How Coffee
Fueled the Civil War, Jon Grinspan, New York Times, July
9, 2014
It was the
greatest coffee run in American history. The Ohio boys had been fighting since
morning, trapped in the raging battle of Antietam, in September 1862. Suddenly,
a 19-year-old William McKinley appeared, under heavy fire, hauling vats of hot
coffee. The men held out tin cups, gulped the brew and started firing again.
“It was like putting a new regiment in the fight,” their officer recalled.
Three decades later, McKinley ran for president in part on this singular act of
caffeinated heroism.
At the time, no
one found McKinley’s act all that strange. For Union soldiers, and the lucky
Confederates who could scrounge some, coffee fueled the war. Soldiers drank it
before marches, after marches, on patrol, during combat. In their diaries, “coffee”
appears more frequently than the words “rifle,” “cannon” or “bullet.” Ragged
veterans and tired nurses agreed with one diarist: “Nobody can ‘soldier’
without coffee.”
Union troops
made their coffee everywhere, and with everything: with water from canteens and
puddles, brackish bays and Mississippi mud, liquid their horses would not
drink. They cooked it over fires of plundered fence rails, or heated mugs in
scalding steam-vents on naval gunboats. When times were good, coffee
accompanied beefsteaks and oysters; when they were bad it washed down raw
salt-pork and maggoty hardtack. Coffee was often the last comfort troops
enjoyed before entering battle, and the first sign of safety for those who
survived.
The Union Army
encouraged this love, issuing soldiers roughly 36 pounds of coffee each year.
Men ground the beans themselves (some carbines even had built-in grinders) and
brewed it in little pots called muckets. They spent much of their downtime
discussing the quality of that morning’s brew. Reading their diaries, one can
sense the delight (and addiction) as troops gushed about a “delicious cup of
black,” or fumed about “wishy-washy coffee.” Escaped slaves who joined Union
Army camps could always find work as cooks if they were good at “settling” the
coffee – getting the grounds to sink to the bottom of the unfiltered muckets.
For much of the
war, the massive Union Army of the Potomac made up the second-largest
population center in the Confederacy, and each morning this sprawling city
became a coffee factory. First, as another diarist noted, “little campfires,
rapidly increasing to hundreds in number, would shoot up along the hills and
plains.” Then the encampment buzzed with the sound of thousands of grinders
simultaneously crushing beans. Soon tens of thousands of muckets gurgled with
fresh brew.
Confederates were
not so lucky. The Union blockade kept most coffee out of seceded territory. One
British observer noted that the loss of coffee “afflicts the Confederates even
more than the loss of spirits,” while an Alabama nurse joked that the fierce
craving for caffeine would, somehow, be the Union’s “means of subjugating us.”
When coffee was available, captured or smuggled or traded with Union troops
during casual cease-fires, Confederates wrote rhapsodically about their first
sip.
The problem
spilled over to the Union invaders. When Gen. William T. Sherman’s Union troops
decided to live off plunder and forage as they cut their way through Georgia
and South Carolina, soldiers complained that while food was plentiful, there
were no beans to be found. “Coffee is only got from Uncle Sam,” an Ohio officer
grumbled, and his men “could scarce get along without it.”
Confederate
soldiers and civilians would not go without. Many cooked up coffee substitutes,
roasting corn or rye or chopped beets, grinding them finely and brewing up
something warm and brown. It contained no caffeine, but desperate soldiers
claimed to love it. Gen. George Pickett, famous for that failed charge at
Gettysburg, thanked his wife for the delicious “coffee” she had sent, gushing:
“No Mocha or Java ever tasted half so good as this rye-sweet-potato blend!”
Did the fact
that Union troops were near jittery from coffee, while rebels survived on
impotent brown water, have an impact on the outcome of the conflict? Union
soldiers certainly thought so. Though they rarely used the word “caffeine,” in
their letters and diaries they raved about that “wonderful stimulant in a cup
of coffee,” considering it a “nerve tonic.” One depressed soldier wrote home
that he was surprised that he was still living, and reasoned: “what keeps me
alive must be the coffee.”
Others went
further, considering coffee a weapon of war. Gen. Benjamin Butler ordered his
men to carry coffee in their canteens, and planned attacks based on when his
men would be most caffeinated. He assured another general, before a fight in
October 1864, that “if your men get their coffee early in the morning you can
hold.”
Coffee did not
win the war – Union material resources and manpower played a much, much bigger
role than the quality of its Java – but it might say something about the
victors. From one perspective, coffee was emblematic of the new Northern order
of fast-paced wage labor, a hurried, business-minded, industrializing nation of
strivers. For years, Northern bosses had urged their workers to switch from
liquor to coffee, dreaming of sober, caffeinated, untiring employees.
Southerners drank coffee too – in New Orleans especially – but the way Union
soldiers gulped the stuff at every meal pointed ahead toward the world the war
made, a civilization that lives on today in every office breakroom.
But more than
that, coffee was simply delicious, soothing – “the soldier’s chiefest bodily
consolation” – for men and women pushed beyond their limits. Caffeine was
secondary. Soldiers often brewed coffee at the end of long marches, deep in the
night while other men assembled tents. These grunts were too tired for caffeine
to make a difference; they just wanted to share a warm cup – of Brazilian beans
or scorched rye – before passing out.
This explains
their fierce love. When one captured Union soldier was finally freed from a
prison camp, he meditated on his experiences. Over his first cup of coffee in
more than a year, he wondered if he could ever forgive “those Confederate
thieves for robbing me of so many precious doses.” Getting worked up, he fumed,
“Just think of it, in three hundred days there was lost to me, forever, so many
hundred pots of good old Government Java.”
So when William
McKinley braved enemy fire to bring his comrades a warm cup – an act
memorialized in a stone monument at Antietam today – he knew what it meant to
them.
Notes on Gettysburg Magazine, Issue 50, Cover Date: January 2014 arrived in the U.S. mail on Monday July 28.
