill.com or the showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield! Every drop of progress begins with good copper!
♦ A copper pot struck once with a mallet, clear ringing tone
Wilkins: Segment three, copper and the craft. Let me walk you through the still-house, for what is a tax on spirits if you do not know what the spirits are? Start with the mash. Cooked cracked corn and water, cooled and set to work with yeast. It ferments for several days, giving off carbon dioxide, which will creep along the floor of a closed room and has killed careless men, so keep a window open and a lamp high. When it has worked down to a low-strength wash of a few percent alcohol, it goes into the pot. The still concentrates it. Now, the cuts, which is the whole art. The first thing off the still is the foreshots, then the heads, which carry methanol and harsh volatiles, and these are thrown away, never drunk, no matter how thirsty the man or how clever his uncle. Then come the hearts, the sweet center of the run, which a careful maker keeps. Last come the tails, oily and heavy, set aside or sent back through. Copper does a finer job than iron or tin because it reacts with the sulfur compounds in the vapor and holds them back, so that the rotten-egg stink stays on the metal and not in the jar. That is why you scrub the copper bright after every run and never let the green crust flake into a finished product. And the joints, friends, the joints: silver solder and honest unions, never lead, never a salvaged radiator, for lead is a poison that will sicken or kill a man. And mind the fire. Alcohol vapor is flammable, and a leaking still near an open flame has burned many a still-house to the sills. A still that is leaking is a still that is on its way to being a bonfire.
♦ Metal pot lid clatters, a copper tube tapped
Wilkins: And remember, what I describe is for history and instruction. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal under United States law, and everything on this program is for historical and educational purposes only. I say that for the law and for you, and I have been arrested twice for ignoring it, so take my word as that of a man who learned the hard way.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a cough, the slap of a postcard on a table
Wilkins: Segment four. The postcard and the voicemail. We have a tape from Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Let's hear it.
♦ Telephone line crackle, a tinny recorded voice
Wilkins: He asks: '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?'
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Rabbit, my friend, I love your uncle, I have never met him, and I would pull his teeth for free to prove it. But here is the truth. Hickory charcoal and oak charcoal do adsorb some harsh compounds. A finished spirit run slowly through a bed of good hardwood charcoal can lose a bit of its bite. That much is real, and old distillers knew it. But raw ashes or green shavings tossed into a boiling thump keg or a pot charge do nothing to strip out methanol. Methanol boils off in the foreshots and heads, and the only protection a man has is to throw those away. A thump keg is a second vessel that redistills the vapor and adds strength, but it is not a filter, and it cannot make a bad cut good. Your uncle's ashes in the thump keg are like a banker's flower in his lapel: they look respectable and do nothing about the rot underneath. Now I knew a fellow in Barnstead who swore by white-oak shavings, and he swore by them right up until the day he went to the doctor with a headache that had lasted a week, and the doctor said, 'sir, it is not the oak.'
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin again
Wilkins: That is the sound of G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., going onto a copper cent, as a seal on that bit of wisdom. Rabbit, God bless you and the folks of Wilkesboro, and give my regards to your uncle, and tell him throw out the heads, not the ashes.
♦ Bear grunt outside the window, chain clinking
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees with me, and he has never been wrong about a ham.
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! When you want real copper craftsmanship, the Flame-Flow still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, is waiting at moonshinestill.com. That is moonshinestill.com, or the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield!
♪ Parlor banjo and fiddle theme, soft and warm
Wilkins: And before we close, a word about the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. If you wish to learn the craft of copper, the cuts, the careful hand and the clean fire, come to Fort Wilkins and learn it from a man who has been arrested for it twice and learned something both times. Details at the showroom on Route 28. And remember, this is for history and instruction, and the law is the law, and Barnaby does not accept summonses.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar