Our Southern Highlanders

by Horace Kephart

The intention of the Revenue Department was certainly not to inflame the mountain people, but to treat them as considerately as possible. And yet, the policy of “be to their faults a little blind” had borne no other fruit than to strengthen the combinations of moonshiners and their sympathizers to such a degree that they could set the ordinary force of officers at defiance, and things had come to such a pass that men of wide experience in the revenue service had reached the conclusion that “the fraud of illicit distilling was an evil too firmly established to be uprooted, and that it must be endured.”

The real trouble was that public sentiment in the mountains was almost unanimously in the moonshiners’ favor. Leading citizens were either directly interested in the traffic, or were in active sympathy with the distillers. “In some cases,” said the Commissioner, “State officers, including judges on the bench, have sided with the illicit distillers and have encouraged the use of the State courts for the prosecution of the officers of the United States upon all sorts of charges, with the evident purpose of obstructing the enforcement of the laws of the United States.... I regret to have to record the fact that when the officers of the United States have been shot down from ambuscade, in cold blood, as a rule no efforts have been made on the part of the State officers to arrest the murderers; but in cases where the officers of the United States have been engaged in enforcement of the laws, and have unfortunately come in conflict with the violators of the law, and homicides have occurred, active steps have been at once taken for the arrest of such officers, and nothing would be left undone by the State authorities to bring them to trial and punishment.”

There is no question but that this statement of the Commissioner was a fair presentation of facts; but when he went on to expose the root of the evil, the underlying sentiment that made, and still makes, illicit distilling popular among our mountaineers, I think that he was singularly at fault. This was his explanation—the only one that I have found in all the reports of the Department from 1870 to 1904:

“Much of the opposition to the enforcement of the internal revenue laws [he does not say all, but offers no other theory] is properly attributable to a latent feeling of hostility to the government and laws of the United States still prevailing in the breasts of a portion of the people of these districts, and in consequence of this condition of things the officers of the United States have often been treated very much as though they were emissaries from some foreign country quartered upon the people for the collection of tribute.”

This shows an out-and-out misunderstanding of the character of the mountain people, their history, their proclivities, and the circumstances of their lives. The southern mountaineers, as a class, have been remarkably loyal to the Union ever since it was formed. Far more of them fought for the Union than for the Confederacy in our Civil War. And, anyway, politics has never had anything to do with the moonshining question. The reason for illicit distilling is purely an economic one, as I have shown. If officers of the Federal Government have been treated as foreigners they have met the same reception that all outsiders meet from the mountaineers. A native of the Carolina tidewater is a “furriner” in the Carolina mountains, and so is a native of the “bluegrass” when he enters the eastern hills of his own State. The highlander’s word “furriner” means to him what βάρβαρος did to an ancient Greek. Ordinarily he is courteous to the unfortunate alien, though never deferential; in his heart of hearts he regards the queer fellow with lofty superiority. This trait is characteristic of all primitive peoples, of all isolated peoples. It is provincialism, pure and simple—a provincialism more crudely expressed in Appalachia than in Gotham or The Hub, but no cruder in essence for all that.

The vigorous campaign of 1877 bore such fruit that, in the following year, the Commissioner was able to report: “We virtually have peaceable possession of the districts of 4th and 5th North Carolina, Georgia, West Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, and Arkansas, in many of which formidable resistance to the enforcement of the law has prevailed.... In the western portion of the 5th Virginia district, in part of West Virginia, in the 6th North Carolina district, in part of South Carolina, and in the 2d and 5th districts of Tennessee, I apprehend further serious difficulties.... It is very desirable, in order to prevent bloodshed, that the internal revenue forces sent into these infected regions to make seizures and arrests shall be so strong as to deter armed resistance.”

In January, 1880, a combined movement by armed bodies of internal revenue officers was made from West Virginia southwestward through the mountains and foothills infested with illicit distillers. “The effect of this movement was to convince violators of the law that it was the determination of the Government to put an end to frauds and resistance of authority, and since that time it has been manifest to all well-meaning men in those regions of the country that the day of the illicit distiller is past.” In his report for 1881-82 the Commissioner declared that “The supremacy of the laws ... has been established in all parts of the country.”

As a matter of fact, the number of arrests per annum, which hitherto had ranged from 1,000 to 3,000, now dropped off considerably, and the casualties in the service became few and far between. But, in 1894, Congress increased the tax on spirits from the old 90 cents figure to $1.10 a gallon. The effect was almost instantaneous. We have no means of learning how many new moonshine stills were set up, but we do know that the number of seizures doubled and trebled, and that bloodshed proportionally increased. Again the complaint went out that “justice was frequently defeated,” even in cases of conviction, by failure to visit adequate punishment upon the offenders. It is, to-day, a notorious fact that our blockaders dread their own State courts far more than they do the Federal courts, because the punishment for selling liquor in the mountain counties is surer to follow conviction than is the penalty for violating Federal law. The latter is severe enough, if it were enforced; for defrauding, or attempting to defraud, the United States of the tax on spirits, the law prescribes forfeiture of the distillery and apparatus, and of all spirits and raw materials, besides a fine of not less than $500 nor more than $5,000, and imprisonment for not less than six months nor longer than three years. I am not able to say what percentage of arrests is followed by conviction, nor how many convicted persons suffer the full penalty of the law. I only know that public opinion in the mountains did not consider an arrest, or even a conviction, by the Federal authorities, as a very serious matter during the period from 1880 up to the past two or three years, and little resistance was offered by blockaders when captured.

Recently, however, a new factor has entered the moonshining problem and profoundly altered it: the South has gone “dry.”

One might have expected that prohibition would be bitterly opposed in Appalachia, in view of the fact that here the old-fashioned principle still prevails, in practice, that moderate drinking is neither a sin nor a disgrace, and that a man has the same right to make his own whiskey as his own soup, if he chooses. Undoubtedly those who fight the liquor traffic on purely moral grounds are a small minority in the mountains. But the blockaders themselves are glad to see prohibitory laws enforced to the letter, so far as saloons and registered distilleries are concerned, and the drinking public prefer their native product from both patriotic and gustatory motives. Such a combination is irresistible.