Substitutes and Bounty Jumpers
Alchemist G. G. Wilkins grins his way through the draft economy of 1863: the Enrollment Act, the $300 commutation fee, substitute brokers, stacked town bounties, and the bounty jumpers who enlisted, collected and ran over and over again. He also tells how men begged him to pull their front teeth so they would fail the army's cartridge-biting test, and how Barnaby the bear dealt with a substitute broker from Concord. Wilkes County runner Junior Vance tells new family stories about Confederate draft dodgers hiding in the Brushy Mountains and how he took a revenue man's money himself. Wilkins then walks through the copper craft and its safety rules, answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's voicemail about hickory ash and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and debunks the blue-flame test.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby. BARNABY! Settle your great greasy carcass down, or I'll pull your back molars and sell 'em to a Concord widow as the knucklebones of a saint. ...There. He heard a wagon creak out on the turnpike and thinks it's the provost marshal come to draft him. I've told him a dozen times the army would take his teeth and his appetite and send back nothing but a pension form, and he won't hear it.
♦ Bear grunt, low and resentful
Wilkins: Same to you, sir.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, and assorted reprobates of the Suncook Valley. Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am Dr. George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, twice a guest of the Merrimack County sheriff, and the only man in this valley whose name is stamped on the money. Tonight's subject is one that makes every man in this county look at his boots. Substitutes and Bounty Jumpers: the grand American market in other men's courage, bought by the head and resold by the dozen. Pour yourself something honest and sit close to the horn.
♪ Theme fades under a single banjo strum
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Has your old kettle gone green, crooked, and crusty? Then look to the Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, handcrafted from pure heavy-gauge copper! See it at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle swells, then settles
Wilkins: Now. Segment the first. Picture the spring of 1863. The war has gone on two years longer than every newspaper promised, and the volunteers who marched off with roses on their bayonets are coming home in boxes, or with one sleeve pinned up, or not at all. Mr. Lincoln is short of men. So on the third day of March, 1863, Congress passes the Enrollment Act, the first national draft this Republic ever saw. Every male citizen, and every immigrant who'd declared he meant to become one, from about twenty years of age up to forty-five, gets his name written in a provost marshal's book.
Wilkins: But here's the Yankee cleverness, and I mean that the way a man means it when he finds a fox has learned to open the henhouse latch. If your name came out of the drum, you had two doors out. Door the first: hire a substitute, some other fellow to go and get shot in your stead. Door the second: pay the government three hundred dollars in commutation and stay home with your feet in the oven.
♦ Coins jingling in a leather pouch
Wilkins: Three hundred dollars. Close to a year's wages for a man swinging an axe or tending a loom down at the mills on the Suncook. That was the first time in history the United States admitted a man's courage had a price, and the price was about one good mule and a used coffin. The working men understood the arithmetic right off. They called it a rich man's war and a poor man's fight, and they weren't wrong. Mill owners paid the fee the way you'd pay for a pound of nails. The farmhand behind them went to Virginia.
Wilkins: Mind you, I don't judge a man for hiring a substitute. I judge him for what comes next. A fellow who hires another man to do his fighting will soon hire one to do his courting, and before you know it his wife is writing the substitute thank-you letters and knitting him socks.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, chain rattles
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. Now, how did they choose? In public, on a platform, with a big turning drum full of folded slips, and a blindfolded man reaching in to draw the names. That's the only honest arrangement I ever saw in government: it takes a blind man to be fair and a deaf one to collect the taxes. The drawing began in New York City in July of '63, and the city went up like a powder mill. Days of rioting, buildings burned, blood in the gutters, one of the deadliest riots this nation has ever suffered. Up here in New Hampshire we were quieter about it. We don't riot, we sulk, and then we vote at town meeting.
Wilkins: And town meeting is where the real money changed hands. Every town had a quota to fill. Fill it with volunteers and nobody in town got drafted. So the selectmen of every hamlet from Pittsfield to Pittsburg voted bounties. Cash to any man who'd enlist and be counted against the town's number. Then the state added a bounty, and the federal government added another, and they stacked up like flapjacks at a logging camp. By the end a man could hold several hundred dollars in his fist for signing his name, and later in the war some got near a thousand. Towns that didn't have it borrowed it. Pittsfield will be paying off that note so long that our grandchildren will be taxed for a war their grandfathers spent hiding in the hayloft.
♪ Brief fiddle sting, sly and sliding
Wilkins: And where there's free money lying in the road, along comes a buzzard to pick at it. Enter the bounty jumper. Here is the trade, start to finish. You walk into a recruiting office in, say, Manchester. You sign your name, John Smith, healthy as a plow horse. You collect your bounty, or the first installment of it. You get your blue coat. That night you climb over the fence of the camp, sell the coat, take the cars to Nashua or across into Massachusetts, and sign up again as James Brown. Collect, desert, repeat. A bounty jumper is a patriot who loves his country so much he joins it nine times.
Wilkins: Nine is nothing. There was a fellow named John O'Connor who was reported to have confessed to jumping thirty-two times. Thirty-two! That's more commitment than most of the husbands in Merrimack County have ever shown to anything but supper. They gave him four years in prison for it, and I'd guess he spent them figuring out how to enlist with the warden.
Wilkins: Now, the army is not entirely stupid. Only mostly. Get caught and you could be shot for desertion, and some jumpers were, stood up against a fence in front of the whole regiment. The provost men started keeping lists of faces and scars and peculiar marks. And that, friends, is where the substitute broker comes in, the lowest crawling creature in this whole history, lower than a revenue man, and I don't say that lightly.
♦ Wilkins spits into a brass cuspidor, a clean ring
Wilkins: A substitute broker found you a man to go in your place, for a price, and kept a fat slice for himself. The honest ones, both of them, found willing men. The rest worked the taverns with a bottle of rotgut, a pinch of laudanum, and a pen. A farm boy wakes up in a barracks in Concord with a headache like a mule kicked him, a signature on a paper he never read, and a broker in Boston counting the boy's bounty. They sent the lame, the half-blind, and the plain dead drunk, and they sent the jumpers back in a dozen times over, because a jumper was a reliable product.
Wilkins: Which brings me to Fort Wilkins, and to my own small part in the draft economy, which I'll confess now while the sheriff is asleep.
♪ Banjo picks a low, conspiratorial run
Wilkins: A Union soldier loads his musket with a paper cartridge, and he tears that paper open with his front teeth. No front teeth, no tearing. No tearing, no soldier. The army's examining surgeons would reject a man who didn't have opposing front teeth to bite with. So in the summer of '63 I had a line out my door like Sunday at a camp meeting. Grown men, healthy men, sound teeth white as a parson's collar, all of them begging me to pull those teeth before the drum turned.
Wilkins: A dollar a tooth. Upper and lower, so they couldn't bite. I've pulled thousands of teeth for honest rot and abscess and the black misery, but I never had so many men thank me for ruining their smiles. One fellow from up Barnstead way, I won't give the name because his grandchildren may be listening and have his face, sat in my chair and asked if I could leave the rest and just knock out the two in front. I set the forceps on that big front incisor, put my knee on his chest, and pulled, and it came out with a sound like a cork leaving a jug of cider that's been working all winter. He spat a mouthful of red on my apron and said, 'Thank you, Doctor, God bless the Union.' Then he tried to whistle for his dog on the way home, sprayed his own mare, and she kicked him into the ditch on the turnpike. A man with no front teeth can't bite a cartridge, can't whistle for his dog, and can't tell his wife a lie without spraying her with it.
♦ Barnaby huffs, a wet snort
Wilkins: Now the broker story. Barnaby, you remember this one. There was a substitute broker out of Concord. I'll call him Ephraim Gorse, because that wasn't his name and he'd sue me if it were. He used to drive the turnpike with a wagon and a demijohn, looking for men too drunk to stand up and too poor to say no. One evening in August, Gorse pulls up at Fort Wilkins, sees my hired man, Asa, asleep in the shade with his hat over his face after a hard day stacking cordwood, and decides Asa looks like three hundred dollars delivered to the Concord barracks. Gorse gets Asa under the arms and starts dragging him toward the wagon. Right past the log window. Right across the chain line.
Wilkins: Barnaby was eating at the time. Barnaby does not care to be disturbed at supper. Four hundred pounds of bear came off that window ledge without a sound, quick as a falling anvil, and took Gorse by the boot. Then by the calf inside the boot. I heard it from the forge, and I'll tell you what it sounded like, because nobody else will: like a wet sail tearing off a schooner's yard in a gale. Then a crack like a green stick over your knee. Gorse hollered like a shoat that had just found out what the knife was for. Asa never woke up. Barnaby shook that leg the way a terrier shakes a rat, and Gorse's boot came off with a good deal of Gorse still in it. There was blood on the woodpile and a strip of trouser hanging off a bear's tooth like a flag of surrender.
Wilkins: I got Barnaby back with a ham bone and stitched Gorse myself with harness thread, free of charge, which is the only charity I've ever done a broker. And here's the beauty of it. That fall Gorse's own name came out of the drum. The provost surgeon took one look at his leg, chewed and puckered and crooked as a split rail, and rejected him for service. So the only man in Concord who ever earned a real exemption earned it in a bear's mouth.
♦ Bear grunt, satisfied
Wilkins: Now, I've got a guest tonight who knows a thing or two about outrunning the law, though the carriages he drove were faster than anything that ever came down Route 28 behind a horse. He hauled corn liquor down out of the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina, and he speaks like his words were cured in tobacco smoke. Say hello to Junior Vance.
♦ Chair scraping on plank floor, a jar set down on the table
Junior: Evenin', Doctor. Evenin' to your bear, too. I seen him out the window and he looked at me like I owed him money.
Wilkins: You probably do. Everybody does. Junior, the Union had its draft in '63, but your Confederacy had one first, didn't it?
Junior: Yes sir. April of 1862, a whole year ahead of y'all. And let me tell you, Wilkes County did not care for it one bit. Them Brushy Mountains got so full of men hidin' from the conscript officers you couldn't throw a rock without hittin' somebody's husband. The state sent the Home Guard up to hunt 'em, and the Home Guard mostly hunted for supper and went home.
Wilkins: And you had kin among those hiding men?
Junior: My great-great-granddaddy, Absalom Vance. He didn't want no part of it. Said he'd fight any man that come on his land, but he wasn't walkin' to Virginia to do it. So he took to a rock house up on the ridge. That's a big overhang of stone, dry underneath, kinda like a porch God built and forgot to put a house on. He lived up in there two whole winters.
Wilkins: Two winters under a rock. I've known married men in Pittsfield who'd call that a vacation.
Junior: [laughs, a dry rasp] Well, his wife, my great-great-grandmama Lettie, she had the real job. She'd watch the road from the cabin, and she worked out a signal with the wash line. If the Home Guard was comin' up the holler, she'd hang out her red flannel petticoat. Absalom could see that thing from the ridge plain as a fire. If it was safe, she hung a white bedsheet, and he'd come down after dark for cornbread and whatever else a man comes down off a mountain for.
Wilkins: The petticoat telegraph! Better than anything Western Union ever strung on a pole. Did they ever catch on?
Junior: One time. There was a sergeant in the Home Guard, fella named Pruitt, who got suspicious that Lettie did a powerful lot of laundry for a woman with no man at home. Washin' on Tuesday, washin' on Thursday, washin' on Saturday night. So Pruitt comes up the holler with three boys and his musket. Red petticoat goes up the line. And Absalom, instead of runnin', comes down the back side of the ridge to meet him with two jugs of apple brandy.
Wilkins: Bribery! The oldest exemption in the Republic.
Junior: Yes sir. And it worked. They sat on a log and passed them jugs around until the sun went down. Pruitt went back and wrote out his report, and the family's still got the story of it word for word. It said: 'Searched the whole ridge. Found nothing but one hog of bad character.'
♦ Wilkins slaps the table, laughing
Wilkins: A hog of bad character! I've served on a jury with that very hog. Now Junior, you ran your liquor in a later day than mine, but I want to ask you about the bounty business. Did any man ever try to buy you?
Junior: [chuckles] One did. There was a revenue agent workin' Wilkes and Surry, slick feller, shiny shoes on a dirt road, and that's how you knew he wasn't from there. He couldn't catch me, so he decided he'd hire me. He sits down across from me in a diner in North Wilkesboro and slides forty dollars across the table. Says, 'Junior, you drive your next load down the Elkin road Thursday night, and you'll see some lights, and you just pull over and let it happen. Forty now, sixty more after.'
Wilkins: He was paying you a bounty to enlist on his side.
Junior: That's exactly what it was. So I took his forty dollars. I enlisted, Doctor. I shook his hand. And Thursday night I hauled that load the other way, down through the back side of Elkin and around, and there was his roadblock sittin' out there with all their lights on, guardin' a whole lot of nothin'. Next week I mailed him a postcard. Didn't sign it. All it said was 'Enlisted. Collected. Deserted.'
Wilkins: [roaring laughter] Junior, you've jumped a bounty on the Treasury itself. Enlisted, collected, and deserted in one evening. That makes you the most efficient bounty jumper ever to wear shoe leather. O'Connor needed thirty-two tries to do what you did with one postcard.
Junior: Well, I come from a family with practice. Now, I got a cousin, Dewey. Dewey heard the law was gonna be thick on the road one Friday night, so he figured he'd hire himself a substitute. Paid a boy named Harlan twenty-five dollars to drive Dewey's load to Charlotte for him.
Wilkins: A substitute broker in his own right.
Junior: Yes sir. And Harlan got through clean as a whistle. Not a light behind him the whole way. Meanwhile Dewey, the one stayin' safe at home, gets arrested that same night at his own rehearsal supper, in front of his bride and her mama, for a whole stack of tickets he never paid. Deputy walked in right as they was cuttin' the pie.
Wilkins: There's the whole moral of the war right there. A man who substitutes his way out of danger will always find the danger waiting at the dessert table. Did the bride marry him?
Junior: She did. She paid the tickets. She's been holdin' it over him forty years now.
Wilkins: The longest sentence ever handed down in North Carolina. Junior Vance, it's an honor. Stay at the table, the jar's still half full.
Junior: Don't mind if I do, Doc.
♪ Fiddle reel rises and cuts, a rattle of tambourine
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♪ Tambourine shake and closing banjo flourish
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; a hammer taps an anvil lightly, testing
Wilkins: Back at the anvil. Segment the third: copper and the craft. Before I say a word, the plain law: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of this United States. What follows is history and instruction. I'm explaining how my trade was done, not telling you to go do it.
Wilkins: Now. Everything in a still comes down to four things: the mash, the fire, the copper, and the cuts. Take them in order.
Wilkins: The mash. A grain man cracks his corn coarse, cooks it in water until it thickens like porridge, and lets it cool. While it's warm, not hot, he stirs in a share of malted barley. The malt holds the enzymes that turn the corn's starch into sugar, the way a good lawyer turns a crime into a misunderstanding. Once it's cool enough that you can hold your hand in it, in goes the yeast. Then you wait, with the fermenter covered against flies but never sealed, in a place that's airy and warm, a few days to a week, until the bubbling stops and the cap falls. What's left is wash: a sour, beery soup with a little alcohol in it, and every drop of trouble or glory in your finished spirit started right there in that tub.
Wilkins: A word for the apple men in this valley, and there are plenty. Fruit is a different animal. Apples and pears carry pectin, the stuff that sets your grandmother's jelly, and when fruit ferments, that pectin breaks down into methanol, the wood alcohol, the blind-staggers poison. A fruit mash gives you more of it than a grain mash does. Apple brandy is a fine thing, but a careless apple man can give a whole congregation the blind staggers and blame it on the sermon. Cut your fruit spirits with more care than anything else you make.
♦ Wood fire crackling under a kettle
Wilkins: The fire. Low and patient. A still is not a locomotive. And here is the commandment I'd carve on the lintel if I could spell it right: never seal a still tight. Vapor has to have a clear path out through the condenser. Block it, with a jammed worm, a plug of mash, or a cap clamped on by a fool, and the pressure builds until the pot bursts and scalds every man in the room. A sealed still is a bomb with a good reputation. Never walk away from a running still, not to piss, not to court, not to fetch the mail. And keep your collection jar well away from any open flame. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air. It creeps along the floorboards like a cat after cream, and when it finds the firebox it lights the whole shed. I watched a man's eyebrows leave his face in Northwood in 1858 and never come back. He drew them on with lamp black for church.
Wilkins: The copper. Why copper and not iron or tin? Because copper fights the stink. When yeast is stressed, too hot or underfed, it throws off sulfur compounds, and the rotten-egg one, hydrogen sulfide, is the worst of the lot. Hot vapor carries them up out of the pot. Where that vapor touches copper, in the helmet, up the neck, down through the worm, the copper grabs the sulfur and holds it. So the copper that does the most good is the copper the vapor touches. A copper pot with an iron cap is like a sermon with no ending: the good part never gets to where it's needed. After every run, scrub out the black and the green with vinegar and salt until it shines like a new cent, and rinse it clean, because none of that crust belongs anywhere near your jar.
