The Enrolled Men and the Whiskey Jug: Pittsfield's Draft Day of 1863
In the summer of 1863 the Civil War draft wheel turned in Concord, and outside the provost marshal's office a thirsty crowd passed the moonshine jug as every name was read. Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, a Pittsfield, New Hampshire dentist, blacksmith and copper still man, tells the history of the Enrollment Act, the $300 commutation fee and the scramble for substitutes, and recalls the week forty draft-dodgers turned up in his dental chair with sudden front-tooth trouble. There are also tales of a substitute who kept deserting back to his still, a widow's still hidden in a coffin box, and some plain thump keg distilling advice.
In this episode
- Enrollment Act of March 1863 and how the Civil War draft worked
- The draft wheel, the blindfolded drawing, and the $300 commutation fee
- Hiring substitutes and the 'rich man's war, poor man's fight' anger
- Draft-day crowd and moonshine jugs outside the provost marshal's office in Concord, NH
- Why missing front teeth could get a soldier out of service: biting paper cartridges
- Captain Donald Vance: a deserting substitute, a widow's still hidden in a coffin box, and lamp-soot blacked teeth
- Call-in: hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg for Wilkesboro, NC
- Why the old blue-flame proof test is wrong, told over the blacksmith's anvil
Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins covers the Enrollment Act of March 1863: the draft wheel, the $300 commutation fee, the rush for substitutes, and the thirsty crowd outside the provost marshal's office in Concord. He also describes the week Pittsfield men lined up at his dental chair with front-tooth troubles they had never had before. Captain Donald Vance tells new stories of a substitute who kept deserting back to his still, a widow's still hidden in a coffin box, and a draftee who blacked his teeth with lamp soot. In the call-in segment Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, then debunks the old blue-flame test while stamping coins on his anvil.
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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. Get your snout off that window sash. You have been licking that same pane of glass since Tuesday, and there is nothing behind it but me, and I am not on the menu tonight, you overstuffed fur rug with a grudge. Lie down. LIE DOWN. Good. There is a ham bone in it for you if you hold your peace until the fiddle stops.
♦ Bear grunts once, chain drags across the porch planks and goes slack
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then settling under the voice
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and you sober citizens who were listening by accident. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, and twice the guest of the Merrimack County sheriff. Tonight we are going back two summers to the most nervous season this valley ever had, the summer of '63, when Washington put every man's name in a wheel and turned the crank. We call it 'The Enrolled Men and the Whiskey Jug: Pittsfield's Draft Day of 1863.' There will be draft wheels, three-hundred-dollar men, substitutes who could not stay put, and a parade of Pittsfield cowards in my dental chair, all suddenly struck by a disease of the front teeth. Keep your jar handy and your teeth where they are.
♪ Theme fades with a final banjo roll
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Do you crave the secret knowledge of the copper kettle? The Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course is enrolling now: eight weeks of history, heat, and honest cuts. Step right up to moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com, and claim your seat before the doors swing shut!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a log settles in the stove
♪ Short fiddle sting, segment transition
Wilkins: Segment the first. History. Draw your chair up to the stove.
Wilkins: On the third day of March, 1863, Mr. Lincoln signed a law called the Enrollment Act. Before that the Union filled its regiments the old way: bounties, brass bands, pretty girls waving handkerchiefs, and a recruiting sergeant buying the drinks. By the spring of '63, after Fredericksburg had been fed to the grave, the handkerchiefs were not working anymore. So Congress said, in effect, we will not ask you, we will count you.
Wilkins: Every male citizen from twenty to forty-five was to be enrolled, along with any foreign-born man who had sworn he meant to become a citizen. Every able man from twenty to forty-five, which in Pittsfield means every man who can find his own boots before noon. They split the men into two classes. Class One took every man from twenty to thirty-five, and the unmarried ones from thirty-five to forty-five. Class Two was the married men over thirty-five, who were to be called only after Class One was used up. Now I ask you: what kind of government thinks a married man of forty has less to live for? A government of bachelors, that is what kind.
Wilkins: Every congressional district got a provost marshal, and with him a board of enrollment: the provost marshal, a commissioner, and a surgeon. Ours sat in Concord. Then came the enrolling officers, poor clerks with an ink bottle on a string around their necks, sent down every road in the county, door to door, writing down every man's name, age, trade, and whether he was married. You never saw a valley so full of men claiming to be forty-six, or so many bachelors who suddenly discovered a wife living somewhere vague over in Vermont.
