The Gospel Penny: Two-Cent Pieces and the Folks Who Spent Them
Dr. G. G. Wilkins digs into the bronze two-cent piece of 1864: Rev. Watkinson's letter, Mr. Longacre's shield, the first 'IN GOD WE TRUST', the drop-letter postage it paid, and the private tokens it drove out. He also tells a grisly new tale of Barnaby the bear eating a deputy's coin purse and the very unpleasant way the coins came back. Blue Ridge herbalist Clara Higgins brings fresh mountain stories of 'Gospel pennies', a fiddle with a coin rattle in its belly, and a persimmon-brandy widow who priced her dram by the drinker's Adam's apple. In Segment 4, Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC on hickory ash and red oak shavings in the thump keg, then knocks down the old 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! Hush your gob, you great hairy sack of sin. That's no deputy, that's the wind. If it were a deputy you'd have him half et by now and be complaining about the buttons. Lie down. Lie DOWN.
♦ A heavy thump against the log wall, a long, wet bear sigh, chain settling in the dirt
Wilkins: There. Four hundred pounds of bad manners, napping on my woodpile like a congressman on a Treasury bill.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners and those still deciding. Welcome 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: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, and the reason the Merrimack County sheriff sleeps with one boot on. Tonight we talk about the strangest little lump of metal Washington ever pressed into a Yankee's palm: the two-cent piece. It's a year old, fat as a toad, pious as a deacon, and nobody can quite decide what it's for.
♦ Wilkins flips a heavy coin. It rings on a plank table and wobbles to a stop
Wilkins: But first, the man with the voice like a medicine wagon.
♪ Quick banjo flourish
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Is your still held together with flour paste and hope? Stop it! Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills seal tight, clamp fast, and don't leak a breath of vapor. Shop hardware at moonshinestill.com! That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme swells and fades
♪ Slow fiddle bridge, minor key
Wilkins: Segment the first. The history of the two-cent piece, and who in God's green creation actually spends one.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; a coin dragged across the table
Wilkins: Picture the hard-money famine of the war years, when every honest copper in the land hid under a mattress and folks traded in postage stamps and paper scraps. Storekeepers got so desperate they had little copper tokens struck on their own account, with their names and their bragging on them. Congress watched all that and finally did something, which is about as rare as a sober Fourth of July in Epsom. On the twenty-second of April, eighteen sixty-four, they passed a Coinage Act. It turned the old copper-nickel cent into bronze, and it gave birth to a brand-new bastard: the two-cent piece.
Wilkins: Now look at the thing. Mr. James B. Longacre, Chief Engraver of the Mint, drew it up. On the front, a shield with two arrows crossed behind it, wrapped in laurel. On the back, '2 CENTS' in a wreath of wheat, like a harvest supper served on a button. It's struck in bronze, ninety-five parts copper and the rest tin and zinc, and it weighs ninety-six grains. That's heavy enough to pull a man's pocket crooked and light enough that a sexton steals four of them out of the plate before the second hymn.
Wilkins: And here's the part that's got every pulpit from Concord to Kentucky clucking. Look over the shield, on that little ribbon. 'IN GOD WE TRUST.' This is the first coin of these United States ever to carry those words. Back in November of sixty-one, a Pennsylvania preacher, the Reverend Mark R. Watkinson of Ridleyville, wrote to Secretary Chase of the Treasury. He fretted that if the Union fell, posterity would dig up our coins and take us for heathens. Chase passed it to Mr. Pollock, the Mint Director, and Pollock put it on the two-cent piece. So Washington put God on a coin worth two cents, which tells you exactly how much the Treasury thinks the Almighty will stand for.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside; chain rattles once
Wilkins: Quiet, Barnaby, I'm talking theology. Now, any coin man worth his loupe should know this: the eighteen sixty-four pieces come two ways. On most of them the motto is struck in big, bold letters. On a scarcer few the motto is small and pinched, as if the engraver was ashamed of it. Hold on to a small-motto piece if you find one. Some sharp-eyed collector will pay more than two cents for it someday, though I'd rather drink the profit now than wait for him.
Wilkins: So who spends a two-cent piece? I'll tell you, because I've watched them all year across my counter. First, the post office. Since sixty-three, a local drop letter, the kind you leave for a neighbor in the same town, has cost two cents. One coin pays it exactly, no change and no arguing. Every lovesick mill girl on the Suncook is posting notes to her beau at two cents a sigh. Second, the newsboys in Concord and Manchester, hollering casualty lists at two cents a paper. Third, the storekeepers, who are mighty glad to have a government coin at last instead of Mr. So-and-so's private token. Those tokens are dead now, by the way. In June of sixty-four Congress outlawed any private man striking his own one-cent or two-cent coin. I take that as a love letter addressed to me personally, though all I ever do is decorate the government's coins with my good name.
Wilkins: But there's a catch, and it's in the law. The two-cent piece is legal tender only up to twenty cents in a single payment. Try to settle your tax with a sack of them and the collector can tell you to go to hell, legally. That suits me fine, since that's where I'd send him anyhow.
Wilkins: And now there's a new rival coming. This past March, Congress authorized a three-cent coin made of copper and nickel. So the two-cent piece is too big to be a penny, too small to be a nickel, and too pious to be spent in a whorehouse without blushing. Mark my words, friends, wax this cylinder and play it back in ten years: this coin won't see a decade. Congress will kill it the way they kill everything useful, slowly, in committee, after a good lunch. Nearly twenty million of them were struck last year, and every one of them is a little bronze orphan waiting for the poorhouse.
♪ Banjo sting
♪ Rollicking fiddle reel, fades under
Wilkins: Segment the second: Legends, outlaws, and runners. I'll start with a fresh one from my own dooryard, and I warn the ladies to send the children out to the barn.
♦ Wax crackle; Wilkins pours a measure into a tin cup
Wilkins: This October past, the Merrimack County sheriff sent a new deputy up the turnpike. A fat, pink, Concord-bred boy with a coin purse on a string at his belt, jingling like a sleigh. He'd been told to 'inquire into irregular spirits.' He tiptoed past my log window thinking Barnaby was a pile of buffalo robes. Barnaby is not a pile of buffalo robes.
♦ A sudden roar, chain snapping taut, a man's high scream
Wilkins: Barnaby came off that woodpile like the wrath of Moses. He didn't bite the boy. He hooked one claw into the seat of his woolen trousers and tore the whole hind end out in a single pull, drawers and all, with a sound like a sail splitting in a gale. The coin purse went with it. Then that bear sat down, calm as a deacon at supper, and swallowed it, string and leather and eleven two-cent pieces, gulp, gulp, the way you'd take an oyster. The deputy stood there with his bare pink moon shining at the Suncook Valley and cried out, 'That's county money!' I said, 'Son, it's bear money now.'
Wilkins: He walked home bare-arsed through Barnstead in October, and his hind end was so blue the Methodists took it for a sign.
♦ Barnaby grunts smugly outside
Wilkins: But I'm a man of honor, and I meant to return the county's property. So for three days I followed that bear around with a shovel and a stick. I won't spare you, since you came for the truth. On the third morning I found them in a pile the size of a church hat, steaming in the frost, eleven little shields winking up at me out of the worst-smelling mess in Merrimack County. I picked out every one, scoured them in hot vinegar and salt till they shone, and spent them at the Pittsfield post office on drop letters. The postmaster sniffed them and asked why the coins smelled of wet bear. I told him that was the smell of the federal government's own money coming home to roost. I have laundered money before, friends, but never by way of a bear's bowels, and I don't recommend it to any banker who values his breakfast.
Wilkins: And now, a guest who's come a long, hard way up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, through a country still smoking from the war, to sit at my plank table. She's an herbalist, a forager, and she knows more mountain words for liquor than a Concord judge knows excuses. Miss Clara Higgins, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Clara: Well, thank you, Doctor. I'd say it's a pleasure, but your bear just looked at me like I was a ham with a bonnet on.
Wilkins: He's only sizing you up, ma'am. He's had a rich diet lately. County money.
Clara: So I heard. All the way out on the porch I heard. And I'll tell you, Doctor, you've got the honor of being the only man I ever met who'd go digging through bear leavings for twenty-two cents.
