Thirty Gallons of Courage: Whiskey at Gettysburg
Dr. G. G. Wilkins covers how New Hampshire soldiers sneaked whiskey past their officers in the run-up to Gettysburg. He tells his tall tale of thirty gallons shipped south in crates marked as dental plaster, and walks through the surgeon's whiskey and chloroform in the field hospitals before explaining mash, boiling points and cuts at the still. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance brings four new stories from the hill towns, and Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC learns what hickory ash and red oak shavings really do in a thump keg before Wilkins strikes down the blue-flame test 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! Sit down, you overstuffed sack of pond mud! He smells the hearts coming off the worm and figures he's owed a veteran's pension. The only shot ever fired at that bear was mine, and I missed him on purpose, which is more mercy than the Rebels ever showed the 2nd New Hampshire. Settle, now. Settle.
♦ Bear grunts once more, chain drags across frozen dirt, then quiet
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, and the two Merrimack County deputies I can see crouched behind my woodpile. Your boots are sticking out, boys. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, iron-beater, coin-striker, and the most patriotic outlaw on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Tonight the war is over and the boys are coming home on the cars from Concord, some on two legs and some on less. So we're going to talk about the thing that got them through it: whiskey. Tonight's program is called Thirty Gallons of Courage: Whiskey at Gettysburg.
♪ Theme fades under a single fiddle note
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Is your still sealed with dough paste like Grandmother's pie crust? For shame! The Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills close up tight and stay tight. Shop hardware at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Short banjo sting
The History
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, log fire popping in a stone hearth
Wilkins: First the law, then the lawbreaking, the way the Lord intended. In the old days a soldier of the United States drew a ration of spirits, the same as he drew beef and bread. Then in 1832 some temperance colonel with a face like a dried apricot took it away and gave the men coffee and sugar instead. So the American soldier marched into this war on coffee, and if you ever smelled army coffee you'll know why half of them deserted.
Wilkins: Now, the regulation did leave a crack in the door. A commanding officer could order a whiskey ration, a gill, which is about four ounces, after heavy fatigue duty or a soaking in cold and wet. A gill. Four ounces to a man who just dug trenches for eleven hours in Virginia clay, with the rain running down the crack of his backside like the Suncook in April. Four ounces won't wet the tonsils of a Pittsfield churchwarden.
Wilkins: The Navy had it worse. Congress took the sailors' grog away by an act of July 1862, and on the first day of September that year the spirit ration was done. Sailors have been sober and miserable ever since, which I understand is the whole point of the Navy.
♦ Wilkins sets a tin cup down hard on a plank table
Wilkins: Here's the hypocrisy that tickles my liver. The sutler, the traveling peddler who follows the army selling tobacco, writing paper, cheese and canned peaches at robbery prices, was generally forbidden to sell liquor to the enlisted man. The officer, though, could get his. So the man with brass buttons drinks and the man with tin ones goes dry, on the theory that a gentleman can hold his liquor. I have pulled teeth from both kinds, and I tell you a colonel's breath at morning roll call could strip the bluing off a musket barrel, and that same colonel would write up a private for smelling of cider.
Wilkins: So the private did what any self-respecting New Hampshire boy does when a man in a better coat tells him no. He smuggled. The soldiers' letters tell it plain. Whiskey came down from home in a mother's package, packed in a hollowed loaf of brown bread with the crust glued back on with molasses. It came in canteens and tins, sold by the sutler as peaches, and you knew the peaches were brandy because the peaches were gone and the man was singing. It came labeled as cough syrup, liniment, horse medicine. I knew a Barnstead boy whose sister sent him a Bible with the middle of Leviticus carved out and a pint flask nestled in it, and he said it was the first time Leviticus ever did a man any good.
♦ Bear huffs outside window
Wilkins: Hush, Barnaby, you never read Leviticus. You ate Deuteronomy.
Wilkins: Now to the thirty gallons, which is the name of this episode and the reason my name is cursed in a certain quartermaster's office to this day. In the spring of 1863 a letter come up from a Suncook Valley boy in the 12th New Hampshire, camped down in Virginia mud. He wrote: Doctor, the whiskey ration comes once a fortnight and smells like a tanner's boot. Send help. So I sent help. Thirty gallons of my best double-run, split into six casks and packed in crates stenciled DR. WILKINS' DENTAL PLASTER, FOR THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC, HANDLE GENTLY.
Wilkins: Not one quartermaster opened them. No man alive wants to pry a lid off a box that might contain a dentist's opinion. Those casks rode the cars from Concord to Boston, the steamer to Washington and a mule wagon to the camp, and by the time it got there one cask was a mite lighter, because a teamster in Maryland had worked out that dental plaster sloshes. I don't blame him. I would have done the same.
Wilkins: Those boys carried what was left north in their canteens, through that hellfire heat of late June when men were dropping in the road like shot crows, all the way into Pennsylvania. And on the second day of July, 1863, they stood on the Emmitsburg Road while the whole Confederate army came at them through a peach orchard.
♪ Low, mournful fiddle drone underneath
Wilkins: Three New Hampshire regiments fought at Gettysburg. The 2nd was in the Peach Orchard. The 5th, the Fighting Fifth, was in the Wheatfield. The 12th was on the Emmitsburg Road. All three were ground up that second day like corn under a millstone. You want to know about courage, it wasn't in my casks. It was in those boys. The whiskey just kept them company.
♪ Fiddle drone fades
Legends, Outlaws, And Runners
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, wind against the log walls
Wilkins: Now let me tell you about Colonel Edward E. Cross of Lancaster, up in Coos County. A hard man, a fighter, a newspaperman, and nobody's darling. On the second of July he led his brigade, the Fifth New Hampshire with it, into the Wheatfield, and there he took a ball that killed him by nightfall. And the Fifth New Hampshire, when all the counting was done after the war, had lost more men killed in battle than any other Union infantry regiment. Any of them. From these hills. I'll drink to that, and to Cross, though he'd likely have had me arrested for it.
♦ Liquid poured into a tin cup, a long swallow, a satisfied exhale
Wilkins: Now a darker one, because we can't let you go to bed comfortable. In '63 the bounty men and substitute brokers come up from Concord and Boston like flies on a dead horse. They'd find a farm boy, ply him with whiskey, sign him up as somebody's substitute, and keep three-quarters of his bounty money. One of those brokers, a greasy fellow in a checked waistcoat who smelled of bay rum and lies, tried it on a Pittsfield boy, sixteen years old and simple, right on my own turnpike. And when he went to collect his paper he made his biggest mistake. He walked his horse past my still-house window.
♦ Chain rattles hard, a deep bear growl
Wilkins: Barnaby has a fine nose for a cheat. He come off that log like a landslide. The chain's twelve feet long and the broker was thirteen feet off, which would have saved him, except the fool's horse threw him one foot closer. Barnaby got hold of the seat of his trousers, then the drawers under them, then a good portion of what the drawers were there to protect. There was a sound like a wet sail tearing in a gale, and then a sound I'll not describe, because there may be ladies listening, and even if there aren't, Barnaby has his pride.
Wilkins: The man walked sideways for a month. When he sat down at the Pittsfield tavern he lowered himself like he was settling onto a hornet's nest, and he never sat square again for the rest of his life. Barnaby kept the trouser seat and some of the contents, and every spring I still find brass buttons in what that bear leaves behind. And the boy? I tore up his paper in the fire, gave him a dollar, and set him to splitting my wood until he was of age. He went to war proper at eighteen and came home whole. Barnaby saved a life that day, by the back door.
♦ Bear grunts contentedly
Wilkins: Now I've got a guest in the room, and I've already fed him so he can't arrest me without belching. He served in the revenue service and dragged himself up and down every hill town in this state and Vermont after copper and corn. He's stern as a deacon and has a laugh like a woodshed door. Welcome to Fort Wilkins, Captain Donald Vance.
Captain: Evening, Doctor. Evening to your listeners. And good evening to the bear, who has been looking at my leg through that window for the last twenty minutes like it's a Christmas ham.
Wilkins: He does that to everyone with a government salary. Captain, tonight is soldiers and whiskey. You've been on the trail since the war ended. What do the veterans hide in their cellars?
Captain: Government property, Doctor. Or so they tell me. Up in Plymouth last autumn I followed the smell of scorched corn to a little cellar under a sheep barn. The man was a veteran, a fine fellow, lost two fingers at Fredericksburg. He kept his whiskey in a wooden chest stenciled U.S. MEDICAL DEPARTMENT, SPIRITUS FRUMENTI. He'd carried it home from the army somehow, God knows how.
Wilkins: Spiritus frumenti! Whiskey with a Latin collar on.
Captain: Just so. He stood on that chest with his arms crossed and said, Captain, this is the property of the United States government, and the government cannot tax its own property. I argued, he argued, the sheep argued. In the end I confiscated the contents and wrote in my report: Two gallons medical whiskey, returned to the government, internally.
Wilkins: Internally! [laughs] Captain, you drank the evidence.
Captain: I sampled the evidence. With witnesses. Two of the witnesses were sheep.
Wilkins: The government taxing its own whiskey is like a dog biting its own tail: loud, painful, and the dog ends up dizzy and no richer. What else?
Captain: Wentworth. You know the country, all ledges and blackflies. A young man there had been a drummer boy with a New Hampshire regiment. Fourteen when he enlisted, came home a grown man with arms like ship's cable. His uncle had a still up the ravine, and whenever a stranger come up the road that boy would turn a butter churn upside down on his porch and beat the long roll on it. Every still in that valley went dark in four minutes.
Wilkins: The long roll. The call to arms.
Captain: The call to arms, Doctor. And I'm ashamed to tell you I'd been a militia man myself in my youth, and when I heard that roll come rattling across the valley I caught my own boots falling into step. Left, right, left, all the way up the hill, like a fool on parade. My deputy laughed so hard he fell in the brook. By the time we marched up, all we found was a cold firebox and the uncle sitting on a stump reading his almanac upside down.
Wilkins: A drummer boy who can beat the long roll on a butter churn is worth more to a still than the copper, the corn, and the alderman you bribed, put together.
Captain: I'd hire him myself, if the Treasury had any music in its soul. It doesn't.
Wilkins: Tell them about the parson's wife. I've heard rumors, and the rumors had a Bible in them.
Captain: Bristol. A good woman, I'll say that, and terrifying. During the war she'd been with the ladies of the Sanitary Commission, rolling bandages and boiling linen for the hospitals. After the war the boiling kept on, and the steam coming out of her cellar windows smelled less like linen every week. I come with a warrant, and she met me at the door with a rolling pin and the Book of Proverbs. Turns out a copper wash boiler makes a passable pot still if you know the trick, and she knew the trick.
Wilkins: Did you cite her?
Captain: I cited her, Doctor. I'm a sworn man. But she made me carry the barrel up out of that cellar myself, step by step, while she read me Proverbs, chapter thirty-one, verse six. Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish. Then she said, I sent forty jars of this to the boys at the hospitals, young man, where were you? Where was I? I was in the revenue service, and I've never been so whipped by scripture since my mother died.
Wilkins: Captain, your backside has been bitten, kicked and lectured by more of New Hampshire than any honest map shows. One more, and then we let these good people get to the bar.
Captain: This one's no raid. Sitting in a tavern in Concord this summer, an old 12th New Hampshire man slides a pewter flask across the table to me. Dented in clear through the middle like a thumb pressed into butter. He says, Emmitsburg Road, second of July. A spent ball hit me square in the breast pocket. It stopped in the flask. The whiskey run down my belly and I thought it was my blood and I fainted dead away. When I come to, the Rebs had gone past me thinking I was dead.
Wilkins: Saved by the sauce.
Captain: Saved by the sauce. And then he leans in, serious as a judge, and he says, Captain, you're a revenue man. That ball spilled near a pint. Does the bullet owe the two dollars, or do I? I told him the account was settled in full, July second, 1863, and I bought his next one myself.
♦ Two tin cups clink
Wilkins: Captain Donald Vance, ladies and gentlemen. The only revenue man ever allowed to sit inside Fort Wilkins without Barnaby's teeth in him. Stay by the fire, Captain. We'll have more of you.
Captain: As long as the bear stays on his side of the glass.
Ad Break
♪ Brisk, bouncing medicine-show banjo vamp
Announcer: Step right up, friends of the copper and the flame! Hear me now: one weak joint is all it takes! One slipping hose clamp, one smear of flour paste, and your precious vapor whistles into the room. A dangerous loss, a wasted run, and a fire looking for a match! Why trust your run to the baker's pantry? Moonshine Stills brings you the Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets: precision 304 stainless and copper hybrid fittings, precision-milled and pressure-tested for a lifetime of airtight service! Food-grade PTFE gaskets that will not crumble, quick-release stainless wing clamps that snap tight by hand, and they mate true to stills of heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper! All for only thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents! See them with your own eyes at the showroom at Fort Wilkins, on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, or shop hardware at moonshinestill.com! That's https://moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings. Once more, friends: moonshinestill.com. Seal it right, sleep easy at night!
