Letters from the Front
Dr. G. G. Wilkins opens a cigar box of Civil War letters and reads one from a Pittsfield private, written after Burnside's Mud March, begging for a flask. He explains the Soldier's Letter postage rule, the army whiskey-and-quinine ration, the ban on sutlers selling liquor, and how families hid spirits in boxes sent home to camp. He also tells how Barnaby mauled a Treasury snoop who came to search his mail. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister shares new stories: a flask that stopped a Rebel ball, a Testament-shaped flask a chaplain sent back with a Psalm, and the lead-soldered flasks that sickened a soldier. In Segment 4, Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, then knocks down the blue-flame myth between strikes 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 down, you moth-eaten buffalo robe. That is the mail sack you smell, not the mail carrier, and the carrier is spoken for. The last man you sniffed that hard had to be identified by his boots. Lie DOWN.
♦ Chain drags across frozen dirt, a long sulky bear groan, then a wet snort against the window glass
Wilkins: Now he has fogged the glass again. That pane has seen more bear snot than a Coos County trapper's handkerchief.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, veterans, widows, sweethearts, and you nosy postmasters who steam open other men's envelopes over the teakettle. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I am your host, Doctor George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, coin-whacker, and the only man in Merrimack County the sheriff greets by first name and by warrant number.
Wilkins: Tonight's broadcast is called Letters from the Front. The war is done, God be thanked. The boys are coming home up the Turnpike thinner than they left, some of them short an arm or a leg, and every one of them is owed a drink and a chair by the stove. On my workbench sits a cigar box crammed with letters that came to this fort from camps in Virginia, Louisiana, and the Carolinas. Some of them ask for socks. Some ask for prayers. And a great many, I am proud to say, ask for a flask.
Wilkins: Later on, my coppersmith Silas Hacksaw McAllister will come in from the foundry to tell us what it took to build a flask that could survive a war, a provost guard, and a chaplain. We also have a talking cylinder that came up by stage from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, a Rebel state no less, from a fellow called Rabbit. First, a word of law, because I have been arrested enough to know the value of saying it out loud: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and everything on this program is for history and education only. Hush, Barnaby.
♦ Bear huffs, chain settles
Announcer: A QUICK WORD, friends! A leaky joint wastes good vapor and invites the fire! Seal your apparatus tight with Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills, just thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents! See them at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Short bright fiddle sting
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
♪ Slow, mournful fiddle playing an army camp air, fading under
Wilkins: Segment the first: how a letter got from a muddy Virginia tent to a Pittsfield kitchen table. When the war began, a soldier had to scrape up a three-cent stamp like any other citizen, and a private who earned thirteen dollars a month, when the paymaster bothered to show, often had nothing but lice in his pockets. So in 1862 Congress took pity. A soldier could write the words Soldier's Letter across his envelope, get an officer to sign beneath it, and send it off unpaid. The family at home paid the postage when it arrived.
Wilkins: Mothers paid it gladly. A three-cent stamp is a cheap price for proof your boy still has his head. But I tell you, I have seen envelopes come through this valley so stained with coffee, tobacco juice, and what I pray was mud that the postmaster handled them with fire tongs. One came to a widow on the Barnstead road with a louse still alive in the fold. She named it after her son and kept it in a pill tin until Christmas.
♦ Paper rustling, a brittle envelope unfolded
Wilkins: Here is the one I promised you. It is from a Pittsfield private. I will call him Asa Drew, which is not his true name, because he is courting a girl in Gilmanton now and she does not need to know everything. Mark the date: camp near Falmouth, Virginia, January the twenty-sixth, 1863. That is just after General Burnside's Mud March. Burnside tried a winter advance across the Rappahannock, and the rain came down for days until the roads turned to porridge. Wagons sank to the hubs and cannon to the muzzles, and mules went down into the muck. The whole Army of the Potomac slithered back to camp like a whipped dog. Here is what Asa wrote.
Wilkins: Dear Ma. I am alive, which is more than I can say for my feet. We have been on a march the officers call a maneuver and the men call something I will not write to my mother. I saw the mud eat a mule, Ma. Ears and all. It went down braying, and the last thing above the mud was its tail, flicking like it was waving goodbye to the Union. The hardtack has worms that outrank me. Please send wool socks, a dried-apple pie, and some of Grandsire's tobacco, and tell Doc Wilkins I will pay him when the paymaster comes, which the boys say will happen about the same week as the Second Coming. I want a flask of his best. The Captain gives out a whiskey ration only when it rains, and it rains every day, and still the whiskey does not come. Hide it good. Lieutenant opens every box looking for it, and whatever he finds he drinks and calls it confiscation.
