The 1863 Civil War Draft in Pittsfield, NH: Riot Rumors and $300 Commutation

The Wheel Comes to Merrimack County

On the third day of March, 1863, Congress passed the Enrollment Act. It was the first time this Union ever drafted men by federal law. Every male citizen from twenty to forty-five was to have his name written in the book, and so was every foreigner who had declared he meant to become one. Asa Blodgett read it out at the village store, slow, moving his finger under the words like a man following a deer track.

They split us into two classes, the way a butcher splits a hog. Class One took every man from twenty to thirty-five, and the unmarried men up to forty-five. Class Two was married men past thirty-five, and they would be called only once Class One was used up. You never saw so many Pittsfield bachelors of thirty-eight take up courting all at once. The Widow Hutchins got four proposals in one week. One came from a man who had already called her goat ugly to her face.

Then came the clause every man had by heart sooner than the Lord's Prayer. A drafted man could pay three hundred dollars commutation and go home, or he could hire a substitute to go in his place. A laboring man at the Suncook mills might see three hundred dollars in a year if he never fell sick and never drank, and I can tell you the second condition fit none of my customers. So the cry went up from Concord to the coast: a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. For my part, I know Pittsfield men who would have paid three hundred dollars to get away from home, and they volunteered first.

Provost marshals went into every district, under a man named Fry down in Washington, and enrolling officers went door to door with ink pots and ledgers. One came up my lane in June, a thin young fellow with a cough. Barnaby rose on his hind legs at the end of his chain, eight feet of black fur and a breath like a tannery privy. The boy wrote my name down from forty yards off, and the bear's too. So far as I know Barnaby is still enrolled in Class One, unmarried, and I hope they draw him.

Rumors Up the Turnpike

In July the Concord stage brought word that the draft drawing in New York City had turned into a riot, four days of it, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth. I will not soften this. The mobs burned draft offices, hunted Black men and women through the streets and murdered them, and set fire to the Colored Orphan Asylum with children inside it. They were cowards and butchers, and any one of those orphans was worth a hundred of the scum who lit the match. Soldiers had to be brought straight back from Gettysburg to put it down. Boston had its own scrap in the North End the next day.

A rumor travels up the Suncook Valley Turnpike the way vapour goes up a still head: hot, fast, and full of things that ought to be thrown away. Monday it was a riot in Boston. Tuesday it was ten thousand rioters marching north to burn every provost office in New Hampshire. Wednesday Hiram Tuttle swore they had reached Epsom and were roasting a selectman on a spit. Thursday I went out at dawn with my shotgun to see what came up the road. One tin peddler, two cows, and a drunk Methodist singing "John Brown's Body" in the wrong key. That was the whole army of insurrection.

The real wheel was coming all the same. Our district's names would be drawn from a turning box by a man in a blindfold, and that wheel spun fairer than any card table in Concord. It is a terrible thing to say about the cards.

A Plague of Toothaches

Now my own trade came into it. The examining surgeons had a list of reasons to send a man home, and teeth were on it. A soldier tore his paper cartridge open with his teeth before he poured the powder. No opposing front teeth meant no cartridge, and no cartridge meant no soldier.

Men who had not opened their mouths to me in ten years except to call me a cheat now opened them wide enough to drive a hay wagon in. They came at night with cash, with hams, with a quilt. One brought his wife's good silver spoons. I sent them back, because a man who will trade his wife's spoons for his own hide has teeth I do not want on my anvil. I told every one of them that I was a tooth-puller and not a tooth-thief. I would take a rotten tooth and charge double for the man's breath, but a healthy incisor stayed where it was.

Then there was Ephraim, whose family name I will keep for his grandchildren's sake. He did not trust me to be crooked, so he went out to his barn with a jug and a pair of hoof nippers and pulled his own two front teeth. One came out clean. The other broke at the gum and left its root standing like a fence post after a fire. I dug it out by lantern light while he bellowed hymns, cussed, and bit clean through a leather strap. I poured a little spirit on the wound and a good deal more into myself, as a professional must. Then the surgeon passed him anyway, on the strength of his molars and eye teeth. The Union got a soldier who could tear a cartridge but could not whistle for his dog. I am told he served handsomely in Virginia and spat further through that gap than any man in his regiment.

A Keg of Rye for Civic Deliberation

Pittsfield, like many New England towns, decided that if the government meant to take its men, the town would rather buy volunteers with bounty money and perhaps pay commutation for any poor devil the wheel caught. That wanted a vote, and a meeting of Yankees about money is a fistfight with minutes. Deacon Sargent called the treasury a sacred trust. Asa Blodgett answered that the deacon's son was twenty-three and unmarried, and the deacon sat down very hard. Every man had his arithmetic and not one had his nerve.

So I rolled a keg of rye in from my wagon, set a tin dipper on top, and said nothing. A Yankee will not take a free thing if you offer it, but he will take it if you leave it lying there. By the second dipper the deacon moved that the town pay every drafted man's commutation, and by the fourth he wanted to commute the Ten Commandments too. Hiram Tuttle confessed to the roasted-selectman rumor. The selectman forgave him and then threw him in the horse trough. By the fifth dipper the bounty had passed and the moderator wept. Two men who had been at law over a line fence since 1849 went home singing arm in arm, until one fell in the ditch by the Congregational church and the other went in after him out of loyalty. Rye did not save the Union. It saved one evening of Pittsfield from its own stubbornness, and that is harder work.

Brokers, Bears, and the Men Who Ran

Wherever there is a three-hundred-dollar loophole, some weasel turns up to rent it out. In August a substitute broker I shall call Mr. Crimmins came up from Concord: silk hat, carpetbag, a hairpiece the colour of a wet fox. He offered me a strong young Irishman in Manchester for three hundred and eighty dollars. I told him I was forty-six and past the age, which was not strictly true, and that I would sooner send Barnaby than buy a man like a mule. He backed away still selling, and he backed straight into the bear's reach. Barnaby smelled the salt pork in the carpetbag and shook the bag apart. Then he ate the pork, a bottle of hair oil with the cork still in it, and two dozen blank substitute contracts. When Crimmins fled, his hat and hairpiece fell off together, and Barnaby swallowed the hairpiece like an oyster. Two days later it came out the other end of the bear, still curled. I nailed it to the barn door as a warning to all brokers, and the swallows nested in it the next spring.

Not every man who ducked a draft was a coward, though. My visitor Junior Vance, of the Brushy Mountains in Wilkes County, North Carolina, speaks of years that have not happened yet and machines I do not understand, but he pays in hard money. His great-great-granddaddy Absalom hid from the Confederate conscript officers in a rock house up the mountain, a dry overhang in the cliff. He carried a copper pot up there piece by piece and made liquor the whole war. His wife Lettie warned him of the Home Guard with a red flannel petticoat on the clothesline, which he watched through a spyglass he had traded a gallon for. One day a thunderstorm soaked the flannel dark, and Absalom took it for a ham hung to cure and came down the mountain hungry. He walked in the back door as two Home Guard boys came in the front. Lettie threw a quilt over him and told them he was her sick mama with the smallpox. They left so fast that one forgot his hat, and Absalom wore it to church for forty years.

Junior's own summons came in a year he calls sixty-six, after years of driving a Ford with the muffler off had left him deaf as a post. At the induction physical in Charlotte a doctor whispered numbers behind him, and Junior gave every one the same answer. Even when the man came round and hollered whether he could hear at all, Junior said, "Thirty-two." They sent him home. His friend Peanut Crump ate half a bar of his granny's lye soap to bring on a fever. He got no fever and a terrible bellyache instead, passed the physical clean, and blew a soap bubble the size of a plum when the roll was called. The sergeant studied him a long while and said, "Crump, you are the cleanest man in this Army, inside and out." Folks call him Bubbles to this day.

At the Apparatus: Rye, Copper, and Honest Cuts

First the plain law: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and what follows is for history and instruction. Rye is a contrary grain, and its mash will glue your paddle to the tub, so never run it alone. My bill was roughly seven parts rye, a part and a half cracked corn, and a part and a half malted barley. The corn gives body, and the malt's enzymes turn starch into sugar the yeast can eat. Stir the corn into water near a boil and keep stirring against scorch. Let it fall to about one hundred fifty degrees and stir in the rye hard to break the dough balls. At about one hundred forty-eight add the malt, cover it, and rest it an hour or two until pasty turns sweet. That is your alchemy, sugar from no sugar. Cool to blood-warm, about eighty, and pitch the yeast. Ferment four days to a week under a cloth, with good air in the room, for the gas that rises from a working mash pools low and smothers.

Run it in heavy copper and scrub the pot after every run. Bright copper catches rye's sulphur stinks as a dark crust on its own skin, and dull copper is lazy copper. Never use lead solder. Keep the fire LOW so the spirit comes off in order, and keep open flame away from any leak. Throw out the foreshots, which smell like a varnish shop and a hospital had a child, for that is where the blinding spirits run. Discard the heads as well. Keep the sweet, spicy hearts, and set the oily tails aside to run again. Cut in small jars, never one big bucket, because a big bucket hides your mistakes the same way a big town meeting hides a coward.

A Wilkesboro man, Cletus "Rabbit" Miller, asked whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads. They do not. Red oak's pores are open tubes, which is why no cooper makes whiskey barrels of it. In a hot keg its shavings give only colour and bitter tannin. Hickory ash is potash, lye for the soap kettle, and it brings foaming, puking up the line, and scorch. What his uncle's old-timers credited to the ashes was most likely a lower fire, a better mash, or a soberer distiller. The bead is the same sort of trick. It tells a practised eye something of proof, but foreshots and heads bead as prettily as a Sunday bonnet. A good bead on bad liquor is a handsome tombstone on a fool's grave. In the end the wheel turned, and some Pittsfield boys paid, some sent substitutes, some went, and some never came back up the turnpike. I pulled their baby teeth, and I would have given the whole still for any one of them. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.