The Soldiers' Bounty Pay Day: Whiskey, Greenbacks, and Pittsfield Recruits in 1864
Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins remembers the bounty-money summer of 1864: the Enrollment Act, stacked federal, state, and town bounties, bounty jumpers, falling greenbacks, and the sharpers who followed the cash to the Pittsfield tavern. He tells how he caught a counterfeit Lincoln ten-dollar note by holding it up against a worn copper cent, and how he talked a drunken sergeant out of a boxing match with Barnaby. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells three new stories (a two-chamber canteen that stopped a ball at Petersburg, a broker's gilded lead coins caught on a brass scale, and a bounty jumper hammered out of a copper pot), then helps walk through a pay-day corn-and-malt mash and honest cuts. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC asks about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, which leads into the white oak versus red oak question, potash lye, and the old blue-flame myth.
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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: Barnaby. BARNABY. Quit rattling that chain like a deacon shaking the poor box the Sunday after a funeral. That is a drip, you four-hundred-pound sack of fleas and bad intentions, a drip into a jar. It ain't a ham hitting a plate. Lie down. Lie down or I'll pull your other eyetooth and wear it on my watch chain next to the first one.
♦ Low bear grumble, chain dragging through frozen dooryard mud, a heavy thump as the bear flops down
Wilkins: There. He's lain down on the woodchuck he caught this morning, or what's left of it, which is mostly an opinion and a smell.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, selectmen, and you few honest men left in Merrimack County. Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I'm Dr. George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, coin-stamper, and the only man in town the sheriff has to arrest by appointment. Tonight we go back to the hot, crooked, money-drunk summer of 1864, the Soldiers' Bounty Pay Day, when greenbacks blew down the turnpike like maple leaves in October and every card-sharp, pickpocket, and painted Manchester lady followed them right to my door.
♪ Theme fades under crackle
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♪ Short banjo sting
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. How a man got sold for three hundred dollars and called it patriotism. Pour yourself something and set down.
♦ Cork pulled from a jug, a splash into a tin cup
Wilkins: In March of 1863 Congress passed the Enrollment Act, the first real national draft this country ever had. Every able-bodied male citizen from about twenty to forty-five got his name in the book, and every district got a quota of men it owed Mr. Lincoln. If the volunteers didn't fill it, the provost marshal put the names in a wheel and drew them out like a raffle at a church supper, except the prize was a Rebel ball in the gizzard. That draft wheel in the Concord office turned more men pious in one afternoon than forty years of camp meetings.
Wilkins: Now no town wanted its sons drawn out of a wheel like turnips. So the towns did what Yankees always do when they're scared: they threw money at it. The federal government paid a bounty, about three hundred dollars to a new recruit by '64 and about four hundred to an old soldier who'd sign on again as a veteran volunteer. Then the State of New Hampshire put its own money on top. Then the town called a special meeting, and the voters stood in that drafty meetinghouse with their hats in their hands and voted to borrow money this town won't finish paying off till my grandchildren have false teeth. Stack it all together and in some places one recruit was worth more than a thousand dollars. A hand in the cotton mill down on the Suncook would sweat three years to see that much.
Wilkins: There was another way out, for a while. A drafted man could pay a three-hundred-dollar commutation fee and stay home with his cows and his conscience. The poor men called it the rich man's war and the poor man's fight, and they were right. Then in July of '64 Congress shut that door for most men. After that, if your name came out of the wheel, you went or you bought a substitute, and the price of substitutes climbed faster than a cat up a chimney fire.
Wilkins: That's where the substitute brokers come in. Sweet Jesus, the brokers. They'd go down to the Boston docks and the Portsmouth grog shops and round up any fellow with two legs and a pulse, some of them not too particular about the pulse, and sell him to a desperate town by the head, like a drover at the Brighton cattle market. A substitute broker is a drover who sells the cattle, keeps the hide, and sends the cow a bill for the walk.
Wilkins: And then the bounty jumpers. A jumper signed up, took his bounty in cash, deserted the first dark night, walked two counties over, grew a different set of whiskers, and signed up again under a new name. Some of those boys enlisted more times than I've been married, and I can't count that high without my fingers and Barnaby's toes.
♦ Bear snort from outside the window
Wilkins: Hush. Nobody said a word against your toes.
Wilkins: Now here's the joke under the joke. The bounty didn't come in gold. It came in greenbacks. In February of 1862 Congress passed the Legal Tender Act and started printing United States Notes, green on the back, and you couldn't take them to the Treasury and get gold. They were worth whatever folks believed they were worth, and in the summer of '64, when Grant was bleeding in the Wilderness and Early was riding up to the edge of Washington, folks didn't believe much. In July of that year it took about two dollars and eighty-five cents in greenbacks to buy one gold dollar. Put another way, a greenback dollar would buy you thirty-five cents in gold, a kind word from nobody, and a sore conscience in the morning.
Wilkins: Worse than that, half the paper in a man's pocket might be bad. Before the war every two-bit bank from Bangor to Baltimore printed its own notes, thousands of kinds, and every storekeeper kept a counterfeit detector on the counter, a little printed paper listing every bad bill and every busted bank. Folks figure a third of the paper money passing hands by the end of the war was counterfeit. A third! This very summer the Treasury set up a Secret Service to hunt counterfeiters. About time. I've been hunting them myself for years with nothing but a magnifying glass, a worn copper cent, and a bear.
♪ Fiddle bridge, rising
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Pay day in Pittsfield, and a parade of thieves.
♦ Distant tavern noise, a fiddle sawing badly, glass breaking, men laughing
Wilkins: Picture it. Late summer of '64, hot as the hinges of hell. Our boys had signed their papers, the town treasurer paid out the town money, and suddenly there were twenty-year-old plow boys walking the turnpike with more cash than their fathers had seen since the Hartford Convention. The tavern was packed to the rafters. You couldn't spit without hitting a recruit, and you couldn't hit a recruit without some sharper picking his pocket while he wiped his face.
Wilkins: Oh, they came. The thimble-riggers with their three walnut shells and a pea that was never under any of them. The three-card men. A fellow selling brass rings he swore were gold from a Sacramento claim, and they turned your finger greener than a frog's backside by Tuesday. A peddler with a wagonload of iron breastplates, soldier's armor he called it, guaranteed to stop a Rebel ball. Plenty of boys bought them, and plenty dumped them in a ditch before they got to Virginia, because they weighed about as much as a Shaker's sin. And the painted ladies down from Manchester wearing more rouge than a Portsmouth schooner wears paint, smiling at those farm boys like a fox smiles at a henhouse with the door off.
Wilkins: And every one of them came up the turnpike to Fort Wilkins sooner or later, because every one of them was thirsty, and I'm the only man in Merrimack County who sells honest spirit for dishonest money with a straight face.
♦ Coins jingle on a wooden counter
Wilkins: So here's the greenback story. A fellow comes in wearing a beaver hat tall enough to start its own weather and a waistcoat the color of a bruise. Smells of bay rum and lies. He asks for six jars, and he lays down a crisp new ten-dollar United States Note with Mr. Lincoln's face on the left, just like the real ones. Crisp. Too crisp. That's the first thing. A real bill in Pittsfield in 1864 had been through more hands than a church collection plate and was softer than a widow's handkerchief.
Wilkins: So I reached in my vest and took out my old friend, a 1798 large cent worn so smooth from seventy years in farmers' pockets you could about see through it. I put the cent on the counter beside the note and took out the little round glass I use to look for rot in a back molar. Here's the thing a metalsmith knows: a coin is struck by a steel die under a press, and even worn down to a ghost, what's left of Liberty's hair still has a clean edge where the metal was pushed. A real greenback is engraved by machine, that lacy lathe-work around the border, lines as fine as a spider's opinion, all crisp and even. Well, sir, under that glass my seventy-year-old cent had sharper lines than that ten-dollar bill. That bill had been printed so careless that Mr. Lincoln looked like he'd been drawn by a man with the palsy and a grudge.
Wilkins: Then I licked my thumb and rubbed the back. Green came right off on my skin like moss off a rock. I held up that green thumb in his face and said, 'Friend, Mr. Lincoln's ink stays where Mr. Lincoln puts it.'
Wilkins: He went white and reached for his coat, and I didn't wait to find out if it was a pistol or a handkerchief. I took him by the collar and the seat of the britches and walked him out the side door, which, as some of you know, is the door that opens on Barnaby.
♦ Bear roar, chain snapping taut, a man shrieking
Wilkins: Barnaby hadn't eaten since breakfast, and to a bear that's a famine. He stood up on his hind legs, and that's seven foot of black fur and breath like a tannery privy, and he took that beaver hat right off the man's head in one bite. Only the hat came with a good piece of the left ear, because the fellow had the hat jammed down tight to look taller. And I tell you, a bear eating an ear sounds just like a hog walking across a floor of soda crackers. Crunch, crunch, a little wet pop, and then a lick. The sharper was hollering and clapping his hand to the side of his head, blood running down his neck into that bruise-colored waistcoat, and Barnaby swallowed the ear, coughed up the hat, sniffed it, and ate the hat too, out of spite.
Wilkins: Now I'm a fair man. He owed me for my time. So while he was sitting in the dirt crying for his mother, I looked into his open, howling mouth and saw a fine gold crown on the upper left bicuspid. I had my forceps in my apron. I charged him the going rate for a tooth-pulling and paid myself in the tooth. One twist, a squeak like a gate hinge, and that gold was in my palm. I melted it down that night. Best payment I took all summer.
♦ Wilkins chuckles, a cup set down hard
Wilkins: Now the sergeant. The army sent a recruiting sergeant up to march our boys to the rendezvous at Concord. Big fellow, I'll call him Sergeant Thorne to spare his family, with a red beard and a voice like a bull moose with the croup. He'd been drinking with the recruits since noon, and by sundown he was drunk enough to see two of everything and pick a fight with both. He came lurching up to the fort, saw Barnaby lying on his woodchuck, and announced, for the honor of the regiment, that he'd box the bear. Three rounds, Marquess of nobody, bare knuckles.
Wilkins: Well, I didn't want to lose a sergeant. The paperwork alone would kill me. So I sat him down on a stump and told him about Hosea Pratt.
Wilkins: Hosea was a teamster from over in Gilmanton, built like a hogshead, who bet a whole jar he could put Barnaby on his back. Barnaby put Hosea on his back, then on his front, then in two directions at once, I'd swear to it before any magistrate. Hosea threw one punch, and Barnaby took his thumb off at the second knuckle. It sounded like somebody snapping a frozen carrot. Then Barnaby caught the waistband of his britches, gave his head a shake like a dog with a rat, and those britches came clean off, buttons flying like grapeshot. Hosea's britches came off in Barnaby's teeth and he ran home through Gilmanton Corners with his hind end shining like a church candle at Christmas. Barnaby kept that thumb a week and rolled it around in his mouth like a boy with a sugarplum he means to make last. Hosea counts to nine now and has a mighty hard time hitching a wagon.
Wilkins: The sergeant listened to all that, swaying like a birch in a gale, and said, 'I ain't afraid of no bear. A sergeant of the United States Army fears no living thing.' And it came to me. I said, 'Sergeant, I agree you ain't afraid. But you'd better know who you're fixing to strike. By authority of the Suncook Valley Volunteers, of which I'm the whole roster, Barnaby holds the brevet rank of colonel. You know what the Articles of War say about a sergeant striking a superior officer.' I gave Barnaby a brevet colonelcy on the spot, which makes him the only officer in the Union Army ever promoted for eating a teamster.
Wilkins: That sergeant's face worked like a churn. He stood up stiff as a ramrod, swayed, saluted Barnaby with the wrong hand, said 'Beg the colonel's pardon,' and fell face first into my manure pile, where he lost his supper in four separate courses. And Barnaby, God bless his filthy soul, ambled over to the end of his chain and licked that sergeant's whiskers clean as a dinner plate. The man woke at dawn with a clean face, a filthy uniform, and no memory at all, and marched our boys to Concord on time. The army never sent me a thank-you, and the colonel never got his pension.
♦ Bear grunt, satisfied
Wilkins: Now I've got a man in the studio who can hammer copper into anything but manners. He's built half the vessels in this foundry, and he has hands like a pair of anvils somebody taught to shake. Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister. Silas, welcome to the cylinder.
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Evening to everyone listening. I'll try not to hit the machine.
Wilkins: Silas, you were in town that bounty summer. What did all that money mean to a coppersmith?
