The Shinplaster Panic: Civil War Postage Currency, Fractional Notes and Copper Tokens

When the Hard Money Ran Off

Neighbors, you who keep a fire under copper and a row of jars at the worm's end: lay down your thief for a spell and think back to the summer of 1862. The war had gone on more than a year. On the twenty-fifth of February, Congress passed the Legal Tender Act and gave us the greenback, a paper dollar with nothing behind it but Mr. Lincoln's good name and a printing press. Every sharp-eyed farmer from Chichester to Barnstead set that greenback beside a silver half-dime and judged the silver worth more. By midsummer the paper dollar had slid against gold, and the silver change was gone from every till in New England. Then the copper-nickel cents went too.

What does a Yankee do when he cannot make change? He improvises, and badly. Folks began to pay with postage stamps, plain gummed stamps meant to be licked. Picture a Pittsfield mill hand in July, sweating through his shirt with a pocketful of three-cent stamps. By the time he reached the store, the sweat and the gum had pressed the lot into a brick, a sticky lump that would not buy a biscuit but would mail itself to Boston if you licked it. Postmasters were mobbed. Men stood in line to buy stamps they had no thought of mailing, and the clerks were ready to throw the inkwells at them.

Washington answered on July 17, 1862, with the Postage Currency Act. On the twenty-first of August the first Postage Currency notes came out, little paper bills printed with pictures of the five-cent Jefferson and the ten-cent Washington stamps. Some of the first sheets even had perforated edges like true stamps, as though the Treasury could not decide whether it was printing money or writing a letter to its aunt. The people called them shinplasters. That word is older than the war. It was thrown at the sorry notes of the Revolution, and again at the flood of private scrip in the Panic of 1837, when every shopkeeper with a press and a grudge printed his own money.

Stamps Behind Glass and Tokens on the Counter

In 1863 the Treasury grew bolder and called its product Fractional Currency, in three, five, ten, twenty-five and fifty cents. These little rectangles of misery wore soft as a flannel shirt within a month and smelled of whatever pocket they had last lived in. I once handled a ten-cent note that came out of a tanner's apron, and afterward I washed my hands twice and my soul once. I would sooner pull a mule's molar with my bare fingers than make change in that stuff on a wet day.

There is also a curiosity for the parlor. In August of 1862 a Yankee named John Gault patented the encased postage stamp. The stamp sat inside a round brass frame behind a clear window of mica, so it could not glue itself to its neighbor, and the merchant had his advertisement struck on the back. Ayer's medicines down in Lowell had them made, and so did Drake's Plantation Bitters, the outfit that paints its riddle, S.T. 1860 X, on every barn and boulder from here to Albany. So with every purchase you received a laxative recommendation along with your change. Mr. Gault put your money behind glass where you could look at it but never touch it, which is exactly how my wife treats my wages.

The merchants did not wait for Washington. Taverns, mills and dry-goods men from here to Ohio struck their own copper tokens, about the size of a cent and mostly of copper or brass. Some bore the words 'Not One Cent' in tiny letters to dodge the counterfeiting law, and others carried a flag, a cannon, or the grocer's name and street. The coin men now reckon that more than twenty-five million of these tokens were struck, in thousands of varieties. Here is the meat of it. The tokens were thinner and lighter than the government's copper-nickel cent, and nobody cared, because a token was metal. It rang on the counter and it did not dissolve in the rain.

The Bronze Cent Comes Home

The Mint took notice. On April 22, 1864, Congress passed a Coinage Act that changed the cent to a thinner bronze piece, about ninety-five parts copper with the rest tin and zinc, near enough the weight of the merchants' tokens. The same act gave us the two-cent piece, the first coin of this Republic to carry the motto 'In God We Trust.' I find that touching, since it took a war and a panic before the Treasury trusted anybody. Then on June 8, 1864, private one- and two-cent coins were outlawed, and that was the end of the grocers' tokens.

The paper kept on embarrassing itself. The latest five-cent note carries the face of one Spencer M. Clark, chief of the Treasury's currency bureau, who decided his own whiskers would look handsome on the people's money. Congress is sharpening its knives over it, and mark me, they will forbid any living man's face on our currency. That tells you what the Treasury reckons a bureaucrat's face is worth: five cents, and only on paper.

So why did copper win? A shinplaster is a promise printed on paper so thin you can read the lie straight through it. A copper cent you can bite, ring, weigh, stamp and bury, and when you dig it up forty years later it is still a cent. When a man's hand closes on his change, he wants it to weigh something.