Wilkins: A Yankee doesn't waste, Miss Higgins. Now tell me, have you seen these two-cent pieces down in Virginia?
Clara: Lord, have I. Before the surrender we didn't see a Union coin from one year to the next. Confederate paper, and you could wallpaper a privy with it, and folks did. But this past spring, right after Appomattox, a Union paymaster's wagon came up the valley pike through Augusta County, and it broke an axle in a creek ford. A keg busted open, and two-cent pieces went everywhere, shining in the water like fish scales.
Wilkins: And the mountain folk helped the paymaster gather them up, I'm sure, out of patriotic feeling.
Clara: Oh, every one of 'em helped. Helped themselves. That paymaster went home lighter than he came, and half the young'uns in the county had a coin in their cheek like a squirrel. And on account of the motto, folks took to calling them 'Gospel pennies'. You'd hear a man say, 'Lend me a Gospel penny till Saturday,' and he meant a two-cent piece, and he meant he'd never pay it back.
Wilkins: Ha! Gospel pennies. And did the preachers bless them?
Clara: Now that's a story. There was a hard-shell preacher down on the Tye River, lean as a fence rail, voice like a hog caller. He got up one Sunday and preached a whole hour that putting the Lord's name on money to be spent in groggeries was blasphemy, a graven abomination, and so on. Folks were shaking in the pews. Then he passed his own hat, and every Gospel penny in that congregation went into it, and he never said a word against a one. Come Tuesday, my granddaddy saw him at a still-house back of Massies Mill, swapping the whole hatful for a gallon jug.
Wilkins: A preacher who calls money blasphemy on Sunday and buys a jug with it on Tuesday is just a man with a very long grace before supper.
Clara: That's him exactly. He said the Lord moves in mysterious ways. Granddaddy said the Lord was moving right down that preacher's throat.
♦ Wilkins slaps the table; tin cup rattles
Wilkins: Now, you're a scholar of the old words. What's the slang down your way for this foolish coin?
Clara: Well, a 'two-center' is a dram that's poured short. If a man hands you a cup and it's only half full, you say, 'Don't you two-center me, Elijah.' And since the post office went to two cents for a drop letter, the young fellows in my hollow say 'I'm going out to post a drop letter' when they mean they're stepping behind the barn to make water.
Wilkins: Ha! Then Barnaby posts a drop letter every quarter hour, and it's always addressed to my woodpile.
Clara: Then you've got the best-watered woodpile in New Hampshire, and I wouldn't burn it indoors.
Wilkins: Tell me about the music, Miss Higgins. I hear the mountains are full of fiddlers.
Clara: My Uncle Absalom was the worst and the loudest. Now, the old fiddlers in the Blue Ridge put a rattlesnake's rattle inside the fiddle for luck, and it makes a little buzz when you play. Absalom couldn't find a rattlesnake willing, so he slid a Gospel penny through the f-hole instead. Every time he leaned into a hoedown that coin buzzed and rattled around in the fiddle's belly like a hornet in a jug. He named the fiddle 'Two Short of a Nickel'.
Wilkins: Did it improve the music?
Clara: Doctor, nothing improved Absalom's music. But it covered up the wrong notes. Uncle Absalom's fiddle buzzed like a rattlesnake, and so did Absalom after the third dance. One night at a corn-shucking he played so hard the coin came flying out the f-hole and hit the tax collector's wife right in the eye, and Absalom said it was the only tax he ever paid back to the government.
♦ Wilkins wheezes with laughter, coughing
Wilkins: Oh, that's a medicine better than any I sell. Now, you know your fruit brandies. What did a two-cent piece buy in the mountains?
Clara: There was a widow in Floyd County, Mrs. Tabitha, made the finest wild persimmon brandy in the Blue Ridge. You wait till those persimmons are dead ripe, soft as pudding, or they'll pucker your mouth like a drawstring purse. She charged one Gospel penny a swallow. But here's the trick: she judged a swallow by the drinker's Adam's apple. She'd look you up and down, take your neck in her hand like a chicken's, and set the price.
Wilkins: A woman of science!
