08 - Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Kephart

Our Southern Highlanders is a captivating memoir by Horace Kephart, a Pennsylvania-born writer and librarian, who shares his profound experiences and cultural insights from his time in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. Narrated by Meredith Womac Cook, this work offers a unique glimpse into a bygone era, though readers should be aware that it contains some offensive language and overt racism reflective of its time and setting.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Section eight of Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Keppart. This
LibriVox recordings in the public domain read by Claire Blockaders
and the Revenue. Little or no attention seems to have
been paid to the moonshining that was going on in
the mountains until about eighteen seventy six, owing no doubt
to the larger game and registered distilleries. In his report

(00:22):
for eighteen seventy six seven, the new Commissioner of Internal
Revenue called attention to the illicit manufacture of whisky in
the mountain counties of the South, and urged vigorous measures
for its immediate suppression. The extent of these frauds, said
he would startle belief. I can safely say that during
the past year, not less than three thousand illicit stills

(00:42):
have been operated in the districts named. Those stills are
of a producing capacity of ten to fifty gallons a day.
They are usually located at inaccessible points in the mountains,
away from the ordinary lines of travel, and are generally
owned by unlettered men of desperate character, armed and ready
to reach the officers of the law where occasion requires.

(01:03):
They come together in companies of from ten to fifty
persons gun in hand to drive the officers out of
the country. They resist as long as resistance as possible,
and when their stills are seized and they themselves are arrested,
they plead ignorance and poverty, and at once crave the
pardon of the government. These frauds had become so open
and notorious that I became satisfied extraordinary measures would be

(01:25):
required to break them up. Collectors were each authorized to
employ from five to ten additional deputies. Experienced revenue agents
of perseverance and courage were assigned to duty to cooperate
with the collectors. United States marshals were called upon to
cooperate with the collectors and to arrest all persons known
to aviolate the laws, and district attorneys were enjoined to

(01:47):
persecute all offenders in certain portions of the country. Many
citizens not guilty of violating the law themselves were in
strong sympathy with those who did violate, and the officers
in many instances found themselves unsafe reported in the execution
of the laws by a healthy state of public opinion.
The distillers, ever ready to forcibly resist the officers, were
I have no doubt, at times treated with harshness. This

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occasioned much indignation on the part of those who sympathized
with the lawbreakers. The Commissioner recommended in his report the
passage of a law expressly providing that where a person
is caught in the act of operating an illicit still,
he may be arrested without warrant. In conclusion, he said,
at this time, not only as the United States defrauded
of its revenues and its officers openly resisted, but when

(02:34):
arrests are made, it often occurs that prisoners are rescued
by mob violence, and officers and witnesses are often at
night dragged from their homes and cruelly beaten or waylaid
and assassinated. One day I asked a mountain man, how
about the revenue officers? What sort of men are they?
Torn down scoundrels? Every one? Oh, come now, yes, they

(02:54):
are plumb ornery, lock stock, barrel and gunstick. Consider what
they have to go through? I remarked, Like other detectives,
they cannot secure evidence without practicing deception. Their occupation is
hard and dangerous. Here in the mountains, every man's hand
is against them. Why is it again them? We ain't
all blockaters. Yet you can search these mountains through with
a fine tooth comb and you wouldn't find any critter.

(03:16):
As has a good word to say for the revenue.
The reason is t we know them men from way back.
We know what they as to do before they did
the service, and why they did it. Most of them
were blockaters their own selves till they saw how they
could make more money turncoatin'. They use their authority to
abuse people who ain't never done nothing, know how dangerous

(03:38):
business shucks. There's Jim Cody for a sample. I suppressed
the real name. He was principally raised in this county,
and I've known him from a boy. He's been eight
years in the government service and he hain't never been
a shot at once. But he's killed the blockater. Oh yes.
He arrested Tom Hayward, a chunk of a boy that
was scared, most fitified and never resisted more in a

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mouse Cody. He was half drunk as self handcuffed. Tom
quarreled with him and shot the boy dead while the
handcuffs was on 'em. Tom's relations sued Cody in the
county court, but he carried the case to the federal court,
and they were too poor to follow it up. I
tell you, though, thar's a settlement less than thousand mile
from the river where Jorm Cody Ain't never showed his
nose since he knows there'd be another revenue murdered. It

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must be ticklish business for an officer to prowl about
the head waters of these mountain streams lookin' for sign
hell's banger. They don't go projecting around lookin' for stills.
They set at home on their hunkers till some feller
comes and informs. What class of people does the informing Oh,
sometimes hits some pison old bum who's been refused credit.

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Sometimes hits the wife or mother of some feller who's
drinkin too much. Then again, hit may be some rival
blockader who aims to cut off the other feller's trade
in same time divert suspicion from his own self. But
generally hiss just someone who has a grudge against the
blockader for family reasons or business reasons, and turns in
to get even. It is only fair to present this

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side of the case because there is much truth in it,
and because it goes far to explain the bitter feeling
against revenue agents personally, that it's almost universal in the
mountains and is shared even by the mountain preachers. It
should be understood, too, in this connection, that the Southern
Highlander has a long memory. Slights and injuries suffered by
one generation have the scars transmitted to sons and grandsons.

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There is no denying that there have been officers in
the Revenue Service who, stung by the contempt in which
they were held as renegades from their own people, have
used their authority in settling private scores and have inflicted
grievous wrongs upon innocent people. This is a matter of
official record. In his report for eighteen eighty two, the
Commissioner of Internal Revenue himself declared that instances have been
brought to my attention where numerous prosecutions have been instituted

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for the most trivial violations of law, and the arrested
parties taken long distances and subjected to great inconveniences and expense,
not in the interests of the government, but apparently for
no other reason than to make costs. An ex United
States commissioner told me that in the darkest days of
this struggle, when he himself was obliged to buckle on
a revolver every time he put his head out of doors,

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he had more trouble with his own deputies than with
the Moonshiner's. As a rule, none but desperadoes could be
hired for the service, he declared. For example, one time
a deputy in your county wanted some liquor for himself.
He and two of his cronies crossed the line into
South Carolina, raided a still, and got beastly drunk. The
blockaders bush whacked them, riddled a mule and its rider

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with buckshot, and shot my deputy through the brain with
a squirrel rifle. We went over there and buried the
victims a few days later during a snowstorm, working with
our holster flaps unbuttoned. I had all the work and worry,
simply because that rascal was bent on getting drunk without
paying for it. However it cost him his life. They
were not all like that, though, continued the judge. Now

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and then there would turn up in the service a
man who had entered it from honorable motives, and whose
conduct at all times was chivalric and clean. There was
Hirsch Harkins, for example, now United States collector at Ashville.
I had many cases in which Harkins figured. Tell me
of one I urged well. One time there was a
man named Jenks. That was not the real name, but
it will serve, who was too rich to be suspected

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of blockading. Jenks had a license to make brandy, but
not whiskey. One day Harkins was visiting his still house
and he noticed something dubious. Thrusting his arm down through
the peach pomise, he found mash underneath. It is a
penitentiary offense to mix the two. Harkins procured more evidence
from Jinks distiller and hauled the offender before me. The
trial was conducted in a hotel room full of people.

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We were not very formal in those days, kept our
hats on. There was no thought of Jenkins trying to
run away, for he was well to do so. He
was given the freedom of the room. He paced nervously
back and forth between my desk and the door, growing
more restless. As the trial proceeded. A clerk sat near me,
riding a bond, and Harkins stood behind him dictating its terms. Suddenly,

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Jinks wheeled around near the door, jerked out a navy revolver,
fired and bolted. It is hard to say whom he
shot at, for the bullet went through Harkins's coat, through
the clerk's hat, and through my hat too. I ducked
under the desk to get my revolver in. Hearkins, thinking
that I was killed, sprang to pick me up, but
I came up firing. It was wonderful how soon that
room was emptied. Harkins took after the fugitive and had

(08:16):
a wild chase, but he got him. It was my
good fortune a few evenings later to have a long
talk with mister Harkins himself. He was a fine giant
of a man, standing six feet three and symmetrically proportioned.
No one looking into his kindly gray eyes would suspect
that they belonged to one who had seen as hard
and dangerous service in the revenue department as any man.
Then Living in an easy, unassuming way, he told me

