Salt importance in the Civil War Each Confederate soldier was supposedly provided with starch (26 pounds of coarse meal, 7 pounds of flour or biscuit, 3 pounds of rice), protein (10 pounds of bacon), and salt (one and a half pounds). Bacon was the meat of the South, and every pound of it required salt. Horses need salt too. The historian Ella Lonn devoted an entire book to the problem of salt in the Confederacy during the Civil War. The salt supply was a problem throughout the war, and we will never know whether the salt shortage that preyed on the minds of the Southerners translated into a vital reason for their defeat. We know that the Confederate soldiers were hungrier than the Northerners throughout the war. We shall never know whether the hogs that were not slaughtered because there was no salt to preserve them took the edge off the Confederate troops, or whether the salt that was not available for the horses took the edge off the cavalry. What hogs we have to make our meat, we cant get salt to salt it, wrote Mrs Sarah Brown to Governor Pettus of Mississippi in December 1861. In 1862, Governor Brown of Georgia wrote that only half of the meat of the State could be saved for the 1862-1863 season. We do know that that most intelligent and brutally efficient of the Northern Generals, Sherman, had no doubt about salt. It was as important as gunpowder, he declared. Without salt they cannot make bacon and salt beef, and, Salt is eminently contraband, because [of] its use in curing meats, without which armies cannot be subsisted. Sherman sent a captain for trial on a charge of aiding the enemy, because he had allowed salt through the lines to the Confederates. The Union forces were sent orders to destroy salt stores and salt works wherever they were found. In November 1863, General Burnside noted in a despatch to Grant that Lee had placed a strong defensive force in front of Saltville [Virginia]. Grant understood the significance of the deployment. In December 1863 he wrote to General Foster, If your troops can get as far as Saltville and destroy the works there, it will be an immense loss to the enemy. In the event, the Confederates guarded the works so well that the Union Army did not take (and destroy) the salt works until December 1864. General Burbridge boasted that the loss of Saltville would be more felt by the enemy than the loss of Richmond. Meanwhile the North, even with salt sources of its own, imported 86,208 tons of salt from England in 1864 alone. Some speculate that the shortage of Salt in the South may have shortened the Civil War by as much as 2 years. It has also been said that had it not been for its Salt shortage the South might have defeated the North.
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 00:12:49 +0000
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