Counterstamp Coin Collecting in the 1860s: The Coinage Act and Stamped Cents

The Coinage Act of 1857 and a New Fever

Friends of the worm and the kettle, you know me as a man who thinks hard about what goes into his copper. Lately, though, the country has gone daft over what comes out of its pockets. In February of 1857 Congress, in its infinite wisdom and limited sobriety, passed a Coinage Act that did away with the old large cent. That was the big, fat copper disc, near the size of a half dollar and heavy enough to stun a squirrel at twenty paces. The half cent went to the grave with it. In their place the Mint struck a little copper-nickel cent with a flying eagle on its face, eighty-eight parts copper to twelve of nickel. It is so thin and pale that it looks as if it has been sick a fortnight.

Tell an American a thing is going away and he will suddenly love it like a dead mother. As the big coppers vanished, every clerk, schoolmaster and idle banker's son from Boston to Baltimore began combing his change for them, studying dates, varieties and the tilt of Liberty's curls. The same Act ended the legal-tender standing of the Spanish silver, the pillar pieces and reales we had been spending since before the Revolution. So with one stroke the government turned two whole families of coin into curiosities, and curiosities breed collectors the way a manure pile breeds flies.

By '58 the gentlemen had organized. That year saw the American Numismatic Society founded in New York and the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society in Philadelphia. The granddaddy of the trade is Joseph Mickley of Philadelphia. He was born in 1799 and wanted a cent from his birth year, but the 1799 cent is as scarce as an honest revenue man. He kept hunting, the hunting became a cabinet, and the cabinet became the most famous coin collection in America. Edward Cogan, also of Philadelphia, began selling coins at auction in 1858, copper cents mostly. He is reckoned the first man in this country to make an honest living dealing in old money. Consider that, and then consider your banker.

A Copper Drummer at the Anvil

Here is where I enter the story. The big coppers made a fine billboard. A man keeping a store, a tavern or a tooth-pulling parlour could take a steel punch with his name cut into the end, lay a cent on the anvil, and strike. That coin then carried his name to every pocket it passed through, a little copper drummer that never slept, never drank and never asked for wages. Merchants have done it since the twenties and thirties. I did it at my own anvil: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H.

Now the coin men want them. Last month a gentleman in Philadelphia wrote offering three dollars for one cent bearing my name. I likely stamped it while hung over, since I do my best smithing in that condition. That makes my hangover the most valuable thing I ever produced.

The Boston Sharper and the Bear

Once it got about that my stamped coppers fetched cabinet prices, I had a visitor. This was in the spring of last year: a Boston fellow with a waxed mustache like two drowned rat tails, checked trousers loud enough to hear from the Suncook bridge, and a card reading 'Dealer in Antiquities and Rare Specie.' He did not want the coins. He wanted the punch, and offered eight dollars for it. A man who owns the punch can strike Wilkins coppers until doomsday and sell every one to some Philadelphia lunatic as genuine. I declined and sent his trousers back down Route 28.

Three nights later, at two in the morning, the trousers returned. I heard the latch on my shop shutter and lay in my bunk grinning. That window sits eleven feet from Barnaby's chain stake, and Barnaby's chain is twelve feet long. First the bear's breathing changed, from a bellows with the croup to a man about to say grace over a ham. Then came a squeak like a mouse stepping on a tack. Four hundred pounds of bear took Boston by the seat and shook him as a terrier shakes a rat. Cloth tore like a sail in a gale, coins jingled out of his pockets, and that Boston voice climbed to a note I have only heard from a pig at a slaughtering.

When I came round with a lantern and a ham bone, Barnaby had him pinned against the woodpile. He had one boot, half a coat and no trousers at all, and a bite out of his left haunch you could have set a teacup in. He had soiled himself so thoroughly that the bear backed off sneezing. I traded the ham bone for the man. Then I sewed up his backside on my tooth-pulling chair with fishing silk and a curved needle, nine stitches in all, while he offered me forty dollars to stop. I charged him fifty. I also pulled a molar he had cracked clenching his jaw, and that one was free. Next morning I found eleven of my own stamped cents in the grass. He had been buying them along the turnpike for a nickel apiece, so Barnaby had banked them for me a second time.

Bear Pennies, Fips and Levies

Miss Clara Higgins, a scholar of Blue Ridge slang, came up from Virginia to tell me my coppers have travelled farther than I have. Around '59 a tin peddler carried one of my stamped cents into Floyd County. The old man running a still up a closed hollow bought it for a jar, and from then on the sign for getting into that hollow was a cent with a name stamped on it. Folks called it the bear penny, after the peddler's tales of Barnaby. Soon every boy in the hollow was scratching his own name into cents with a nail, so the old man changed the sign to whistling a certain hymn wrong in a certain place.

In the mountains a jar cost fips and levies, not cents. A fip was the Spanish half real, about six and a quarter cents. A levy was the full real, about twelve and a half. Miss Higgins says her granddaddy was still pricing liquor that way at the start of the war, Act of '57 or no. Her great-uncle Ransom hung drilled silver dimes on ankles, claiming they would blacken if a man drank poison shine. Every one blackened in time, because silver tarnishes on sweaty skin, and a poisoned man goes blind before the silver knows a thing. She also told of a teacup under her grandmother's floorboard holding forty-one stamped coins, each one logged on a slip with the peddler who brought it. That is a collector worth a hundred spyglass gentlemen.

How to Know a True Counterstamp

Take heed from Asa Pruitt of Patrick County, the finest persimmon-brandy man on the Dan River, who could not spell his own name. Having no steel punch, he hammered a red-hot horseshoe nail into his coppers line by line, making a crooked A and P. City collectors now pay good money for those coins, thinking them some grand merchant's mark.

Gentlemen, examine your specimens as you would examine a run. A true punch strikes all at once, and its letters sink together with clean walls. A nail scratch goes in a stroke at a time, every line a different depth. A real hammer-struck counterstamp often shows a flat or soft spot on the reverse, opposite the punch, because the anvil pushes back where the steel drives in. Every hand-cut punch has its quirks, a letter a hair crooked or a serif nicked, and they appear on every coin it strikes, so lay your piece beside one you know is good. Letters too perfect, too even or too fresh deserve suspicion. A coin dated after they bury me is either a forgery or proof that I have learned a trick in Hell worth knowing. Which letter on my punch carries the flaw, I will not say.

Copper, Cider Brandy and the Cuts

Do not melt cents to build a still. The old large cents were near pure copper, but the copper-nickel cents carry twelve parts nickel, and the new bronze cents of '64 are near ninety-five parts copper with tin and zinc. That is alloy, not still metal. Use clean, pure sheet copper, and never lead solder, for lead poisons a man slow and sure. Copper wears in a still because the sulfur in the vapour eats at the head and the neck of the arm, and that wear is the metal taking the stink out of your spirit. I have seen a twenty-year still in Barnstead you could read a newspaper through at the neck. Patch thin copper or retire it. Keep it bright with vinegar and a fist of salt, then rinse it well.

What follows is history and learning only, for the law forbids making spirits for drinking without a federal permit. The old New England cider brandy began with hard cider fermented dry in a cool cellar, running perhaps six or seven parts in a hundred spirit. Charge the copper pot no more than two-thirds full, and keep the fire low and steady so you do not scorch the lees. Set out a row of small numbered jars to watch the run change. Throw out every drop of the foreshots. The heads follow, smelling of glue and pear-drop candy, and the methanol hides among them where no nose can be certain of it. Discard the early run by measure, and generously. The hearts come sweet and clean, smelling of apple and cellar. The tails, oily and smelling of wet dog, go back for the next charge. Alcohol vapour is heavier than air and creeps along the floor to find your flame, so keep the place aired and never leave a running still. As Miss Higgins put it, "the still wants a sitter like a baby wants a mama. Walk off and it'll cry, and when a still cries, it burns."

Ashes, Oak Shavings and the Shake-Bead

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, sent word that his uncle swears by hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Hickory ash is what you leach for soap lye. It might tame a little sour acid, which is likely where the notion came from, but methanol is no acid and lye does not touch it. Red oak only lends tannin, colour and a woody taste. It dresses the liquor and cleans nothing, like rouge on a corpse. In Miss Higgins's country they call such liquor "barn-painted." The only cure for bad heads is never to keep them.

As for the shake-bead: big lasting beads tell you roughly about strength, and nothing at all about poison. Methanol beads, and a jar full of heads beads as prettily as the finest hearts. So check your change, keep your copper clean and your fire low, and if you find a cent with my name on it, think kindly of an old dentist and his bear.