Greenbacks, Gold, and Granite State Grain: What a Gallon Cost in 1863
What did a gallon of moonshine cost in 1863, when Lincoln's paper greenbacks moved against gold every week? Alchemist G. G. Wilkins broadcasts from his copper still at Fort Wilkins in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, to work out Civil War distilling prices, the gold premium and why he wanted hard copper cents in his hand. Retired Federal Revenue Officer Captain Donald Vance brings new moonshine history tales of gold buried in a butter churn, a ledger kept in two inks and a cellar papered with tax stamps, while Barnaby the bear rattles his chain outside.
In this episode
- How the Legal Tender Act of 1862 created greenbacks and Civil War paper money
- The gold premium explained: why greenbacks rose and fell with Union battles
- What a gallon of moonshine and a bushel of corn and rye cost in 1863
- Why a New Hampshire distiller priced whiskey in both gold and greenbacks
- Copper large cents, hard currency and a moonshiner's own stamped coins
- A revenue officer's tales: back taxes weighed in gold on a general store candy scale
- A Vermont distiller's two-ink ledger and a cellar papered with federal spirits tax stamps
- Listener call-in: hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg to clean out bad heads
Wilkins broadcasts from Fort Wilkins on the arithmetic of 1863: how Lincoln's Legal Tender Act of 1862 set paper greenbacks shuffling against gold, why the premium on gold wobbled a distiller's price per gallon, and why he preferred hard copper cents in his palm. Retired Federal Revenue Officer Captain Donald Vance joins for brand-new tales of currency, tax stamps, and a ledger gone to mischief, and Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro calls in to ask whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Settle down out there, Barnaby, that jingle in your chain is the only hard currency left on this turnpike that hasn't lost half its value since breakfast. Sit. SIT. Good bear.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, good evening, and welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins, on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route Twenty-Eight, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire, where the fire is low, the copper is bright, and the money is worth whatever a man will swear to with a straight face. Tonight's subject is one that has emptied more granite pockets than frostbite: Greenbacks, Gold, and Granite State Grain, or, what in the name of Mr. Lincoln's printing office did a gallon cost in 1863.
Announcer: Quick word, friends. If your copper is tired and your spirit is harsh, look to the Flame-Flow still, heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper, United States Patent ten, five-six-one, nine-six-zero. Order at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com.
Wilkins: Now then. Segment the first. Let us talk of money, which is a thing I handle as seldom as a parson handles sin and with about the same reluctance. In the year of our Lord eighteen sixty-two, Mr. Lincoln and his Congress passed what they called the Legal Tender Act, and out of it came a creature never before seen in this republic: the greenback. A United States Note, printed in green ink on the backside, not backed by one grain of gold nor one sliver of silver, and yet the law declared it legal tender for most every debt a man could owe or be owed.
Wilkins: Understand what that means to a distiller with a jar in each hand. Before this, a dollar was a dollar because somewhere a government kept the gold to make it so. After this, a dollar was a dollar because a lawyer said so, and I have met the lawyers of Merrimack County, and I would sooner back my money with a bear.
Wilkins: A greenback in 1863 was a note that promised to be worth a dollar someday, which is the same promise a Concord suitor makes to a widow with a good woodlot. And just like that suitor, the greenback came up short by the harvest. For here is the cruelty of it: paper and gold did not stay equal. They set to feuding. When the Union armies won a field, the greenback stood up straight and near looked a man in the eye. When the armies lost, the paper sagged and gold swelled up proud, and they called the difference the gold premium.
Wilkins: They call it a gold premium because gold charges extra for showing up, like a Methodist at a free supper. 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 by the worst of the war, worse than that. Now picture the farmer up the Suncook with his corn and his rye. In the spring he'd ask you one price; by harvest, with the paper thinned out, he'd ask you near double, and swear on his mother he hadn't raised it a cent, it was the money that had shrunk underneath him.
Wilkins: And 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 per gallon of honest double-run? I charged it both ways. In gold, two dollars. In greenbacks, whatever the Concord newspapers told me gold was fetching that Tuesday, and if a man argued, I sent him to argue with the newspaper, and if he argued with the newspaper, I sent him to argue with Barnaby, who settles all disputes of currency in a single installment.