♪ Banjo vamp ends on a bright chord
Copper And The Craft
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, steady drip into a glass jar
Wilkins: Now, the surgeons. I went down after Gettysburg with a wagon of my own spirits, supposedly for the Sanitary Commission, though I won't swear every jar arrived. I've pulled a great many teeth in my time and seen men faint at the sight of my forceps, but nothing in a dentist's chair prepared me for those barns along the Baltimore Pike. The surgeons stood in their shirtsleeves, aprons stiff and black with blood like a cobbler's leather. They passed the arms and legs out the window, and the pile out there grew taller than a haycock in the July sun. The flies were so thick the pile seemed to breathe. The smell got into the wagon boards and I never could scrub it out. I burned that wagon in the spring.
Wilkins: Here's the truth, and it's not what the grandfathers tell you. Most of those boys did not bite a bullet with only whiskey for comfort. The Union surgeons used chloroform or ether in the great majority of their operations. They dripped it on a cloth over the man's face, he went under, and the saw did its work. The whiskey came before and after. The Medical Department's own supply tables listed whiskey, spiritus frumenti, and brandy as stimulants. The doctors believed spirits would rouse a man out of shock and keep his heart going. Today's best physicians are coming round to the view that it does a bleeding man more harm than good, but in '63 that was the gospel.
Wilkins: Afterward, Medical Director Letterman's ambulance and hospital system gathered the wounded, and they built a great tent city east of town on the York Pike, Camp Letterman, row on row of canvas. A surgeon's saw and my forceps are cousins, friends. But his patient got chloroform and mine get my conversation, and I'll let you decide which is the greater mercy.
Captain: I'd take the chloroform, Doctor.
Wilkins: So would I, Captain, and I've heard myself talk.
♦ Wilkins raps knuckles on a copper pot, a bright ring
Wilkins: Now to the craft. Before I explain it, I'm obliged to say this: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and everything you hear on this program is for history and education only. There. My conscience is clean, even if my pot isn't.
Wilkins: Corn mash, the old way. Take cracked corn, about eight or ten pounds for every five gallons of water. Heat the water and stir the corn in slow so it doesn't clump into dumplings, and cook it near a boil for an hour or more, until it's thick as a Barnstead porridge. Let it come down to where it's hot enough to sting a finger but not scald it. Then stir in a few pounds of malted barley. The malt turns the starch in the corn to sugar, which is a kind of alchemy the good Lord left lying around for anybody who'd pay attention. Let it sit and sweeten an hour or two. Cool it to blood-warm, no hotter, or you'll kill your yeast like a bad cook kills a marriage. Pitch your yeast and cover the barrel loosely. A loose cover, not a tight one, and ventilate the room, because fermenting mash breathes out gas that'll smother a man.
Wilkins: Four to seven days the mash works and bubbles and grumbles like a deacon at a dance. When it goes quiet and tastes sour rather than sweet, you have your wash, a thin beer of a few percent. Strain it off the grain into your copper pot.
Wilkins: Now the boiling points, and you'd best memorize these the way you memorize your mother's birthday. Water boils at 212 degrees by the Fahrenheit glass. Good grain spirit, ethanol, comes off at about 173. And the poison, methanol, the wood spirit, comes off at about 148. You see the order? The lightest and nastiest comes first. That's why the first of the run, the foreshots, and the sharp-smelling heads after them, smelling of glue and lamp solvent, get thrown out. You never drink them, never sell them, never give them to the sheriff, though God knows I've been tempted. Then the hearts, sweet and clean. Those are what you keep. Then the tails, oily and dull, like wet dog. Set them aside for the next run.
Wilkins: Now fire. Low and even, never a roaring blaze. Mind this especially: alcohol vapor is heavier than air. It doesn't rise up and away like woodsmoke. It pools along the floor like spilled molasses and creeps toward your firebox, and when it finds the flame, whoomp. I knew a man in Gilmanton who lost his eyebrows, his beard, and the better part of his reputation that way. Keep every joint tight, keep the room aired out, keep your fire well away from any leak.
Wilkins: And never, ever seal a still up tight. A pot under heat with no way to vent builds pressure until it bursts, and then you've got scalding mash on the ceiling and burning vapor in your lungs. The vapor has to have a clear road from the pot through the cap, the arm and the worm, open to the air at the end.
Wilkins: And copper, always copper, honest copper with no lead solder in it. The bright copper takes the sulfur stink out of the vapor, so the spirit comes off sweet instead of smelling like a powder magazine after a battle. Keep the copper clean. A hospital steward at Camp Letterman, scrubbing his medicine kettles, told me: Doctor, a dirty kettle kills more men than a Rebel rifle. He was talking about medicine, but I've applied it to whiskey ever since.
Myths, Slang, And The Listener Line
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a click and whir as a recording is cued
Wilkins: The listener line has got a message on the cylinder from a long way off, from the North Carolina hills. Let's hear it.
♦ Faint hiss of the recording, distant echo
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 of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! A Rabbit on my program, and Barnaby just sat up and licked his chops. Don't worry, son, he can't reach Carolina. Not on this chain.
Wilkins: Now, your uncle isn't all wrong, which puts him ahead of most uncles. Let me give you the true and the false. True: the old Carolina and Tennessee men did put things in their thump kegs, the doubler. Some put in fruit or a bit of fresh mash for flavor, and the hot vapor bubbling through carries some of that taste and color into the spirit. That's real. But flavor isn't cleaning. You can't scrub a soul with perfume.
Wilkins: The hickory ash, now. Wood ash is crude lye, potash, the same stuff your grandmother leached in a barrel to make soft soap. It's strong alkali. Toss it in a hot doubler and you'll change the taste, maybe cut a bit of sourness, maybe make it taste like boiled shoe. What it will never do is take the methanol out. That poison is in the vapor, coming off first, and the only cure is throwing out the foreshots and heads with your own hand.
Wilkins: And the red oak shavings, Cletus, here's the joke of it. A cooper won't make a whiskey barrel from red oak, because red oak lacks the little natural plugs in the grain, the tyloses, that white oak has. A red oak barrel weeps like a widow at a wake. Blow through a stick of red oak and you can blow bubbles out the far end. Barnaby went after a red oak barrel once thinking it was full, and found it had leaked bone dry, and I never saw a bear so disappointed in carpentry. Oak shavings will lend tannin and color, like they do in a barrel, but that's dressing, not doctoring. Red oak shavings in a thump keg are a Sunday collar on a hog. It changes the look, but it's still a hog.
Wilkins: So, Rabbit, tell your uncle he's half a philosopher and half a soap-maker, and the cure for a bad head is the same as it ever was: make your cuts honest. And tell him Doc Wilkins of Pittsfield, New Hampshire says hello to all Wilkesboro and every hollow in those Carolina hills. You're a gentleman for writing in, and if you ever come north, stand thirteen feet off the bear.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That's me striking a penny on the anvil, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., to mark the death of an old myth. Here it is: the blue-flame test. You pour a spoonful of spirit, set a match to it, and if it burns blue the old-timers swear it's good, and if it burns yellow or red there's lead in it and you'll go blind.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Hogwash! A blue flame tells you one thing only: there's alcohol in the spoon. That's all. Methanol, the poison, burns with a pale blue flame too, so faint you can hardly see it in daylight. The spoon won't tell you a thing about it. Your death could burn the prettiest blue you ever saw. And a yellow or red flame can come from a dirty spoon, salt, ash, or a dozen other things, so it's no honest test for lead either. Lighting a spoon of spirit and calling it a test is judging a man's honesty by whether his hat catches fire. Plenty of liars have fireproof hats.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Captain: Doctor, if a blue flame proved a thing pure, every revenue man's soul would be certified by now. I've seen your face when you hand over a fine. You burn blue at the ears.
Wilkins: That's my good breeding, Captain, coming out under pressure. Like steam off a pot I never sealed.
♪ Banjo picks up a gentle closing waltz
Sign-Off
Announcer: A quick word before you go! Leaks lose spirit and invite fire. Fit your still with the Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills, airtight for life. Shop hardware today at moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: My thanks to Captain Donald Vance, a revenue man with a heart, which the zoological men tell me is rarer than a two-headed calf. My thanks to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, and to the Fighting Fifth, the 2nd, and the 12th New Hampshire, living and dead. Raise a glass to them tonight, a clean one, from honest cuts.
Wilkins: And if you want to learn the craft proper, the history, the copper, the mash, the fire, and the cuts, done the right way and the lawful way, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you everything but how to train a bear, because that's a gift from God and a mistake I'd not wish on any man.
Captain: Goodnight, Doctor. Goodnight, Barnaby.
♦ Bear grunts suspiciously
Wilkins: He says goodnight, Captain, and he's memorized your leg. 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 final fiddle note, wax crackle fades to silence