Lincoln's Tax Collectors
Dr. G. G. Wilkins takes apart the new federal tax machine of 1862: the district assessors, assistant assessors, collectors, and gaugers sent out by the Bureau of Internal Revenue. He also tells the bloody tale of the Concord assistant assessor whose seat Barnaby ripped off and Wilkins then stitched up with dental silk. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister shares shop stories of revenue men, tampered gauging rods, and seized stills. Wilkins then answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak in the thump keg, and knocks down the old blue-flame test while striking coins on his anvil.
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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! Hush up, you flea-bitten sack of lard. There is nobody at the window but the moon, and the moon has already paid its taxes. Sit down before you pull that chain out of the timber and I have to go after you with the tooth key.
♦ Bear grunts once, low and sulky, chain settles
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, and you damned informers listening at the keyhole. 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. The fire is low, the copper is warm, and the bear is grumpy. Tonight's subject is the most hated breed of animal ever turned loose in these hills, worse than the catamount and worse than the Methodist circuit rider: Lincoln's tax collectors. The men sent to count every still. I have met a good many of them and bandaged a few. Pull your chair up close.
♪ Theme fades under
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Why stumble through the dark when you can learn the craft from the Alchemist himself? The Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course is waiting for you at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com. Learn it right, learn it safe, learn it legal!
♪ Short fiddle sting
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the first. Here is how the machine got built. On the first of July, 1862, Mr. Lincoln signed a law with a title as long as a Pittsfield winter: An Act to provide Internal Revenue to support the Government and to pay Interest on the Public Debt. The Union was bleeding money faster than a man with a busted molar bleeds into his beard. So Congress taxed nearly everything a Yankee does between rising and lying down. They taxed licenses, carriages, billiard tables, gold watches, and patent medicines. They even taxed a man's income, which was a new and unholy idea. And they taxed whiskey.
Wilkins: The spirit tax started on the first of August, 1862, at twenty cents a gallon. That was a pinch but no worse. In March of 1864 they made it sixty cents. In July of 1864 they made it a dollar and a half. On New Year's Day of this very year, 1865, they made it two dollars, which is more than the whiskey costs to make. When the tax is worth more than the goods, every farmer in the Suncook Valley turns into an outlaw by arithmetic.
Wilkins: But a tax is just ink on paper until some son of a bitch comes up your road to collect it. So the law built an army without muskets. The country was cut into collection districts. Each district got an assessor and a collector, both picked by the President himself, which means both were picked because they cheered loud enough at the right convention. Under the assessor came the assistant assessors, the men who walk the roads and knock on doors. Under the collector came the deputy collectors, the men who come back later and take your money. Over the whole herd sat the Commissioner of Internal Revenue. The first one was Mr. George S. Boutwell, a former governor of Massachusetts. If you want a man who will squeeze a penny until the eagle screams, hire a Bay Stater.
Wilkins: Now picture the assistant assessor. Every one of them came to Merrimack County with a ledger, an inkhorn, and a face like a man who has smelled his own boots and approved. He goes house to house from Pittsfield to Epsom to Barnstead and asks how many carriages you own, whether you sell spirits by the glass, whether you keep a billiard table, and what you earned last year. He writes it all down. And here is the devilish part, friends: those lists were open to the public. The Concord paper printed them. So every man in the county could find out his neighbor was poorer than he let on and twice as big a liar. I read that Deacon so-and-so of Chichester claimed an income that would not keep a hen in grit, and the same week he bought a new buggy with yellow wheels. Ha!
Wilkins: The collector posted a fat bond and was paid mostly by commission on what he brought in. So the only thing in New Hampshire that grows faster than a pig on spent mash is a revenue man's pocket. An assistant assessor is a man who could not make a living honestly, so the government made him a living out of the rest of us. Then there is the gauger. He carries a long graduated rod, pokes it into a cask, reads the marks, and works out the gallons, and you pay on his numbers. A gauger's rod is the only thing a revenue man carries that is straighter than he is. Later in the hour Silas will tell you even that is not always true.
