GAUGER
1846–1871
Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York
In 1871, the great Whiskey Wars of Brooklyn were coming to a head. For several months, the federal government, in order to enforce unpopular laws taxing whiskey production, was sending raids of hundreds and sometimes more than a thousand troops into the Irish neighborhood adjacent to the docks in Brooklyn, then called Irishtown, where many distillers were making illegal whiskey. At the end of the Civil War, an expansion of federal powers had required additional revenue, which was meant to come from whiskey tax, a burden that was viewed as unfairly targeted at Brooklyn Democrats, many of them Irish immigrants.
General James Jourdan, assessor for the revenue district, working in the same position as Alfred Pleasonton, who was now commissioner of the entire revenue service, knew his boss was aware of the difficulty of Brooklyn’s Fifth Ward. Months of raids had yielded no results; the illicit distilleries were merely rebuilt, and it was feared that without arrests, the illegal moonshining would go on indefinitely.
The hope was to arrest four men: John Bridges, J. H. Cassidy, Michael McMahon, and John Gorman. Gorman’s still was known to the revenue office; they’d destroyed it a year prior but found he had rebuilt it and was continuing to flout the law. And with the passage of the 1870 Enforcement Act, designed to handle the Ku Klux Klan in the South, the government was authorized to use federal troops to enforce reconstruction policies, one of which was the protection of revenue. In the early morning on July 14, 1871, a group of fifty soldiers assisted forty revenue agents as they split up to serve the arrest warrants at the suspected distilleries. They left the gate of the Brooklyn Navy Yard at two A.M., and, under cover of darkness, hoped to catch the moonshiners at work.
By the time the officers showed up at Gorman’s distillery, he was gone, the bricks still hot from where the still had been heating. Bridges was nowhere to be found. McMahon was arrested, though he jumped from a second-story window in his undershirt and fled through several adjoining sheds before being confronted with a pistol.
In the worst part of the moonshine district, on the way to Cassidy’s residence on a short street known as Dickson’s Alley, Jourdan and his men were proceeding with caution. At the corner of York and Hudson, just as the dozen or so men accompanying him passed under a streetlamp, a shot rang out. Firing back, the marines sent a volley of pistol fire into the dark, but the assailants were crouched down and well hidden. Men on both sides were struck by bullets, and the fighting continued for a few minutes until the moonshiners abandoned their fight and fled toward the river. The officers proceeded to Cassidy’s, and he submitted.
When the smoke cleared, Clinton Gilbert, age twenty-five, a gauger (an official tasked with determining the proof of spirits by means of a Treasury department hydrometer), had been shot through the groin, his injuries severe. Captain Selvage was shot in the ankle, and a bullet hit Major Weeks in the hand. Gilbert staggered back into the yard, and eventually to the Naval Hospital, where he died the following day. He was given a hero’s funeral, attended by a large delegation of fellow veterans of the Civil War, at the Washington Avenue Baptist Church.
After Gilbert’s murder, the distillers of Brooklyn earned a reputation that we might associate with drug dealers today, perhaps summarized best by a government functionary writing under the pen name Franklin Eliot Felton, in his book The Secrets of Internal Revenue:
The production of whiskey from cereals requires larger capital, greater space, more extensive buildings, a higher degree of skill, and more complete machinery and apparatus than the manufacture of Molasses Whiskey, and the contraband distillers of Grain Whiskey constitute an aristocracy of malefactors. They reside in well-furnished houses belonging to themselves, drive fast horses and fancy wagons, patronize the races in which they enter their crack nags, frequent the barrooms of the most fashionable hotels, where they pass their leisure time in conversing about their illegal traffic, discussing the workings and changes of the Revenue law, devising new schemes to defraud the government, and criticizing the operations and improvements of the plans already adopted. They are men of limited education and vulgar manners, which they endeavor to conceal by aping the address of respectable business men. They assume an owl-like reticence to impress their associates with their caution, vigilance and reserve, which qualities are esteemed to be the highest virtues in persons pursuing their nefarious and clandestine avocation.
Internal Revenue Officer Hahn’s Assistant and Unnamed Moonshiner
THE HIGHLAND WEEKLY NEWS (HILLSBORO, OHIO), MAY 27, 1869
