Revenuers and Moonshiners

Enforcing Federal Liquor Law in the Mountain South, 1865-1900

Wilbur R. Miller

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780807843307, 9780807819593
• eBook ISBN: 9781469639710
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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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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 enforce...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication Page
• Preface
• 1 Reconstruction, Revenue, and the National State
• 2 The Political Economy of Mountain Dew
• 3 The Right to Make a Little Licker: Moonshiner Resistance to Federal Authority
• 4 Revenue Enforcement: A Losing Batde, 1865-1877
• 5 General Raum to the Rescue
• 6 Moonshiners in Retreat
• 7 Holding the Ground, 1883-1893
• 8 Crisis and a Continuing Battle, 1893-1900
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• map will be found on page 2
• A section of illustrations will be found beginning on page 82