The Shinplaster Panic
Dr. G. G. Wilkins covers the Shinplaster Panic of 1862 to 1865: postage stamps used as change, John Gault's brass-cased stamps, the government's postage and fractional paper currency, merchants' copper tokens, and the Coinage Acts of 1864 that brought bronze back to the cent. Brushy Mountain runner Junior Vance tells new stories about torn-in-half payment notes, a sack of copper that nearly got him caught, and his granny's test for bad paper. Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's voicemail on hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, then strikes a coin on his anvil while he debunks the old 'lead burns red' flame-test rhyme.
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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 that black carcass down! I hear you rattling that chain like a Methodist deacon hunting his collection plate. Lay down, you sack of fleas and gravy. If you keep that up I will trade you to the Treasury, and they will print your likeness on a three-cent note, which is about what you are worth.
♦ Barnaby huffs, one low grumble, chain goes slack against the logs
Wilkins: That's better. He has had a bad morning. A crow stole his apple core and he has been plotting against the bird ever since.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swells and settles under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, tax dodgers, and any Merrimack deputy pressing his ear to the knothole. You are listening to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, here in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I am Doctor George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, purveyor of copper truth, and twice a guest of the county's hospitality. Tonight we talk about paper money: the dirty, greasy, gummed-up little promises that came after the hard money ran off. We call it the Shinplaster Panic. Tonight we learn why copper won and paper lost, and why a man's palm can tell an honest coin from a liar's promise faster than any banker in Concord.
♪ Theme fades
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Your best copper ought to be working, not sitting in a sugar bowl! Behold the Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, handcrafted in heavy-gauge pure copper. See it for yourself at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Short banjo sting
♦ Wax crackle, fire popping in the forge
Wilkins: Segment the first. History, and pay attention, because there will be a quiz and the prize is Barnaby.
Wilkins: Cast your mind back to the summer of 1862. The war has been on more than a year. Back in February, on the twenty-fifth, Congress passed the Legal Tender Act and gave us the greenback, a paper dollar with nothing behind it but Mr. Lincoln's good name and a printing press. Every sharp-eyed farmer from Chichester to Barnstead looked at that greenback, looked at a silver half-dime, and figured the silver was worth more. By midsummer the paper dollar had slid against gold, and the silver change vanished from every till in New England. Then the copper-nickel cents went too.
Wilkins: So what does a Yankee do when he cannot make change? He improvises, and badly. Folks started paying with postage stamps. Plain, licked, gummed postage stamps. Picture a Pittsfield mill hand in July, sweating through his shirt, with a pocketful of three-cent stamps. By the time he reaches the store, the sweat and the gum have glued the whole lot into a brick. His purse becomes a sticky lump that cannot buy a biscuit but would mail itself to Boston if you licked it. Postmasters were mobbed. Men lined up at the post office to buy stamps they had no intention of mailing, and the clerks were ready to throw the inkwells at them.
♦ Wilkins taps a pipe on the anvil horn
Wilkins: Washington's answer came on July 17, 1862: the Postage Currency Act. On August 21 of that year the first Postage Currency notes came out, little paper bills printed with pictures of the five-cent Jefferson and the ten-cent Washington stamps. Some of the first sheets even had perforated edges like real stamps, as if the Treasury could not decide whether it was printing money or sending a letter to its aunt. Folks called them shinplasters. That word is older than the war, mind you. It was thrown at the sorry notes of the Revolution and at the flood of private scrip in the Panic of 1837, when every shopkeeper with a press and a grudge printed his own money.
Wilkins: Then, in 1863, the Treasury got bolder and called it Fractional Currency: three cents, five, ten, twenty-five, fifty, little rectangles of misery that wore soft as a flannel shirt in a month and smelled like whatever pocket they had last lived in. I have handled a ten-cent note that came out of a tanner's apron, and I washed my hands twice and my soul once. I would rather pull a mule's molar with my bare fingers than make change in Fractional Currency on a wet day.
