Why the Large Cent Died: The End of America's Big Copper Coin

A Coin With Some Self-Respect

Lay one of the old big coppers on a pine table and set it spinning, and you will hear a deep wobbling note with some self-respect in it. The United States large cent was first struck in 1793, and those first pieces weighed 208 grains of copper, nearly half an ounce. In 1795 Congress cut it to 168 grains. It was the only time in history the government took less of anything, and the coin kept that weight until the day it died. It had heft, like a farm wife's hand on the back of your neck in church. Put ten of them in your trouser pocket and every woman on Main Street will take you for a more prosperous man than you are.

Here is a fact to win you a drink at the tavern in Barnstead: there is no large cent dated 1815. Not one. During the War of 1812 the British blockade cut off the copper planchets, the blank discs, that our Mint had been buying from Matthew Boulton's works in Birmingham, England. For a whole year America struck no cents. Pittsfield hardly noticed, since Pittsfield never had one anyhow.

Priced Out of Its Own Skin

Then copper began to climb. By the 1850s the metal in one large cent cost the Mint close to a full cent, and at times more, once you added the rolling, cutting and striking and the wages of the gentlemen in Philadelphia who think lifting a pen is a hard day's work. A copper that costs more than a cent to make is like a son-in-law: the more you put into him, the less he is worth. The merchants hated them too. Pay a Concord storekeeper three dollars in coppers, and by the time he had counted three hundred of the damned things his customer had died, remarried, and come back for more molasses. Banks would not touch them by the bushel. Down South and out West, the people trading in Spanish silver bits looked at our big red cent the way a cow looks at a church organ.

So came the Act of February 21, 1857. Congress abolished the large cent, along with the poor little half cent, and authorized a small cent of 72 grains, eighty-eight parts copper to twelve of nickel. The same act ended the legal-tender standing of Spanish and other foreign silver, those worn-down reales and pistareens we had all been making change with since the Revolution. The Mint, under its Director, Mr. James Ross Snowden, traded the new Flying Eagle cent for old coppers and old Spanish silver, and folks lined up at Philadelphia as if for a free hanging with cake after.

The Flying Eagle was struck for circulation in 1857 and 1858. In 1859 Mr. Longacre gave us the Indian Head cent, a handsome coin but so light that a man's purse feels gelded. Then the war came. Every man, woman and Baptist in the Union hid his hard money in the mattress, and merchants struck their own penny tokens by the millions until Washington outlawed private one- and two-cent coins on June 8, 1864. That spring, by the Act of April 22, 1864, the cent was made thinner yet: bronze, 48 grains, ninety-five parts copper with tin and zinc. The same act gave us the two-cent piece stamped 'In God We Trust,' which I take to mean the Treasury no longer trusts anybody else.

Then came the last joke on the big copper. The minute it stopped being money, people started collecting it. The American Numismatic Society was founded in New York in 1858, and gentlemen in silk waistcoats now pay a dollar for a cent they would not have bent down to pick out of a horse stall ten years ago. My bear Barnaby collects coins as well, but his collection is kept in the one cabinet no numismatist on earth wants to open.

The Professor and the Bear

Every coin that dies leaves a crowd of crooks behind it, like crows on a dead ox. In the summer of 1858, when the big cents still passed hand to hand up here and the Flying Eagle was only a rumor, a peddler came up the turnpike from the Gilmanton side in a red-wheeled wagon. He called himself Professor Lucius Fogg. He professed to be honest, and his coins professed to be copper. He sold liniment, Bibles and ladies' garters, all out of the same crate. He bought a jar of my best and a bag of horse nails and paid in big coppers, twenty-three of them, counted out real slow onto my anvil.

I have hammered copper since I was tall enough to be burned by it, and copper has a nose, a color and a voice. These cents were too even in their wear and too greasy in the hand, and they had the color of a boiled turnip somebody had painted red. I rang one on the anvil horn and got a dull, dead clack. Struck copper sings. Cast lead and brass sit there like a drunk in a pew. The professor had poured his cents in a sand mold behind some barn in Belknap County. I told him so, kindly, with the forceps in my hand. He grabbed his sack and ran the wrong way, straight past the still-house window.

Barnaby swatted the sack first, and cents flew across the yard like grapeshot. Then he took the professor's left calf just below the knee, and the boot came off with the foot still trying to be in it. The bear stood chewing a mouthful of trouser wool as though it needed salt. Being a professional man, I poured clear spirit on the wound and sewed it with waxed fiddle string. Then I sent for the sheriff, who looked at the professor, then the bear, then me, and said, 'Wilkins, I have finally found a man worse than you.' I took it as a compliment. Barnaby had swallowed some of the coins, and over the next week I fished eleven of them out by the woodpile with a stick and a tin plate. They sit in a jar on my shelf labeled 'Evidence, Twice Processed.'

Mule's Eyes and a Winking Corpse

Mrs. Clara Higgins, a historian of Blue Ridge slang, came north from Virginia to the Fort. She explains that 'not worth a red cent' comes from the copper's color, a red cent being the bottom of the purse. In her family, though, the big copper was a 'mule's eye.' Hold one up and it does look like a mule fixing to kick you, brown, round and full of grievance. She says it is only a family word. In her hollow back in the fifties, a stillman made wild persimmon brandy from fruit gathered after the first frost and priced it at two mule's eyes a dram. He would take no silver, holding that silver was for weddings and lawyers.

In 1857 a drover came down her valley with the new little cents. A skinflint storekeeper refused them as 'bird money' and 'Philadelphia tin,' and for years he took nothing but the old coppers. When he died, his kin tore up the floorboards because the house smelled like an old church bell. Under the counter they found a cedar butter churn packed solid with near nine thousand cents, by her granny's count. It took two mules to haul it to the ford, and halfway across the creek one mule sat down in the water and would not budge. The family unloaded the churn a bucket at a time, every cousin in the county turned out to help, and about three hundred cents never reached the far bank.

The mountain people also laid coins on the eyes of the dead, and the big copper stayed put. When her great-great-uncle died in a cold snap, a sorry cousin swapped his two coppers for two Flying Eagles, light as a moth's wing. In a warm room with a hot stove and a good deal of persimmon brandy, the old man's left eyelid crept up like a window shade along about the second hymn. The coin rolled under the bench, and the song leader went backward over it. Her great-granny turned out the cousin's pockets and put the mule's eyes back herself, saying a man ought to be buried with his own money.

Copper, Heat and the Cuts

Do not melt a bushel of cents to make a still. A still is not cast. It is rolled and hammered from sheet, worked cold and annealed hot. Cast copper is porous and brittle and will weep at the seams, and the bronze cent of 1864 carries tin and zinc besides. Buy sheet from an honest mill and join it with rivets and silver solder or a good mechanical union, never lead. Mind also that making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States. What follows is history and education.

Cook cracked corn in water, let it cool to roughly a hundred and fifty degrees, and stir in malted barley or sprouted, dried corn so the malt turns the starch to sugar. Hold it warm and stir until it tastes sweet on your finger. Cool it below ninety degrees before adding yeast, then let it work four days to a week in a warm, airy place, because the heavy gas it throws off will settle in a closed cellar and kill you. What you get is a sour, low beer, the wash. Strain it and charge the pot no more than three-quarters full. Never seal a still tight, for the vapor must always have a free road to the condenser. Keep the fire low and patient.

The cuts are where honest men and fools part company. The first drips, the foreshots, go on the ground. Next come the heads, sharp and solvent-like with acetaldehyde, acetic ether and wood spirit, and those go too. Methanol boils at about a hundred forty-eight degrees and ethanol at about a hundred seventy-three, so the early run is where the worst of it gathers. Keep the hearts, sweet and clean. Set the oily, wet-dog tails aside to run again. Fruit is trickier, because the pectin in a persimmon, apple or peach mash breaks down into wood spirit, so the heads cut must be wide and made without apology. Mrs. Higgins's granddaddy put it best: 'Any man who saves his fruit heads to sell is a man who's fixing to meet his customers again at a funeral.'

Copper's secret is sacrifice. Bright copper grabs the rotten-egg sulfur out of the vapor and holds it on its own skin, so after every run you rinse it, scrub with vinegar and salt, rinse thoroughly again, and dry. Never let green crust fall into anything you would put in your mouth. Alcohol vapor burns, so keep the jar well away from the flame and keep sand and water by the door. Never walk away from a running still, not even to throw a ham bone to the bear.

Ashes, Oak and the Green Penny

Mr. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads, as his uncle swears. Soak wood ash in water and you have lye, a caustic that will take the skin off your knuckles. It may neutralize some sour acids in a wash that has turned, but the methanol does not care about ashes. Oak gives tannin, color and a woody taste. That is seasoning, not cleaning. The only way to be rid of bad heads is to catch them in a separate jar and throw them away, every run. For so good a question I have set aside a counterstamped Pittsfield cent with his name on the wrapping.

There is also the old tale that a copper cent dropped in liquor will turn green if the liquor is poison. Copper greens with verdigris when it meets acid, so it proves only that your spirit is sour. It detects neither wood spirit nor lead. The penny is not a doctor. I am the doctor, and I charge more.

So ends the big copper: born in 1793, shaved down in 1795, starved by the British in 1815, priced out of its own skin by the fifties, and put in the ground by Congress in 1857. If you have a few in a jar, keep them. Your grandchildren will curse you if you spend them.