Civil War Soldiers' Letters Home Begging for a Whiskey Flask

A Cigar Box from the Front

The war is done, God be thanked, and the boys are coming home up the Suncook Valley Turnpike thinner than they left. Some are short an arm or a leg, and every one of them is owed a drink and a chair by the stove. On my workbench here at Fort Wilkins in Pittsfield sits a cigar box crammed with letters that came to this fort from camps in Virginia, Louisiana and the Carolinas. Some ask for socks. Some ask for prayers. A great many, I am proud to say, ask for a flask. I set down their history here for history's sake and for instruction. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and I have been arrested often enough to know the value of saying so plainly.

The Soldier's Letter and the Whiskey Ration

When the war began, a soldier had to scrape up a three-cent stamp like any other citizen. A private earning thirteen dollars a month, when the paymaster bothered to show, often had nothing in his pockets but lice. In 1862 Congress took pity. A soldier could write the words Soldier's Letter across his envelope, get an officer to sign beneath, and send it off unpaid, and the family at home paid the postage on arrival. Mothers paid it gladly, for three cents is a cheap price for proof your boy still has his head. Some envelopes came through this valley so stained with coffee, tobacco juice, and what I pray was mud, that the postmaster handled them with fire tongs. One reached a widow on the Barnstead road with a louse still alive in the fold. She named it after her son and kept it in a pill tin until Christmas.

The letter I prize most came from a Pittsfield private I shall call Asa Drew. That is not his true name, for he is courting a girl in Gilmanton and she need not know everything. It is dated from camp near Falmouth, Virginia, January the twenty-sixth, 1863, just after General Burnside's Mud March. Burnside had tried a winter advance across the Rappahannock, and the rain fell for days until the roads turned to porridge. Wagons sank to the hubs, cannon to the muzzles, and mules went down into the muck, and the whole Army of the Potomac slithered back to camp like a whipped dog. Asa wrote his mother that he was alive, which was more than he could say for his feet, that he had seen the mud eat a mule, ears and all, and that the hardtack had worms that outranked him. He asked for wool socks, a dried-apple pie, Grandsire's tobacco, and a flask of my best, and he begged her to hide it well, for the Lieutenant opened every box and drank whatever he found and called it confiscation.

The boy did not lie about the ration. Army rules let a commander issue a gill of whiskey after heavy fatigue duty or a soaking. In the fever swamps they mixed it with quinine against the ague, and it tasted like a drowned cat steeped in a church bell. Surgeons kept whiskey and brandy in the hospital chest as stimulants for the wounded, and the Sanitary Commission shipped them down with the bandages. But the law forbade sutlers to sell intoxicating liquor to enlisted men. An officer could get a bottle. A private got his whiskey the way a parson gets kissed: rarely, by accident, and with an officer watching.

Grandsire's Stockings

So home packed boxes and sent them south by the Adams Express Company, and some lieutenant would pry the lid with his sword and root through it like a hog through a turnip patch. Folks grew clever. I have heard of whiskey baked inside a hollowed loaf, poured into tins marked peaches, and stuffed up a roast goose where the stuffing ought to go. One Epsom mother sewed a bladder of brandy inside a quilt, and her boy slept warm in two ways at once.

Asa's mother came to this fort with the letter in her apron, crying and cussing in equal measure. I took a flat copper flask, filled it with hearts from a double-run rye, corked and waxed it, wrapped it in oilcloth, and laid it under a dried-apple pie. On top of all, with her blessing, went a pair of Grandsire Drew's wool stockings, worn through haying, sugaring and one funeral, and never once introduced to water. My bear Barnaby, who once ate a dead porcupine quills and all, would not come within ten feet of that box. In February Asa wrote that the Lieutenant got as far as the stockings, went white as a hospital sheet, told him to keep the rest, and went to wash his hands in the creek. That night a Hopkinton boy who had lost his brother at Fredericksburg took a swallow and said it tasted like his father's barn. It is the finest review my liquor ever got, and two sheriffs have read it back to me.

Barnaby and the Treasury Man

In the summer of 1863 a pinch-faced Treasury man came out from Concord in a linen duster, with a warrant and a magnifying lens and a theory that I was shipping untaxed spirits south in the Express boxes. He was correct, but being correct has never saved a man's trousers. I showed him the box by the still-house window. I did not mention that Barnaby had leaned on it all morning, for it held a smoked ham bound for the 12th New Hampshire. When the man reached for the lid, Barnaby took him by the coat tails and then by what was inside them, and shook him as a terrier shakes a barn rat. His spectacles went into the woodpile, his watch into the water trough, and his warrant was chewed to gray paste. He lost three front teeth on the chopping block and most of his left ear. Being a physician of a sort, I poured a dipper of hearts over the ear and stitched it with my wife's silk. It healed a touch low, so now he hears the Republicans on one side and the Democrats on the other. Barnaby swallowed his left gaiter whole and returned it four days later with the buttons still done up. It hangs over my door as a warning to the Treasury.

Flasks That Went to War

My coppersmith, Silas "Hacksaw" McAllister, is a third-generation man who can judge the purity of copper by the note it rings under a hammer. A store flask from Boston, he says, is thin pressed tin with a side seam that one hard march will open. His were hammered from good sheet, curved to ride the ribs beneath the blouse, with a short neck no branch could snap. One went to a sergeant from out by Berry Pond, shaped to his left short ribs. At Gettysburg that July a Rebel ball struck it dead center; the copper folded like a cupped hand and held the ball, but the bottom seam split and the spirit ran warm down his leg. Smelling liquor and feeling wet, he judged himself gut-shot, lay down behind a fence rail to pray, then drew out a flattened ball and a fistful of rye. That flask hangs in the foundry still, and the ball rattles when you shake it.

Pittsfield wives, reasoning that no officer searches Scripture, had Silas build a flask like a pocket Testament, black-japanned copper with a brass clasp and HOLY BIBLE gilt on the spine. A Baptist chaplain from Dover with a nose like a bird dog confiscated it, and a week later it came home empty and rinsed, with a card on the clasp: Psalm one hundred and four, verse fifteen, wine that maketh glad the heart of man. For the provost guards at the river crossings Silas built a regulation canteen holding water, with a copper flask hidden inside behind a side plug. The guard shook it, swigged, tasted water, and passed the man through.

Not every tale is merry. In '62 a traveling tinker sold cheap flasks joined with soft solder heavy in lead. A Chichester boy carried one through a winter in camp and came home with a blue-gray line along his gums, cramps in his belly, and wrists too weak to hold a fork. That is the lead line. Silas's rule, and his father's before him, is this: "Not one drop of lead touches a vessel that carries drink." Every vessel is hammered seamless or joined with silver solder. Mind old pewter and cheap glazed crocks as well. Glass, copper, or oak. Write that on your barn door.

The Rye in Asa's Flask

To make what went south, cook a bushel of cracked corn in about twenty-five gallons of water, stirring against scorching, to a thick gruel. Cool it blood-warm, then stir in a peck of malted rye, whose diastase is the alchemist's servant that turns starch to sugar; skip it and you have wallpaper paste. Add rye meal for flavor and pitch a bread starter or brewer's barm. Let it work four to seven days in a warm room with a draft through it, and when the cap falls and the bubbling quits, strain off the wash and leave the grain behind. Charge the pot no more than three-quarters full. Bring the fire up slow and keep it low, for alcohol vapor is heavier than air and creeps along the floor to your firebox. Keep joints tight, water and sand at hand, and never walk away from a running still.

Then the cuts, where men go blind. Throw out the foreshots, a good pint on a pot my size, stinking of hatter's glue and thick with methanol. Set aside the heads, sharp as varnish and green apples. Keep the hearts, sweet and clean of the grain. Save the oily tails, smelling of a wet dog on a boiled turnip, for the next charge. Judge by nose and tongue in small jars, run by run. Afterward you will find black smut in your swan neck, the sulfur the copper caught out of your vapor. Scrub it bright every time.

Ashes, Shavings and the Blue Flame

From Wilkesboro, North Carolina, Cletus "Rabbit" Miller asked whether old-timers truly threw "hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads." Hickory ash is potash, the very stuff for lye soap; a Northwood fellow tried it in '59, his keg puked gray lather through the worm, and he sold the result to barbers. Red oak is so open in the grain that no honest cooper makes a whiskey barrel of it; its shavings give color and tannin, rouge on a corpse. Neither can catch methanol. Heads boil off early, and only your own hand can cut them out. As for burning a spoonful to see it flame blue: methanol itself burns pale blue, and no flame can tell you of lead. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.