Silas: Work, mostly. Men with cash want things made, and they want them by Thursday. I'll tell you about one. Young fellow from up the Barnstead road, I'll call him Amos, enlisted in the spring of '64. Came to the shop with two dollars of his bounty and asked if I could make him a canteen that would hold water in the front and rye in the back, so the sergeant would never smell it.
Wilkins: A two-chamber canteen. The boy had a head for engineering.
Silas: He had a head for rye. I made it out of sheet copper, two halves, a partition riveted and sweated in the middle. And I lined the rye side with tin, because I won't let spirit sit against bare copper for a month in a hot knapsack. It picks up a taste, and worse than a taste. Tinned copper is the old way, and the old way is right on that.
Wilkins: And did the canteen fight for the Union?
Silas: It did. Amos was in the works in front of Petersburg that summer. A Minie ball came over the parapet and hit him square in the hip, right on the canteen. It went in the rye side, through the tin and copper, and stopped flat against that inner partition. The rye ran out down his leg. He told his mother in a letter he thought it was blood and fainted, and when he woke up the whole trench smelled like a tavern and the lieutenant was asking where he got it.
Wilkins: That rye canteen took a Rebel ball for him, which is more than his own brother-in-law ever did.
Silas: He mailed it home to me to be mended. I set one copper rivet in the hole and sent it back, but he came home this spring and gave it to me. It hangs on the foundry wall by the door. I won't sell it for any money.
Wilkins: Speaking of money, Silas, you had a run-in with one of the brokers.
Silas: I did. A substitute broker out of Boston, fine coat, rings on every finger. He wanted a pot built fast, said he had a partner in Strafford County. He paid in gold dollars, little ones, a fistful of them, and they were the right color. But I've weighed metal all my life. You get a feel. They sat a little too light in the hand for gold.
Wilkins: And a smith trusts his hand before he trusts a Boston coat.
Silas: So I set one on my brass balance against a gold dollar I knew was good. Gold is mighty heavy metal, Doctor, heavier than lead by a good piece. A gold dollar is near twice as dense as lead. His coin rose up on that pan like a cork. Then I put a file to the edge, one stroke, and there was the gray underneath. Lead, with a skin of gilt over it thin as a fly's wing.
Wilkins: Gilded lead is like a revenue man's smile: bright on top, heavy in the gut, and gray as a grave once you scratch it.
Silas: I gave him back his coins, all of them, and I told him to leave. I didn't have a bear. I had a four-pound planishing hammer in my hand and I didn't put it down. He left.
Wilkins: Ha! Now tell them about the jumper in the pot. I've heard it, and I want the county to hear it.
Silas: Well. In the fall of '64 the provost marshal's men were hunting a bounty jumper through these hills. He'd taken town money from three different towns that we know of. The night before they came by, I came into the foundry and found the cover sitting a little crooked on a forty-gallon pot I was finishing. I lifted it a crack and there he was, curled up in the bottom like a dog in a barrel.
Wilkins: And you didn't turn him in.
Silas: I didn't say a word. I put the cover back, took my planishing hammer, and went to work on the outside of that pot, which needed doing anyway. Tap, tap, tap, every blow even, all the way around the belly and up the shoulder. Copper carries sound beautifully, Doctor. Inside a pot, every blow is a cannon. I kept at it most of an hour, steady as a clock.
♦ Rhythmic hammer blows on copper, ringing and reverberating
Silas: About the fiftieth minute the cover flew off and he climbed out with his hands over his ears, eyes rolling, tears running. He said, 'Mister, I'll go back. I'll go back to the regiment. Just stop.' When the marshal's men came at noon he was sitting on my bench waiting for them, and he thanked them.
Wilkins: Silas played that bounty jumper like a church bell, and he came out of the pot with religion, a ringing head, and no further interest in desertion. Silas, stay with us. Folks, don't touch that dial. Not that you've got a dial. I'm not sure what you've got.
♪ Banjo flourish into ad break
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
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♪ Brassy patent-medicine fanfare, then fiddle return
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, slow drip into jar
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the Craft, or what to do when half the county wants a jar by Saturday.