Wilkins: Now here is a curiosity for the parlor. A Yankee named John Gault patented the encased postage stamp in August of 1862. You set a stamp inside a round brass frame behind a clear window of mica, so it would not glue itself to your neighbor, and on the back the merchant stamped his advertisement. Ayer's medicines down in Lowell had them made. So did Drake's Plantation Bitters, the outfit that paints that riddle, S.T. 1860 X, on every barn and boulder from here to Albany. That meant every time you made a purchase you also got a laxative recommendation. Mr. Gault put your money behind glass so you could look at it but never touch it, which is exactly how my wife treats my wages.
Wilkins: And the merchants? They did not wait for Washington. Taverns, mills, and dry-goods men from here to Ohio started striking their own copper tokens, about the size of a cent and mostly copper or brass. Some said 'Not One Cent' in tiny letters to dodge the counterfeiting law. Others carried a flag, a cannon, or the grocer's own name and street. Today the coin men reckon more than twenty-five million of those Civil War tokens were struck, in thousands of varieties. And here is the meat of it, neighbors. Those tokens were thinner and lighter than the government's copper-nickel cent, and nobody cared. The public took them gladly, because a token was metal, it rang on the counter, and it did not dissolve in the rain.
Wilkins: The Mint took notice. On April 22, 1864, Congress passed a Coinage Act that switched the cent to a thinner bronze piece, about ninety-five parts copper with the remainder tin and zinc, near enough the weight of those merchants' tokens. The same act gave us the two-cent piece, the first coin of this Republic to carry the motto 'In God We Trust,' which I find touching, since it took a war and a panic before the Treasury trusted anybody. Then on June 8, 1864, they outlawed private one- and two-cent coins, so the grocers' tokens were finished.
Wilkins: The paper kept embarrassing itself, too. The latest five-cent note carries the face of one Spencer M. Clark, chief of the Treasury's currency bureau, who decided his own whiskers would look handsome on the people's money. Congress is sharpening its knives over it, and mark me, they will pass a law forbidding any living man's face on our currency. So that tells you exactly what the Treasury thinks a bureaucrat's face is worth: five cents, and only on paper.
Wilkins: So why did copper win? Because a shinplaster is a promise printed on paper so thin you could read the lie straight through it. A copper cent you can bite, ring, weigh, stamp, and bury, and when you dig it up forty years later it is still a cent. The government spent three years printing paper promises and finally admitted what every Pittsfield blacksmith already knew: when a man's hand closes on change, he wants it to weigh something.
♪ Fiddle bridge, sawing and mournful, then quickening
♦ Barnaby's chain dragging slowly along the log wall
Wilkins: Segment the second. Legends, outlaws, and the scoundrels of the paper trade. Let me tell you about the note-shaver.
Wilkins: A note-shaver, for the young ones, is a money broker who buys your doubtful paper for half its face and calls the other half 'his trouble,' and his trouble usually includes your watch. In the fall of '63 one of these gentlemen rolls up the turnpike from the Concord side in a yellow-wheeled buggy, wearing a frock coat the color of a drowned plum, smelling of bay rum and bad intentions. He wants six jars of my medicinal product, and he wants to pay me in a fat sheaf of notes from the Bank of the Suncook and Epsom.
Wilkins: Neighbors, there is no Bank of the Suncook and Epsom. There never was. The nearest thing to a bank in Epsom is a woman named Hepsibah who keeps eggs in her bonnet. I tell him so, politely, and he leans over my counter and says, 'Doctor, I don't believe a tooth-puller can read banknotes.' So I tell him I can read a man's whole life story from his molars, and his said he had been lying since he cut them.
Wilkins: He grabs two jars and bolts out the side door, which, as you all know, opens right beside the window where Barnaby takes his afternoon rest. Barnaby does not like fast movement, and he does not like bay rum. He came off that woodpile like a black avalanche. Four hundred pounds of bear hit that note-shaver square in the backside. I heard the frock coat go first, a long wet rip like a sail splitting in a gale. Then came a sound I can only compare to a man biting into a cold Baldwin apple, except the apple was the gentleman's left hindquarter. Barnaby opened that frock coat like a Bible, read him chapter and verse, and kept the Book of Hindquarters.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, as if remembering fondly
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, we are talking about you. The fellow howled a high note that turned the milk at the Pittsfield mills. Both jars rolled into the ditch unbroken, praise be. The counterfeit notes fluttered across the turnpike like September leaves, and Barnaby sat on the gentleman's legs and licked bay rum off his collar until I fetched him off with a ham hock. There was blood on the woodpile, wool in the bear's teeth, and a hole in that man's trousers you could have passed a pie through.
Wilkins: Now I am a physician of sorts, so I laid him face-down across my anvil bench and stitched his backside with waxed linen thread and a curved sail needle. Eleven stitches. He wept like a widow at a camp meeting. And I charged him in copper, because I will not take paper for sewing up a man who deals in it. He did not sit down again until the leaves turned, and when he did, he sat like a man perched on a pew full of tacks. I keep one of his notes nailed over the door to this day, next to his top button.
Wilkins: Now, I have a guest tonight who knows a thing or two about the wages of risk. He has come all the way up from the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina, a mountain runner who knows every turn between the hollows and Charlotte. Please welcome Junior Vance. Junior, sit down, but not on the bench with the bloodstain.
Junior: Doc, I been settin' on worse. Thank you kindly. And I'll say this right off. Your bear looked at me through that window like I was a pork chop that owed him money.
Wilkins: He judges every man that way. You passed, or you would not be sitting here. Junior, we are talking about paper money tonight, and paper nobody trusts. When you ran a load, how did your buyers pay you?
Junior: Well, Doc, the big buyers down Charlotte way never trusted me and I never trusted them, so we done it with a torn note. Feller takes a stack of bills, tears every one clean in half, hands me one half at pickup and keeps the other half. I make my delivery, he hands me the matchin' halves, and I tape 'em back together at the kitchen table like a quilt.
Wilkins: A torn note! That is the most honest use of paper money I have heard all year.
Junior: It's honest until it ain't. One night I had a whole pocketful of half-notes, and I stopped at a buyer's place in Wilkesboro to collect the other halves. He laid 'em on a stump in the yard to count 'em, and his old redbone hound come trottin' up and ate the whole stack. Swallowed it like a biscuit. That buyer looked at me and I looked at him, and we both looked at that dog.
Wilkins: And what did you do?
Junior: Doc, we waited on that dog. Two days. I won't tell you the particulars of the recovery, but I went through that yard with a stick and a lantern like I was pannin' for gold. Come out with three pieces of a ten-dollar bill and a sorry-lookin' Lincoln. Took 'em to the bank and the teller held 'em up with a pair of tongs and said, 'Mister, we don't redeem what the dog has already spent.'
Wilkins: Junior's buyers tear the notes in half. Down here we tear the men in half and keep the notes whole. So you would agree that hard money has its virtues.
Junior: Hard money got me in worse trouble. There was a little store up in the Brushies, ran by a widow woman, and she paid me for a whole load in copper pennies. Forty dollars in cents. Four thousand of 'em in a feed sack. You know what four thousand pennies weighs, Doc?
Wilkins: About as much as a Baptist's grudge, and it sits about as low.
Junior: It sat my rig down in the back so low it about drug the road. Comin' out of the hollow, the law sees me ridin' squatted like that and figures I'm hauled to the gills. Chased me half the night, over every ridge and branch crossing in the county. Finally I let 'em catch me just to get some sleep. Deputy opens up the back, finds nothin' but a feed sack of pennies, and stands there scratchin'. He says, 'Junior, what in thunder?' And I says, 'Deputy, this here's a perfectly legal load of poverty.'
Wilkins: A sack of pennies is the only cargo that can get a man chased for smuggling and fined for being poor in the same night! Junior, the women of your family, did they trust paper at all?
Junior: My granny trusted the Lord, cast iron, and copper, in that order, and she checked the Lord twice a week. She had a test for paper money. Took a clean white flour sack and rubbed the bill hard across it. A good note left a little gray smudge. A bad note, the cheap ink'd come off blue as a jaybird. One Sunday a travelin' preacher come through, and when the plate went round she seen him slip a note in it like he was makin' a donation, but takin' change out. After the service she marched up with her flour sack, rubbed that bill right in front of the congregation, and it come off blue as Monday.
Wilkins: Mercy. What happened to the preacher?
Junior: He preached his next sermon two counties over, Doc, and he preached it fast.
Wilkins: Your granny judged a preacher's soul by the color of his paper money, which is more theology than I got out of three years of Pittsfield Sunday school. Did she keep her savings in a bank?
Junior: No sir. Fruit jars, buried under the hog pen, 'cause she said no thief alive would dig where a hog done its business. She passed on, and it was forty years before my uncles found the spot. Dug up three jars of pure copper pennies, green on top and bright underneath, and every one still spendable. And here's the strange part. Them hogs had wore a groove in the dirt right over them jars, like they'd been standin' guard.
Wilkins: Those hogs guarded that copper forty years for nothing but slop. If the Treasury had hogs like that, we would not need sheriffs. Junior Vance, you are a gentleman and a scoundrel in perfect proportion. Stay by the stove, there is coffee, and do not feed the bear.
Junior: Doc, I wouldn't feed that bear if he asked me in writin'.
♪ Banjo roll into the break
♦ Wax crackle, a brass handbell rings three times
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♪ Banjo flourish out of the break
♦ Bellows wheeze, forge coals brighten
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the Craft. Now neighbors, as always, the making of distilled spirit for drinking without the government's permission is against the law of these United States, and everything I tell you is for history and education. I am a man who has seen the inside of the county jail twice, and I do not recommend the bedding.
Wilkins: I want to tie tonight's money talk to the metal itself. Take a copper cent and leave it in your vest pocket next to a boiled egg. In a week it is black as a stovepipe. Why? Copper reaches out and grabs sulfur, from the egg, from the coal smoke, from the wool of your vest, and it forms a dark crust of sulfide. A copper cent will turn black in a deputy's pocket, which is more color than I have ever seen in a deputy's conscience. The very same appetite is why the copper in a still gives you sweeter spirit. The metal does the grabbing so your tongue does not have to. A coin and a still are cousins.
Wilkins: Now the method, in the old way. For a corn mash, take good cracked corn and cook it in clean water till it goes thick as porridge. Let it cool down, warm to your hand but not scalding, and stir in a fair portion of malted barley. Now here is the alchemy. The malt carries a hidden power, an enzyme the learned men call diastase, that turns the starch of the corn into sugar. Too hot and you kill it, too cold and it dawdles. Let it rest and sweeten, then cool it further and pitch your yeast. Cover it loose against flies, keep it warm, and keep the room aired, for that working mash breathes out a gas that can lay a man flat. In some days it goes quiet and sour, and you have your wash, a weak beer of a few parts in a hundred.
Wilkins: Into the pot it goes. Never fill the pot to the brim, for it will foam and puke into your worm. Never seal the pot tight, and never let the vapor path choke, because a still heated under pressure will burst and paint your rafters with you. And keep your collecting jars well back from the firebox, because that vapor will catch, and a still-house fire is no tall tale.
Wilkins: Now the cuts, and listen close. Bring the heat up slow. A low fire is a patient fire. The first drops are the foreshots, sharp and nasty, smelling of glue and lamp oil. Those you throw out, every drop, no matter how much it pains your purse. Then come the heads, still harsh and solvent-smelling. These are not for drinking either. Throw them out or set them aside for cleaning, never for a man's belly. Here is my method. Do not run into one great crock. Collect into a long row of small jars, numbered left to right like a church pew of little sinners. That way you judge jar by jar, by smell and by taste on the back of the hand, and when the harshness falls away and the spirit comes sweet and clean, those are the hearts, your prize. Later the spirit goes oily and wet-cardboard flat, smelling of old dishrags. That is the tails. Set them aside. A small jar can be judged; a big crock can only be regretted.
Wilkins: And when the run is done, clean your copper, neighbors. Rinse it, scrub it, and keep it bright, the way you would polish a good cent you meant to pass to your grandson.
♪ Fiddle reel, light and quick
♦ Wax crackle, a click and hiss as a recorded message begins
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, slang, and the call-in line. We have a voice on the tape tonight from down in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Junior, this may be one of your neighbors. Let us hear it.
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?
♦ Tape hiss ends with a click
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro! Bless you, Rabbit, and bless your uncle too, because he is a man of tradition, and tradition is a fine thing as long as nobody drinks it. Let me sort the ashes from the shavings, as it were.
