Lectures in history, a university of texas at austin professor teaches an online class about president Ronald Reagan and the end of the cold war. Thank you all for tuning in. We are here with the tattooed historian. My great friend. A little bit in before we dive into the topic which is hygiene and nutrition. Tell us a little bit about who you are, what you bring to the history table. I think you bring a unique perspective and some great ideas. Thank you. , started out as a historian and i went on to work alongside the u. S. Army corps of engineers as a historian and archivist. That, i beganinto a facebook page. I used it as a way to showcase some of the archival things. I was enjoying that process. We were going through the archives and we were trying to find out what was inside of them. This blew up. I was not expecting that. I was expecting to maybe get 100 people to follow along. Facebook. G on, it built up more and more. I went fulltime with this project in april of 2018. I have been doing it fulltime for two years now. I wanted to give a platform to historians. I didnt wanted to be me showcasing what i know all of the time. I want to dive into todays topic. Tell us a little bit about hygiene and nutrition of civil war soldiers. Before i go into screen sharing, i want to let everyone , this started off years ago. I was a historical reenactor. I left to cook and talk about rations. We could talk about cleanliness in the field. I was a pretty hardcore campaigner. Ey best friend at times was ly soap. We hung out with other history nerds. Guy who got toe cook for everybody. There was even a time when we found blueberries alongside of the road and i made a blueberry cobbler. I thought i should look at the history little bit. What i will present to you today is a little bit of background on each thing. This is by no means an overarching great narrative. This is an introductory piece. To spark your curiosity. Hopefully you can reach out in the Comment Section with any questions you have. I will start my powerpoint presentation. I have been doing so many interviews. Food and hygiene in the civil war is an awesome topic. The full campaign ration of these men in this lithograph is one pound of hardtack, threequarter pounds of salt pork, or one and a quarter pounds of fresh meat, salt, sugar, coffee. This equates to roughly 4000 calories. You are looking at the caloric intake of what our modern troops should be getting. Per day. On campaign, which is your marching, your camping for the , take thatre moving 4000 calorie intake and lets look at the gettysburg campaign. The average soldier at will ingest about 1800 calories a day. They are getting about half of what they should be getting. This causes fatigue and causes men to drop out. Today is basically the caloric intake of those who live in the congo. I have a tattoo of hardtack and coffee. Not surprising in the latest. Salt pork, salt beef, rarely potatoes, andead, occasional onion, flour, beans, split peas, rice, dried apples, dried peaches, desiccated vegetables. That is what he saw he said said he saw throughout his service. Were starveddes into walking skeletons. They were sickly looking men. So weak they could stagger when they walked. He said he has not eaten enough to keep a sick kitten alive. Often we get a meal a day. When new jersey soldier said, our soup, coffee, and meat were boiled in camp kettles, which were often used for boiling dirty close. As you see before you, it is the meat ration. One of my favorites, salt pork. You can see why it is called that by this photo. Company cooks tended to boil salt pork. Many simply poked it with sticks to see if it was done or not. It usually was not. It was undercooked and that caused many problems. Someone tried to eat it raw. Many of us have learned to call it indigestible. But we ignore the existence of such a thing. When salt pork was not available, substitutions would be made such as beef or ham. Many people had to deal with over prepared meet all of the time. One North Carolina soldier stated, i learned to eat fat bacon raw and to like it. Theires, soldiers set out supply of meat and the sun, thinking that the sun could bake it. One of the biggest ones everyone talks about, hardtack. We issued hardtack to our troops in the u. S. Army all the way up to the first world war. This was not just stay civil war thing. It goes over three centuries. It usually came in large boxes. Men would receive about nine crackers per ration. Is, hardtack is flour and water. Andets into your stomach expands and makes you feel like you have eaten more than you actually have. These can be prepared in different ways. It could be fried in pork use. It ins how i used to eat the field and im still alive. I used to soak it when i was a living history interpreter. You throw in the hardtack and it is kind of like bread. Another one. Was one other one is loft course. And what isacked ever available. When hardtack was not available, flour or soft bread was usually issued. There was a small time when soft bread was baked under the terrace on the left side of the capital building. These ovens could produce about 16,000 loaves of pred per day. There were logistical issues. In 1864, there was a bakery put in in city point, virginia. These were staffed by professional bakers. They produced 23,000 loaves of bread. Often issued to confederate troops. Many varieties came out of this. The quality of the cornmeal declined. One rebel stated, cornmeal was nothing more or less than a mixture of corncobs, husks, and sawdust. This one gets a lot of peoples attention, desiccated vegetables. What are they . He says, this consisted of a small piece per man. They had been dried. , theyxpanded and water showed the layers of cabbage leaves. Ofatified with layers carrots. Some other unknown vegetable quantities. This to fight the powers of the analyst to give it away. They could not understand what was in this. Many soldiers just started calling it desecrated vegetables. Scurvy ran rampant through these armies due to these poor vegetable diets and lack of root. It was not until 1854 that federal troops started seeing fresh fruits and vegetables. This was mostly supplied by the eunice u. S. Sanitary commission. My favorite of all, coffee. One surgeon said the wounded seem to have little or no power because they had no off the before they went battle. This led to many cases of dehydration. Soldiers were known to get water anyway they could, even if it was detrimental to their health. They filled canteens in a nearby ditch. This stagnant water would be repulsive to uri but the pushed themply greens, on the surface aside with their 10 cups. They plunged in their canteens to fill them up. They were convinced that a pint of good coffee is a better beverage for a soldier than all of the ride, bourbon, brandy, or anything alcoholic. No equal as preparation for a hard days march. Coffee and sugar were kept in a bag together. Put two tablespoons full of the mixture in a pint of water. They let it boil. The confederates had a harder time because of the blockade. Plan started to squeeze the confederacy with its blockade. Many had to substitute coffee. They used potatoes, peanuts, corn to make a coffee substitute. For some interpreters out there and reenactors, many of us would not date all weekend. After a few days we would smell pretty bad out there. You can imagine going week set a time without a bath. Joseph woodward was a soldier in the u. S. Army. Times ofreat armies in war, personal cleanliness is often not a instant. Theirn are unwashed, close filthy, bodies full of vermin. Heaps of garbage lie about. Especially needed was policing the lid of trains the latrines. The dirt is entirely neglected. Large numbers of men will not use the sinks or latrines. Very clump of bushes it is impossible to step outside the encampment without having eyes and nostrils continually offended. That is one of the best quotes about hygiene i ever found out there in the archives. It is so dramatic. It makes you think of the pungent smell and what is going on around you at that time. One inspector was just union camps and said, they were littered with refuse, food, rubbish. Sometimes in an offensive state of decomposition. , heaps ofund pits manure, awful close to the camp. Officials and a lot of the officers wanted their men to bathe about once per week. That is what they figured was enough. Men bathed only when they had the opportunity, like these men in the river here. That meant sometimes not only weeks but months without bathing properly. Proper bath was different for everyone. You could smell an army before you could see one. Not based in a month or two and now they are camping close together. You can imagine what that smell wouldve been. Or maybe you dont want to imagine. One of the worst was the gray backs. Im talking about these little guys. Lise. These would be an issue for the u. S. Army for years. As a guy who dabbles in the first world war, this is where the term cooties comes from. They are lise. The men in the civil war started calling them gray backs. One soldier recalled, i once heard the orderly of a company takenr relate that he had 52 from the shirt of his chief in one setting. Ofy would get into the seems your close and nest in there. You would have to dig them out. You would see soldiers getting lise off of their body or out of their own jacket. The best course of action was to boil the uniform in a large pot of water, remember, also the pot used for making food, or expose the lies lice to extreme heat over a campfire. Conditionssanitary and around the camp caused a whole host of diseases to pop up. Dysentery ravaged both forces. Probably accounting for close to 100,000 deaths. Cases of latrines being too close to water sources were prevalent. Contaminated water could be found in thousands of canteens throughout the war. This as well as poorly cooked. Ations also led to typhoid roughly 30 of those who contracted typhoid recovered from it. This on the right is an enhanced photo of a i and with the log he would sit on. That sink is supposed to be five feet deep. Unless youver was are in a camp for a long time. Of your screent you will see a latrine in the middle of the field. Look at the close proximity of the camp. If there is runoff, those men will be in trouble. A doctor with the u. S. Sanitary commission started to change things. They started to clean up a lot of these areas. One doctor sees the stuff in latrine621 and sees the is the ground in the vicinity which slopes down to the stream from which all water in the camp is obtained. Are putting these sometimes on Higher Ground and it is running off in the rainwater. Theclose proximity in which men live together also permitted measles and tuberculosis to make appearance. Camp life was not a clean or safe environment. See all the men gathered together in large clumps. Beenof them