Wilkins: Mind you first, neighbors: distilling spirits without the government's license is against the law of these United States, and everything I say tonight is for history and learning, not for your woodshed. Now. That bounty summer, every jar in Merrimack County sold the minute it cooled. And when demand runs that hot, lazy makers cut corners, and in this trade the corners they cut are a man's eyes and a man's life. So let me tell you how it's done honest. Silas, keep me truthful.
Silas: I'll try, Doctor. It's work.
Wilkins: The mash. Call it Pay-Day Mash, in honor of our boys. Start with cracked corn and good water, and cook it at a near-boil a good long while, stirring so it doesn't scorch, until it's thick as county gravy. That cooking breaks the corn's starch open. But starch ain't sugar, and yeast can't eat starch any more than Barnaby can eat a Bible, and he's tried.
♦ Bear grunt
Wilkins: So you let the pot cool to about a hundred and fifty degrees, too hot to hold your hand in, and stir in malted barley, roughly one part malt to five of corn. In the malt is a ferment the French chemists Payen and Persoz named diastase back in '33, and it turns starch into sugar right before your eyes. Hold it warm an hour or so. You can test it the way a chemist would: put a drop of the liquor on a white saucer and add a drop of tincture of iodine. If it turns blue-black, there's still starch in it. If it stays brown, the sugar's made.
Silas: Then you cool it all the way down.
Wilkins: To blood-warm, under ninety. Pitch your yeast, good brewer's barm, and set it somewhere warm with a door open, because fermenting mash breathes out a gas that will smother a man in a closed cellar. Four days to a week and you've got a sour, beery wash. Then it goes to the still.
Wilkins: Now copper. In the old books of the alchemists, copper is the metal of Venus, the goddess of love, and she has earned the name, because nothing in this world loves rotten-egg sulfur like copper does. The vapor climbs up the still carrying a stink of sulfur, and copper grabs it and keeps it on its own skin, and what comes out the worm is sweeter. Silas, tell them what that does to a pot.
Silas: It takes from the pot as it gives to the spirit. You'll see the inside go dark, black and blue and sometimes green. That's the copper doing its work, and it has to be scrubbed off after every run so there's bright metal under the next vapor. I use hot water, salt, and vinegar, and a stiff brush, then a rinse till the water runs clear. And I'll mention, since the Doctor likes news, there's an English smith named Elkington who's patented a way to refine copper with a galvanic current this very year. Purer copper than any of us have hammered. Lead and arsenic and other filth in cheap metal ruin spirit and poison men, so mark my words, that process will matter.
Wilkins: Now the cuts. Here is where I get serious, and you'll know I'm serious because I'll go a whole minute without insulting anybody. First run is the stripping run: you take everything that comes off the wash, fast, to make low wines. Second run is the spirit run, and you run it slow on a gentle fire. The first spill out of the worm on that second run is the foreshots, and it stinks of shellac thinner and turpentine. Throw it out. Every drop. Don't drink it, don't sell it, don't rub it on your gums. Next come the heads, harsh, sharp, smelling of bruised apples and varnish. They carry the worst of the poison spirits, and you set them aside away from anything you'll drink. Then the hearts come, and you'll know them. Sweet, clean, smelling of the grain. That's your spirit. Last come the tails, oily and flat, smelling like wet wool and old dishwater. Set them aside for another run.
Silas: Use small jars, Doctor. Tell them that.
Wilkins: Yes. Catch the run in a row of small jars, not one big crock, so you can smell each one and make your cut honest. Here's where the poison comes from. The wood spirit, methanol the chemists call it, comes mostly from the pectin in fruit skins and pulp. That's why a careless apple brandy can be meaner than a corn whiskey. And during that bounty summer there were sharpers keeping their heads in the jar to stretch it out, selling it to boys with paper money and no sense. Heads are like a bounty broker's promise: they smell sweet up front and leave you blind by Thursday. I have pulled teeth from men who went blind from bad liquor, and believe me, they couldn't see the forceps coming, which was the only mercy in it.
Wilkins: And fire. The spirit is as flammable as lamp oil, and the vapor is worse. Never leave a still unattended. Never let a leaking joint weep vapor near an open flame. Keep a pail of sand and a pail of water by the door, and keep your fire low and steady. I've seen a still-house in this county go up like a Fourth of July bonfire because some fool sealed his joint with flour paste and went to the privy.
Silas: An honest joint, a low fire, and a nose you trust. That's the craft.
Wilkins: Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, ladies and gentlemen. Best hands in the Suncook Valley, and the only man I know who can hammer a deserter back into the army.
Silas: Thank you, Doctor. Mind the bear on my way out.
Wilkins: He likes you. You don't smell like a sheriff.
♪ Fiddle reel bridge
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, slang, and the mail. This here is a speaking cylinder sent all the way from the Carolina hills, from Wilkesboro on the Yadkin River in Wilkes County, North Carolina, where I hear a good many men spent the war hiding in the Brushy Mountains from both armies, and God love them for it. Let's hear it.
♦ Cylinder change, hiss and scratch of a recorded message
Cletus: 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?
♦ Recording clicks off
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller! Rabbit, you're a man after my own heart, which is a short trip, since my heart is located about where my liver used to be. I'm going to answer you with two things your uncle never had, chemistry and an anvil. And every time I tell you a truth, I'll strike you a coin.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Truth number one: hickory ash is mostly potash, lye, the same stuff your grandmother leached through a barrel of ashes to make soft soap and to skin the hulls off hominy. Lye is alkaline. It'll fight some of the sourness of acid, and it'll take the hide off your knuckles. But the poison in bad heads is wood spirit, and wood spirit doesn't care what you throw in after it. It boils off early in the run, and the only way to get rid of it is to catch it in the first jars and throw it out. And put enough hickory ash and tails oil in your keg and you won't make whiskey, you'll make soap, which at least will wash your conscience.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Truth number two, red oak. Here's something every cooper in New England knows. Red oak is full of open pores, long hollow tubes from end to end. Take a short stick of red oak, put one end in a glass of water, blow on the other end, and the water bubbles. Red oak is so full of holes you could blow a cigar through a fence post and get the post drunk. That's why no honest cooper makes a whiskey barrel from red oak. It leaks like a deputy's alibi. White oak has its pores stopped up with little growths the botanists call tyloses, so it holds liquor tight. That's why the barrels are white oak.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Truth number three. Where did your uncle get the notion? Oak does change spirit, but it does it slowly, over months and years in a charred barrel, giving it color and a vanilla sweetness. Shavings in a thump keg get a few minutes with the vapor. They might lend a whiff of wood, but they won't clean a bad head any more than a new hat cleans a dirty neck. So your uncle wasn't making swamp medicine exactly. He was making swamp perfume. Bless him anyway. Any man who tinkers is halfway to an alchemist.
Wilkins: And since we're busting myths, here's one that's killed more men than Barnaby ever thought about. The blue flame. Old-timers would pour a spoonful in a saucer, set it alight, and say, 'Lead burns red and makes you dead. Blue is true.' Horse manure. That flame tells you how strong the spirit is and not one damned thing about lead. Lead in a jar doesn't paint the flame any color you can trust. And wood spirit burns blue too, pale and almost invisible, prettier than any whiskey. You could burn pure poison in a saucer and get a blue flame as lovely as a choir girl's ribbon. A man who judges his spirit by the color of the flame is the same man who judges a wife by the color of her bonnet, and he deserves what he gets from both. Clean copper, no lead solder, honest cuts. That's your only test.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, then a second, heavier strike
Wilkins: There. Rabbit, I've just struck a large cent with G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. for you, and it's going in the post to Wilkesboro. Show it to your uncle, and tell him the next time he throws ashes in his keg, throw a little on his own head too, for repentance. God bless Wilkes County and the whole Yadkin Valley.
♪ Banjo picks up, gentle
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♪ Theme returns with antique warmth
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Well, neighbors, the jar's near full, the lamp's near empty, and Barnaby is snoring like a sawmill on a slow day. If tonight lit a fire in your belly, and I mean a gentle one, kept low, come learn the craft proper in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you copper, mash, fire, and cuts the way they ought to be taught: honest, careful, and lawful, with the history in it and the poison out of it. Bring your questions and your best manners, and leave your counterfeit tens at home, because the colonel is hungry.
Wilkins: To our boys who took the bounty and went south, the ones who came home and the ones who didn't: we drink to you, and we pour a little on the ground. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme fades into wax cylinder crackle and silence