The Soldiers' Home Furlough: What Wounded Men Brought Back to Pittsfield in 1863
Wilkins tells of the wounded New Hampshire men who came home up the Suncook Valley on furlough in 1863. He covers what they brought with them: camp-carved trinkets, army whiskey slang, quinine-laced whiskey rations, and festering jaw wounds he dug out with forceps. He also tells how those men changed Pittsfield's mind about the war and the twenty-cent liquor tax. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance brings three new stories of furloughed soldiers turned distillers: a sloshing crutch, a still soldered with melted Minie balls that poisoned a man's mother, and an ox team that knew Hardee's Tactics. In the call-in, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and Wilkins answers with the history of New Hampshire potash and the open grain of red oak. He also knocks down the old story that army surgeons sawed without chloroform.
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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! Settle your carcass down. That's no revenue man at the gate, that's the widow's nanny goat, and she's got more sense than to step inside your circle of chain. Lie down, you great fur-bottomed sinner, before I pull your eyeteeth for the practice.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen ground, a heavy thump as four hundred pounds of bear drops onto a woodpile
Wilkins: That's the sound of the finest law officer in Merrimack County retiring for the evening. He takes no bribes and he keeps no notes, and he's the only constable who ever left a whole deputy in his belly and no evidence.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, Methodists and all of you somewhere in between. 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 am Dr. George G. Wilkins, tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, and the man the Merrimack County sheriff has had to visit twice and remember for always.
Wilkins: Tonight's subject is close to my heart and closer to my forceps. It's The Soldiers' Home Furlough: What Wounded Men Brought Back to Pittsfield in 1863. That summer the boys came home up this turnpike in pieces, some of them on two legs and some on one. They brought carved bone rings, army whiskey habits, and lead still sitting in their jaws, and they changed this town's mind about the war and about Mr. Lincoln's tax on the jug.
Wilkins: But first, a word from the gentleman who pays for my lamp oil.
♪ Quick banjo flourish
Announcer: Friends! A quick word! The Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, is hammered from pure, heavy-gauge copper and built to last a lifetime! See it at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Fiddle sting fades
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a log settles in the stove
Wilkins: Now. Segment the first. The history.
Wilkins: Picture May of 1863. Down in Virginia, at a crossroads with a tavern and a whole lot of nothing, called Chancellorsville, the Twelfth New Hampshire got chewed up worse than a hambone under Barnaby's porch. Those were Lakes Region men 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.
Wilkins: Then came July and Gettysburg. The Fifth New Hampshire lost Colonel Cross in the Wheatfield. He was the fierce old devil who tied a black kerchief around his head before every fight, and he was mortally wounded that evening. The Second and the Twelfth were in it too. That summer the hospitals filled, and once the hospitals filled, the furloughs started.
Wilkins: Now you young folk who think a railroad runs up this valley can think again. There's no Suncook Valley line to Pittsfield, and the way the Concord money men argue, there won't be for years yet. In '63 a wounded man rode the cars as far as Concord and then got jounced up the turnpike in a stage or a farmer's wagon. The Concord stage has springs the way a deacon has mercy: they're mentioned in the brochure and never felt on the road. Imagine riding that with a fresh stump and every rut in Epsom saying hello to your stitches.
Wilkins: Where were they coming from? Mostly the big general hospitals in Washington City. Armory Square, and a dozen others like it: long, whitewashed pavilion wards with the windows open, built that way because the doctors had at last worked out that a sick man needs air more than he needs a sermon. One of the men walking those wards was a big, bearded, rather odd poet from Brooklyn named Whitman. He'd sit by a boy's cot and write his letter home for him, and bring him an orange or 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.
Wilkins: Understand this about the war, because it's the truth those boys carried home. The bullet was not the big killer. Disease was. Of every three Union men dead, about two died of camp fever, typhoid, measles or the bloody flux. Dysentery, I mean, for the ladies listening, though the ladies who scraped lint for the army know exactly what I mean.
Wilkins: The lint! Every parlor in Pittsfield that winter had a lady scraping old linen tablecloths down to fluff with a knife, and it went south by the barrel to the soldiers' aid societies and the Sanitary Commission. They packed it into wounds. Not a soul alive knew that half that lint was carrying more filth into a man than the Rebel ball did. The surgeons in those days looked at a wound oozing thick, creamy yellow matter and called it 'laudable pus.' Laudable! Only a doctor could look at a hole that smells like a tannery privy and call it praiseworthy.
♦ Wilkins pours from a jar, glass clinks
Wilkins: So, what did the boys bring home? Let me open my trinket drawer.
♦ Wooden drawer scrapes open, small objects rattle
Wilkins: Here's a ring carved from a beef bone. The private who made it swore it came from the very ox that gave him the dysentery, and he gave it to his sweetheart as a token of love, which tells you all you need to know about romance in the Army of the Potomac. Here's a pipe carved from mountain laurel root, the Virginia kind, hard as a sheriff's heart and twice as easy to light. And this little lump is a Minie ball whittled into a chessman, a bishop, if you squint. There's lead in his hat and lead in his heart, like most bishops.
Wilkins: One boy mailed his mother a hardtack cracker with the address written right on its face in ink. The postmaster delivered it and she kept it on the mantel. That cracker is still there, it's still harder than the mantel, and I'd wager it'll be holding up the chimney long after the chimney's gone.
Wilkins: The boys also brought home the army's habits with the jug. I'll tell you plain, they came back knowing more names for bad whiskey than a Concord lawyer has for a fee. Tanglefoot, which makes your feet argue. Bust-head, which does what it says. Oh-be-joyful, which never once was. Nockum stiff, and pop-skull. The army gave whiskey more names than it gave the men pay.
Wilkins: Now and then a surgeon would issue a whiskey ration with quinine stirred into it against the fevers, a gill of spirits so bitter it'd turn your tongue inside out to look for the exit. And when they'd marched all night in the rain, an officer might give them a dram to keep them from shaking apart. The rest of what they drank they bought from sutlers, the traveling peddlers who followed the camps. Sutler whiskey was so foul the lice left the men who drank it, and that was the only medical miracle of the whole Peninsula.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, chain rattles once
Wilkins: Hush, Barnaby, I'm getting to the jaws.
Wilkins: Here's where a dentist-surgeon earned his keep. A corporal came up the turnpike that July. I won't use his name, because he's a grown man with a farm now and a temper. A Rebel ball took him through the left cheek at Chancellorsville. The army surgeon dug out the ball and left the rest of that jaw rattling like a Baptist's collection box after a sermon on charity. He sat down in my chair, opened his mouth, and the smell came out ahead of him like a herald. I've smelled dead woodchuck in August under a hay barn, neighbors, and this was worse.
Wilkins: I went in with the forceps. First came two molars, split clean down the middle like kindling. Then a chip of jawbone the size of a fingernail paring. Then, way back where the gum had swollen up purple as a plum, a sliver of lead no longer than a barley grain, that had sat in there festering for nine weeks. It came out with a sound like pulling a boot from the Suncook mud, a long wet sucking pop. He didn't flinch once. He looked at that sliver in my palm and said, 'Doc, that's the only piece of Virginia I ever wanted to bring home, and now I don't want it either.'
Wilkins: Now, a word on the dentistry of soldiering. The Union army has no dentists, not one. You know what it does have? A rule that a recruit must have opposing front teeth to tear open his paper cartridges. No biting teeth, no musket. I've had young men in this chair asking me to save their front teeth so they could go and get shot, and old men asking me to pull theirs so they couldn't. I served both of them and charged both the same, because a tooth's a tooth and patriotism's billed separately.
