HARD TACK AND COFFEE

Salt was a crucial resource during the American Civil War. It not only preserved meat in the years before refrigeration - but was also vital in the curing of leather.

Union General William Tecumseh Sherman once said that "salt is eminently contraband," as an army that has salt can adequately feed its men.

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Hard Tack and Coffee: The Unwritten Story of Army Life (1887) is a memoir by John D. Billings (1841 - 1926). 

Billings was a veteran of the 10th Massachusetts Volunteer Light Artillery Battery. 

Originally published in 1888, Hard Tack and Coffee quickly became a Best Seller, and is considered one of the most important books written by a Civil War veteran.

The book is abundantly illustrated by the pen and ink drawings of Charles W. Reed, also a veteran, who served as bugler in the 9th Massachusetts Battery, who later received the Medal of Honor for saving the life of his battery commander at Gettysburg. 

Hard Tack and Coffee is not about battles, but rather about how the common Union soldiers of the Civil War lived in camp and on the marching trail.

What would otherwise be a mundane subject is enlivened by Billings' humorous prose and - - - Reed's superb drawings which are based on the sketches he kept in his journal during the war.

The book is noteworthy as it covers the details of regular soldier life, and as such has become a valuable resource for Civil War historians / re-enactors.

The volume is divided into twenty-one chapters - which treat the origins of the Civil War, enlisting, how soldiers were sheltered, life in tents, life in log huts, unlucky soldiers and shirkers ("Jonahs and Beats"), Army rations, offenses and punishments, a day in camp, raw recruits, special rations and boxes from home, foraging, corps and corps badges, some inventions and devices of the war, the army mule, hospitals and ambulances, clothing, breaking camp and marching, army wagon trains, road and bridge builders, and signal flags and torches.

Some of the information is specific to Billings' experiences as a Massachusetts volunteer artillery veteran. However, much of it is very useful to anyone researching or simply reading about the ordinary soldier in the Union army.

Historian Henry Steele Commager ((1902–1998) called Hard Tack and Coffee, "... one of the most entertaining of all civil war books".

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Whether they’re called corn cakes, hoecakes, johnnycakes or corn pone, Mr. Lincoln loved 'em. He admitted to being able to eat them “ ...as quickly as two women could make them!”

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SOUTHBOUND AND STONE-WALLING

Before the Civil War, peanuts were not a widely cultivated crop in the United States -Virginia and North Carolina were the principal producers and were generally viewed as a foodstuff fit for the lowest social classes and for - livestock.

When they were consumed, they were usually eaten raw, boiled or roasted, although a few cookbooks suggested ways to make dessert items with them.

The goober pea’s status in the Southern diet changed during the war as other foods became scarce. An excellent source of protein, peanuts were seen as a means of fighting malnutrition.

In addition to their prewar modes of consumption, people used peanuts as a substitute for items that were no longer readily available, such as grinding them to a paste and blending them with milk and sugar when coffee was scarce.

“This appreciation was real,” Andrew F. Smith wrote in Peanuts: The Illustrious History of the Goober Pea. “Southerners continued to drink peanut beverages decades after the war ended.” Peanut oil was used to lubricate locomotives when whale oil could not be obtained - but had the advantage of not gumming up the machinery—while housewives saw it as a sound stand-in for lard and shortening as well as lamp fuel.

Peanuts became ingrained in the culture, going so far as to crop up in music. For Virginian soldiers wanting to take a dig at North Carolina’s peanut crop, there was:

"The goobers they are small Over thar!

The goobers they are small, And they digs them in the fall,

And they eats them, shells and all, Over thar!"

The humorous song “Eatin’ Goober Peas” also surfaced during the war years. You can hear the song in full as performed by Burl Ives and Johnny Cash.

It's worth a look and listen.

Love Burl Ives and Johnny ... .

Just before the battle the General hears a row,

He says, “The Yanks are coming, I hear the rifles now,”

He turns around in wonder, and what do you think he sees?

The Georgia militia eating goober peas!

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BROTHER(S) VS BROTHER(S)

157 years ago to this year, the American Civil war finally ended.

Except for American deaths - many more were caused from wound infections and amputations rather than bullets and cannon-balls. More Americans died in the Civil war than all of the wars the United States have been in up to 2022.

In 2011, demographic historian Dr. J. David Hacker published “A Census-Based Count of Civil War Dead,” in the scholarly quarterly, Civil War History, reporting that his in-depth study of recently digitized census data concluded that a more accurate estimate of Civil War deaths is about 750,000, with a range from 650.000 to as many as 850,000 dead.

Hacker, an associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota, believed that a fresh, detailed examination of the numbers from the 1850, 1860 and 1870 U.S. census tabulations might reveal a massive reduction for the young male population in 1870 that would reflect the human toll of the war. Hacker’s research concluded that the normal survival pattern for young American men from 1860 to 1870 was far less—by about 750,000—than it would have been had no war occurred.

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Hardtack is made from flour, water, and salt.

It could last a long time - there is even hard tack from the Civil War in the museum at Manassas National Battlefield Park today. Soldiers really didn't like eating hardtack. It was known as “sheet iron crackers” or “tooth duller” because it was so hard.

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TRUE SOUTHERN ORGANICS

A shortage of conventional medicine (blockades) during the American Civil War (1861–1865) spurred Confederate physicians to use preparations of native plants as medicines. In 1863, botanist Francis Porcher compiled a book of medicinal plants native to the southern United States, including plants used in Native American traditional medicine.

Colonel Frank Parker was hungry. Parker, the leader of the Thirtieth Regiment North Carolina Troops during the Civil War, wrote to his wife in Weldon in January 1862 that “I shall await the arrival of your potatoes, sausage & c. with patience and shall welcome them with open mouths and good appetites.” Soldiers who fought in the war often did not get enough food.

