1864 Civil War Bounty Pay Day in Pittsfield, NH: Greenbacks and Bounty Jumpers

A Man Sold for Three Hundred Dollars

Pour yourself something and sit down, for I mean to take you back to the hot, crooked, money-drunk summer of 1864, when greenbacks blew down the Suncook Valley Turnpike like maple leaves in October, and every card-sharp, pickpocket and painted Manchester lady followed them straight to the door of Fort Wilkins.

It began in March of 1863, when Congress passed the Enrollment Act, the first true national draft this country ever had. Every able-bodied male citizen from about twenty to forty-five went into the book, and every district owed Mr. Lincoln a quota. Where volunteers fell short, the provost marshal put the names in a wheel and drew them out like a church-supper raffle, except the prize was a Rebel ball in the gizzard. That wheel in the Concord office made more men pious in one afternoon than forty years of camp meetings.

No town wished its sons drawn like turnips, so the towns did what Yankees always do when frightened: they threw money at it. By '64 the federal government paid about three hundred dollars to a new recruit and about four hundred to an old soldier who signed on again as a veteran volunteer. The State of New Hampshire laid its own money on top, and then the town called a special meeting and voted to borrow sums it will not finish repaying until my grandchildren wear false teeth. Stacked together, one recruit in some places was worth above a thousand dollars, more than a hand in the Suncook cotton mill would see in three years of sweat.

For a time a drafted man might pay a three-hundred-dollar commutation fee and stay home with his cows and his conscience. The poor called it the rich man's war and the poor man's fight, and they were right. In July of '64 Congress shut that door for most men, and the price of substitutes climbed faster than a cat up a chimney fire. Then came the substitute brokers, who swept the Boston docks and the Portsmouth grog shops for any fellow with two legs and a pulse and sold him by the head, like a drover at the Brighton market. And then the bounty jumpers, who took their bounty in cash, deserted the first dark night, grew new whiskers two counties over, and enlisted again under a new name.

Paper Money and the Copper Cent

The joke beneath the joke is that the bounty came not in gold but in greenbacks. In February of 1862 Congress passed the Legal Tender Act and began printing United States Notes that no man could carry to the Treasury for gold. They were worth what folks believed, and in July of '64, with Grant bleeding in the Wilderness and Early riding to the edge of Washington, it took about two dollars and eighty-five cents in greenbacks to buy one gold dollar. Worse, a good share of paper was simply bad. Folks reckon a third of the paper passing hands by war's end was counterfeit, and only this very summer did the Treasury raise a Secret Service to hunt the makers of it.

I have hunted them myself for years, with a magnifying glass, a worn copper cent and a bear. One such gentleman came into the fort in a beaver hat tall enough to make its own weather and a waistcoat the colour of a bruise, and laid down a ten-dollar United States Note with Mr. Lincoln's face on the left. Crisp. Too crisp. A true bill in Pittsfield that summer had passed through more hands than a collection plate and was soft as a widow's handkerchief.

Here is the experiment, and any metal-worker may repeat it. I set my old 1798 large cent, worn near transparent by seventy years in farmers' pockets, beside the note, and took up the little round glass I use to seek rot in a back molar. A coin is struck by a steel die, and even worn to a ghost, what remains of Liberty's hair keeps a clean edge where the metal was pushed. A true greenback is engraved by machine, with lacy lathe-work at the border, every line fine and even. Under the glass my ancient cent showed sharper lines than that ten-dollar bill. Then I licked my thumb and rubbed the back, and the green came off like moss off a rock. Mr. Lincoln's ink stays where Mr. Lincoln puts it.

I walked the gentleman out the side door, which opens upon Barnaby. The bear took the hat in one bite, and a good piece of the left ear with it, for the fellow had jammed the hat down to look taller. While he sat howling in the dirt I observed a gold crown upon his upper left bicuspid and paid myself for my trouble at the going rate for a tooth-pulling. I melted it that night. Best payment I took all summer.

The Colonel and the Sergeant

The army sent a recruiting sergeant to march our boys to the rendezvous at Concord; I shall call him Sergeant Thorne to spare his family. He had drunk with the recruits since noon, and at sundown he proposed, for the honour of the regiment, to box my bear. Rather than lose a sergeant and drown in paperwork, I sat him on a stump and told him of Hosea Pratt, the Gilmanton teamster who bet a jar he could put Barnaby on his back, threw one punch, lost his thumb at the second knuckle, and ran home through Gilmanton Corners without his britches.

The sergeant swore he feared no living thing. So I informed him that, by authority of the Suncook Valley Volunteers, of which I am the entire roster, Barnaby held the brevet rank of colonel, and reminded him what the Articles of War say of a sergeant striking a superior officer. He saluted the colonel with the wrong hand, begged his pardon, and fell face-first into my manure pile. He woke at dawn remembering nothing and marched our boys to Concord on time.

A Coppersmith's Bounty Summer

My friend Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, master coppersmith, had his own harvest of that season. A Barnstead boy he calls Amos paid him two dollars of bounty for a canteen holding water in front and rye behind. Silas raised it from sheet copper with a partition riveted and sweated in the middle, and lined the rye side with tin, for he will not let spirit sit a month against bare copper in a hot knapsack. In the works before Petersburg a Minie ball struck that canteen square, passed through tin and copper on the rye side, and stopped flat against the partition. The rye ran down the boy's leg and he fainted, thinking it blood. The canteen, mended with one copper rivet, now hangs by the foundry door, and Silas will not sell it.

A Boston broker once paid Silas in little gold dollars that sat too light in the hand. On his brass balance, against a gold dollar known to be good, the broker's coin rose like a cork, for gold is near twice as dense as lead. One stroke of the file showed gray beneath a gilt skin thin as a fly's wing. And when Silas found a hunted bounty jumper curled in a forty-gallon pot, he said nothing, but planished the belly and shoulder of that pot with steady blows for most of an hour. Copper carries sound beautifully, and inside a pot each blow is a cannon. The fellow climbed out begging to go back to his regiment, and thanked the marshal's men when they came.

Pay-Day Mash and the Cuts

Mind you, distilling without the government's license is against the law of these United States, and what follows is for history and learning. Cook cracked corn in good water at near a boil, stirring against scorching, until thick as county gravy; this opens the starch. Cool to about one hundred and fifty degrees and stir in malted barley, roughly one part malt to five of corn. The ferment the French chemists Payen and Persoz named diastase in '33 turns starch to sugar. Hold it warm an hour or so, then test as a chemist would: a drop of liquor on a white saucer with a drop of tincture of iodine. Blue-black means starch remains; brown means the sugar is made. Cool to blood-warm, under ninety, pitch good brewer's barm, and keep a door open, for fermenting mash breathes a gas that will smother a man in a closed cellar. In four days to a week you have your wash.

Copper is the metal of Venus in the old books, and nothing loves rotten-egg sulfur as she does; she seizes it on her own skin, darkening black, blue and green. Scrub her bright after every run with hot water, salt, vinegar and a stiff brush. Silas tells me an English smith named Elkington has this year patented refining copper by galvanic current, which matters, for lead and arsenic in cheap metal poison men.

Strip the wash fast to low wines, then run the spirit slow on a gentle fire, catching it in a row of small jars. The foreshots stink of shellac thinner: throw out every drop. The heads, harsh with bruised apple and varnish, carry the worst poisons; set them well apart. The hearts come sweet and clean of the grain. The tails turn oily, like wet wool, and go back for another run. The wood spirit, methanol, comes chiefly from pectin in fruit skins, which is why careless apple brandy can be meaner than corn whiskey. Keep sand and water by the door, never leave a still alone, and never let a joint weep vapour near flame. As Silas put it, "An honest joint, a low fire, and a nose you trust. That's the craft."

Ashes, Red Oak and the Blue Flame

From Wilkesboro on the Yadkin, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller wrote: "My uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads." Hickory ash is chiefly potash, the lye of soft soap and hominy; it fights some sourness but does nothing to wood spirit, which boils off early and is only removed by discarding the first jars. Red oak is shot through with open pores end to end; blow through a short stick set in water and it bubbles, which is why no honest cooper makes a whiskey barrel of it. White oak has its pores stopped with tyloses and holds liquor tight. Oak improves spirit over months and years in a charred barrel, not in a few minutes of vapour.

Lastly, the blue flame. Lead does not paint a flame any colour you can trust, and wood spirit burns blue as a choir girl's ribbon. The flame speaks of strength and nothing more. Clean copper, no lead solder, and honest cuts: that is your only test. Keep your fire low.