Revenuers and Moonshiners: Enforcing Federal Liquor Law in the Mountain South, 1865-1900

By Wilbur R. Miller

The federal government's attempt to enforce civil rights measures during Reconstruction is usually regarded as a failure. Far more successful, however, was the collection of federal excise taxes on liquor during the same period -- an effort that secured for the government its single most important source of internal revenue. In Revenuers and Moonshiners Wilbur Miller explores the development and professionalization of the federal bureaucracy by examining federal liquor law enforcement in the mountain South after the Civil War. He addresses the central questions of the conditions under which unpopular federal laws could be enforced and the ways in which enforcement remained limited.

The extension of federal taxing power to cover homemade whiskey was fiercely resisted by mountain people, who had long relied on distilling to produce an easily transported and readily salable product made from their corn. As a result, the collection of the tax required the creation of the most extensive civilian law enforcement agency in the nation's history, the Bureau of Internal Revenue. The bureau both regulated taxpaying distilleries and combated illicit production. This battle against moonshiners, Miller argues, implemented by the Republican party's vision of a federal authority capable of reaching into the most remote parts of the nation.

Miller concentrates his analysis on the revenuers, but he nevertheless draws a clear picture of the mountain people who resisted them. He dispels traditional views of moonshiners as folk heroes imbued with a stubborn individualism or simple country folk victimized by outside forces beyond their control or understanding. Rather, Miller shows that the men (and sometimes women) who made moonshine were members of a complex and changing society that was a product of both traditional aspects of mountain culture and the forces of industrialization that were reshaping their society after the Civil War.

Originally published in 1991.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781469639710

Wilbur R. Miller

Wilbur R. Miller is author of Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London, 1830-1870.

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Preface

This book began as something else, a study of federal civil rights law enforcement during the Reconstruction era of the 1870s. My previous work on urban policing and several years of teaching a course on the Civil War and Reconstruction led me to see Reconstruction as a novel federal policing effort in the face of determined southern resistance. Part of the explanation for its failure could be found in difficulties and dilemmas of balancing force and restraint experienced by ordinary policemen. Research in this area, though, soon convinced me that many other scholars have covered this ground and that I would add only a slight twist to familiar interpretations.

The apparent dead end led to this book. Amid the mountain of archival material on enforcement of Reconstruction civil rights and election laws were many references to internal revenue and moonshiners. In fact, most of the correspondence of several southern federal district attorneys was concerned with difficulties in collecting the whiskey tax and dealing with violent resistance. I had serendipitously found a new topic, one that not only addresses the police problem of federal authority in an area that has been scarcely explored, but adds a new element to historians’ ongoing debates about whether the Civil War left a legacy of permanently expanded federal power.

In addition, the study of revenue enforcement offered a chance to compare it to Reconstruction, since many of the same officials were engaged in both tasks, though usually in different regions of their states. Contrasting the failure of Reconstruction with the relative success of revenue enforcement contributes to understanding a central question: What are the conditions under which unpopular laws can be enforced, and what are the limits of their enforcement? Policies and practices of government officials, political calculations and needs, and the nature of the people resisting authority all entered the picture.

The confrontation between revenuers and moonshiners who refused to pay the federal excise tax on their home-distilled whiskey was localized, mostly confined to the southern Appalachians. Local people, though, were challenging a fundamental aspect of national authority, the ability of the government to collect its taxes. A regional confrontation became a national issue, and its history is part of the nation’s history.

This study is more about revenuers than moonshiners, adding to knowledge of federal policing, the nature of national authority, and the growth of a bureaucratic state in the late nineteenth century. Consequently, moonshining and its practitioners are seen from the perspective of the revenuers. I am not trying to make heroes of the revenuers, for it will be clear that there were corrupt and brutal men among them as well as some who were honest and brave. The ordinary revenuer had a job to do and usually tried to do it to the best of his ability.

Since this is an account of the interaction between federal officials and moonshiners, something about the moonshiners themselves and the southern Appalachian society in which they lived must be part of the story. Moonshiners have been traditional heroes, representatives of a stubborn individualism that appeals to Americans’ resentment of government interference in their lives. Moonshiners have also been presented as simple country folk, victims of outside forces beyond their understanding or control. I have not sought to debunk or support either image but, in general, have come to understand moonshiners as men, and sometimes women, going about their business for a variety of reasons or motives. This discussion begins with chapter 2, and general readers may wish to begin there, since the first chapter addresses issues mostly of interest to specialists in late-nineteenth-century institutional history.

In describing mountain society, I have been able to rely primarily on the work of a group of historians, notably Ronald Eller, Gordon McKinney, Altina Waller, Durwood Dunn, and others acknowledged in my notes, who during the last ten or fifteen years reshaped our understanding of Appalachia. Reading their books, and the responses of McKinney, Waller, and an anonymous manuscript reader to my work, has enabled me to understand the moonshiner quite differently from the old, very widely disseminated image of the backward, quaint, squirrel-rifle-and-whiskey-jug-toting hillbilly. He and sometimes she were part of a changing society, a product of both the traditional aspects of mountain culture and the forces of industrialization that were reshaping Appalachian society after the Civil War. Revenuers were but one of the novelties many mountain people faced.

Thanks are due to Harold Hyman, who has followed this project as it took shape over the years and offered both encouragement and caution against trying to carry my arguments too far. If I am insufficiently cautious here, of course I cannot say that I did not have warning. William F. Holmes, the first academic historian to pay attention to moonshiners, also deserves thanks here for support in the early stages of this study.

Thanks to my wife, Carole Turbin, belong here rather than the usual place at the end. In the midst of writing her own book, she helped me figure out what mine was really about and contributed to formulating its argument. Her confidence was essential in seeing a very long and drawn-out project to its completion.

In addition to these intellectual debts is the practical help every researcher receives from archivists and librarians. I wish to thank especially Cynthia Fox and William Sherman, who seemed to take a personal interest in my hunt through Department of Justice and Bureau of Internal Revenue records in the National Archives. Likewise, Mary Ann Hawkins and Charles Reeves of the Atlanta Branch of the National Archives cheerfully helped in my efforts to mine at least the surface of their rich collection of federal court records. The staffs of the Southern Historical Collection and North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were always courteous and efficient, as were those at the West Virginia University Library and the University of Georgia Library. Although my work there was more routine and less personal, the New York Public, Columbia University, New York University, and the SUNY Stony Brook libraries proved to be especially useful as well as convenient.

David Perry of the University of North Carolina Press kept faith in this book’s sometimes rough progress toward publication. Ron Maner, project editor, and Stephanie Wenzel, copyeditor, people important in the publishing process who are not often acknowledged, deserve thanks for their contributions.

Finally, I wish to thank various funding agencies and hope that the book will justify their confidence in its author. The State University of New York’s Research Foundation provided a grant that got this project started in its original form. The American Council of Learned Societies awarded me a fellowship which gave me the time and momentum to finish the book. The American Historical Association, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Endowment for the Humanities provided travel funds for trips to various collections.

1 Reconstruction, Revenue, and the National State

Amos Owens of Rutherford County, North Carolina, was one of many southerners who resisted the national governments intrusion into their way of life after the Civil War. He returned from the war to find his slave freed and a heavy tax imposed on the liquor he had been making for years. Owens responded to these two forms of Yankee oppression by joining the Ku Klux Klan and becoming a celebrated moonshiner. His double confrontation with federal authority landed him in prison three times, the first for violating the Reconstruction-era law against Klan activity, the other two for illicit distilling contrary to the revenue laws. There were others like Owens, Klansmen and moonshiners, who challenged the authority of the national state when it reached into their lives to punish activities they themselves did not consider crimes.¹

Many contemporary observers believed that Union victory in the Civil War left the federal government a legacy of greatly increased power. This legacy included the constitutional amendments guaranteeing civil rights for emancipated blacks. These had to be enforced against southern whites’ violence, fraud, and intimidation, mobilizing the federal judicial system and army against Owens and his fellow white supremacists. Taken more for granted by contemporaries and less well known to historians, the war also fostered another expansion of the state, a far-reaching system of internal revenue taxation. Wartime excise taxes on whiskey, tobacco, and other items were retained to pay the huge national debt and the cost of the government’s expanded operations. Collection of these taxes required an army of new officials to insure that every drop of whiskey produced contributed its share of the revenue. These officials often confronted moonshiners like Owens who resisted taxation of traditional mountain dew. This book tells a largely untold story of how the revenue system developed into a permanent feature of the national government, and of its long struggle to assert and maintain its power to impose liquor taxes in the moonshiners’ southern mountain domain. Operating within the limits of the nineteenth-century federal government, the bureau and its officials both embodied many of those limits and foreshadowed later development of a national state, an administrative apparatus capable of penetrating all parts of the nation’s territory.²

Both contemporary commentators and historians analyzing the expansion of national authority after the Civil War have focused on the Reconstruction experience. James G. Blaine argued that the Republican party politicians who dominated the federal government after the war discovered that every thing which may be done by either Nation or State may be better and more securely done by the Nation. The change of view... led to far-reaching consequences. Most historians, however, argue that Reconstruclion’s contributions to expanded federal power were not in fact very far-reaching. Emphasizing the failure of Reconstruction, they contend that efforts to protect civil rights did not lead to a permanent administrative state. They stress that centralization was narrowly confined by the nation’s federal structure and American political traditions, which sharply restricted the institutional means of enforcing federal laws. The Civil War, according to Morton Keller, gave Americans a sense of profound social and political change more than it actually implanted permanent expansion of national authority.³

The collapse of civil rights enforcement in the face of southern resistance seems to have inhibited development of centralized power for many years. Reconstruction succumbed to traditional American racism, localism, and commitment to laissez-faire economics, revealing a lack of social underpinning for the novel assertion of national power. One historian, expanding on a turn-of-the-century commentator’s phrase, described the federal government as a weakened spring in the later nineteenth century. Harold Hyman argues that the Civil War’s impact on governmental power was far more important on the state than the national level. Stephen Skowronek minimizes the Reconstruction era’s significance in the development of an American administrative state and describes a patchwork slowly and unevenly emerging into a coherent set of institutions only in the early twentieth century. The end of Reconstruction seemed to mark the close of a period of institutional change instead of paving the way for a new type of national authority.⁴

However, historians who have emphasized the restricted role of government after Reconstruction have overlooked the internal revenue system.⁵ Students of administrative history and development of federal power are practically silent about the Bureau of Internal Revenue, looking instead to formation of a professional civil service, reform of the army, and economic regulation as sources of growing national authority. The revenue bureau deserves more than the passing nod it has received.

If a government is to be effective, able to extend its authority throughout its territory, then it must efficiently collect its taxes. The agency with that duty plays an important role in integrating the nation and in developing citizens’ acceptance of an obligation to maintain their government. People pay taxes, not because they have a strong sense of patriotic duty, but because they fear the consequences of not paying. Even one person’s resistance to taxation is a test of national authority that must be contained before it encourages other people to believe they can also get away with evasion. Individual moonshiners did not cost the government much in lost tax money, but collectively they did withhold substantial revenues. If moonshiners believed that the authorities would leave them alone, more and more people in the southern Appalachian heartland of moonshining would take up wildcat distilling of corn whiskey or fruit brandy. Revenue officials could never eliminate moonshining, but they sought to make it clear that most illicit distillers would eventually face the consequences–fine and imprisonment–of their evasion.

Internal revenue or excise taxation had never been popular in America. The excise of 1791 prompted the famous whiskey rebellion two years later. Although the government suppressed the tax rebels, it retreated from its first attempt to collect excises. During the War of 1812 the liquor tax was only temporary and not burdensome on small distillers. The Civil War taxation, which extracted dollars and pennies from a vast number of products and transactions, was also meant to be a temporary war measure. After the conflict, most of the excise taxes were lifted, but those on liquor and tobacco have remained to this day. Though levied on manufacturers, they appeared in higher prices paid only by individuals who chose to drink and smoke. To many supporters there was a moral component of the excises because they would raise the price of vice and reduce consumption. The tax did not discourage drinking or smoking, however, and the moral argument fell out of favor during the 1870s. The strongest argument for retention of the taxes, which temperance advocates began to view as an evil of the revenue system, was that the income from liquor and tobacco excises became a significant and necessary component of government revenues. The war’s huge public debt had to be paid off, and as the years went by the government owed more to citizens in the form of veterans’ pensions. During the 1880s, Treasury surpluses appeared as the national debt was liquidated, and some people advocated abolishing internal revenue taxation completely. Nevertheless, the whiskey and tobacco taxes came to be accepted by both political parties. Republicans had created the system and, while they dominated the executive branch, had a stake in its success, even though the party preferred increasing the protective tariff to meet the cost of government as well as to shelter American industry. Democrats, who furiously denounced the revenue system as oppressive centralization when they were out of power, discovered that if they wished to lower the tariff they had to maintain internal taxes. Like the Republicans, they also appreciated the hundreds of patronage appointments the tax collection apparatus provided. Although subject to partisan criticism of its administration by whichever party was on the outs, the liquor excise and its collection bureaucracy had become an essential component of the state that neither party was ready to jettison.

