Amoskeag Mills Civil War Wages: Greenbacks, Tokens and Payday in Pittsfield NH

Every man at his own apparatus knows the law. Put heat beneath a thing and it will rise, travel, and gather wherever the copper runs coolest. Money obeys the same law. In the war years the heat was in Manchester. The cool copper, by the grace of God and a good balance scale, was my counter at Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike in Pittsfield. Let us follow that vapour from the Amoskeag pay window to the farms of our valley, while Barnaby, my black bear, rattles his chain beneath the window.

A Company Town at Amoskeag Falls

Twenty-odd miles south of us the Merrimack throws itself over the Amoskeag Falls like a drunk going down the cellar stairs. The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company was incorporated there in 1831. Its Boston gentlemen did not merely build a mill. They cut a whole town to fit it, as a tailor cuts a coat for a fat alderman, with streets, canals, long brick mills, and rows of company boardinghouses. Manchester is a company town wearing a city's Sunday hat.

For years our own daughters worked those looms. They were farm girls from Pittsfield, Barnstead, Gilmanton and Loudon, and from every stony hill farm in New Hampshire and half of Vermont. They stood thirteen hours a day in a room so loud a girl might curse the overseer to his face and he would think she was praying. And they sent money home, regular as the Concord stage. A Gilmanton family paid off a farm mortgage on one daughter's loom wages. I knew a Pittsfield man whose two sisters kept him at Dartmouth College, and he came home with Latin, a cough, and no notion how to milk a cow.

Then came the war, and with it the cotton famine. Without Southern cotton there was no cloth, and up and down the Merrimack the mills ran short time or shut their gates. Amoskeag was cleverer than most. Its machine shops took a government contract and turned out Springfield-pattern rifle-muskets by the tens of thousands. So the company that made the ticking on your mattress made the musket that kept the Rebel from sleeping on it. Mark that ticking, blue and white stripe and tough as a mule's hide, for it returns to this story wrapped around something wet.

Greenbacks, Postage Currency and the Merchant's Token

Pay came at the counting-room window. The hands stood in a long line with their caps in their fists, and behind the glass sat a clerk with ink on his fingers and a face like a pickled beet. There were fines for lateness, fines for talking, and board docked off the top, for a mill agent counts his hands' money with a third hand nobody sees.

What lay in that envelope is a lesson in how metals behave. At the end of December 1861 the banks stopped paying out gold. By the summer of 1862 silver had run off like a hired man on a hot day, and even the little nickel cents vanished into teapots and mattresses. So Congress printed. The Legal Tender Act of February 1862 gave us the greenback, that August brought postage currency in five, ten, twenty-five and fifty cents, and after it came the fractional currency of 1863. Those notes were so small a man could lose a week's wages in his mustache. I once found eleven cents in Hezekiah Drake's beard while pulling his eyetooth, and he accused me of planting it.

The greenback slid against gold like a sledge on a greased hill. In July of 1864 it took about two hundred and eighty-five paper dollars to buy a hundred in gold. So the merchants made their own money: millions upon millions of cent-sized copper and bronze tokens, stamped with a grocer's name, a flag, Liberty's head, or a patriotic slogan. A merchant's token is a love letter that promises faithfulness, but only at his own store. Some mills and company stores paid in tickets and scrip, good only across their own counters. In 1864 Congress outlawed private one- and two-cent pieces meant to pass as money, and I keep my opinions on that beside my anvil and my punch.

Payday Saturday on the Turnpike

Payday weekends were the best selling days of the whole season in the Suncook Valley. A girl came home, or a brother rode down to fetch her trunk, or a mill hand took the Concord cars and then the stage out the turnpike. Either way, up Route 28 on Saturday came a month's wages, warm in the pocket and not yet spent on sin. It went on molasses, nails, calico, a new set of teeth, and a jar of something clear to soften the news that the price of everything had doubled. On Monday it went back down in the pocket of whoever sold the most whiskey and the fewest lies.

Asa Tilton ran my jars down to the Manchester boardinghouses and ran mill money back. He had the face of a choirboy and the morals of a weasel in a henhouse, and his trick was the ticking. He unrolled three bolts of Amoskeag cloth in my barn and laid the jars, packed in straw, down the middle. Then he rolled each bolt back up as fat and innocent as a sleeping parson. One payday Saturday near Suncook village, a sour revenue man from Concord jabbed his ramrod into all three bolts and struck nothing but cloth. Asa had wound the jars dead center, and the ramrod was a hand too short. Asa thanked him, sold him a yard of ticking for his mother, and charged him a nickel over the Manchester price.