Wilkins: You need a license as well. A retail liquor dealer had to pay a fee every year for the privilege of being robbed. And the act brought in little adhesive revenue stamps that had to go on deeds, receipts, and patent and proprietary medicines. I am a dentist, friends, and I sell a tooth tincture. So now I keep a revenue stamp on my tooth tincture so Washington knows it is medicinal, and I keep a bear by the window so Washington knows it is mine.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain rattles
Wilkins: Yes, yes, I am getting to you, you vain beast.
♪ Banjo bridge, minor key, a little sinister
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the second: legends, outlaws, and the men who limped home. I have told you before about deputies and rivers. Tonight you get a fellow I have never spoken of on this program. In the fall of 1863 a new assistant assessor rode out from Concord. I will call him Mr. Hezekiah Plumb, because that is close enough to his name and his mother has suffered enough. He was a pale, long, wet-lipped creature with a high collar, a brass gauging rod, an inkhorn on a string around his neck, and a ledger as thick as a family Bible. He came up the turnpike on a rented mare, tied her to my hitching rail, and walked around the back of the still-house without so much as a good afternoon. Rude bastard.
Wilkins: It was dusk. Barnaby was lying under the log window in a heap, black as a stove and twice as warm, and Mr. Plumb took him for a pile of old buffalo robes. He decided he would measure my mash tub through the window. He reached his gauging rod over that heap and poked it through the gap in the shutter. On the way, friends, the brass foot of that rod came down square on Barnaby's left ear.
♦ Deep, rising bear growl
Wilkins: There is a sound a bear makes waking up offended. It comes up from the bottom of him like a cellar door opening in a storm. Barnaby took that rod in his teeth and bit it in two. I heard the brass go with a noise like a church bell dropped on a stone step. Mr. Plumb, God love his stupidity, did not run. He stood there holding the stump of his rod and said, quite clearly, Sir, I am an officer of the United States. Barnaby did not care. He reached out with one paw and took hold of Mr. Plumb's coattails, trouser seat, drawers, and a strip of the Plumb hide about the width of a razor strop. Then he pulled.
♦ Wet canvas tearing, a man's high shriek
Wilkins: It sounded like a wet sail ripping off a schooner in a gale, and right behind it came a yell that scared crows off Catamount Hill. Mr. Plumb went over the woodshed fence and up onto the privy roof showing the rising moon a backside as bare and red as a skinned ham. He had one new stripe across it, bleeding down both legs into his boots. Barnaby sat below, chewing the coattails, and then he found the ledger. Ink and all, friends. He ate the inkhorn's worth of ink and three months of Pittsfield assessments, and he pissed purple for two days. That is the closest the Bureau of Internal Revenue has ever come to making a lasting impression on this town.
Wilkins: Mr. Plumb stayed on that privy roof four hours, through a cold rain, singing out for the sheriff and then for his mother. Near midnight I put Barnaby in the shed with a ham bone and brought the man down by lantern. Now, I am a professional. I laid him belly-down on my dental table, poured whiskey on the wound, and he made a noise like a goose under a cartwheel. Then I sewed him shut with dental silk. Eleven stitches. The finest work of my career. Straight as a fence rail, and I would put it in a museum if he would let me. And the ungrateful bastard rode back to Concord and still assessed me. Assessed me on a billiard table. I do not own a billiard table! I believe he was confused by the pain.
♦ Barnaby grunts, contented
Wilkins: Look at him. Proud as a selectman. Now, I have a guest tonight who has dealt with more revenue men across a workbench than I have across a bear. He is a coppersmith at the Fort Wilkins foundry, and he has a hammer arm like a ship's windlass. Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, welcome to the cylinder.
Silas: Evening, Doctor. I heard that story through the shop wall. I will say this for your stitching: Plumb walked crooked, but he walked.
Wilkins: High praise from a man who has never complimented anything but a seam. Silas, your family has been bending copper in this valley a long time. When the Bureau came, what did it look like from the shop side?
Silas: It changed what folks asked for, Doctor. Before 1862 a man ordered a still. After 1862 he ordered something that was not a still. My father built one for a farmer up past Berry Pond, a big copper kettle with a lid that came off and a neck that unscrewed and fit inside the woodbox. With the neck off it was a laundry boiler, plain as any in Merrimack County. Good heavy copper, tight seams, nothing unusual about it.
Wilkins: And did the assessor come?
Silas: He came. Rode in on a Monday, which was the farmer's bad luck and his wife's good luck, because Monday is wash day. She saw him on the road, set that kettle on the fire, and filled it with every pair of long underwear in the house. That was the farmer's, his three boys', and the hired man's, all worn the whole winter. She stood there stirring with a paddle and asked the assessor to step inside and get warm.
Wilkins: Oh, God.
Silas: Long underwear boiled for an hour gives off a smell, Doctor. My father said the assessor's eyes ran like a spring brook. He stood in that kitchen as long as a man could, wrote down one cow and a wagon, and left without asking a single question about the copper. The wife said afterward it was the first time in her life the menfolk's drawers had been worth something to the household.
Wilkins: That smell would back down a Confederate cavalry charge, never mind a man from the Bureau. That woman should have a pension. What else? I know you have had revenue men in the shop.
Silas: More than once. Last spring a deputy collector brought me a gauging rod to straighten. Brass, good work, but bowed a little in the middle. He said a distiller over Epsom way had dropped it, quite by accident, in front of him. So I put it on the bench to true it up, and I ran my thumb down the marks out of habit. Something felt wrong. A craftsman can feel a sixteenth of an inch the way you can feel a bad tooth with your tongue.
Wilkins: Truer words, Silas. Go on.
Silas: Somebody had taken a fine file to the foot of that rod and dressed off just a little. Every mark was reading short by a hair. You put that rod in a cask and it tells you a few gallons less than what is there. A few gallons a cask, at those tax rates, is real money. The distiller had borrowed the rod for an afternoon, so he said, to check his own barrels, and he gave it back filed and bent so nobody would look close.
Wilkins: And did you tell the deputy?
Silas: I told him the truth, Doctor. Metal does not lie, and I will not lie for it. I showed him the fresh file marks under my glass, bright brass under the old tarnish. He went white, then red, then he paid me double to keep my mouth shut about him lending his rod in the first place.
Wilkins: Ha! So both sides were crooked and the coppersmith got paid twice. That is the most American thing I have heard since the Fourth of July. A deputy collector once told me he was only doing his job, and I told him so does a tapeworm. Now, Silas, they say the collectors brought you seized stills to break up. Is that so?
Silas: It is, and that is the part of the trade I do not enjoy. A collector came in the fall with a still in his wagon, seized off a fellow down toward Pembroke. He wanted it cut up so it could never run again, and he paid by the pound. I took my shears to the first seam, and the joint was gray. Not brass, not silver. Lead solder, Doctor, slathered on thick like butter on a church-supper roll.
Wilkins: The devil's own glue.
Silas: That man had been running hot spirit through lead seams for who knows how long and selling it to his neighbors. Lead is a poison. It goes into the spirit, it goes into the man, and it stays there. I told the collector plainly that the folks who bought from that pot had more to fear from its seams than from Mr. Lincoln's two dollars. He did not like hearing it. I believe he had bought a jug or two himself.
Wilkins: Then he got his medicine twice. That is the sober part of this business, friends, and you should mark it. A tax will empty your pocket. Bad metal will empty your coffin. One more, Silas. You told me once about the government lock.
Silas: Yes. Where the collectors watch a licensed house close, they hang a government lock on the spirit tub so nothing can be drawn off untaxed. One fellow, not in this county, got clever. He bored a little hole into the copper behind the hasp, out of sight, and fit a quill tap. His floor was spread with white pine sawdust to soak up drips. When the inspector came, he saw sawdust that had gone pink. Copper filings show pink against white pine plain as blood on snow. The man had swept, but nobody sweeps fine enough to fool copper.
