Muster Day on the Pittsfield Common: Militia Training Days and the Call of 1861

The Cornstalk Militia Takes the Field

Under the old militia law, here in New Hampshire and all through New England, every able-bodied man from about eighteen to forty-five stood enrolled. He was bound to furnish his own firelock, his powder horn or flask, a cartridge box and a knapsack, and to turn out and drill whenever the captain called. A man who stayed home paid a fine, and many paid it gladly. It cost less than a whole day of being hollered at by one's own brother-in-law in a borrowed cocked hat.

The year had two great days. In spring came company training, when each town drilled on its own ground. In Pittsfield that meant the common by the meetinghouse, with Catamount Mountain looking down on us like a disappointed aunt. In autumn came the general muster, when the whole regiment marched in to be reviewed by some colonel on a borrowed horse. Pittsfield has been a town since 1782, and I doubt it has held one sober muster in all those years.

A Pittsfield company on training day had the discipline of a henhouse in a thunderstorm and about half the firepower. Half the muskets had not been fired since Bunker Hill, and the rest were cornstalks, umbrellas, and one fellow's wife's rolling pin, the only weapon on the field any man truly feared. City folk called us the cornstalk militia, and we earned the name. I have seen a man present arms with a hoe, and another present arms with a hoe that still had the potato on it.

Our captain in my young days was Captain Ebenezer Thing. That was his true name, and we made every joke about it you are now making. Sober, he could not tell his left from his right, and on muster day sobriety never troubled him. When he ordered a march by the left flank, half the company went left, a quarter went right, and the rest went straight to the cider cart. That was the one order every man understood the first time.

Gingerbread, Cider, and the Rye Wagons

Wherever the drum went, the wagons followed like flies after a butcher's boy. Hard cider stood by the barrel, New England rum came sweet and hot as a Salem sermon, and the hill farms sent their rye. Then there was the gingerbread, which was a sacrament of its own. Every peddler in the county baked it in great flat sheets and sold it by the square. It was so hard you could load it in the six-pounder, and one year we did. It flew about forty rods and broke a window on the Lane house, and old man Lane came out and ate the evidence.

By afternoon came the sham fight. Nobody wished to play the redcoats, so the redcoats were paid with the extra jug, and so the redcoats always won. I believe that was the only time King George ever took New Hampshire. After that came horse trading, wrestling, a fistfight or four, and a man selling a cure for baldness out of the same jar he sold a cure for warts out of. In time the trainings grew so ridiculous that the boys mocked them on purpose. They formed companies of rags called the Horribles, with bonnets for helmets, stovepipe for cannon, and a goat for a colonel. I marched with them one year as Surgeon-General, my tooth forceps hung on a chain like a bishop's cross. By the forties and early fifties the New England states had given up the compulsory musters in favour of volunteer companies, and training day faded the way a good fire does: still warm, but nobody feeding it.

The Drum Sounds Different: April 1861

Then came April of 1861. Fort Sumter fell, and on the fifteenth of April Mr. Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand militia to serve ninety days. They said it would pass like a fever and be over by haying. New Hampshire raised her First Regiment, and the boys gathered at Concord. That spring the drum on our common was the same drum with the same sticks, yet it sounded different. Nobody laughed at the man with the hoe any longer, because now they were asking him his name.

Where the gingerbread cart had stood, a recruiting sergeant sat at a table with a ledger and a jug. A recruiting sergeant and a tooth-puller use the same patter: this will not hurt a bit, now sign here and bite down. I have spoken those words ten thousand times, and never was I so ashamed of them as when I heard that sergeant say them to boys whose baby teeth I had pulled. As the war ground on, the town meetings voted bounties to fill our quota. In March of 1863 Washington passed the Enrollment Act and brought the draft. A drafted man could hire a substitute or pay three hundred dollars commutation and stay home. A rich man bought his life with what a poor man could not earn in a year, and so the poor man went. The cider still flowed, but now it was poured for mothers.

Copper in the Touch-Hole, and a Bear at the Salute

My friend Silas "Hacksaw" McAllister, master coppersmith, saved the town gun for that muster of '61. It was an old brass six-pounder, fired every Fourth and every muster since before his father was born, and the selectmen wanted it to salute the boys bound for Concord. But the touch-hole, the vent a gunner primes and fires through, bears the worst of the burning powder gas, and shot after shot had eaten it so wide you could have posted a letter through it. A vent that wide blows fire out the top instead of driving the ball out the front. Silas applied the proper cure for a brass gun. He drilled out the ruined hole, threaded in a plug of good copper, which stands up to that burning gas better than the gun metal around it, and drilled a fresh, true vent through its middle. He did the work by lantern light. His apprentice held the lamp, at least when he was not holding the selectman's jug.

I kept my booth that day under a maple, a tooth-pulling chair with a sign reading PAINLESS on one side and RYE TONIC on the other. I pulled teeth between volleys so the cannon would drown the screaming. My bear Barnaby was chained to an iron stake by the horse sheds, since the last time I left him home he ate a kitchen door. Also on the common was Mr. Pettibone, a revenue assessor up from Concord, in a white waistcoat and very tight new buff breeches, sniffing every jug with his notebook in hand.

The gunner touched off Silas's new copper vent, and the six-pounder spoke. Barnaby came out of the ground like a cork from a hot jug, stake, chain, and a fair piece of horse shed with him. He went through the front rank like a scythe through wheat. Captain Thing leapt onto the gingerbread table, and Barnaby, who was heading for that table anyway, ate forty pounds of muster gingerbread off it. Then he caught the scent of Pettibone, whose waistcoat was soaked in spilled rum until he smelled like a molasses barrel with legs. In four bounds Barnaby hooked the seat of those buff breeches and tore them off entire, from belt to knee. The assessor ran off the common in his shirt tails while the drummer boy played him out to the Rogue's March. The breeches flew from the liberty pole through two Fourths of July. His horse never came back, and we sold it at the next spring's auction for eleven dollars and a jar. Barnaby went to sleep on the warm cannon barrel, and no one would go near him to load a second salute. I will say it plainly all the same: a loose bear in a crowd is no joke, and I spent a week paying for horse sheds.

Powder Flasks and a Dented Drum

Every powder flask on the common was copper or brass, for iron or steel can strike a spark and copper will not. At inspection the captain had each man pull his stopper to show his powder dry. Josiah Pervear, a farmer from up toward Barnstead road, pulled his, and the flask was full to the shoulder with rye. The captain gave it two long sniffs, pronounced the powder wet, and confiscated it for the safety of the company. He then inspected it alone behind the meetinghouse sheds all afternoon and came back to evening parade to salute a cow.

Silas tells a quieter story too. A fifteen-year-old drummer named Asa brought three dollars in pennies to the foundry in '61. Half of them were stamped with my mark, for I punched G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. on every copper I gave in change. Asa's wooden drum shell was cracked through, and he was going with the regiment. Silas hammered him a copper shell, planished it bright, set the tack heads in a ring, and gave him back his pennies. In the summer of '65 Asa came home with a dent the size of a thumbprint below the hoop, where a ball had struck somewhere in Virginia. He asked Silas to beat it out, and Silas refused: "I told him that dent is the finest work ever done on that drum, and it wasn't done by me."

The Rye Those Wagons Carried

Since every rye wagon on the common was filled from somebody's copper, here is how a careful man ran his rye, set down as history only. The law forbids distilling spirits for drinking without a federal permit. He used rye for spice, with a good share of malted barley for its working power, since yeast cannot eat raw starch. He cracked the rye and cooked it to porridge with a gentle fire and constant stirring, because rye's natural gums make the mash thick and apt to scorch. He let it cool to about 145 to 158 degrees, stirred in the malt, and held it warm while the malt turned starch to sugar. Then he cooled it to blood warm, pitched the yeast, and let it work several days in a warm room with air moving, because a fermenting mash breathes out a gas that will smother a man in a shut cellar.

He ran it twice. The fast stripping run pulled cloudy low wines, and the slow spirit run of those low wines was where the cuts were made. Leave headspace in the pot and heat it slow, or the charge will foam and puke into the condenser. Above all, a still must never be sealed. It must stay open to the air through the condenser, or it becomes a bomb with a copper jacket. Methanol boils near 148 degrees against 173 for ethanol, so it gathers thickest at the start, though some smears on through. Throw out the foreshots generously: a full teacupful or more for every five gallons of wash, and more if you have any doubt. Set aside the solventy heads and the oily tails, and keep the sweet hearts. Silas reminds me that copper strips sulfur stink from the vapor mostly up high, in the head, neck and arm, so a copper pot with an iron head is a fine boot with no sole. Keep every joint tight, since leaked vapor in a room with a fire is grave peril.

Ashes, Oak, and the Blue Flame

Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads. They do not. New England once leached hardwood ashes into lye and boiled it down to potash and pearlash for England's soap and glass. Ash and water make caustic lye, so ashes in the doubler only make a weak soap kettle. Oak belongs in a barrel after the run, and white oak at that, since red oak's pores run so open you can blow bubbles through a stick of it. Red oak in a hot keg adds bitterness and a taste like a fence post. Wood or fruit in a doubler is flavouring, never purifying, because the bad heads pass straight through. The only cure is a good cut.

As for the man who lights a spoonful and declares a blue flame safe: good spirit burns pale blue, and so does methanol. No flame colour is a trustworthy test for any poison. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.