The Scots-Irish also found that the soft, cool limestone spring water of the southern Appalachians brewed an excellent product, which helped establish the region as the future home of most U.S.-made whiskey. Thanks to America's natives—such as North Georgia's Cherokee, whom the settlers subsequently slaughtered or displaced—the Scots-Irish also discovered a surprising new ingredient for their whiskey.
Corn was a purely American grain. Cherokee Indians taught the Scots-Irish how to grow it and how it could thrive in otherwise unyielding red soils. Settlers began using this newfound grain—instead of barley, rye, or potatoes—to make their whiskey. In ways they could not have imagined, distilled corn juice became the perfect antidote to the impoverished frontier lives they'd chosen. Instead of hauling bulky baskets of corn or sacks of grain to sell at distant markets, they could distill a bushel of corn down into a few portable gallons of white whiskey. They'd then sell or trade it, either locally or in the larger cities and towns, just as Seay and his bootlegger buddies would do 150 years later with a Ford instead of a mule.
At the time of America's birth, a bushel of corn worth fifty cents at the market could instead produce three gallons of corn liquor worth an incredible two dollars apiece. Not only were the profits greater, but it was light, easy to transport, and didn't spoil, actually improving with age instead. Along the way, southern whiskey makers discovered that aging corn whiskey inside charred oak barrels further mellowed the taste, from bitter to smoky, which put Kentucky and its bourbon (named for the county in which it was made) on the map.* By the late 1700s, a third of America's settlers were Scots-Irish, and most kept a still in the backyard or behind the barn, where they magically turned corn into whiskey.
Corn whiskey was much more than a cocktail.
In eighteenth-century southern America, whiskey truly became aqua vitae, the water of life, as sustaining a staple as bread. It helped fuel the new nation's growth, and not only in the South. A vital cog in the young economy, whiskey (and, in the North, rum) was often used as currency. George Washington built a large whiskey distillery at Mount Vernon and often paid his gardener, doctor, and seamstress with corn and rye whiskey. Thomas Jefferson was known to brew some potent whiskey at Monticello, even though he and Washington both played a role in enacting America's first tax on liquor.
In remote hollows where potable water was scarce, or in cities where it was dirty, whiskey and other spirits were among the few drinkable liquids. In the Revolutionary War, Washington's soldiers received daily rations of whiskey. Those who were injured in battle sucked on a bottle for anesthetic. As America's first medication, whiskey was used to treat ailments from snake bites to fever. Mothers rubbed whiskey on a teething child's gums. It fueled social life, too, at taverns, barn raisings, and weddings. Campaigning politicians always carried a bottle to share, and flasks were passed from mouth to mouth at church meetings as the preacher shouted and thumped from a backwoods pulpit.
By the 1800s, corn whiskey sustained southern life. In the North, rum had long been the preferred drink. Rum's production owed much to the triangular trade between England, Africa, and America. That trade route brought slaves from Africa to the British islands of the Caribbean. In the Caribbean, the slave ships picked up sugar cane, which was delivered to America and distilled into rum; some of the African slaves were delivered to southern cotton plantations. When the slave trade was disrupted in the 1800s, the availability of sugar cane and rum declined. Southern-made whiskey took up the slack.
Scots-Irish settlers also introduced to southern America their melancholy fiddle music, set and step dancing (predecessors to square dancing), whimsical storytelling, vigorous independence, strong family values, and, as a result of the shabby treatment they'd received in Northern Ireland and in New England, a xenophobic distrust of authority and outsiders. Scots-Irish aspect and attitude distilled into a southern culture that would influence the entire culture of the new nation.
Four of the first five U.S. presidents came from the South, their character shaped by the land of moonshine. For forty-nine of the nation's first seventy-two years, a slaveholding southerner was president. Southerners wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They dominated Congress and the Supreme Court. The land of moonshine helped form not only the U.S. political and justice systems but the ideas behind it all: gritty self-rule and independence, free thinking and free speech.
“Booze was food, medicine, and companionship in the early days of America,” Eric Burns writes in Spirits of America: A Social History of Alcohol. “Alcoholic beverages… would serve as an almost indispensable accompaniment to liberty: sparking the urge to separate from the motherland, igniting patriotism, stoking the passion for growth and prosperity … as if freedom were an engine and spirits the fuel.”
Such passions were personified in men such as Amos Owens, a hard-drinking Scots-Irish outdoorsman from western North Carolina. “Uncle Amos” became widely known for his whiskey flavored with sourwood honey and cherries, which he called “cherry bounce.” When the Civil War slashed the nation in two, Amos fought with Jeb Stuart and the Rebel army, was captured, and served many months near starvation in a Union stockade. To pay off war debts, the government reinstated a tax on whiskey* and created the Internal Revenue Service to collect it, along with income taxes.
Amos returned home to Cherry Mountain, vowing never to pay a cent of tax on his moonshine, especially not to the enemy government that had defeated his people. Like many southerners, Amos was mad— mad that his side lost the war, mad that a foreign government was now trying to profit from his cherry juice. “Amos believed it was his God-given right to make Cherry Bounce,” one southern writer later said. “That's why God put cherry trees on his mountain in the first place.”
Tax collectors and federal agents repeatedly visited Amos's place. He used a telescope to keep an eye out for them. At one point, he wrote to a Charlotte newspaper announcing that his mountain was seceding from the United States. Such antics kept federal judge Robert Dick busy and amused, as Amos made frequent appearances in Dick's courtroom, taunting the judge in his whiskey-tinged, falsetto voice. When Judge Dick scolded Amos, telling him that he'd never even touched a drop of whiskey, Amos told Dick he'd “missed a durned lotsa fun.” The judge sent Amos to federal prison three times for a total of nine years, but incarceration never seemed to rehabilitate the man. With his ever-present beaver hat, Amos would preside over goose-pulling contests and nude dancing at his famous annual Cherry Bounce Festival. If he was arrested, he would sell whiskey to the folks who came to town for court week, right out of the back of his wagon, right outside the courthouse.
Many southerners came to share Amos's belief that the northern government had no business regulating their God-given right to make, drink, sell, and deliver whiskey. They deeply, almost religiously, felt that not only was there nothing illegal or immoral about moonshining, it was a proud and noble tradition. American moonshine and its clean-shaven cousin, bourbon, would indeed become true American originals, along with other products of the South, such as peanut butter, grits, bluegrass music, and the blues.
Soon to be added to that list of southern creations: stock car racing.
Like Raymond Parks, Lloyd Seay was born into a dark, angry, embittered family of drunken, felonious recidivists, men who taunted the law, their women, and one another. Often, they died violent deaths involving cars, liquor, guns, or all three.
Poor and desperate, the men of the Seay family sometimes broke into neighbors' homes just to steal clothing. More than once, they stole Ford coupes. At the courthouse, they signed court papers with an “X,” because they had never learned to read or write. Through the 1920s and ′30s, Seay men were caught fornicating with neighbors' wives, assaulting unwilling sexual partners, and, of course, running and drinking corn liquor.
For Lloyd, there was little choice but to become part of that world. His parents were dead-tired and dirt-poor by the time he came along, the baby of the family
. Parental guidance, such as it was, came from reckless, moonshine-swilling uncles who helped raise Lloyd. Seay's name appeared plenty in the pages of court docket books, beside the “X” he scratched to indicate that he understood the charges against him, just like his uncles. His were usually minor offenses: stealing a thirty-cent quart of motor oil from Harben Brothers Service Station, speeding, reckless driving. He was once charged with “operating a Ford automobile on the Dawsonville-Tate public highway in the night time without having any lights thereon.” Moonshiners often drove without their lights to elude the law. Still, Seay—like his elder cousin Raymond—seemed to find ways to make peace with his violent, genetic instincts, or at least keep them largely in check.
Seay's other cousin, Roy Hall, discovered no such balance in his life. There seemed to be no moral regulator built into his psyche. For Roy Hall, life had to be full speed or not at all. He was obscenely handsome and absurdly cocky. Everyone around him assumed Hall's life would be cut short by violence.
