Originally aired on April 21, 1995 - In part 34 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson describes the diet of the Civil War soldier.
#34 – Army Rations
What the men of blue and gray had to eat led to the loudest and the most widespread complaints by Civil War soldiers. Army rations of that day were poor in quality and monotonous; and more often than not, it was in small supply. A Tennessee soldier once stated blandly: “Sometimes we had a good meal, but generally we…had to buckle up our belts to find whether we possessed stomachs”.
Food rations issued to the soldiers generally was somewhere between mediocre and downright awful. Coffee was the mainstay, one soldier noted, and he added: “Without it was misery indeed”. Confederates could not always get coffee and turned to such substitute beans as peanuts, peas and corn.
What to eat along with the beverage was something else. The meat rations of the Civil War literally defy belief. Meat was always in short supply – and that may have been good fortune. Beef was distributed either fresh or pickled. Most men ate it raw because it tasted the same whether cooked or not. The consumption of uncooked meat posed dangers to health, of course. A New Jersey infantryman once declared after a new issue of meat: “Every man who had eaten any of the stuff was laid up, and what with the heaving up and the back door trots, we had a sorry time of it”.
Cornbread was the staple of every Johnny Reb’s diet. The meal was coarse, un-sifted, and sometimes of amazing consistency when cooked. John Casler of the Stonewall Brigade asserted: “The corn bread would get so hard and moldy that when we broke it, it looked like it had cobwebs in it”. Balls of cornmeal, called “slapjacks”, were cooked over an open fire. The result were corn cakes consisting of alternate layers of paste and soot. A Texan swore that “it would kill a horse to digest them”.
On the Union side, Billy Yanks ate a three-inch-square cracker known as hardtack. They usually were stone-like in texture and infested with worms. In 1862 a Pennsylvanian confided in his diary: “Camp gossip says that the crackers have been in storage since the Mexican War. They are…almost hard as a brick, and undoubtedly would keep for years and be as palatable as they now are”. A New Yorker finished a meal of hardtack and informed his sweetheart: “Well, I have been to dinner and my teeth have become easier and I will make another stab at writing you”.
Much of the sickness so prevalent in army camps was a direct result of poor army rations. Diarrhea, dysentery, scurvy, and malnutrition were attributable to the steady diet of fried meat, hard bread, and strong coffee – supplemented on occasion with green peaches and unripe apples. Moreover, a Billy Yank confessed, “the mess pans were used to fry our pork in and also as a wash basin. Our soup, coffee and meat were boiled in camp kettles…which were also used for boiling our dirty clothes”.
That government-issued food was so often in short supply heightened the problem still further. An Illinois soldier asserted that “hunger is one thing that is dreaded more than balls from the enemy guns”. Lack of food, a Confederate stated dejectedly, “was the one thing that we suffered from most. We were always hungry”. Both men were being honest.
A South Carolinian admitted in 1864 to having a bold appetite. He then confessed that a day or so earlier, he “devoured the hindquarters of a muskrat with vindictive relish, and looked with longing eyes upon our adjutant general’s young dog”.
In spite of hunger, indigestion, occasional food poisoning, and chronic diarrhea, most soldiers of the 1860s followed the human trait of adapting to that which they could not change. With respect to food, the men tolerated it, swallowed it – and hoped for the best.