Wilkins: The cuts. The old-timers ran twice. The first run, the stripping run, goes fast and pulls everything that will boil out of the wash into what they call low wines, cloudy and rank. The second run, the spirit run, goes slow, and that's when you cut. Catch it in small jars, a row of them along the bench, numbered, never one big crock. First out come the foreshots, sharp as nail-polish fumes and full of poison. Out they go, and you throw away more than your greedy heart wants to. Then the heads, harsh and solvent-smelling; set them aside and don't drink them. Then the hearts, sweet and clean on the nose: that's your keeping spirit. Then the tails come on, oily and wet-dog smelling, and those get saved for the next run. You make the cuts with your nose, a thermometer if you've got one, and the patience of a man waiting for a tooth abscess to come to a head. The jars let you change your mind. One big crock lets you poison your cousin.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
Wilkins: Barnaby says I've been too sober about it. All right. Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the mail.
♪ Short banjo vamp, playful
Wilkins: We've got a call-in tape, a talking letter, sent all the way up from Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Junior, this might be one of your neighbors. Let her roll.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle shifts in pitch; a second, scratchier recording begins
Wilkins: The gentleman is Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, and his question is this: '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; crackle returns
Junior: That's a Rabbit Miller for sure. Them Millers'll put anything in a keg but a receipt.
Wilkins: Rabbit, here's the plain truth with the bark still on it. Take the hickory ash first. Wood ash is potash, potassium carbonate, the very same stuff every New England farmer leached out of his hearth for soft soap. Half the cleared land in this state was burned off and sold to the potash dealers by the barrel. It's alkaline, like lye. Put it in a thump keg and it'll neutralize some of the sour, acidy notes in a run, and I suppose that's why the old-timers swore by it. But methanol is not an acid. Ash can't touch it, can't bind it, can't change it one bit. Rabbit, your uncle's hickory ash is soap with ambitions. It'll scrub a shirt, but it won't touch a drop of methanol.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Oak gives tannin, color, and a woody bite, the same as a charred barrel does over a year or two. So the spirit comes out the far end darker and tasting older, and a man thinks, well, look at that, it's been cleaned. It hasn't. It's been dressed up. Red oak shavings in a thump keg are like a fancy collar on a mongrel: he looks better at church, but he'll still bite the deacon. The bad heads are still in the jar until you cut them out with your own hand at the spirit run. So, Rabbit, your uncle's half right about the flavor and all wrong about the cleaning, which is a better average than most uncles. A shout to you, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. You've earned a stamped cent.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There it goes. G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., struck into an Indian Head cent, and it's in the post to you, Rabbit. My punch has stamped my name on more Indian Head cents than the Treasury has stamped on promises, and mine at least hold their face value in this county.
Wilkins: Now one more myth while the anvil's warm: the blue flame. You've all seen some sport at a tavern pour a spoonful of spirit, put a match to it, and announce, 'Burns blue, she's pure! If she burns yellow there's lead in it!' Hogwash on a silver tray. Good grain spirit burns blue, sure. So does methanol. Wood alcohol burns with a pale blue flame of its own, so that spoon could be full of blinding poison and still burn like an angel's halo. And flame color is no honest test for lead either. The blue flame tells you as much about your whiskey as a pretty bonnet tells you about the woman's cooking. The only tests worth a damn are a clean copper still, a lead-free pot, and honest cuts.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That one's for the blue-flame myth. Struck dead.
Junior: Doc, down home a feller'd shake the jar and read the bead too. Swore by it.
Wilkins: The bead tells you about strength, Junior, and nothing whatever about poison. That's a fight for another night. My anvil needs to cool.
♪ Banjo theme begins softly underneath
Announcer: A quick word before we part! The Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, is pure electrolytic copper built to last a lifetime. See it at moonshinestill.com, or visit the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Friends, that's the hour. The draft took the brave, the broke, and the unlucky, and left Pittsfield with nothing but sheriffs, selectmen, and me, and two of those three should have been drafted twice. My thanks to Junior Vance for coming all the way up from the Brushy Mountains and drinking my good jar while he was at it.
Junior: Pleasure's mine, Doc. Tell that bear I'm sorry about whatever I did.
Wilkins: He'll forget it by spring. And if you'd like to learn this craft right, the history, the copper, the mash, and above all the cuts, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. Unlike the provost marshal, I won't draft you, and unlike a substitute broker, I won't drug you. You'll walk out with your front teeth and your eyesight. Ask at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield. And remember: this program is history and instruction, and making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law.
♦ Barnaby grunts at the window; chain clinks
Wilkins: Hush, you old deserter. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme swells and fades with antique warmth
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar