Civil War Soldier Mail: Soldier's Letters, Smuggled Whiskey and Boxes From Home

Three Cents and a Soldier's Letter

When the war came, half the young men of the Suncook Valley went south with a rifle, a blanket, and a mother's prayer sewn into the lining of the coat. Down there, after dry socks and the end of the war, what they wanted most was a letter. What they most wanted to send home, after word that they were still alive, was money, and now and then a little something off the sutler's back shelf.

Ordinary postage was three cents the half ounce. A soldier drawing thirteen dollars a month, and paid months late, often had neither the three cents nor a stamp to stick it on. So early in the war Congress let a Union soldier write 'Soldier's Letter' across his envelope, get an officer to sign it, and send it off unpaid. The postage was collected from whoever received it. Uncle Sam let the boy mail his letter for nothing and sent the bill to his mother. It is the only time the government has ever acted exactly like a son.

Those envelopes were a sight. The printers of Boston and New York turned out patriotic covers printed with eagles, flags, cannon, Columbia in her bedsheet, and verses bad enough to make a Concord poet lose his supper. A Barnstead boy would write his mother under a thundering eagle that he had had the dysentery nine days running, and would she please send stockings.

If you had kin on the other side, Lord help you. Letters between the lines went by flag-of-truce mail through exchange points such as Fortress Monroe in Virginia. You were to keep to one page, and an inspector opened and read every letter. Write one word about regiments, roads, or the weather over a fortification and into the fire it went. Those inspectors read every love letter that passed between Richmond and Fortress Monroe, which made them the best-informed and most miserable men in the Republic. Picture reading ten thousand letters that all say the cornbread in camp is made of gravel. I would sooner pull ten thousand teeth, and I have come near it.

Bust-Head, Barrel Shirts, and Bibles Without Judges

The Army forbade the sutlers, those peddlers who trailed after the camps, to sell liquor to enlisted men without an officer's leave. You may guess how well that worked. A sutler would sell you a tin of sardines for the price of a mule and a bottle of bust-head for the price of the mule's mother. The boys gave the stuff names to curl a parson's whiskers: 'Oh! Be Joyful,' 'Tanglefoot,' 'Pop-skull,' and 'Rifle knock-knee.' That last I have always admired as a precise medical description.

They smuggled it every way a frightened, thirsty boy could think of. They carried it in canteens, which is the obvious way and so the first place a sergeant looked. They poured it down a musket barrel with a cork in the muzzle, which worked fine until inspection, and they hid it in hollowed loaves. And it came in boxes from home, sent by the express companies, Adams Express most of all. Those boxes held socks, pickles, cakes and Bibles, and every so often a Bible with no Book of Judges, because a pint bottle sat where Judges used to be. Provost guards and officers sometimes searched the boxes. Many a mother's fruitcake was opened with a bayonet like a hog at slaughter, with crumbs everywhere and a guilty little bottle lying in the middle like a babe in a manger.

A man caught drunk might be made to wear the barrel shirt. They knocked the ends out of a barrel, set it over his shoulders, sometimes hung a sign on it, and marched him through camp. It is the only army garment that fits every man equally badly. Or they bucked and gagged him, trussed like a Christmas goose with a stick in his teeth for hours, or set him walking in circles under a log until he was sorry he had been born, never mind the whiskey.

The Proposal in Private Batchelder's Boot

Before he marched, a Suncook Valley private named Amos Batchelder came to my shop. He is long since buried in honour, so I may tell it. He did not come for a tooth, though he needed four pulled and I told him so. He came for a flat tin flask of my double-run. I filled it, and for luck I dropped in one of my own copper cents, stamped at this anvil: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. He rattled it like a baby's toy and swore he would bring it back.

Down in Virginia, Amos wrote the letter of his life, a proposal of marriage on both sides of cheap paper. He had nowhere safe from rain, thieves, and sergeants but his right boot. In went the flask, and in went the letter, folded small. Then he marched twenty-two miles in July heat.

You have never smelled a soldier's boot after such a march. It would make a buzzard lose its faith. Blisters burst and soaked the wool, the sock went the colour of old cheese, and the leather sweated like a deacon at a dance. All the while my flask loosened its stopper one jolt at a time and dribbled good whiskey into that swamp. That night the letter came out soaked through and blue where the ink had run.

Having no other paper, he dried it by the fire and mailed it marked 'Soldier's Letter.' Her family paid three cents for the stinkingest piece of mail ever carried into Merrimack County. Her mother sniffed it and went the colour of a boiled beet. All that could be made out was 'dearest,' 'forever,' and a great wet smear where 'will you' ought to be. The mother read it aloud at supper and declared it the first time a man's feet had ever proposed to her daughter.

The girl said yes. She told me so herself, in my chair, with my forceps on her eye tooth: if he was steady enough to write it after drinking half that flask, he would be steady enough to keep a farm. A practical woman; the Valley breeds them. Amos came home in '65 short one toe and with every bit of his sense. He gave me back my cent with a hole worn through it from rattling, and it hangs on a nail over the forge.

Of Snoops, Biscuits, and Peach Preserves

Letters bring snoops. A man came up from Concord, whom I will not name, as he has family. He had heard that orders for my 'tooth remedy' came through the Pittsfield post office, and he meant to carry off a satchel of them as evidence. At dusk he stepped over the chalk line behind my still-house. Inside that line, Barnaby's chain reaches. A bear that roars is bluffing, and Barnaby did not roar. He stood up, seven feet of him, and laid one paw on the man's backside. The cloth tore like a sail in a gale and the buttons pinged off the woodpile like birdshot. The fellow came out of his breeches like a pea from a pod and ran to Barnstead in his drawers, with four red furrows down one cheek of his hind end, as neat as a plowed field in April. Barnaby then ate the satchel, buckle and six letters together, and wore an ink-blue tongue for a week like a schoolmaster who drinks. One of those letters held a two-dollar note a selectman owed me.

My visitor from Wilkes County in the Brushy Mountains of North Carolina, Mr. Junior Vance, knows something of hidden freight on hard roads. His mama could not send letters to the house, so she sent them in care of a filling station in Wilkesboro. The keeper there steamed them open over his coffee pot, and she knew it because the glue was always tacky and the pages smelled of his cigars. So she wrote in biscuits. Rising biscuits meant the road was clear. Flat biscuits meant a new deputy was about. Burnt biscuits meant the law was waiting at the river bridge. When a letter said the biscuits had burnt and filled the kitchen with smoke, Junior turned about in a cornfield and took out forty feet of fence. He learned afterward that three cars had sat at that bridge. I say we had generals in the late war who would have given an arm to have that woman on staff.

Junior once split his cargo between two boots: a pint in the right, and in the left a poem for a girl named Loretta that rhymed her name with 'I'd sure like to get her.' A deputy at the county line ordered his boots off and found the poem. He read it aloud to his partner three times over, until both were holding the fender and weeping, and then one said: 'Son, the Lord has punished you enough already.' They never touched the right boot. Loretta married the mail carrier, which proves a woman will always pick the man who delivers. Junior's granny also mailed a box to an Army cousin with socks, a fruitcake, and a quart jar marked 'peach preserves.' The first sergeant unscrewed the lid, took one whiff, and confiscated it, and thereafter treated the boy like his own. The cousin never pulled latrine duty again.

The Numbered Jars at Your Own Apparatus

First, the law. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and all I set down here is for history and instruction. I have been arrested twice, and I would not wish the jail mattress on any reader.

Amos's flask leaked, but the whiskey in it was good, and it was good because of how it was cut. Do not run your spirit into one great crock; that is how fools and widows are made. Set out a row of a couple dozen small jars, clean and numbered. Mine are chalked, and Barnaby has twice licked off number nine, so I keep a ledger as well.

Bring the pot up slow on a low fire. First off the worm come the foreshots, a small measure of the lightest and nastiest spirit, smelling of varnish or a shoemaker's glue pot. Out goes every drop, and none of it ever goes near a cup, a mouth, or a sore tooth. Next come the heads, sharp and solvent-smelling, which carry acetaldehyde, ethyl acetate, and a share of the methanol. Give them their own jars and set them aside for discard. Then the hearts, the sweet clean middle that smells of grain or apple and nothing that stings. Last come the tails, oily and heavy, like a wet dog that has rolled in cornmeal.

Let the jars breathe overnight under a cloth, and in the morning go down the row with your nose, rubbing a drop between your palms. Your hearts begin where the sharpness fades, and they end where the sweetness turns greasy. Judge the cuts with your nose, not your hopes. When in doubt, cut more heads, not fewer. You will lose a little spirit and keep your eyesight.

The blue-black bloom inside the helmet after a run is the copper at its work, holding back the sulfur stink. Scrub it after every run so the bright metal is ready next time. Copper carries heat as fast as gossip in a sewing circle, so keep your fire gentle, for a pot run hot pukes mash up the column. Vapour from a weeping joint will find the flame as surely as a deputy finds a free supper. I once saw a man slap at his burning sleeve like a wasp, the flame was so pale, and he spent a month in bandages. Keep your joints tight, the house aired, and sand at hand, and never leave a fire alone, not even for the sheriff knocking.

The Blue Flame and the Thump-Keg Remedies

The blue-flame test is hogwash. Methanol, the poison that blinds, burns with a pale blue flame of its own, nearly invisible by day. Flame colour tells you nothing reliable about methanol or lead. A man who burns a spoonful to prove his whiskey safe is like one who tests a bridge by admiring it. Whiskey is made safe by the cuts, clean copper, and no lead anywhere in the rig.

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro sent me his uncle's claim that old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Ask any cooper why he will not make a whiskey barrel from red oak. Its pores lie open like a sponge, where white oak's are plugged with the growths called tyloses. In the keg, red oak gives only harsh tannin, like chewing a fence rail. Hickory ash is what our grandmothers leached for soap-lye; it is full of caustic potash and makes a muddy, soapy, bumping mess. The seed of truth is that some old makers put fruit or a little grain in the keg for flavour, and that works. But the foreshots and the first solvent jars, with their share of methanol, come out one way only: you cut them off and throw them away. No wood, ash, keg, prayer, or bear does it for you.

Write your mother. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.