Hard Times Tokens
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells the story of the Hard Times tokens of 1833 to 1844: the copper store cards and political satire pieces that merchants struck during Jackson's Bank War and the Panic of 1837, and how they turned a shortage of small change into a profit for the merchants. Retired revenue man Captain Donald Vance joins him with four new stories about tokens he came across at still-houses, including a bribe whose own inscription confessed it, and Barnaby the bear deals roughly with a peddler who tried to pay in polished-up coppers. In the mailbag, Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and he debunks the blue-flame test while striking coins 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. BARNABY. Settle your great hairy carcass down. That is a sparrow on the woodpile, not a sheriff. You ate the last sheriff's hat in March and were blowing felt out your backside until Easter, so you will kindly mind your diet.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen dirt, one long resentful groan
Wilkins: There. He is sulking now. A bear sulks like a widow at a will-reading: loud, then quiet, then hungry.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, you sinners, tipplers, tooth-sufferers, and assorted Christians of uncertain standing. 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, New Hampshire. I am your host, Dr. George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, alchemist, and twice the honored guest of the Merrimack County lockup. Tonight's subject is near to my heart and nearer to my pocket. Hard Times Tokens: the copper money of the eighteen-thirties, struck by merchants, mocked by politicians, and carried by every poor fool in the Republic who could not lay hands on a real cent. Tonight we ask what a pocketful of brown copper says about the human heart, and I will warn you now that the answer smells like the bottom of a spittoon.
♪ Theme swells, then fades under
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Pure copper makes pure work, and the Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, is the purest copper going. See it at moonshinestill.com, or at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a log settling in the stove
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. The Bank War and the brown money.
♪ Slow, minor-key fiddle under
Wilkins: Picture the year 1833. Old Andrew Jackson sits in the President's House with a pipe in his teeth and a grudge against the Second Bank of the United States and its president, Mr. Nicholas Biddle of Philadelphia, a man so polished you could shave in his forehead. Jackson called the Bank a monster. Biddle called Jackson a barbarian. They were both right, and the whole country paid for it.
Wilkins: That same year Jackson ordered the federal deposits pulled out of Biddle's bank and scattered into state banks of his own choosing. His enemies called them the pet banks, and they were pets the way Barnaby is a pet: well fed, poorly trained, and fixing to take your arm off.
♦ Bear grunt outside, chain clink
Wilkins: Hush, I was not talking about you. I was mostly talking about you.
Wilkins: The pet banks got drunk on paper. They printed notes the way a Concord drunk prints apologies: freely, and without any metal behind them. Land speculators bought up the West on that paper. Then in July of 1836 Jackson issued his Specie Circular, which said public land must be paid for in gold or silver, hard money only. All the coin in the East went sliding west like grease down a hot skillet. The next May the New York banks suspended specie payments, meaning they would no longer hand you gold or silver for their own paper, and nearly every bank in the Union did the same. That was the Panic of 1837. I was a sprout then, but I remember my father standing in a Pittsfield store with a bank note in his hand, looking at it the way a man looks at a letter from a woman who has already left him.
Wilkins: When hard money panics, it hides. Silver went into mattresses, copper went into crocks, and you could not get change for a quarter dollar if you set the quarter on fire. So the merchants of New York, Boston, Providence, and every crossroads with a counter did what merchants always do in a crisis. They found a way to make money out of your misery. They struck their own coppers.
♦ Distant clank of a press, small coins spilling onto a wooden counter
Wilkins: These are the Hard Times Tokens. They were mostly the size of the large cent, coppery brown, and they passed hand to hand from about 1833 until about 1844. Some were store cards, with the merchant's name and his trade on one face: hats, umbrellas, groceries, dry goods, plain advertisement. Others were politics with a rim on them, and those are the beauties.
Wilkins: One shows Old Hickory himself coming up out of a strongbox, sword in one hand and purse in the other, with the motto 'I take the responsibility.' He came out of that box like a drunk out of a church closet, and the purse was not his. Another shows a jackass, an honest-to-God jackass, with the words 'I follow in the steps of my illustrious predecessor.' That one is Martin Van Buren, Little Van, who followed Jackson into office. Van Buren followed in his footsteps, and the Treasury followed Van Buren straight into the ditch, braying. Flip it over and there is a tortoise lugging a strongbox on its back, labeled 'Executive Experiment,' meaning Van Buren's Sub-Treasury scheme: government money moving at the speed of a turtle, and about as clever.
Wilkins: Then there is Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, whom they called Old Bullion for preaching gold and silver until his voice gave out. The token-makers called their coppers 'Mint Drops' and 'Bentonian Currency' to rub his nose in it. Old Bullion. I have known Concord aldermen who earned the same nickname at the free lunch counter by a different route.
Wilkins: My favorite has a ship under full sail labeled 'Webster Credit Currency,' and on the other side a ship smashed to kindling on the rocks, labeled 'Van Buren Metallic Currency.' That is the Whig sermon in two pictures: trust the paper and sail, trust the metal and sink. I have pulled teeth with more honest arguments in them.
Wilkins: And so you know these coppers were not all foolery, there is one from 1838, put out by the abolition folks, showing a kneeling woman in chains with the words 'Am I not a woman and a sister.' Those people put a hard question into the poorest man's palm every time he made change, and I take my hat off to them. That is the one token from that whole sorry decade that was not trying to rob anybody.
♪ Fiddle sting
Wilkins: Now here is the greed, friends. A great many of these tokens read 'Millions for defence, not one cent for tribute,' an old toast from the XYZ quarrel with France in 1798. The merchants kept the motto for a clever, crooked reason: the token said NOT ONE CENT right on its face. It did not pretend to be federal coin, so the maker could stand before a judge and swear he was no counterfeiter. A token that says 'Not One Cent' is the only honest thing a merchant ever handed across a counter.
Wilkins: The federal large cent weighed one hundred sixty-eight grains of good copper. A great many tokens weighed less, and by common reckoning they cost the merchant less than a cent apiece to strike. So he bought copper by the pound, struck it into cents, paid it out in change as a cent, and every one that wandered off to Vermont in a drover's pocket and never came back was pure profit, sweet as a stolen pie. A store card was also a handbill, so the poor man carried the merchant's advertisement around in his breeches for free. A merchant who coins his own money has found a way to steal from you and charge you for the privilege of being robbed.
♦ Wax crackle, drip into jar
Wilkins: Congress finally ran out of patience last year. By an Act of June 8, 1864, it is now against the law for any private person to make coins or tokens meant to pass as one-cent or two-cent pieces. Thirty years of merchants playing mint-master ended with a scratch of a pen. Lord knows I have done my share of punching at my own anvil, but I stamp my name on the government's coin. I never claimed to make it. There is a difference, and I have explained it to two sheriffs, neither of whom understood a word.
♪ Banjo transition
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Sharps, swindlers, and the man who tried to pay Barnaby's landlord in brass.
Wilkins: Last October a peddler came up the Turnpike from Lowell with a tin trunk and a smile like a busted fence. He wanted two jugs of my medicinal tincture and laid down a fistful of old 'Not One Cent' coppers, rubbed so bright with vinegar and sand that they glowed like a parson's nose at a wedding. He swore they were good federal cents. I have bitten more copper than any man in Merrimack County, and I can tell a Hard Times token from a cent with my eyes shut and my teeth in a jar. I told him no.
Wilkins: Well, he grinned and went off up the road, and come dusk I heard my still-house window creak. That fool had circled round through the alders to help himself. He did not know about the chain, and he did not know about the fellow at the end of it.
♦ Bear grunt, then a sudden roar, chain snapping taut
Wilkins: Barnaby took him by the seat of the trousers. If you have never heard a black bear open a Lowell man's backside, it sounds like tearing a wet bedsheet slow, and then a noise like a boot pulled out of mud. Barnaby came away with the trousers, the drawers, and a slab of the man's left ham about the size and color of a breakfast pork chop. That peddler hollered like the noon whistle at the Suncook mills, only with more blasphemy and a better range. Out of his pocket rained every one of those polished coppers, and Barnaby, being a bear of appetite, licked up eleven of them along with the ham.
Wilkins: I sat the peddler face-down on my dentist's chair, which he did not enjoy for anatomical reasons, poured a cup of foreshots, the rankest stuff in the house and fit for nothing but a wound, over the open meat, and stitched him up with horsehair and a sail needle. He swore he would never cheat a Pittsfield man again, mostly because he could no longer sit down to do the arithmetic. As for the eleven tokens, I got them back three days later, proven by passage, which is more assaying than any Boston bank ever gave a coin. I have one on my anvil tonight. I washed it. Twice.
♦ Bear grunts contentedly, chain settles
Wilkins: Now, my guest tonight has chased more crooked copper through these hills than any man alive, and I have never seen him lose his temper or his supper. Out of Manchester, a retired revenue man with a voice like a church bell full of gravel: Captain Donald Vance. Captain, welcome to Fort Wilkins. Mind the bear. He had peddler last month and is still feeling choosy.
Captain: Doctor, I have walked past worse than Barnaby to get a cup of coffee. Though I will admit none of them were smiling at me.
Wilkins: He is not smiling, Captain. That is how he looks when he is counting your fingers.
Captain: Then I will keep my hands in my pockets, which is where a revenue man's hands belong, by most accounts.
Wilkins: Ha! Now, I am told you have run into these Hard Times coppers more than once in your raiding days.
Captain: More than once, Doctor. The tokens never quite went away. They just went to live with the kind of men I was paid to visit. Take an outfit I raided over in Orange County, Vermont. Big operation, eight or nine hired men, a good copper pot. The owner was a hard old skinflint, and he had taken a kettle that burst one winter, punched the copper into little round chits, and stamped every one 'GOOD FOR ONE DRAM.' That was how he paid his hands. They could not buy flour or boots with it. The only place on God's earth those chits would spend was at his own spigot.
Wilkins: So he paid them in his own whiskey and charged them for the drinking of it.
Captain: To the dram. When we weighed the seizure, the chits outweighed the whiskey. I had a crock and a half of spirit and a nail keg full of copper promises. Those hired men were the most sober drunkards I ever met, because they had worked off every drop before they ever drank it.
Wilkins: The chits outweighed the whiskey, and I would bet the hired men's grievances outweighed the both of them.
Captain: You would win. Two of them helped us carry the still out. Volunteered. Never saw men so cheerful at a funeral.
Wilkins: That is Hard Times greed in one bucket, friends: make the money, own the store, and keep the poor devil running in a circle between the two. What else have you got, Captain?
Captain: Well, there was a tavern keeper in Belknap County, a big moist fellow, sweated like a cheese in July. He saw me coming up the lane and met me at the door with a canvas sack, and he says, 'Captain, I believe you dropped this.' It is heavy and it jingles, and it is plainly a bribe. So I reach in, and the very first copper I pull out is an old Hard Times token reading, plain as Scripture, 'NOT ONE CENT.'
Wilkins: Oh, glory.
Captain: I held it up to the light and said, 'Friend, even your money is telling me no.' I logged the whole sack as a bribe that had confessed itself, and I put the token in the report as Exhibit A, the only witness in Belknap County that ever told me the truth on the first asking.
Wilkins: A bribe that confesses itself saves the government the cost of a lawyer. Did he hang?
Captain: He was fined, Doctor, and he wept, and he was fined a little more for the weeping, because he did it on my boots.
Wilkins: Now, Captain, I have heard you are soft on old men, and I mean that as the highest praise a moonshiner can give.
Captain: Soft is a strong word. Fair, I hope. There was a fellow up in Haverhill, this side of the river, near ninety, running a little pot no bigger than a bean kettle. We were pulling up the plank floor of his still-house when my deputy's bar struck something hard right under the firebox. We dug it out, and it was a lump of green and black metal about the size of a loaf of bread. The old man started to cry. It was his savings from 1837. He had buried every merchant copper he had hoarded through the Panic, a whole crock of them, and then built his firebox right on top and ran it for twenty years. The heat had fused them into one solid lump. You could still see a little Jackson nose sticking out the side, and the corner of a jackass.
Wilkins: Jackson's money went in, and twenty years later it came out a doorstop, which is about what Jackson's money was worth by 1840 anyhow.
Captain: I handed it back to him. Told him it was not contraband, just a brick of Jacksonian greed, and a man is entitled to keep his own mistakes. He used it to hold his barn door open the rest of his days.
Wilkins: Captain, you are the only revenue man I ever met whose handshake left my fingers all accounted for. One more?
Captain: One more, and it is on me. My first month on the job, green as spring grass, I go to collect a tax on a Portsmouth widow who had a little still in her root cellar. Before I am off the porch she is throwing tokens at my head, and I mean throwing them hard, with an arm like a Navy gunner. They were all stamped with her late husband's grocery advertisement, 'Teas, Coffees, and West India Goods.' And she hollers, 'Those are all he ever left me, and they are all you will ever collect!' One caught me square over the eye. I still have the scar.
Wilkins: What did you do?
Captain: I picked them up, every one, counted them in front of her, and gave her a receipt. Forty-one tokens. Then I went home and my wife asked who hit me, and I said a dead grocer.
Wilkins: Captain Donald Vance, ladies and gentlemen, the only man who ever got wounded by a store card and filed the paperwork on it. Captain, stay by the stove. We are going to step away for a word from the people keeping the lamps lit around here.
Captain: I will stay by the stove, Doctor. Away from the window.
♦ Bear grunt, chain clink
♪ Brisk banjo vamp, medicine-show tempo
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♪ Banjo flourish, out
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the craft. Alchemy for the honest and the half-honest.
♪ Low, warm fiddle drone under
Wilkins: Now, we spent the first half of this show on bad copper, so let us talk about good copper. A token-maker wants his copper thin and cheap, to fatten his own purse. A still-maker wants his copper thick and pure, because the copper does chemistry for him and a thin pot of trash metal will poison your customers and burn your house down, in that order or the other.
Wilkins: I am going to walk you through a corn run the way my own hands do it. First, mind the law: Washington requires a permit to distill spirit for drinking, and this program is told for history and instruction alone. Barnaby holds no permit, and look at him.
Wilkins: Step one, the mash. Take your cracked corn and cook it in water until it goes thick as a mud-season road and smells like a johnnycake. Let it cool to about one hundred fifty degrees by the thermometer. You must have a thermometer, and do not tell me your thumb is good enough, for I have pulled teeth from men who trusted their thumbs. At that heat you stir in your malted barley. The malt carries a natural ferment, what the learned men call diastase, that turns the corn starch into sugar. Raw corn by itself is a stubborn Baptist and will not convert without help.
Wilkins: Step two. Cool it further, down to about eighty degrees, and pitch your yeast. Pitch it too hot and you will kill it, like scalding a baby chick in the dishwater, and your mash will lie there dead as a Whig convention. Then let it work five to seven days in a warm place with air moving through. The yeast eats the sugar and gives you a thin, sour beer we call wash, only a few parts in a hundred spirit.
♦ Bubbling, burping ferment
Wilkins: That noise is not Barnaby's stomach, though I understand the confusion.
Wilkins: Step three, the run. Strain your wash into the pot, seal the joints, and bring up the fire low and slow, and I mean LOW. Hot vapor climbs the cap and the copper does its alchemy, and the condenser worm must be kept running cold the whole time. If your worm runs warm, raw spirit vapor comes out of the end like a ghost, finds your firebox, and turns your still-house into a lantern with you inside it. I have seen a man in Barnstead come out of a fire like that with no eyebrows, no beard, and the hair on his arms curled up like a cooked spider, and he was the lucky one. Never leave a run alone. Not to pee, not to flirt, not to chase a bear.
Wilkins: Step four, and listen close, because this is where men go blind. The cuts. The first drops off the worm are the foreshots, the most volatile of all, and that is where the methanol lives, the wood spirit that blinds and kills. Throw them out, and throw out a generous measure. On a twenty-gallon wash I will toss a good pint and more without blinking. If you doubt yourself, pour out more. The bear does not need it, the jury does not need it, and you surely do not.
Wilkins: After the foreshots come the heads. They smell of varnish and solvent, like a hatter's back room, and they will give you a headache that feels like a mule kicked you from inside. Set them aside. Then come the hearts: clean, sweet, a whiff of corn and summer. That is the spirit worth the work. Then the tails start in, oily, cloudy, smelling like wet paper or a dog that has been in the Suncook. Set those aside too. Cut by your nose, your tongue held back, and several small jars, never one big one. One big jar is how heads end up in the hearts, just the way a greedy merchant mixes his tokens with his cents.
Wilkins: And the copper, while all this goes on, is catching the sulfur stink and holding it back so the spirit runs sweet. That only works on clean, pure metal. Thin metal with lead or worse in it, the kind a token-sharp would sell you, is a poison waiting for a buyer. Buy good copper, join it right, scrub it after every run, and it will outlive you, your wife, and the two of your children who turned out disappointing.
♪ Fiddle resolves
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a mail sack thumps onto the table
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, mouth-talk, and the mailbag. Tonight we have a message on the listener cylinder, all the way from Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Let us crank it up.