Wilkins: Here is where it gets interesting, and expensive. A drafted man had three ways out besides a bad leg or a good lie. He could go. He could hire a substitute, some other fellow who would carry the musket in his place, and that excused him for the substitute's whole enlistment. Or he could pay the Government three hundred dollars in commutation, and that excused him from that one draft only, mind you, so he might be drawn again next time. Three hundred dollars. That was about what a laborer in the Pittsfield mills earned in a year if he never missed a day and never bought a drink, and I have not met that man. Three hundred dollars buys a man out of the war, which is the first time in history a Yankee paid full price for anything.
Wilkins: You can guess what the laboring men said about it. 'A rich man's war and a poor man's fight,' they called it, and they were not wrong. Down in New York in July of that same year it turned to blood in the streets. Here in New Hampshire the towns did what Yankees do. They held a town meeting, argued until the lamp oil ran out, and voted bounties and subscriptions so the town would fill its quota with volunteers and keep its own boys home. Congress finally threw out the commutation fee for most men in July of '64, after a year of everyone hating it.
Wilkins: Now the drawing. They wrote each enrolled name on a slip, rolled the slips up, dropped them into a wheel, a big wooden drum on an axle like a butter churn that had gone to college, and turned it. Then they brought out a man, tied a blindfold over his eyes so no one could cry favoritism, and had him reach in and pull names out one at a time while a clerk read them to the crowd. The draft wheel was the only honest gambling table in Merrimack County, and it paid out in muskets.
♦ Wooden drum creaking as it turns, paper slips rustling
Wilkins: And outside the provost marshal's office in Concord, neighbors, the crowd. I rode up on draft day with two jugs under the wagon seat, purely for medicinal purposes, as the honest man always says. There were farmers from Loudon and Chichester, mill hands from Suncook, boys from Epsom with straw in their hair, and every one of them as dry as a Shaker's joke book. Men went in pale and came out either white or whooping. Every time the clerk read a name you could hear a jug cork pop somewhere in the crowd, either to celebrate or to grieve, and the cork made the same sound either way.
Wilkins: I stood on the wagon tongue and watched one big lummox from Barnstead hear his own name and faint dead away, straight backward. He hit the boardwalk like a dropped side of beef, his hat rolled into the gutter, and a dog took it. When he came to he asked whether he had been shot already. I told him not yet, son, but you have been enrolled, which is the same thing on a delay.
♦ Wax crackle, Barnaby shifts and grumbles outside
Wilkins: But the real trouble came to Fort Wilkins the week before the drawing. Word had got around, from what lawyer I do not know, that the examining surgeon would throw out any man who had lost so many teeth that he could not chew his rations or tear a cartridge. You see, neighbors, the infantryman's cartridge is a little paper tube of powder with the ball in one end. You bite the end off, pour the powder down the barrel, and spit out the paper. To do that you need upper and lower front teeth that meet like a pair of tongs. A man with no front teeth cannot bite a cartridge, and a man who cannot bite a cartridge cannot load a musket, and a man who cannot load a musket is of no use to the Union except as a tall target.
Wilkins: So in one week I had forty men in my chair, all swearing their front teeth had ached since boyhood, and not one of them had complained of a toothache until the Government learned to read. Strong young fellows with teeth like a row of new piano keys, sitting there moaning, pointing at their incisors and saying, 'That one, Doc. And that one. And that one underneath.' A man who will pay me to pull two good teeth so he cannot bite a cartridge is a man who has thought hard about the war and decided it tastes bad.
Wilkins: Young Ebenezer from up the Barnstead road came in with a rag tied around his jaw like a Christmas pudding. I unwrapped him, tapped every tooth with the steel, and he did not flinch once until I got to his wallet. I diagnosed him with acute patriotism of the gums, and told him the only cure was going home and chewing his own dinner like a man. He cried. Grown man, cried in my chair, then asked if I had anything to make the crying stop. I sold him a cup of the clear for ten cents and he went home to think about the Republic.
Wilkins: I will be honest with you, as honest as a man can be who has been in court twice. I pulled teeth that were rotten, and there were plenty, because this valley rinses its mouth with cider and has never once owned a toothbrush. A tooth that was black and loose and stinking, I took, and if that kept a man home, God and the provost marshal could argue it out. But a sound tooth I would not pull for a draft card, not for two dollars, not for ten. I have my professional pride. Besides, any fool who pulls a good tooth for money is no better than a substitute broker, and a substitute broker is a dentist for the conscience: he pulls out what troubles you and charges you for the hole.
♪ Brief banjo interlude
♪ Fiddle sting, segment transition
Wilkins: Segment the second. Legends, outlaws, and runners. Before I bring on my guest, let me tell you how the enrolling officer came to Fort Wilkins.
Wilkins: It was a June morning in '63, hot as the hinges of perdition. Down the Turnpike comes a clerk named, well, I shall not say, for his family is respectable and he has suffered enough. Thin fellow, linen duster, tin ink bottle around his neck on a string, ledger under one arm, and a little paper of salt herring in his coat pocket for his dinner. Barnaby smelled that herring from the Suncook bridge.
Wilkins: The clerk knocks, and I call through the log window that I am occupied with an apparatus. He is a curious man, God help him, so instead of waiting he leans his whole arm in through the open window, past the sash, past the jug on the sill, and asks what is in the jug. Now the whole porch was in Barnaby's reach, neighbors, and the window was over that porch.
♦ Chain snaps taut, a deep bear huff
Wilkins: Barnaby did not roar. That is what people get wrong about bears. A bear that means business does not roar. He made a little wet click with his jaw, like a man opening a snuff box, and took that clerk's arm at the elbow, sleeve and all, very gently, the way a hound takes a quail. The clerk made a noise I have heard only once before, from a pig at Christmas. Then Barnaby leaned back. Four hundred pounds of bear leaning back, and you could hear the shoulder seam of that linen duster go, pop, pop, pop, every stitch one after the other like a string of firecrackers. The sleeve came off whole. The clerk was still inside the coat, and the coat was still mostly on the clerk, and Barnaby set about the coat-tail.
Wilkins: The coat-tail had the herring pocket. Barnaby buried his face in that pocket with a sound like a man drinking soup through a mustache, and he ate the herring, the paper, the lining, a pencil stub, and, I am sorry to say, most of the seat of the man's trousers, which had got pinned under the coat. His suspenders snapped, one, two, and I heard the second buckle ring off the stove pipe. The ledger fell in the dust. Barnaby sniffed it, it smelled of herring through the coat, and he ate the ledger too, binding and all, chewing with his mouth open, ink running black down his chin like he had been drinking from the clerk's own bottle.
Wilkins: When I got out the door the clerk was hanging off the porch rail by one hand, white as a boiled egg and bare to the breeze in the back, and Barnaby was sitting there like a deacon after supper, belching up herring and ink. Barnaby enrolled himself that summer by eating the enroller's ledger, which is more than most Pittsfield men did voluntarily. That enrolling officer came for one name and left without a sleeve, a coat-tail, a pocket of salt herring, or any further interest in the census. And here is the dentist's postscript: he had cracked a front tooth on the window sill on his way out. I pulled it for free. When the draft came he was rejected for want of front teeth. He wrote me a thank-you note. Barnaby ate that too.
♦ Barnaby grunts, contented
Wilkins: Now, friends, my guest tonight is a man who has spent his life on the other side of the law from me and somehow come out of it with his sense of humor whole and his hat on straight. He has climbed more frozen ravines after copper than any man in New England. Please welcome Captain Donald Vance, revenue man, retired, of Manchester. Captain, sit down, mind the bear, and do not take anything off the window sill.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. I took one look at that window sill on my way in and decided my arms were too fond of each other to be parted.
Wilkins: Wise. Captain, you were working the hill country in '63. What did draft summer look like to a revenue man?
Captain: Like a fox hunt, Doctor, where all the foxes had a still. Draft summer was the busiest season I ever saw. A man who might be marched off to Virginia in the autumn did not care much about the Treasury's two dollars a gallon in July. He wanted his money in his hand, quick, and spirit was the quickest money in the hills. And every substitute broker in Concord was buying men like hogs.
Wilkins: Tell us about the brokers. I have opinions, but I want yours.
Captain: There was one I will not name, Doctor, a fellow with a checked waistcoat and a voice like warm molasses, who kept a table at a Concord tavern. A drafted farmer would come in sweating, and this broker would say, 'I have a stout young man who will go in your place, for a fee.' Well, one autumn I was hunting a still up in the hills past Warner, and I came on a cabin with smoke in the wrong place, as we say. Inside, sitting on a mash barrel feeding his fire, was a long-jawed young fellow in a Union blouse.
Wilkins: A deserter.
Captain: Three times over, Doctor. That broker had sold him as a substitute three separate times to three separate farmers. Each time the boy enlisted, took his bounty, waited for a dark night, and walked home over the hills to his still, because, as he told me, 'Captain, the mash don't stir itself.' I took off his hat to see if he had a fever and found three bounties' worth of greenbacks sewn into the hat band, folded flat as a shingle.
Wilkins: Captain, you could wring that hat band out and fund a regiment. What did you do with him?
Captain: The desertion was the Army's business, and I sent word to the provost marshal. The still was mine. I broke it, and I will say this for the boy, it was a tidy little pot, hand-riveted, and he wept over it more than he ever wept over the Union. The broker I could not touch. He moved to Boston and, I am told, went into the insurance trade, which suited him.
♦ Wilkins slaps the table, laughing
Wilkins: The insurance trade. Of course he did. Tell me another, Captain. The enrollment canvass. Those clerks with the ink bottles.
Captain: Ah. Now this one I tell with my hat in my hand. Hillsborough County, summer of '63. An enrolling officer, a young clerk, came to a widow's farmhouse to write down her son's name. The widow met him at the door in full black crepe, eyes red, and led him into the front parlor. In the middle of the parlor, on two sawhorses, was a long pine box shaped like a coffin, a candle burning on the lid and a sprig of rosemary on top. She said, very low, 'My boy's uncle. Taken Tuesday.' That clerk took off his hat, mumbled his sorrows, wrote down the son's name and nothing else, and backed out of the house like a man leaving a cathedral.
Wilkins: And there was no uncle in the box.
Captain: There was no uncle within forty miles, Doctor. There was a twenty-gallon copper pot, a worm coiled up in the foot end, and a jug of hearts packed in sawdust where the head should go. I learned of it that winter, and here is how. A neighbor wrote to my office: 'Sir, the widow's coffin is dripping.' Well, a coffin that drips in a cold parlor in January is not a coffin. I went out, I knocked, the widow met me in her crepe, and I said, 'Madam, I have come to pay my respects to the uncle.' She looked at me a long while and said, 'You had better take him then, he is no use to me if folk know.' I carted that coffin to Manchester on a sled with the candle still on it. Every man I passed on the road took his hat off.
Wilkins: Ha! A funeral procession for a still. Captain, you have made my evening. Now, the teeth. I told my listeners about my chair. Did you see any of that up in the Green Mountains?
Captain: I saw the finest piece of tooth-fraud in the history of the Republic, Doctor. I was in a Vermont town on examination day, waiting on a man I had business with, and I sat in the hall while the surgeon examined the drafted men. One young fellow walks in, opens his mouth wide, and where his front teeth ought to be there is nothing, a black gap like a barn door at midnight. 'Lost 'em to a mule, sir,' he says.
Wilkins: Pull the other one.
Captain: That is precisely what the surgeon did, Doctor, in a manner of speaking. That surgeon had been examining men since breakfast and had seen every trick in the almanac. He took a rag, wet it from a flask in his bag, and gave that boy's front teeth one good rub. The black came off on the rag, lamp soot and molasses, and the teeth came out of the dark like a sunrise over Lake Champlain, white as a church. The surgeon smelled the rag, nodded, and said, 'Fit for duty. And the soot is fit for my lamp.' The boy asked whether he could at least keep the molasses.
♦ Wilkins laughs, a chair creaks
Wilkins: Lamp soot and molasses. I have pulled four thousand teeth and never thought of that. I am almost ashamed. What was in the flask?
Captain: Whiskey, Doctor. The surgeon said whiskey was the only thing in Vermont that would cut molasses and a lie at the same time.
Wilkins: Captain, one more before I let you go. You were in Concord on draft day yourself?
Captain: I was, Doctor, outside the provost office, and I will tell you the cleverest piece of commerce I ever saw. A tavern keeper had rolled a barrel onto the boardwalk with a tin dipper on a chain. Above the barrel on one side he had chalked 'COURAGE, five cents,' and on the other side, 'CONSOLATION, five cents.' He sold courage by the dipper to the men going in and consolation by the dipper to the men coming out, both drawn from the very same barrel. I watched one man buy courage, go in, get drawn, come out, and buy consolation, and he swore to me the consolation was smoother.
Wilkins: The only man in Concord who made money on both sides of the draft was the fellow with the dipper, and he never once had to tear a cartridge. Captain, did you seize the barrel?
Captain: I checked his license, Doctor. It was in order. So I bought a dipper of consolation myself and went home. Some days the law is a fence, and some days it is only a place to lean.
Wilkins: Captain Donald Vance, ladies and gentlemen. Stern as a Granite State winter and twice as warm when the stove is lit. Stay for a dipper, Captain, but sit on the other side of the room from the window.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. I have kept my arms for sixty years, and I intend to be buried with both of them.
♪ Fiddle sting rising into a jaunty pitchman's banjo rag
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♪ Banjo rag ends with a flourish
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, the slow drip into the jar returns
♪ Fiddle sting, segment transition
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft. I have spent half this evening talking about men who wanted to keep their front teeth out of a war. Let us talk about the one place where a man truly needs his nose and his patience: the cuts. And tonight, in honor of the draft, I am going to call the cuts by name the way a clerk calls the draft roll, one by one, and tell you who gets sent home and who gets kept.
Wilkins: First, the mash. Whatever went into your wash, corn, rye, or apples, it was cooked, cooled, given yeast, and left to work into a sour, beery liquor of a few parts in a hundred spirit. A still does not make spirit, mind you. It only gathers up what the yeast already made, the way a provost marshal does not make soldiers, he only collects them.
Wilkins: Here is my draft-summer rye and corn, the one I ran that hot July. For a fifty-gallon tub I take about thirty pounds of cracked corn and cook it in clean spring water until it thickens like porridge. When it has cooled enough that I can hold my knuckle in it, I stir in about ten pounds of ground rye and a few pounds of good malted barley, for the malt is what turns the starch to sugar. I stir it like I owe it money, let it cool to blood-warm, about as warm as a man's wrist, then pitch in a strong yeast, cover it with a cloth, and keep it out of the draft, the weather kind, not the Government kind. In five or six days, when the bubbling quiets and the cap falls and it tastes sour and dry instead of sweet, it is ready for the kettle.
Wilkins: Now the run, and the safety, and I want you to listen to this part as if your eyesight depends on it, because it does. Heat comes up slow and steady. Never hurry the fire. A pot driven too hard will puke, that is to say boil over, and send mash up into the cap and the worm, and you will have a foul run, or worse, a blocked worm and a burst joint spraying hot vapor onto an open flame. Spirit vapor burns. A still-house is a powder magazine with a chimney.
Wilkins: The first spirit out of the worm is the foreshots. Pure methanol boils at about one hundred forty-eight degrees by Mr. Fahrenheit's scale, and ethanol, the good spirit, at about one hundred seventy-three. In a real kettle of wash they do not leave in two neat bunches like a regiment marching in file. But the methanol and the sharpest vapors crowd up to the front of the run, so the first jars carry the most of it. Foreshots go on the ground, or in the lamp, but never down a throat. I throw away at least a full cup from every five gallons of wash in the pot, and more if I am in doubt, because I would rather lose a dollar than a customer's sight.
Wilkins: And here is the thing every apple-man in New England needs to hear. Fruit makes more methanol than grain does. The pectin in the apple, the stuff your wife boils to set her jelly, breaks down in the fermenting into methanol. So your cider brandy, your pear, your grape-skin spirit all carry a heavier load of poison up front than a good corn and rye. A brandy man must be more generous with his cuts, not less. More than one old-timer who swore by the apple went blind by the apple.
Wilkins: After the foreshots come the heads. They smell like a cabinet-maker's shop: varnish, glue, sharp lacquer, the stuff the chemists call acetone and ethyl acetate. Put a drop on your palm, rub your hands, and smell. If it bites your nose like a deputy's dog, it is heads, and it is not yet sent off to the hearts jar.
Wilkins: Then, friends, the hearts. When the smell goes sweet and round, like warm grain, like bread crust, like clean apple, that is the hearts, the able men of the run, fit for service. You keep them.
Wilkins: Last come the tails, when the spirit turns oily and flat and smells like wet cardboard or a damp wool sock left behind a stove. Tails are not poison like foreshots, but they are poor company. You set them aside, and a thrifty man saves them to run again with the next batch.
Wilkins: My rule is the old enrolling officer's rule: do not trust one big book, keep a page for every man. Collect your run in many small jars, a row of twenty or thirty, numbered in order on the shelf. When the run is done, let them stand open a few hours to breathe, then go down the line with your nose, jar by jar. You will find where the heads truly end and the tails truly begin far better than you ever could standing over the worm in the heat, half-drunk on fumes. Blend only the true hearts. Send the rest home.
Wilkins: And never forget, I have said it until my beard went gray: the cuts are the only thing that takes the poison out. No charm, no sermon, no copper, no wishing.
Wilkins: A word on the law, since the Captain is still sitting in my kitchen. Making spirit for drinking without the Government's permission is against the law of the United States. Everything I tell you on this program is history and education, offered so you understand what your grandfathers did and why the careful ones lived longer. If you want to do it yourself, get a permit, as dull as that sounds.
♦ Drip into the jar slows, Barnaby sighs heavily
♪ Fiddle sting, segment transition
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, slang, and the mail bag. Tonight we have a talking cylinder from far down south, sent up the coast to Fort Wilkins. Let me wind the machine.
♦ Crank winding, needle drop, heavy cylinder hiss
Wilkins: This is Cletus Miller, known to his kin as 'Rabbit,' from Wilkesboro in North Carolina. Rabbit says, and I read from the card in his own hand: '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, a fine question from a fine country, and you tell your uncle Wilkins of Pittsfield sends his respects and his sympathy. Let us take this apart the way I take apart a bad tooth: root, crown, and bill.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: The root first: the ashes. Hickory ash is not cleaning powder, Rabbit, it is potash. It is the very same stuff every farm wife in Merrimack County soaks in her ash-hopper to leach out lye, and boils with fat to make soft soap. Pitch a shovel of that into a thump keg full of hot low wines and fusel oils, and do you know what you get? A keg of foam. A frothing, slippery, soapy mess that can boil up and over into your worm and give your whole run the flavor of a washtub on a Monday. Rabbit, ashes in a thump keg will give you soap, and a man who drinks soap at least dies clean.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the crown: the red oak shavings. Here your uncle is not entirely a liar, and I will give him his due, as I gave the Captain's broker his. Oak in the thump keg, like a handful of peaches or apples that some of the Carolina boys throw in, will lend the vapor a little color, a little tannin, a little perfume as it bubbles through. That is seasoning, Rabbit. It is the parsley on the plate. It does not touch the heads. A bad head goes into that keg poison and comes out poison wearing an oak-leaf hat.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And the bill: how you truly clean out bad heads. Slow fire, small jars, an honest nose, and a strong arm to throw away what smells like varnish, even when it hurts your purse. That is all there is. So yes, Rabbit, your uncle is making swamp medicine, but at least it is a clean-smelling, soapy swamp. Shout-out to you, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller, and to every soul in Wilkesboro, a town that has forgotten more about a copper pot than most of New Hampshire ever learned. Keep listening, Rabbit, and keep your uncle away from the ash-hopper.
♦ Cylinder needle lifts, hiss stops
Wilkins: Now, since I have the anvil warm, one more old myth for the fire: the blue flame. You have all seen it at a husking bee. Some old fellow pours a spoonful of spirit, puts a match to it, and says, 'Burns blue, it's pure. Burns yellow, there's trouble. Burns red, there's lead in your worm.' And everybody nods like it was scripture.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Hogwash, all of it. Burning a spoonful proves one thing only: the spirit is strong enough to burn. That is all. Here is the cruel joke of it. Methanol, the blinding stuff, burns with a pale blue flame you can scarcely see by daylight, the same as good spirit does. So the spoon that 'burns pure' may be full of foreshots. And as for lead, a little dissolved lead from a bad joint will not paint your flame red like a Fourth of July rocket. You could be holding poison in a spoon and a match and smiling about it. A blue flame proves your spirit will burn, and so will a deputy's warrant, and neither one proves it is fit to swallow. If a flame could detect a liar, every courthouse in New Hampshire would be lit up like the Fourth of July.
Wilkins: The only test that counts is the one you do before the spirit ever reaches the spoon: honest cuts, clean copper, and no lead anywhere in the works.
♦ Final steel punch clangs on copper coin, coin rings as it drops into a tin
Wilkins: There. One more cent for the collection: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. I have been drafted by the Government, fined by the county, and bitten by my own bear, and the bear is the only one who apologized.
♦ Barnaby grunts, as if in disagreement
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! The Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course is waiting for you: thirty hours of history, copper, and honest cuts. Go now to moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com, and enroll before the wheel turns without you!
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns softly
Wilkins: Well, neighbors, that is our evening. Two summers ago this valley lined up at the draft wheel, lined up at my dental chair, and lined up at the dipper, and I am not ashamed to say I made a living on two of the three. Some of the boys who were drawn that summer came home, and some sleep in Virginia, and every one of them is owed a drink and a kind word, so raise your jar to them tonight. My thanks to Captain Donald Vance for his coffins and his soot. My thanks to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro. And if you want to learn this craft properly, from the history down to the last jar of hearts, the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course is open for enrollment, and the Announcer has told you three times where to find it, so I will not insult you with a fourth.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme closes on a single fiddle note, wax cylinder crackle fades to silence