The Balance Scale Never Lies

I confess it freely: I weigh a man's coin before he has finished talking, as any natural philosopher tests a doubtful sample. Since 1853 a silver half dollar has weighed one hundred ninety-two grains. A clipped one is light, and so is a sweated one. A lead-cored counterfeit out of some Boston cellar is heavy in the wrong places and rings as dead as a church bell full of mud. The bronze cent of 1864 weighs forty-eight grains, two-thirds of the seventy-two-grain nickel cent it replaced, and the old copper large cent is a fat one hundred sixty-eight. The coin has never once lied to me, and the man has never once stopped.

Last payday a sharper from Concord, his hair oiled down like a wet otter, laid down a half dollar for a jar and a tooth wash. It went clink on the pan, heavy. I bit it, and it gave under my teeth like cold butter. Lead. I told him so politely, with tooth forceps in my fist, and he left without his change by the short way, past Barnaby's chain. Barnaby came away with a mouthful of broadcloth, a slice of the gentleman's left hind quarter about the size of a pork chop, and his purse. The purse burst and threw counterfeit half dollars across my dooryard like hail. Barnaby ate three of them and passed them in the woodlot a week later. I recovered all three, punched them with my stamp, and nailed them over the door as a warning to sharpers. Mind you, nobody with sense keeps a chained bear. I never claimed sense.

Drawing Day and Sorry Day

Miss Clara Higgins, a student of mountain talk from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, says her people had more money that wasn't money than money that was. Near Lynchburg, some tobacco factories paid their hands partly in tin tokens good only at the company store. Her grandmother stood by the road on payday and bought a dollar's worth of those tokens for seventy cents hard money, then spent them at the full dollar on flour and calico. She kept it up every payday for six years. “She said she doubled her money and halved her friends,” Miss Higgins told me, “and she didn't miss either one.”

Where I weigh the coin, her great-uncle Jubal weighed the purse. He made persimmon brandy and sold it on court day. He named no price, only hefted the buyer's purse like a melon: a heavy purse paid two dollars a jug, a light one fifty cents and a blessing. Her cousin Delphia was once paid by a cattle drover in an old Spanish silver piece, shaved as thin as a communion wafer, which folded in her teeth like a pocketknife. She took his fine felt hat for change and wore it to church for eleven years.

In the mountains, payday was drawing day and the Monday after was sorry day. The soldiers had names for the bad whiskey: tanglefoot, bust-head, pop-skull, and forty-rod, which was said to kill a man at forty rods. The old Irish and Scotch folk simply called it the creature.

The Distiller's Calendar and the Cuts

Making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States. What follows is history and natural science, and the wash belongs to licensed men.

Payday shaped the old craft, because a man selling on Saturday had to work the calendar backward. He set the mash Sunday night after meeting and left it four or five days to work, covered, in a warm corner with the barn door cracked so the gas could leave. He ran it Thursday and rested it Friday. My granddad's Suncook Valley mash began with cracked corn cooked to a thick porridge and cooled until he could hold his hand in it. Then he stirred in a portion of malted barley to turn the starch to sugar, cooled it further, and added yeast. A bushel of meal to a good barrel of water yields a thin, sour beer, a few parts in a hundred spirit and the rest hope.

In apple country, beware the pomace. Fruit mash makes more methanol than grain mash, because the pectin that sets your wife's jelly breaks down in fermenting and gives it off. So the apple man must be more generous with his cuts. The foreshots go out, a good teacup or more for every five gallons of wash, and more if in doubt. Never drink them or rub them on a sore tooth. The heads, smelling of the varnish pot, go too. The hearts are sweet and clean. The oily, wet-dog tails go into a separate jar to be run again. Methanol crowds the front of the run, but some lingers on, so catch your run in a dozen or twenty small jars and give each one a sniff. One bad jar in a big crock spoils the batch, but one bad jar on the shelf is only one bad jar.

Clean copper grabs the sulfur stink in the vapour; that is chemistry, not superstition. So scrub your still after every run. Keep the far end of the worm open to the air, always. A clogged or plugged worm builds pressure until the pot bursts, spilling scalding wash and sending flammable vapour toward the fire. Keep the fire low and the joints tight, keep water and wet sacks at hand, and never walk away from a running still.

Hickory Ash, Red Oak and the Blue Flame

Cletus “Rabbit” Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads. They do not. Hickory ash is potash, which is lye. In a hot doubler it can foam like a mad dog's mouth, carry soapy, bitter flavours into the worm, and dull your bright copper. My neighbour Ephraim tried it, and his spirit came out tasting like he had washed a hog in it. Red oak's pores are open straight through, unlike white oak's, which are stopped with the plugs the learned men call tyloses. Its shavings yield only tannin, bitterness and a brown colour that may fool a fool into thinking the spirit is aged. Neither will take out one drop of methanol. Only the cuts do that.

As for the spoon and the match: a blue flame tells you that the spirit will burn and roughly how strong it is, and nothing more. Methanol burns pale blue too, and the colour of a flame is no honest test for lead. Next payday, remember that Manchester money came from a girl standing at a loom thirteen hours a day so her family could keep the farm. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.