What a Gallon of Whiskey Cost in 1863: Greenbacks, Gold and the Gold Premium

The fire is low at Fort Wilkins tonight, and the copper is bright. Barnaby, my black bear, sits chained outside the cabin window on the Suncook Valley Turnpike in Pittsfield. The jingle of his chain may be the only hard currency left on this road that has not lost half its value since breakfast. My subject is one that has emptied more granite pockets than frostbite ever did: what, in the name of Mr. Lincoln's printing office, did a gallon cost in 1863?

The Greenback Comes to the Suncook

I handle money about as seldom as a parson handles sin, and with about the same reluctance. Still, every man at his apparatus ought to know the arithmetic that governed his trade. In 1862 Mr. Lincoln and his Congress passed the Legal Tender Act, and out of it came a creature never before seen in this republic: the greenback. It was a United States Note, printed in green ink on the back. Not one grain of gold nor one sliver of silver stood behind it, yet the law declared it legal tender for most every debt a man could owe or be owed.

Consider what that meant to a distiller with a jar in each hand. Before, a dollar was a dollar because somewhere a government kept the gold to make it so. After, a dollar was a dollar because a lawyer said so. I have met the lawyers of Merrimack County, and I would sooner back my money with a bear.

The greenback promised to be worth a dollar someday. A Concord suitor makes the same promise to a widow with a good woodlot, and like that suitor, the greenback came up short by harvest. The cruelty was that paper and gold did not stay equal. They took to feuding. When the Union armies won a field, the greenback stood up straight and nearly looked a man in the eye. When the armies lost, the paper sagged and gold swelled up proud. The difference between them was called the gold premium. It earned the name because gold charges extra for showing up, like a Methodist at a free supper.

What a Gallon Fetched

By the latter part of 'sixty-three a man might need a dollar and a half in greenbacks to buy a dollar in gold, and at the worst of the war he needed more than that. Think of the farmer up the Suncook with his corn and his rye. In spring he asked you one price. By harvest, with the paper thinned out, he asked near double. He would swear on his mother that he had not raised it a cent and that the money had shrunk underneath him.

He was half right. Corn that cost me forty cents the bushel in gold coin cost me sixty and seventy in soft paper, and the rye followed it up the hill like a hound after bacon. So what did I charge for a gallon of honest double-run? I charged it both ways. In gold it was two dollars. In greenbacks it was whatever the Concord newspapers said gold was fetching that Tuesday. If a man argued, I sent him to argue with the newspaper. If he argued with the newspaper, I sent him to Barnaby, who settles every dispute of currency in a single installment.

Copper in the Palm

My own preference was copper. I would take a palm of copper large cents over a fistful of greenbacks any Sunday. A cent at least has the decency to look you in the eye and not shrink while you carry it home. In 1863 a copper cent was worth its weight whatever the paper did. More than once I took my punch to the anvil and stamped them G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. That way every honest cent passing through this valley carried my name and my guarantee, which is worth more than Washington's and smells better than his paper.

A Revenue Captain's Ledger

A man who spent his life chasing copper and reading other men's ledgers recently came up the turnpike to the Fort. He is Captain Donald Vance, a retired Federal Revenue Officer out of Manchester. Barnaby gave him the long look a creditor gives a debtor, and he wisely kept his hands where the bear could see them. That is the only wise thing any revenue man has ever done in my doorway.

His first tale came from Berlin, in the North Country. An old distiller there owed a tidy sum of back tax and would not hand over a single greenback, for he trusted paper about as far as he trusted the weather. He went out to his woodshed, dug up a butter churn, and poured out gold half-eagles, five-dollar pieces buried since before the war. He had the only savings account in Coos County that could not catch fire. The Captain had no scale fit for gold coin, and a worn half-eagle is light, while the Treasury wanted full measure. So he sent the man's grandson to the general store to borrow the little brass candy scale they weighed peppermints on. By lamplight in that kitchen he weighed out the tax against a scale meant for licorice and lemon drops, and balanced it to the pennyweight. "Cleanest payment I ever took in twenty-eight years," said he. I have paid my own taxes in blackberry cordial and bad Latin, and never once in anything you could eat, which I now regret.

In Vermont the Captain came upon a distiller who kept his books in two inks. Every price reckoned in gold went down in black, and every price reckoned in greenbacks went down in red. Each entry was written twice, two columns marching down the page like soldiers, because he never knew from one week to the next which money a customer would bring. The book was so neat and so well reconciled that the Captain had not the heart to seize it. He copied what he needed and sent the book to a county historical society, where a page of it is said to hang framed to this day. A man who keeps one column in gold and one in paper is not a bookkeeper. He is a fortune-teller with a ruler, and I salute him. My own book had one column and three lies, and it balanced every night by the grace of a poor memory.

His last tale came from Grafton County. A farmer there had a damp cellar with a cold draft blowing through a crack in the fieldstone wall. He stopped it by pasting the crack over, careful as wallpaper, with dozens of genuine federal distilled-spirits tax stamps, licked and stuck edge to edge to keep the wind off his potatoes. Every one of those stamps was supposed to be accounted for against spirit made and tax paid. The Captain had the poor man stand on a stool and peel each stamp off with a butter knife, steam them loose, and lay them to dry on the kitchen table so the two of them could reckon what they represented. It took half a day, and the draft came back the minute they finished. The government got its stamps and the potatoes got the frostbite. That is the most honest summary of federal taxation I have ever heard.

The Proof Gallon and the Honest Run

Here the war's wobbly dollar met the gauger's honest rod, and the two tangled a distiller's books into a hangman's knot. The tax was not reckoned on the barrel but on the proof gallon, meaning the quantity of pure spirit inside. Proof gallons are measured by strength and not merely by volume. A weak barrel and a strong barrel of the same size owed the government different sums. A man had to know his proof to the hair, or he paid for liquor he never made.

So let us walk through an honest run as I would teach a greenhorn at my elbow. The work begins before the still warms. Cook your grain with water, cool it to blood-warm, pitch the yeast, and leave it several days until it works down to a low wash of a few percent. The still makes nothing of its own. It only gathers and concentrates what the yeast has already built.

Then bring the heat up gently and keep it low. The spirit comes off in a fixed order, and you must know that order as well as you know your own children. First come the foreshots, the meanest of the lot, carrying methanol and the harsh volatiles that boil off earliest. Throw them out. Next come the heads, still sharp and still carrying poison and a solvent stink. Throw those out too. Never drink them, never save them, and never let anyone talk you into a sip to "test it." After the heads come the hearts, the clean sweet middle, which is all a wise man keeps. Last come the tails, running oily and dull; set them aside to redistill another day.

You make the cuts with your nose, your thermometer and your patience, and no shortcut replaces them. Throughout the run your copper is at work. It reacts with the sulfur compounds in the vapour and strips out the rotten stink before it reaches your jar. Keep that copper bright. Leave lead and salvaged radiators on the scrap heap, where poison belongs. Keep your books honest, your proof true, and your conscience reasonably clear, if you have one left after a war.

Ashes in the Thump Keg

A letter of sorts came from the Carolina hills, from one Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. He asked: "Alchemist, 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, or was he just making swamp medicine?"

I salute the uncle's confidence, for it is the one thing he has in abundance, and I will nail the truth to the anvil. The thump keg, or doubler, is a second vessel between the still and the condenser. Vapour bubbles up through the hot liquid in it and is distilled again, which adds strength and shine to the spirit. That is all it does. It is a second distillation and not a sieve, a filter or a confessional. You cannot pour your sins into a thump keg and get them washed clean.

Hickory and oak are good hardwoods, and their charcoal, properly burned and used on the finished spirit, will adsorb some harsh compounds. To that extent the old-timers half earned their reputation. But raw ash and green shavings dumped into a boiling thump keg will not remove one drop of methanol. Methanol boils off early, in the foreshots and heads, and the only thing on God's earth that removes it is the cut. Ash in the keg is theater. It makes a man feel busy while he poisons himself on schedule. Those hickory ashes will clean a bad head about as well as a greenback fills a cavity: they look like money and do nothing. Tell your uncle to make the cut, throw out the heads, keep the copper bright, and leave the ashes in the fireplace, where they have an honest job.

My ledger balanced to the penny every night, provided you did not ask which pennies or whose night. I wish you all the same peaceful accounting. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.