The Yankee Peddler: Tin Carts, Wooden Nutmegs and Lincoln's 1862 Peddler Tax

The Tin Cart Comes Down the Turnpike

Picture a New Hampshire farm in March. The mud stands up to the hubs, and the root cellar is down to three wrinkled potatoes and a turnip that has seen things. The good wife has not laid eyes on a new pin, a new pan, or a new face since Thanksgiving. Then a jingle and a rattle comes down the turnpike like a church steeple falling downstairs. It is a red-painted wagon hung all over with tin cups, dippers, pails, lanterns and pie plates, and the fellow up on the box is smiling like he already owns your barn. That, reader, is the Yankee peddler.

As near as anyone can tell, the tin trade began with a pair of tinsmiths, the Pattison brothers, who settled in Berlin, Connecticut in the last century. They hammered out more tinware than the town could buy, so they went door to door. Before long half of Berlin was making tin and the other half was on the roads selling it from Maine to Georgia. No town its size has sent more smooth-talking scoundrels into the world, and I count Boston in that, which sends plenty.

Hard money has been as scarce as hen's teeth since the war started, so the tin man swapped. He took rags, goose feathers, hog bristles and anything else lying about the shed. The rags went on to the paper mills, which means the very newspaper that called him a swindler was printed on your grandmother's old drawers. That is what I call commerce.

Then there is the wooden nutmeg. A peddler whittles nutmegs out of basswood, stains them brown, and sells them to some poor woman who grates her knuckles bloody trying to spice a pudding, and that is how Connecticut came to be called the Nutmeg State. The truth is it is mostly legend. Some say the nutmegs were genuine, and folks who had never grated one took them for fakes. I will say only this: a Connecticut peddler will sell you a wooden nutmeg, and if you complain he will sell you a wooden grater to go with it. My bear Barnaby once ate one, and two days later it came out the far end looking better than it went in.

Clocks, Soft Sawder and Mr. Lincoln's Tax

When Eli Terry and the other Connecticut clockmakers began turning out cheap shelf clocks by the cartload, the peddlers carried them across the country, and many a farmhouse in this valley heard its first tick off a peddler's wagon. If you want to know how those fellows talked, read Judge Haliburton's book The Clockmaker, published in 1836, which tells of a Yankee peddler named Sam Slick. Sam's whole method was soft sawder and human nature. He would flatter the wife, admire the baby, and leave the clock on the mantel just to try, knowing nobody would part with it once they had heard it tick. Here in Pittsfield we call that lying with a clean collar on.

In time Mr. Lincoln got his fingers in the trade as well. His Revenue Act of 1862 put a federal license on half the trades in the Union, and peddlers were among them. The fee rose with how a man traveled: on foot, with one horse, with two, and on up. So Mr. Lincoln taxed a peddler by the horse, and the only honest creature in the whole outfit was the one paying the tax.

Ezra Pickett and the Mule Deuteronomy

Last October, with the apples in and frost on the pumpkins, a wagon came up the turnpike from Epsom, painted as red as a harlot's garter and drawn by a mule called Deuteronomy. On the box sat Mister Ezra Pickett of Berlin, Connecticut. He had a face like a boiled ham somebody had sat on in church, a beaver hat with a dent the size of a cannonball, and a laugh like a pump handle wanting grease. He was selling before his boots touched the mud. Out of that wagon came tin pans, clocks, corset stays, darning needles, Dr. Somebody's Vegetable Elixir (good for consumption, croup and grief), a patent apple-parer, and a box of horehound candy that had seen two presidents.

Then he brought out a tin still, as shiny as a new dime, with the worm coiled like a sleeping blacksnake, and he called it pure as heaven and half the price of copper. I put my eye to the seams. They were lead solder, gray and fat as the belly of a dead perch. I told him that a worm soldered with lead is a coffin you drink out of on the installment plan.

A peddler who smells a refusal does not quit. He gets cheaper. So I bargained. First I asked him, sweet as you please, to show me his federal peddler's license. Ezra went as pale as a boiled egg, for his license was for one horse, and Deuteronomy is a mule. Then I noticed him chewing on the right side and wincing on the left. A lower molar was rotted as black as a Concord chimney. I sat him in my chair, gave him a tin cup of something warm to steady his nerve, braced my knee in his lap, and pulled. It came out with a sound like a boot leaving a cow pond. Ezra hollered loud enough to stop the Suncook flowing.

When the smoke cleared, the ledger stood like this. I took the tooth as a down payment, and it was the first genuine article he sold me all day. I charged a dollar for the pulling, a quarter for the tin cup, and fifty cents for consultation on federal licensing. He paid me in goods: the apple-parer, a gross of darning needles, two tin lanterns, and the horehound candy, which went to Barnaby. For change I gave him three large cents struck square across Lady Liberty's forehead with my mark, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. The lead-soldered still I hammered into a feed bucket for the horse, and the horse is not happy about it.