When they did receive food, it often was not very good. They sometimes ate the same thing day after day. The soldiers looked forward to packages from home, but often their families did not have enough to eat themselves.

North Carolinians suffered many hardships during the Civil war. About 125,000 men from the state served in the Confederate army, and others served in the Union army.

The war lasted from 1861 to 1865, and soldiers were away from home for months and sometimes years. Since many of the men who joined the army were farmers, the wives and children they left behind had to do the farmwork.

That meant less food to eat.

People did without some things we consider common, or they found substitutes. An April 1863 article in a Greensboro NC newspaper, for example, explained that okra seeds could replace coffee beans, if “carefully parched and the coffee made in the usual way, when we found it almost exactly like coffee in color, very pleasantly tasted and entirely agreeable.”

Mary Grierson, of Cabarrus County, NC, in her memoir How We Lived during the Confederate War, listed wheat, rye, and sweet potatoes as substitutes for coffee. She also wrote that molasses cane “was crushed with wooden rollers by horse power and the juice boiled in wash pots and was used instead of sugar—we called it ‘long sweetening."

In the early days of the Civil War, people sent food and clothing to their family members in the army. As the war went on, and the men were away for longer periods, there was less to send.

The Union navy blockaded Southern ports to stop ships from bringing in supplies. Agents from the Confederate government requisitioned food and livestock, taking them for the army to use. Union troops came through some areas of North Carolina and stole food and animals.

In early 1863 Mary Williams and fifty-nine other desperate women from the western part of the state asked Governor Zebulon Vance not to draft any more men from their farms into military service. The women noted that without the men they could not plant as many crops. The farmwives wrote, “Famine is staring us in the face. There is nothing so heart rending to a Mother as to have her children crying round her for bread and she have none to give them.” County sheriffs and local governments tried to provide food for soldiers’ families, but many people still went hungry. Sometimes they tried drastic measures to get food.

In the town of Salisbury in March 1863, a group of fifty to seventy-five women armed with axes and hatchets descended on the railroad depot and several stores looking for flour. The women thought that the railroad agent and the storekeepers were hoarding flour, hiding it to sell later at a higher price. When faced with the angry mob, the storekeepers gave “presents” of flour, molasses, and salt to the women. According to the newspaper Carolina Watchman, the agent at the railroad depot insisted he had no flour. The women broke into the depot, took ten barrels of flour, and left the agent “sitting on a log blowing like a March wind.”

Shortages in the western county of Madison, NC had a more tragic result. A group of Union sympathizers from Shelton Laurel raided the town of Madison for supplies. In retaliation for the looting and for attacks on Confederate soldiers, Brigadier General Henry Heth dispatched Confederate troops to the area to stop the Unionists’ raids. Lieutenant Colonel James A. Keith rounded up thirteen suspected Union sympathizers and had his men shoot them. One victim, David Shelton, was but thirteen years old.

One of the things that the Unionists had hoped to get in their raid was salt. As mentioned, salt was very important because people used it to preserve meat. There was no readily available substitute.

By early 1863, a Raleigh newspaper reported that the price of salt had risen from twelve dollars to one hundred dollars for a two-bushel sack. Citizens depended on small private saltworks and on government-run saltworks in Saltville, Virginia, and along the coast of North Carolina.

Union troops captured saltworks at Morehead City and on Currituck Sound in 1862. Throughout the war, saltworks near Wilmington produced much of the state’s supply. Workers pumped saltwater into shallow ponds, where some of the water evaporated. They then boiled the remaining water in large pans until only salt remained.

In August 1863 the Wilmington saltworks made five thousand bushels of salt. David G. Worth, the state’s salt commissioner, wrote the next month to Governor Vance that production was below normal because many of the workers were sick with a “malignant fever” and because of other struggles, including getting firewood.

Many people employed at the Wilmington saltworks worked there because they objected to serving in the army for religious or personal reasons. That worried Major General William Whiting, the Confederate commander of the area. He thought the war objectors would act as spies or send signals to Union ships off the coast.

Whiting also wanted more workers for building forts to protect the city. At one point, his fears led him to seize all of the horses, workers, and boats belonging to the saltworks. The governor wrote,

“This is a great calamity to our people, to stop the making of 350 bushels of Salt per day right in the midst of the pork packing season . . . [the salt works] is almost as important to the State, as the safety of the city, as our people cannot live without the Salt.”

In spite of the need for the saltworks, Whiting closed it for good in late 1864 and made the workers labor on a fort. The Union army and navy were threatening to attack Wilmington. The city was very important for the Confederates. It was the last open port where ships could bring in supplies.

After the Confederates surrendered in April 1865, North Carolinians could return to their farms and import some things they needed from outside the state.

Life was very different when the war ended.

Formerly enslaved people became free to work for themselves. More than forty thousand of the state’s men had been killed, and many others had been wounded. A lot of property had been destroyed. It took time, but eventually North Carolinians were able to grow and buy food again, perhaps appreciating it more after suffering wartime shortages.

War. Us Homo sapiens still have a lot to learn and love - but First - we must all learn to really forgive.

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Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address

Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address was delivered on March 4, 1865, during the final days of the Civil War and only a month before he was assassinated. In his second inaugural address, Lincoln discussed the war and slavery, and ends with these words of reconciliation:

"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations."

EXTRA LAST COMMENTS

Great read - Stephen B. Oates - With Malice Toward NONE.

When spending as much as six (6) weeks at a time assigned in the Deep South, I finally visited just about every Civil War site I had read about years before. It was always at sunrise or sunset and each battle site I visited I was alone - as I could always feel the spirits of those that fought and died and it seemed I could hear and feel their wives and children weep deep into the night for their lost sons, husbands and children.