Wilkins: As for the town's welcome, Pittsfield turned out. The church bell rang every time a wagon came up from Epsom with a uniform in it. Women brought pies to the door and old men brought advice, which was less use than the pies. And at Fort Wilkins, any man in blue with a hospital paper in his pocket got his first jar free. I'm a moonshiner, neighbors, but I'm not a barbarian.
Wilkins: And that's how the tax business changed. In '63 Mr. Lincoln's whiskey excise stood at twenty cents a gallon. Twenty cents was a tax a man could grumble about. Now, in this year of '65, it's two dollars a gallon. Two dollars is a tax a man can only pray about. Back before the furloughs, the old Yankees in this valley talked about that tax like it was a toothache from Washington. Then the boys came home, 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. After that, some of the loudest grumblers quietly paid. Some others kept on not paying, but they stopped bragging about it. Shame is the cheapest revenue man the Treasury ever hired.
♪ Low fiddle bridge, mournful then lifting
Wilkins: Segment the second. Legends, outlaws and the scoundrels the war bred like flies on a fresh-cut stump.
Wilkins: You've all heard of the substitute broker. Under the Enrollment Act of '63, a drafted man could hire another man to go in his place, or pay three hundred dollars commutation and stay home. That cracked the door for a breed of vermin who bought and sold men like cordwood, bilking the recruit on one end and the drafted man on the other.
Wilkins: One of these fellows came up Route 28 in the fall of '63. Brocade vest, a watch chain you could moor a gundalow with, and a smell of bay rum strong enough to make your eyes water from the woodshed. He'd heard a furloughed private's widowed mother had a little money put by, and he meant to talk her into paying for a substitute for her second son, with himself taking a fat commission off the top. She'd come to me to have a tooth seen to, and she told me about it in the chair. When I'm working in a mouth, folks tell me everything. It's hard to lie with a forceps in your face.
Wilkins: So when Mr. Brocade came calling at Fort Wilkins to buy a jar for courage, I pointed him around the back, to the window by the woodpile. I said, 'The good stuff's just there, by the black buffalo robe.'
♦ Chain snaps taut, a deep bear roar, cloth tearing
Wilkins: That buffalo robe stood up. Barnaby took him from behind. He didn't take the whole man, mind you. Barnaby's a gentleman and takes only what he needs. He got a mouthful of trouser seat and what was inside it, and when he pulled back it sounded like a wet quilt being torn in half by an angry Methodist. The man screamed so high the Widow's goat fainted. I'm told he went down the turnpike holding his own seat in his hand like a hymnal, and there was a trail of bay rum and blood all the way to the Epsom line. Barnaby chewed the brocade for a week. He spat out the watch chain, which I sold, and I gave the money to the old woman.
Wilkins: A substitute broker sells another man's body to the government at a profit. Barnaby simply cut out the middleman and took his share directly off the broker's backside.
♦ Bear grunts contentedly, lip-smacking
Wilkins: Now, I promised you a guest. I've got a man at my table tonight who's spent his working life on the other side of the jug from me. He's a revenue officer out of Manchester, a fellow who knows the difference between a clean copper pot and a death trap and treats them accordingly. Please welcome Captain Donald Vance.
♦ Chair scrapes, a heavy man sits, a tin cup set down on oak
Captain: Evening, Doctor. Evening, neighbors. And evening to the bear, who looked at me on the way in the way a hungry man looks at a church supper.
Wilkins: He's only sizing you up, Captain. You've got more meat on you than the last fellow and better manners. A revenue man and a moonshiner sitting at one table is how the war ought to have ended: two enemies sharing a bench and lying to each other politely.
Captain: I'll do my lying in my reports, Doctor, the way the government likes it. You want soldiers' stories tonight. I've got a few. Those furloughed boys gave me more trouble and more heartache than any regiment of hill-farm stillers.
Wilkins: Give it to us.
Captain: The spring of '64, on the Concord road, I came on a sergeant of the Twelfth with one leg, swinging along on an ash crutch. Fine-looking man, beard down to his second button. But every time that crutch hit the road, it sloshed. Sloshed like a butter churn. I asked him to walk a little faster and it sounded like a pint of oh-be-joyful going down a drain.
Wilkins: I've heard of a wooden leg, Captain, but never one with a bung.
Captain: He'd hollowed the crutch out himself in the hospital, with a borrowed auger, and corked the foot of it. He looked me square in the eye and said, 'Captain, I left a leg in Virginia for the Union. I reckon the Union can leave me this pint.' I sat on the stone wall and thought about it, and in the end I wrote in my book, 'one crutch, half full, ration of a wounded man,' and I bought him dinner at the tavern. He ate like a horse, and he paid for the drinks out of the crutch.
Wilkins: Spoken like a Christian with a badge, which is rarer than a Christian with a bear.
Captain: Now the next one isn't funny, Doctor, and I won't pretend it is.
♪ Single low fiddle note, held
Captain: Up in the Ossipee hills there was a young private home on sick furlough, a good boy, who'd watched the old Virginia stillers in the camps and thought he'd learned the trick of it. He built himself a still from an army camp kettle. And to seal the joints, he melted down a fistful of Minie balls he'd carried home as keepsakes.
Wilkins: Lead. Good Lord.
Captain: Lead, all through the hot joints, where the spirit touched it. He ran it a month. By the time I got up there, his mother was in bed with cramps that bent her double, and when she smiled at me, Doctor, there was a blue-gray line all along her gums like somebody'd drawn it with a slate pencil.
Wilkins: The lead line. I've seen it on a painter and on a printer's devil, and I've never once wanted to see it again. That lad soldered his still with Rebel lead, and the Confederacy nearly got one more Yankee out of it two years after the fact.
Captain: I took an axe to that kettle in his dooryard. He wept, a big furloughed soldier, crying over a kettle. I didn't fine him a cent. I put him in my wagon the next week and drove him to a coppersmith in Concord, and that smith took him on. Last I heard, he's turning out tea kettles and sap pans with clean joints, and his mother pulled through. I've shut down a good many outfits, but that's the one I think about.
Wilkins: You did right by him, Captain. Copper, properly joined, and never a thread of lead. I'll say it twice tonight, because it bears saying.
Captain: Now let me cheer the room up before the bear gets maudlin. A veteran of the Second New Hampshire, down near the Pittsfield line. I won't say which side of the line, Doctor.
Wilkins: Wise. Barnaby has a long memory and a short chain.
Captain: This fellow came home and couldn't stop soldiering. He drilled his oxen by Hardee's Tactics, in earnest, every morning in the barnyard. I came up his lane one October afternoon, smelling mash in the air plain as Sunday ham. And he stood up on his cart and bellowed, 'By the left flank! March!'
♦ Ox bellow, cart wheels grinding on gravel
Captain: And those two oxen wheeled the whole cart crossways in the lane, neat as a parade, and stood there. Not a step more. I couldn't get my horse around, so I had to climb the stone wall, tear my coat on a briar, and wade through a pumpkin patch. By the time I got up to the barn there wasn't a kettle, a barrel, or a drop. There was just the veteran sitting on a milk stool with a Bible open upside down, saying, 'Afternoon, Captain. Lovely weather for a review.'
Wilkins: Those oxen were better drilled than half the officers I ever saw, and smarter, because they never once applied for a promotion.
Captain: I gave him a salute and went home. A man who can teach an ox the left flank has earned one afternoon off from the government.
Wilkins: Captain, I'd give you a counterstamped penny for your trouble, but you'd have to report it as a bribe of one cent, and the paperwork would cost the Treasury eleven.
Captain: Twelve, Doctor. They charge for the ink.
♪ Banjo bounce into commercial
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♪ Fiddle flourish and drum roll
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, the drip into the jar resumes
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft. Tonight I'll walk you through what I call the Furlough Batch: a potato mash, because when the boys came home that autumn, the grain was short and the cellars were full of potatoes.
Wilkins: First, the law of the land, which I recite with my hand on Barnaby's head. Making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and everything said on this program is for history and learning. My copper has been seized, and my fine paid, and I recommend neither.
Wilkins: Now. A potato is the most honest vegetable in New England. It comes out of the ground dirty and never pretends otherwise. But it's starch, not sugar, and yeast can't eat starch any more than Barnaby can eat a sermon. So here's the method.
Wilkins: One. Scrub your potatoes, cut them, and boil them soft. Mash them into a porridge with clean water.
Wilkins: Two. Let it cool till your thermometer reads about one hundred and fifty degrees by Fahrenheit. Too hot and you'll kill what you're about to add. Then stir in crushed malted barley, roughly one part malt to five or six of potato by weight. The malt carries the enzymes, the natural ferments that turn starch into sugar. Cover it, keep it warm, and stir it now and then for an hour or two. You'll taste it go from paste to sweet. That's the alchemy, neighbors, and no philosopher's stone ever did it better.
Wilkins: Three. Cool the mash till it's blood-warm, then pitch in your yeast, good brewer's barm from a clean source. Let it work several days. Do this in a room with air moving through it. Fermenting mash breathes out a heavy gas that pools in low places, and a man who leans into a closed vat to have a sniff may go to sleep there for good.
Wilkins: Four. Strain off the wash. A potato wash foams like a mad dog, so fill your pot no more than two-thirds full, or it'll boil up into your column and puke potato into your worm.
Wilkins: Five. Heat it gentle and even. No open flame near the vapor path or the collecting jars, ever. Alcohol vapor burns, and a leaky joint near the firebox is how still-houses become bonfires and moonshiners become stories.
Wilkins: Now the cuts, and I'll go slow, because this is where men live or die. The first spirit off the worm is the foreshots, sharp and solvent-smelling, like shoemaker's cement and spite. Throw it out, every drop. Then come the heads, still harsh and burning. Throw them out or set them aside to clean tools, never to drink. Pay special attention with a potato batch, because pectin in potato skins and in fruit is a source of methanol, the wood spirit that blinds and kills, and methanol comes off early. There's no ash, shaving, or prayer that pulls it out afterward. Cutting it off is your only protection.
Wilkins: Then come the hearts, smooth and sweet, the part you're working for. Keep those. Last come the tails, oily and heavy. Those carry the fusel oil, and here's a curiosity for you: the chemists first went poking into fusel oil in spirit made from potatoes. Fusel oil is the part of the run that tastes like your grandmother's lamp and kicks like your grandfather's mule. Set the tails aside to run again with the next batch.
Wilkins: As for the copper, watch the inside of your pot after a potato run. The early spirit leaves it darker, because the copper is taking up the sulfur stink that a stressed ferment throws off. Ferment too hot or too long and you'll make more of that stink. Copper can only cure so much of a sin. And when you're done, clean it bright, so it's ready to work next time.
♦ Wilkins raps knuckles on a copper pot, a deep warm ring
Wilkins: Hear that? That's an honest pot. A lead-soldered kettle sounds like a cough.
♪ Brief banjo interlude
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, slang, and a voice from far away. We've got a speaking-cylinder sent up from the Carolinas. That's right, a Tar Heel. The war's over, the Union holds, and I'll take a good question from any man who knows which end of a doubler is up. Let's give it a turn.
♦ Cylinder hiss, a click, distant scratchy recording
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?
♦ Cylinder click off
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, I salute you, your uncle, and every swamp he ever doctored. Let me take your uncle's two medicines one at a time, and let me strike a coin while I think, because the anvil clears my head the way the doubler never cleared his.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: First, the hickory ashes. Rabbit, up here in New Hampshire, before the mills, the farmers burned whole forests of hardwood just to make ash, boiled it down in kettles, and sold the potash and pearlash to England for soap and glass. Hardwood ash is strong alkali. It's what our grandmothers dripped water through to make lye. So your uncle put potash in his doubler, which is the same stuff my great-grandsire shipped to England to make soap. At best he was washing his whiskey, and at worst he was making a very angry bar of it.
Wilkins: Now here's the grain of truth, and I'll give your uncle his due. An alkali in that keg can neutralize some of the sour acid in a mash that's gone vinegary, so the spirit may smell a mite less sharp. That may be what the old-timers noticed and swore by. But it doesn't touch the wood spirit, Rabbit. Not a drop of methanol is removed. It also fouls your keg with a gray sludge and can give your spirit a soapy, burnt taste. It was never a cure for bad heads. The only cure is cutting them off and throwing them away.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Second, the red oak shavings. Any cooper in Merrimack County will tell you the same: red oak is so open in the grain you can blow pipe smoke clean through a stave of it. That's why tight barrels are white oak. A barrel of red oak holds whiskey about as well as a congressman holds a promise. Toss the shavings in hot spirit and what you get is tannin, color, and a woody taste, a little like the barrel, only faster and rougher. So your uncle's red oak was a paint job and a flavoring. It may have looked like an aged liquor and tasted like one too, but whatever poison was in it went right on into the jug.
Wilkins: So Rabbit, your uncle wasn't a liar. He was a man who confused color with cure, and that's a sin half the doctors in Washington committed all through the war. Thank you for writing up from Wilkesboro. You're welcome at Fort Wilkins any time, and Barnaby promises to bite only the parts of you that you don't need.
♦ Bear grunt, chain clink
Wilkins: Now, a myth for the war. You'll hear a returning man spin it in every tavern from here to Dover: 'The surgeons cut our legs off with no chloroform, and we bit a bullet and sang.' Neighbors, it makes a fine story, but it's mostly false. In the great majority of Union amputations, the surgeons put the man under with chloroform or ether first. The screaming the boys remember came mostly from men coming round after, or from the poor devils waiting their turn and hearing the saw. The only thing a soldier ever bit through in that surgeon's tent was his own pride, and the chloroform did the rest.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And since I'm at the anvil, let me tell you what I've been doing with these coins this year. Every furloughed man who sits in my chair goes home with a cent stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., for luck. Mind you, Congress outlawed private coinage in '64 and put an end to all those store-card tokens the merchants struck during the coin famine. That's the government telling a blacksmith he may hit anything on his anvil but his own name. I'm not making coin, I'm decorating it, and I'll argue that point before any magistrate who wants a jar for his cough.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, the coin rings and rolls across the anvil
Wilkins: A last bit of soldier's slang before we go. When a man came home from the hospital and spent his first week on the porch doing nothing, his comrades called him a 'hospital rat.' And when a man was sly about the jug, they said he'd been 'to see the sutler.' If you hear either in a Pittsfield tavern, you'll know where it came from. It came up the turnpike with a limp.
♪ Banjo flourish
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Don't trust your craft to scrap and solder. The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, is heavy-gauge pure copper, built true! Order yours at moonshinestill.com. Again, that's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme rises softly, banjo and fiddle with antique warmth
Wilkins: That's the hour, neighbors. If you'd learn the craft from the man who's been arrested for it twice and invited to dinner by the arresting officer once, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. That's copper, mash, cuts, fire, and the honest history of it all, taught in lessons from right here at Fort Wilkins. Ask at the showroom on Route 28, or send word by post.
Wilkins: My thanks to Captain Donald Vance for his stories and his mercy. And to every man who came up that turnpike in '63 with a hole in him and a joke still in his mouth: Pittsfield remembers you, and so does my forceps. Barnaby has heard more speeches about the war than any senator, and he's had the good sense not to make one himself. So I'll take my lesson from the bear and stop talking.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♦ Wax cylinder crackle fades to silence