Wilkins: But my own preference, and hear me now, was copper. Give me a palm of copper large cents over a fistful of greenbacks any Sunday. I would rather be paid in copper cents than greenbacks, for a cent at least has the decency to look you in the eye and not shrink while you carry it home. A copper cent in 1863 was worth its weight whatever the paper did, and more than once I took my punch to the anvil and stamped them G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., so that every honest cent that passed through this valley carried my name and my guarantee, which is worth more than Washington's and smells better than his paper.
Wilkins: Segment the second, and the part I favor, for tonight the Lord has sent me a man who spent his life chasing copper and reading other men's ledgers. Please welcome to the Fort a retired Federal Revenue Officer out of Manchester, Captain Donald Vance. Captain, come in out of the cold before Barnaby mistakes you for a tax.
Captain: Evening, Wilkins. I will say your bear gave me a long look as I came up the turnpike, the kind of look a creditor gives a debtor, and I kept my hands where he could see them.
Wilkins: That is the only wise thing any revenue man has ever done in this doorway. Now, Captain, we are speaking of money gone wobbly in the war years. You chased stills, but you also chased the arithmetic. Give me a tale.
Captain: Well, here's one you'll like, and I never told it on your program nor any other. Up in Berlin, in the North Country, there was an old distiller owed a tidy sum of back tax, and when I came to collect, he would not hand me a single scrap of paper money. Not one greenback. He trusted it like he trusted the weather. Instead 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.
Wilkins: A churn of gold. The man had the only savings account in Coos County that couldn't catch fire.
Captain: And here was my trouble. I had no scale fit to weigh gold coin, and a worn half-eagle is light, and the Treasury wanted full measure. So I sent the man's grandson down to the general store to borrow the candy scale, the little brass one they weighed peppermints on, and there in his kitchen, by lamplight, I weighed out that man's tax in gold against a scale meant for licorice and lemon drops. Balanced it to the pennyweight. Cleanest payment I ever took in twenty-eight years.
Wilkins: A tax paid on a candy scale. I have paid mine in blackberry cordial and bad Latin and never once in anything you could eat, which I now regret.
Captain: Second one for you. Down in Vermont I came on a ledger that stopped me cold. This distiller kept his books in two inks, see. Black ink for every price reckoned in gold, red ink for every price reckoned in greenbacks. Every single entry, twice over, two columns marching down the page like soldiers, because he never knew from one week to the next which money a customer would bring. And it was kept so fine, so neat, every figure reconciled, that I did not have the heart to seize it for evidence. I copied what I needed and I sent the book itself to a county historical society, where I am told a page of it hangs framed to this day.
Wilkins: A man keeping two columns, one in gold and one in paper, is not a bookkeeper, he is a fortune-teller with a ruler. I salute him. My own book had one column and three lies, and it balanced every night by the grace of a poor memory.
Captain: Last one, and this is the one that still makes me laugh. Grafton County, a farmer with a damp cellar and a cold draft coming through a crack in the fieldstone wall. And to stop that draft, what had the man done? He had pasted the crack over, careful as wallpaper, with genuine federal distilled-spirits tax stamps. Dozens of them. Licked and stuck, edge to edge, to keep the wind out of his potatoes.
Wilkins: The tax stamp is a little scrap of paper the government licks and sticks to your labor, which is the only honest work I ever saw a revenue man do with his tongue, and here's a farmer turned it to insulation.
Captain: He had no notion he'd papered his cellar in a small fortune of federal paper, every one of which was supposed to be accounted for against spirit made and tax paid. I made that poor man stand on a stool and peel every stamp off the wall with a butter knife, steam them loose, and lay them out to dry on the kitchen table so we could reckon what they represented. Took half a day. The draft came back the minute we finished.
Wilkins: So the government got its stamps and the potatoes got the frostbite. That, Captain, is the most honest summary of federal taxation I have heard in my life. Thank you for coming up the turnpike. Mind the bear on your way past; he does not accept paper.
Captain: I'll pay him in ham, Wilkins, same as I pay all my debts of real value.
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Wilkins: Segment the third, copper and the craft, where a man quits counting money and starts measuring proof. Now here is where the war's wobbly dollar met the gauger's honest rod, and it tangled an honest distiller's books into a hangman's knot. For the tax was not reckoned on the barrel. It was reckoned on the proof gallon, the quantity of pure spirit inside. Proof gallons are measured by strength, not merely volume, so a weak barrel and a strong barrel of the very same size owed the government different sums, and a man had to know his proof to the hair or pay for liquor he never made.
Wilkins: So let me walk you through an honest run, start to finish, the way I'd teach a greenhorn at my own elbow. You begin before the still ever warms. Mash is fermented first: cooked grain and water, cooled to blood-warm, pitched with yeast, and left several days until it works down to a low wash of a few percent. That wash is what the still concentrates; the still makes nothing, it only gathers what the yeast already built.
Wilkins: Then the heat comes up, gentle and low, and the spirit comes off in order, and you must know the order like you know your own children. First comes the foreshots, the meanest of the lot, carrying methanol and the harsh volatiles that boil off earliest. You throw the foreshots out. Then the heads, still sharp, still carrying poison and solvent-stink; you throw the heads out too. Never drink them, never save them, never let a soul talk you into a sip to 'test it.' Only after the heads do you reach the hearts, the clean sweet middle, which is all a wise man keeps. And at the last come the tails, running oily and dull, which you set aside to redistill another day.
Wilkins: That is the whole of it and the half that matters. The cuts are made with your nose and your thermometer and your patience, and there is no shortcut, no ash, no charm, no prayer that replaces them. And through all of it your copper is working, reacting with the sulfur compounds in the vapor, stripping out the rotten stink before it ever rides into your jar. Keep that copper bright, keep your lead and your salvaged radiators out on the scrap heap where poison belongs, and your books honest, your proof true, and your conscience, if you have one left after a war, reasonably clear.
Wilkins: Segment the fourth, where we open the call-in line and salt it with myth. We have a tape tonight all the way from the Carolina hills. Let's hear it.
♦ Wax cylinder click and hiss of a recorded voicemail playing back
Wilkins: Caller, you're on Radio Moonshine.
Wilkins: The caller is one Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and Rabbit asks, and I quote the man as faithfully as the wax allows: "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?"
Wilkins: Rabbit Miller, of Wilkesboro, I thank you for the call and I salute your uncle's confidence, for confidence is the only thing he has got in abundance. Here is the truth, and I'll nail it to the anvil.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin on the anvil
Wilkins: Your thump keg, your doubler, is a second vessel between the still and the condenser. Vapor bubbles up through hot liquid in it and gets re-distilled, which adds strength and shine to your spirit. That is all it does. It is a second distillation, not a sieve, not a filter, not a confessional. You cannot pour your sins into a thump keg and get them washed clean.
Wilkins: Now the ashes. Hickory and oak are good hardwoods, and their charcoal, properly burned and used on the finished spirit, will adsorb some harsh compounds, that part is true and 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. Not one. Methanol boils off early, in the foreshots and the heads, and the only thing on God's earth that removes it is the cut, the discipline of throwing those foreshots and heads away. Ash in the keg is theater. It makes a man feel busy while he poisons himself on schedule.
Wilkins: Rabbit, your uncle's hickory ashes will clean a bad head about as well as a greenback will fill a cavity: it looks like money and it does nothing. If his run has a bad head, the fault is in his cuts, and no amount of swamp medicine will mend what his patience should have caught. Tell your uncle Wilkins says make the cut, throw the heads out, keep the copper bright, and leave the ashes in the fireplace where they have an honest job. And thank you, Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, for calling the Fort. You keep that line warm.
Announcer: One more quick word before he signs off. The Flame-Flow still, heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper, United States Patent ten, five-six-one, nine-six-zero, waiting for you at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route Twenty-Eight, or order direct at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com.
Wilkins: Segment the last, the sign-off. Friends, if tonight has taught you that you'd sooner understand your own copper than trust any paper the government prints, then do yourself the favor and take up the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course, taught by my own hand, wherein I teach the mash, the cuts, the care of copper, and the keeping of books so honest no gauger could faint at them. No ashes, no swamp medicine, no greenbacks required, though copper cents are always welcome at this anvil.
Wilkins: My ledger balanced to the penny every night, provided you did not ask which pennies or whose night, and I wish you all the same peaceful accounting. From the log fortress on the Suncook, this has been Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and a final slow drip of distillate into a glass jar
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme fading out with antique warmth