♦ Wilkins chuckles, paper set down
Wilkins: The boy was not lying about the ration. Army rules let a commander issue a gill of whiskey after heavy fatigue duty or a soaking. Down in the fever swamps they mixed it with quinine and poured it into the men to keep off the ague, and it tasted like a drowned cat steeped in a church bell. The army surgeons kept whiskey and brandy in the hospital chest as stimulants for the wounded too, and the Sanitary Commission shipped them down along with the bandages. But a private could not buy his own from the sutler. The law forbade sutlers to sell intoxicating liquor to enlisted men. An officer could get a bottle. A private got his whiskey the way a parson gets kissed: rarely, by accident, and with an officer watching.
Wilkins: So the boys wrote home, and home packed boxes and sent them south by the Adams Express Company. Some lieutenant would pry the lid off with his sword and go through it like a hog through a turnip patch. Folks got clever. I have heard of whiskey baked inside a hollowed loaf, poured into tins marked peaches, and stuffed up a roast goose where the stuffing ought to go. One Epsom mother sewed a bladder of brandy inside a quilt, and her boy slept warm in two ways at once.
Wilkins: Asa's mother came to this fort with the letter in her apron, crying and cussing in equal measure. Here is what I did. I took a flat copper flask Silas had built, filled it with hearts from a double-run rye, and corked and waxed it. I wrapped it in oilcloth and laid it in the box under a dried-apple pie. Then, with his mother's blessing, I put on top of everything a pair of Grandsire Drew's wool stockings. That old man had worn them through haying season, sugaring season, and one funeral, and never once introduced them to water.
♦ Barnaby sneezes violently outside
Wilkins: Barnaby remembers them. He would not come within ten feet of that box, and that bear once ate a dead porcupine, quills and all, and came back for the tail.
♦ Second envelope rustles open
Wilkins: Asa's next letter, February 1863. Dear Ma. The box came. Lieutenant pried the lid, got as far as Grandsire's stockings, and went white as a hospital sheet. He said, Private, you may keep the rest, and he walked off to wash his hands in the creek. He surrendered faster than General Lee did, though we did not know that phrase yet. That night I passed the flask around my mess. A Hopkinton boy who lost his brother at Fredericksburg took one swallow and cried and said it tasted like his father's barn. I believe he meant it kindly. Thank Doc Wilkins. Tell him it was the warmest I have been since I left New Hampshire, and I was standing in snow to my knees.
Wilkins: That letter is the finest review my liquor ever got, and I have had it read back to me by two sheriffs.
♪ Fiddle swells, then a banjo roll for the transition
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the second: legends, outlaws, and the fools who tried to read Dr. Wilkins's mail. In the summer of 1863 a pinch-faced Treasury man came out from Concord. I will not name him, because he has suffered enough, and you are about to hear how. He had a theory that I was shipping untaxed spirits to the army in the Express boxes. He was correct, but being correct has never saved a man's trousers.
Wilkins: He came up the Turnpike in a linen duster with a warrant and a magnifying lens. He wanted to inspect any box that was bound south. I said, certainly, sir. It is stacked right by the still-house window. What I did not mention was that Barnaby had been leaning on that box all morning, because it held a smoked ham bound for the 12th New Hampshire.
♦ Distant chain rattle, low rumbling growl
Wilkins: The man reached for the lid. Barnaby took him by the coat tails, and then by what was inside the coat tails. He shook him the way a terrier shakes a barn rat. It sounded like a wet feather bolster ripping on a nail, with a squeal over the top like a pig going under a gate. His spectacles went into the woodpile. His watch went into Barnaby's water trough, and it ran better afterward. His warrant got chewed into a gray paste. When Barnaby finally dropped him, he had lost three front teeth on the chopping block, a good pound of his hindquarter, and most of his left ear, which was hanging by a thread of gristle like a hen's wattle.
Wilkins: I am a physician of a sort, so I did my duty. I sat him on a feed sack, poured a dipper of hearts over the ear, and stitched it back with silk from my wife's sewing basket. It healed a touch lower than the other one, so now he hears the Republicans on one side and the Democrats on the other. I pulled the stubs of his three broken teeth and charged him for it, because the Hippocratic oath says do no harm, and it says nothing at all about doing it for free. He paid in a greenback, I gave him change in counterstamped cents, and he wrote standing up for a twelvemonth.
