From Open Culture, July 3 (third day of the Battle of Gettysburg):
Americans doing “e‑mail jobs” and working in the “laptop class” tend to make much of the quantity of coffee they require to keep going, or even to get started. In that sense alone, they have something in common with Civil War soldiers. “Union soldiers were given 36 pounds of coffee a year by the government, and they made their daily brew everywhere and with everything: with water from canteens and puddles, brackish bays and Mississippi mud,” write NPR’s Kitchen Sisters. “The Confederacy, on the other hand, was decidedly less caffeinated. As soon as the war began, the Union blockaded Southern ports and cut off the South’s access to coffee.”
Smithsonian National Museum of American History curator Jon Grinspan tells of how “desperate Confederate soldiers would invent makeshift coffees,” roasting “rye, rice, sweet potatoes or beets until they were dark, chocolaty and caramelized. The resulting brew contained no caffeine, but at least it was something warm and brown and consoling.” (See video at bottom of the post.) The stark caffeination differential that resulted must count as one of many factors that led to the Union’s ultimate victory. Part of what kept their coffee supplies robust was imports from Liberia, the African republic that had been established earlier in the nineteenth century by freed American slaves.
“The Union’s ability to purchase and distribute coffee from Liberia, alongside other sources, was helping the army’s morale,” writes Bronwen Everill at Smithsonian.com. “In December 1862, one soldier wrote that ‘what keeps me alive must be the coffee.’ ”....
....MUCH MORE including video, coffee links (but nary a mention of chicory)