Note-Shavers, Torn Notes and a Sack of Pennies

In the fall of '63 a note-shaver came up the turnpike from the Concord side. For the young ones, that is a broker who buys your doubtful paper at half its face and calls the other half his trouble. He drove a yellow-wheeled buggy, wore a frock coat the colour of a drowned plum, and smelled of bay rum and bad intentions. He wanted six jars of my medicinal product and offered to pay in notes of the Bank of the Suncook and Epsom. There is no such bank, and there never was. When I told him so, he snatched two jars and bolted out the side door, straight past the window where Barnaby, my black bear, takes his afternoon rest. Barnaby does not care for fast movement or for bay rum. Four hundred pounds of bear struck that gentleman square in the hindquarters and opened his frock coat like a Bible. The jars rolled into the ditch unbroken, praise be, and the counterfeit notes blew across the turnpike like September leaves. I stitched the fellow up on my anvil bench with waxed linen and a curved sail needle, eleven stitches in all, and I charged him in copper. One of his notes is still nailed over my door, next to his top button.

My guest for the occasion was Junior Vance, a runner out of the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina. His Charlotte buyers paid him with torn notes: every bill was ripped in half, one half handed over at pickup and the other on delivery. That arrangement served until a buyer's redbone hound ate a whole stack of halves off a stump, and Junior spent two days searching that yard with a stick and a lantern. Hard money served him no better. A widow storekeeper once paid him forty dollars in cents, four thousand of them in a feed sack, and the weight sat his rig down so low in the back that the law took him for a loaded man and chased him half the night. When the deputy found nothing but pennies, Junior told him, 'Deputy, this here's a perfectly legal load of poverty.'

Junior's granny trusted the Lord, cast iron and copper, in that order. She tested paper money by rubbing it hard across a clean white flour sack. A good note left a gray smudge, while a bad one shed cheap ink as blue as a jaybird. That test once exposed a travelling preacher in front of his whole congregation. She kept her savings in fruit jars buried under the hog pen, and forty years after she passed, her sons dug up three jars of copper pennies. They were green on top and bright underneath, and every one was still spendable.

Copper's Appetite and the Patient Fire

Now to the metal itself. The law forbids distilling spirit for drinking without the government's leave, so take what follows as history and education. Leave a copper cent in your vest pocket beside a boiled egg and within a week it will be black as a stovepipe. Copper reaches out and seizes sulfur, whether from the egg, the coal smoke or the wool, and forms a dark crust of sulfide. That same appetite is why a copper still gives a sweeter spirit: the metal does the grabbing so your tongue need not. A coin and a still are cousins.

For a corn mash in the old way, cook cracked corn in clean water until it is thick as porridge. Let it cool until it is warm to the hand but not scalding, then stir in a fair portion of malted barley. The malt carries an enzyme the learned men call diastase, which turns the corn's starch into sugar. Too much heat kills it, and too little lets it dawdle. Let the mash rest and sweeten, cool it further, and pitch your yeast. Cover it loosely against flies, keep it warm, and keep the room aired, because a working mash breathes out a gas that can lay a man flat. After some days it goes quiet and sour, and you have your wash, a weak beer of a few parts in a hundred.

Never fill the pot to the brim, or it will foam over into your worm. Never seal it tight or let the vapour path choke, because a still heated under pressure will burst and paint your rafters with you. Keep your jars well back from the firebox, since the vapour will catch fire. Bring the heat up slowly. The foreshots, sharp and smelling of glue and lamp oil, must be thrown out to the last drop. The heads that follow are still harsh and smell of solvent; they are for cleaning, never for a man's belly. Collect into a long row of small numbered jars and judge each one by smell and by a taste on the back of the hand. When the harshness falls away and the spirit runs sweet and clean, those jars are your hearts. When it turns oily and flat as a wet dishrag, you have reached the tails, so set them aside. A small jar can be judged, but a big crock can only be regretted. When the run is done, rinse and scrub your copper and keep it as bright as a cent you meant to pass to your grandson.

Ashes, Oak Shavings and the Flame-Test Rhyme

From Wilkesboro came this query from Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller: 'My uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads.' Wood ash is potash, the same stuff your granny leached for lye soap, and in a hot keg it gives only a faint soapy taste. The harsh heads carry what the chemists call wood spirit, which is made by cooking wood in a closed iron retort. Throwing wood at wood spirit is like throwing a cat into the barn to get rid of cats. Wood spirit boils at a lower heat than good grain spirit, so it comes out early in the foreshots and heads, and the only cure is to throw those away. Red oak is as porous as a sponge, which is why a cooper's barrel of it weeps while white oak holds water. In hot spirit, red oak shavings give tannin, colour and a woody bite. They make young liquor look old the way a powdered wig makes a young lawyer look wise. The shavings colour the spirit, but they do not clean it. Save your ashes for soap and your oak for the cooper.

Last comes the old rhyme 'Lead burns red and makes you dead.' It is hogwash. Wood spirit, the stuff that blinds men, burns with a pale blue flame nearly invisible by daylight, just as good spirit does. Flame colour tells you next to nothing about lead and nothing reliable about wood spirit. A flame test only proves you were willing to set your supper on fire. Your only protection is clean metal, no lead solder, no scrap junk, and honest cuts. With that I struck Junior's granny's cent on my anvil, plain and deep, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and sent it home to the Brushies. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.