had never around these diseases before. Especially men who came from sparsely Populated Areas of the country. From denselyme Populated Areas seem to have a better time with what we would consider childhood diseases. They had already been through that and overcome it. You are starting to see men from the country come out. Farmers who had never been exposed to this amount of people. It starts to ravage the camps and civil war armies. To withs all comes down these diseases and 30 conditions is three things. One is overcrowding. Including men and animals living near each other. You have forces on the exterior of this camp line. Sometimes horses and mules are put on the high ground. You can imagine what happens when the rainwater comes through. Objectives involving the end of the war always took precedence over sanitation issues. Just get the war down, we will not worry about how clean the camp is. Poor environmental conditions. In various forms of weather, many times with one blanket, it is not good protection. Times when the environment plays a key factor in sickening the army. A lot of these men end up in hospitals. These hospitals are filled with men who are suffering from diseases and camp which could have been prevented. They did not have proper sanitary issues. Hygiene was not of the utmost importance. Ending the war was the most important to many of the commanders. It came down to civilian organizations to try to come in and help these men along. Food, it also came down to, you were eating off the same plate every day and not washing the plate. The u. S. Army had not started issuing utensils. You were saving using the same utensils over and over again and not washing them. Doing camp duties in the same pots where you were still making your food. That will create a lot of problems with an outbreak of diseases or other things going on in camp. Especially with dysentery and such. With all of this combining into one, you have just as many youats to your existence as do in battle, if not more so. As you have heard time and again, you are more likely to die from disease than from combat. These are some of the reasons why you either have a poor diet or you are in an area where hygiene is not of the utmost importance to whomever may be around. Mind, we can have further discussion of this in the comments section. Or if you have some things you want to interject with. I would love to hear your take on the hygiene. That was great. Thank you so much. We got some good questions in the comments. , we gote we did a video inundated with comments and then i could not find them all. As you were speaking, i was writing them down. Just two comments i would like to highlight that i enjoyed. Who isfriend of ours part of the blue and gray hospital association, he mentioned, i always smell the meat first. If i dont vomit, it is edible. [laughter] that was a thing with the men when they were issued the meat. You better cook that ration quickly even though it had been cured in salt for months. There would be a green tent to it after a bout a day. What i would do is boil it first. You did not wanted to turn green. I might not get to eat until sunday. It would begin to smell terrible. Yikes. , it sounds like our group needs to work a lot harder to be authentic. You dont know the problem until you acknowledge it. You dont have to worry about the disease to be authentic. Please dont go out there and eat raw salt pork between two pieces of hardtack. Civil war sushi. Basically. Goodays felt like having food made properly in the field made an interpretive experience better. I was always trying to do that as much as possible. If you are an interpreter or reenactor, that is one way to up your game. See how tough it actually can be. A question on that about cooking and food. For cooks generally decent cooks . Question. A great men are always going to complain about the food. You could have the best ingredients and yet youre not going to please everybody. However, usually what would happen is the men would figure out, this guy is the best code. Duty. L have him do the you traded off. You can so when i cant but i will cook. If you are in a stagnant camp like a winter encampment, many times what they would do is take a few different guys who are really good at it and put them at a location considered a kitchen and allow them to do their work. Together and put your rations together and cook them. He figures out i am a better cook than him. When we get to a winter encampment, we are like, this guy can really. Can sit and peel potatoes all day. You try to work out who is the better cook. The same towns. Maybe this guy is known for being a great baker. We will make him bake. It all works out in the end. You will always have guys complaining about the food. Is like a military story as old as time itself. Im sure you can find romans complaining about the cook. I know a little bit about this topic. An interpreter and living historian may have some info. We had a couple of questions about teeth and toothbrushing. That, theou say about dental hygiene . That is a great question. I shouldve thought about putting that in there. During the civil war, you could get tooth powder. You would mix that powder into water and create a taste. A lot of times, two things could happen. You are either not near it or the grocery does not carry it at the time. Or you just need to a sickly take ashes out of the fire pit. You have seen charcoal toothpaste. