Civil War Cigars and Medicinal Tobacco

By Kyle Wichtendahl, 2-19-13

     [Since 2012 I have been responsible for the garden at the Pry House Field Hospital Museum on Antietam National Battlefield. The Pry House garden began as a 19th century style medicinal and kitchen garden, including medicinal plants, herbs, and vegetables. As close as possible, these plants mirrored those available to the Pry Family in the 1860s, meaning heirloom varieties. Since then, the garden has transformed to focus exclusively on medicinal plants, becoming an exhibit of the flora that was employed by military and civilian caregivers in the Civil War Era.
      I am strictly an amateur, with no real experience in growing a garden. The purpose of this blog is to document my experiences as I learn by doing. It is anything but authoritative and I welcome any comments and advice for a greenhorn. Please be kind!]

Most people that know me personally are aware that while I am not a habitual smoker, I do very much enjoy smoking my pipes or a good cigar. Especially when Civil War reenacting, I might be seen with a cigar or pipe in hand.

Soon, the National Museum of Civil War Medicine will be coming out with its own line of 1860s-style cigars. The museum also hosts a special Cigar and Whiskey Night, and the museum's new cigars will be incorporated into that event. These cigars will be made for us by F. X. Smith's Sons Co., a small family-owned and operated business that has been producing cigars in southern Pennsylvania since 1863. Many of the cigars they offer are very similar to those which smoked by soldiers and civilians during the Civil War. They are made with 100% American tobacco, mostly from Pennsylvania.

As someone who appreciates a good cigar, I have been tapped as our official taster as the museum chooses which cigars to carry. It's been a tough and demanding assignment, but someone had to do it.

Tobacco growing in southern Pennsylvania
Trying these different vintage-style cigars for the medicine museum had me thinking about the diverse and pervasive usage of tobacco as a medicine through history. I thought that might make a good post on the blog for the medicinal herb garden.

Today, most of us rightfully associate tobacco usage with significant health risks. The dangers of smoking have now been so deeply ingrained into our current social consciousness that it seems counter-intuitive to remember that throughout most of history tobacco was venerated a "holy herb" with great medical properties. Early English colonies prospered in America because of an insatiable demand for tobacco in medicine just as much as recreational smoking.

Prior to the arrival of European settlers, native peoples in North and South America made extensive use of tobacco and its related plants. They believed that green and dried tobacco leaves and smoke promoted health both in and outside of the body. It was used to prevent and treat diseases, to cleanse both body and environment, and as an anesthetic, all with some spiritual connection.

Spanish and Portuguese settlers were quick to discover and appropriate tobacco for their own recreational and medicinal uses. It quickly became a miracle cure, a panacea that could treat virtually every ailment known to mankind. Tobacco is all forms was applied to ailing bodies both internally and topically to combat cold and flu, wounds, burns and other skin conditions, bodily pain, constipation and diarrhea, sexually transmitted diseases, and ironically enough, respiratory complaints, heart conditions, and cancers. Even earaches could supposedly be treated by blowing smoke into the ear. In the 16th, 17th, and early 18th century, there were very few ailments that might not be improved by the proper application of the "holy herb."

An 18th century illustration of a tobacco enema device

In the Civil War era, tobacco was no longer the cure-all it had once been in Western medicine. However, it still had a real place in the pharmacopeia. By the mid-19th century, chemists had isolated the nicotine as the active ingredient in tobacco and pure nicotine often become the base of medicine rather than raw tobacco. Nicotine mixtures remained a popular treatment for a variety of skin afflictions and complaints. As retched as it may sound, tobacco-smoke enemas continued to be used in some medical circles through the Civil War period as a treatment for severe constipation, hernias, and other intestinal complaints. Nevertheless, tobacco usage was in decline following the revelation that high doses of nicotine act as a cardiac poison.

Folk medicine would continue to make ready use of tobacco. It was frequently used to treat insect bites and other skin irritations as well as an ingredient in poultices for swelling and injuries. Such uses continued well into the 20th century as tobacco was included in salves for superficial wounds and ulcers, ringworm, athlete's foot, and other itching skin conditions.

Not surprisingly, tobacco as a medical treatment is not currently endorsed by the American Medical Association or the Food and Drug Administration.

I am hoping to add tobacco to the Pry House Garden. I first want to be sure that the variety I obtain and plant will be correct to Civil War era use and cultivation.

Image: An 18th century illustration of a tobacco enema device

From: gardenofantietam.blogspot.com

Read More

Coffin Nails: The Tobacco Controversy in the 19th Century

From: tobacco.harpweek.com

Although a few women shared the tobacco habit in nineteenth-century America, it was overwhelming a male endeavor.  The most popular ways for American men of the time to consume tobacco were pipes, cigars, and chewing tobacco.  Snuff had largely gone out of fashion by mid-century, except for occasional sniffs by high-society youth.  Pipes were a favorite of all social classes, and varied in style from expensive, elaborately carved wood or stone to simpler, moderately-priced versions to cheap ones made of clay or corncob.  Chewing tobacco was common throughout the century in rural and urban areas alike, requiring spittoons in the cities’ public buildings.  It was popular among working class and poor Americans, but was shunned by polite society in the late-nineteenth century.
American soldiers were introduced to cigars during the Mexican War (1846-1848) and they became a fad with men in the 1850s.  Cigars ranged in price from cheap to expensive, but were associated for the rest of the century with affluence, respectability, and success in the male bastions of business, politics, and the military.  Cigars were the most exclusively male of all tobacco products, while cigarettes, in contrast, were considered unmanly until the end of the nineteenth century.  The manufacturing of cigarettes in the United States began in the early 1860s and mass production was achieved in the early 1880s.  There were two basic kinds of cigarette products:  high-end, expensive brands made of imported tobacco; and low-end, cheap brands made of domestic tobacco.

High-end cigarettes were linked with the moral decadence of Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America, where the products were both manufactured and popular.  Hand-rolled cigarettes, also made from imported tobacco, implied the user had the leisure to indulge the habit, and was not participating in his manly duty to earn a living and provide for a family.  Thus, the cigar represented the family man who gained wealth through hard work and self-sacrifice, and who respected traditional morality and authority; the cigarette symbolized the man whose inherited wealth allowed him to remain in a sort of perpetual, self-centered adolescence—unmarried, disrespectful of conventional morality and authority, and attracted to things foreign.

An article in the May 28, 1870 issue of Harper’s Weekly mocked “The Hero of a Fast Novel” (“fast” means immoral or socially improper).  He was constantly pleasure seeking, and lived in luxury by spending other people’s money or going into debt.  The cigarette was as much an identifying mark of the “fast” youth as his expensive food and wine.  “When out shooting, these gentlemen, who are ‘roughing it,’ toss the dogs foie gras and truffles, and drink delicate Burgundies to their perfumed cigarettes.”

A cartoon in the October 14, 1882 issue depicted a “Swell Struggling with the Cig’rette Poisoner.”  Like the “fast” young man, a “swell” was wealthy, self-indulgent, and egotistical.  In the cartoon, he wore evening clothes and top hat for a riotous night on the town.  His floral boutonniere may have mimicked the practice of Oscar Wilde, who toured the United States that year wearing or carrying lilies and sunflowers (that may be a lily pad in the swell’s buttonhole).  The text and image made it clear that the cartoonist considered cigarette smoking to be addictive and deadly.  The multiple cigarette “ribs” of the snake signified chain-smoking, which restricted his free will by encircling him.  According to the caption (which may have been sarcastic) he struggled (or should have struggled) against its hold on his life.  The skeletal view of the snake and the designation of cigarettes as “poison” delivered the powerful message that cigarette smoking is deadly.

Although cigarettes made with domestic tobacco had always been cheaper than those containing imported tobacco, two things lowered the price more.  The first was the drastic reduction of the federal tax on cigarette manufacturers in 1883.  Originally imposed to help pay for the Union war effort during the Civil War, two decades later Congress cut the tax by almost 29%, and manufacturers like James Buchanan “Buck” Duke of North Carolina, passed the savings along to customers.  In the February 25, 1882 issue of Harper’s Weekly, a cartoon by Thomas Nast criticized the call for the tax reduction.  The artist presented two stylishly dressed young men in a tobacco haze.  Their cigarette habit made them stupid and lazy, the opposite of the “manly air” they wanted to project.

The second important factor occurred when Duke contracted in 1883 with James Bonsack to perfect the latter’s invention for mass-producing cigarettes.  On April 30, 1884, the machine lasted an entire ten-hour shift, making 120,000 cigarettes.  The device reduced manufacturing costs and, in turn, consumer prices as it increased production and availability.  By the early 1890s, Duke had a near monopoly of the cigarette market via his American Tobacco Company (broken up by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1911).

The markets for cheap, domestic cigarettes in the late-nineteenth century were primarily boys and immigrant men from southern and eastern Europe, where the habit was common.  The low cost and convenience of cigarettes also encouraged urban working-class men to take up the practice over the next few decades.  Cigarettes could be smoked quickly while walking to and from work, on lunch breaks, and when the boss was not around.  They were also less offensive than other tobacco product to nonsmokers in the congested and rapidly growing cities of America.

These groups of cigarette smokers reinforced the stereotype that the habit was unmanly.  Boys were immature, and presumably did not have the responsibility of providing for a family (actually, some working-class boys did, at least in part).  In 1885, an editorial in The New York Times chastised men for smoking cigarettes and warned of the dangers it posed to the nation’s political survival.  “A grown man has no possible excuse for thus imitating the small boy…  The decadence of Spain began when the Spaniards adopted cigarettes and if this pernicious habit obtains among adult Americans[, then] the ruin of the Republic is close at hand…”  (The focus on Catholic Spain probably also reflected anti-Catholic sentiment among the dominant Protestant population in the United States.)

Poor and working-class men (which included most immigrants) were considered unsuccessful financially, and not socially (and sometimes, morally) respectable.  Therefore, they did not fit the middle-class ideal of American manhood in the late-nineteenth century.  A one-sentence item in the “Personal” column of the July 12, 1888 issue of Harper’s Weekly proclaimed, “Washington is proud of the fact that not one Congressman smokes cigarettes.”  It is certain, though, that many used cigars, pipes, or chewing tobacco.

The public attitude against men smoking cigarettes began to change with the Spanish-American War in 1898.  Many of the young American soldiers, particularly those from rural areas, were introduced to cigarettes as they came in contact with residents of the (former) Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, where cigarettes were smoked by most of the population.  Although U.S. military officials approved enlisted men using pipes and chewing tobacco, they tried unsuccessfully to discourage cigarette smoking.  In fact, American sailors threatened to mutiny if deprived of cigarettes.  They had practical advantages over other tobacco products.  They could be carried easily in a uniform pocket, smoked quickly, and did not spoil in humid weather like cigars.  In cramped military quarters, particularly on long sea voyages, the milder cigarette odor would be less offensive to nonsmokers than strong cigar smoke.

At first, Harper’s Weekly presented cigarette smoking as a Spanish practice.  In the August 13, 1898 issue, at one point in a news story on a truce in the fighting in Cuba, the correspondent identified the two sides by their respective choice of tobacco:  “Meanwhile the little men in light blue [Spanish soldiers] sit calmly on the edge of their trenches and smoke cigarettes, while the big men in dark blue [American soldiers] sit on the edge of theirs and good-humoredly cast tobacco juice toward [the city of] Santiago.”  However, in the next week’s issue, in a news story on “The Taking of Guam,” the correspondent referred to American sailors aboard the U.S. transport, Australia, using cigarettes, cigars, and chewing tobacco.  The situation was similar in Puerto Rico, from where Charles L. Hofmann of Battery A, Pennsylvania Light Artillery, wrote home, “You can buy the best cigars here… and their cigarettes are good and strong.”

In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, E. S. Martin questioned, in his “This Busy World” column from the December 24, 1898 issue of Harper’s Weekly, the presumption that cigarettes undermined “American manhood.”  Instead, he connected the habit explicitly with American servicemen, who smoked so many cigarettes in Cuba that they ran out of supplies.  He emphasized that cigarette smoking among American military personnel was simply a fact from the recent war, “which every one must recall.”  In the February 25, 1899 issue, a feature article on “Our New Possessions—Puerto Rico,” discussed the “Tobacco Culture” of the island, a new American territory after the war.  The author argued that with minor changes to cigarettes made in Puerto Rico, they would find a ready market in the United States.

The years between the Spanish-American War and America’s entry into World War I in 1917 were a period of transition for the public attitude toward men and cigarette smoking.  The notion in earlier decades that the foreign origin of high-end cigarette made the manliness and morality of male smokers suspect appears to have diminished by the late 1890s (even before the Spanish-American War).  An advertisement for the Nestor cigarette brand in the March 19, 1898 issue of Harper’s Weekly declared proudly that its product was “THE MODERN EMBODIMENT OF ANCIENT ORIENTAL LUXURIOUSNESS”:  so much for middle-class respectability and the work ethic.  A Nestor ad in the January 21, 1899 issue marketed to “smokers of refined taste” and featured a sketch of an Arab man (or perhaps a British man in Arab attire).

That there was still uncertainty, however, about cigarettes and American manhood is demonstrated in two other ads.  In the September 3, 1898 issue, the Van Bibber brand of cigarettes were called “LITTLE CIGARS,” to associate them with the unquestionably acceptable tobacco product for men.  In the February 18, 1899 issue, an illustrated ad for Lucke’s Rolls cigars stated, “They are not a smoke for boys or cigarette smokers.”  (Notice another Nestor ad at the top of the page.)  The fact that the cigar ad insulted cigarette smokers also indicates that the cigar company was experiencing competition from cigarette manufacturers.

Historians have attributed a drop in cigarette sales for a few years in the late-1890s and early-1900s primarily to the return of economic prosperity, which allowed more male smokers to afford cigars over the cheaper cigarettes.  In his “This Busy World” column from the August 19, 1899 issue of Harper’s Weekly, E. S. Martin noted that after increasing for 12 years, domestic cigarette production dropped during the previous year.  He observed, though, that the sale of luxury cigarettes had increased (evidence of the improved economy).

In the early-twentieth century, military officials continued their unsuccessful attempts at suppressing cigarette smoking.  In 1903, the Military Academy at West Point banned cigarettes (but promoted pipes) and soon court-martialed two cadets for possession.  However, the prohibition lapsed into disuse when the chief medical officer of West Point admitted in 1915 that “a large percentage” of cadets were “habitual cigarette smokers.”  Similarly, intense opposition from sailors caused the U.S. Navy to reverse a 1907 ban on cigarettes for those less than 21 years old.

By the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, cigarette smoking seems to have been widespread in the military.  The public association of cigarette smoking with the manly image of American servicemen, which had begun with the Spanish-American War in 1898, was reinforced in World War I.  The difference was that instead of military officials resisting the practice, as they had done in the earlier conflict, the U.S. military, federal government, and auxiliary associations officially approved, promoted, and distributed cigarettes among American military personnel.  Whereas cigarettes had been linked previously with moral decadence and considered a “gateway” drug for the use of stronger substances, they were now viewed as a partial substitute for bad (or worse) behavior:  alcohol was banned to servicemen, and military camps had prostitute-free zones around them.

Cigarette smoking would never again be considered unmanly, which was too bad for men.  By 1955, over half of American men smoked cigarettes.  Nine years later, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a report declaring that cigarette smoking caused cancer in men.   Today, despite a lower percentage of male cigarette smokers than in the past, lung cancer (overwhelmingly caused by smoking) is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths among American men.  The habit also increases the risk of heart disease, strokes, and other types of cancer.

Harper's Weekly References
1)  May 28, 1870, p. 343
article, “The Hero of a Fast Novel,” he smokes perfumed cigarettes
2)  October 14, 1882, p. 651, c. 3-4
cartoon, “Swell Struggling with the Cigarette Poisoner”

3)  February 25, 1882, p. 128, c. 1-2
cartoon, “A Bill To Make Idiots,” Nast, regarding proposal to lower tobacco tax; identifies smokers as “lunatic” and “idiot”

4)  July 12, 1888, p. 527, c. 3
item from “Personal” column:  “Washington is proud of the fact that not one Congressman smokes cigarettes.”

5)  August 13, 1898, p. 802-804
“The Truce,” Americans soldiers chewing tobacco, Spanish smoking cigarettes

6)  August 20, 1898, pp. 829-830, c. 1
“The Taking of Guam,” American sailors using cigars, cigarettes, and chewing tobacco

7)  December 24, 1898, p. 1263, c. 3
item in “This Busy World” column, by E. S. Martin, discusses laws against cigarettes, fear of undermining American manhood, but points out American soldiers in Cuba were smoking them

8)  February 25, 1899, pp. 193 and 196
feature article, “Our New Possessions—Puerto Rico,” discusses the “Tobacco Culture” of the island, argues that making minor changes to the cigarettes would give them a ready market in the United States

9)  March 19, 1898, p. 287, c. 1-2
ad, Nestor brand cigarette, “Oriental Luxuriousness”

10)  January 21, 1899, p. 75, c. 1-2
ad, Nestor brand cigarette, “An absolute necessity to smokers of refined taste”

11)  September 3, 1898, p. 879, c. 4
ad, marketed as “little cigars”

12)  February 18, 1899, p. 179
cigar ad, “They are not a smoke for boys or cigarette smokers.”

13)  August 19, 1899, p. 809, c. 1
item in “This Busy World” column, domestic cigarette production down, but sales of (foreign) luxury cigarettes up

Sources Consulted
Kluger, Richard, Ashes to Ashes:  America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris (NY:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1996)
Moyer, David, M.D., “The Tobacco Reference Guide,” http://new.globalink.org/tobacco/trg/Chapter15/table_of_contents.html

“Pennsylvania Volunteers of the Spanish-American War:  Letters Home,” http://paspanishamericanwar.com/letters/hofmann.html

Tate, Cassandra, Cigarette Wars:  The Triumph of the Little White Slaver (NY:  Oxford UP, 1999)

“Tips for Tobacco Users:  Tobacco Use During the Civil War,” http://www.shasta.com/suesgoodco/newcivilians/tobacco.htm

Slade, John, M.D., “Tobacco Epidemic: Historical Lessons,”

Read More

Southern Tobacco In The Civil War

From: civilwarhome.com

        Native Americans cultivated tobacco in North America before the first English settlers arrived in Jamestown in 1607. The Indians believed that native tobacco had both religious and medicinal importance. Its use, for example, had great ritual significance for the Indians in the Chesapeake region. Native Americans often smoked tobacco in a pipe to cement a peace accord.

        Colonists at Jamestown were the first Europeans on the North American mainland to cultivate tobacco. As early as 1610 John Rolfe shipped a cargo to England for sale. But the naturally occurring tobacco plant in the Chesapeake region (Nicotiana rustica) was considered too bitter and harsh, and in 1611 Rolfe obtained seeds of the milder Nicotiana tabacum from the Spanish West Indies, Venezuela, and Trinidad for the Jamestown colonists. Thereafter, tobacco production increased rapidly in the Chesapeake Bay area, soon spreading to Maryland. Production continued to increase throughout the colonial period and by the middle of the eighteenth century, Maryland and Virginia were shipping nearly 70 million pounds of tobacco a year to Britain.

        Some colonial aristocrats in both Britain and the American colonies believed that tobacco smoking was evil and hazardous to the health. This had little effect in halting the spread of the practice. By the eve of the Revolutionary War, tobacco had become the leading cash crop produced by all the colonies, North and South. Exports rose to over 100 million pounds a year, constituting half of all colonial export trade with Britain.

        The methods used for cultivating and curing tobacco have changed over time and varied from region to region. Initially, planters in the Chesapeake region cured tobacco by gathering the plant on the ground and letting the sun dry the leaves, hut sun-curing was soon given up in favor of a technique known as air-curing. Tobacco workers gathered leaves in parcels called "hands" and placed them over polls five feet in length. Then the hands were hung inside an open barn to complete the curing process. When fully dried, the tobacco was packed into large containers called hogsheads for shipping. Air-curing, popular in the Piedmont and tidewater regions until the early nineteenth century, resulted in a milder tasting leaf.

        Methods of curing tobacco by heat were known in the 1700s, but the process did not become popular until the early nineteenth century. In the 1820s the bright tobacco leaves of North Carolina and eastern Virginia, and later Kentucky and middle Tennessee, were cured by using enclosed smoking-sawdust fires to dry the tobacco hung in small barns. Although the modern method of flu-curing tobacco using charcoal heat was invented in 1839 in North Carolina, this method was not widely used until after the Civil War.

        Both tobacco cultivation and manufacturing are labor-intensive activities. Initially, the Virginia Company of London used white indentured servants to harvest the crop, but they were soon replaced by African slaves. The presence of a large slave population engaged in the cultivation and curing of tobacco tied the growth of slavery to the rise of the plantation system. By 1860, 350,000 slaves were cultivating tobacco. It was, however, an exploitive crop that quickly exhausted the soil, requiring constant clearing of new land. The system also worked against the establishment of urban industrial centers in the colonial and antebellum South.

        Throughout the colonial period commercial production of tobacco had centered in Northern port cities, but by the antebellum period, as a result of a surplus of slave labor and the great supply of raw material, commercial manufacturing shifted to the tobacco-growing regions in the South. Virginia dominated the industry with factories located at Richmond, Petersburg, Lynchburg, and Danville, and the border states of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri also became tobacco manufacturing centers.

        The differing ways of consuming tobacco have often mirrored larger cultural trends. Tobacco has been smoked in pipes, cigars, and cigarettes, and also chewed and taken as snuff Pipe smoking was the most prevalent form of tobacco consumption in the colonial period, although in the late 1700s taking snuff became popular among the elite who were emulating the European aristocracies. Chewing was distinctly American and became popular on the expanding frontier. After the Mexican War cigar smoking became the fad, but during the Civil War people returned to pipes and began rolling cigarettes for the first time.

        As in so many other areas of Southern life, the Civil War seriously disrupted the South's tobacco growing and manufacturing. The tobacco-rich states of Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee sided with the Confederacy; the success of their crop rose and fell with that of the rebel nation. The tobacco-producing border states of Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland fell early to Union control. Under the pressure of war, tobacco manufacturing, located in the South throughout the antebellum period, shifted quickly to the North. New York City became the North's tobacco-manufacturing center, servicing the area once dominated by Virginia tobacco planters. Like New York, Louisville also profited by the wars disruption of Southern market towns, becoming the center of tobacco trade in the West.

        Confederate policy and military campaigns in the heartland of the South's tobacco regions devastated Southern tobacco planting and manufacturing. In an attempt to encourage the planting of foodstuffs, the Confederate Congress in March 1862 passed a joint resolution recommending that Confederate states refrain from planting tobacco. Planters often ignored Congress's suggestions, however. The Virginia Assembly also attempted to limit tobacco growing with a law passed in March 1863, and renewed planting restrictions again in February 1864. Other tobacco-growing states passed similar legislation during the war. In addition, local newspapers such as the Edgefield Advertiser of South Carolina also exhorted their readers to switch from the planting of tobacco to desperately needed foodstuffs.

        Union control of the Mississippi from mid-1863, combined with the naval blockade, restricted the export and manufacturing of tobacco products, as did the shift of factories to manufacturing war materiel. In Richmond, after the First Battle of Manassas, several tobacco warehouses were converted into prisons for Union soldiers. The tobacco-rich county of Louisa, Virginia, saw the kind of physical destruction typical of regions exposed to intense military activity. Intermittent Union raids into the county and one of the wars largest cavalry battles at Trevillians Depot destroyed not only the crops and livestock but also the county's infrastructure. Every Confederate and border state saw a decline in tobacco production in the 1860s.

        The tobacco town of Danville, Virginia, however, took advantage of the vicissitudes of war. In the late 1850s its tobacco industry was in decline, and the community was reluctant to answer the call to arms in 1861. Nevertheless, Danville prospered during the war. Located safely behind enemy lines along a major railroad to Richmond, Danville became a lucrative place for the activities of merchants and manufacturers. Through their investments, the town and the surrounding county saw a revival in the tobacco industry. As a result of its returning prosperity, Danville citizens opposed attempts by Confederate soldiers to destroy the rail connection with Richmond in order to stop the Union advance. Local businessmen also looked favorably upon the Union takeover on the ground that it would bring peace and stability to the region.

        While the war made it difficult for the public to obtain tobacco, both Confederate and Union soldiers found it plentiful. Since much of the fighting took place in the tobacco rich regions of the South, soldiers often helped themselves. For years the U.S. Navy had supplied its sailors with tobacco rations. In February 1864 the Confederate government followed suit and included tobacco as part of the army's rations. Often, in the quiet moments between battle, Confederate and Union soldiers would exchange goods. The traditional swap was Northern coffee for Southern tobacco. Tobacco habits also revealed class distinctions in the South. Confederate officers did not receive the tobacco rations granted to soldiers. Nevertheless, Confederate officers favored the more fashionable smoking of cigars.

        Tobacco had a profound influence on the history of the South. Early cultivation brought prosperity and helped ensure the economic survival of the colonies. The development of the tobacco plantation system, however, helped establish slavery in the South to a degree not found in the North. Because tobacco cultivation quickly wore out the soil, planters were constantly clearing new land, leading to the expansion of slavery and tobacco growing.

Source: "The Confederacy" A Macmillan Information Now Encyclopedia, article by Orville Vernon Burton and Henry Kamerling.

Read More

The “Social Dip”: Tobacco Use by Mid-19th Century Southern Women

by Vicki Betts

According to numerous observers of the time, the most distinctive characteristic that set apart many southern women from their Northern sisters was their fondness for tobacco.[1]  Time and again, Federal soldiers commented about encounters with snuff-dipping or pipe-smoking women and girls in the Confederacy, and the habit occasionally prompted remarks from regional sources as well.  While not encouraging modern reenactors to pick up a health-threatening activity for authenticity’s sake, this article will provide the historical background for women’s tobacco use, and offer alternatives, if desired, for particular personas.
               
When Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World, he found the natives already using tobacco for both ceremonial and medicinal purposes.  By 1612 settlers were cultivating the plant in Virginia, and it soon became the chief trade commodity with Europe.  After the American Revolution, the cash crop spread into Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri, where a rich culture featuring tobacco followed the crop into the frontier, both North and South.  Earliest usage centered around the pipe, with inhaled snuff gaining popularity among the upper classes soon after the French and Indian War.  The emergence of Andrew Jackson in the early 19th century prompted the “common man” to reject snuff as effete, and he turned to chewing tobacco instead.  Cigars joined the “chaw” after the Mexican War (1846-1848) when United States soldiers encountered Latin Americans enjoying this form of smoking.  Cigarettes were still almost unknown by the time of the Civil War, being limited to “the few natives who had acquired the habit during a residence abroad, and to foreigners, French, Italian, and Cuban settlers, who followed the practices of their youth.”  The earliest documented cigarette in the Virginia-Carolina area is mentioned in an 1868 letter from Samuel Schooler, a young man associated with the leading families of Virginia, who noted that it “is unheard of in these parts.”[2]
             
Women did not pick up the cigar in a century increasingly concerned with maintaining distinctive spheres for male and female.  However, many among the older generation, occasionally in the rural North, but particularly in the rural South, continued to smoke pipes, including Mrs. Andrew Jackson and Mrs. Zachary Taylor, both presidents’ wives.  When Kate Stone’s middle-aged mother refugeed with her family from Louisiana to Texas during the Civil War, one of the most common questions she was asked was, “Don’t you smoke?”  Governor Henry Allen of Louisiana, meeting with two “country-women—soldiers’ mothers” in Shreveport to discuss their needs, was “too courteous a gentleman not to conform immediately to the customs of ‘Ladies.’  So, as he rather enjoyed a pipe, he would join them very sociably” since “these people are never seated five minutes anywhere, without drawing out this panacea for all their ills, and ‘taking a smoke.’”[3]
             
In the country, pipes were often made from materials at hand, including wood, clay, stone, bone, metal, or corncobs.  By 1860, New Yorker Virginia Penny noted that many of the store-bought white clay pipes were imported, due to lower labor costs abroad.  Many were made in Germany.  They sold for one penny each.  The steamboat Arabia, which sank in 1858, and the Bertrand, which sank just after the war, included numerous small red clay pipe bowls and reed stems.  The Bertrand’s were identified as coming from the Pamplin area of Virginia.  Other areas of the South also produced clay pipes, usually as a secondary product of a potter.  Interestingly enough, in upper East Tennessee and in Burke County, North Carolina, pipe manufacturing appeared to be an older woman’s profession.  Sally Michaels used soapstone molds, fired her white clay pipes in the fireplace, and marketed them in nearby Morganton, North Carolina, before, during, and just after the war.[4]
             
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine praised the corncob as “the true American pipe. . . This rural pipe is undoubtedly the most agreeable of all others, for a new one is used at every sitting, and the cob, from its dryness and sponginess, draws out, in the process of combustion, all the pernicious oil of the tobacco, and the pith actually increases the fragrance of the tobacco itself.”  Production was easy, with all necessary materials near at hand.  According to Shucks, Shocks, and Hominy Blocks, pipemakers would age cobs and cut them into blanks (two or three from each cob).  The soft cob centers were removed, and inside and out, the pieces were trimmed and burnished down to the hard, woodlike barrel or cylinder.  Bottom plugs were fixed in the bowls, and then were ready for drilling stem holes and inserting stems.  Hollow plant stems from wild honeysuckle, elderberry, or the easily replaceable dried goldenrod served well as pipe stems.[5] Others used sections of switch cane for stems.
             
