Whiskey Rebellion Ghosts
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells the story of the 1791 excise and the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794: tarred collectors, Tom the Tinker, the siege of Bower Hill, Washington leading thirteen thousand militia, and why that grudge lasted in New Hampshire from the Exeter paper-money mob to his own still-house. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells new stories: a Monongahela pot shot through by Tom the Tinker, a 'haunted' Epsom still, and his great-grandfather's legendary still that could shrink in front of a tax gauger. He then helps Wilkins walk through rye mash and honest cuts. Wilkins also answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC about hickory ash and red oak in the thump keg, and knocks down 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 yourself, you great flea-bitten sack of lard. There are no excise men in the yard tonight, only ghosts, and ghosts make poor chewing. Lie down. Lie DOWN. There. He has the table manners of a Philadelphia congressman and roughly the same opinion of excise men.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen ground, settles
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners, and any revenue man hiding in my woodpile with his ear to the knothole. 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, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am Doctor George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, coin-stamper, and the man the county sheriff loves to visit and hates to leave empty-handed. Tonight's subject has been rattling its chains in the American cellar for seventy years. We are calling up the Whiskey Rebellion Ghosts.
♪ Theme fades under a single fiddle note
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Want to learn the old craft properly, from the ground up? The Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course teaches the history, the copper, and the cuts. See it all at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle swells and fades
♪ Low mountain fiddle bridge
Wilkins: Segment the first. Pull your chair to the stove and let an old man talk about the year 1791. A gentleman from New York named Alexander Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury, and he had a problem. The young republic had taken on the war debts of all thirteen states, and creditors were knocking. Hamilton had a head for figures and a neck for trouble, and the frontier would gladly have measured both. His answer, passed by Congress in March of 1791, was the first federal excise on spirits distilled right here at home.
♦ Distant drip into jar
Wilkins: Now picture a farmer out past the Allegheny Mountains in western Pennsylvania, the Monongahela country. He grows rye. He cannot eat all of it and he cannot sell it, because the nearest market is over the mountains on a road a goat would refuse. A packhorse can carry only a few bushels of grain over that ridge. Turn the same grain into whiskey and the same horse carries the worth of many times as many bushels, sloshing in two kegs. Out there whiskey was not a vice. It was money. Men paid the preacher in it, the blacksmith in it, and the midwife in it. Taxing that farmer's whiskey was like taxing a Baptist's sweat: he produced it honest and resented every drop you took.
Wilkins: And the law was crooked as a cow's hind leg. A big distiller could pay by the gallon. The little farm distiller generally paid a yearly rate on the size of his still, whether it ran all winter or sat cold. So the rich man in the city paid less per gallon than the poor man on the ridge. Many of those ridge men were Scots-Irish, whose grandfathers had dodged the Crown's exciseman back in the old country for generations. Even the poet Robert Burns took a post as an excise officer in Scotland in 1789. Burns wrote love poems and collected the excise, so the Scots got their hearts broken and their pockets picked by the same man.
♦ Fire pops in the stove
Wilkins: The frontier answered with tar. In September of 1791 a collector named Robert Johnson was caught, stripped, tarred, feathered, and turned loose. Now, I have pulled molars from men howling less than a man getting a bucket of hot pine tar slopped across his bare shoulders. The tar sets as it cools and takes the hair with it. The feathers stick in his ears, his eyebrows, and the crack of his backside, and he spends the next month plucking himself like a Christmas goose and leaving a little of his hide on every feather.
Wilkins: Then came a phantom called Tom the Tinker. Nobody was Tom and everybody was Tom. Letters signed with his name were nailed to trees and printed in the Pittsburgh paper, warning any man who registered his still and paid the tax. A man who paid woke to find his copper pot shot through like a colander. They called that tinkering a still. Remember the name Tom the Tinker. A coppersmith will be along shortly to tell you what that musket ball did to good metal.
Wilkins: In July of 1794 it boiled over. Armed men marched on Bower Hill, the fine house of General John Neville, the federal inspector. Shots were fired. The rebel leader, Major James McFarlane, was killed. The house burned. A few weeks later about seven thousand men gathered at Braddock's Field and put up liberty poles, talking loud about marching on Pittsburgh.
