The Copper-Nickel Cent of 1857: How the Mint Act Shrank the American Penny

The Old Large Cent and My Steel Punch

Eight years back I stood at this same anvil at Fort Wilkins, on the Suncook Valley Turnpike in Pittsfield, with a coffee can of large cents at my elbow. You will remember the old large cent, brother alchemist. It was copper near enough pure, a hundred sixty-eight grains, and as big around as a fat man's thumbnail. You could stop a door with a stack of them, or lay a pair on a dead man's eyes and still have a pair left over for a cigar. For a man with a steel punch and a name to spread, it was a perfect piece of metal. It was soft and broad, and it took a stamp the way fresh snow takes a boot.

One blow, and she read G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. Off she went down the turnpike to Barnstead, Epsom and Concord, telling every soul who handled her where to get a tooth pulled, a horse shod, or a jar filled for medicinal purposes. I cut that punch myself from a good bar of English cast steel. I filed every letter backwards by candlelight, hardened it in brine, and drew the temper to a pale straw. Against soft copper it was a king. I did not yet know that its kingdom was about to shrink.

The Mint Act of 1857

On the twenty-first day of February, 1857, Congress passed the Mint Act. It killed the large cent in one stroke and the half cent in the same stroke. Nobody wore black for the half cent, because nobody could find one to bury. It was worth so little that beggars sent it back, and storekeepers kept them in a cigar box as a curiosity. That is the only honest use I ever saw for one.

In their place the Mint gave us a little cent of copper and nickel, eighty-eight parts copper to twelve of nickel, weighing seventy-two grains. That is less than half the weight of the old coin. Washington shrank the penny to half its size and kept its value whole, which is the first honest trick it ever pulled on a Yankee. It bore a flying eagle, so folks called it the Flying Eagle. It also had a pale, sickly look, like a clerk who never goes out of doors, so folks called it a nick, or a white cent, or a nickel, long before any five-cent piece came along to steal the name.

Your schoolmaster likely never told you that the same Act took Spanish silver off the books. Until then a New England farmer's purse was half Spanish. There was the real, which we Yankees called a ninepence, and the half real, which we called a fourpence or a fourpence-ha'penny. New York called the same coins a shilling and a sixpence, which tells you all you need to know about New York. Then there was the pistareen, a lower-grade Spanish two-bit piece worth about twenty cents on a good day and fifteen on an honest one. Most were worn so smooth you could not tell King Charles from a boiled potato.

For a spell the Mint took a Spanish quarter for twenty cents, a ninepence for ten and a fourpence for five. That was a shave, but a fair one, since half those coins were lighter than a revenue man's conscience. In May of '57 crowds gathered outside the Philadelphia Mint with bags, buckets and wheelbarrows, as though Communion wine were being given away. Up here it went slower, but it went. By '58 my coffee can was half full of nicks.

Stamped Twice, Spent Once

I set a white cent on the anvil and gave it the same honest blow I had given a thousand large ones, and the punch chipped. It went into that copper-nickel the way a deacon goes into a dance hall: hesitant, and it came out bent. The nickel makes the alloy hard. Even the Mint in Philadelphia had trouble striking those cents cleanly, and it wore out dies faster than a Pittsfield mill girl wears out a Sunday ribbon. The W came off my punch, and for a week my coins read G. G. ILKINS, like a fellow with a head cold.

There was a second trouble. The small cent is barely big enough for a flea to dance on, and my whole line would not fit. So I struck the name on one side and the town on the other. Every cent took two blows: stamped twice and spent once, like every bridegroom in Merrimack County.

I went over to Spanish silver while it lasted, and to whatever large cents I could beg off old women's mantels. I cut a second punch, smaller and tempered softer, a shade toward bronze-color, so it would bend before it broke. Then in '64 the Mint changed its mind again and went to bronze, forty-eight grains and thin as a parson's patience. Bronze is soft again, God bless it. By then, though, every purse was full of copperhead tokens, private pennies struck by every tavern, sutler and patent-medicine man from here to Ohio. In June of '64 Congress tired of the competition and forbade any private man to coin a cent or two-cent piece. The same year it gave us a two-cent piece of its own, which went over about as well as you would expect in a town that cannot make change for a nickel.

Pewter Dollars and the Sheriff's Evidence

Coins draw thieves the way a privy draws flies. In the summer of '59 a gentleman in a linen duster came up the turnpike and offered two Spanish dollars for a gallon of my tooth-rinsing preparation. They had a gray, greasy shine, like the inside of a spoiled oyster. I bite things for a living, so I put one between my molars, and it bent like warm cheese. It was pewter. Bringing pewter dollars to a tooth-puller is like bringing a wooden leg to a woodpecker. The gentleman ran past my woodpile and ran out of luck exactly where Barnaby's chain ends. My bear took a strip off his backside the size of a pocket Bible, likely the first scripture that rump ever carried. I laid the man across my dental chair, poured a pint of good spirit on the wound, and closed it with eleven stitches of waxed linen harness thread. He rode home sidesaddle on a mule for a month. Barnaby swallowed three of the pewter dollars, and three days later I found them in the pasture, polished by the journey.

The Merrimack sheriff has had me in irons twice. The first time, he carried off my coin punch as evidence of my trade. I told him to go ahead and prove that a steel punch is liquor. He kept it six weeks, and then the county handed it back in a flour sack. I struck the next coin with it on the courthouse steps.

What the Revenue Man Found

Captain Donald Vance, retired from a long career hunting copper in these hills and in the Green Mountains, sat across my anvil lately. In the Pemigewasset country, he says, he found a pot still holed a dozen times by careless fire. The owner had heated old large cents, hammered them thin and riveted them on as neat as shingles. Forty Liberty heads still showed on that pot. The man would not use the white cents, because the nickel makes them crack under the hammer, and the Captain has never seen a copper-nickel patch that held. He took the man to the magistrate but took the still apart gently. It seemed a shame to break up the only treasury in Grafton County that balanced.

In Woodstock, Vermont, a storekeeper complained of a hill farmer who paid every Saturday in bright new white cents. The Captain opened the cash drawer and smelled sour mash. He followed the shiny pennies from a ferryman to a harness shop to an egg widow, and up a cow path to a still under a sugarhouse floor, with its smoke sent up the chimney alongside the sap steam. A man who works over a mash tub every day cannot smell himself, any more than a fish knows he is wet.

In the Connecticut River valley he found a worm made of old lead pipe from a cider press, with the joints daubed in more lead. The owner offered him a worn pistareen. "Sir," the Captain told him, "I have been insulted for more, but never so cheaply." Then he beat the worm flat as a griddle cake with a sledge. Lead has no place in a still, reader: not in the worm, not in the joints, not in the solder.

Then he set a coin on my anvil: one of my own large cents, struck deep with a young man's blow. He had found it in a smugglers' cove on the east shore of Lake Memphremagog, on the Canada line, where boatmen ran spirits north and woolens south. A dozen of my coppers sat in a tobacco tin there, and each one served as the password for passage on the night boat. The statute has run out on that one, and I have my penny home.

Copper at the Forge, Mash in the Tub

First the law: making spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and what follows is for history and education. A pot is raised from sheet copper with a hammer over a stake. Hammering work-hardens copper until she cracks, so heat her to a dull glow. Unlike steel, copper softens whether you quench her or let her cool on the bench. Anneal, hammer, anneal, a hundred times for one good pot. The old cents came already annealed by the Mint. Nickel stiffens copper the way starch stiffens a collar, and no forge heat of mine would make it kind.

For the mash, take cracked corn, about a peck to five gallons of water, bring it near boiling, and stir until it is thick as porridge. Cool it to about a hundred fifty degrees and stir in malted barley, a sixth or a fifth part of the grain. Hold it there, covered, an hour or two while the malt's virtue turns the starch to sugar. Too hot kills that virtue, and too cool makes it lazy. Cool to about eighty degrees before pitching yeast, and let it work four to seven days in a warm room with moving air. The mash breathes off a gas that will kill a man in a closed cellar, so keep the door open. When the cap falls, you have a wash.

Strain it, fill the pot no more than three quarters, and keep the fire low, with no lamp or pipe near the joints. Catch the run in small numbered jars. Throw out the foreshots. Throw out the solvent-smelling heads too, and be generous with that cut. Wood alcohol boils at about a hundred forty-eight degrees and good spirit at about a hundred seventy-three, but the poison smears across the early run, and fruit pectin breeds more of it. When in doubt, cut it out. Keep the sweet hearts, and set aside the oily tails to run again. Bright copper takes the stinking sulfur from the vapour, so scrub after every run. The Captain never once saw a man poisoned by spirit cut honestly from a clean copper pot.

Hickory Ash, Red Oak and the Silver Coin

Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks: "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?" Half a point to the uncle. Hickory ash is mostly potash, an alkali, and it holds some of the sour acids back as salts. But wood alcohol is no acid, and it rides straight through. The ash is like a sheriff at a barn dance who settles the sour ones and never catches the villain. Oak shavings only dress the spirit up with colour and tannin. Red oak is so open in the pore that you can blow pipe smoke through a stick of it, which is why coopers use white oak for liquor barrels.

As for dropping a silver coin in the jug to find poison, that is bunkum. Silver blackens from sulfur, the same as a spoon after boiled eggs. It shows neither wood alcohol nor lead. My sister-in-law tested her husband's whiskey with a silver spoon for twenty years, and the spoon outlived him. The Captain has pulled many coins from bad jugs, and every one was shining. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.