Throughout the South, tobacco was often grown in garden patches for family use, and the leaves spread out on roofs of outbuildings or hung in barns to dry.[6]  Storebought tobacco remained popular, although it is difficult if not impossible to differentiate possible male and female preferences from store ledgers, probate records, and newspaper advertisements.  By the latter 1830s many of the younger generation of Southern women had developed a tobacco practice distinctive to their region, especially when contrasted to the growing anti-tobacco sentiment among reform-minded Northern women.  They did not take snuff, a dry, finely powdered tobacco, in their noses, a method that had largely disappeared in both areas.  Instead, Southern women began to “dip” it into their mouths.  Daniel Hundley in his Social Relations in Our Southern States (1860) described the process:

"The usual mode is, to procure a straight wooden toothbrush—one made of the bark of the hickory-nut tree preferred—chew one end of the brush until it becomes soft and pliant, then dab back into the mouth again with the fine particles of snuff adhering; then proceed to mop the gums and teeth adroitly, to suck, and chew, and spit to your heart’s content.  Ah!  it is almost as decent as smoking cigars, and it is fully as distingue’ as chewing tobacco!"[7]
             
Prior to the war, much of the snuff was professionally processed, sometimes including flavorings. Two company brands dominated Southern newspaper advertisements—Peter Lorillard in New York, a company founded in 1760, and Garrett & Sons.  Lorillard produced the most common brand mentioned in accounts—Maccaboy, a brown snuff.  They also marketed Demagros, Fine Rappee, Coarse Rappee, Pure Virginia, Natchitoches, American Gentleman, and Copenhagen brown snuffs, and Scotch, Fresh  Scotch, High Toast Scotch, Irish High Toast, Fresh Honey Dew Scotch, and Lundyfoot yellow snuffs.  Lorillard sold their product both in bottles and in bulk to stores.  Virginia Penny reported seeing women in factories putting up snuff in jars, bottles, and varnished tobacco stained bladders.  The nicotine habit for women appeared to be growing.  The National Almanac and Annual Report for the Year 1864 stated that in 1859 and 1860, 11,354 pounds of snuff were produced in the United States, rising to 17,703 pounds in 1860 and 1861.  Output dropped, however, to 7,914 pounds in 1861 and 1862, probably due to the elimination of most of the Southern market.  In Philadelphia alone, in 1862, four mills employed fifty hands, at a capital investment of $80,000, no small amount for that period.[8]
             
Some snuff was also imported.  Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper carried a running advertisement for “Oco or Dental Snuff,” a “tobac en poudre dentifrice” endorsed by Paris as “the most useful and elegant toilette article in the world,” “divested of its objectionable qualities, and retaining its powers as a disinfectant and detergent.”  It came in two forms—“Silver-Banded Oco, Designed expressly for the Northern market—retains all of its powers as a dentifrice—though greatly reduced in its stimulating properties” and “Golden-Banded Oco, retains all its natural strength and pungency,” presumably for the Southern market.[9]
             
The type of wood used for “brushes” was a matter of personal choice.  While Hundley mentioned hickory, the Nashville Dispatch described althea twigs.  An Atlanta newspaperman reported cherry sticks, but Charles Lanman saw soft pine sticks in Alabama.  A recent informal survey among family and friends brought recollections of grandmothers and great-grandmothers using black gum, sweet gum, elm, and peach, with the ladies usually adamant about their preferred species of tree.  When the habit crossed class lines, the quality of the accessory improved.  According to Billings the very wealthy owned brushes with silver tips![10]
             
Snuff containers from the mid-19th century, either jars or boxes, have been difficult to locate and identify, even after consulting the Museum of Tobacco Art and Culture in Nashville.  Period sources simply say “snuff-box,” “very nice round boxes with lids,” “a small bottle of snuff,” “a little open mouth bottle,” “fancy snuffboxes of papier-mache or japanning” and “a rose-wood snuff-box richly inlaid with gold.”  One prime example, however, is currently on display at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia.  Corporal John O. Casler, 33rd Virginia Infantry, “liberated” a snuff box from the pocket of a dead Federal soldier.  It is made of wood, approximately one inch deep, two inches wide, and three inches long, with a black lacquer finish.  On the lid, lengthwise, is printed in gold “Help yourself,” surrounded by fancy gold pen embellishments and a lined notched rectangle, also gold.  The lip of the lid may identify it as a “planewood snuff box” with a “Laurencekirk hinge” made in Scotland during the 19th century.  Its size and fragility, along with the lack of a snuff habit among most young Federal soldiers, might indicate that the original location of this attractive container was on a parlor table in a Southern home.[11]
             
What sort of Southern woman dipped snuff, smoked a pipe, or even, as a last resort, chewed tobacco?   She could be either black or white.  She also tended to be rural rather than urban, although that eliminated relatively few in this overwhelmingly agricultural region.  Accounts appear from Texas (where Olmstead called it a “Virginia habit”) and Arkansas, all across the South to Georgia and the Old Dominion.  It seemed to be a nearly universal habit in northern Mississippi and Alabama.  A Federal refugee aid worker in Nashville declared that she “could not recall a single instance of women or good sized girls who did not use tobacco in some form.  A young girl, a refugee from Northern Alabama, who was present, was asked if she knew of any women or girls in her section who did not smoke.  Only one—her granddaddy’s folks, she said; the old man was opposed to tobacco; but his was the only family that she knew who did not use it.”   An 1863 commentator estimated that “more than two-thirds of the Georgia women one sees on the railroad and at the hotels, use snuff for chewing, or ‘dipping,’ as it is called.”  John Aughey, a Virginian, estimated that among poor white Southern women in his state “scarcely one in fifty of this class is exempt from the disgusting habit. . . . Every five of these will use a two-ounce paper of snuff per day.”[12]
             
As noted, the practice was extremely widespread among the lower classes, although not uncommon among the yeoman, or “second class respectability of the South.”  Even some among “otherwise intelligent members of the Southern Middle Classes” and those “who had in every way the appearance of being ladies” dipped.  Young ladies on trains who upbraided gentlemen for smoking in their presence, had no qualms about dipping and “spurting their tobacco juice through the aperture [window] with all the gusto and nonchalance of a couple of Jack Tars off a cruise.”  Little Celine Fremaux, who refugeed out of Baton Rouge to Port Hudson, stayed at the house of a friend whose new wife had a strange habit.

"I was never so astounded in my life. . . . I afterward found out that they were ‘Dipping,’ a past time indulged in by many ladies in out of the way country places.  Later I heard nice ladies speak of her quite as an equal.  So it was only my narrow mindedness that made me at that time think that ladies were those who were like us, and our circle of friends."[13]
             
Courting-age girls and young women more commonly dipped than smoked, which shocked both Northern and Southern soldiers unaccustomed to the practice.  An Illinois captain in Scottsboro, Alabama, called at a house with three young women.  “Each of them had a quid of tobacco in her cheek about the size of my stone inkstand, and if they didn’t make the extract fly worse than I ever saw in any country grocery, shoot me.”  John Tallman wrote from Vicksburg:  “Thare are some nice looking girls, but they will chew tobaco, Sweet little things.  Don’t you think ‘I’ for instance would . . . make a nice showing rideing along in a carriage with a young lady, me spitting tobacco juice out of one side of the carriage and she out the other . . . wall aint that nice, oh, cow!”  Southerner Robert Patrick, riding the train between Atlanta and Dalton, commenced a flirtation with

"a very pretty young lady. . . . I noticed that she was constantly spitting some dark colored fluid from her mouth.  I thought she had the toothache, and had perhaps something in her mouth to cure it.  I looked on the floor and there was a great puddle at her feet.  It resembled tobacco juice very much, and by George it was tobacco juice, for I saw her spit out the old chew and put in a fresh one.  I ‘wilted.’  A soldier sitting near me remarked, ‘she is might good looking but she is awful on tobacco.’"

Philip Daingerfield, of the 13th Arkansas Infantry and Washington Artillery, found himself after the Battle of Franklin back in the Tupelo neighborhood of a pretty young lady who had visited him while he was sick two years previously.  “I found, oh I found (accidentally) that my pretty Josephine ‘dipped!’  Dipped snuff!  Alas, alas!  How rude the awakening.  The sweet ideal shattered irreparably.  For no conceivable future enchantment could reconstruct that ideal—with a snuff stick in her mouth.”[14]
             
The social acceptability of either smoking or dipping varied from community to community.  Among some young women,

"There is nothing that will more surely and quickly bring a stranger into the fellowship and good graces of the ladies than to join them in their pet habit of snuff-rubbing.  It seems to form a bond of friendship which they regard as sacred as the vows of wedlock. . . . “will you dip with me?” is the usual way of putting the invitation, when the box is drawn from the pocket and rapped slightly on the cover, sometimes by all present, who thus signify their readiness to ‘dip,’ then it is repassed open to all, and the ‘dipping and rubbing’ begins in earnest."

If young gentlemen are present, they “generally join them in this unique use of snuff, as they are always sure to be invited and urged if they decline, and to merit their favor of course they must appear social. . . . But the maid is happiest of all when with her lover she sits face to face, and they ‘dip’ together from the same magic plant—tobacco.”  Charles Wills confirmed this was the case in Iuka, Mississippi.

"At tea parties, after they have supped, the sticks and snuff are passed round and the dipping commences.  Sometimes girls ask their beaux to take a dip with them during a spark.  I asked one if it didn’t interfere with the old fashioned habit of kissing.  She assured me that it did not in the least, and I marveled."

Thomas Knox found little concealment practiced in the custom of snuff-dipping.  At one house where they called, a middle-aged woman held her snuff-stick in her mouth all the time she was talking to them, just as a man might hold a cigar there, and an older woman sat by the fireplace smoking a corncob pipe with the utmost indifference to the presence of the young visitors.

Some women smoked in public, but used the “finger and dipping-stick on the sly.”  Others smoked behind the house or dipped only in private.  In Texas during the 1840s, John Lockhart described the women who gathered behind the church after services:  “The elderly ones would draw their pipes from the long calico bag and have a good smoke, while the younger set would draw from their dress pocket the box and brush and have a social dip.”[15]
             
Dipping could have some humorous consequences, besides dampening the ardor of a fastidious young man.  When Fenner’s Battery of New Orleans staged an entertainment at  Resaca, Georgia, in 1864, one of the soldiers, costumed as the heroine “Lelia,” “addressing her lover, ‘Rinaldo,’ from the window, vows, among other things, that she loves him better than snuff; and when, instead of ‘Rinaldo’ at the cross roads for the elopement, she is surprised and abducted by the pirate, Zimluco, she goes off struggling with her snuff-stick firmly clenched between her ruby lips.”  Near Memphis, a Federal picket stopped the carriage of a planter and his wife, demanding that they get out and be searched.  The planter cooperated, but the lady kept her seat.  Twice more the captain requested that she step down, and finally the husband insisted.

She obeyed and quite a parcel dropped under her dress.  The captain snatched it up thinking he had captured a lot of quinine, or some other valuable prize, but the husband laughed and said, “She dips, Captain, she dips.”  The captain motioned the blushing woman back into the carriage and then sheepishly handed the lady her snuff.[16]
             
The purported health benefit of snuff had been as a dentifrice, imparting to the teeth “that peculiar brilliancy for which the ladies of Southern Europe are so justly celebrated.”  “[I]t is claimed that it whitens and preserves the teeth and sweetens the mouth, and produces a beneficial effect on the lungs, all of which is true or not, just as you choose to believe.”  Others thought that it “gives lustre to the eye and a freshness to the cheek rarely surpassed.”  Old women dipped “as it made them feel young again.”  It “affords an exhilarating pleasure to those who practice it,” “a pleasant sort of mild intoxication.”  “Everywhere I marked only pleasant and soothing effects from the use of tobacco.”[17]
             
Even in the mid-nineteenth century, however, others noted tobacco’s harmful effects, including addiction.  Due to snuff, “the gums are inflamed, the teeth are discolored, the lips are shriveled, and the complexion is sallow.  The throat is dry and irritated, and there is a constant desire to expectorate.”  John Aughey agreed, adding that “the habit leads . . . to nervous disorders of every kind.  Those who indulge in it become haggard at a very early age.”  Dr. Thomas F. Green, superintendent of the Georgia State Lunatic Asylum, reported in 1860 that

The practice of snuff dipping or of rubbing, is by far the most objectionable mode of using tobacco and more certain than any other to interfere, promptly and seriously with a healthy state of the nervous system, and disorder the functions of the most important organs.  Mothers who indulge in this baneful practice, to the extent that some females do, need not be surprised to find their offspring imbeciles in mind and body. . . . If they must use tobacco we advise them to quit dipping and go to smoking, it is less injurious and more genteel.[18]
             
The Civil War and the resulting blockade affected tobacco usage even in the South.  Northern sources of processed and flavored snuffs were eliminated, driving up prices as early as 1862.  Kate Cumming, in Okolona, Mississippi, visiting “a very nice family where there were two very pretty girls, both quite young,” listened to their “many lamentations at the high price of snuff.”  In January of 1863 a writer from LaGrange, Tennessee, reported that “the rebel women are suffering grievously for the want of snuff.”   A Mrs. Elkins of Georgia, whose home lay in Sherman’s path, “lamented [the] deprivation of good snuff since [the] war” to Henry Hitchcock, one of Sherman’s staff officers.  “[I]f she could get good snuff [she] wouldn’t begrudge hardly anything else.”  A correspondent of the Chicago Journal with Rosecrans’ army wrote:  “Just here and now, tobacco, and not cotton is king.  Negroes will sing, dance, or cry for it, and the siftings of a soldier’s pocket are eagerly scraped up by the natives, and the little brooms [snuff brushes] speedily ‘raise a dust’ in it.”  With Northern sources largely eliminated, advertisements for Southern mills began to appear, such as J. L. Jones & Brother, Tally Ho, NC, “manufacturers of an excellent article of Snuff.”[19]
             
Snuff consumption and pipe smoking picked back up soon after the war and continued among rural southern women into the early twentieth century.  Although many brands of dry snuff are still available in regional grocery stores, the image of a short stick protruding from a woman’s lips is no longer familiar to most people under the age of sixty years.  A mention of the habit of those older, however, often brings a chuckle and a flood of grandmother memories.
             
If tobacco usage is to be part of the interpretation of your character, how can it be done effectively? If you already smoke cigarettes, switch to a pipe.  Many merchants carry both white and red clay pipes—either color with a reed stem would be appropriate.  Corn cob pipes are easy to reproduce following the instructions given.  Urban reenactors may purchase dried field corn or cobs at many large hardware stores—check the squirrel feeder area.  Even if tobacco is never used, the pipe can serve as an interesting prop, with the excuse that the home patch was raided by the soldiers, and there is no cash to buy any more at the store.  Tobacco pouches can follow the general design used by soldiers and illustrated in many books on uniforms, accoutrements, and accessories.
             
Fake snuff can be made of cocoa mixed with sugar, although the blend is usually swallowed and doesn’t make strong dark spit.  The sugar itself is not good for long exposure to the teeth.  Brushes are as close as the nearest tree, species of your choice, and just having the end sticking out of the mouth may be sufficient.  Brass snuff boxes are sold by several merchants, as are very small tin cans with removable lids.  A tight closure is an absolute necessity with either real snuff or cocoa and sugar.  Two original snuff jars are pictured in Civil War Collector’s Encyclopedia (Volumes III, IV, and V) by Francis Lord (p. 169) and these are consistent with other originals examined.

As a last resort, some women would turn to the manly art of chewing tobacco.  A mint moist snuff is currently on the market that might fill that need.  It would probably also provide a rather satisfying spit for an indignant secesh woman, aimed suspiciously near a pair of shiny black federal boots!

[1] “Pictures of Southern Life:  The Snuff Dippers,”  Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 6 February 1864, 311; E. R. Billings, Tobacco:  Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture, and Commerce (Hartford, CT:  American Publishing Co., 1875), 244.

[2] Joseph C. Robert, The Story of Tobacco in America (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1967):  102-3; Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes:  America’s Hundred-Year  Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris (New York:  Alfred  A. Knopf, 1996), 14; “About Cigarettes,” The Galaxy 23 (May 1877):  471 (first quotation); Nannie May Tilly, The Bright-Tobacco Industry, 1860-1929 (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1948), 507 (second quotation).

[3] Billings, Tobacco, 246; M. H. Dunlop, Sixty Miles from Contentment:  Traveling the Nineteenth-Century American Interior (New York:  Basic Books, 1995), 158; Kate Stone, Brokenburn:  The Journal of Kate  Stone, 1861-1865.  John Q. Anderson, ed.  (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University, 1972), 235 (first quotation); Sarah A. Dorsey, Recollections of Henry Watkins Allen, Brigadier-General Confederate States Army, Ex-Governor of Louisiana (New York:  M. Doolady, 1866), 251 (second, third, and fourth quotations).

[4] Kluger, Ashes to Ashes, 14; C.  Barney, Recollections of Field Service With the Twentieth Iowa Infantry Volunteers; or, What I Saw in the Army (Davenport, Iowa:  Gazette Job Rooms, 1865), 274; Nicholas P. Hardeman, Shucks, Shocks, and Hominy Blocks:  Corn as a Way of Life in Pioneer America (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University, 1981), 169-170; E. W. Locke, Three Years in Camp and Hospital (Boston:  Geo. D. Russell & Co., 1872), 258; Thomas W. Knox, “The Lost Army:  Scouting and Fighting Adventures of  Two Boys in Missouri and Arkansas in 1861, ’62,” National Tribune, 4 October 1888, p. 1, c. 2-3; Billings, 246; Elizabeth Silverthorne, Plantation Life in Texas (College Station:  Texas A&M University Press, 1986), 127; Nashville Daily Union, 3 September 1864, p. 2, c. 4; Frederick Law Olmstead, The Cotton Kingdom:   A Selection (Indianapolis:  Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1971), 201; Virginia Penny, The Employments of Women:  A  Cyclopedia of Woman’s Work (Boston:  Walker, Wise & Co., 1863; reprint, Sylvania, OH:  Mrs. Martin’s Mercantile and Millinery, 1996), 251; Byron Sudbury, “Historic Clay Tobacco Pipemakers in the United States of America,” The Archaeology of the  Clay Tobacco Pipe.  II.  The United States of America.  Peter Davey, ed.  (Oxford:  British Archeological Reports, 1979), 155, 181, 199, 199-203, 206.

[5] “The History and Mystery of Tobacco,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 61 (June 1855):  13 (first quotation); Hardeman, 169-170 (second quotation).

[6] Jack J. Gottsegen, Tobacco:  A Study of Its Consumption in the United States (New York:  Pitman Publishing Corporation, 1940), 9-10; Frederick Law Olmstead, A Journey in the Back Country (New York:  Mason Brothers, 1860; reprint, New York:  Schocken Books, 1970), 231; Silverthorne, 127; Ellen N. Murry, Notes on the Republic (Washington, TX:  Star of the  Republic Museum, 1991), 106.

[7] Robert, 101-102; Daniel R. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States (New York:  H. B. Price, 1860), 264 (quotation).  Other detailed descriptions are found in:  John H. Aughey, The Iron Furnace; or Slavery and Secession (Philadelphia:  William S. & Alfred Martien, 1863), 213-214; Billings, 247; Nashville Dispatch, 3 October 1863, p. 2, c. 2; Charles Lanman, Adventures in the Wilds of the United States and British American Provinces (Philadelphia:  John W. Moore, 1856), 2:  166; Knox, “The Lost Army,” p. 1, c. 2-3; Thomas W. Knox, Camp-Fire and Cotton Field:  Southern Adventures in Time of War:  Life with the Union Armies and Residence on a  Louisiana Plantation (New York:  Blelock, 1865; reprint.  New York:  Da Capo Press, 1969):  232.

[8] State Gazette [Austin, TX], 14 January 1860, p. 3, c. 8.  Lorillard, Inc. still produces tobacco products, predominantly cigarettes.  Garret & Sons snuff is now manufactured by American Snuff, in operation since 1782, and currently a subsidiary of Conwood Corporation in Memphis.  The Garrett & Sons trademark was one of the first ten registered in the U.S. patent office, and is the oldest one still in use.  (David L. Simpson, III to author, 16  April 1998); Southern Confederacy [Atlanta, GA], 13 June 1861, p. 1, c. 6; Chronicle & Sentinel [Augusta, GA], 31 July 1861, p. 3, c. 5; Penny, 472-3; The National Almanac and  Annual Record for the Year 1864 (Philadelphia:  George W. Childs, 1864), 194; Mobile [AL] Daily Register, 3 May 1862, p. 2, c. 2.

[9] Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 18 February 1860, 189 (all quotations).

[10] Hundley, 264; Nashville Dispatch, 3 October 1863, p. 2, c. 2; Memphis Daily Appeal [Atlanta, GA], 4 December 1863, p. 1, c. 3; Lanman, 166; Billings, 247.

[11] Aughey, 213 (first quotation); Billings, 247 (second quotation); Lanman, 166 (third quotation); Garcia, 99 (fourth quotation); Silverthorne (127 (fifth quotation); Billings, 247 (sixth quotation); Amoret and Christopher Scott, Smoking Antiques (Princes Riseborough:  Shire Publications, 1996), 26-27 (seventh and eighth quotations).

[12] Silverthorne, 127; Nashville Dispatch, 3 October 1863, p. 2, c. 2; Lanman, 166; for a Memphis example of dipping see Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank:  The Common Soldier of the Union (Garden City, NY:  Doubleday & Co., 1971), 101; Olmstead, The Cotton Kingdom:  A Selection, 160 (first quotation); Nashville Daily Union, 3 September 1864, p. 2, c. 4; Billings, 245; Nashville Dispatch, 30 December 1864, p. 1, c. 3 (second quotation); Memphis Daily Appeal [Atlanta, GA], 4 December 1863, p. 1, c. 3 (third quotation); Aughey, 213-214 (fourth quotation).

[13] Nashville Dispatch, 3 October 1863, p. 2, c. 2; Nashville Dispatch, 10 December 1863, p. 4, c. 3; Nashville Dispatch, 30 December 1864, p. 1, c. 3; Daily Chronicle & Sentinel [Augusta, GA], 17 May 1862, p. 1, c. 2; Philip Daingerfield Stephenson, The Civil War Memoir of Philip Daingerfield Stephenson, D. D., ed. Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes, Jr.  (Conway, AR:  University of Central Arkansas Press, 1995), 368; Nashville Daily Union, 3 September 1864, p. 2, c. 4; Wiley, 101-2; Olmstead, The Cotton Kingdom, 160, 201; Aughey, 214; Hundley, 264 (first and second quotation); Charles W. Wills, Army Life of an Illinois Soldier, Mary E. Kellogg, comp.  (Carbondale:  Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 123; Billings, 247 (third quotation); Memphis Daily Appeal [Atlanta, GA], 4 December 1863, p. 1, c. 3 (fourth quotation); Celine Fremaux Garcia, Celine:  Remembering Louisiana, 1850-1871, Patrick J. Geary, ed. (Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 1987), 99 (fifth quotation).

[14] Wiley, 101-2 (first and second quotations); Robert Patrick, Reluctant Rebel:  The Secret Diary of Robert Patrick, 1861-1865, F. Taylor, ed.  (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 1959), 136 (third quotation); Stephenson, 351-2 (fourth quotation).

[15] Billings, 244-246 (first and second quotations); Wills, 99-100 (third quotation); Knox, “The Lost Army,” p. 1, c. 2-3 (fourth quotation); Locke, p. 258 (fifth quotation); Olmstead, The Cotton Kingdom, 160; Wills, 123; Murry, 106 (sixth quotation).

[16] Memphis Daily Appeal [Atlanta, GA], 18 March 1864, p. 2, c. 3 (first quotation); William Camm, “Diary of Colonel  William Camm, 1861 to 1865,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 18 (January 1926):  902 (second quotation).

[17] “Pictures of Southern Life,” 311; “The History and Mystery of Tobacco,” 13; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 18 February 1860, 189 (first quotation); Billings, 247 (second quotation), 244 (third quotation), 246 (fourth quotation); Lanman, 166 (fifth quotation); Knox, “The Lost Army,” p. 1, c. 2-3 (sixth quotation); Billings, 246 (seventh quotation).

[18] Knox, “The Lost Army,” p. 1, c. 2-3; Knox, Camp-fire and Cotton-Field, 232 (first quotation); Aughey, 214 (second quotation); Daily Chronicle & Sentinel [Augusta, GA], 27 November 1860, p. 3, c. 2 (third quotation).

[19] Kate Cumming, Kate:  The Journal of a Confederate Nurse, Richard Barksdale Harwell, ed.  (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University, 1959), 49 (first and second quotations); Memphis Daily Appeal [Jackson, MS], 2 January 1863, p. 2, c. 4 (third quotation); Henry Hitchcock, Marching With Sherman (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1927.  reprint.  Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 154-155 (fourth and fifth quotations); Nashville Dispatch, 3 October 1863, p. 2, c. 2 (sixth quotation); Southern Confederacy [Atlanta, GA] 15 February 1863, p. 1, c. 2 (seventy quotation).

From: uttyler.edu

Read More

Tobacco and Smoking Among the Blue and Gray

 Reviewed By: Sean Trainor, 11-11-15

"Tobacco and Smoking Among the Blue and Gray: The Illustrated History of An American Folk-Art Curiosity—The Civil War Soldier’s Tobacco Pipe" by Ben Rapaport. Briar Books Press, 2014. Cloth, $65.00.

The American Civil War has inspired an incredible amount of writing. For some, this is a source of annoyance. Do we really need a three-volume history of the Battle of Gettysburg, the naysayers cry, or detailed biographies of low-ranking, second-rate officers in the Army of the Cumberland? Perhaps not. But for many readers, the sheer volume of writing on the war is a source of attraction—a reminder of just how rich, vast, and varied even a small sliver of the human past can be.

Those in the latter camp will no doubt find much to enjoy in Ben Rapaport’s Tobacco and Smoking Among the Blue and Gray, the first book to date on pipe-carving and tobacco-smoking among the Union and Confederate armies (and among the first crop of publications from Briar Books Press, the pipeman’s premier publisher). Penned by a prolific authority on the material culture of tobacco use, Tobacco and Smoking surveys the finest examples of Civil War-era briarwood pipes—the majority produced by untrained amateurs in the Union and Confederate armies—as well as the social and cultural context of pipe smoking among Civil War-era soldiers.

The book will be of interest to both collectors of Civil War memorabilia and scholars of the period. For the former, the book boasts hundreds of images of period pipes from the collections of Norm Flayderman and Jan Sorgenfrei—now departed, but previously the United States’ leading collectors of Civil War-era tobacciana. Just as importantly, Tobacco and Smoking includes tips on how to incorporate period-appropriate, hand-carved pipe reproductions in the reenactor’s kit, and whether to invest in antique pipes—among the hottest tickets in Civil War memorabilia today, where choice pieces are regularly fetching upwards of $2,000.

For more scholarly-minded students of the conflict, the book offers intriguing chapters on tobacco use in the ranks and pipe-making materials and methods, as well as more wide-ranging reflections on the intimate relationship between tobacco and organized violence in modern history. The latter subject Rapaport handles deftly, as he addresses the various purposes the wicked weed serves in times of war: from masking the smells of human waste, body odor, and decomposition, to fighting hunger, calming nerves, and boosting under-rested soldiers’ energies. Perhaps most impressively, Rapaport manages to evoke—in a way that only past or present smokers will understand—how tobacco simultaneously lends poetry to solitude, warmth to companionship, and wild, pathetic desperation to withdrawal. Thus, cheek by jowl with touching scenes of men mingling smoke after an ugly day’s fighting, we find dismal stories of Andersonville prisoners swapping their scarce allotment of bread for rotten tobacco or plucking discarded chaw from the spittle-strewn earth to satisfy their jones. Tobacco, it seems, made life easier for Civil War soldiers—until it didn’t.

But no doubt the most intriguing feature of Tobacco and Smoking is what the book doesn’t say. Omitting any sustained analysis of the surveyed pipes, Rapaport leaves it to the reader to plug these artifacts into existing historiographical conversations. The most obvious of these is the ongoing debate regarding Civil War soldiers’ reasons for fighting, which would almost certainly be enriched by considering pipes as a primary source. Painstakingly carved over lengthy periods of time—and ostensibly reflective, not just of pipe-decorating tropes, but of their creators’ beliefs and convictions—the pipes’ iconography offers viewers untapped insights into soldiers’ motivations. What, then, do these pipes say about the people who made them? Overrun with eagles, Old Glories, Lady Liberties, and Union slogans—and conspicuously absent any reference to slavery or emancipation—the Yankee-made pipes (which constitute the majority of Rapaport’s survey) tend to confirm Gary W. Gallagher’s argument in The Union War that, for white Northerners, the war began and ended as a fight for Union. Whether this inference is simply a distortion of Rapaport’s sample remains for another historian to decide.

Taken as a whole, Tobacco and Smoking will gratify readers who enjoy an unexpected approach to a familiar topic and frustrate those who prefer scholarly and historiographical rigor. Rapaport, after all, is not a professional historian, nor does he pretend to be. Despite an encyclopedic knowledge of pipes and some impressive research on the history of tobacco use in the mid-nineteenth century, Rapaport nevertheless cites a number of questionable sources—including Wikipedia—and cleaves to several outdated interpretations of the war. Slavery is scarcely mentioned in the pages of Tobacco and Smoking, and the portrait of the conflict that emerges from the book bears a markedly reconciliationist hue. Indeed, by Rapaport’s reckoning, the men who carved the war’s pipes were manly and valorous ones with nary a political thought in their heads: content to prove their bravery by day and smoke away their troubles by night.

But, despite these shortcomings, pipe historian Ben Rapaport achieves two impressive feats in Tobacco and Smoking Among the Blue and Gray. He writes a better book than most Civil War historians could write about pipes. And he invites readers to reconsider a familiar episode in American history from a provocative and fruitful perspective. Never again will I overlook the omnipresent pipes and tobacco paraphernalia in Civil War-era imagery—or forget soldiers’ loving, compulsive, perverse devotion to the murky enemy in their midst.

Sean Trainor is the Digital Pedagogy Content Designer for the Richards Civil War Era Center’s People’s Contest Digital Archiving Project at the Pennsylvania State University. He also teaches history and humanities at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida.

From: civilwarmonitor.com

Read More