The Enrollment Act of 1863 and Draft Day in Pittsfield, New Hampshire

Two summers past, this valley lived through the most nervous season it has ever known. It was the summer of '63, when Washington wrote every man's name on a slip, dropped it in a wheel and turned the crank. I watched it from my wagon seat, from my dental chair and from my own porch, where my bear Barnaby took a hand in the business. Pour yourself a measure, keep your teeth where they are, and I will tell it as it happened.

The Government Learns to Count

On the third day of March, 1863, Mr. Lincoln signed the Enrollment Act. Until then the Union had filled its regiments the old way, with bounties, brass bands, pretty girls waving handkerchiefs and a recruiting sergeant buying the drinks. By the spring of '63, after Fredericksburg had been fed to the grave, the handkerchiefs had stopped working. In effect Congress said that it would no longer ask a man. It would count him.

Every male citizen from twenty to forty-five was to be enrolled, along with any foreign-born man who had sworn he meant to become a citizen. In Pittsfield that meant every man who could find his own boots before noon. They were split into two classes. Class One took every man from twenty to thirty-five and the unmarried ones from thirty-five to forty-five. Class Two held the married men over thirty-five, who were to be called only after Class One was used up. What kind of government thinks a married man of forty has less to live for? A government of bachelors, I say.

Each congressional district had a provost marshal and a board of enrollment made up of the marshal, a commissioner and a surgeon. Ours sat in Concord. Below them came the enrolling officers, poor clerks with an ink bottle on a string around their necks. They went door to door down every road in the county and wrote down each man's name, age, trade and whether he was married. You never saw a valley so full of men claiming to be forty-six, or so many bachelors who suddenly remembered a wife living somewhere vague over in Vermont.

Three Hundred Dollars and the Wheel

Apart from a bad leg or a good lie, a drafted man had three ways out. He could go. He could hire a substitute to carry the musket in his place, which excused him for the whole of the substitute's enlistment. Or he could pay the Government three hundred dollars in commutation. That excused him from that one draft only, so his name might be drawn again the next time. Three hundred dollars was about what a laborer in the Pittsfield mills earned in a year if he never missed a day and never bought a drink, and I have yet to meet that man. It was the first time in history a Yankee paid full price for anything.

The laboring men called it a rich man's war and a poor man's fight, and they were not wrong. In New York that July the anger turned to blood in the streets. Here in New Hampshire the towns did what Yankees do. They held town meetings, argued until the lamp oil ran out, and voted bounties and subscriptions so they could fill their quotas with volunteers and keep their own boys home. Congress finally threw out the commutation fee for most men in July of '64, after a year in which everyone hated it.

For the drawing, each name was written on a slip and rolled up, and the slips went into a big wooden drum on an axle, like a butter churn that had gone to college. The drum was turned. Then a man was blindfolded so that no one could cry favoritism, and he drew the names out one at a time while a clerk read them to the crowd. It was the only honest gambling table in Merrimack County, and it paid out in muskets.

Draft Day in Concord

I rode up to the provost marshal's office with two jugs under the wagon seat, purely for medicinal purposes. Farmers had come from Loudon and Chichester, mill hands from Suncook and boys from Epsom with straw still in their hair, every one of them as dry as a Shaker's joke book. Each time the clerk read a name, a cork popped somewhere in the crowd, either to celebrate or to grieve, and it made the same sound either way. I watched one big lummox from Barnstead hear his own name and faint straight backward onto the boardwalk. His hat rolled into the gutter and a dog took it. When he came to, he asked whether he had been shot already. I told him not yet, son, but you have been enrolled, which is the same thing on a delay.

My friend Captain Donald Vance, a retired revenue man of Manchester, stood in that same crowd and saw the cleverest piece of commerce of the day. A tavern keeper had rolled a barrel onto the boardwalk with a tin dipper on a chain. On one side he had chalked COURAGE, five cents, and on the other CONSOLATION, five cents, and he filled both from the very same barrel. One man bought courage, went in, was drawn, came out and bought consolation, and he swore the consolation was smoother. The Captain checked the fellow's license, found it in order, and bought a dipper of consolation himself.

A Sudden Disease of the Front Teeth

The real trouble reached Fort Wilkins the week before the drawing. Word had got about that the examining surgeon would reject any man who had lost too many teeth to chew his rations or tear a cartridge. The infantryman's cartridge is a paper tube of powder with the ball in one end. He bites off the end, pours the powder down the barrel and spits out the paper, and for that he needs upper and lower front teeth that meet like tongs. Within a week I had forty men in my chair, strong young fellows with teeth like new piano keys, all swearing their incisors had ached since boyhood.

Young Ebenezer from up the Barnstead road came in with a rag tied around his jaw like a Christmas pudding. I tapped every tooth with the steel, and he did not flinch until I got to his wallet. I diagnosed acute patriotism of the gums. He cried, and I sold him a cup of the clear for ten cents. I pulled teeth that were rotten, and there were plenty in a valley that rinses its mouth with cider. A sound tooth I would not pull for a draft card, not for two dollars and not for ten.

The Captain watched a craftier hand at an examination in Vermont. A young fellow opened his mouth to show a black gap and claimed he had lost his teeth to a mule. The surgeon wet a rag from his flask and rubbed, and lamp soot and molasses came away on the rag to show teeth as white as a church. In the Captain's telling, the surgeon said: "Fit for duty. And the soot is fit for my lamp." There was whiskey in the flask, which was the only thing in Vermont that would cut molasses and a lie at the same time.

Substitutes, Coffins and a Hungry Bear

That June an enrolling clerk came down the Turnpike with a paper of salt herring in his coat pocket. He reached in through my open window to ask what was in the jug on the sill. Barnaby took his arm at the elbow as gently as a hound takes a quail, leaned back four hundred pounds, and stripped off the sleeve one stitch at a time. Then he ate the herring, the pocket, most of the seat of the clerk's trousers and the ledger, binding and all. The clerk had cracked a front tooth on the sill as he fled. I pulled it for free, and when the draft came he was rejected for want of front teeth.

The Captain told me of a substitute whom one Concord broker had sold three separate times to three separate farmers. The Captain found him past Warner, feeding the fire under his still in a Union blouse. Each time, the boy had enlisted, taken his bounty and walked home on a dark night because, as he put it, "the mash don't stir itself." Three bounties' worth of greenbacks were sewn into his hat band. In Hillsborough County a widow in black crepe showed an enrolling clerk a pine coffin with a candle and a sprig of rosemary on the lid. Inside lay a twenty-gallon copper pot, a worm coiled in the foot end and a jug of hearts packed in sawdust. That winter a neighbor reported that the coffin was dripping, and the Captain carted it to Manchester on a sled while every man on the road took off his hat.

Calling the Roll of the Run

Making spirit for drinking without the Government's permission is against the law of the United States, so what follows is history and education. If you would do it yourself, get a permit. A still makes no spirit. It only gathers what the yeast made, as a provost marshal collects soldiers but does not make them. For my draft-summer mash I cook about thirty pounds of cracked corn in a fifty-gallon tub of spring water until it is like porridge. When it has cooled enough to hold a knuckle in, I add about ten pounds of ground rye and a few pounds of malted barley, cool it to blood-warm, pitch a strong yeast and cover it. In five or six days it tastes sour and dry and is ready.

Bring the heat up slow, because a pot driven hard will puke into the worm, and spirit vapor burns. The foreshots come first. Methanol boils at about one hundred forty-eight degrees by Mr. Fahrenheit's scale and ethanol at about one hundred seventy-three, and the methanol crowds the front of the run. I throw away at least a cup for every five gallons of wash, and more for fruit, because the pectin of the apple turns to methanol. The heads come next and smell of varnish and glue. Then come the hearts, sweet as bread crust, which are the able men fit for service. Last come the tails, oily as a damp wool sock, which a thrifty man saves to run again. Catch the run in twenty or thirty numbered jars, let them breathe, and judge each by nose. Only the cuts take the poison out.

Ashes, Oak and the Blue Flame

Cletus Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, called Rabbit by his kin, wrote to ask whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg will clean out bad heads. Hickory ash is potash, the stuff our farm wives leach for lye, and it will give you a keg of soapy foam. Oak lends color, tannin and perfume, but a bad head goes into the keg as poison and comes out as poison wearing an oak-leaf hat. As for the old blue-flame test, burning a spoonful proves only that the spirit will burn. Methanol burns pale blue as well, and lead will not turn the flame red. Raise a jar to the boys drawn that summer, and keep your copper clean and your fire low.