During the later 1870s the revenue bureau established its ability to impose and collect taxes on liquor and tobacco. After several years of inefficiency and corruption, culminating in the notorious whiskey ring scandal of the mid-1870s, the bureau consolidated its regulatory aspect, the careful monitoring of distilleries to insure taxation of their entire product.

Bureau officials and distillers developed a close relationship that sometimes encouraged local corruption but usually reflected a sense of the mutual interests of the regulators and the regulated industry. Taxpaying distillers became important allies in the bureau’s crusade against evasion. Revenuers and distillers also became allies against growing prohibition sentiment.

The heads of the bureau, called commissioners, were political appointees and presided over a vast patronage empire of hundreds of employees. Despite their essential partisan role, the commissioners developed a professional sense of their duty and responsibility that called for high standards of competence and honesty among their subordinates. Exceptions there were, but the bureau heads sought to weed them out when they learned of them. Commissioner Green B. Raum, who significantly improved the revenue serviced honesty and efficiency between 1876 and 1883, used the success of his own bureau as an argument against the need for a civil service law. Under Raum, the revenue bureau also became an effective police agency, seeking out the moonshiners who distilled and sold their mountain dew without paying their share to Uncle Sam. Working with U.S. marshals who served warrants or arrested moonshiners caught in the act, and district attorneys who prosecuted all federal offenders, local revenue officials never abandoned their efforts despite continuing resistance and periods of discouragement and crisis.

Popular accounts of moonshining have generally pictured revenue enforcement as a futile effort against stubborn and determined individualists. Revenuers might be able to win battles, but never the war. In some regions they indeed confronted what seemed to be perpetual guerilla warfare, but the moonshiners could never feel permanently secure against arrest and seizure of their stills. Revenuers considered themselves successful when their informers came forward to reveal hidden stills and their raids discouraged violent resistance. The revenue bureau’s simple goal was to bring in more tax money, both by discouraging widespread moonshining and encouraging mountain people to open small legal distilleries.

The bureau usually achieved its goals after the mid-1870s, except in two periods of protracted warfare. The first was in the late 1870s and early 1880S, when Commissioner Raum was making his determined effort to crack down on moonshiners. The outcome of his battle was uncertain at first, his efforts actually inspiring heavier resistance. At the end, though, he could point to increased tax revenues, decreased violence, and greater support from local citizens. His successors during the 1880s had to cope with localized resistance, but not the organized efforts of Raum’s day. The second crisis came during the national depression of the 1890s, when farmers became desperate for cash that could be earned from mountain dew and Congress raised the liquor tax to compensate for a growing federal deficit. Revenue officials of both political parties had to cope with an outbreak of moonshining and increased resistance. They were able to contain, though not entirely eliminate, evasion and violence by the early 1900S.

The twentieth century introduced a complicating factor, the spread of local and state prohibition, which changed the nature of the conflict and undermined revenuers’ gains during the late nineteenth century. The drying up of more and more areas of the South during the early 1900s eliminated all legal sale and local manufacture of liquor, encouraging moonshiners to become businessmen producing white lightnin’ for a greatly expanded market. Prohibition laws encouraged moonshining in dry areas, but also in neighboring wet districts that exported their product to dry ones. This traffic made the federal task of tax collection more difficult even where prohibition was not in effect. Nevertheless, the revenuers kept up their fight and held their ground against growing numbers of opponents.

The arrival of national prohibition in 1920, a far greater expansion of the state than tax collection, led federal officials from a difficult task to an impossible one. Making drinkers pay higher prices for their liquor and punishing tax evaders were state powers most citizens recognized; denying drinkers the right to buy their liquor was state imposition of one group’s morality upon another group. The revenue bureau had won increasing public support in its wars against moonshiners, but prohibition alienated thousands of people who had accepted the governments right to tax liquor but who exercised their own right to drink or not as they pleased.

In many ways national prohibition was a failure of state power comparable to Reconstruction: in both cases the federal government was attempting to enter citizens’ lives by radically altering familiar institutions and behavior. Like prohibition, civil rights laws aroused growing opposition, and the government was unwilling to commit the resources necessary to overcome it. A closer look at the weaknesses of Reconstruction highlights the reasons why revenue enforcement was relatively successful before prohibition upset the delicate balance between authority and resistance.

Reconstruction, originally hailed by its champions as a bold assertion of federal authority to protect the rights of newly enfranchised black citizens, succumbed to growing resistance in the South and declining support in the North. Although southern violence had at first hardened northern determination to maintain Reconstruction, as the years went by its persistence, despite suppression of the original Ku Klux Klan, made many northerners believe that law and order were best preserved by abandoning Reconstruction enforcement and leaving white southerners alone. Over the years northerners became less committed to Reconstruction, and the effort to protect civil rights became more isolated as a partisan program of the Republican party.⁶

Many Americans, Republicans among them, believed that passage of constitutional amendments, civil rights laws, and force acts were sufficient demonstrations of national supremacy and protection of citizens’ rights. Massachusetts senator Henry Wilson hoped that the strength of the national government, going out from the capital into the lawless regions of the country, will awe and put down lawless men and strengthen the weak and timid, and give courage to men who would have law and order. Republicans spoke as if they supported a strong national state, but they never really faced the problem of how much force was needed to awe and put down lawless men in the South. They were unwilling to provide the financial and manpower resources for a sustained, permanent enforcement of Reconstruction. American cultural and political traditions effectively ruled out a national police force or a standing army that could provide the protection black citizens and their white allies needed.⁷

Northern Democrats and their southern allies appealed to traditional fear of standing armies and centralized government to undermine support for Reconstruction. They fostered a myth that the federal government had dangerously expanded its control over states and individuals. Some Republicans joined Democrats in their aversion to creating another Ireland, where repressive force had become permanent, increasing resentment and bitterness instead of increasing respect for law and order. Democrats attacked Republicans at a vulnerable point, their insolence and arrogance in claiming that their party is the state.⁸

Republicans, who dominated national government for fifteen years, indeed acted as if their party were the state and did not develop a state independent of the party. Many people came to perceive Reconstruction simply as a partisan device to keep Republicans in power. As resistance to Reconstruction continued and southerners won sympathizers in the North, many Republicans themselves began to see civil rights enforcement as politically inexpedient. If retaining power meant abandoning principle, the choice was clear. Radicals who had blended a concern for power with principle faded from the scene during the 1870s, leaving party leadership to moderates and stalwarts who valued officeholding above all. Reconstruction would survive only as long as Republicans believed it politically useful and were powerful enough to implement it.

As Stephen Skowronek argues, none of the new national powers that Republicans exercised were beyond the reach of party concerns. Although the Department of Justice and the United States Circuit Courts were direct outgrowths of Reconstruction, national power did not rest on a firm basis of permanent institutions. Supreme Court decisions gnawed away at the expansion of federal authority granted by Reconstruction legislation, and Democrats in Congress slashed appropriations and restricted the police role of the army. Unlike the revenue system when the Democrats inherited its administration in 1885, the national power that Reconstruction had created effectively disappeared with the end of Republican commitment and dominance. Republicans never developed a state that transcended their own political needs; they did not create a neutral or even bipartisan administrative organization with imperatives of its own in their efforts to define and protect national citizenship.⁹

This fundamental difference–Reconstruction’s inability to rise above partisanship and the revenue system’s usefulness to both parties–helps explain the revenue bureau’s ability to function as an agent of national authority. Its necessity and utility allowed the bureau to develop its own administrative imperatives: taxing every drop of whiskey produced, and pursuing evaders into the most isolated hollows of the southern Appalachians when necessary. In confronting these resisters, the revenue officials often faced obstacles similar to those that undermined Reconstruction, but there were also important differences on the operational level.

Federal officials confronting resistance to revenue collection in the South were frequently the same men who had the duty of enforcing civil rights. District attorneys, marshals, and soldiers (until 1878) were responsible for upholding Reconstruction and worked with revenuers in the battle with moonshiners. In both areas of law enforcement these men struggled with insufficient resources and manpower, prosecution in state courts for alleged offenses committed while on duty, ostracism, and physical danger. Local juries were often hostile, and witnesses and informers were frequently silenced, driven away, or sometimes killed. In their enforcement of unpopular laws in a hostile community, the men on the front lines in the South experienced a dilemma familiar to policemen. Exercise of too much force would arouse resistance based on charges of tyranny and oppression. Too much restraint or leniency, on the other hand, would be interpreted as weakness and would also encourage resistance.¹⁰ How officials coped with this dilemma marked a major difference between civil rights and revenue enforcement. Inability to balance force and restraint forever plagued and contributed to undermining the campaign against white supremacists, but officials were more successful in avoiding excessive force or weakness when they confronted moonshiners.

Ideally law enforcement should judiciously mix strength and restraint, but the effort to uphold Reconstruction was unable to do so. District attorneys, marshals, and other federal officials found it practically impossible to carry out the attorney general’s repeated injunctions to enforce the laws vigorously and impartially. Usually district attorneys were committed to their jobs and tried to be as vigorous as possible in carrying them out, but they were underpaid and overworked, rarely had an adequate staff of assistants, sometimes faced federal judges who were unsympathetic to Reconstruction, and endured attacks on their character and threats to their lives from white supremacists. Marshals faced similar obstacles and often lacked funds to pay witnesses or deputies, who were shot at and sometimes killed. Federal officials did not have a permanent force of detectives to gather evidence crucial to prosecution of Klansmen and other terrorists. The army, useful in preventing violence when it was mobilized, was steadily shrinking in size during the 1870s and never could act as a patrol force to maintain order. Law enforcement could rarely be vigorous, but when brief crackdowns did occur, as in breaking the Klan in 1871-72, they evoked cries of oppression or bayonet rule that received increasing sympathy among northerners weary of Reconstruction. Concessions or leniency designed to win support from law-abiding southerners were taken advantage of as signs of federal weakness. Impartiality proved impossible because Reconstruction enforcement was inherendy political despite the care that some officials took to deflect criticism.¹¹

In dealing with moonshiners, Revenue Commissioner Green B. Raum was able to develop a strategy of selective leniency, in the form of suspended sentences, combined with sufficient force to establish his officers permanently in the southern mountains. The leniency began to win the support of law-abiding citizens and helped reduce complaints of excessive force. Raum and his successors were careful not to allow leniency to be seen as weakness or passivity. When too many moonshiners took advantage of suspended sentences to resume their activity, the revenuers swept through the mountains again, arresting offenders and seizing their stills. Moonshiners could evade and resist the revenuers for awhile, sometimes mounting formidable organized efforts, but the crackdown inevitably followed. Though too much force did evoke angry charges of arbitrary arrest and brutality, criticism never congealed into a systematic attack on the entire revenue system or a national movement to abolish the whiskey tax. Criticism sometimes led to reforms in the revenue bureaucracy, which helped reduce opposition. In contrast, the only reform acceptable to critics of Reconstruction was dropping the effort to protect black civil rights altogether.

Revenue officials’ attempts to balance strength and restraint were more effective than in civil rights enforcement partly because moonshiners, however violent and determined many of them were, were collectively weaker than white supremacists. They were limited to the Appalachian region and embodied distinetly local attitudes and behavior. In contrast, white supremacist vigilantes represented almost universal feeling and were supported by the South’s wealthiest and most powerful citizens. They could draw on a reservoir of sympathy throughout the South; even people who disapproved of their tactics endorsed their goals.