Lincoln's Two Dollars and the Granite Rebellion
Dr. Wilkins traces the 1862 Revenue Act and Lincoln's two-dollar-a-gallon whiskey tax, which turned honest Yankee farmers into midnight moonshiners. His guest, retired federal revenue officer Captain Donald Vance of Manchester, shares tales from 28 years tracking copper stills, including a Civil War-era tax receipt, a trail of green bootprints, and an old distiller's gingerbread. The episode also covers still safety and the cuts, and answers a listener's question about ashes in the thump keg.
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Full episode transcript
Wilkins: [SOUND: 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: Easy, Barnaby. Easy, you mangy sack of bacon. Sit your fat backside down, the Doctor is speaking to the public. There now. He has just eaten a bucket of windfall apples and a smoked ham hock he took from a gentleman who came asking about my papers, and a bear in that condition is a philosopher, not a menace. Mostly.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, thirsty sinners, and any federal men skulking in the hemlocks. This is the Radio Moonshine, and I am your host, Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins, on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. Tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, and the finest practitioner of the alchemical arts between the Merrimack and the Canadian line. Pour yourself something, sit down, and put your feet up. Not the dog, the feet.
Wilkins: Now, a word before we begin. Everything said on this program is for the historical edification of the listening public. The making of distilled spirits for drinking without a lawful permit is against the law of the United States, and I would not have you do it. I merely have the misfortune of knowing, in vivid detail, how it was done by other men, in other barns, long ago. Strictly for scholarship. Tonight's scholarship concerns a subject close to every New Hampshire heart and every New Hampshire pocketbook, which is to say, the tax.
Wilkins: [SOUND: Wooden stool creaking, a tin cup set down on a plank table]
Wilkins: Let us go back to the summer of 1862. The war is a year old. Bull Run was a disgrace, the Peninsula was a bloody mess, and the boys of the Fifth and the Seventh and the Ninth New Hampshire are dying of dysentery in Virginia mud faster than the Rebels can shoot them. Friends, it takes money to feed an army, to shoe it, to arm it, and to bury it. Mr. Lincoln's government had been spending like a drunken sailor in a Portsmouth parlor house, and the Treasury ledger had gone red as a new bride's cheeks.
Wilkins: So Congress sat down and passed the Revenue Act of 1862. Mr. Lincoln signed it on the first of July. That law did two grand things. First, it created the Bureau of Internal Revenue, a new brood of federal officers whose only purpose on God's earth was to go about the countryside looking into your cellar. Second, it taxed everything that moved and a good many things that did not. Incomes, carriages, gold watches, billiard tables, playing cards, and, most dear to my heart, distilled spirits.
Wilkins: Now consider. Before the war, a New Hampshire farmer could press his cider in October, let it work in the barrel, run the hard cider through a kettle in the dead of winter, and sell the brandy at the Pittsfield store without a federal man so much as tipping his hat. The Union had never taxed spirits to any great degree. Then comes the war, and the tax starts small and climbs like a nine-year-old boy up a cherry tree. By 1864 the rate had reached two dollars a gallon, and the price of the whiskey itself was not much above that. The government wanted nearly as much for the privilege as the stuff was worth.
Wilkins: Imagine a man who has made honest rye whiskey in the Suncook Valley for thirty years, as his father did, and his father's father. He raised the rye, he malted it, he cooked the mash, and the cost of that gallon was maybe a dollar, a dollar and a quarter. Now a gentleman in a blue coat shows up on his porch and informs him that the Government of the United States requires two dollars on top. Friends, the arithmetic is simple. A man who is told to pay double for what he has always made free will do one of two things. He will pay, and weep. Or he will move the still into the woodshed behind a pile of cordwood and tell the Government to kiss his granite.
Wilkins: And that, dear listeners, is how Mr. Lincoln, the great emancipator, rail-splitter, and savior of the Union, accomplished something no preacher in New England ever managed. He turned the honest Yankee farmer into a criminal overnight. Every good deacon with a cider mill became a midnight moonshiner. I have seen it with my own eyes. The Congregational church in this very valley had a still in the sexton's cellar, and I will not say whose, but it was a Methodist in the next town who turned them in, and I believe that was not out of piety but out of simple jealousy.
Wilkins: [SOUND: Heavy laughter, a cork popping]
Wilkins: Now, in fairness to the Union cause, I do not say the tax was wicked. Our boys needed beans and bullets, and a nation does not fight a war on promises. But I do say that Mr. Lincoln taxed the whiskey to save the Union, and I am proud to report he also saved the Suncook Valley's whole supply of apples from ever being eaten. Not a single honest apple went to the table after 1862. Every last one went to the barrel, and thence to the kettle, and thence to a jar under the hay.
Wilkins: The collecting of this tax fell to men called assessors and collectors. They were appointed by the district, they were paid a fraction of what they brought in, and they were, to a man, the most despised creatures in the state of New Hampshire. A revenue man's honesty is like a Concord winter: long, cold, and gone the minute somebody offers him a jar. Now, I do not say every one of them was a rogue. Some were fine fellows. But I have noticed that the fine ones did not last long in the post, and the ones who lasted had a certain sleek, well-fed look about them, like a barn cat with a secret.
Wilkins: And there was a second matter, friends, that nobody tells in the schoolbooks. In the same years the tax came down, the country ran short of hard money. Gold and silver went into hiding, men hoarded them in stockings and under floorboards, and the little copper cents and silver pieces vanished from the till. A man could not make change. Shopkeepers were passing around postage stamps and scraps of paper. And I, an inventive fellow with an anvil and a punch, did what any patriot would do. I took good copper large cents and good silver pieces, laid them on my anvil, and struck them with my own mark. G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H.
Wilkins: [SOUND: Steel punch clangs on a copper coin, then a second strike]
Wilkins: There. That is the sound of a free man's advertisement, friends. Every coin I stamped went into circulation carrying my name through every barroom and general store in Merrimack County. The Government taxed my whiskey, and I stamped the Government's own money with my face, so to speak, and I call that a fair exchange. They have never forgiven me, and I have never asked them to.
Wilkins: Now, I was arrested twice by the sheriff of Merrimack County, as I think you all know. The first time I was hauled before a magistrate in a state of high indignation, and the magistrate asked me to explain myself. I told him I was a dentist, and that the liquid in question was a medicinal anesthetic prepared for the extraction of teeth, and furthermore that I had extracted a molar from his own brother the previous spring and he had not complained about the anesthetic then. The magistrate went quite pale. The second time I did not trouble myself to argue. I simply put the sheriff in the chair, told him I had a tooth I would like to look at, and he declined the offer. I was home by supper.
Wilkins: [SOUND: Barnaby grunts, chain rattles]
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, you were part of that too. The bear has never been audited, and I would pay good money to watch an assessor try to count his fleas.
Wilkins: But we have a visitor tonight, and I confess my knees are knocking. A man who spent twenty-eight years hunting fellows like me through the mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont. A federal revenue officer, friends, in the flesh, and retired, so I am told, and house-broken. He hails from Manchester, in a later age than mine, and I have made Barnaby promise not to eat him before the sponsor. Captain Donald Vance, welcome to Fort Wilkins!
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. Good to be here. I count four violations from the road to your front door, and I am not writing a single one of them down.
Wilkins: Hear that, Barnaby? A federal man with a soft heart. The republic is doomed. Now, Captain, twenty-eight years chasing copper through the White Mountains and the Green. What manner of man does that to himself?
Captain: A patient one, Doctor. And I'll tell you what I told every young agent. Respect the old-timers who built clean copper stills, and shut down the radiator outfits, the lead-soldered ones, because those put poison in the jar. Two different animals.
Wilkins: A revenue man with a conscience. I had not believed the species existed. Tell me, did you ever turn up a relic from my own day?
Captain: Once. Up in a Vermont attic, a farmer's old coat on a nail. Sewn into the lining was a faded tax receipt from the 1860s, stamped for two dollars. Whoever wore that coat paid the Lincoln levy and wanted proof of it to his grave.
Wilkins: Two dollars! The very levy I have been howling about all evening. The man was either honest or terrified, and in my experience that is the same condition. Did you confiscate it?
Captain: Put it back in the lining, Doctor. Some things belong where a man hid them.
Wilkins: Sentimental. Disgusting. I adore it. But how does a man find a still? A divining rod? A hound with a grudge?
Captain: Usually we didn't need either one. We could smell a smoking pine-knot fire three miles upwind on a November morning. But one winter in the Franconia hills I met a careful fellow who burned dry hardwood and kept his fire low. So I followed bootprints. Green stains in the snow, copper verdigris rubbed off on his soles. They led me up a ravine to a still tucked behind a frozen waterfall, a curtain of ice hanging right over the door.
Wilkins: Behind a waterfall! The scoundrel is a poet. And you clapped the irons on him, I trust, in the name of the Republic?
Captain: Let me finish. He was eighty years old. He sat me down and served me gingerbread, still warm, and then he proudly showed me a hand-riveted copper pot, every seam true. I shook his hand and left without a citation. In my report I wrote 'museum quality, no hazard.'
Wilkins: A federal officer who ate the gingerbread and let the evidence walk out the door! Barnaby is weeping, Captain, and so, God help me, am I.
Wilkins: [SOUND: Laughter]
Captain: Doctor, a man who builds a pot like that has earned a little mercy. The law is the law, but it was never meant to hang a craftsman for his craft.
Wilkins: Spoken like a deacon who has seen the inside of a sexton's cellar. Mr. Lincoln, you would be astonished.
Captain: Hasn't changed a bit, Doctor. Only the paperwork.
Wilkins: [SOUND: Cork pulled, liquid poured into tin cups]
Wilkins: Captain Donald Vance, my friend, thank you. Stay by the stove, there is a ham bone for you and a ham bone for the bear, and I will not say which is which. We will return after a word from our sponsor.
♪ Short banjo and fiddle sting
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♪ Banjo and fiddle swell, then fade
Wilkins: [SOUND: Wax cylinder crackle, a spoon stirring in a pot]
Wilkins: Welcome back, friends. Now, I have talked all evening about the tax and the men who dodged it. I will now talk, for the benefit of the historically curious, about the craft itself, because a man cannot truly understand why the tax was so cruel until he understands how much labor stood behind each gallon. And I will keep it honest, and I will keep it safe, for the record, so that no one confuses scholarship with instruction. The mashing, distilling, and selling of spirits without a permit is unlawful, and I describe these things as history, as a naturalist describes the habits of the wolf.
Wilkins: First, the mash. A farmer in the Suncook Valley would take his rye, or his corn, or the apples from his orchard, and he would cook them to release the sugars. With grain, he malted a portion, which is to say he sprouted it, so the sprouting would make the enzymes that turn starch into sugar. With apples, he pressed them for cider and let nature do the rest. Yeast, which floats in the air as a gift from Providence, would find the sugar and eat it, and in its eating make alcohol and a great belch of carbonic gas. A good mash works for a week or so, bubbling and stinking, and the smell of a working mash in a cold cellar is, to those who love it, the smell of home.
Wilkins: Then comes the still. A copper pot, a head, a worm or condenser, and a fire. Now I will say a thing here, and I will say it once and plainly, because it is the difference between a craftsman and a corpse. Copper is the metal. Copper, and copper only, with good tin or silver-bearing solder, never lead. Lead solder is poison, friends. It leaches into the spirit, it settles in the blood and the bones and the brain, and it sickens and kills. There were men in the old days, desperate men, who built stills from salvaged radiators and soldered them with lead, and those men produced whiskey that blinded and crippled and killed their customers. That is a documented hazard of the illicit trade and I will not have it laid at the door of honest copper.
Wilkins: Now, the copper does more than hold the liquid. It does a bit of alchemy. The vapor rises through the copper, and the copper takes the sulfur compounds out of it. Those are the rotten-egg stinks that come off the fermenting mash, and left alone they would make the whiskey taste like a swamp. The copper binds the sulfur and holds it, and the spirit that comes out is sweeter for it. That is why a good still is copper through and through. The metal is not decoration, it is a working part of the machine, a catalyst, and it wears with use. A man who knew his trade knew when to clean his copper and when to replace it.
Wilkins: Next, the cuts. This is the heart of the craft, and the part that kills the careless. When the still begins to run, the first thing out is called the foreshots. That is the volatile stuff that boils at the lowest heat, and it carries methanol, which is wood alcohol, and other harsh compounds that will blind a man and kill him. The foreshots are thrown away. Never drunk, never sold, never given to a dog. After the foreshots come the heads, which are still sharp and solventy and carry acetone and the like. They smell like nail varnish and cause the worst sort of headache. The heads are set aside. Then comes the hearts, the clean, sweet middle of the run, the part worth keeping. And finally the tails, oily and heavy and tasting of wet cardboard and wet dog. The tails are set aside as well, and sometimes saved to be run again with the next batch.
Wilkins: So you see, the whole art is in knowing where to stop and where to start. A man cuts the foreshots, he cuts the heads, he keeps the hearts, and he cuts the tails. A good distiller uses his nose, his tongue, and his thermometer, and he does not rush. A bad distiller keeps it all, and sells it, and his customers learn the lesson in the worst way. I have extracted more teeth from the mouths of men who drank bad whiskey than I care to count, and I have buried a few whose teeth I could not save.
Wilkins: And fire. Mind the fire, friends. A still is a vessel full of flammable vapor, and a leak in a seam, a cracked joint, a careless spark, will turn a woodshed into a funeral pyre. Keep the fire low, keep the joints tight, keep the room aired, and never, ever leave a still unattended. I have seen barns go up in an instant, with the man inside who thought he could step out for a smoke. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. That is the creed, and it is a good one.
Wilkins: [SOUND: Barnaby grunts, the chain clinks, a bucket is kicked over]
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. He has never lost a barn, though he has certainly eaten several.
Wilkins: Now, friends, the post has brought us a message, a call-in, as they say in the modern manner, left for me by a listener on the line. I will play it for you.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a tinny recorded voice
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, writes thus: '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?'
Wilkins: Well, Rabbit, let me address your uncle with the respect due an elder and the honesty due a student. There is a kernel of truth in what he says, and a great deal of swamp medicine wrapped around it.
Wilkins: First, the thump keg. For those who do not know, a thump keg, or doubler, is a second vessel through which the vapor passes on its way to the condenser. It does a second distillation, in a sense, and sharpens the spirit. Now, men did put things in the thump keg. Some put in a bit of the mash itself, to flavor it. Some put in water, to temper the vapor. And yes, some men put in charcoal or ash or wood shavings, thinking to filter the spirit as it passed.
Wilkins: Now, charcoal has a genuine use. Activated charcoal, made from good hardwood, does adsorb certain compounds, and filtering whiskey through charcoal is an old and honorable practice, practiced in Tennessee and elsewhere. It mellows the spirit and removes some of the harsher congeners. But charcoal is a filter, not a thump keg additive, and it does its work best when the spirit is cool and slow-passing, not when it is hot vapor bubbling through a keg.
Wilkins: Hickory ashes, on the other hand, are lye. They are alkaline, they are caustic, and they will react with the vapor in ways no prudent man should invite. Red oak shavings carry tannins and the oils of the wood, and those will color the spirit and flavor it, but they will not clean out the heads. The heads are volatile solvents, and the only way to remove them is to cut them off the run, with a thermometer and a good nose and a patient hand. No shaving of oak, no sprinkle of ash, no charm or amulet will do the work of a careful distiller.
Wilkins: So, Rabbit, your uncle is partly right and mostly mistaken. He is right that men have long sought to improve their whiskey by adding things. He is mistaken that ashes or shavings will clean out bad heads. The heads must be cut, not covered. A man who tries to hide the heads under a pinch of ash is a man who will get a headache for his trouble, and sell it to a neighbor who will get a worse one. A man who thumps his keg with hickory ashes and calls it medicine is the same man who calls his wife's cooking 'rustic.'
Wilkins: [SOUND: Steel punch clangs on a copper coin]
Wilkins: There, Rabbit, I have stamped your answer. Give your uncle my regards, tell him the Doctor says he is a fine old gentleman, and tell him to keep his ashes in the stove where they belong. Thank you for writing, friend, and thank you for keeping the old arts alive, even where the old arts are best left in the books.
Wilkins: And now, friends, we come to the close of another evening. I thank my guest, Captain Donald Vance of Manchester, for his company and his wisdom. I thank my listeners, every honest rascal of you, for tuning your receivers to Fort Wilkins. I thank Mr. Lincoln, in his grave and in his glory, for giving us the most interesting tax in American history, and I thank the Congress for proving, again and again, that a man who is taxed too hard will find a way to be clever.
Wilkins: And a final word. For those of you who wish to study the art of distillation properly, as a matter of history, chemistry, and craft, I offer the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course, taught in person at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield. We cover the mash, the cuts, the copper, the fire, and the law, with great attention to the law, since the law is the part that will eat you if you ignore it. Bring a notebook and a strong stomach. Bears are not included, but they are not excluded either.
Wilkins: 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 swells and fades out