♦ Cylinder machine cranking, hiss, scratchy playback
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?
♦ Playback hiss cuts out
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro! Rabbit, a hearty Pittsfield howdy to you and your whole hollow, and to your uncle, who I suspect is a man of strong opinions and no evidence. Let me set a token on the anvil while I think.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. Now, Rabbit, your uncle is half right, and the right half is in the wrong barrel. Hickory ash is mostly potash, the same strong alkali your granny boiled with fat to make lye soap. Some old-timers did put a small pinch of ash or lime in a mash gone too sour, in the fermenter, to settle the acid so the yeast could go on working. That much is true craft. But tossed into the thump keg to clean out the heads? It is a stranger at the wrong funeral. Hickory ash in the doubler is like a Whig at a Democrat barbecue: loud, out of place, and changing nothing about the meat.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Here is a fact your uncle can take to church. Red oak is so porous that a cooper will not make a whiskey barrel of it. It leaks like a sieve. Coopers use white oak, because its pores are plugged up with little natural growths that hold the liquor in. What red oak shavings will do in a thump keg is stain your spirit the color of tea and add a pucker of tannin, so raw whiskey looks like it sat in a barrel for years. That is no cleaning, Rabbit. It is face-paint. Red oak shavings in a thump keg are like rouge on a hog: the color is fine, but it is still a hog, and now a vain one.
Wilkins: And the bad heads? Neither ash nor oak will pull them out. The heads and the foreshots come out one way only, and that is by your hand, cutting them away into a jar you never drink from. The thump keg doubles your strength. It does not wash your sins.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: While I have the punch hot, here is one more myth to bury. The blue flame. Every jug-peddler from here to Wilkesboro will pour a spoonful, set a match to it, and say, 'Burns blue, it's pure. Burns red or yellow, there's lead in it.' Horse apples. The wood spirit, the methanol that will blind you, burns with a pale blue flame nearly invisible, just about the same as good spirit. So a blue flame can be blue poison. And a flame will not tell you true about lead either. A spoon fire tells you exactly as much about your spirit as a handsome hat tells you about a deputy's honesty. The only test that counts is honest metal and honest cuts, made before the jug is ever corked.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, ringing
Wilkins: Rabbit, I have stamped this one for you: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., struck over the face of one of those Lowell peddler's polished tokens, the very one that went through Barnaby. Washed, I promise. It is going in the mail to Wilkesboro. Tell your uncle to keep it in his pocket and stay out of the thump keg.
♦ Bear grunt outside, as if offended
Wilkins: Do not sulk, Barnaby. You have struck more coin with your teeth than the Philadelphia Mint has with its press, and your strikes are a good deal more memorable.
♪ Banjo turnaround
Announcer: A quick word before we part, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, heavy-gauge electrolytic copper, handcrafted with pride! Order yours at moonshinestill.com, or call on the Fort Wilkins showroom, Route 28, Pittsfield!
♪ Theme rises gently under
Wilkins: SIGN-OFF. Captain Vance, before you brave the bear, any last word for the folks?
Captain: Only this, Doctor. In all my years the best men I met in the hills were the ones who did not cut corners, on their copper or their customers. The worst always had a pocketful of somebody else's promises.
Wilkins: Spoken like a revenue man and a Christian, two things I did not know could live in one coat. Thank you, Captain Donald Vance of Manchester.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. And thank you, Barnaby, for not eating me.
♦ Bear grunt, sounds faintly disappointed
Wilkins: Friends, if tonight's talk of mash and cuts has set your mind working, I invite you to the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course, where I teach the whole craft from the old books: copper and how it behaves, mash and ferment, cuts by nose and jar, fire and how to keep it from killing you, and the law of the land, which I have studied closely from both sides of a jail door. Ask after it at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 or at moonshinestill.com. You will leave knowing more than the sheriff, which is no great feat, and more than your uncle, which may be.
Wilkins: Now here is the moral of Hard Times, and I give it to you free, since it never cost the merchants anything either. When times turn hard, some men share their bread and some men strike a token. The token-maker said 'Not One Cent' right on the face of his money and still got rich on it, because nobody bothered to read it. So read what is in your palm, friends. Read the man selling it to you. Greed is a fire that never asks for wood. It just eats the house.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme, fading into wax cylinder crackle