Whiskey at Gettysburg: Civil War Soldiers, Smuggled Spirits and Honest Cuts

The war is over, and the boys are coming home on the cars from Concord, some on two legs and some on fewer. As I write this at Fort Wilkins in Pittsfield, the hearts are dripping off my worm into a glass jar. Outside, Barnaby the black bear rattles his chain, because he believes he is owed a veteran's pension. He is not. The only shot ever fired at that bear was mine, and I missed him on purpose. That is more mercy than the Rebels ever showed the 2nd New Hampshire. My subject is the thing that carried our soldiers through the war, which was whiskey, and after that, what you as a natural philosopher at your own copper can learn from it.

A Gill of Comfort, and the Law Against It

First the law, then the lawbreaking, as the Lord intended. In the old days a soldier of the United States drew a ration of spirits along with his beef and bread. Then in 1832 some temperance colonel with a face like a dried apricot took it away and gave the men coffee and sugar instead. Anyone who has smelled army coffee will understand why half of them deserted.

The regulation did leave the door open a crack. A commanding officer could order a gill of whiskey, about four ounces, after heavy fatigue duty or a soaking in the cold and wet. Four ounces, for a man who has dug trenches for eleven hours in Virginia clay! It would not wet the tonsils of a Pittsfield churchwarden. The Navy fared worse. Congress took the sailors' grog away by an act of July 1862, and on the first day of September that year the spirit ration was finished.

Then there was the sutler, the travelling peddler who sold tobacco, writing paper, cheese and canned peaches at robbers' prices. He was generally forbidden to sell liquor to the enlisted man, though the officer could get his. So the man with brass buttons drank and the man with tin ones went dry. I have pulled teeth from both kinds, and I can tell you that a colonel's breath at morning roll call could strip the bluing off a musket barrel.

So the private smuggled, as any New Hampshire boy will when a man in a better coat tells him no. Whiskey came down from home inside a hollowed loaf of brown bread with the crust glued back on with molasses. It came in canteens and tins that the sutler sold as peaches. You knew the peaches were brandy because the peaches were gone and the man was singing. It came labelled as cough syrup, liniment and horse medicine. A Barnstead boy's sister sent him a Bible with the middle of Leviticus carved out and a pint flask nestled in the hole. He said it was the first time Leviticus ever did a man any good.

Thirty Gallons of Dental Plaster

Now to the thirty gallons, for which my name is still cursed in a certain quartermaster's office. In the spring of 1863 a Suncook Valley boy of the 12th New Hampshire wrote to me from the Virginia mud. He said the whiskey ration came once a fortnight, smelled like a tanner's boot, and would I please send help. I sent thirty gallons of my best double-run, divided among six casks and packed in crates stencilled DR. WILKINS' DENTAL PLASTER, FOR THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC, HANDLE GENTLY.

Not one quartermaster opened them, because no man alive wants to pry the lid off a box that may contain a dentist's opinion. The casks rode the cars from Concord to Boston, the steamer to Washington and a mule wagon to the camp. One cask arrived a mite lighter, because a teamster in Maryland had worked out that dental plaster sloshes. I do not blame him.

The boys carried what was left north in their canteens through the terrible heat of late June, with men dropping in the road like shot crows, all the way into Pennsylvania. On the second day of July, 1863, they stood on the Emmitsburg Road while the Confederate army came at them through a peach orchard.

Three Regiments, a Bear and a Dented Flask

Three New Hampshire regiments fought at Gettysburg. The 2nd was in the Peach Orchard, the 5th was in the Wheatfield and the 12th was on the Emmitsburg Road. All three were ground up that second day like corn under a millstone. Colonel Edward E. Cross of Lancaster led his brigade, the Fighting Fifth among it, into the Wheatfield. He was a hard man and nobody's darling, and there he took a ball that killed him by nightfall. When the counting was done after the war, the Fifth had lost more men killed in battle than any other Union infantry regiment. The courage was never in my casks; it was in those boys. The whiskey only kept them company.

Whiskey had its darker uses too. In '63 the bounty men and substitute brokers came up from Concord and Boston like flies to a dead horse. They would ply a farm boy with whiskey, sign him up as somebody's substitute and keep three-quarters of his bounty. One of them, a greasy fellow in a checked waistcoat, tried it on a simple Pittsfield boy of sixteen. Then he walked his horse past my still-house window. Barnaby's chain is twelve feet long. The broker was thirteen feet off, but his horse threw him one foot closer. Barnaby took the seat of his trousers, then the drawers beneath, then a good part of what the drawers were there to protect. The man walked sideways for a month. I tore up the boy's paper in the fire, gave him a dollar and set him to splitting my wood until he came of age. He went to war properly at eighteen and came home whole.

My friend Captain Donald Vance, retired from the revenue service, has brought me stories from the hill towns. In Plymouth a veteran who had lost two fingers at Fredericksburg kept his whiskey in a chest stencilled U.S. MEDICAL DEPARTMENT, SPIRITUS FRUMENTI. He insisted the government could not tax its own property. The Captain confiscated the contents and wrote in his report: "Two gallons medical whiskey, returned to the government, internally." In Wentworth a former drummer boy would turn a butter churn upside down and beat the long roll on it, and every still in the valley went dark within four minutes. In Bristol a parson's wife, once of the Sanitary Commission, had turned a copper wash boiler into a passable pot still. She made the Captain carry the barrel up from her cellar while she read him Proverbs, chapter thirty-one, verse six: Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish.

Last comes an old 12th New Hampshire man in a Concord tavern, who showed the Captain a pewter flask dented clean through the middle. On the Emmitsburg Road a spent ball had stopped in it. The whiskey ran down his belly, he took it for his blood and fainted, and the Rebels passed him by for dead. Then he asked, serious as a judge: "That ball spilled near a pint. Does the bullet owe the two dollars, or do I?"

Chloroform, Whiskey and the Surgeon's Saw

I went down after Gettysburg with a wagon of my own spirits, supposedly for the Sanitary Commission. Nothing in a dentist's chair had prepared me for the barns along the Baltimore Pike. The surgeons worked in their shirtsleeves, with aprons stiff and black as cobbler's leather. They passed arms and legs out of the window until the pile grew taller than a haycock. The smell got into my wagon boards, and in the spring I burned the wagon.

The grandfathers have this part wrong. Most of those boys did not bite a bullet with only whiskey for comfort. In the great majority of operations the Union surgeons dripped chloroform or ether onto a cloth over the man's face. The whiskey came before and after. The Medical Department's supply tables listed whiskey, spiritus frumenti and brandy as stimulants, in the belief that spirits would rouse a man from shock. The best physicians now suspect that whiskey does a bleeding man more harm than good. Afterwards Medical Director Letterman's system gathered the wounded into a great tent city on the York Pike, called Camp Letterman.

The Experiment at the Copper

I am obliged to say this first. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and what follows is for history and education only.

For corn mash the old way, take eight or ten pounds of cracked corn for every five gallons of water. Stir the corn slowly into the heated water so it does not clump, and cook it near a boil for an hour or more, until it is as thick as Barnstead porridge. Let it cool until it would sting a finger without scalding it, then stir in a few pounds of malted barley. The malt turns the corn's starch to sugar, which is an alchemy the Lord left lying about for anyone who would pay attention. Let it sweeten an hour or two, then cool it to blood-warm and no hotter, or you will kill your yeast. Pitch the yeast, cover the barrel loosely and air the room well, because fermenting mash breathes out a gas that will smother a man. After four to seven days it goes quiet and tastes sour, not sweet. That is your wash, a thin beer of a few percent. Strain it off the grain into your copper pot.

Now commit three numbers to memory. By the Fahrenheit glass, water boils at 212 degrees, grain spirit at about 173 and the poison wood spirit, methanol, at about 148. The lightest and nastiest comes first. Throw out the foreshots and the sharp heads that smell of glue and lamp solvent. Keep the hearts, which run sweet and clean. Set aside the tails, which are oily and smell like a wet dog, for the next run.

Keep your fire low and even. Alcohol vapour is heavier than air, so it pools along the floor and creeps toward your firebox. A Gilmanton man lost his eyebrows, his beard and the better part of his reputation that way. Keep every joint tight and the room aired. Never seal a still up tight, or the pressure will build until it bursts. The vapour needs a clear road through the cap, the arm and the worm, open to the air at the end. Use honest copper with no lead solder, because bright copper takes the sulphur stink out of the vapour. Keep the copper clean. A hospital steward at Camp Letterman, scrubbing his kettles, told me that a dirty kettle kills more men than a Rebel rifle.

Hickory Ash, Red Oak and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asked me whether hickory ash or red oak shavings thrown into the thump keg will clean out bad heads. His uncle is half right. The old Carolina and Tennessee men did put fruit or fresh mash in the doubler, and the vapour carried away some of its taste and colour. But flavouring is not cleaning. Wood ash is crude lye and a strong alkali. It may cut some sourness, or it may make the spirit taste of boiled shoe, but it will never remove the wood spirit, which comes off first in the vapour. Red oak lacks the tyloses that plug the grain of white oak, which is why a red oak barrel weeps like a widow at a wake. Its shavings will add tannin and colour, but that is a Sunday collar on a hog. The only cure for a bad head is an honest cut, made by your own hand.

Last, I strike the blue-flame test dead on my anvil. A blue flame tells you only that there is alcohol in the spoon. Methanol burns a pale blue too, so faint you can hardly see it by daylight. A yellow or red flame can come from a dirty spoon, from salt or from ash, so it proves nothing about lead. Judging spirit that way is like judging a man's honesty by whether his hat catches fire, and plenty of liars own fireproof hats. Raise a glass tonight to the 2nd, the Fighting Fifth and the 12th New Hampshire, the living and the dead. Make it a clean glass, from honest cuts. Keep your copper clean and your fire low.