Contraband Letters Home
Dr. Wilkins covers the soldier's mail of the Civil War: the 'Soldier's Letter' postage privilege, flag-of-truce letters read by inspectors, boxes from home searched by the provost guard, and the Suncook Valley private who hid a love letter and a leaking flask in the same boot. Wilkins also tells how Barnaby wrecked a nosy Concord letter-snoop, and Wilkes County runner Junior Vance tells new stories about his mama's coded letters, a love poem that saved a hidden pint, and a jar of 'peach preserves' mailed to an Army cousin. Wilkins then explains making cuts by the numbered-jar method, debunks the blue-flame test, and answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg.
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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 yourself, you overgrown hearth rug. Barnaby has eaten the postmaster's mittens, the postmaster's almanac, and very nearly the postmaster, and he still thinks he's owed a letter. Lie down. Nobody is writing to you. You can't read and you owe money in three townships.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen dirt, then quiet
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swells and settles
Wilkins: Good evening, you sinners, saints, and you in between who sit in the back pew to sneak out early. 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, Dr. George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, and the only man in this county arrested twice who still gets invited to Thanksgiving. Tonight's subject is a tender one, so wipe your nose. We are talking about Contraband Letters Home: the mail of the late war, what our boys stuffed into their envelopes, and what else they stuffed into their boots alongside the envelopes.
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Do you want to learn the old craft from the man who stamped his name into the nation's copper? The Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course is enrolling now. Thirty hours of instruction, blueprints, and live questions answered. Find it at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Short fiddle sting
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. Pull your chair up to the stove.
♦ Wax crackle, a log shifting in the stove
Wilkins: When the war came, half the young men of the Suncook Valley went south with a rifle, a blanket, and a mother's prayer sewn into the lining of their coat. What they wanted most down there, after dry socks and the end of the war, was a letter. And what they wanted to send home most, after news that they were alive, was money, and now and then a little something from the sutler's back shelf.
Wilkins: Here's how the mail ran. Ordinary postage was three cents for a half ounce, and a soldier on thirteen dollars a month, paid months late, often didn't have three cents or a stamp to put it on. So early in the war Congress allowed a Union soldier to write 'Soldier's Letter' across the envelope, get an officer to sign it, and send it off without paying. The postage was collected from whoever received it. Uncle Sam let the soldier mail his letter for nothing and sent the bill to his mother, which is the only time the government has ever acted exactly like a son.
Wilkins: Those envelopes were a sight. The printers in Boston and New York turned out what we called patriotic covers: envelopes printed with eagles, flags, cannons, Columbia in her bedsheet, and verses bad enough to make a Concord poet throw up his supper. A boy from Barnstead would write his mother on paper with a thundering eagle in the corner, and inside he'd tell her he'd had dysentery for nine days and would she please send stockings.
Wilkins: If you had kin on the other side, Lord help you. Letters between the lines went by flag-of-truce mail through exchange points like Fortress Monroe in Virginia. You were told to keep to one page, and every letter was opened and read by an inspector. Write one word about regiments, roads, or the weather over a fortification and your letter went into the fire. The flag-of-truce inspectors read every love letter between Richmond and Fortress Monroe, which makes them the best-informed and most miserable men in the Republic. Picture reading ten thousand letters that all say 'I miss your cooking, the cornbread here is made of gravel.' I'd rather pull ten thousand teeth, and I've come close.
Wilkins: Now the contraband. The Army barred sutlers, the traveling peddlers who followed the camps, from selling liquor to the enlisted men without an officer's leave. You can guess how well that worked. A sutler would sell you a tin of sardines for the price of a mule and a bottle of bust-head for the price of the mule's mother. The boys had names for the stuff that'd curl a parson's whiskers: 'Oh! Be Joyful.' 'Tanglefoot.' 'Pop-skull.' 'Rifle knock-knee,' which I've always admired as a precise medical description.
Wilkins: And they smuggled it every way a frightened, thirsty boy could think of. In canteens, which is the obvious way and so the first place a sergeant looked. Down the barrel of a musket with a cork in the muzzle, a fine trick until inspection. Inside a hollowed loaf of bread. And in boxes from home. Families sent boxes by the express companies, Adams Express most of all: socks, pickles, cakes, Bibles, and every so often a Bible with no Book of Judges, because a pint bottle was sitting where Judges used to be. The provost guards and officers sometimes searched those boxes, and a good many mothers' fruitcakes were cut open with a bayonet like a hog at slaughter, crumbs everywhere and a guilty little bottle lying in the middle like a baby in a manger.
Wilkins: A soldier caught drunk might get the barrel shirt: they knocked the ends out of a barrel, put it over his shoulders, sometimes hung a sign on it, and marched him through camp in it. The barrel shirt is the only garment in the army that fits every man equally badly. Or he got bucked and gagged, trussed up like a Christmas goose with a stick in his teeth for hours, or walked in circles carrying a log until he regretted being born, never mind the whiskey.
Wilkins: Which brings me to the boot. Pay attention. There's a moral in it, and no woman in it comes out disgraced.
♪ Low, slow fiddle under
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Legends, outlaws, and fools in love.
Wilkins: There was a Suncook Valley boy, dead and buried in honor long since so I can tell it, a private named Amos Batchelder. Before he marched, Amos came to my shop. Not for a tooth, though he needed four pulled and I told him so, but for a flat tin flask of my double-run, which I filled. And for luck I dropped in one of my own copper cents, stamped right here at this anvil.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. He rattled it like a baby's toy and swore he'd bring it back.
Wilkins: Down in Virginia, Amos wrote the letter of his life to a girl back home, a proposal of marriage on two sides of cheap paper. And Amos had nowhere to keep a thing safe from rain, thieves, and sergeants except his right boot. So in went the flask, and in went the letter, folded small. Then he marched twenty-two miles in July heat.
Wilkins: Friends, you've never smelled a soldier's boot after a twenty-mile march in July. It would make a buzzard lose its faith. Blisters bursting and soaking into the wool, the sock gone the color of old cheese, the leather sweating like a deacon at a dance. And all that while my flask was loosening its stopper one jolt at a time and dribbling good whiskey down into that swamp. When Amos pulled the boot off that night, out came the letter, soaked through and blue where the ink ran, smelling like a distillery that had been walked through by a regiment of feet.
Wilkins: He had no other paper, so he dried it by the fire and mailed it anyway, marked 'Soldier's Letter,' and his sweetheart's family paid the three cents to receive the stinkingest piece of mail ever carried into Merrimack County. Her mother opened it, sniffed it, and turned the color of a boiled beet. Half the words were blots. All you could make out was 'dearest,' 'forever,' and a big wet smear where 'will you' ought to be. The mother read it aloud at supper and said it was the first time a man's feet ever proposed to her daughter.
Wilkins: The girl said yes. She told me so herself, in my chair, with my forceps on her eye tooth. She said, 'Doctor, if he was steady enough to write it after drinking half of that flask, he'll be steady enough to keep a farm.' A practical woman. The Valley breeds them. Amos came home in '65 with one less toe and every bit of his sense, and he gave me back my copper cent with a hole worn in it from rattling. It hangs on a nail over the forge.
♦ Barnaby grunting, chain clink
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, I'll tell your part, you vain thing. Letters bring snoops. A man came up from Concord, I won't name him, he's got family. He'd heard that letters ordering my 'tooth remedy' came through the Pittsfield post office, and he figured to snatch a satchel of them as evidence. He came round the back of the still-house at dusk with his satchel under his arm and stepped over the chalk line I'd drawn in the dirt. Inside that line, the chain reaches.
Wilkins: Barnaby didn't roar. A bear that roars is a bear that's bluffing. He just stood up, seven feet of him, smelling of wet leaves and old mutton, and laid one paw on that man's backside. I heard the cloth go first, a long tearing like a sail splitting in a gale. Then his buttons let go and went pinging off the woodpile like birdshot. Then the man let go too, of everything: satchel, dignity, and a fair bit of what he'd had for lunch. He came out of his breeches like a pea out of a pod and ran to Barnstead in his drawers, with four red furrows down one cheek of his hind end as neat as a plowed field in April, bleeding into his stockings with every step. That Concord snoop came for my correspondence and left with his correspondence open to the air, from the belt down.
Wilkins: Barnaby sat down and ate the satchel. Leather, buckle, and six letters. He went about with an ink-blue tongue for a week, like a schoolmaster who drinks. One of those letters, I'm sorry to say, held a two-dollar note owed me by a selectman, so the bear has cost me more than the sheriff ever did.
Wilkins: Now, I have a guest tonight from far off. He came up from the Brushy Mountains of North Carolina, Wilkes County, a country that knows corn and copper and cussing as well as we do. He knows a thing about running hard roads with something hidden that oughtn't to be. Welcome to Fort Wilkins, Mr. Junior Vance.
Junior: Thank you, Doc. I tell you, I've been in some rough places, but I never shook hands with a man whose bear has a tab at the post office.
Wilkins: He's got a tab everywhere. Junior, tonight's about letters and hiding things. Did the mail ever figure in your line of work?
Junior: Lord, did it. When I was hauling, my mama wrote me every week. I couldn't have letters coming to the house, too many eyes, so she sent them care of a filling station in Wilkesboro. Trouble was, the fella that ran the station steamed them open over his coffee pot. Read every one. Mama figured it out because the glue was always tacky and the letters smelled like his cigars.
Wilkins: A postmaster's sin in a mechanic's shop.
Junior: So Mama got clever. She wrote in biscuits. 'Aunt Ruby's biscuits are rising' meant the road's clear. 'Biscuits came out flat' meant a new deputy was around. And 'biscuits burnt' meant the law was sitting at the river bridge waiting. One Saturday I got a letter that said, 'Junior, the biscuits burnt something awful, the whole kitchen's full of smoke.' I read that and turned around in a cornfield so fast I took out forty feet of somebody's fence. Found out later they had three cars at that bridge. That letter kept me out of the penitentiary.
Wilkins: Junior, your mama's biscuit code was better than anything the War Department ever came up with, and her biscuits were likely better too. We had generals in the late war who'd have given an arm to have that woman on staff, and some of them gave an arm anyhow.
Junior: She'd have run that war in a month and had it home by supper.
Wilkins: Now tell me about boots. This whole episode is about a boy who kept a letter and a flask in one boot.
Junior: Well, I've got a boot story, but I split mine up. I was sweet on a girl named Loretta. I wrote her a poem, the worst poem a man ever put on paper. Rhymed 'Loretta' with 'I'd sure like to get her,' I'm ashamed to say. I had it folded in my left boot to give her that night. In my right boot I had a pint I was delivering as a favor.
Wilkins: A man of balance.
Junior: Deputy stops me at the county line. Doesn't find anything in the car, because there wasn't anything in the car that night. So he gets ornery and says, 'Boots off.' Pulls off the left one, out falls the poem. He unfolds it, and he reads it out loud. Then he calls the other deputy over and reads it again. By the third time they were crying, Doc. Holding onto the fender laughing, and one of them said, 'Son, the Lord has punished you enough already,' and he handed me my boot and waved me on. Never touched the right one.
Wilkins: A deputy who reads poetry at a roadblock is a deputy who has never been loved, and it shows. Did the poem work on the girl?
Junior: No sir. Loretta married the mail carrier.
Wilkins: Which proves a woman will always pick the man who delivers. Did you ever mail anything you shouldn't have, Junior?
Junior: One time. My cousin was in the Army, stationed way off, miserable and homesick, and his first sergeant rode him something terrible. So Granny packed a box with socks and a fruitcake and a quart jar marked 'peach preserves.' There were some peaches in it, I'll say that much. Sergeant opens the box at mail call, holds the jar up to the light, unscrews the lid, takes one whiff, and you could see his whole face change. He confiscated it, of course. But from that day on he treated my cousin like his own boy. Gave him the easiest duty in the company for the rest of his hitch. My cousin said he never once pulled latrine duty again.
Wilkins: Any first sergeant who can be bought with one jar of peach preserves was underpaid by the Army and overpaid by the Almighty. Junior, you're a credit to the Brushy Mountains and a disgrace to poetry. Stay by the stove. We'll want you again.
Junior: I'm not going anywhere, Doc. That bear's sitting between me and the door.
♪ Banjo bridge, bright and rollicking
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen! Step right up and lend me your ears! Are you tired of guessing, of fumbling with copper and fire like a blind man at a barn dance? Would you master the thermodynamics of vapor, the true art of the cuts, and the deep, storied history of American spirits? Then hear this: the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course is enrolling now, an eight-week historical and technical distilling academy from Fort Wilkins Academy! Learn directly from master distillers, coppersmiths, and historians! Over thirty hours of detailed modules! Genuine blueprints! Live question-and-answer sessions where your questions get answered! You'll learn why heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper is the alchemist's metal, how to separate heads from hearts with the skill of a surgeon, and how the old Yankee and Appalachian makers did it before you were born. All for the price of one hundred ninety-nine dollars! You can see the copper with your own eyes at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Seats are limited, so don't dawdle! Enroll today at fortwilkins.com/course. Once more, friends: fortwilkins.com/course, also found at moonshinestill.com/course. Reserve your seat now!
♪ Banjo flourish, out
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the craft.
♦ Wax crackle, a copper lid set down with a soft ring
Wilkins: Now that everybody's been sold something, let's talk about doing the work right. Before I start, the law. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal under United States law, and everything on this program is for historical and educational purposes only. I say it because I've been arrested twice, and I wouldn't wish the jail mattress on any of you.
Wilkins: Amos's flask leaked, but the whiskey in it was good, and it was good because of how it was cut. Here's the method I taught him, and it's the method I'll teach you. Don't run your spirit into one big crock. That's how fools and widows get made. Set out a row of small jars, a couple dozen of them, clean and numbered. My jars are numbered in chalk, and Barnaby has licked off number nine twice, so I keep a ledger as well.
Wilkins: Bring the pot up slow on a low fire. The first spirit off the worm is the foreshots, a small amount of the lightest, nastiest stuff in the run. It smells like varnish or a shoemaker's glue pot. Out it goes, every drop, and it never goes near a cup, a mouth, or a sore tooth. Then come the heads, still sharp and solvent-smelling, carrying acetaldehyde, ethyl acetate, and a share of the methanol. Into their own numbered jars, and set aside for discard. Then the hearts, the sweet, clean middle of the run, smelling of grain or apple and nothing that stings. Last come the tails, oily and heavy, smelling like a wet dog that rolled in cornmeal. Set them aside.
Wilkins: The beauty of small jars is that you don't decide in a hurry. Let them sit and breathe overnight with a cloth over the tops. In the morning, go down the row with your nose. Rub a drop between your palms and smell it. Where the sharp smell fades out, that's where your hearts begin. Where the sweetness turns heavy and greasy, that's where they end. Judge your cuts with your nose, not your hopes. Hope has blinded more men than bad whiskey, and bad whiskey has blinded plenty. When in doubt, cut more heads, not fewer. You'll lose a little and keep your eyesight.
Wilkins: And the copper. You saw the blue-black bloom on the inside of my helmet after a run? That's the metal doing its job, grabbing the sulfur stink out of the vapor and holding it so it never reaches your jar. Scrub it after every run so the bright metal is there to work next time. Copper also carries heat as fast as gossip in a sewing circle, so your fire must be gentle. A pot run hot pukes mash up the column, and the run is ruined.
Wilkins: Fire is the other thing that can kill you. Alcohol vapor from a weeping joint will find the flame under your pot as surely as a deputy finds a free supper. I've watched a man's sleeve catch, and the flame was so pale he slapped at it like a wasp before he understood he was burning. He spent a month in bandages smelling like singed hog. Keep your joints tight, your still-house aired, a bucket of sand within reach, and never leave a fire alone. Not for the privy, not for a pretty neighbor, not for the sheriff knocking. Let him knock.
Junior: Doc, that small jar business is exactly what the old men in Wilkes County did. Mason jars in a row like soldiers.