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many stories of his own adventures among moonshiners and counterfeiters
in the old days, when these southern appellations fairly swarmed
with desperate characters. One grim affair will suffice to give
an impression of the man and of the times in
which his spurs were won. There was a man on
South Mountain, South Carolina, whom, for the sake of relatives
who may still be living, we will call Lafonte. There

(09:00):
was information that Lafont was running a blind tiger. He
got his whisky from four brothers who were blockading near
his father's house, just within the North Carolina line. The
government had sent an officer named Meryl to capture Lafont,
but the latter drove Merrill away with a shotgun. Harkins
then received orders to make the arrest, Taking Merrill with
him as guide. Harkins rode to the father's house and

(09:21):
found Lafont himself working near a high fence. As soon
as a criminal saw the officer's approaching, he ran for
the house to get his gun. Harkins galloped along the
other side of the fence, and after a rough and
tumble fight, captured as man. The officers then carried their
prisoner to the house of a man whose name I
have forgotten, call Um White, who lived about two miles away. Meantime,
they had heard Lafont's sister give three piercing screams as

(09:43):
a signal to his confederates in the neighborhood, and they
knew that trouble would quickly brew. Breakfast was ready in
White's home when the mob arrived. Harkins sent Meryl in
to breakfast and himself went out on the porch, carbine
in hand to stand off the thoroughly angry gang. White
also went out, beseeching the mob to des matters looked
squally for a time, but it was finally agreed that
Lafont should give bond, whereupon he was promptly released. The

(10:07):
two officers then finished their breakfast and shortly set out
for the Blue House, an abandoned schoolhouse about forty miles
distant where the trial was to be conducted. They were
followed at a distance by Lafont's half drunken champions, who
were by no means placated. Owing to the fact that
the Blue House was in a neighborhood friendly to the government.
Harkins and Merrills soon dodged to one side in the
forest until the rioters had passed them, and then proceeded

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leisurely in the rear. On their way to the Blue House,
they cut up four stills, destroyed a furnace and made
several arrests. The next day, three United States Commissioners opened
court in the old Schoolhouse. The room was crowded by
curious spectators. The trial had not proceeded beyond preliminaries when
shots and shouts from the pursuing mob were heard in
the distance. Immediately the room was emptied of both crowd

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and commissioners, who fled in all directions, leaving Harkins and
Merrill to fight their battle alone. There were thirteen men
in the Moonshiner's mob. They surrounded the house and immediately
began shooting in through the windows. The officers returned the fire,
but a hard pine ceiling in the room caused the
bullets of the attacking party to ricochet in all directions
and made the place untenable. Harkins and his comrades sprang

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out through the windows, but from opposite sides of the house.
Merrill ran, but Harkins grappled with the men nearest to him,
and in a moment the whole force of desperadoes was
upon him like a swarm of bees. Unfortunately, the brave
fellow had left his carbine at the house where he
had spent the night. His only weapon was a revolver
that had only three cartridges in the cylinder. Each of
these shots dropped a man, but there were ten men left.

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Nothing but Harkins's gigantic strength saved him that day from
immediate death. His long arms tackled three or four men
at once, and all went down in a bunch. Others
fell on top as in a college cane rush. There
had been swift shooting hitherto, but now it was mostly
knife and pistol. But it is almost incredible, but it
is true that this extraordinary battle waged for three quarters
of an hour. At its end only one man faced,

(11:57):
the now thoroughly exhausted and badly wounded, indomitable officer. At
this fellow Harkins hurled his pistol. It struck him in
the forehead, and the battle was won. A thick overcoat
that mister Harkins wore was pierced by twenty one bullets,
seven of which penetrated his body. He received besides three
or four bad knife wounds in his back, and he
was literally dripping blood from head to foot. This tragedy

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had an almost comic sequel. After all danger had passed.
A sheriff appeared on the scene, who placed not the
mob leader but the federal officer under arrest. Harkins left
a guard over the three men whom he had shot
and submitted to arrest, but demanded that he be taken
to the farmhouse where he had left his horse. This
the sheriff actually refused to permit, although Harkins was evidently
past all possibility of continuing far afoot. Disgusted at such imbecility,

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the deputies stalked away from the sheriff, leaving the latter
with his mouth open and utterly obsessed. A short distance
up the road, Hearkin met a countryman mounted on a
sorry old mule. Loan me that mule for half an hour,
he requested, You see, I can walk no further. But
the fellow, scared out of his wits by the spectacle
of a man in such desperate plight, refused to accommodate him.
Get down off that mule, or I'll break your neck.

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The mule changed riders. When the story was finished, I
asked mister Harkins if it was true, as the reading
public generally believes that moonshiners prefer death to capture. Do
they shoot a revenue officer at sight? The answer was terse.
They used to shoot, nowadays they run. We have come
to the time when our government began in dead urns
to fight the moonshiners and endeavor to suppress their traffic.

(13:29):
It was in eighteen seventy seven. To give a fair
picture from the official standpoint of the state of affairs
at that time, I will quote from the report of
the Commissioner of Internal Revenue for the year eighteen seventy
seven to seventy eight. It is with extreme regret he said,
I find it my duty to report the great difficulties
that have been and are still encountered in many of
the Southern states, and the enforcement of the laws in

(13:51):
the mountain regions of West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia,
and Alabama, and in some portions of Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas.
The illicit manufacture of spirits has been carried on for
a number of years, and I am satisfied that the
annual loss to the government from the source has been
very nearly, if not quite equal to the annual appropriation
for the collection of the internal revenue tax. Throughout the

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whole country. In the regions of country named, there are
known to exist about five thousand copper stills, many of which,
at certain times are lawfully used in the production of
brandy from apples and peaches. But I am convinced that
a large portion of these stills have been and are
used in the illicit manufacture of spirits. Part of the
spirits thus produced has been consumed in the immediate neighborhood,

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the balance has been distributed and sold throughout the adjacent districts.
This nefarious business has been carried on, as a rule,
by a determined set of men, who, in their various
neighborhoods league together for defense against the officers of the law,
and at a given signal are ready to come together
with arms in their hands to drive the officers of
Internal Revenue out of the country. As illustrating the extraordinary

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resus distance which the officers have had, on some occasions
to encounter, I referred to the occurrences in Overton County, Tennessee,
in August last where a posse of eleven Internal Revenue
officers who had stopped at a farmer's house for the night,
were attacked by a band of armed illicit distillers, who
kept up constant fusillade during the whole night, and whose

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force was augmented during the following day till it numbered
nearly two hundred men. The officers took shelter in a
log house which served them as a fort, returning the
fire as best they could, and were there besieged for
forty two hours, three of their party being shot one
through the body, one through the arm, and one in
the face. I directed a strong force to go to
their relief, but in the meantime, through the intervention of citizens,

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the besieged officers were permitted to retire, taking their wounded
with them and without surrendering their arms. So formidable has
been the resistance to the enforcement of the laws that
in the districts of Fifth Virginia, sixth North Carolina, South Carolina,
second in fifth Tennessee, second West Virginia, Arkansas, and Kentucky,
I found it necessary to supply the collectors with breech

(16:04):
loaded carbines. In these districts, and also in the states
of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, in the fourth district of North Carolina,
and in the second and fifth districts of Missouri, I
have authorized the organization of posses ranging from five to
sixty in number, to aid in making seizures and arrests,
the object being to have a force sufficiently strong to

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deter resistance, if possible, and if need be, to overcome it.
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 bee 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

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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 moonshiner's favor. Leading citizens were either directly interested in

(17:09):
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
persecution 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

(17:30):
to have to record the fact that when the officers
of the United States have been shot down from ambushcade
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

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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

(18:14):
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 eighteen seventy to nineteen o four.
Much of the opposition to the enforcement of the internal
revenue laws he still does not say at all, but
offers no other theory, is properly attributable to a latent
feeling of hostility to the government and laws of the

(18:36):
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. End this shows an out and
out misunderstanding of the character of the Mountain people, their history,

(19:00):
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 moon shining question. The reason for illicit
distilling is purely an economic one. As I have shown,

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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 Highlanders word fernerer means to
him what barbaros did to an ancient Greek. Ordinarily, he

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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
of provincialism, more crudely expressed in Appalachia than in Gotham
or the Hub, but no cruder in essence. For all

