stills in the hills

I’m still gazing at the New York picture papers from 100 years ago, especially trying to keep alert for anything that might relate to the American Civil War. Recently I noticed a thumbnail that looked like an old cabin. Could the photo possibly have anything to do with Abraham Lincoln, who the federal government assures us was born in a log cabin? After all, nowadays we have replica history and even reenactors.

Upon enlargement it was evident that the picture I was looking really had nothing to do with the Civil War. However, the photo was taken in Kentucky, where the sixteenth president was born. The man in the picture was about as old as Mr. Lincoln would have been had he lived. The Kentucky centenarian’s occupation was probably related to government efforts to pay for Mr. Lincoln’s war. From the August 11, 1918 issue of the New York Tribune:

As you can read at taxhistory.org, the federal government raised money during the Civil War by issuing bonds and increasing taxes, including a tax on liquor:

The Internal Revenue Act of 1862, enacted by Congress in July, 1862, soaked up much of the inflationary pressure produced by Greenbacks. It did so because the Act placed excise taxes on just about everything, including sin and luxury items like liquor, tobacco, playing cards, carriages, yachts, billiard tables, and jewelry. It taxed patent medicines and newspaper advertisements. It imposed license taxes on practically every profession or service except the clergy. It instituted stamp taxes, value added taxes on manufactured goods and processed meats, inheritance taxes, taxes on the gross receipts of corporations, banks, and insurance companies, as well as taxes on dividends or interest they paid to investors. To administer these excise taxes, along with the tariff system, the Internal Revenue Act also created a Bureau of Internal Revenue, whose first commissioner, George Boutwell, described it as “the largest Government department ever organized.”

A table at Wikipedia shows that excise taxes accounted for a substantial part of federal revenue from 1865 through 1915 and they returned in 1928. I’m assuming that at least some moonshine was produced to avoid the government revenooer. Some people made their own spirits on the sly. As early as December 1867 Harper’s Weekly published a drawing of the illicit Southern mode of distillation. By 1877 moonshine culture had developed to such an extent that the same magazine published a page of images related to the “Moonshine Man” of Kentucky. Harper’s featured a similar page about “crooked whiskey in North Carolina” in 1879.

An apparently Republican campaign document during the 1868 election campaign showed how war debt and taxes had decreased since the war under the Republican-led Congress, but the federal government was still taxing “Distilled Spirits, Beer, Tobacco and Playing Cards”

It seems that alcohol has had quite a big part in American history. The Whiskey Rebellion during the early 1790’s tested the federal government’s power to collect a tax on distilled spirits under the brand new Constitution: “The Whiskey Rebellion demonstrated that the new national government had the will and ability to suppress violent resistance to its laws, though the whiskey excise remained difficult to collect.”

From 1920 until 1933 the Eighteenth Amendment to the federal Constitution prohibited “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all the territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.” People could still consume alcohol if they had it and doctors could apparently prescribe “medicinal alcohol”.

From the Library of Congress: night, 1868, Kentucky, North Carolina, tarred and feathered; during Prohibition – “Moonshine still recently confiscated by the Internal Revenue Bureau photographed at the Treasury Department”. The prescription can be found at Wikipedia