Wilkins: Then the Brushy Mountains and the Suncook Valley agree on something besides hating the tax man.
♪ Fiddle bridge
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, slang, and the call-in tape. Let's start with a myth that's killed more men than the Fifth New Hampshire's whole campaign of bad cooking: the blue flame.
Wilkins: You've seen it. A man pours a spoonful, puts a match to it, and declares that a blue flame means it's safe, a yellow flame means it's weak, and red means lead and death. Hogwash. Methanol, the poison that blinds you, burns with a pale blue flame of its own, nearly invisible in daylight. A spoon of poison can burn as pretty and blue as a sapphire on a bishop. Flame color tells you nothing reliable about methanol or lead. A man who burns a spoonful to prove his whiskey safe is like a man who tests a bridge by admiring it. What makes whiskey safe is the cuts, clean copper, and no lead anywhere in the rig.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. That one's for the myth's tombstone. Now, we have a recording come all the way up from North Carolina. Roll the tape, boy.
♦ Wax cylinder hiss, a click, a faint telephone-line warble
Wilkins: The voice you'd hear belongs to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and he asks, and I read it to you true: '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?'
Junior: Rabbit Miller! I know that family. They named him Rabbit because of how fast he leaves a church supper before the dishes.
Wilkins: Then he's a man of sense. Rabbit, let's take your uncle's remedies one at a time, and I'll be gentler with them than they'll be with your stomach.
Wilkins: First, the red oak. Ask any cooper why he won't make a whiskey barrel from red oak. Red oak is full of open pores, like a sponge cut lengthwise, and a red oak barrel leaks like a Concord politician. White oak's pores are plugged with little growths the woodworkers call tyloses, and so white oak holds liquor and red oak doesn't. Throw red oak shavings in your thump keg and all you'll get is a dose of harsh tannin, a taste like chewing a fence rail. It cleans out nothing. Rabbit, your uncle's red oak shavings would leak out of a barrel and into a man's opinion of himself.
Wilkins: Second, the hickory ash. That's what our grandmothers leached through a barrel to make lye for soap. Hardwood ash is full of potash, which is caustic. Put it in your thump keg and you get muddy, soapy, caustic liquid boiling away and bumping. Hickory ash in a thump keg makes lye, and I've pulled teeth from men who drank less soap at their own baptism.
Wilkins: Now, here's the truth in your uncle's tale, because there's a seed of truth in every lie told on a porch. Some old makers did put fruit or a little grain in the thump keg to give the spirit flavor, and that works. But neither ash nor shavings removes the bad heads. The bad heads, the foreshots and the solvent-smelling first jars with their share of methanol, are taken out one way only: you cut them off and throw them away. No wood, ash, keg, prayer, or bear does it for you.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Rabbit, that coin's stamped in your honor, and it goes in an envelope to Wilkesboro marked 'Soldier's Letter,' so your uncle pays the postage. Shout out to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller and the whole Miller clan of Wilkes County. Tell your uncle he's welcome at Fort Wilkins any time, so long as he leaves his ash bucket at the county line and doesn't step over the chalk.
Junior: And tell him Junior Vance said the biscuits are rising.
Wilkins: There's a parting gift. Junior, thank you for coming all this way and for telling the truth, mostly.
Junior: Thank you, Doc. Mostly is the best you'll get out of a Wilkes County man.
♪ Banjo and fiddle, slow and warm
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! If tonight's lesson in cuts, copper, and myth stirred your curiosity, the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course will take you all the way: eight weeks, thirty-plus hours, blueprints, and live questions answered. Enroll at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: Friends, that's our broadcast. The boys of the late war wrote home on paper that smelled of smoke and feet and sometimes whiskey, and their mothers kept every sheet in the bureau drawer. Whatever you do, write your mother. And if you want to learn the craft from the coppersmiths and historians and from my own crooked wisdom, the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course is waiting for you. Come see the copper at Fort Wilkins on Route 28. I counterstamp the coin so the sheriff knows where his bribe came from. Honesty is a fine thing in a crook.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme fades under wax cylinder crackle to silence