Episode Ten: Warfare and Coffee Part One – The Civil War

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When I say the words, “Civil War” what are the first things that pop into your mind? If you’re from the United States, it’s probably things like slavery, Abraham Lincoln, or Gettysburg. But, in fact, the thing Civil War Soldiers journaled about more than anything else was coffee. War has a way of making people appreciate the small pleasures in life. Coffee, as it turns out, is one of the biggest small pleasures that exists.

Over the next several episodes we’ll be exploring the intersection of warfare and coffee, beginning this week with the American Civil War.

Civil War-era rifle with built in butt stock coffee grinder

Episode Ten Sources:

Episode Ten Transcript:

Over the course of United States’ history, nothing has had a bigger impact on its economy and culture than the wars that its fought in. This shouldn’t be a huge surprise – war has a way of stripping away all the superfluous extras in a culture. Things like celebrity gossip and trendy clothes pale in comparison to having to consider the value of human life.

For many Americans, wars are deeply personal. Whether it’s a grandfather who served in World War II, an uncle that served in the Gulf War, or a friend that deployed to Afghanistan, war is something that reaches us all. And for those who have served or serve in the United States Military, war can be a perspective-altering, life-changing experience.

Over the next several episodes, I’ll be exploring the intersection of warfare and coffee, beginning with the American Civil War. While this may seem like a niche aspect of coffee’s history, nothing could be further from the truth. War has a way of making people appreciate the small pleasures in life, and coffee, as it turns out, is one of the biggest small pleasures that exists.

I’m Colin Mansfield, and welcome to Coffee Canon.

When I say the words, “Civil War” what are the first things that pop into your mind? If you’re from America, it’s probably things like slavery, Abraham Lincoln, or Gettysburg.

When Jon Grinspan, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, began digging through journals written by Civil War Soldiers, those are exactly the types of things he thought Soldiers would be talking about. “I went looking for the big stories,” he said, “And all they kept talking about was the coffee they had for breakfast, or the coffee they wanted to have for breakfast.”

He found that the word “coffee” was used in Civil War journals more often than the words “war,” “bullet,” “cannon,” “slavery,” “mother,” or even “Lincoln.” Grinspan said, “You can only ignore what they’re talking about for so long before you realize that’s the story.”

 

On September 17th, 1862 the North and South clashed at the Battle of Antietam near Sharpsburg, Maryland. The fighting had begun before daybreak, and by that afternoon Soldiers were hungry, worn out, and just plain tired. A 19 year-old commissary sergeant who served with Company E of the 23rd Ohio Infantry decided he could make a difference. He organized a mobile field kitchen and, under fire, distributed hot coffee and warm food to tired troops. The young sergeant was promoted to second lieutenant for his act of valor, and later was memorialized on a monument that stands to today.  This man survived the war, getting promoted to Brevet Major along the way. After the war, his political aspirations led him to run for President of the United States in 1869. His name was William McKinley, and of course, he won. His early act of coffee heroism earned him not just gratitude from Soldiers and a promotion, but it also got the attention of someone who would become a political mentor for young McKinley: Rutherford B. Hayes, who was in command of McKinley’s unit. 

 

Civil War Soldiers were emphatic about coffee. On July 5th, 1863, Civil War General Reub Williams wrote in his diary, “Even at that early period of the war, and before it was over I came to the conclusion that coffee was the most sustaining article of all the rations issued by the government. When worn out with an all day march and constant skirmishing, more than all else, a tin of good strong coffee did more to enliven a collapsed soldier. It put him in a condition to resume his march to sustain more of his laborious work than all else he consumed …”

During his research, Jon Grinspan, that curator we heard from earlier, found that Union Soldiers made coffee drinking a ritual, and would go to great lengths to enjoy it daily. They made it everywhere, and with everything: water from canteens, puddles, brackish bays, and even Mississippi mud. The North gave Union Soldiers about 36 pounds of coffee per person, per year. “Soldiers would drink it before marches, after marches, on patrol, during combat,” Grinspan said.

Where the North had coffee, the South had tobacco and a wider selection of food from Southern crops. According to Andrew F. Smith, a professor of food studies at the New School in New York, when they weren’t fighting a battle, Union and Confederate troops would meet in the middle of fields to exchange goods. Not only that, but Southern Soldiers wanted coffee so badly that they invented knock-off beverages to try and make up for their lack of beans. They roasted rye, rice, sweet potatoes or beets until they were a similar consistency to ground coffee – dark and carmelized. Of course, these alternative brews contained no caffeine, but at the very least they were something warm and consoling to drink.

 

Over 3 million Soldiers fought in the American Civil War, with the Union outnumbering the Confederates about 2 to 1. But perhaps the most striking number related to this war is the death count. Between 600,000 and 800,000 people died during the Civil War from combat, accident, starvation, and disease. By comparison, World War II had about 400,000 casualties. The Civil War is far and away the bloodiest war in American history. 

While disease and lack of infection-fighting medicine was one of the biggest causes for this high casualty count, another contributing factor was the disparity between Civil War tactics, and technology. 

Take, for example, the musket. Prior to the Civil War, infantry Soldiers typically relied on muskets that fired just one bullet at a time. The maximum range for these weapons was about 250 yards, but they were really inaccurate. To account for this, Soldiers were forced to stand much closer to their target – 80 yards was the actual effective range. This meant that battles were fought at relatively close proximity, with each side trading firing volleys.

But by the time the Civil War broke out, the rifle had been invented. Because of the way they’re designed, these early rifles were accurate out to about 1,000 yards. And as the technology wheel continued to turn, repeating rifles were the next major innovation in warfare. While muskets and early rifles could only load one bullet at a time, repeating rifles held multiple. The most famous of these – the Spencer carbine – could fire 7 shots in 30 seconds.

At the same time, tactics had not changed much since the late 1700s. Lining men up and marching them towards each other in combat was still a tried-and-true tactic, but with the rifle and repeating rifle now at play, this meant faster, more accurate shots, and more casualties. Much, much more. According to one source, rifles accounted for around 90% of Civil War casualties.

Tactics were slow to change, but that didn’t keep Generals from looking for a leg up against the competition in other ways. Union General Benjamin Butler saw coffee as a potential strategic advantage. He ordered his men to carry coffee in canteens with them into battle, and even planned attacks when his men would be most wired. His advice to fellow Generals was, “If your men get coffee early in the morning, you can hold.” Other letters from Union troops talk about coffee as a “nerve tonic,” saying it contained a “wonderful stimulant.” One Soldier wrote home, surprised that he was still living. He reasoned, “what keeps me alive must be coffee.”

 

In 1859 Sharps Rifle Company started manufacturing a rifle with a hand-cranked coffee grinder built into the butt stock. Troops from the North would fill the stock with beans, grind them up, and start brewing.

As the war went on, Union camps turned into makeshift cities that housed hundreds of thousands of men. Their coffee addiction was on display every morning. In one Soldier’s diary, he writes, “little campfires rapidly increasing to hundreds in numbers that would shoot up along the hills and plains.” Thousands of coffee grinders could be heard across the camp, all simultaneously crushing beans. Soon, everyone would have a mucket – or coffee pot – ready for their morning ritual.

In an editorial Jon Grinspan wrote for the New York Times, he tells the story of a Union Soldier who was freed from a prisoner of war camp at the end of the Civil War. The Soldier started thinking of everything he missed during his imprisonment. He wrote that, more than anything, he could never forgive “those Confederate thieves for robbing me of so many precious doses…Just think of it, in three hundred days there was lost to me, forever, so many hundred pots of good old Government Java.”

 

The Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in United States history. It pitted brother against brother – literally, in some cases, and was a major turning point in America. Looking back, it can be easy to see huge historical events like the Civil War as flat, 2-dimensional narratives that exist in books and movies. They can almost seem disconnected from our modern lives. That’s why, when we hear that Civil War Soldiers journaled about coffee more often than Abraham Lincoln or bullets, it can be jarring. It reminds us that these were real people, with real lives, who were longing for something completely and utterly ordinary: a cup of hot coffee. 

Both Union and Confederate troops went to incredible lengths to get their daily cup including using puddle water and roasted beets. But about 50 years later,  there was a new way to make coffee – instantly. It was also the start of another major war not just in American history, but in global history. World War I, next time on Coffee Canon.

 

I’m Colin Mansfield and thanks for listening to Coffee Canon. If you enjoyed this episode, shoot me a note on Twitter or Instagram: my handle is @BoiseCoffee. You can also leave a review on Apple Podcasts, and I’ll love you forever. Have a great week, and please, be careful with your rifle coffee grinder. 

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