The Exeter Court Docket: What Happened to Granite State Liquor Cases After the War
Dr. G. G. Wilkins follows Granite State liquor and revenue cases through the courts after the war, from grand jury indictments and recognizance bonds to informers' shares, cases 'placed on file,' and the Commissioner's power to settle them quietly. Along the way he compares what the law threatened for unlicensed distilling, counterfeit coin and tax fraud with the small fines most men actually paid. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells of swearing to a still's identity in federal court, buying the same forfeited pot back at auction again and again, and a juror who knew his patchwork. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC asks whether hickory ashes and red oak shavings clean the thump keg, and Wilkins puts the blue-flame test to rest.
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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 down, you overgrown hearth rug. The man at the gate is only the egg peddler, not a deputy marshal, and you've already had his hat this month. Lie down, I say. Lie DOWN. There. He's sulking now, like a Baptist at a dance.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, sinners, and those of you in between, which is everybody in Merrimack County. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, here in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I'm your host, your tooth-puller, your blacksmith, and twice the Merrimack sheriff's favorite customer. Tonight we're going to court. Not my own court date, thank God, though the clerk keeps a chair warm for me. Tonight it's the Exeter Court Docket, and what became of Granite State liquor cases after the war.
♪ Theme fades to a single banjo strum
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Before the gavel falls, remember the Flame-Flow Still, made under United States Patent 10,561,960 from heavy pure copper and built to last a lifetime of honest demonstrations! Go to moonshinestill.com today. That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle, a log shifts in the stove
Wilkins: Segment the first, the history. Now, a good many of you think a liquor case in this state starts with a deputy and ends with a jail cell. It does not. It starts with a jealous neighbor and ends with a clerk taking a nap. In between there's a heap of paper, and I'm going to walk you through every inky foot of it.
Wilkins: First you need to know where the paper goes. When old Congress set up the federal courts back in 1789, they ruled that the District Court for New Hampshire would sit at Portsmouth and at Exeter. So a revenue case, meaning a case of cheating Mr. Lincoln's tax collectors, might start in a cow pasture in Pittsfield and finish forty miles off in Exeter, down by the Squamscott River, where the Academy boys sit on the fence and laugh at the farmers coming to be fined. Exeter is the Rockingham shire town too, so you get county justice and federal justice in the same town, like two dogs sharing one sausage.
Wilkins: State liquor cases under our own dry law mostly stay in the county court, Concord for us Merrimack folk. Federal cases, unlicensed distilling, not paying the tax, rolling barrels past the gauger, those go to the federal bench. And since sixty-six that bench has belonged to Judge Daniel Clark, who served in the United States Senate before they gave him a gavel. So he'd already spent years listening to men lie under a dome and call it business. He's well prepared for us.
Wilkins: Now, how does a man get onto the docket? Step one, the complaint. Somebody squeals. And here's the poison in the pudding: under the moiety system, an informer may collect a share of the fines and forfeitures. So the man who reports your still may walk off with a slice of your punishment. An informer in Merrimack County is loved like a boil on a fiddler's bow arm. I knew one fellow over Chichester way who informed on three stills in a single spring and was paid for it, and by midsummer every dog in town bit him on sight, and some of the dogs had been trained to it by their owners on Sunday afternoons.
Wilkins: Step two, the grand jury. A grand jury is twenty-three men locked in a room to decide whether a neighbor should be punished for selling them the very thing they drank at lunch. If enough of them nod, you're indicted. That's a true bill, and the clerk writes it out in a hand so fine you'd think he was courting it. The clerk's quill was the only thing in Exeter that stayed stiff past nine in the evening.
Wilkins: Step three, the bond. They don't usually throw you in a cell to wait. You're 'recognized,' as the lawyers say. You give your bond to appear, and you bring sureties, neighbors who sign that they'll forfeit good money if you run off to the Canadas. So your sureties are your friends, and often your customers. When they made me give bond, my sureties were a blacksmith, a deacon, and a widow, and the widow was the only one who ever paid what she promised.
Wilkins: Now to the question every man asks with his hat in his hands: what's the price? Let me set three crimes side by side, like teeth on a tray. One: running an unlicensed still. On paper, under the revenue laws, that can bring heavy fines in the hundreds and thousands of dollars, a jail term, and forfeiture of the still, the spirits, and anything else the marshal can carry off. Two: dodging the tax on spirits already made. More fines, more forfeiture. And three, the big bear in the woods: counterfeiting coin. Under the Crimes Act of 1825, false gold or silver coin can bring you up to ten years at hard labor and a fine of five thousand dollars.
Wilkins: Counterfeit a dollar and you get ten years of hard labor. Counterfeit an honest face and you get elected to the legislature.
Wilkins: And mind this. In July of sixty-five the Treasury set up a new outfit called the Secret Service. Its whole job is chasing false money. Not guarding generals, not tasting whiskey, just counterfeit notes and bad coin. In Pittsfield they'd starve, because nobody here has enough real money to bother faking it.
♦ A light tap of a hammer on the anvil
Wilkins: Now some of you know I strike my name on coins at this anvil, and you're thinking, Wilkins, aren't you whistling past your own graveyard? No sir. Putting a merchant's name on a genuine coin is advertising. The coin is still the government's true copper or silver. I haven't faked a thing. I've only signed it, like a man carving his initials in a church pew. Rude, maybe, but no felony. The counterfeiter makes a lie. I just put my name on the truth.
Wilkins: So why, with all those fearsome penalties on paper, do most liquor cases end in a small fine and a long dinner? Five reasons, and I'll pull them one at a time like molars.
Wilkins: Tooth one: the jury. Trial juries are drawn from the towns, and the towns drink. You can't seat twelve men in Rockingham County who have never had a swallow from the defendant's jug. Ten men on that jury have drunk from that pot, and the other two are lying.
Wilkins: Tooth two: the witnesses. The government's best witness is usually a customer, and a customer has a terrible memory. He gets on the stand, and suddenly he can't recall the day, the barn, the jar, or his own middle name.
Wilkins: Tooth three: money. Jail costs the county board and firewood. A fine puts money in the till. Any selectman can do that sum without taking his boots off.
Wilkins: Tooth four: the quiet settlement. By now the revenue law lets the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, with the Treasury Secretary's approval, settle a case for a payment instead of trying it. So a man pays, the papers get stamped, and everybody goes home. A plea bargain in Exeter is when the government pretends to be merciful and you pretend to be sorry, and both of you go to dinner.
Wilkins: Tooth five, and this one's pure New England: the case gets 'placed on file.' Not tried, not dismissed, just tucked in the clerk's drawer, where it can be woken up if you misbehave. A case placed on file in Exeter is like a mother-in-law in the spare room: never quite gone and always ready to come down the stairs.
Wilkins: And here's the sum that changed everything. The two-dollar tax made so many cheats that the whole country turned into a nation of rogues. So in July of sixty-eight Congress gave up and dropped the spirits tax to fifty cents a proof gallon, and tightened the distillery rules while they were at it. When a law makes a liar of every farmer, sooner or later even Washington notices the smell.
♪ Short fiddle sting
Wilkins: Segment the second: outlaws, runners, and my own sorry acquaintance with the bench. Now, I've been arrested twice by the Merrimack sheriff, and I'll tell you a docket story I've never told on this program.
Wilkins: Some years back, a man came up the turnpike at dawn carrying a summons. A process server, a skinny fellow with a coat too big for him and a conscience to match. Instead of coming up the road like a Christian, he decided to sneak through the hazel brush along the back, right past the still-house window. And who sleeps under that window?
♦ Barnaby grunts low, chain drags across planks
Wilkins: That's right. Barnaby woke up and found a stranger's backside about four feet from his nose, and he took it as a gift. He caught that man by the seat of his trousers and gave one shake, like a terrier with a rat. Friends, I heard the cloth go first, a long wet rip like a sail tearing in a gale, and then a second sound, a softer one, that was not cloth. That bear peeled a strip of hide off the fellow's left haunch about the size of a pie plate. The man hit a note I've only heard from the Pittsfield choir when the organ bellows split, a high C with gravel in it. He went over the rail fence head first and left one boot, half his trousers, and the summons in the dirt.
Wilkins: And Barnaby ate the summons. Wax seal, ribbon, and all. Chewed it up, looked thoughtful, and about an hour later coughed it up on my doorstep, wet as a newborn calf, with the county seal still on it. And I'll be damned if it wasn't still legally served.
Wilkins: That process server went home standing up in the wagon bed like a Roman general, only facing backward and weeping. Doc Wilkins dressed the wound, I should add. I charged him half price, on account of my bear being the cause. Barnaby has only one legal opinion, and he delivers it with his back teeth.
Wilkins: My own trial came later. The jury was Pittsfield men, and the evidence was a single stone jug. Halfway through, the foreman stood up and asked the court's leave for the jury to taste the evidence, to ascertain its character. The judge, a merciful man and a thirsty one, allowed it. They went to the jury room with the jug. By suppertime the evidence had no character left and neither did the jury, and they came back saying they couldn't convict a man on an empty jug. The prosecutor turned purple as a beet. I bought him a drink anyway, out of Christian charity.
♪ Banjo walk-up
Wilkins: Now I've got a man in the chair across the stove who's seen the inside of a federal courtroom from the witness box, which is a far more comfortable seat than mine. He's the best copper hand in this valley, hands like two shovels, and I've watched him hammer a seam so true you could float a duck on it. Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, welcome to the show.
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Evening, all. I'll try to keep my hands out of your snuff box this time.
Wilkins: You'll try and you'll fail. Silas, you were called to Exeter as an expert witness, weren't you? Tell 'em.
Silas: I was. Sixty-eight, in the federal court. The marshal had seized a copper vessel off a farm in Epsom, and the farmer's lawyer swore up and down it was a maple sap evaporator. The government wanted a coppersmith to say what it really was, and they picked me.
Wilkins: And did you lie for him like a proper neighbor?
Silas: No sir, I did not. I'll not perjure myself over a pot. I stood in front of the jury and showed them the vapor collar on the cap, and the hole where the arm comes off for the worm. A sap pan is wide and shallow so the steam can get away. This had a domed head built to catch steam and send it somewhere. I said, gentlemen, nobody pipes off maple steam to save it. That's a still.
Wilkins: So you hanged the poor devil.
Silas: Well, the lawyer tried to rattle me. He asked if a man of my skill could be mistaken. I said under oath that I couldn't, because the seam work was the finest I'd seen in the district, cleanly lapped, true-riveted, not one drop of lead in it. That pot was so well made I wanted to know who taught the man. The farmer got fined and lost the pot. And when I came down off the stand he pumped my hand and thanked me.
Wilkins: He thanked you!
Silas: He did. Every man in that courtroom heard a coppersmith swear his work was the best in the district. By the next spring he had orders for three pots for 'sap,' and he was charging double.
Wilkins: Silas swore that pot was a still and the owner thanked him, which is the first time in history a man thanked the witness for hanging him. Now tell 'em about the auctions, because I know you've got grease on your conscience there.
Silas: When the court condemns a still, the marshal sells it off. Sometimes on the courthouse steps, sometimes at the jail yard. It's sold as copper, by the pound, mostly to tinkers and smiths. There was one pot out of Barnstead, a good forty-gallon with a fat belly, and I bought it at auction for scrap price.
Wilkins: And melted it down like an honest man.
Silas: I meant to. But before I got the fire hot, the Barnstead man turned up at my shop with his hat in hand and bought it back from me, plus a dollar for my trouble. Eight months later the marshal took it again. Back to auction. I bought it again. He bought it from me again.
Wilkins: How many times?
Silas: Condemned three times, sold four. By the third sale the deputy didn't even bother with the paperwork description. He just wrote, 'the Barnstead pot, again.' I took to calling it the most-convicted pot in New England. The government made money every time, I made money every time, and the farmer made whiskey every time. It was the only arrangement in the county where all three of us came out ahead.
Wilkins: That still has been to court more often than most Portsmouth lawyers go sober. One more, Silas, and then I'll let you have the jug. The juror story.
Silas: Ha. Now that one's a hard one to tell with a straight face. A Rockingham County trial, and the evidence was a copper pot sitting on a table in front of the jury. I'd patched it the winter before. I put my patches on as a diamond, point up, with four rivets, so a man knows whose work it is. The government witness was going on about the pot, and one juror in the front row, an old farmer from out Nottingham way, leaned over squinting and said loud enough for the bailiff to hear, 'That's McAllister's diamond. He put the very same patch on mine the same week.'
Wilkins: Oh, Lord.
Silas: The courtroom went silent as a fresh grave. The judge looked at the juror. The juror looked at his boots. The prosecutor looked like a man who'd sat on a hornet. They dismissed the whole jury and sent everybody home, and I don't believe that case was ever called up again. And the farmer came to my shop the next week for another patch, cheerful as you please, because his pot had a sprung seam from his wife beating on it with a ladle.
Wilkins: You're a menace to American justice, Silas.
Silas: I'm a coppersmith, Doctor. I only make the vessels. What men pour in them is between them and the Almighty and the gauger.
♪ Banjo and fiddle bridge, bright and quick
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♪ Pitchman's fanfare on fiddle, fading
♦ Wax crackle, the stove door creaks open and shut
Wilkins: Segment the third: copper and the craft. Silas, stay in that chair, because you're going to keep me honest. Now I'll walk you through the whole road from mash to jar, the way it was done in this valley. Keep in mind it's history and schooling, not a dare. Making spirits to drink without a federal permit is against United States law, and this program is for history and learning only.
Wilkins: Step one, the mash. Take a bushel of cracked corn and scald it in hot water till it goes to porridge. Corn is all starch, and yeast can't eat starch any more than Barnaby can eat a church bell. So when the mash cools a little, you stir in a good peck of malted barley. The malt carries the ferments that turn starch to sugar. Let it rest, stir it, taste it, and the porridge goes sweet as a widow's smile.
Wilkins: Step two, cool it down to blood-warm, pitch your yeast, and let her work under a cloth for some days, someplace warm and with good air, till the bubbling quits. Now you've got a beer, a sour, thin, ugly wash, and the still's job is to pull the spirit out of it.
Wilkins: Step three, the stripping run. You charge the pot, fire it, and run it fast and rough to pull out all the spirit you can. Step four, the spirit run. You put that low wine back in and run it slow, and that slow run is where you make your cuts. Now, Silas, about the copper. Folks think the pot bottom does the cleaning.
Silas: Most do, and most are wrong, Doctor. Copper does its sulfur work best where the vapor touches it: the head, the swan neck, the arm, and the worm. The rotten-egg stink rides up in the steam, and up there the copper grabs it and holds on. And that grabbing costs the metal something. Every run eats a whisker of copper. That's why an old still wears thin up in the neck and needs a patch, and why I'm never short of work.
Wilkins: So when a man calls copper a catalyst, he's only half right. It gives of itself, like a good mother or a bad banker. Now, the cuts, and this is life and death, so I'll say it plain. First off the worm come the foreshots, sharp and hot as a lawyer's breath. Then the heads, which smell like a varnish shop. Then the hearts, the sweet clean middle. Then the tails, oily and wet-dog, which you save to run again.
Wilkins: Here's what most men don't know. Methanol, the wood spirit that blinds and kills, does boil lower than good spirit, so plenty of it comes early. But it doesn't all leave politely at the front door. Some of it trails through the run like a dog following a wagon. So a careful man doesn't cut close. He throws out a generous measure of foreshots and heads, more than his greed would like. Better to pour a little whiskey on the ground than your eyesight.
Silas: And tell 'em about apples, Doctor. The cider brandy men.
Wilkins: I'm coming to it. Old New England loved her apple brandy, but fruit mash makes more of that wood spirit than corn, because of the pectin in the skins and pulp, the stuff that sets a jelly. Pectin breaks down into methanol in the mash. So a man running apple pomace has to be twice as stern with his heads as a corn man. More fruit, more caution. That's the rule in my house.
Wilkins: And fire. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air. It doesn't rise like smoke. It sinks and creeps along the floorboards like a cat after a mouse, and it creeps right to your firebox or your lamp. A leaky joint can burn down the still-house, the woodshed, the barn, and you, in that order. So keep a draft moving through, keep your joints tight, keep the flame low and away from any seep, and never walk off from a running still to go courting. I knew a man in Loudon who did, and the only thing the fire left him was the courting.
Silas: And keep lead out of it. No lead solder, no salvaged junk. I've hammered copper my whole life, and I'll not put my name on a joint that'll poison a man.
Wilkins: Amen. Silas McAllister, the best hands in Merrimack County and the worst witness the defense ever had. Thank you, friend.
Silas: My pleasure, Doctor. Mind the bear on my way out.
Wilkins: Mind him? He's minded you since you came in. Go out the front.
♪ Fiddle reel, short
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the mailbag. We've got a talking cylinder that came all the way up from the Carolina hills, and the post office charged me more for it than the sheriff fined me. Let's give it a turn.
♦ Cylinder crank, hiss and pop of a recorded message beginning
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
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller, from Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, I'm honored you'd send a question four hundred miles to a man with a bear. Now let me take your uncle's two ingredients one at a time.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: The hickory ash. There's a scrap of truth in it, and I'll give him that. Wood ash is where our grandmothers got their lye for soap. Run water through an ash hopper and you get potash, which is strongly alkaline. Toss that in a thump keg and it can grab hold of some of the acid, the vinegar sourness from a mash gone off, and keep it from riding over. So your uncle might have tamed a sour run a little. But bad heads, Rabbit? Heads aren't acid. The wood spirit in them doesn't care a fig about lye. It walks right past the ash like a deacon past a beggar. And lye brings its own off-flavors, soapy and harsh. Cletus, your uncle threw ash in his keg and called it doctoring, which makes him the only physician in Carolina whose cure needs a broom afterward.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Ask any cooper why he won't make a whiskey barrel out of red oak. Red oak has open pores. It lacks the little plugs that seal white oak, so a red oak barrel weeps like a widow at a will reading. That's why coopers use white oak. Red oak shavings in your doubler will lend the spirit color and some tannin bite, so it looks older and tastes woodier. But it cleans nothing. Red oak shavings in the doubler are like rouge on a hog: it colors the cheeks and leaves the hog exactly as it was. The only cure for bad heads is the cut. A sharp nose, a patient hand, and a generous pour on the ground.
Wilkins: So, swamp medicine? Half swamp, half medicine, Rabbit, and mostly habit. Give your uncle my regards, tell him he's a fine man with a wrong idea, and tell him if he ever comes up the Suncook Turnpike, the first jar of tea is on me. Cletus Miller, Wilkesboro, North Carolina, you're a true friend of Radio Moonshine!
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And since we're busting myths, here's one that sends men to the doctor every year: the blue flame. A man pours a spoonful of spirit, sets a match to it, and if it burns blue he calls it pure. Friends, a blue flame proves only that alcohol is in it. Wood spirit, the poison methanol, burns with a pale blue flame too, clean as a parson's collar. So the spoon tells you how strong the spirit is, not whether it's safe. A blue flame proves your spirit will burn, which so will your barn, your beard and the deputy's warrant, and none of those are safe to drink either. Trust the cut, not the match.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin, the coin skitters onto the floor
Wilkins: There goes another cent with my name on it, under the stove where the mice will spend it. Barnaby, leave that alone. It's legal tender, not lunch.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
Announcer: Another quick word! Before Doctor Wilkins says goodnight, remember the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, handmade in pure copper! See it at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28, or visit moonshinestill.com tonight. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme returns, soft banjo under
Wilkins: That's our docket for tonight, friends. We followed the paper from the informer's grudge to the grand jury, through the bond and the sureties, and out the far side into a small fine, a quiet settlement, or a case placed on file to gather dust. We learned that counterfeiters hang heavy and still-men pay light, that the Secret Service was born to chase bad notes, and that a coppersmith's diamond patch can scuttle a federal case quicker than any lawyer.
Wilkins: And if you'd rather learn the craft from a man who's sat on both sides of the bench and pulled teeth on all of them, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. That's mash, metal, cuts, fire, and the whole history of the thing, taught for lawful demonstration and honest schooling. Ask at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, or look in at moonshinestill.com. Bring your questions and leave your ham bones for Barnaby.
Wilkins: My thanks to Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, to Rabbit Miller down in Wilkesboro, and to every one of you listening by the stove tonight. Remember what you heard: making spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and this program is for history and learning only.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme fades into wax cylinder crackle and silence