Wilkins: As for Barnaby, he swallowed the man's left gaiter whole and returned it four days later behind the woodshed with the buttons still done up. I have it nailed over the door as a warning to the Treasury.
♦ Barnaby lets out a satisfied, rumbling grunt
Wilkins: Do not cheer him. He gets proud. Now let me bring in a man whose hands built half the flasks that went to war from this valley. He is a third-generation coppersmith, he runs the foundry here at Fort Wilkins, and he is the only man I know who can tell the purity of copper by the note it rings under a hammer. Silas Hacksaw McAllister. Sit down, Silas, and mind the spittoon. It is the one with the dent.
♦ Heavy boots on plank floor, a chair scrapes
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Evening, folks. I left my apron on, if that's all right. Took the hammer marks out of a kettle bottom right up to the minute.
Wilkins: Silas, during the war this fort shipped more copper flasks south than the Treasury shipped greenbacks. What did a soldier's flask have to stand up to?
Silas: Everything a soldier did, Doctor, and some things he'd rather not tell his mother. He slept on it, fell on it, and waded rivers with it. It got shot at. A store flask from Boston is thin pressed tin with a seam down the side, and one hard march will open it. So I hammered mine from good sheet, curved them to ride against a man's ribs under the blouse, and made the neck short so a branch couldn't snap it.
Wilkins: Tell them about the sergeant.
Silas: Sergeant from out by Berry Pond. I won't name him, since his wife is still living and still particular. In the spring of '63 his mother ordered a flask, and I made it curved to fit over his left short ribs. That July he was at Gettysburg. A Rebel ball came at him and struck the flask dead center. The copper folded in like a cupped hand and held the ball. But it split the seam at the bottom, and the whole flask of spirit ran warm down the inside of his trouser leg.
Wilkins: Oh, Lord.
Silas: He told me that he felt the blow, felt the wet running down his leg, and smelled the liquor. In the smoke he decided he'd been gut-shot and had wet himself in the same moment. He lay down behind a fence rail and said his prayers. Then he reached in to feel the hole and pulled out a flattened ball and a fistful of rye. He said he went straight from making peace with God to swearing at the Confederacy for wasting good liquor.
Wilkins: A man in that spot has every right to swear. Did he come home?
Silas: He came home, and he wrote to me from camp first asking me to beat the dent out so he could carry it again. I wrote back no, sir. That dent is the best work I ever did, and I didn't even do it. It hangs on a nail in the foundry right now. If you shake it, the ball still rattles inside.
♦ A copper flask rattling, a small lead ball clinking inside
Wilkins: There it is, folks. Hear that? It's the sound of a Pittsfield man living to see his grandchildren. Now, Silas, you also built flasks for the more devout among our boys.
Silas: Some of the Pittsfield wives figured an officer won't search Scripture. So they had me build a flask shaped just like a pocket Testament. It was black-japanned copper with a brass clasp, and gilt letters on the spine reading HOLY BIBLE. The cork sat where the ribbon marker would be. It was handsome work. I put two weeks into it.
Wilkins: And?
Silas: The regimental chaplain found it. He was a Baptist from Dover with a nose like a bird dog. He took it from the boy and kept it about a week. Then it came back home by the Express, empty and rinsed, with a little card tied to the clasp in the chaplain's hand. Psalm one hundred and four, verse fifteen. Wine that maketh glad the heart of man.
Wilkins: The chaplain drank the Gospel and mailed back the Psalms! I would have liked that man. Silas, tell them the one that isn't funny, because they ought to hear it.
Silas: Yes, sir. In '62 a traveling tinker came through the valley selling flasks off a wagon. He was cheap, and he was quick. He joined his seams with soft solder heavy in lead, because it flows easy and costs little. A boy from down toward Chichester carried one of them through a whole winter in camp, with spirit sloshing against those joints every day. He came home on furlough with a blue-gray line along his gums like somebody had drawn it with a pencil. He had cramps in his belly, and his wrists were so weak he couldn't hold a fork. The doctor said lead.
Wilkins: That is the lead line, folks. Plumbers and painters get it too. When you see that blue edge on a man's gums, his insides are being poisoned slow.
Silas: So here's my rule, Doctor, and it was my father's rule before me. Every flask and every still that leaves my bench is either hammered seamless or joined with silver solder. Not one drop of lead touches a vessel that carries drink. I'd sooner close the foundry.
Wilkins: Give us one more. The canteen.
Silas: The provost guards at the river crossings got wise to flasks, so they'd shake a man down. I built a regulation canteen with a tin shell and a wool cover, the very same as army issue. Inside it, soldered with silver, sat a copper flask, and the space between the two held water. The cork led to the water and a hidden plug in the side led to the copper. A guard would shake it, hear water sloshing, take a swig, and find it was water. He'd pass the man right on through.
Wilkins: A man's flask is the second most private thing he carries, and the army inspected both. Silas McAllister, ladies and gentlemen. Stay put, Silas, we will want you for the copper talk.
♪ Banjo flourish into a brassy patent-medicine-show march
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a crowd murmur as at a county fair
Announcer: STEP RIGHT UP, distillers and tinkerers! Has your apparatus ever HISSED at you? Have you smelled that sweet, sneaking vapor slip from a joint pasted up with flour and water, while your fire roars not three feet below it? Friend, that is no apparatus. That is a powder keg with a cork in it! Flour paste cracks. Hose clamps slip. A slipping joint is lost spirit, lost money, and maybe a lost barn! Put an end to it with Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills! These are heavy-gauge, precision-milled ferrules in hybrid fittings of 304 stainless and heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper. They seat on food-grade PTFE gaskets and lock down with quick-release stainless wing clamps. Every one is pressure-tested for airtight reliability that will last you a lifetime. Snap it, clamp it, and trust it, all for just thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents! Come handle them yourself in the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Or order this very night at moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings! Once more for those in the back pews: moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings! Never risk a vapor leak again!
♪ March ends on a cymbal crash
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
♪ Low, warm banjo picking under
Wilkins: Segment the third: copper and the craft. Silas, you stay and correct me when I lie. Let me walk folks through how that rye in Asa's flask was made. First, we have copper heads and Copperheads. A Copperhead is a Northern man with Southern sympathies. A copper head is what my still has. Only one of them ever did the Union any good.
Silas: And only one of them can be cleaned with a scrub brush.
Wilkins: Ha! Step one is the mash. Cook a bushel of cracked corn in about twenty-five gallons of water, stirring so it doesn't scorch, until it is a thick gruel. Let it cool until you can hold your hand in it comfortably, blood-warm and no hotter. Then stir in a peck of malted rye. The malt carries diastase, which is the alchemist's servant that turns the starch into sugar. If you skip the malt, you have made wallpaper paste. Stir in your rye meal for flavor, and pitch good yeast, whether a bread starter or barm from the brewer.
Wilkins: Let it work four to seven days in a warm room with a good draft through it. When the cap falls and the bubbling quits, it is a wash. Strain off the liquid, and mind you, the spent grain does not go in the pot or it will scorch.
Silas: Charge the pot no more than three-quarters full, Doctor. Leave her room to breathe, or she'll puke mash right up the neck into the worm.
Wilkins: Exactly so. Now the fire. Bring it up slow and keep it low. Here is a fact that has burned down more still-houses than all the revenue men put together. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air. It does not rise politely to the rafters. It creeps along the floor like a drunk looking for his hat until it finds your firebox, and then whoomp. So keep every joint tight, keep the fire boxed, keep a bucket of water and a bucket of sand within reach, and never, ever walk away from a running still to go see a man about a horse.
Wilkins: Now the cuts, and listen close, because this is where men go blind. The first spirit that trickles out is the foreshots. It is sharp, it stinks of hatter's glue and lamp spirit, and it is thick with methanol, the wood alcohol. Throw it out. On a pot my size, that is a good pint at least, and it goes on the ground, not in a cup, not in a liniment, and not in your brother-in-law, however much he deserves it. Foreshots will blind you faster than a Concord dancing girl's ankle.
Wilkins: After the foreshots come the heads. They are still sharp, like varnish and green apples, and they make the morning-after headache that feels like a mule kicked you between the eyes. Set the heads aside and do not drink them. Then come the hearts. They run sweet and clean and smell of the grain, and they are what went in Asa's flask. Finally the tails start coming. They run oily and flat, and they smell like a wet dog sleeping on a boiled turnip. Set the tails aside to go back in with the next charge.
Silas: And you judge it by nose and tongue on a few drops in a spoon, run by run, and catch it in small jars so you can change your mind. Don't run it all into one bucket and guess.