Wilkins: Caught by his own shavings. Silas, you are a moral man and an honest smith, and I do not know how you stand working for me.
Silas: You pay on time, Doctor, and the bear keeps the drummers away.
Wilkins: Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, everybody. Stay close, I may need you for the metal talk.
♪ Brisk banjo flourish into ad break
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a pitchman's bell rung twice
Announcer: Step right up, friends, step right up! Do you stand before your copper puzzled, wondering where the heads stop and the hearts begin? Has the thermodynamics of vapor got you tied up like a hog at the fair? Then hear this! The Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course, presented by Fort Wilkins Academy, is a full eight-week course in the history and the technique of American spirits! You will learn directly from master distillers, coppersmiths, and historians. That is more than thirty hours of detailed lessons, real blueprints, and live question-and-answer sessions where your questions get answered! Learn the art of the cuts. Learn why heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper does what no other metal can. Learn the deep history of the American craft, from the cider orchards of New England to the mountain hollows. All of it for just one hundred ninety-nine dollars! Visit our showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, or reserve your seat today at fortwilkins.com/course. That's fortwilkins.com/course! You will also find it through our friends at moonshinestill.com/course. Seats are filling faster than a jar under a good spout, so enroll today at fortwilkins.com/course!
♦ Pitchman's bell rung once
♪ Fiddle returns, warm and slow
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, drip into jar
Wilkins: Segment the third: copper and the craft. If the revenue men want to count every still, the least we can do is know what we are counting. I will walk you through a grain run the way I was taught, step by step. A word first, though. This program is history and entertainment. Distilling spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against United States law. Mr. Plumb's backside is proof the government takes it seriously.
Wilkins: First comes the mash. Take about eight pounds of cracked corn to five gallons of good water and bring it up hot, near a hundred and sixty-five degrees, stirring so it does not scorch. Hold it there until it thickens up like porridge. Then let it fall to between a hundred and forty-eight and a hundred and fifty-five degrees and stir in two pounds of malted barley, crushed. In that warm range the barley has a power in it, a ferment we cannot see, that turns the corn's starch into sugar. Hold it an hour and a half, and keep it covered. Then cool it to around eighty degrees, and only then pitch your yeast. Pitch it hot and you cook the little beasts. Let it work five to seven days in a warm room with air moving through, until it stops bubbling and tastes sour and dry.
Wilkins: Second, the run. You strain the wash into the pot and bring up the heat slowly. And now let me tell you something the old men get wrong. Everybody brags about a copper pot, but the bottom of the pot is not where copper earns its keep. The sulfur cleanup happens where the vapor touches the metal: the helmet, the neck, the arm running over to the worm, and the worm itself. Silas, would you agree?
Silas: I would, Doctor. I would sooner see a man with a plain kettle and a good copper head and worm than a fine copper pot with a cheap pipe on top. The vapor has to rub against bright copper. That is where the stink stays behind.
Wilkins: Spoken like a man who has smelled both. Third, the cuts, and here is where men go blind or die. The first drops that come over are the foreshots. They are sharp and they smell of glue and nail varnish, and a great deal of the poison comes over in them. You throw them out. You do not taste them, you do not sell them, you do not rub them on a sore gum. Next come the heads. They are still harsh and solvent-smelling, and they bite the nose. Those go out too, or into a separate jar that will never be drunk. Be generous in what you throw away. A man who is stingy with his heads is generous with his neighbors' eyesight.
Wilkins: Then come the hearts, sweet and clean and smooth, smelling like the grain itself grown up and gone to church. That is what the whole business is for. Catch it in a row of small jars, one after another, and do not guess. Smell each jar and set them in order on the bench. Last come the tails. They are oily and turbid, with a wet-dog, wet-cardboard smell. Set them aside. Some men run them again with the next batch.
Wilkins: Fourth, the fire, and I am not joking now. Spirit vapor is heavier than air. It does not rise politely up the chimney like a Christian soul. It crawls along the floor like a deputy looking for a dropped coin, and it pools there. One spark, one pipe-ash, one lantern set too low, and your still-house goes up like the Fourth of July in Concord. Keep the house aired out. Keep open flame away from the spout where the spirit runs. Check every joint for leaks before you fire up. And never, ever walk away from a running still. Not to the privy, not to the bear, not even to stitch an assessor.
♦ Barnaby huffs
Wilkins: He does not care for that last part.
♪ Banjo bridge, playful
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, then the click of a phonograph cylinder being swapped
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the mailbag. We have a call-in cylinder all the way from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, so the Carolina hills have found us at last. Let us hear it.
♦ Tinny playback crackle, faint hiss
Wilkins: Here is Mr. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller. He asks: Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Playback clicks off
Wilkins: Rabbit, a hearty Pittsfield hello to you and your uncle, and to everybody down in Wilkes County. Let me pick up the punch.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That is one copper cent stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and it goes in the Rabbit Miller jar. Now, the ashes. Hickory ash is mostly potash, which is lye, the same stuff your grandmother boiled with fat to make soap. Lye is an alkali. Drop it in a thump keg full of sour backset and it will cut some of the acid. Your uncle may have smelled a little less vinegar and called it a cure. But methanol is not an acid, Rabbit. The lye does not touch it. All the ash does is give you a lye taste and a scum on the doubler like a washtub on Saturday night.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the red oak. Here is something the coopers know and the moonshiners forget. No honest cooper makes a whiskey barrel out of red oak, because red oak is full of open pores and it leaks like a deacon's promise. They use white oak, which holds. Red oak shavings in a thump keg will give you tannin and some color, so the spirit looks older than it is. It is a disguise, Rabbit, not a cure. Red oak in a thump keg is like a Concord lawyer at a church supper: it adds color, takes up room, and leaks. The only thing that cleans out bad heads is the cut. Throw away the foreshots and the heads, and be generous about it.
Wilkins: While we are knocking down tall tales, there is one more. Men in every tavern from here to the Carolinas will pour a spoonful of spirit, set a match to it, and declare that a blue flame means it is safe. Friends, methanol burns blue too. The pale little flame of the very poison that blinds you looks just like the flame of good whiskey. A blue flame proves your spirit burns, and that is all it proves. The blue-flame test is the kind of science that works fine until you are blind, and then you cannot see the flame anyway.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That is three. Silas, what do they call a revenue man in your shop?
Silas: My father called them the inkhorn gentlemen, Doctor. Down at the Pittsfield mill they say a man has been plumbed when the assessor has been through his house and found everything.
Wilkins: Plumbed! Ha! And they named it after the man with the stitched backside. I take full credit. Rabbit Miller, thank you for your question. You are a credit to Wilkesboro, and three of my coins are on their way to you in a tobacco tin. Do not spend them all on ashes.
Wilkins: Let me say one last thing about the revenue men before we close. I have been taxed on my whiskey, my license, my income, and my tooth tincture. The only thing on this property Mr. Lincoln never taxed is Barnaby, because no assessor has come back alive enough to count him. And I will say this with real affection: the Union got saved, and a little of that saving came out of Pittsfield jars. I curse them every quarter-day and tip my hat to the boys in blue every Sunday.
♪ Theme rises softly
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! If tonight's lesson in cuts and copper set your mind afire, take the next step with the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course. Find it at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: My thanks to Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister for his straight talk and straight seams, to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, and to Mr. Hezekiah Plumb's backside, wherever it sits tonight. If you want to learn this craft properly, from the history to the copper to the cuts, then enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course at fortwilkins.com/course, or come see the copper at our showroom right here on Route 28 in Pittsfield. Barnaby will greet you. Stay on the right side of the chain.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, fading into wax cylinder crackle