Hall's father had left home before he was born and died of illness ten days after his birth. When Hall was ten, his mother also died, just like Raymond Parks's mother.* An uncle came and took Hall out of his Dawsonville school—for good. He was separated from his only sister, Eula May, and went to live with the uncle in Atlanta, where he began a streetwise life of crime. Before he was even a teenager, Roy was working as a numbers runner for “the bug.” First, he worked for his uncle and later for cousin Raymond. From the bug, it was just a baby step toward the life of high-speed moonshining.
In the mid-1930s, unskilled laborers in and around Atlanta might earn as little as forty cents an hour, less than twenty dollars a week. A tripper could earn twice that for a single Dawsonville-to-Atlanta run. In just one week of moonshining, with two or three nightly trips, Seay and Hall could make enough to buy a new Model A Ford. As Jess Carr put it in his book The Second Oldest Profession, “It was a thousand-dollar-a-week job if the driver worked every night—and lived through it.” For many, the risk of jail or death was worth the reward. Better to live boldly than die of boredom in a factory.
Before Prohibition, moonshining had been largely a family business and a mostly harmless local one. During Prohibition, moonshiners became sophisticated, commercial mass producers. After Prohibition, the production of corn liquor continued its maturity from quaint, backwoods artisanal hobby to profitable and dangerous enterprise, which one writer likened to “a gentle home pet that grew to become a devouring monster.” More than anywhere else, that monster prowled the roads between Atlanta and Dawsonville. Of an estimated thirty-five million gallons of moonshine produced nationwide in 1934, nearly a million gallons a year came from the foothills surrounding Dawsonville. One famous backwoods distillery, in an emptied-out chicken house, pumped out seven hundred gallons of corn liquor a day. “Virtually everyone in Dawson County was associated with the whiskey business in some way,” one retired Dawsonville bootlegger said.
Across the thirteen years of Prohibition, the price of liquor had risen tenfold, to $20 or more per gallon. But even after the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed by the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment (giving whiskey the distinction of being the only target of two constitutional amendments), the price remained high—partly because the two hundred or so legal distilleries that had existed before Prohibition took a few years to rebuild, but also because the government was collecting a whopping $2-per-gallon tax. For many, the decision was simple: Why buy legal whiskey when moonshine was far cheaper? And why work for $20 a week when you can make $400 delivering that moonshine?
Of course, it wasn't just Dawsonville. All across Appalachia, entrepreneurial farm boys made small fortunes in Martinsville, Virginia; Wilkes County, North Carolina; Asheville, North Carolina; Greenville, South Carolina; eastern Kentucky; and so on. In the culture of the South, fathers thought little of sending their twelve-and fourteen-year-old sons out to deliver a load of moonshine. It was a rite of passage, like bagging your first deer, your first woman. Also, in the minds of many southern farmers, moonshining was just an extension of agriculture, and bootlegging no more than delivering a farm product to market. They saw no reason the IRS should take a cut.
NASCAR legend Curtis Turner claimed to have delivered his first load of whiskey in 1934, at age ten. A few miles from home, with one hundred gallons in his father's Oldsmobile, Curtis approached a slow-moving mail truck but couldn't remember, Do I pass on the left or the right? He chose the right and slid off the road into a fence. Years later, to show off his well-honed “bootlegger turn” to a fellow moonshiner, Turner lined up two rows of whiskey jars on the road, ten feet apart. He then sped toward the jars, spun 180 degrees, and slid backward between the two rows, without touching a jar.
“It was easy,” he said. “I couldn't waste all the good liquor.”
In 1935, police and IRS agents pounced on the village of Ingle Hollow, in North Carolina's notorious Wilkes County, another moon-shining hub, to make the biggest moonshine bust in U.S. history. Officials found the tiny Johnson house crammed to the ceiling with 7,100 gallons of liquor, and agents hauled Robert Johnson Sr. off to prison. Again. Four-year-old Robert Glenn “Junior” Johnson, barefoot and in overalls, waved good-bye to his daddy, while his mother poured coffee and served pie to the tax agents, whose names she'd come to know. Junior's father would spend a third of his sixty-three years behind bars. At age fourteen, Junior followed his father's path, treating bootlegging like a full-time job, driving back roads by day to learn which escape routes to take at night. Johnson, like Curtis Turner, would also become a major player in NASCAR's first quarter century and in many minds is considered NASCAR's best driver of all time.
“Moonshiners put more time, energy, thought and love into their cars than any racers ever will,” Johnson said later in life. “Lose on the track and you go home. Lose with a load of whiskey and you go to jail.” Johnson knew what he was talking about. He spent a year inside Chil-licothe, the same Ohio prison that had been the temporary home to a number of Dawsonville moonshiners, including Raymond Parks.
Other racers would later claim they had little choice in the matter. “If it hadn't been for bootlegging and racing, we'd have starved to death,” said Tim Flock, one of three moonshining brothers who would each become a NASCAR legend.
In the rural South, such young men grew fast. And with practice, the smart ones—those who didn't get killed or arrested—learned how to transfer their moonshining skills to the racetrack. Racing ahead of the law on snaky dirt roads honed in Lloyd Seay, Roy Hall, and their contemporaries instincts that would transfer perfectly to racing.
But first, the job of the North Georgia bootlegger grew more complicated.
Until Seay and Hall joined the ranks in the mid-1930s, policing moonshiners had mostly been a job for local sheriffs and their deputies, who were often outmanned or easily paid off with a hundred-dollar bill. In 1934, the IRS created a new Alcohol Tax Unit, which leveled the playing field a bit by recruiting state troopers, college athletes, and ex-soldiers as its first agents, whose job was to mercilessly quash the bootleg whiskey business.
In Chicago, Elliot Ness and his “Untouchables” had tangled with mobster Al Capone's liquor boys. But in the South, “revenuers”—so named because they sought to collect whiskey revenues—prowled the back roads of southern states alone, in search of untaxed whiskey and its makers. The era produced men such as Kentucky's famous, gun-toting William “Big Six” Henderson—”the Elliot Ness of moonshiners” — a lanky revenuer who arrested five thousand moonshiners in his decades-long career. Suspects rarely gave up their real names, instead claiming to be Franklin Roosevelt, Daniel Boone, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Lindbergh, George Washington, or Henry Ford. Revenuers considered moonshiners their prey, likening their job to deer hunting at an extreme level.
“It was a game, you against them,” said one tax agent.
Some bootleggers tried to elude their pursuers by being coy. They hid whiskey inside tru
ckloads of lumber, sacks of cotton, stacks of tires, even crates of chickens. But trucks were slow and obvious targets for a savvy revenuer, so most moonshiners delivered their loads by car, usually a V-8-powered Ford.
Among the early lessons learned was how to carefully pack a load of glass jars into a Ford so they didn't crack when jostled by a rutted road. Some trippers covered their load with an army blanket, then doused the blanket with bleach, to mask the smell of alcohol, just in case they got pulled over. Some posed as traveling salesmen or, like Raymond Parks, wore a suit and tie and blended in with morning commuters. One moonshiner, when he sensed revenuers might be nearby, added to that morning-commute tactic an extra touch: “I'd start picking my nose because nobody is going to keep staring at you if you start picking your nose.” But even an empty whiskey car attracted revenuers' attentions. Larger springs were added to the rear suspension of a whiskey car, to help it carry a hundred gallons of liquor. When it wasn't loaded down, an empty whiskey car bounced, and the heavy-duty springs caused its rear end to ride high, “like a cat in heat.”
A bouncing, butt-in-the-air Ford could be easily spotted by a revenue agent. Although sometimes it did no good to catch an empty whiskey car. One night, a North Georgia tripper hit a rut and smashed a few of his jars. Even after he'd delivered the unbroken jars, the car reeked like a distillery. On his way home, a revenue agent pulled him over. The agent searched the car, looking for evidence beyond the powerful odor.
“Where are you from?” he finally asked.
“Dawsonville.”
“What do you do there?”
“I'm a farmer,” the bootlegger lied.
Eventually, the agent had no choice but to let him and his reeking whiskey car go.
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