Civil War Substitutes, Bounty Jumpers and the 1863 Draft Commutation Fee

The Drum and the Three Hundred Dollars

Picture the spring of 1863. The war has gone on two years longer than every newspaper promised. The volunteers who marched off with roses on their bayonets are coming home in boxes, or with one sleeve pinned up, or not at all. Mr. Lincoln is short of men. So on the third day of March, 1863, Congress passes the Enrollment Act, the first national draft this Republic ever saw. Every male citizen from about twenty years of age up to forty-five went into a provost marshal's book, and so did every immigrant who had declared he meant to become one.

Then came the Yankee cleverness, and I mean that the way a man means it when he finds a fox has learned to open the henhouse latch. If your name came out of the drum, you had two doors out. You could hire a substitute, some other fellow to go and get shot in your stead. Or you could pay the government three hundred dollars in commutation and stay home with your feet in the oven. Three hundred dollars was close to a year's wages for a man swinging an axe or tending a loom at the mills on the Suncook. That price came to about one good mule and a used coffin. The working men understood the arithmetic right off and called it a rich man's war and a poor man's fight, and they were not wrong. The mill owner paid the fee the way he would pay for a pound of nails, and the farmhand behind him went to Virginia.

I do not judge a man for hiring a substitute. I judge him for what comes next. A fellow who hires another man to do his fighting will soon hire one to do his courting, and before long his wife is knitting the substitute socks.

The names were drawn in public, on a platform, from a great turning drum of folded slips, by a blindfolded man. It is the only honest arrangement I ever saw in government: it takes a blind man to be fair and a deaf one to collect the taxes. The drawing began in New York City in July of '63, and that city went up like a powder mill, with days of rioting, buildings burned, and one of the deadliest riots this nation has ever suffered. Up here in New Hampshire we were quieter. We do not riot. We sulk, and then we vote at town meeting.

Bounties Stacked Like Flapjacks, and the Men Who Jumped Them

Town meeting is where the real money changed hands. Every town had a quota, and if the town filled it with volunteers, nobody there got drafted. So the selectmen of every hamlet from Pittsfield to Pittsburg voted bounties to any man who would enlist and be counted against the town's number. The state added a bounty, the federal government added another, and they stacked up like flapjacks at a logging camp. A man might hold several hundred dollars in his fist for signing his name, and later in the war some got near a thousand. Towns that did not have the money borrowed it. Pittsfield will be paying off that note until our grandchildren are taxed for a war their grandfathers spent hiding in the hayloft.

Where free money lies in the road, a buzzard comes along to pick at it, and here that buzzard was the bounty jumper. He walks into a recruiting office in Manchester, signs as John Smith, collects his bounty or the first part of it, and draws his blue coat. That night he climbs the camp fence, sells the coat, takes the cars to Nashua or over into Massachusetts, and signs again as James Brown. A bounty jumper is a patriot who loves his country so much he joins it nine times. Nine is nothing, either. One John O'Connor was reported to have confessed to jumping thirty-two times, and they gave him four years in prison, which I expect he spent working out how to enlist with the warden. The army is not entirely stupid, only mostly. A caught jumper could be shot for desertion, and some were, stood against a fence before the whole regiment, and the provost men began keeping lists of faces, scars, and peculiar marks.

Brokers, Front Teeth, and a Bear at Supper

That brings us to the substitute broker, the lowest creature in this history, lower than a revenue man, and I do not say that lightly. He found you a man to go in your place and kept a fat slice of the price for himself. The honest ones, both of them, found willing men. The rest worked the taverns with rotgut, a pinch of laudanum, and a pen. A farm boy would wake in a Concord barracks with a head like a mule had kicked it, his signature on a paper he never read, while a broker in Boston counted the boy's bounty. They sent the lame, the half-blind, and the dead drunk, and they sent jumpers back in a dozen times over, because a jumper was a reliable product.

I had my own small part in this trade, and I will confess it while the sheriff sleeps. A Union soldier tore his paper cartridge open with his front teeth, and the examining surgeons rejected any man without opposing front teeth to bite with. So in the summer of '63 I had a line out my door like Sunday at a camp meeting: healthy men with teeth white as a parson's collar, all begging me to pull them before the drum turned. My price was a dollar a tooth, upper and lower. One fellow from up Barnstead way had me take the big front incisor. It came out with a sound like a cork leaving a jug of cider that has been working all winter. He spat red on my apron and said, 'Thank you, Doctor, God bless the Union.' Then he tried to whistle for his dog on the way home, sprayed his own mare, and she kicked him into the ditch.

Then there was a Concord broker I will call Ephraim Gorse, because that was not his name. He drove the turnpike with a wagon and a demijohn. One August evening he found my hired man Asa asleep in the shade after a day of stacking cordwood, judged him to be three hundred dollars delivered to the barracks, and began dragging him off, right past the log window and across the chain line of Barnaby, my black bear. Barnaby was at supper and does not care to be disturbed. Four hundred pounds of bear came off that ledge quick as a falling anvil and took Gorse by the boot, then by the calf inside it. It sounded like a wet sail tearing in a gale, and then came a crack like a green stick over a knee. Asa never woke. I got Barnaby back with a ham bone and stitched Gorse with harness thread, free of charge, which is the only charity I ever did a broker. That fall Gorse's own name came out of the drum, and the provost surgeon looked at his chewed and crooked leg and rejected him. He was the only man in Concord to earn a real exemption, and he earned it in a bear's mouth.

The Petticoat Telegraph of the Brushy Mountains

My guest Junior Vance hauled corn liquor out of the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina, and he reminds me that the Confederacy drafted first, in April of 1862. Those mountains filled with men hiding from the conscript officers. The Home Guard was sent to hunt them, and it mostly hunted supper. His great-great-grandfather Absalom Vance would fight any man on his own land but would not walk to Virginia to do it. He lived two winters in a rock house on the ridge, a great dry overhang of stone. His wife Lettie watched the road and signalled on the wash line: a red flannel petticoat if the Home Guard was coming up the holler, a white bedsheet if all was safe.

A Home Guard sergeant named Pruitt grew suspicious of so much laundry from a woman with no man at home, and came up with three boys and his musket. Up went the petticoat. Absalom did not run. He came down the back of the ridge with two jugs of apple brandy, and the party sat on a log until sundown. The family still keeps Pruitt's report word for word: 'Searched the whole ridge. Found nothing but one hog of bad character.'

In his own day Junior was offered a bounty of his own. A revenue agent in shiny shoes, working Wilkes and Surry, slid him forty dollars, with sixty more to follow, to drive his next load down the Elkin road on Thursday night and pull over at the lights. Junior took the forty and ran his load the other way, around the back side of Elkin, while the roadblock guarded a great deal of nothing. The next week he mailed the agent an unsigned postal card: 'Enlisted. Collected. Deserted.' O'Connor needed thirty-two tries to do what Junior did with one card. Junior's cousin Dewey paid a boy named Harlan twenty-five dollars to carry his load to Charlotte. Harlan went through clean, and Dewey was arrested at home that same night, at the supper before his wedding, for a stack of fines he never paid. The bride married him anyway, paid the fines, and has held it over him for forty years.

At the Apparatus: Mash, Fire, Copper and Cuts

First the plain law: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States. What follows is history and instruction. Everything at the still comes down to four things, the mash, the fire, the copper, and the cuts. The grain man cracks his corn coarse and cooks it in water until it thickens like porridge. While it is warm but not hot he stirs in malted barley, whose enzymes turn the starch to sugar. When he can hold his hand in it, in goes the yeast. Keep the fermenter covered against flies but never sealed, somewhere airy and warm, for a few days to a week, until the bubbling stops and the cap falls. The fruit distiller must take more care. Pectin in apples and pears breaks down into methanol, the wood alcohol, as the fruit ferments, and fruit gives more of it than grain does. Cut your fruit spirits with more care than anything else you make.

Keep the fire low and patient, because a still is not a locomotive. Never seal a still tight. The vapour must have a clear path through the condenser, and a jammed worm, a plug of mash, or a clamped cap will build pressure until the pot bursts and scalds the room. Never walk away from a running still. Keep the jar well away from open flame, for alcohol vapour is heavier than air and creeps along the floorboards to the firebox. I watched a man's eyebrows leave his face in Northwood in 1858, and they never came back.

Copper earns its place by fighting the stink. Stressed yeast throws off sulfur compounds, hydrogen sulfide the worst of them, and wherever the hot vapour touches copper, in the helmet, the neck, and the worm, the copper grabs that sulfur and holds it. A copper pot with an iron cap is like a sermon with no ending, because the good part never reaches where it is needed. After every run, scour off the black and green with vinegar and salt and rinse it clean. The old-timers ran twice: a fast stripping run to low wines, then a slow spirit run caught in a row of small numbered jars, never one big crock. First come the foreshots, sharp and poisonous, so throw out more of them than your greedy heart wants to. Next come the heads, harsh and solvent-smelling, which you set aside. After them the hearts, sweet and clean, are your keeping spirit. Last come the tails, oily and wet-dog smelling, which you save for the next run. The jars let you change your mind. One big crock lets you poison your cousin.

Ash, Oak Shavings and the Blue Flame

A correspondent from Wilkesboro, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller, writes that his uncle swears the old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Wood ash is potash, potassium carbonate, the stuff every New England farmer leached for soft soap. It is alkaline like lye and will quiet some sour, acid notes, but methanol is no acid, and ash cannot touch it. It is soap with ambitions. Oak shavings give tannin, colour, and a woody bite, so the spirit comes out looking older. It has been dressed up, not cleaned, like a mongrel in a fancy collar who will still bite the deacon. The bad heads stay in the jar until your own hand cuts them out. For his trouble Rabbit gets an Indian Head cent stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H.

Last, the tavern sport who lights a spoonful of spirit and declares that blue means pure and yellow means lead is serving hogwash on a silver tray. Methanol burns with a pale blue flame of its own, and flame colour is no honest test for lead. Shaking the jar to read the bead tells you strength and nothing about poison. The only tests worth having are a clean copper still, a lead-free pot, and careful cuts.