Wilkins: First, the hickory ash. What is wood ash? It is potash, Rabbit. It is what your granny leached in a hopper to make lye for soap. Toss strong lye into a hot keg, and what you get is a faint soapy taste, as if you had rinsed the jug with Saturday's wash water. It cleans nothing but your conscience.
Wilkins: Second, the bad head your uncle wants to scrub out. Those harsh heads carry what the chemists call wood spirit. And why do they call it wood spirit, Rabbit? Because they make it by cooking wood in a closed iron retort until it sweats out of the timber! So your uncle threw wood into the keg to chase out wood spirit, which is like throwing a cat into a barn to get rid of cats. That wood spirit boils off at a lower heat than the good grain spirit, so it rushes out early, in the foreshots and heads, and the only cure is to throw those away.
Wilkins: Third, red oak shavings. Now there is something real here, just not what your uncle thinks. Every cooper knows red oak is porous as a sponge. Make a barrel of it and it weeps from every stave, while white oak's pores are plugged up natural and it holds water like a miser holds a dollar. Put red oak shavings in hot spirit and what you get is tannin, color, and a woody bite. It makes young liquor look older and browner than it is. Red oak shavings make young liquor look old the same way a powdered wig makes a young lawyer look wise: it fools the jury and nobody else. It colors the spirit. It does not clean it.
Junior: Doc, I knowed fellers down home who'd drop a handful of oak chips in a jar just so the buyer'd think it was aged. Charged a dollar more for brown.
Wilkins: There you have it, Rabbit, from your own mountains. Brown sells. Brown does not save your liver. So tell your uncle the Alchemist salutes him, and tell him to save his ashes for soap and his oak for the cooper. Rabbit Miller, you are hereby made an honorary citizen of Fort Wilkins, entitled to one free tooth-pulling and one stern look from Barnaby.
♦ Barnaby grunts, one short bark-like huff
Wilkins: He approves. Now, while I have the punch warm, let us knock down a myth. Hand me that cent, Junior, the one from your granny's jar.
Junior: Careful with it, Doc. That one's been under a hog.
Wilkins: Then it's the most honest coin in the room. On the anvil she goes. The old rhyme you have all heard goes 'Lead burns red and makes you dead.' Men pour a spoonful of spirit, set it alight, and pronounce judgment by the color of the flame.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Hogwash! Wood spirit, the stuff that blinds men, burns with a pale blue flame, nearly invisible in daylight, just the same as good clean spirit. So a fine blue flame can be dancing on poison and you would never know. Flame color tells you next to nothing about lead and nothing reliable about wood spirit.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: The only thing a flame test proves is that you were willing to set your supper on fire. Believing the rhyme makes you dumber than a mud turtle in a churn. Clean metal, no lead solder, no scrap junk, and honest cuts are your only protection, neighbors.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, a final ringing tone
Wilkins: There. Stamped plain and deep, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. My punch is stiff, my anvil is willing, and the widow on the Barnstead road says my stroke is the most dependable in Merrimack County. She means the hammer, and so do I, mostly. Junior, take this cent back to the Brushies with my mark on it.
Junior: Doc, I'll bury it under a hog and tell my grandkids where it ain't.
♪ Banjo and fiddle, slow and warm, under
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Paper fades, but copper endures. Give your craft the heavy-gauge copper of the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960. Order it today at moonshinestill.com!
♦ Fire settling in the forge, wax crackle
Wilkins: Well, neighbors, that is our show. If you want to learn the craft proper, the history, the metal, the cuts, and the safe way of things, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. Ask at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 or inquire at moonshinestill.com. I will teach you everything I know, excepting how I got out of jail, which is a trade secret and the sheriff's embarrassment. My thanks to Junior Vance of the Brushy Mountains, to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro and his ash-throwing uncle, and to Barnaby, who has dined on finer men than any note-shaver and never once asked for change.
Junior: Thank you, Doc. Mind the bear.
Wilkins: I always do, Junior. Barnaby is the only thing in this valley I can't stamp my name on.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme rises, then fades into wax cylinder crackle