Clara: A woman of commerce. One day a bull-necked teamster came through, neck like a stovepipe, Adam's apple the size of a pullet's egg. She charged him three Gospel pennies a swallow. He hollered robbery, and she said, 'Son, that gullet of yours could swallow a church bell. You pay for the plumbing.' And he paid it, Doctor, because it was the best brandy he ever had.
Wilkins: Then she's a better businesswoman than the whole United States Treasury, which can't decide what one swallow of bronze is worth. Miss Clara Higgins, you'll stay with us through the evening?
Clara: Long as that bear stays on his side of the window, I'll stay on mine.
♪ Fiddle reel swells, then down
♪ Low, warm banjo picking
Wilkins: Segment the third: copper and the craft. And here's where tonight's coin earns its keep. Take a two-cent piece, ninety-five parts copper. It's nearly a little copper still with a shield on it. Now, why do we prize copper for the still-pot, the cap and the worm? Not for pretty looks, though I'm vain about my pot. It's because copper is alchemy you can hold. When the vapor rises off a mash, it carries sulfur-stink with it: rotten eggs, cabbage, the smell of a Concord alderman's armpit. Copper grabs that sulfur and holds it fast on its own skin as a dark sulfide, so the vapor goes on clean. But that catch only works on bright metal. A pot gone black and green inside is a sleeping guard. So after every run I scrub her inside with hot vinegar and salt, rinse her hard with clean water till there's no sour left, and dry her. And I never let a flake of that green crust near anything that's poured.
Wilkins: Now, the law first. The law of these United States says no man distills spirits without the government's license, and this program is for history and learning only. I'm telling you how the craft is done, not inviting you to go and do it.
Wilkins: The mash. I'll give you a plain corn-and-barley mash the way an honest farmer cooks it. Take about fifty pounds of cracked corn to some twenty-five gallons of water and cook it, stirring, near the boil, till it thickens like Indian pudding. Let it cool to about a hundred and fifty degrees on the glass. That's about as hot as you can stand to hold your hand in it for only a second. Then stir in ten pounds of ground malted barley. The malt does a quiet miracle: in an hour or two it turns the corn's starch into sugar. Then cool it again to blood-warm, about eighty degrees. Never hotter, or you'll scald the yeast dead. Pitch your yeast and cover it loose with a cloth. My mash smells like a Concord alderman's armpit on the third day, and that's how you know it's working, same as the alderman. In four days to a week the bubbling quits and you have a sour wash of a few parts alcohol.
Wilkins: Mind your air while it works. A fermenting tub breathes out choke-damp, the same bad air that kills men in wells and cellars, and it settles low. Keep a door open and a window up, and don't go stooping over a tub in a shut-up cellar.
Wilkins: The run. Strain your wash so you don't scorch grain on the bottom. Fill the pot no more than three-quarters, so foam can't come up into the cap. Seal the joints so they don't weep vapor, but never seal the whole still shut tight. Vapor has to have its road out through the worm. A still sealed up tight is a church bell full of gunpowder. It'll ring once, and you'll hear it in Epsom. Bring the fire up slow and keep it low. Never walk away from a lit still, and keep no open flame anywhere near a leak, because that vapor will catch, and a log still-house burns like a hymnal.
Wilkins: The cuts. Here's where a man shows if he's honest. The first spirit out the worm, the foreshots, is the poison end, sharp as a hornet and loaded with wood alcohol. Throw it out. Throw out a good half pint for every five gallons of wash, and more if your nose argues. Wood alcohol blinds and kills, and it doesn't care that you're thirsty. After the foreshots come the heads, still sharp, smelling of glue and varnish. Catch them in small jars, number every jar, and set them aside. They aren't for drinking. Then the hearts come, sweet and clean, smooth on the nose, and that's your keeping spirit. When it goes oily and smells of wet dog and old porridge, that's the tails. Catch those separate and run them again with the next charge, or throw them away. Small jars, slow fire, an honest nose. No coin, charm or preacher can do that work for you.
♦ Slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
Wilkins: Listen to that. That's the sound of patience, which is the one ingredient no revenue man can tax.