♦ Wind against log walls
Wilkins: General Washington, president of these United States, called out about thirteen thousand militia from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia, and rode out with them himself as far as Carlisle and Bedford, with Hamilton beside him like a tick on a hound. No sitting president has led troops in the field before or since. And when the army got over the mountains, the rebellion had melted like a snowbank in March. About twenty prisoners were marched to Philadelphia, two were convicted of treason, and Washington pardoned them both. The rebels put up liberty poles all over the Monongahela, and the government answered with a whole lot of liberty and very little pole.
Wilkins: And here is the joke the Almighty played on the whole republic. After he left the presidency, General Washington built a commercial distillery at Mount Vernon. By 1799 it was making about eleven thousand gallons of whiskey a year, one of the biggest in the country. He marched thirteen thousand men over the mountains to collect a tax, then went home and built the biggest still in Virginia, which is the most American thing a man ever did. He was a fine general and a finer distiller. I would trust him with my country but never with my mash bill. Jefferson's men repealed the whole excise in 1802, and the ghosts were left to wander.
♪ Single banjo string plucked low
Wilkins: Why did New England never forget? You may think we Yankees were Federalists to the bone, and in the counting-houses of Portsmouth and Boston we were. But the hill farmer of New Hampshire had his own grudge already. In September of 1786 a mob of several hundred men surrounded our own legislature at Exeter demanding paper money and relief from debt, and General John Sullivan's militia broke them up the next morning. In 1808 Vermont smugglers defied Jefferson's Embargo in the Black Snake affair on the Winooski River. Government men died, and a smuggler named Cyrus Dean was hanged that November. Pittsfield was incorporated in 1782, and the men who cleared these fields along the Suncook remembered every one of those fights. When Washington City came after a man's jug, the Granite State heard Tom the Tinker whispering from the chimney corner.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside the window
Wilkins: Which brings me to the ghost of Fort Wilkins. Some winters past, a Concord assessor I will call Mister Pruitt, since his mother deserves the mercy, got the notion he could frighten me into a confession. Gossip around the turnpike said I believed the dead rebels of Bower Hill walked on moonlit nights. So he wrapped himself in his wife's best linen bedsheet, cut eyeholes, and came moaning across my yard at midnight wailing, 'Wilkins, confess your still!'
♦ Chain snaps taut, bear roars
Wilkins: He forgot one detail. Barnaby does not believe in ghosts. Barnaby believes in meat. That bear hit the end of his chain just as the sheet came within reach, sank his teeth into the linen and the breeches beneath, and pulled. It sounded like somebody tearing a wet ledger book in half, then a holler that cracked the ice on my rain barrel. The sheet came away. So did the seat of the breeches, a fair strip of wool drawers, and, I am sorry to report, a palm-sized piece of the assessor himself. Mister Pruitt went off down Route 28 toward Epsom with his white backside shining in the moonlight like a Shaker's conscience, leaving a trail of blood and linen thread a hound could have followed blind.
Wilkins: Barnaby ate the bedsheet entire. I found the ghost again in the woodlot the next Thursday, folded considerably smaller and in poor spirits. That was the only haunting in Merrimack County ever ended by digestion. The assessor's lawyer wrote me demanding damages for one pair of breeches and the contents thereof, and I wrote back that the contents were never assessed at much. I have been arrested twice in Merrimack County and haunted not once, and I credit the bear for the second record and my own wit for neither.
♪ Fiddle sting, then soft banjo
Wilkins: Segment the second, legends and outlaws, and tonight I have brought in a man from my own foundry. He has burns on his forearms older than some of you listening and a hammer that has kissed more copper than a Boston banker. Please welcome Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister. Silas, sit down, and mind the bear hair on that stool.
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Evening, all. I'll stand a minute. Last time I sat on that stool I came up wearing half of Barnaby's winter coat.
Wilkins: He sheds like a Methodist sheds sin, all at once and only in spring. Silas, I promised these folks a word about Tom the Tinker. You have one, I believe.
Silas: I do. When my grandfather was a young man, a tin peddler came up the turnpike with a cart full of pans and one copper pot that was not like any New England work. He said it came from the Monongahela country, out of a dead man's barn, and it had three round holes punched through the shoulder. Each hole was plugged with a whittled pine peg, swelled up tight.
Wilkins: Musket balls.
Silas: Musket balls, Doctor. A ball goes in clean on one side and leaves a ragged lip where it pushes the metal outward. You can read which way the shooter stood by the curl. The peddler swore it was Tom the Tinker's work, done to a man who paid his tax. And whoever owned that pot after the shooting didn't throw it away. He whittled pegs, drove them in wet, and they swelled and held. My grandfather said those pine plugs had held for better than forty years.
Wilkins: Pine pegs in a hot pot. That's a man who loved his still more than his life.
Silas: Or a man too poor for another one. Grandfather cut the pegs out, dressed the ragged lips flat, and riveted copper patches over each hole, inside and out. He kept one peg in a snuff tin on the mantel. It's still black with seventy-year-old mash. It smells like a rebel's breath.
Wilkins: You hear that? Ghosts in a snuff tin. Now tell them about the haunted barn in Epsom, because I laughed until I nearly swallowed my pipe stem.
Silas: An Epsom farmer came to me white as flour. His barn was haunted, he said. Every night the north wind blew, a low moaning came out of the loft where he kept his still, and his wife said it was the ghost of a Whiskey Rebel come to punish him for paying a tax once in 1863.
Wilkins: Did he pay it?
Silas: He paid it once, and he's been sorry ever since. I went up into the loft on a windy night with a lantern. The swan neck had a hairline crack along the seam where somebody had worked the copper too cold, and when the wind came through the knothole in the gable it blew right across that crack like a boy blowing across a jug. The ghost moaned in B-flat.
Wilkins: The only rebel in New England who stayed in tune.
Silas: I took the neck off, brazed the seam proper, and the ghost quit. The farmer was happy. His wife was not. She told me the ghost was the only thing that ever kept her husband home of a night, and now he was back at the tavern by Thursday.
Wilkins: So you fixed his still and ruined his marriage. That's a coppersmith's career in one evening. Now, Silas, the 1791 tax charged the little man by the size of his still. Your family has a legend about that.
Silas: We do, and I'll tell it honest, because I don't believe a word of it. My great-grandfather was said to have hammered a still with a springy belly. You could tap the sides in with a mallet so it measured smaller when the gauger came with his rod and his tape, then pop it back out once the man rode off.
Wilkins: A still that could suck in its gut like a widower at a church supper.
Silas: That's the story. But copper work-hardens, Doctor. Every time you bend it, it gets stiffer and more brittle, until you anneal it in the fire to soften it again. Pop a belly in and out a few times in one season and it would crack like a February puddle. If he really built it, he built it once and buried it the next year. So I call it family poetry, not family metalwork.
Wilkins: And yet you hung a ghost-ward over the forge door. Tell them.
Silas: Two summers ago I was digging in an old cellar hole near Catamount Hill, where a farmstead burned before anyone now living was born. Down in the char I found a still cap green as a frog. It was old work, square rivets, maybe from the seventeen-nineties. Filed into the rim was a little notch shaped like a pole with a cap on top.
Wilkins: A liberty pole.
Silas: That's what I took it for. Somebody in this very valley marked his still with the sign of the rebels. I cleaned it gentle, never scoured the old marks, and hung it over the forge door. My apprentice won't walk under it after dark. Says he hears fiddling.
Wilkins: That's just me, son, practicing for the funeral of every revenue man in Merrimack County. Silas, stay put. After a word from the Academy, you and I are going to take a still apart and talk honest about the cuts.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
♪ Brisk patent-medicine banjo vamp
Announcer: Step right up, friends, step right up! Have you ever stood beside a still and wondered when the heads turn to hearts? Do you trust your nose, your thumb, or your neighbor's lies? Stop guessing! The Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course is here: a full eight-week Historical and Technical Distilling Academy from Fort Wilkins Academy! You'll master the thermodynamics of vapor, the honest art of the cuts, and the deep history of American spirits, from the Monongahela rebels to the Suncook Valley. Learn directly from master distillers, coppersmiths, and historians, with over thirty hours of detailed modules, blueprints, and live question-and-answer sessions. Find out why heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper beats tin, iron, and salvage scrap every time! See the work with your own eyes at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. And the price for all of it is just one hundred ninety-nine dollars! Seats are filling faster than a tax collector's barrel of feathers. Enroll today at fortwilkins.com/course, or at moonshinestill.com/course. Once more, friends: fortwilkins.com/course, or moonshinestill.com/course. Reserve your seat now!
♪ Vamp ends on a banjo flourish
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Segment the third: copper and the craft. First the plain law, which I say every night because the ghost of the excise is still walking. Making distilled spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and what we tell you here is history and education. Now, Silas, where does it start?
Silas: It starts in the barrel, not the pot. The Monongahela men made rye. Say you've got a ten-gallon mash. Take about fifteen pounds of rye meal and three pounds of malted barley. The rye has starch but nothing to turn it into sugar. The barley malt carries the enzymes that do the turning.
Wilkins: Heat your water and stir the rye in slow, or it balls up like a wad of wet newspaper in a bear's gut. Rye gets gummy and thick, so keep stirring. Once the rye is cooked, let it come down to about one hundred fifty degrees by a Fahrenheit glass, somewhere between a hundred forty-eight and a hundred fifty-eight. Then stir in the malt and hold it there an hour or more. That's when the starch turns to sugar.
Silas: To know it's done, drip a little mash onto a white saucer and add a drop of tincture of iodine. If it goes blue-black, starch remains and you wait longer. If it stays brownish, you're converted.
Wilkins: A mash that won't convert is like a Concord deacon at a dance: plenty of starch and no sweetness at all. Cool it to about eighty degrees, pitch your yeast, cover it loose so it breathes, and give it four days to a week to work into wash. Then the copper.
Silas: Then the copper. Most men run it twice. The first run strips the wash down to low wines, quick and rough. The second run, the spirit run, is where the cuts are made, and that run should be slow. Fire low, Doctor's motto.
Wilkins: And never seal a still. The vapor needs an open road to the worm. Block the line or choke the condenser and the pressure builds until the pot bursts and throws hot, burning spirit across the room like a sheriff's wife throws crockery. Keep your cooling water running cold, keep any open flame well away from a leaking joint, and never leave a running still unattended, not to piss, not to pray, not to argue with the bear.
Silas: Then the cuts. First come the foreshots. Methanol boils near a hundred forty-eight degrees and our ethanol near a hundred seventy-three, so the lightest, meanest stuff comes off first. But it doesn't come out in one tidy squirt, and a thermometer alone won't tell you when it's finished.
Wilkins: So be generous. A careful man pours away at least a good half pint per five gallons of wash and doesn't argue with himself about it. Pour the foreshots on the ground or on a revenue man's boots, whichever is nearer, but never down your own gullet. They can blind you and they can kill you.
Silas: Then the heads. You'll know them by the smell.
Wilkins: The heads smell like a cobbler's glue pot married a nail-polish peddler, and they deserve each other. Catch them in small jars, a row of them, numbered. Don't run it all into one crock like a drunk filling his hat.
Silas: Then the hearts, the clean middle. Sweet, round, grain in the nose and no burn behind it. Last come the tails, which run oily and wet-dog in the smell, and the proof falls off.
Wilkins: Tails are like a brother-in-law at Thanksgiving: oily, slow to leave, and best set aside for another day. Many men save them to go back in with the next run. Here's my trick, Silas. Set your numbered jars out overnight with a cloth over them, then smell each one by morning light. The sharp ones on the heads side go out. The wet-dog ones go back. Keep only what's honest.
Silas: And one warning on fruit. Cider brandy, peach, pear. Fruit carries pectin, and pectin is where methanol comes from, so a fruit mash makes more of it than a grain mash. Be more generous still on the heads cut when you run apples.
Wilkins: Now the alchemy. Why copper, Silas? The sulfur business, which every listener has heard me preach.
Silas: I'll keep it short. Copper takes the sulfur stink out of the vapor and holds it on the metal. Keep the copper bright and it keeps doing the work. I'll only add what a smith knows: put copper where the vapor touches longest, in the cap, the neck, and the first turns of the worm, and that's where the cleanup happens. And use heavy-gauge metal so you can scrub it hard for twenty years without wearing through.
Wilkins: Silas McAllister, you are a credit to the hammer and a disappointment to the gauger. Thank you, sir.
Silas: Thank you, Doctor. I'll go shake the bear hair off my britches.
♦ Footsteps, door creaks, bear grunts a greeting
♪ Short fiddle reel
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the mailbag, or in this case the call-in cylinder, since some clever devil found a way to talk into my wax from North Carolina. Let us play it.
♦ Recorded cylinder hiss, faint telephone-line warble
Cletus (recorded): 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?
♦ Cylinder clicks off
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, God bless you and your uncle both. Let me take hickory first. What's wood ash? It's potash, an alkaline salt. My own grandfather's generation burned whole hardwood forests up here, boiled the ash in kettles, and hauled the potash to Portsmouth for cash money. It was the frontier's first export, pretty near. Potash is the backbone of lye, and lye is the backbone of soap.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: So an ash in the thump keg can knock down some of the sour acid in a rough wash. That much is true. But it does not touch methanol. Methanol comes over in the foreshots and heads, ash or no ash, and the only cure is to throw those away. Rabbit, your uncle's hickory ash makes fine soap, and if he drinks enough of his own thump keg he will need it.
Wilkins: Now the red oak. There your uncle's not entirely a liar. Oak shavings in the doubler or in a jar give the spirit tannin, color, and a woody flavor, the way a barrel does over a long time. That's real, and plenty of old-timers did it for taste. But it's flavor, not safety. Red oak in the doubler is like rouge on a widow: it improves the complexion but does not change her age.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: While I've got the punch in my hand, let's bury another ghost: the blue-flame test. You'll hear some tavern sage say you pour a spoonful in a dish, set it alight, and if it burns blue it's safe, and if it burns yellow or red there's lead or poison in it. That's horse apples. Methanol burns with a pale blue flame, near invisible in daylight, just as clean-looking as good spirit. A flame can't tell you a thing about methanol, and it's no honest test for lead either. I set fire to a spoonful of my heads once to prove a point to a Gilmanton man, and it burned blue and pretty as a bishop's eye and would have blinded him all the same. A man who trusts the blue flame test is a man who would trust a bear to watch his ham.
Wilkins: Which reminds me of a bit of slang. A revenue man, among my patients, is called a wisdom tooth: he shows up late, he does no useful work, and you never get him out without blood.
♦ Coin clinks onto anvil
Wilkins: Tonight, in honor of the ghosts, I'm holding a large cent dated 1794, the very year Washington marched over the mountains. It's worn smooth as a deacon's excuse. Hold still, Liberty.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, ring fades
Wilkins: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. That 1794 copper has outlived the rebellion, the excise, Hamilton, and the man who first spent it in a tavern. Now it carries my name, which is the most it has ever been worth. Rabbit Miller, this one is yours. Tell your uncle to keep the ash for soap, the oak for flavor, and the heads cut for his eyesight. A shout to all of Wilkesboro and the whole Yadkin country!
♪ Banjo rises, bright
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Learn the cuts the right way before the ghosts do it for you. The Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course is waiting. Visit moonshinestill.com today. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme returns, slow and warm
Wilkins: That's our evening, friends. If you want to learn this craft the honest way, with the history, the copper, the thermometer, and the jars in a row, the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course will teach it to you better than any uncle, ghost, or revenue man ever could. My thanks to Silas McAllister, to Rabbit Miller down in Wilkesboro, and to Barnaby, who has eaten no ghosts tonight and is sulking about it.
♦ Bear grumbles, chain shifts
Wilkins: Remember the Monongahela men, the Exeter mob, and Tom the Tinker in the chimney corner, and remember that every tax collector in history has been outlived by the jug he came for. 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