Wounded Civil War Soldiers Home on Furlough in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, 1863

Up the Turnpike in Pieces

In May of 1863, at a Virginia crossroads called Chancellorsville that had a tavern and not much else, the Twelfth New Hampshire was chewed up worse than a hambone under my bear's porch. They were Lakes Region and hill-town men, boys from Gilmanton and Barnstead and the farms around this valley. They went into those woods a regiment and came out a rumor. July brought Gettysburg. The Fifth New Hampshire lost Colonel Cross in the Wheatfield. He was the fierce old devil who tied a black kerchief round his head before every fight, and he was mortally wounded that evening. The Second and the Twelfth were in it as well. The hospitals filled that summer, and when the hospitals were full the furloughs began.

No railroad runs up the Suncook Valley to Pittsfield, and the way the Concord money men argue, none will for years yet. A wounded man rode the cars as far as Concord and was then jounced up the turnpike in a stage or a farmer's wagon. The Concord stage has springs the way a deacon has mercy: they are mentioned in the brochure and never felt on the road. Think of riding it with a fresh stump while every rut in Epsom says how-do to your stitches.

Most of them came from the big general hospitals in Washington City, Armory Square and a dozen like it. These are long whitewashed pavilion wards with the windows open, built so because the doctors had at last worked out that a sick man needs air more than he needs a sermon. A big, bearded and rather odd poet from Brooklyn named Whitman walked those wards. He wrote boys' letters home for them and brought an orange, a twist of tobacco or a few pennies. A New Hampshire private told me the poet smelled of soap and sadness, and he meant it kindly.

The truth those boys carried home was that the bullet was not the great killer. Disease was. Of every three Union men dead, about two died of camp fever, typhoid, measles or the bloody flux. Meanwhile every parlor in Pittsfield had a lady scraping old linen tablecloths into lint, which went south by the barrel to the soldiers' aid societies and the Sanitary Commission to be packed into wounds. No one alive knew that half of it carried more filth into a man than the Rebel ball had. The surgeons looked at a wound oozing thick yellow matter and called it 'laudable pus.' Only a doctor could look at a hole that smells like a tannery privy and call it praiseworthy.

The Trinket Drawer and the Jug

My trinket drawer holds what they brought. There is a ring carved from beef bone, whose maker swore it came from the very ox that gave him the dysentery. He gave it to his sweetheart, which tells you all you need to know about romance in the Army of the Potomac. There is a pipe of Virginia mountain laurel root, hard as a sheriff's heart. There is a Minie ball whittled into a chessman, a bishop if you squint, with lead in his hat and lead in his heart like most bishops. One boy mailed his mother a hardtack cracker with the address inked on its face. She keeps it on the mantel, and it is still harder than the mantel.

They came home knowing more names for bad whiskey than a Concord lawyer has for a fee: tanglefoot, bust-head, oh-be-joyful (which never once was), nockum stiff and pop-skull. Now and then a surgeon issued a gill of whiskey with quinine stirred in against the fevers, so bitter it turned the tongue inside out looking for the exit. After an all-night march in the rain an officer might give a dram to keep the men from shaking apart. The rest they bought from sutlers, the peddlers who followed the camps. Sutler whiskey was so foul the lice left the men who drank it.

Lead in the Jaw, and the Tax

That July a corporal came up the turnpike. A ball had taken him through the left cheek at Chancellorsville, and the army surgeon had dug it out and left the rest of the jaw rattling like a Baptist's collection box. When he opened his mouth in my chair, the smell came out ahead of him like a herald. With the forceps I took out two molars split down the middle like kindling, then a chip of jawbone the size of a fingernail paring. Last, from far back where the gum had swollen purple as a plum, came a sliver of lead no longer than a barley grain that had festered there nine weeks. It came out with a long wet pop, like a boot pulled from Suncook mud. He never flinched. 'Doc,' said he, 'that's the only piece of Virginia I ever wanted to bring home, and now I don't want it either.'

The Union army has no dentists at all, only a rule that a recruit must have opposing front teeth to tear his paper cartridges. I have had young men beg me to save their front teeth so they could go and be shot, and old men beg me to pull theirs so they could not. I served both and charged both the same. Patriotism is billed separately.

Pittsfield turned out for them. The church bell rang for every wagon that came up from Epsom with a uniform in it, and any man in blue with a hospital paper got his first jar free at Fort Wilkins. In '63 Mr. Lincoln's excise stood at twenty cents a gallon, a tax a man could grumble about. In this year of '65 it is two dollars, a tax a man can only pray about. Before the furloughs, the old Yankees spoke of it as a toothache from Washington. Then the boys sat in the tavern and told them where the money went: hardtack, quinine, chloroform, lint, and a coffin for the poor devil in the next bed. Some of the loudest grumblers quietly paid. Others went on not paying but stopped bragging about it. Shame is the cheapest revenue man the Treasury ever hired.

Three Furloughs, as a Revenue Man Saw Them

Captain Donald Vance, a revenue officer out of Manchester, sat at my table with three stories. In the spring of '64, on the Concord road, he met a one-legged sergeant of the Twelfth whose ash crutch sloshed like a butter churn at every step. The man had hollowed it in the hospital with a borrowed auger and corked the foot. 'Captain,' said he, 'I left a leg in Virginia for the Union. I reckon the Union can leave me this pint.' The Captain wrote 'one crutch, half full, ration of a wounded man' in his book and bought him dinner. The sergeant paid for the drinks out of the crutch.

The second story has no joke in it. Up in the Ossipee hills a private home on sick furlough built a still from an army camp kettle and sealed the hot joints with Minie balls he had melted down. He ran it a month. By the time the Captain arrived, the boy's mother lay doubled with cramps, and a blue-gray line ran along her gums. That is the lead line, which I have seen on a painter and on a printer's devil. The Captain took an axe to the kettle, fined the lad nothing, and drove him to a coppersmith in Concord who took him on. The mother pulled through. Use copper, properly joined, and never a thread of lead where the spirit touches.

The third concerns a veteran of the Second New Hampshire who drilled his oxen every morning by Hardee's Tactics. When the Captain came up his lane one October afternoon, smelling mash, the man bellowed 'By the left flank! March!' The oxen wheeled the cart crossways in the lane and would not budge. By the time the Captain had climbed the wall, torn his coat and waded a pumpkin patch, there was no kettle, barrel or drop to be found. There was only the veteran on a milk stool with a Bible open upside down.

A Furlough Batch of Potatoes

Making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law, and I set this down for history and learning. My copper has been seized and my fine paid. The grain was short that autumn and the cellars were full of potatoes. A potato is starch, though, and yeast cannot eat starch any more than a bear can eat a sermon. Scrub, cut and boil the potatoes soft, then mash them into a porridge with clean water. When the thermometer reads about one hundred and fifty degrees by Fahrenheit, stir in crushed malted barley, roughly one part to five or six of potato by weight. The malt carries the enzymes that turn starch to sugar. Keep it covered and warm, stirring now and then for an hour or two, and taste it go from paste to sweet. Cool it to blood-warm and pitch good brewer's barm. Let it work several days in a room with moving air, for the heavy gas a ferment breathes out pools low and can put a man to sleep for good.

Strain off the wash and fill the pot no more than two-thirds full, because potato wash foams like a mad dog. Heat it gently and evenly, with no open flame near the vapour path or the jars. Throw out the foreshots, which smell of shoemaker's cement and spite, and set aside the harsh heads for cleaning tools. Potato skins carry pectin, a source of the methanol that blinds and kills, and it comes off early. Cutting it away is your only protection. Keep the smooth hearts, and set the oily tails, which carry the fusel oil, aside for the next run. It was in potato spirit that the chemists first went poking into fusel oil. After the run the pot will look darker inside, because the copper is taking up the sulfur stink of a stressed ferment. Copper can cure only so much of a sin, so clean it bright afterward. An honest pot rings when you rap it. A lead-soldered kettle sounds like a cough.

Ashes, Oak and Chloroform

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, sent word that his uncle threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Hardwood ash is strong alkali, the same potash New Hampshire farmers once burned whole forests to make and sold to England for soap and glass. It may neutralize some sour acid in a mash gone vinegary, so the spirit smells less sharp. It removes no methanol whatever, and it leaves a gray sludge and a soapy, burnt taste behind. Red oak is so open in the grain that you can blow pipe smoke through a stave, which is why tight barrels are white oak. Its shavings give only tannin, colour and a woody taste. The uncle confused colour with cure.

Do not believe the tavern tale either, that the surgeons sawed without chloroform while the men bit bullets. In the great majority of Union amputations the man was first put under with chloroform or ether. The screaming the boys remember came from men coming round, or from those waiting their turn. When you hear a man in a Pittsfield tavern called a 'hospital rat,' or said to have been 'to see the sutler,' you will know that the words came up the turnpike with a limp.