My worst peddler, though, was a lightning-rod man, Professor Amos Quackenbush of Lowell, Mass. He called Fort Wilkins a tinderbox awaiting the wrath of the heavens and was up a ladder onto my still-house roof before I could tell him where to go. His coattails hung off the eave directly over Barnaby's corner. Seven feet of standing bear gave them one honest, Christian tug, and the professor came down into the manure pile, which saved his life and cost him his dignity. Barnaby found the horehound drops in his waistcoat, took off the top of his left ear, and sat on him. I got the bear off with a ham hock and a broom handle, stitched the ear with silk thread on the chopping block, and charged two dollars. The rod is chained to Barnaby's post, and it is the only lightning rod I ever saw earn its keep.

Traveling Men of the Brushy Mountains

Mister Junior Vance of North Wilkesboro, in the Brushy Mountains of North Carolina, sat by my stove and told of the traveling men down his way. As a boy of eleven or twelve he rode with a Mister Odell, who drove a rolling store through every holler in Wilkes County. It was a grocery on wheels selling flour, coffee, snuff, lamp oil and stick candy, and since few folks had cash he took eggs and live chickens, with the crates hung off the back, the same as our tin men took rags. The jars rode packed in sawdust beneath those crates. "Forty hens squawking is the best muffler God ever made," Mister Odell told him. When a sheriff on the Boone road put his head in the back, a rooster bit him on the nose and he waved them on. They ate the rooster that Sunday. It was nothing personal.

Junior was bested once, by an encyclopedia man who traded a set of fine leather volumes for a case of jars. The set ran from A to M. He can tell you all about aardvarks and the Mississippi River, and nothing about zebras or the Pope. Another summer a friendly knife grinder came through asking after something for the rheumatism, and Junior's cousin sold him a sealed jar of branch water with a pinch of creek sand for color. The man was a revenue informer. His report, Junior said, gave the evidence as having "tested as creek." He came back later and sharpened every knife in the county trying to make friends, and they let him. A free favor from a stranger is a hook with the worm still on it.

Why I Would Not Take the Tin Still

Rap your knuckles on a copper pot and it rings like a church bell. Tin sounds like a pie plate falling down the cellar stairs. For the experimenter, here is the reasoning. When the wash boils, the vapour carries sulfur stinks, the rotten egg and the Tuesday cabbage, and copper takes up that sulfur and holds it on the metal. Mark this well: the copper that does the work is the copper the vapour touches, meaning the helmet, the neck and the worm. Copper under the liquid in the pot does far less. So a copper pot with a tin top and a tin worm saves money on the very parts that clean the spirit. Between runs, brighten the tarnish with a paste of vinegar and salt until it comes up pink, then rinse it thoroughly.

The mash at Fort Wilkins is cracked corn cooked soft in clean water and stirred so it does not scorch. Let it cool to about a hundred and fifty degrees, a heat you cannot hold your finger in for a count of five, then stir in malted barley to turn the starch to sugar. That is true alchemy, lead to gold except it works. Cool it to blood-warm, pitch the yeast, cover it against flies, and give it four to seven days. Give the fermenting room air, for the mash breathes out a smothering gas. Spirit vapour is heavier than air and creeps along the floor looking for your fire, so keep the heat low and steady, the joints tight, and a good draft through the house, and never leave a running still.

Then the cuts. The foreshots smell like a varnish shop and go on the ground. The heads, still harsh, go aside in their own jar. The hearts come sweet and clean, smelling of corn and bread. The tails turn thin and oily, smell like a wet dog, and are saved to run again. Use small jars and many of them, and smell your way through the run. Copper cleans the sulfur, but only the man at the worm can make the cuts honest.

Ashes, Oak Shavings and the Flame Test

Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro writes that his uncle swears by hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg to clean out bad heads. New Hampshire knows ash. Every town here once had an ashery, where the ashes were leached to lye and boiled down to potash and pearlash for soap, glass and biscuits. But ash is lye waiting for water. It is caustic and makes soapy, bitter trouble, and it does nothing to the heads, which are already in the vapour. Oak gives color and a woody vanilla flavor over months in a barrel, but an afternoon in the keg gives only a whisper of it. The Tennessee men drip finished spirit slowly through sugar-maple charcoal, which is a real practice, though it is charcoal and not ashes thrown in a boiling keg.

Last, the peddler's jingle: "Lead burns red and makes you dead." I struck three coins on the anvil to kill it. First, flame color depends on strength, the light in the room, the spoon, and whatever burns off the dish. Second, a spirit can burn as blue as a June sky and still carry lead from a soldered worm. Third, some of the worst stuff in a bad run burns so pale you can hardly see the flame. The only real test is clean, lead-free equipment and honest cuts made by a sober man. Making spirits to drink without a Treasury permit is against the law, so take all of this as history. Keep your copper clean and your fire low.