(20:06):
that the vigorous campaign of eighteen seventy seven bore such
fruit that in the following year the Commissioner was able
to report, we virtually have peaceable possession of the districts
of fourth and fifth North Carolina, Georgia West Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama,
and Arkansas, and many of which formidable resistance to the
enforcement of the law has prevailed. In the western portion

(20:29):
of the fifth Virginia District, in part of West Virginia,
in the sixth North Carolina District, in part of South Carolina,
and in the second and fifth 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

(20:49):
so strong as to deter armed resistance. In January eighteen
eighty a combined movement by armed bodies of Internal Revenue
officers was made from West Virginia southwest westward 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

(21:09):
end to frauds and resistance of authority. And since that
time it has been manifest in all well meaning men
in these regions of the country that the day of
the illicit distiller is passed. In his report for eighteen
eighty one to eighty two. 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

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of arrests per annum, which hitherto had arranged from one
thousand to three thousand, now dropped off considerably, and the
casualties and the service became few and far between. But
in eighteen ninety four Congress increased the tax on spirits
from the old ninety cents figure to one dollar and
ten cents a gallon. The effect was almost instantaneous. We
have no means of learning how many new moonshine stills

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were set up, but we do know that the number
of seizures doubled and troubled, and that bloodshed proportionally increased again.
And the complaint went out that the justice was frequently defeated,
even in case of conviction, by failure to visit adequate
punishment upon the offenders. It is today a notorious fact
that our blockaders dread their own state courts far more

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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 for 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

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a fine of not less than five hundred dollars nor
more than five thousand, and imprisonment for not less than
six months nor longer than three years. I am not
able to say what percentage of arrest 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

(22:56):
by the federal authorities as a very serious matter during
the period from EA te teen eighty 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

(23:18):
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 whisky 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 their letter,

(23:41):
so as far as saloons and registered distilleries are concerned,
and the drinking public prefer the native product from both
patriotic and gustatory motives, such a combination is irresistible. When
pure blockade of normal strength sold as cheaply as it
did before prohibition, there was no great profit in it,
all risks and expenses considered. But today, even with interstate

(24:03):
shipments of the liquors to consumers, a gallon of blockade
will be watered to have strength, then fortified with cologne,
spirits or other abominations, and peddled out by bootleggers at
one fifty a court in villages and lumber camps, where
somebody always as thirsty and confine the coin to assuage it.
Thus amidst a poverty stricken class of mountaineers, the temptation

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to run a secret still and adulterate the output in
flames and spreads. In any case, the fact is that
blockading as a business conducted in armed defiance of the
law is increasing by leafs and bounds since the mountain
radion went dry. The profits today are much greater than
before because liquor is hard to get in in country districts,

(24:44):
and consumers will pay higher prices without question. Correspondingly, the
risks are greater than ever. Arrests have increased rapidly, and
so have mortal combats between officers and outlaws. Blockading has
returned to much the same status described as previously quoted.
They are Commissioner of Internal Revenue in eighteen seventy six.
I have not seen recent revenue reports, but I do

(25:06):
not need to, for the war between offices and Moonshiner's
is so close to us that we almost live within
gun crack of it. If mister Harkins were alive today,
he would say they used to shoot, and they have
taken it up again. Observe please that it is no
argument for or against prohibition. That is not my business.
As a descriptive writer, it is my duty to collect facts,

(25:28):
whether pleasant or unpleasant, regardless of my own or anyone
else's bias, and present them in orderly sequence. It is
for the reader to deduce his own conclusions, and with
them I have nothing at all to do. I've given
in brief the history of illicit distilling because we must
consider it before we can grasp firmly the basic fact
that this is not so much a moral as an

(25:50):
economic problem. Men do not make whiskey and secret at
the peril of imprisonment or death because they are outlaws
by nature, nor from any other kind of deprivity, but
simply and solely because it looks like easy money to
poor folks. If I may voice my own opinion of
a working remedy, it is this give the mountaineers a
lawful chance to make decent livings where they are. This means,

(26:11):
first of all, decent roads whereby market their farm produce
without losing all profit and cost of transportation. The first
problem of Appalachia today is the very same problem as
that of western Pennsylvania in seventeen eighty four. End of
Section eight