♪ Banjo resolves
♪ Brassy medicine-show fanfare, drum roll
Announcer: Friends! Neighbors! Gather round the wagon! Is your still held together with flour paste, rags and a prayer? Are slipping hose clamps leaking good vapor into the air, where it's a fire hazard and a waste of a whole night's work? Stop it, friends, stop it today! Moonshine Stills brings you the Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets, precision 304 stainless and copper hybrid fittings! Heavy-gauge ferrules! Food-grade PTFE gaskets! Quick-release stainless wing clamps that snap tight in a heartbeat and come apart for cleaning just as fast! Every one is pressure-tested and precision-milled to stay airtight for a lifetime. They're made to mate with heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper, the cleanest copper a still can have. All this, friends, for just thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents! Come see them with your own eyes at the showroom at Fort Wilkins, on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, if the bear allows. Or order this very night at moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings! Once more, so it sticks: shop hardware at moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings! Moonshine Stills: seal it right, clamp it tight!
♪ Fanfare ends with a cymbal crash
♪ Sly, plucked banjo
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the mail. We have a voice on the speaking tube, recorded down in North Carolina. Roll it.
♦ Wax cylinder hiss; a distant, tinny voice
Wilkins: That was Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Rabbit asks: '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?'
Wilkins: Rabbit, I'll give your uncle half a cup of credit and pour the rest on the ground. Take the oak first. Red oak shavings in a thump keg will do something. They'll put a little color, a little tannin bite and a little woody taste in the spirit, the same as a short rest in a barrel. Rabbit, your uncle's oak shavings didn't clean his liquor, they just dressed it for church. A bad head in a Sunday coat is still a bad head.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There goes the first one: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., struck fresh on a Gospel penny. Now the hickory ash. Soak ash in water and you've got lye, the same thing your grandmother boils down to make soap. That's caustic stuff. Splash it in your eye and you'll wish Barnaby had you instead. It might hold back a little of the sour in a wash, but it won't touch the wood alcohol. Not one drop. Pouring lye-water into a thump keg is like curing a toothache by kicking the patient in the jaw. It'll take his mind off the tooth, but it won't fix the tooth. The poison runs out first, in the foreshots and heads, and the only cure is to catch it and throw it out. That's the whole gospel, and there's no two-cent version of it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And while I'm swinging, here's another fool's tale to flatten: the blue flame. Men in every tavern from Pittsfield to Wilkesboro pour a spoonful, set a match to it, and swear that a pretty blue flame means the liquor's safe. Hogwash. Wood alcohol burns with a pale blue flame of its own, so the very poison you fear can pass your test and put you in the ground smiling. The blue flame tells you that your liquor burns, which you'd have known anyway the next morning on the privy seat. And setting fire to spirit anywhere near a still is how a man loses his eyebrows, his barn and his widow's good opinion in one evening.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin; coin skitters across the anvil
Clara: Doctor, my granddaddy did the flame test with a spoon, and he did it so often he never grew eyebrows back after eighteen and fifty.
Wilkins: Then he paid for his schooling in hair, Miss Higgins, which is cheaper than paying in eyes. Rabbit Miller, thank you for the question, and here's to you and all of Wilkesboro. I'm setting aside this fresh-stamped two-cent piece in your name. Come up the turnpike and claim it, and if Barnaby's swallowed it by then, I'll lend you the shovel.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, offended
♪ Banjo bridge
♪ Theme returns softly underneath
Announcer: A quick word before we go! Don't let a slipping hose clamp or a smear of flour paste ruin your whole night's work. Heavy-Duty Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills, just thirty-four ninety-five! Shop now at moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: Friends, if tonight's talk of cuts and copper got your curiosity going, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you the history, the metallurgy, and the honest discipline of the cuts, the way a dentist teaches forceps: with steady hands and no foolishness. My thanks to Miss Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, who's come farther than any two-cent piece ever will.
Clara: Thank you, Doctor. And keep that bear away from my satchel. I've got persimmon seeds in it, and he's been sniffing it all night.
Wilkins: He's a gentleman, ma'am. He only eats county property. 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 fades into wax cylinder crackle