Hard Times Tokens: The Merchant Coppers of the Bank War and the Panic of 1837

Good reader, you keep a fire under your own copper and watch the vapour climb the cap the way a natural philosopher watches his retort. I write to you from Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike. There is a brown copper coin on my anvil, and Barnaby, my black bear, is sulking at the end of his chain. My subject is the Hard Times Tokens. Merchants struck them, politicians were mocked on them, and every poor fool in the Republic who could not get his hands on a real cent carried them. I warn you now that what they tell us about the human heart smells like the bottom of a spittoon.

The Bank War and the Brown Money

Picture the year 1833. Old Andrew Jackson sits in the President's House with a pipe in his teeth and a grudge against the Second Bank of the United States. Its president was Mr. Nicholas Biddle of Philadelphia, a man so polished you could shave in his forehead. Jackson called the Bank a monster, and Biddle called Jackson a barbarian. Both were right, and the whole country paid for it. That year Jackson pulled the federal deposits out of Biddle's bank and scattered them among state banks of his own choosing. His enemies called them the pet banks, and they were pets the way Barnaby is a pet: well fed, poorly trained, and fixing to take your arm off.

The pet banks got drunk on paper. They printed notes freely, with no metal behind them, and land speculators bought up the West on it. In July of 1836 Jackson issued his Specie Circular, which said public land must be paid for in gold or silver. All the coin in the East went sliding west like grease down a hot skillet. The next May the New York banks suspended specie payments, which meant they would no longer give you gold or silver for their own paper, and nearly every bank in the Union did the same. That was the Panic of 1837. I was a sprout then, but I remember my father standing in a Pittsfield store with a bank note in his hand. He looked at it the way a man looks at a letter from a woman who has already left him.

When hard money panics, it hides. Silver went into mattresses and copper went into crocks. You could not get change for a quarter dollar if you set the quarter afire. So the merchants of New York, Boston, Providence, and every crossroads with a counter did what merchants always do in a crisis, and found a way to profit by your misery. They struck their own coppers.

Politics With a Rim On It

Most Hard Times Tokens were the size of the large cent and coppery brown, and they passed from hand to hand from about 1833 until about 1844. Some were plain store cards bearing a merchant's name and trade: hats, umbrellas, groceries, dry goods. Others were politics with a rim on them, and those are the beauties.

One shows Old Hickory himself rising out of a strongbox, sword in one hand and purse in the other, under the motto 'I take the responsibility.' The purse was not his. Another shows an honest-to-God jackass with the words 'I follow in the steps of my illustrious predecessor.' That is Martin Van Buren, Little Van, who followed Jackson into office, and the Treasury followed Van Buren into the ditch, braying. On the other side a tortoise carries a strongbox labelled 'Executive Experiment.' That was Van Buren's Sub-Treasury scheme: government money moving at the speed of a turtle, and about as clever.

Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri preached gold and silver until his voice gave out, and people called him Old Bullion. The token-makers named their coppers 'Mint Drops' and 'Bentonian Currency' to rub his nose in it. My favourite shows a ship under full sail labelled 'Webster Credit Currency,' and on the reverse a ship smashed to kindling on the rocks, labelled 'Van Buren Metallic Currency.' There is the whole Whig sermon in two pictures: trust the paper and sail, trust the metal and sink. I have pulled teeth with more honest arguments in them.

Not every token was foolery. In 1838 the abolition folks put out one showing a kneeling woman in chains, with the words 'Am I not a woman and a sister.' Every time the poorest man made change, it put a hard question into his palm. It is the one token from that whole sorry decade that was not trying to rob anybody, and I take my hat off to them.

Not One Cent, and a Handsome Profit

A great many tokens carried an old toast from the XYZ quarrel with France in 1798: 'Millions for defence, not one cent for tribute.' The merchants kept that motto for a clever and crooked reason. Because the token said NOT ONE CENT right on its face, it did not pretend to be federal coin, and its maker could stand before a judge and swear he was no counterfeiter.

Now weigh the thing the way a chemist weighs his charge. The federal large cent held one hundred sixty-eight grains of good copper. Many tokens weighed less, and by common reckoning they cost the merchant less than a cent apiece to strike. He bought copper by the pound, struck it, and paid it out in change as a cent. Every one that wandered off to Vermont in a drover's pocket and never came back was pure profit, sweet as a stolen pie. A store card was a handbill as well, so the poor man carried the merchant's advertisement around in his breeches for free. Congress finally ran out of patience. Under an Act of June 8, 1864, no private person may make coins or tokens meant to pass as one-cent or two-cent pieces. I have done my share of punching at my own anvil, but I stamp my name on the government's coin. I never claimed to make it.

Crooked Copper at the Still-House

Last October a peddler came up the Turnpike from Lowell wanting two jugs of my medicinal tincture. He laid down a fistful of old 'Not One Cent' coppers, rubbed with vinegar and sand until they glowed like a parson's nose at a wedding, and swore they were federal cents. I can tell a Hard Times token from a cent with my eyes shut and my teeth in a jar, so I told him no. At dusk he circled back through the alders to my still-house window. He did not know about the chain, or about the fellow at the end of it. Barnaby came away with the man's trousers, his drawers, and a slab of his left ham, and he licked up eleven of the polished coppers that rained out of the man's pocket. I poured foreshots, which are fit for nothing but a wound, over the open meat and stitched him with horsehair and a sail needle. Three days later I had the tokens back, proven by passage. That is more assaying than any Boston bank ever gave a coin.

Captain Donald Vance of Manchester, a retired revenue man with a voice like a church bell full of gravel, met these coppers on many a raid. In Orange County, Vermont, a skinflint who kept eight or nine hired men had punched a burst kettle into little round chits stamped 'GOOD FOR ONE DRAM.' They would spend nowhere on God's earth but at his own spigot. When the seizure was weighed, the chits outweighed the whiskey. In Belknap County a tavern keeper who sweated like a cheese in July met the Captain at the door with a jingling canvas sack. The first copper the Captain drew out of it read, plain as Scripture, NOT ONE CENT. He held it to the light and said, 'Friend, even your money is telling me no,' and he logged the sack as a bribe that had confessed itself.

Up in Haverhill, a man near ninety had buried a crock of coppers he hoarded through the Panic, then built his firebox on top and ran it for twenty years. The heat fused them into a green and black lump the size of a loaf of bread, with a little Jackson nose and the corner of a jackass still showing. The Captain handed it back to him, and it held the old man's barn door open for the rest of his days.

Good Copper at Your Own Apparatus

A token-maker wants his copper thin and cheap. A still-maker wants it thick and pure, because the copper does chemistry for him. Mind the law first: Washington requires a permit to distill spirit for drinking, and what follows is for history and instruction.

Cook cracked corn in water until it is as thick as a mud-season road and smells like a johnnycake. Cool it to about one hundred fifty degrees by the thermometer, and do not trust your thumb. Stir in malted barley, whose diastase turns the corn starch to sugar, because raw corn is a stubborn Baptist and will not convert without help. Cool it further, to about eighty degrees, and pitch your yeast; if you pitch too hot, you kill it. Let it work five to seven days in a warm place with air moving through. What you get is wash, a thin sour beer that is only a few parts in a hundred spirit.

Strain the wash into the pot, seal the joints, and bring the fire up low and slow. Keep the worm running cold the whole time. If it runs warm, raw spirit vapour comes out the end like a ghost and finds your firebox. I saw a Barnstead man come out of such a fire with no eyebrows and the hair on his arms curled up like a cooked spider. Never leave a run alone.

Now come the cuts, which are the real experiment. The foreshots come first. They are the most volatile part, and the methanol lives there, the wood spirit that blinds and kills. On a twenty-gallon wash I throw out a good pint and more, and if you doubt yourself, throw out more. Next come the heads, which smell of varnish like a hatter's back room. Then the hearts, clean and sweet, with a whiff of corn and summer. Last come the tails, oily and cloudy, smelling like wet paper. Cut by your nose into several small jars and never one big one, or heads end up in the hearts the way a greedy merchant mixes his tokens in with his cents. All the while, clean, pure copper catches the sulfur stink and holds it back. Thin metal with lead in it is a poison waiting for a buyer.

Ash, Oak, and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, tells me his uncle swears the old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. His uncle is half right, but the right half is in the wrong barrel. Hickory ash is mostly potash, the alkali your granny boiled with fat to make lye soap. Some old-timers did put a small pinch of ash or lime into a mash gone too sour, in the fermenter, to settle the acid so the yeast could keep working. In the thump keg, ash is like a Whig at a Democrat barbecue: loud, out of place, and changing nothing about the meat.

Red oak is so porous that no cooper will make a whiskey barrel of it. Coopers use white oak, whose pores are plugged with little natural growths. Red oak shavings only stain the spirit the colour of tea and add a pucker of tannin, so raw whiskey looks as if it sat in a barrel for years. That is rouge on a hog. Neither ash nor oak pulls out the heads. They come out by your hand, into a jar you never drink from. The thump keg doubles your strength, but it does not wash your sins.

And bury the blue-flame test while you are at it. Methanol burns with a pale blue flame that is nearly invisible, about the same as good spirit, so a blue flame can be blue poison. A spoon fire will not tell you the truth about lead either. I have stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. over one of the Lowell peddler's tokens, the very one that went through Barnaby, washed twice, and it goes in the mail to Rabbit. As Captain Vance says, the best men in the hills never cut corners: 'The worst always had a pocketful of somebody else's promises.' Read what is in your palm. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.