A LEAF FROM THE PAST
In the United States, moonshining is seldom practiced outside the
mountains and foothills of the southern Appalachians, and those parts of
the southwest (namely, in southern Missouri, Arkansas and Texas), into
which the mountaineers have immigrated in considerable numbers.
Here, then, is a conundrum: How does it happen that moonshining is
distinctly a foible of the southern mountaineer?
To get to the truth, we must hark back into that eighteenth century
wherein, as I have already remarked, our mountain people are lingering
to this day. We must leave the South; going, first, to Ireland of 150 or
175 years ago, and then to western Pennsylvania shortly after the
Revolution.
The people of Great Britain, irrespective of race, have always been
ardent haters of excise laws. As Blackstone has curtly said, "From its
original to the present time, the very name of excise has been odious
to the people of England." Dr. Johnson, in his dictionary, defined
excise as "A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by
the common judges of property, but by wretches hired by those to whom
excise is paid." In 1659, when the town of Edinburgh placed an
additional impost on ale, the Convenanter Nicoll proclaimed it an act so
impious that immediately "God frae the heavens declared his anger by
sending thunder and unheard tempests and storms." And we still recall
Burns' fiery invective:
Thae curst horse-leeches o' the Excise
Wha mak the whisky stills their prize!
Haud up thy han', Deil! ance, twice, thrice!
There, seize the blinkers! [wretches]
An bake them up in brunstane pies
For poor d--n'd drinkers.
Perhaps the chief reason, in England, for this outspoken detestation of
the exciseman lay in the fact that the law empowered him to enter
private houses and to search at his own discretion. In Scotland and
Ireland there was another objection, even more valid in the eyes of the
common people; excise struck heaviest at their national drink.
Englishmen, at the time of which we are speaking, were content with
their ale, not yet having contracted the habit of drinking gin; but
Scotchmen and Irishmen preferred distilled spirits, manufactured, as a
rule, out of their own barley, in small pot-stills (_poteen_ means,
literally, a little pot), the process being a common household art
frequently practiced "every man for himself and his neighbor." A tax,
then, upon whiskey was as odious as a tax upon bread baked on the
domestic hearth--if not, indeed, more so.
Now, there came a time when the taxes laid upon spirituous liquors had
increased almost to the point of prohibition. This was done, not so much
for the sake of revenue, as for the sake of the public health and
morals. Englishmen had suddenly taken to drinking gin, and the immediate
effect was similar to that of introducing firewater among a race of
savages. There was hue and cry (apparently with good reason), that the
gin habit, spreading like a plague, among a people unused to strong
liquors, would soon exterminate the English race. Parliament, alarmed at
the outlook, then passed an excise law of extreme severity. As always
happens in such cases, the law promptly defeated its own purpose by
breeding a spirit of defiance and resistance among the great body of the
people.
The heavier the tax, the more widespread became the custom of illicit
distilling. The law was evaded in two different ways, the method
depending somewhat upon the relative loyalty of the people toward the
Crown, and somewhat upon the character of the country, as to whether it
was thickly or thinly settled.
In rich and populous districts, as around London and Edinburgh and
Dublin, the common practice was to bribe government officials. A
historian of that time declares that "Not infrequently the gauger could
have laid his hands upon a dozen stills within as many hours; but he had
cogent reasons for avoiding discoveries unless absolutely forced to make
them. Where informations were laid, it was by no means uncommon for a
trusty messenger to be dispatched from the residence of the gauger to
give due notice, so that by daybreak next morning 'the boys,' with all
their utensils, might disappear. Now and then they were required to
leave an old and worn-out still in place of that which they were to
remove, so that a report of actual seizure might be made. A good
understanding was thus often kept up between the gaugers and the
distillers; the former not infrequently received a 'duty' upon every
still within his jurisdiction, and his cellars were never without 'a sup
of the best.'... The commerce was carried on to a very great extent,
and openly. Poteen was usually preferred, even by the gentry, to
'Parliament' or 'King's' whiskey. It was known to be free from
adulteration, and had a smoky flavor (arising from the peat fires) which
many liked." Another writer says that "The amount of spirits produced by
distillation avowedly illicit vastly exceeded that produced by the
licensed distilleries. According to Wakefield, stills were erected even
in the kitchens of baronets and in the stables of clergymen."
However, this sort of thing was not moonshining. It was only the
beginning of that system of wholesale collusion which, in later times,
was perfected in our own country by the "Whiskey Ring."
Moonshining proper was confined to the poorer class of people,
especially in Ireland, who lived in wild and sparsely settled regions,
who were governed by a clan feeling stronger than their loyalty to the
central Government, and who either could not afford to share their
profits with the gaugers, or disdained to do so. Such people hid their
little pot-stills in inaccessible places, as in the savage mountains and
glens of Connemara, where it was impossible, or at least hazardous, for
the law to reach them. With arms in hand they defied the officers. "The
hatred of the people toward the gauger was for a very long period
intense. The very name invariably aroused the worst passions. To kill a
gauger was considered anything but a crime; wherever it could be done
with comparative safety, he was hunted to the death."
Thus we see that the townsman's weapon against the government was graft,
and the mountaineer's weapon was his gun--a hundred and fifty years ago,
in Ireland, as they are in America to-day. Whether racial character had
much to do with this is a debatable question. But, having spoken of
race, a new factor, and a curious one, steps into our story. Let it be
noted closely, for it bears directly on a problem that has puzzled many
of our own people, namely: What was the origin of our southern
mountaineers?
The north of Ireland, at the time of which we have been speaking, was
not settled by Irishmen, but by Scotchmen, who had been imported by
James I. to take the place of native Hibernians whom he had dispossessed
from the three northern counties. These immigrants came to be known as
the Scotch-Irish. They learned how to make poteen in little stills,
after the Irish fashion, and to defend their stills from intrusive
foreigners, also after the Irish fashion. By and by these Scotch-Irish
fell out with the British Government, and large bodies of them emigrated
to America, settling, for the most part, in western Pennsylvania.
They were a fighting race. Accustomed to plenty of hard knocks at home,
they took to the rough fare and Indian wars of our border as naturally
as ducks take to water. They brought with them, too, an undying hatred
of excise laws, and a spirit of unhesitating resistance to any authority
that sought to enforce such laws.
It was these Scotchmen, in the main, assisted by a good sprinkling of
native Irish, and by the wilder blades among the Pennsylvania-Dutch, who
drove out the Indians from the Alleghany border, formed our rear-guard
in the Revolution, won that rough mountain region for civilization, left
it when the game became scarce and neighbors' houses too frequent,
followed the mountains southward, settled western Virginia and Carolina,
and formed the vanguard westward into Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and
so onward till there was no longer a West to conquer. Some of their
descendants remained behind in the fastnesses of the Alleghanies, the
Blue Ridge, and the Unakas, and became, in turn, the progenitors of that
singular race which, by an absurd pleonasm, is now commonly known as
the "mountain whites," but properly southern highlanders.
The first generation of Pennsylvania frontiersmen knew no laws but those
of their own making. They were too far away, too scattered, and too
poor, for the Crown to bother with them. Then came the Revolution. The
backwoodsmen were loyal to the new American Government--loyal to a man.
They not only fought off the Indians from the rear, but sent many of
their incomparable riflemen to fight at the front as well.
They were the first English-speaking people to use weapons of precision
(the rifle, introduced by the Pennsylvania-Dutch about 1700, was used by
our backwoodsmen exclusively throughout the war). They were the first to
employ open-order formation in civilized warfare. They were the first
outside colonists to assist their New England brethren at the siege of
Boston. They were mustered in as the First Regiment of Foot of the
Continental Army (being the first troops enrolled by our Congress, and
the first to serve under a Federal banner). They carried the day at
Saratoga, the Cowpens, and King's Mountain. From the beginning to the
end of the war, they were Washington's favorite troops.
[Illustration: A Tub Mill]
And yet these same men were the first rebels against the authority of
the United States Government! And it was their old commander-in-chief,
Washington himself, who had the ungrateful task of bringing them to
order by a show of Federal bayonets.
It happened in this wise:
Up to the year 1791 there had been no excise tax in the United Colonies
or the United States. (One that had been tried in Pennsylvania was
utterly abortive). Then the country fell upon hard times. A larger
revenue had to be raised, and Hamilton suggested an excise. The measure
was bitterly opposed by many public men, notably by Jefferson; but it
passed. Immediately there was trouble in the tall timber.
Western Pennsylvania, and the mountains southward, had been settled, as
we have seen, by the Scotch-Irish; men who had brought with them a
certain fondness for whiskey, a certain knack in making it, and an
intense hatred of excise, on general as well as special principles.
There were few roads across the mountains, and these few were
execrable--so bad, indeed, that it was impossible for the backwoodsmen
to bring their corn and rye to market, except in a concentrated form.
The farmers of the seaboard had grown rich, from the high prices that
prevailed during the French Revolution; but the mountain farmers had
remained poor, owing partly to difficulties of tillage, but chiefly to
difficulties of transportation. As Albert Gallatin said, in defending
the western people, "We have no means of bringing the produce of our
lands to sale either in grain or in meal. We are therefore distillers
through necessity, not choice, that we may comprehend the greatest value
in the smallest size and weight. The inhabitants of the eastern side of
the mountains can dispose of their grain without the additional labor of
distillation at a higher price than we can after we have disposed that
labor upon it."
Again, as in all frontier communities, there was a scarcity of cash in
the mountains. Commerce was carried on by barter; but there had to be
some means of raising enough cash to pay taxes, and to purchase such
necessities as sugar, calico, gun powder, etc., from the peddlers who
brought them by pack train across the Alleghanies. Consequently a still
had been set up on nearly every farm. A horse could carry about sixteen
gallons of liquor, which represented eight bushels of grain, in weight
and bulk, and double that amount in value. This whiskey, even after it
had been transported across the mountains, could undersell even so
cheap a beverage as New England rum--so long as no tax was laid upon it.
But when the newly created Congress passed an excise law, it virtually
placed a heavy tax on the poor mountaineers' grain, and let the grain of
the wealthy eastern farmers pass on to market without a cent of charge.
Naturally enough, the excitable people of the border regarded such a law
as aimed exclusively at themselves. They remonstrated, petitioned,
stormed. "From the passing of the law in January, 1791, there appeared a
marked dissatisfaction in the western parts of Pennsylvania, Maryland,
Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. The legislatures of North
Carolina, Virginia and Maryland passed resolutions against the law, and
that of Pennsylvania manifested a strong spirit of opposition to it. As
early as 1791, Washington was informed that throughout this whole region
the people were ready for revolt." "To tax their stills seemed a blow at
the only thing which obdurate nature had given them--a lot hard indeed,
in comparison with that of the people of the sea-board."
Our western mountains (we call most of them southern mountains now)
resembled somewhat those wild highlands of Connemara to which reference
has been made--only they were far wilder, far less populous, and
inhabited by a people still prouder, more independent, more used to
being a law unto themselves than were their ancestors in old Hibernia.
When the Federal exciseman came among this border people and sought to
levy tribute, they blackened or otherwise disguised themselves and
treated him to a coat of tar and feathers, at the same time threatening
to burn his house. He resigned. Indignation meetings were held,
resolutions were passed calling on all good citizens to _disobey_ the
law, and whenever anyone ventured to express a contrary opinion, or
rented a house to a collector, he, too, was tarred and feathered. If a
prudent or ultra-conscientious individual took out a license and sought
to observe the law, he was visited by a gang of "Whiskey Boys" who
smashed the still and inflicted corporal punishment upon its owner.
Finally, warrants were issued against the lawbreakers. The attempt to
serve these writs produced an uprising. On July 16, 1794, a company of
mountain militia marched to the house of the inspector, General Neville,
to force him to give up his commission. Neville fired upon them, and, in
the skirmish that ensued, five of the attacking force were wounded and
one was killed. The next day, a regiment of 500 mountaineers, led by
one "Tom the Tinker," burned Neville's house, and forced him to flee for
his life. His guard of eleven U. S. soldiers surrendered, after losing
one killed and several wounded.
A call was then issued for a meeting of the mountain militia at the
historic Braddock's Field. On Aug. 1, a large body assembled, of whom
2,000 were armed. They marched on Pittsburgh, then a village of 1,200
souls. The townsmen, eager to conciliate and to ward off pillage,
appointed a committee to meet the mob half way. The committee, finding
that it could not induce the mountain men to go home, made a virtue of
necessity by escorting 5,400 of them into Pittsburgh town. As Fisher
says, "The town was warned by messengers, and every preparation was
made, not for defense, but to extinguish the fire of the Whiskey Boys'
thirst, which would prevent the necessity of having to extinguish the
fire they might apply to houses.... Then the work began. Every citizen
worked like a slave to carry provisions and buckets of whiskey to that
camp." Judge Brackenridge tells us that it was an expensive as well as
laborious day, and cost him personally four barrels of prime old
whiskey. The day ended in a bloodless, but probably uproarious,
jollification.
On this same day (the Governor of Pennsylvania having declined to
interfere) Washington issued a proclamation against the rioters, and
called for 15,000 militia to quell the insurrection. Meantime he had
appointed commissioners to go into the disaffected region and try to
persuade the people to submit peacefully before the troops should
arrive. Peace was offered on condition that the leaders of the
disturbance should submit to arrest.
While negotiations were proceeding, the army advanced. Eighteen
ringleaders of the mob were arrested, and the "insurrection" faded away
like smoke. When the troops arrived, there was nothing for them to do.
The insurgent leaders were tried for treason, and two of them were
convicted, but Washington pardoned both of them. The cost of this
expedition was more than one-third of the total expenditures of the
Government, for that year, for all other purposes. The moral effect upon
the nation at large was wholesome, for the Federal Government had
demonstrated, on this its first test, that it could enforce its own laws
and maintain domestic tranquility. The result upon the mountain people
themselves was dubious. Thomas Jefferson wrote to Madison in December:
"The information of our [Virginia's] militia, returned from the
westward, is uniform, that though the people there let them pass
quietly, they were objects of their laughter, not of their fear; that
one thousand men could have cut off their whole force in a thousand
places of the Alleghany; that their detestation of the excise law was
universal, and has now associated with it a detestation of the
Government; and that a separation which was perhaps a very distant and
problematical event, is now near and certain, and determined in the mind
of every man."
But Jefferson himself came to the presidency within six years, and the
excise tax was promptly repealed, never again to be instituted, save as
a war measure, until within a time so recent that it is now remembered
by men whom we would not call very old.
The moonshiners of our own day know nothing of the story that has here
been written. Only once, within my knowledge, has it been told in the
mountains, and then the result was so unexpected, that I append the
incident as a color contrast to this rather sombre narrative.--
I was calling on a white-bearded patriarch who was a trifle vain of his
historical learning. He could not read, but one of his daughters read
to him, and he had learned by heart nearly all that lay between the two
lids of a "Universal History" such as book agents peddle about. Like one
of John Fox's characters, he was fond of the expression "hist'ry says"
so-and-so, and he considered it a clincher in all matters of debate.
Our conversation drifted to the topic of moonshining.
"Down to the time of the Civil War," declared the old settler, "nobody
paid tax on the whiskey he made. Hit was thataway in my Pa's time, and
in Gran'sir's, too. And so 'way back to the time of George Washington.
Now, hist'ry says that Washington was the Father of his Country; and I
reckon he was the _greatest_ man that ever lived--don't you?"
I murmured a complaisant assent.
"Waal, sir, if 't was right to make free whiskey in Washington's day,
hit's right _now_!" and the old man brought his fist down on the table.
"But that is where you make a mistake," I replied. "Washington did
enforce a whiskey tax." Then I told about the Whiskey Insurrection of
1794.
This was news to Grandpa. He listened with deep attention, his brows
lowering as the narrative proceeded. When it was finished he offered
no comment, but brooded to himself in silence. My own thoughts wandered
far afield, until recalled to the topic by a blunt demand:
[Illustration: Cabin on the Little Fork of Sugar Fork of Hazel Creek in
which the author lived alone for three years]
"You say Washington done that?"
"He did."
"George Washington?"
"Yes, sir: the Father of his Country."
"Waal, I'm satisfied now that Washington was a leetle-grain cracked."
* * * * *
The law of 1791, although it imposed a tax on whiskey of only 9 to 11
cents per proof gallon, came near bringing on a civil war, which was
only averted by the leniency of the Federal Government in granting
wholesale amnesty. The most stubborn malcontents in the mountains moved
southward along the Alleghanies into western Virginia and the Carolinas,
where no serious attempt was made to collect the excise; so they could
practice moonshining to their heart's content, and there their
descendants remain to-day.
On the accession of Jefferson, in 1800, the tax on spirits was repealed.
The war of 1812 compelled the Government to tax whiskey again, but as
this was a war tax, shared by commodities generally, it aroused no
opposition. In 1817 the excise was again repealed; and from that time
until 1862 no specific tax was levied on liquors. During this period of
thirty-five years the average market price of whiskey was 24 cents a
gallon, sometimes dropping as low as 14 cents. Spirits were so cheap
that a "burning fluid," consisting of one part spirits of turpentine to
four or five parts alcohol was used in the lamps of nearly every
household. Moonshining, of course, had ceased to exist.
Then came the Civil War. In 1862 a tax of 20 cents a gallon was levied.
Early in 1864 it rose to 60 cents. This cut off the industrial use of
spirits, but did not affect its use as a beverage. In the latter part of
1864 the tax leaped to $1.50 a gallon, and the next year it reached the
prohibitive figure of $2. The result of such excessive taxation was just
what it had been in the old times, in Great Britain. In and around the
centers of population there was wholesale fraud and collusion. "Efforts
made to repress and punish frauds were of absolutely no account
whatever.... The current price at which distilled spirits were sold in
the markets was everywhere recognized and commented on by the press as
less than the amount of the tax, allowing nothing whatever for the cost
of manufacture."
Seeing that the outcome was disastrous from a fiscal point of view--the
revenue from this source was falling to the vanishing point--Congress,
in 1868, cut down the tax to 50 cents a gallon. "Illicit distillation
practically ceased the very hour that the new law came into operation;
... the Government collected during the second year of the continuance
of the act $3 for every one that was obtained during the last year of
the $2 rate."
In 1869 there came a new administration, with frequent removals of
revenue officials for political purposes. The revenue fell off. In 1872
the rate was raised to 70 cents, and in 1875 to 90 cents. The result is
thus summarized by David A. Wells:
"Investigation carefully conducted showed that on the average the
product of illicit distillation costs, through deficient yields, the
necessary bribery of attendants, and the expenses of secret and unusual
methods of transportation, from two to three times as much as the
product of legitimate and legal distillation. So that, calling the
average cost of spirits in the United States 20 cents per gallon, the
product of the illicit distiller would cost 40 to 60 cents, leaving but
10 cents per gallon as the maximum profit to be realized from fraud
under the most favorable conditions--an amount not sufficient to offset
the possibility of severe penalties of fine, imprisonment, and
confiscation of property.... The rate of 70 cents ... constituted a
moderate temptation to fraud. Its increase to 90 cents constituted a
temptation altogether too great for human nature, as employed in
manufacturing and selling whiskey, to resist.... During 1875-6,
highwines sold openly in the Chicago and Cincinnati markets at prices
less than the average cost of production plus the Government tax.
Investigations showed that the persons mainly concerned in the work of
fraud were the Government officials rather than the distillers; and that
a so-called 'Whiskey Ring' ... extended to Washington, and embraced
within its sphere of influence and participation, not merely local
supervisors, collectors, inspectors, and storekeepers of the revenue,
but even officers of the Internal Revenue Bureau, and probably, also,
persons occupying confidential relations with the Executive of the
Nation."
* * * * *
Such being the condition of affairs in the centers of civilization in
the latter part of the nineteenth century, let us now turn to the
mountains, and see how matters stood among those primitive people who
were still tarrying in the eighteenth. Their situation at that time is
thus briefly sketched by a southern historian[7]:
"Before the war these simple folks made their apples and peaches into
brandy, and their corn into whiskey, and these products, with a few
cattle, some dried fruits, honey, beeswax, nuts, wool, hides, fur,
herbs, ginseng and other roots, and woolen socks knitted by the women in
their long winter evenings, formed the stock in trade which they
bartered for their plain necessaries and few luxuries, their homespun
and cotton cloths, sugar, coffee, snuff, and fiddles.... The raising of
a crop of corn in summer, and the getting out of tan-bark and lumber in
winter, were almost their only resources.... The burden of taxation
rested lightly on them. For near two generations no excise duties had
been levied.... The war came on. They were mostly loyal to the Union.
They paid the first moderate tax without a murmur.
"They were willing to pay any tax that they were able to pay. But
suddenly the tax jumped to $1.50, and then to $2, a gallon. The people
were goaded to open rebellion. Their corn at that time brought only from
25 to 40 cents a bushel; apples and peaches, rarely more than 10 cents
at the stills. These were the only crops that could be grown in their
deep and narrow valleys. Transportation was so difficult, and markets so
remote, that there was no way to utilize the surplus except to distill
it. Their stills were too small to bear the cost of government
supervision. The superior officers of the Revenue Department
(collectors, marshals, and district-attorneys or commissioners) were
paid only by commissions on collections and by fees. Their subordinate
agents, whose income depended upon the number of stills they cut up and
upon the arrests made, were, as a class, brutal and desperate
characters. Guerrilla warfare was the natural sequence."