Did Coffee Win the Civil War?

A wonderful article in Mental Floss describes the role coffee played in the Civil War, from the ways soldiers prepared their beans to the outrageous price Southerners paid for coffee ($60 per lb.!). One thing I couldn’t help but find charming–if anything in war can truly be called charming–was how the frontline Northern and Southern troops would occasionally call brief cease-fires in order to exchange Northern coffee for Southern tobacco.

Coffee also provided one of the only true, reliable food staples on the road, as the Civil War was rife with corrupted supply chains selling rotten meat and spoiled milk on both sides of the Mason-Dixon. The following isn’t from the Mental Floss article, but for an idea of how bad it could get, here is an excerpt from a letter written by soldier John D. Billings in 1861:

When the bread was moldy or moist, it was thrown away and made good at the next drawing, so that the men were not the losers; but in the case of its being infested with the weevils, they had to stand it as a rule ; but hardtack was not so bad an article of food, even when traversed by insects, as may be supposed. Eaten in the dark, no one could tell the difference between it and hardtack that was untenanted. It was no uncommon occurrence for a man to find the surface of his pot of coffee swimming with weevils, after breaking up hardtack in it, which had come out of the fragments only to drown; but they were easily skimmed off, and left no distinctive flavor behind.

(Read the whole letter, which is both interesting and cringe-inducing, here.)

The Union soldiers had vastly more coffee at their disposal than the Confederates, and despite the corrupted food providers whole bean coffee is hard to fake, so the Yankees always made sure to have plenty on hand when they could. Soldiers would even eat the beans while marching to keep their energy up. So it’s hard not to wonder if the extra pep from coffee gave an edge to the North. Of course I don’t really think it decided the war, but the role of coffee in it is pretty interesting to both historians and coffee lovers.

(Thanks to Mark for sending me the Mental Floss article.)