The 1864 Two-Cent Piece: History of the First 'In God We Trust' Coin

A Fat Bronze Orphan Born of Famine

Friend, put your hand in your pocket. If you find something heavier than a cent and lighter than your conscience, you very likely have hold of the strangest little lump of metal Washington ever pressed into a Yankee's palm. That is the two-cent piece. It is a year old, fat as a toad and pious as a deacon, and nobody can quite decide what it is for. I have studied it as I study a charge of wash in my pot, by turning it over, weighing it and smelling it. I will set down what I have learned for you, my fellow experimenters.

Think back to the hard-money famine of the war years. Every honest copper in the land hid under a mattress, and folks traded in postage stamps and scraps of paper. Storekeepers grew so desperate that they had little copper tokens struck on their own account, carrying their names and their bragging. Congress watched all that and at last did something, which is about as rare as a sober Fourth of July in Epsom. On the twenty-second of April, eighteen sixty-four, they passed a Coinage Act. It turned the old copper-nickel cent into bronze, and it gave the country a new and illegitimate child: the two-cent piece.

Mr. James B. Longacre, Chief Engraver of the Mint, drew it up. On the face is a shield with two arrows crossed behind it, wrapped in laurel. On the back is '2 CENTS' in a wreath of wheat, like a harvest supper served on a button. It is bronze, ninety-five parts copper and the rest tin and zinc, and it weighs ninety-six grains. That is heavy enough to pull a man's pocket crooked and light enough for a sexton to steal four out of the plate before the second hymn.

God on a Two-Cent Coin

Over the shield, on a little ribbon, are three words that have set every pulpit from Concord to Kentucky clucking: IN GOD WE TRUST. This is the first coin of these United States to carry them. In November of sixty-one a Pennsylvania preacher, the Reverend Mark R. Watkinson of Ridleyville, wrote to Secretary Chase of the Treasury. He feared that if the Union fell, posterity would dig up our coins and take us for heathens. Chase passed the letter to Mr. Pollock, the Mint Director, and Pollock put the motto on the two-cent piece. So Washington put God on a coin worth two cents, which tells you exactly how much the Treasury thinks the Almighty will stand for.

A coin man worth his loupe should know that the eighteen sixty-four pieces come in two kinds. On most of them the motto is struck in big, bold letters. On a scarcer few it is small and pinched, as if the engraver were ashamed of it. Keep a small-motto piece if you find one. Some sharp-eyed collector may one day pay more than two cents for it, though I would sooner drink the profit now than wait for him.

Who Spends the Thing

I have watched them come across my counter all year. The post office spends them first. Since sixty-three a local drop letter, the kind you leave for a neighbor in the same town, has cost two cents, and one coin pays it exactly with no change and no arguing. Every lovesick mill girl on the Suncook is posting notes to her beau at two cents a sigh. The newsboys of Concord and Manchester come next, hollering the casualty lists at two cents a paper. Then come the storekeepers, who are mighty glad to have a government coin at last instead of some private man's token. Those tokens are dead now. In June of sixty-four Congress outlawed any private man striking his own one-cent or two-cent coin.

There is a catch in the law. The two-cent piece is legal tender only up to twenty cents in a single payment. If you try to settle your tax with a sack of them, the collector may lawfully tell you to go to the devil. A new rival is coming as well. This past March, Congress authorized a three-cent coin of copper and nickel. That leaves the two-cent piece too big to be a penny, too small to be a nickel and too pious to be spent anywhere wicked without blushing. Nearly twenty million were struck last year, and every one is a little bronze orphan waiting for the poorhouse. Mark my words: this coin will not see a decade.

Barnaby and the County's Money

Now for a fresh tale from my own dooryard. Send the children out to the barn before you read it. This October past, the Merrimack County sheriff sent a new deputy up the turnpike to 'inquire into irregular spirits.' He was a fat, pink, Concord-bred boy with a coin purse on a string at his belt, and it jingled like a sleigh. He tiptoed past my log window thinking Barnaby was a pile of buffalo robes. Barnaby is my four-hundred-pound black bear, and he is not a pile of buffalo robes.

That bear came off the woodpile like the wrath of Moses. He did not bite the boy. He hooked one claw into the seat of the woolen trousers and tore the whole hind end out in a single pull, drawers and all. Then he sat down, calm as a deacon at supper, and swallowed the purse: string, leather and eleven two-cent pieces, taken down like oysters. The deputy cried, 'That's county money!' I told him it was bear money now. He walked home bare through Barnstead in October, and his hind end was so blue the Methodists took it for a sign.

I am a man of honor, so for three days I followed that bear with a shovel and a stick. On the third morning I found the coins in a steaming pile the size of a church hat, eleven little shields winking up at me out of the worst-smelling mess in Merrimack County. I scoured them in hot vinegar and salt until they shone and spent them on drop letters at the Pittsfield post office. The postmaster asked why they smelled of wet bear. I told him that was the federal government's own money coming home to roost.

Gospel Pennies in the Blue Ridge

Miss Clara Higgins, an herbalist and forager, came up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia to sit at my plank table, and she brought fine stories. Before the surrender her people never saw a Union coin. This past spring, just after Appomattox, a Union paymaster's wagon broke an axle in a creek ford on the valley pike through Augusta County. A keg burst, and two-cent pieces went shining into the water like fish scales. The mountain folk all helped, chiefly themselves, and because of the motto they took to calling the coins Gospel pennies. When a man asks, 'Lend me a Gospel penny till Saturday,' he means a two-cent piece, and he means he will never pay it back.

She told of a hard-shell preacher on the Tye River who preached for an hour that putting the Lord's name on money spent in groggeries was blasphemy. Then he passed his hat and took every Gospel penny in the house without complaint. On Tuesday her granddaddy saw him at a still-house back of Massies Mill, trading the whole hatful for a gallon jug. In her hollow, a dram poured short is called a 'two-center.' Her Uncle Absalom slid a Gospel penny through the f-hole of his fiddle in place of the customary rattlesnake rattle and named the instrument 'Two Short of a Nickel.' At a corn-shucking the coin flew out and struck the tax collector's wife in the eye. Absalom said it was the only tax he ever paid back.

Best of all was a widow of Floyd County, Mrs. Tabitha, who made the finest wild persimmon brandy in the Blue Ridge from fruit left until it was dead ripe and soft as pudding. She charged a Gospel penny a swallow and judged the size of a swallow by the drinker's Adam's apple. When a bull-necked teamster complained at being charged three, she told him: 'Son, that gullet of yours could swallow a church bell. You pay for the plumbing.' He paid, because it was the best brandy he ever had.

Copper, Heat and the Honest Cut

First, the law. No man may distill spirits in these United States without the government's license. I set this down for history and learning, not as an invitation. Even so, the two-cent piece, at ninety-five parts copper, is nearly a little still with a shield on it, and it explains why we prize copper for the pot, cap and worm. Vapor rising off a mash carries a sulfur stink of rotten eggs and cabbage. Copper seizes that sulfur and holds it on its own skin as a dark sulfide, and the vapor goes on clean. This works only on bright metal, so after every run I scrub the pot with hot vinegar and salt, rinse it hard with clean water, and dry it. I never let a flake of green crust near anything that is poured.

For the mash, cook about fifty pounds of cracked corn in some twenty-five gallons of water near the boil, stirring, until it thickens like Indian pudding. Cool it to about a hundred and fifty degrees and stir in ten pounds of ground malted barley, which turns the starch to sugar in an hour or two. Cool it again to blood-warm, about eighty degrees, and never hotter, or you will scald the yeast. Pitch the yeast and cover the tub loosely with a cloth. In four days to a week the bubbling stops. A working tub breathes out choke-damp, which settles low, so keep a door and a window open.

Strain the wash and fill the pot no more than three-quarters full. Seal the joints, but never seal the whole still: a still sealed tight is a church bell full of gunpowder. Keep the fire slow and low, never leave a lit still, and keep open flame away from any leak. Throw out the foreshots, a good half pint for every five gallons of wash, because they carry wood alcohol that blinds and kills. Catch the heads, which smell of glue and varnish, in small numbered jars and set them aside. Keep the sweet, clean hearts. When the spirit turns oily and smells of wet dog and old porridge, you have reached the tails, which you may run again or throw away.

Hickory Ash, Oak Shavings and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asked whether hickory ash or red oak shavings in the thump keg will clean out bad heads, as his uncle swore. I struck G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. onto Gospel pennies at my anvil while I answered him. Oak shavings add color, a little tannin bite and some woody taste, as a short rest in a barrel would. They only dress the spirit for church, and a bad head in a Sunday coat is still a bad head. Hickory ash soaked in water makes lye, a caustic thing that will not touch wood alcohol by a single drop.

The blue-flame test is a fool's tale as well. Wood alcohol burns with a pale blue flame of its own, so the very poison you fear can pass the test. Setting fire to spirit near a still is how a man loses his eyebrows and his barn in one evening. The only safeguard is small jars, a slow fire and an honest nose. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.