Wilkins: Small jars, Silas, amen. Now, copper's alchemy. You will find black smut inside your swan neck after a run. That is the sulfur the copper caught out of the vapor, the stink of rotten eggs and burnt cabbage that would have been in your drink. The copper gives itself up to make your liquor sweet, like a good wife marrying a bad husband. So you scrub it bright after every run.
Silas: One more thing about vessels, Doctor, since we're on flasks. Folks have grandmother's pewter, and it's pretty, but old pewter often has lead in it. So do some of the cheap glazed crocks. Store spirit in them for a month and you've made yourself a slow poison. Use glass, or clean copper joined proper, or a good oak keg.
Wilkins: Glass, copper, or oak. Write that on your barn door. Silas, God bless you and your hammer. Go on back to your kettle bottom.
Silas: Thank you kindly, Doctor. Folks, keep your seams silver and your gums pink.
♦ Chair scrapes, boots cross the floor, door creaks and shuts, Barnaby grunts a greeting outside
♪ Banjo walk-down
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the mailbag. A talking cylinder came up by stage this week, wrapped in a feed sack, all the way from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, down in the Yadkin River country. Four years ago that man and I were technically at war. Let us hear him.
♦ Phonograph horn hiss, a hand-cranked cylinder spinning up, faint crackle
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?
♦ Cylinder winds down with a scratch
Wilkins: Rabbit, God love your uncle, and God love the whole Yadkin Valley. I will answer you with an anvil, because I want this hammered into the record.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: First, hickory ash. What is hickory ash? It is potash, son. It's the very same stuff your granny dripped through the ash hopper to make lye for soap. It is a strong alkali. Pour a scuttle of it into a doubler of hot spirit and mash and what have you got? You are halfway to soap. I knew a fellow in Northwood who tried it in '59. His thump keg foamed like a rabid preacher and puked gray lather clean through the worm. What came out of his still could shave a man. He couldn't drink it, so he sold it to barbers as lather tonic, and it is the only whiskey in New Hampshire that comes with a free shave.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Second, red oak. Here is a cooper's secret. Red oak is so open in the grain that you can put one end of a stave in your mouth and blow pipe smoke out the other end. That is why no honest cooper builds a whiskey barrel from it. He uses white oak, which is tight. Shavings in your thump keg will give you some color, some tannin, and a woody bite, and a raw spirit will look older than it is. But that is paint, not physic. Red oak shavings in a thump keg are like rouge on a corpse: a fine color, and the patient is no better.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Third, and this is the true part. Neither ash nor shavings can catch methanol or clean your heads. The heads come over early in the run because they boil off early, and no amount of bark and cinders will hold them back. The only cure is to cut them out with your own two hands and throw them away. So your uncle was not lying, Rabbit. He was repeating. Out in the hills that is the same sin with better manners.
Wilkins: While I have the punch hot, let me hammer down one more myth that came through Asa's camp. The boys swore that if you burned a spoonful of liquor and it burned blue, it was safe, and if it burned yellow or red, there was lead in it. It is nonsense, all of it. A flame cannot tell you whether there is lead in the spirit. And methanol, the very poison you fear, burns with a pale blue flame itself. A spoonful of pure blindness will burn as blue and pretty as a summer sky. If the blue flame told the truth, every lamp in New Hampshire would be a temperance lecturer.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, the coin skitters across the anvil
Wilkins: There. One fresh large cent, stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and it is going into an envelope for Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. A shout to you, Rabbit, to your uncle, to every Tar Heel hollow and Yadkin River still-house that ever tuned in to a Yankee. The war's over, son. Come north sometime, and I will introduce you to Barnaby. Bring a ham.
♦ Barnaby grunts hopefully at the word ham
♪ Banjo and fiddle reprise, low
Announcer: ONE MORE QUICK WORD! Stop sealing joints with flour paste and prayer! Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills will hold airtight for a lifetime, just thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents. See them at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28, or at moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: That is our broadcast, neighbors. If tonight's letters stirred you to learn the craft properly, by history, by law, and by the book, then write for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. It covers mash, metal, cuts, and copper, taught the way I would teach my own son, minus the bear. Thanks to Silas McAllister, to Rabbit Miller, to Asa Drew and his mud-eaten mule, and to every boy who wrote home from the front and every mother who paid the three cents to read it. If there is a soldier home in your town tonight, buy him a supper, and listen to him if he wants to talk.
Wilkins: 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
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar