The 1862 Small-Change Crisis: Coin Hoarding, Shinplasters and Counterstamps

The Great Vanishing of the Pennies

Cast your mind back, reader, if it has not been pickled at your own worm, to the autumn of eighteen hundred and sixty-one. The war was on, the banks were nervous, and the government was spending money like a drunken sailor on shore leave. In December of that year the banks suspended specie payments, and by early eighteen sixty-two the Treasury had followed. Put plainly, a man could no longer lay a note on a bank's counter and demand gold or silver for it. The promise was broken, and every sensible man in New England understood what that meant.

It meant hard money was about to become scarcer than a sober Irishman at a wake. And what does a Yankee do when he smells trouble? He hoards. Gold went first, into the stocking and under the loose hearthstone. Silver followed close behind: half dollars, quarters and dimes sewn into mattresses, baked into bread, dropped down wells in jars. Then came the most astonishing thing of all, for even the copper cent vanished. Nobody in the history of the Republic had ever hoarded a copper cent. A penny was what you gave a beggar to be rid of him. Yet the large cents and the new small cents went into hiding with the rest, because a man who has lost faith in paper will hoard anything with a bit of metal in it, including, I swear, his dead wife's thimbles.

I knew a man in Chichester who buried four hundred dollars in coin in his own cow pasture and then forgot which cow. He dug for six weeks. The cows were delighted, and the pasture came to look like Cold Harbor. A hoarder's stocking holds more silver than sense, and the moth gets the sense first.

Now consider the poor shopkeeper in Pittsfield, or Concord, or Epsom. A woman comes in for a spool of thread, three cents' worth, with nothing in her purse but a greenback or a bank note, and the merchant has not a single cent to make change. So he gives her a stick of candy, a button, or a promise. I have seen a promise of change written on the back of a playing card. I have seen a dentist's receipt, my own, accepted as legal tender for a pound of nails, which I believe is the only honest use ever made of one.

Stamps, Shinplasters, and a Cow Where the Eagle Ought to Be

Starved for small change, the country began to improvise. First came the stamps. Folks took to carrying postage stamps as small money and passing them across the counter. But a stamp in a hot pocket turns to a sticky wad faster than a Merrimack tax collector turns to a bribe. Merchants took to enclosing them in little brass-framed cases with mica windows, which was clever, but a man cannot carry a hundred of those without jingling like a sleigh.

Then, in the summer of eighteen sixty-two, the Treasury itself took a hand and printed what it called Postage Currency. These were little paper notes of five, ten, twenty-five and fifty cents, with the picture of a postage stamp printed right on the face. Think of it: the government of the United States, in the middle of a war, printing pictures of stamps and calling them money. Later came the Fractional Currency, much the same with fancier faces. The common folk, who name everything with a rude word, called all of these little notes shinplasters, since they were worth about what you would wrap around a bruised shin and served about as well. They were flimsy, they tore, they stained, and they smelled of every pocket they had ever lived in. Yet mark this: the shinplasters worked. They got a woman her thread and a man his nails, and the country kept moving. A bad answer that works is better than a good answer that does not exist.

Private men printed their own as well. My friend Miss Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge of Virginia is a mountain herbalist, a granddaughter of wild-foragers, and a keeper of the old slang of the trade, from white lightning to panther's breath. She showed me the pride of her cabinet, a shinplaster printed by a Concord grocer. “Where any proper bank would put an eagle, he put a cow,” she told me, “looking mighty pleased with herself, standing right there where the national bird ought to be.” I call that the most honest piece of engraving ever done in New Hampshire, for the eagle never gave a man a drop of milk in his life. Folks say the grocer honored every note, and I reckon it was because everybody in town knew the cow.

She keeps another curiosity too. A tavern keeper once paid his farmers in tokens he struck himself from the scraps of old copper kettles, melting down the dented ones nobody could mend. Her token still smells faintly of smoke, and I believe it. The metal never forgets where it has been. Then there was her great-grandmother, who kneaded her pennies into rising bread dough and set the loaf on the back of the stove, reasoning that no thief on earth would go pawing through a woman's baking. One Sunday a loaf was sliced at the table and it rang like a bell. The family ate around the coins, and folks in the hollow called her cooking the richest in the county, and they did not mean the butter.

The Clang of Commerce at My Anvil

When a country is starved for small change, a man with a punch and an anvil becomes a person of consequence. I took in worn large cents, the old Liberty-head coppers so rubbed down by sixty years of pockets that Mr. Washington himself would have asked for a refund of his nose. I took silver pieces and I took coppers, and with one good clang of the steel I stamped each one G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. A farmer in the Suncook Valley will take such a thing in change, because he knows the man who stamped it, knows the man lives where the bear lives, and does not wish to argue about the weight.

Merchants brought me coppers by the pocketful. A plain worn cent looks like any other worn cent, and a man might doubt it. A cent with my name punched into it is a promise that it is good and that G. G. Wilkins will stand behind it. I will say honestly that the value lay in the trust more than in the copper, and what I sold was my reputation, which is more flammable than my still. The revenue men arrested me twice for the spirits and never once for the coins. Perhaps they carried my pennies in their own pockets.

Let me put down one myth while I am at it. Some believe a coin counterstamped with a man's name is worth more because the name adds value. Not a bit of it. The value is in the trust and the copper, and the punch is merely the promise. A fine name on a bad coin is only a fine name on a bad coin, and the world is rarely so gullible as the cheat supposes.

The Cuts: An Experiment in Four Parts

Now to the copper, for a man who talks of money and never of copper is a poor sort of alchemist. First a plain word of law. What follows is for the history of the thing and the education of the reader. To make spirits for drinking without a permit from the federal government is against the law of the United States, and I would not see you in the sheriff's wagon on my account.

When you work a still, the spirit does not come off all at once, any more than a tooth comes out all at once. It comes in stages, and each has its own character, which the natural scientist at his apparatus must learn to read. First come the foreshots, the first dribble, sharp as a Concord lawyer's tongue, carrying the nastiest volatile compounds in the charge, methanol among them. Methanol is wood alcohol, and it will blind a man and kill him dead. Throw the foreshots away. Do not drink them, do not rinse your mouth with them, do not sell them to your neighbor.

After them come the heads. They are still harsh and still carry those light volatile compounds, and they smell of paint thinner and regret. Set them aside as unfit for the cup. A careless man mixes his heads into his good spirit and next morning feels as though a mule had kicked him through the skull, and that is the mild result. Then at last come the hearts, the clean middle of the run, sweet and smooth, the part a careful distiller keeps. You know them by smell, by taste, and by the temperature of the vapour, and you learn the signs through patient years and many ruined batches. Last come the tails, heavy and oily, smelling of wet cardboard and old cabbage. Set them aside to be re-run in a later batch. A man who runs his still too long gets tails in his hearts, and the whole batch turns sour.

Fire, Lead, and Other Bad Masters

Fire is the great enemy. Keep it low and steady. A still that runs too hot can boil over and scald you, or spit hot vapour into an open flame, and I have seen a man's eyebrows go up like a pair of startled swallows. The fire is a good servant and a very bad master.

One more warning, given by a man who has seen the results. Use no lead solder anywhere in a still, and never build one from salvaged radiators or contaminated metal. Lead is a poison. It leaches into the spirit and then into the man, and it sickens or kills. Use pure copper and clean joints. I will not have a customer poisoned by cheap work, for dead customers do not pay their bills.

Hickory Ash in the Thump Keg

A question came to me from Cletus Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, called Rabbit by his friends: “My uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?”

Rabbit, your uncle is not entirely a liar, nor entirely a doctor. Hickory and oak are hardwoods, and their charcoal does something real: it adsorbs some harsh compounds out of a spirit, as a sponge drinks up spilled ink. That is why many distillers filter through charcoal, and why aging in a charred oak barrel mellows the product. But ash thrown into the thump keg, the vessel between the still and the condenser, does not remove methanol, does not strip the foreshots, and does not make a poisoned run safe. Only the honest cuts do that work. No ash, no shaving and no incantation will do it for you.

I knew a fellow in Barnstead named Ephraim who swore by oak shavings in his keg. He never made a cut in his life and drank the whole run, foreshots and all. He was a handsome man until the spring of eighteen fifty-eight, when he took ill, and I will say no more than that the doctors in Concord could not help him and the shavings could not either.

So the pennies went into the stockings, the shinplasters came out of the Treasury, the tokens and worn coppers carried the common trade, and a Pittsfield man with a punch and an anvil did honest business in the gap. A country starved of small change learns either to trust its neighbors or to hoard, and the Suncook Valley chose trust, mostly. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.