Forgotten History: Civil War Coffee

Although it is not something most people stop and think about, have you ever wondered how coffee ended up as our national drink instead of tea?

You can thank the Union Army for that. Most historians are aware that the Nazis pumped their troops full of amphetamines during WWII to keep them going. (Ya know, Blitzkrieg) Far fewer know that the Union Army was pumping their men full of coffee for the same purpose.

While it is generally accepted that the superior industrial base was ultimately responsible for the Union victory, of equal importance, in my opinion, was the fact that the Union kept their troops pumped full of caffeine.

The top photo is of a reproduction Union coffee wagon as supplied by the United States Christian Commission. Although the USCC helped mostly Union soldiers, they also supplied some Confederate soldiers as well. From their website:

"There is a group of heroes that served upon the battlefields of the Civil War without rifles or cannons. They came with bibles, bandages and the love of Christ. These were the heroes of the U.S. Christian Commission.

Where was God during this terrible suffering and bloodshed? The answer lies most notably in the stories of heroism exhibited by the United States Christian Commission and the delegates that so fearlessly and faithfully served the soldiers with the gospel. Formed in the fall of 1861 by the Young Men’s Christian Association to “take active measure to promote the spiritual and temporal welfare of the soldiers in the army, and the sailors and marines in the navy, in co-operation with chaplains and others.

During the war, five thousand delegates volunteered and distributed over $6,000,000 worth of goods and supplies (in 1860's valuation) to the soldiers and sailors of the Union army on the battlefields, camps, hospitals and prisons. They also served the soldiers in grey when the opportunity arose. It is estimated that the service rendered by the delegates of the Christian Commission equal the continuous work of one man for 658 years!"

As an aside, nicotine, via the tobacco leaf, helped keep the Southern soldier on his toes, though to a much less extent than his Union counterpart. Nevertheless, now and again Union and Confederate soldiers would meet up and swap coffee for tobacco. Another factor in Northern performance was the fact that the North had better rations.

From the U.S Army Quartermaster Foundation website: "Who shall have this?" Sergeant John W. Fuller asked in a voice loud enough for all the assembled troops to hear. He stood beside two ordinary army blankets laden with precious contents. One contained forty-five carefully divided mounds of ground coffee, the other an equal number of piles of sugar. Together, they represented a four-day ration of coffee and sugar for Company C of the 100th Regiment of the Indiana Volunteer Infantry.

Sergeant Fuller was pointing to one of the heaps of coffee. No matter how carefully they tried, it was impossible to divide the coffee equally; the company had no scales. As a result, each mound was always a bit larger or smaller than the others. In order to distribute the ration, First Sergeant Sanford W, Meyers, facing away from the coffee and the company, read from the muster roll and called out a name at random. Private Theodore F. Upson stepped forward to claim this most important part of a soldier's ration, then, its sweetener.

Salt pork and hardtack, the rest of the marching ration were to be weighed and issued later by the regimental commissary but that wasn't important now. The company focused its attention on the blankets. The weather in this third week of June, 1864 was wet and unseasonably cool, as it had been for the four previous weeks of the campaign to Atlanta. The source of that next, all sustaining cup of hot coffee, now ranked in importance with the Confederate enemy entrenched less than a mile away - Private Upson returned to the ranks with his fair, if not quite equal share of coffee, and the issue continued, by random name, till each pile of coffee and sugar had been claimed."

Union coffee was typically issued green and had to be roasted and ground, not always an easy task in a combat environment, but eventually the troops got to guzzle their java.

After the war ended, returning Union troops kept up their desire for coffee and eventually the South would come to demand it as well.