The Stamp Act of Whiskey: Reading an 1862 Internal Revenue License Like a Lawyer
Dr. G. G. Wilkins reads the license sections of Lincoln's 1862 Internal Revenue Act out loud, looking for loopholes. He covers who had to pay (dentists, liquor dealers, peddlers, jugglers), why paper without a stamp was no good in court, and why he claims a dentist with a still owes two licenses or none. He also tells the gory story of the assessor's clerk who tried to read the license Wilkins nailed to Barnaby's collar. Blue Ridge herbalist Clara Higgins explains why Virginia makers never saw a Union license during the war, and tells stories about a copper pot buried in a family graveyard, a widow who rented out a dipper, and the birth of the word 'blockade' for untaxed liquor. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro asks about hickory ash and red oak in the thump keg, and the episode ends by debunking the 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. That is not a revenue man, that is the wind, and the wind pays no taxes either, so you two ought to get along. Lie down. Lie DOWN, you four-hundred-pound sack of grievances, or I will sell your hide to a Concord lawyer for a sleigh robe and he will sit on you every Sunday.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen mud, a heavy body thumps against the log wall
Wilkins: There. He's sulking. He sulks like a widow at a will-reading, all groans and side-eyes. Fetch the banjo, boys.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, good neighbors, and whatever sinners are listening behind the barn. Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. The coals are banked, the copper is bright, and the bear is only half awake, which is the safest he gets. I'm Dr. George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, coin-stamper, and two-time guest of the Merrimack County sheriff.
Wilkins: Tonight's sermon is titled The Stamp Act of Whiskey: Reading an 1862 Internal Revenue License Like a Lawyer. On my workbench, pinned under a horseshoe and a jar of something clear enough to read through, I have a federal license. We are going to read it like a lawyer: slowly, suspiciously, and billing somebody for it.
♪ Theme fades under a crackle
Announcer: A quick word from our friends at Moonshine Stills! The Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Alembic is pure spun copper, small enough for a parlor table and handsome enough for a king's apothecary. See it today at moonshinestill.com! That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a log settles in the stove
Wilkins: Segment the first: the history. On the first day of July, 1862, with the Union bleeding money faster than a stuck hog bleeds into a scalding barrel, President Lincoln signed the Internal Revenue Act. It made a new office, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, and the first man to hold it was George S. Boutwell of Massachusetts. Massachusetts! Asking a Massachusetts man to run the revenue is like hiring a fox to count hens and then charging the hens for his lantern oil.
Wilkins: The Act carved the country into collection districts and turned loose a pack of assessors and collectors. Each one carried a pencil, a ledger, and a nose like a hound's for any man with a dollar he hadn't confessed to. Their business was selling licenses and collecting duties, and they treated both the way a tooth-key treats a molar: twist till something gives.
Wilkins: So, the fine print. The license section is a list of practically every trade that ever made an honest dollar, and several that never did. Bankers. Auctioneers. Apothecaries. Brewers, rectifiers, distillers. Retail dealers in liquor and wholesale dealers in liquor. Horse dealers. Billiard rooms and bowling alleys. Peddlers. Jugglers. Circuses. And right there in the same company, physicians, surgeons, and dentists, at ten dollars a head. The government put the dentist and the juggler on the same page of the schedule. I take offense at that, because the juggler drops less.
♦ Paper rustles; Wilkins taps it with a knuckle
Wilkins: Look at the peddlers, now. They were licensed in classes by how they traveled: on foot, with one horse, or with two horses or more, and the fee went up with the horses. So I went down to the assessor and asked what class a peddler would be in if he traveled with one bear. He asked what the bear pulled. I said mostly deputies. He would not license Barnaby as a horse. He said no horse he ever met had eaten a harness and the man holding it. I said he hadn't met the right horses.
Wilkins: Then the liquor men. Retail and wholesale were separated by how much you sold at one time, and by my reading retail meant under three gallons. The wholesale license cost a good deal more. So, says the lawyer in me, what about a man who sells exactly three gallons and not a thimble less? Any man who wants less can bring a friend with a thirst. Three gallons is more than most Pittsfield men can carry home sober, and that's not my problem. I am a merchant, not a nursemaid.
Wilkins: Now, a distiller paid his license and then also paid the duty on every gallon he made. The first duty under the 1862 Act was twenty cents a gallon. I won't preach on how high it climbed after that, because I preached that sermon already and Barnaby slept through it. Tonight is about the paper: the license, and the little stamps that came with it.
Wilkins: Starting the first of October, 1862, the Act put stamp duties on paper and goods. Two cents on a bank check. Stamps on deeds, on playing cards, and on patent medicines, every bottle of Dr. So-and-So's Celebrated Liver Invigorator. Here's the part a lawyer licks his lips over. A paper that needed a stamp and didn't have one could be declared invalid and kept out of evidence in court. Your deed, your note, your contract, worthless as a eunuch at a barn dance. A paper without a stamp is like a husband without a ring: the courts won't recognize him and his creditors won't leave him alone.
Wilkins: What did it cost a man to trade without his license? A fine on top of the tax he already owed, and for some offenses the Act allowed prison. And the license was a narrow thing. It covered the person named on it, at the place named on it, for one year. It was no passport to sell up and down the turnpike like a tinker. Write down Main Street and it doesn't follow you to the back pasture.
Wilkins: Which is why, when the assessor asked where my place of business was, I said Fort Wilkins. He asked how far Fort Wilkins extended. I said, sir, Fort Wilkins extends as far as Fort Wilkins needs to extend. That covers the shop, the still-house, the woodlot, both sides of the brook, and any place I happen to be standing with a jug. He wrote 'Pittsfield' and underlined it twice. That's a man with no poetry in him.
♦ Bear grunt, chain rattle
Wilkins: Now, the law said a license was to be posted where an inspector could see it. So I posted mine where an inspector could see it. I nailed it to a cedar shingle and hung the shingle on Barnaby's collar. I never said he could read it with all ten fingers.
Wilkins: Here is what happened, and you squeamish folk can stick your fingers in your ears, or better yet count them while you still have them. Last spring a deputy assessor's clerk came up from Concord. A narrow little stamp-licker with spectacles and a mustache like a dead caterpillar. He wanted to see my posted license. I pointed at the bear. He went pale as a boiled turnip. But he was a man of the law, so he crept up on Barnaby, reached out real dainty to tilt the shingle toward the light, and squinted at the print.
Wilkins: Barnaby was asleep in the mud the way a stone is asleep in a field. He opened one eye. Just the one. Then he turned his head about as fast as you'd swat a horsefly, and took that clerk's first two fingers into his mouth the way a boy takes a candy stick. You know the sound a green radish makes when you yank it out of wet ground? That sound, but wetter, with a squeal on top like a pig through a gate. The clerk sat down hard in the slush and held up his hand. Thumb, ring finger, little finger, and two red stumps spurting like a cider press with the screw cranked down. He sprayed the snow pink for three yards and fainted onto his own ledger.
Wilkins: I packed the stumps with lint and cobweb and a splash of my best, tied them off with waxed thread from my tooth kit, and poured the rest of the jar into him till he stopped hollering for his mother. Barnaby licked his chops like a deacon after the communion wine and went back to sleep with a government ring still somewhere in his innards. We never did find that ring, and I have looked, in places a man shouldn't have to look.
Wilkins: The clerk left that day with eight fingers and a new respect for posted notices, and his ledgers have leaned to the left ever since. He did report that my license was properly displayed. Which it was.
♪ Short fiddle sting
Wilkins: So that brings me to the riddle in tonight's handbill. Why should a dentist with a still hold two licenses, or in my case, arguably none? Two, says the plain reader: ten dollars as a dentist, and the distiller's license on top, and a retail paper if he sells a dram over the counter. Two at the least, maybe three, and a man starts to feel like a pincushion at a sewing circle.
Wilkins: But read it like a lawyer and the ground goes soft. The license is for a man carrying on a business, and a business means receipts. My dental receipts come in eggs, bear grease, one-legged chickens, and copper cents I stamped myself at that anvil. So by my reading I have no receipts, only groceries and advertising. If my counterstamped cents are money, then I'm a mint. If they're advertising, I'm a newspaper. Trouble is, the government taxes both, damn their thoroughness.
Wilkins: And the still? I told the assessor its first duty is medical. A man about to lose a molar wants courage, and I make the courage. He said making the courage was distilling, and pouring it into a patient was retailing. I said putting it in his mouth was dentistry. Then he asked to inspect my private parts of the apparatus, and I told him the worm was coiled and shy and does not perform for strangers. He wrote me down for both licenses. I wrote him down for a tooth that's going to ache by Thanksgiving, and I'm never wrong about teeth.
♪ Banjo bridge with antique warmth
Wilkins: Segment the second: legends, outlaws, and runners. Tonight I have a guest who came up the long road from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, through mud and mountains and the dining car of a train I won't name, because they still owe me for a pie. She is an herbalist and a historian of the old mountain words for liquor. Miss Clara Higgins, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Clara: Well, thank you kindly, Doctor. I do believe that bear out yonder looked at me like I was a ham with a bonnet on.
Wilkins: He looks at everybody that way. He looked at the Methodist circuit rider that way and the man never rode the Pittsfield circuit again. Clara, the last time a Virginian came to New Hampshire he came with a musket, and you came with better manners and a stronger bottle.
Clara: Oh, I'll take that, Doctor. And speaking of muskets, here's what your license papers miss about my country. In '62, when Mr. Lincoln's assessors were licking pencils up here, our mountain folks never saw one. Not a single Union assessor rode into the Blue Ridge, because it was Confederate country. The Act couldn't touch us till the shooting stopped.
Wilkins: So you were free as birds.
Clara: Free as a bird in a cookpot. The Confederate legislatures, Virginia right along with them, clamped down on distilling grain, because they needed every ear of corn for soldiers and for supper. And the Confederacy wanted copper the way a drowning man wants air. Copper for cannon, copper for percussion caps. Their agents went after it anywhere they could find it, and a mountain still is a mighty lot of copper sitting by a creek.
Wilkins: So a Confederate copper agent was a man who'd steal your pot to make a cannon to shoot at the fellow who wanted to tax the pot. Either way your pot was going to war.
Clara: That's the size of it. Which brings me to my great-great-uncle Absalom down in Patrick County. When word came that the copper men were riding up the hollow, he hauled his pot up to the family burying ground in the dark of the moon, dug a proper grave, and laid it in. Then he whittled a wooden marker that said 'Here Lies Old Faithful, Taken Too Soon.'
Wilkins: Ha! A Christian burial for a pot!
Clara: Better than that. His own mother didn't know what Old Faithful was, and nobody had the heart to tell her. For three years that sweet old woman carried laurel and wild violets up the hill every Sunday and stood there weeping over his still. The copper agents rode right by, took their hats off, and said 'sorry for your loss, ma'am.'
Wilkins: Clara, that's the most beautiful lie I've heard since my own wedding vows. And when the war was over?
Clara: In '66 the federal men finally came up our way, licenses and stamps and all, the very papers you're reading tonight. Uncle Absalom figured he'd make peace. He'd dig up Old Faithful and brew the assessor a gift of persimmon brandy, sweeten him up. So he dug down, lifted the lid, and found a family of ground squirrels living inside, fat as butter, with a nest of corn shucks and his granny's lost thimble.
Wilkins: Ground squirrels paying rent in a still. That's the only honest tenancy that ever happened in a whiskey vessel.
Clara: That's just what he said. He told the assessor the squirrels had been paying rent the whole time, so the pot was a boarding house and should be taxed as such. The man laughed so hard he forgot to write anything down.
♦ Wilkins slaps the workbench, jars clink
Wilkins: Now tell me about these words of yours. You mountain folk don't call it whiskey, I'm told. You call it a dozen things, all of them lies.
Clara: Every one of them true, Doctor. You've heard tanglefoot, I expect.
Wilkins: Every soldier in the Granite regiments came home saying tanglefoot. And Oh-be-joyful. Our boys from the Fifth New Hampshire called a canteen of it Oh-be-joyful, and they weren't joyful long.
Clara: That's soldier talk, both sides of the line. And forty-rod, for liquor so mean they said it'd kill a man at forty rods. But the word my grandmother loved best was 'blockade.' Blockade liquor. It comes from the war, from Mr. Lincoln's ships shutting up the southern ports. Folks got to calling anything sneaked past the law blockade goods, and in the mountains it stuck to the untaxed whiskey like a tick on a hound. When a man in our hollow says 'blockade,' he means liquor that never met a stamp.
Wilkins: So the Union Navy named your moonshine. That's the first useful thing the Navy ever did for a mountain man.
Clara: Granny said you could tell which war, which road, and which creek a family came from by what they called their liquor. Bust-head down one ridge. Who-hit-John up another. Her people said 'blockade,' and that told you they'd lived through the war in a hard place and come out the far side stubborn.
Wilkins: Now, Clara, my handbill promises enterprising citizens finding gaps in the license. Did any of your people read the law like a lawyer?
Clara: Oh Lord, Aunt Tildy. Floyd County, a widow woman, sharp as a briar. After the war a federal assessor told her plain: sell one more drop of persimmon brandy without a retail license and he'd fine her into the poorhouse. So she quit selling it.
Wilkins: That doesn't sound like a Virginian.
Clara: Hold on, now. She hung a tin dipper on a nail by her spring and charged five cents for the rent of the dipper. The brandy, she gave away, free as Christian charity, in a crock under the springhouse floor. When the assessor came back steaming, she put her hands on her hips and said, 'Sir, I sell no liquor. I rent a cup. If the United States has a tax on cups, show me the page.'
Wilkins: Renting the dipper and giving away the brandy is the most lawyerly thing a Virginian ever did, and Virginia produced Thomas Jefferson. Did he find the page?
Clara: He searched that book from front to back, licking his finger every page, and there was no cup tax. He paid his five cents, drank his free brandy, and said it was the most expensive cup of nothing he ever had. He came back every month after.
Wilkins: God bless Aunt Tildy. Was there ever a man who posted his license somewhere a man of the law would never look?
Clara: There was a Franklin County applejack man, one of my grandmother's cousins, who did buy his license, being a careful sort. But he didn't care to have it nailed up where folks could see his business. So he posted it inside the vestibule of the Primitive Baptist church, behind the hymnals. His reasoning was no revenue man would think to look for sin in the house of God.
Wilkins: And?
Clara: The preacher found it on the second Sunday. Didn't say a word. But from then on, every jug that went past that church door got a little lighter. The preacher was taking a tithe. One jug in ten went to the parsonage, sure as Scripture.
Wilkins: The preacher took a tithe on every jug, which proves the church and the Treasury studied under the same tutor. Clara Higgins, you've been a joy and a scandal, and I mean both as compliments. Stay by the stove. We've got a voicemail from your part of the country coming up.
Clara: I wouldn't miss it, Doctor. And keep that bear on his side of the window.
♦ Bear grunts, chain clinks
Wilkins: He heard you. That's his way of saying no promises.
♪ Brisk banjo flourish into ad break
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♪ Ad sting fades into wax crackle
Wilkins: That man could sell a ladder to a drowning man. Segment the third: copper and the craft. Before I go on, here's the plain truth of your own age, which I'll speak once and mean: 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. Learn your history, buy your permits, and leave the outlaw business to the dead, who don't mind the fines.
Wilkins: Now, the craft. A still makes no liquor. It only finds the liquor already hiding in your mash, the way my forceps find the tooth. So start with the mash. Cracked corn and water, cooked till the starch swells and goes soft like porridge. Corn starch isn't sugar, and yeast won't eat starch any more than Barnaby will eat a hymnal. So you cool the mash down to about a hundred fifty degrees by the thermometer and stir in malted barley. Malt carries the enzymes that cut starch into sugar, the same way a good miller cuts grain into flour. Hold it there while it sweetens. Cool it further, till it's no warmer than a milking pail, pitch your yeast, and let it work. Keep the fermenting room aired, because that working mash breathes out a heavy gas that'll quietly smother a fool.
Wilkins: When the bubbling quiets, you have a wash: a sour, thin beer, a few parts in a hundred alcohol, tasting like a wet barn. That goes into the copper. And now the cuts, which matter more than anything else I'll tell you tonight.
♦ Slow drip into a jar, fire crackles
Wilkins: Fire it gentle. Methanol boils at about a hundred forty-eight degrees and our good ethanol at about a hundred seventy-three, so the poison crowds toward the front of the run. The first drops are your foreshots. Throw them out. Don't taste them, don't save them for liniment, don't give them to your mother-in-law. Your foreshots smell like a glue pot and a cobbler's armpit, and a man who drinks them will soon need my forceps and a gravedigger, in that order. For a small pot, throw out the first good cupful from every five gallons of wash, and more if you're in any doubt. Doubt is cheaper than blindness.
Wilkins: Next come the heads, sharp and solvent-smelling, the kind of fumes that make your eyes water like you've been told a sad story by a liar. Heads are like a Concord politician: loud, sharp, and quick to give you a headache. You let them run off into the bucket where they belong. Change jars often and judge by nose and tongue, a drop rubbed between your palms, never a swallow.
Wilkins: Then the hearts, sweet and clean, smelling of the grain the way warm bread smells of the field. That's what you keep. Then the tails creep in, oily and flat, with a wet-dog stink and a slick on the tongue. Set them aside for another run. A man who greedily runs the hearts into the tails gets more whiskey and less friends.
Wilkins: Why copper? Not tradition, not looks. Copper takes hold of the sulfur in the vapor, the stuff that stinks like rotten eggs, and keeps it. And here's what most smiths don't tell you: copper does its best work where the vapor touches it, up in the head, the neck, and the worm, more than down in the bottom of the pot where the liquid boils. A copper pot with an iron head is a bishop with no Bible. Keep that vapor path bright and scrubbed.
Wilkins: And fire. Never walk away from a running still, not to piss, not to court, not to answer the Lord himself. Keep the still-house aired. Keep a bucket of water and a bucket of sand by the door. Alcohol vapor leaking near an open flame doesn't give warning. It just goes up with a whump, and the next thing your neighbors know of you is a smell like a pig roast and a hole where the roof was. I've pulled teeth out of men whose eyebrows never came back.
♪ Fiddle turn
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the mail. This week the post rider brought a wax cylinder all the way from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, packed in sawdust and a sock I won't put near my face. It's from a gentleman called Rabbit. Let's crank it up.
♦ Phonograph crank, hiss and pop of a distant recording
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?
♦ Recording clicks off, wax crackle
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, you have a fine voice and a dangerous uncle. Let's take the ash first. Hardwood ash soaked in water makes lye. Potash. Your granny ran water through a hopper of ash to make lye for soap, and to turn her corn into hominy. That's what ash is good for. Toss it in a thump keg and you've made a lye bath that raises a stink and a scum and turns your spirit soapy. Your uncle put lye in his thump keg and called it medicine, and what he got was the only whiskey in Wilkes County you could wash your drawers in.
Wilkins: Does it touch the heads? Not a whit. Methanol and the harsh heads don't care a fig for ash. They come over early because they boil early, and the only way out of the jar is the bucket, by your own hand, by measure and by nose. No powder, no bark, no prayer does it for you.
Clara: Doctor, my granny used ash lye for hominy every fall, and I'll tell you true, she never let it near a jug. She said lye was for corn and for sinners' souls, not for a still.
Wilkins: Your granny had better sense than half the coppersmiths in New England. Now, the red oak. Here's a coopers' secret, Rabbit. Red oak is open-pored. Pores like a drunkard's nose. A man can take a stave of red oak, put his lips to one end, and blow pipe smoke clean out the other. That's why coopers make whiskey barrels from tight-grained white oak. A red oak barrel leaks like a county commissioner at a temperance supper. Now, oak of any kind in contact with spirit will give it a bit of color and a bite of tannin. That's flavoring, like a rushed sort of aging. It isn't cleaning. You can't stain a bad head into a good one any more than you can paint a rotten tooth white and call it sound.
Wilkins: So your uncle's half right, Rabbit, the way a stopped clock is right. The old-timers did put strange things in their thumpers, and some of it changed the taste. But not one shaving ever saved a man from a bad cut. Give your uncle my regards, and tell him to keep his ash for soap.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's a fresh cent stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., going down to Wilkesboro by post for you, Cletus, so you can show your uncle real proof. The first honest thing to come out of a fire in that family. Shout-out to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller and every hollow along the Yadkin!
Wilkins: Now for our myth of the night: the blue flame. Every jug-peddler from Bangor to the Blue Ridge will pour a spoonful, put a match to it, and say, 'Burns blue, it's safe. Burns red or yellow, there's lead in it.' Hogwash.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: One. Methanol, the very poison in the foreshots, burns with a pale blue flame of its own. So a spoon of blinding poison can burn as pretty and blue as a Sunday sky.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Two. Flame color is no honest test for lead. A spoon of fire won't tell you what your still's solder has been sweating into your jar.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Three. The only thing a blue flame proves is that it's burning. The blue-flame test is like a sheriff's smile: pretty, brief, and it tells you nothing about what's coming next. Make honest cuts and keep honest copper, or don't make it at all.
Clara: Down home they'd shake the jar and watch the bead, too, and a fair few of them died grinning at a pretty bubble.
Wilkins: The bead's a measure of strength, not of safety, Clara, and that's a sermon for another Sunday. Thank you, Miss Higgins, for coming all this way.
Clara: Thank you, Doctor. It's been a pure pleasure, and you tell Barnaby I said he's a gentleman.
Wilkins: I'll tell him. He won't believe it.
♦ Bear grunt
♪ Theme rises softly
Announcer: A quick word before we part! The Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Alembic: pure copper, hand-riveted, perfect for rosewater and floral oils on your own countertop. See it at Fort Wilkins on Route 28, or at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: And if you'd like to learn the craft proper, the copper, the mash, the cuts, the fire, and how to read a law like a lawyer and a pot like a smith, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. You'll learn from a man who's been arrested twice and maimed nobody but a few deputies. Ask at Fort Wilkins, and mind your permits.
Wilkins: Until next time, neighbors. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Banjo and fiddle theme fades into wax cylinder crackle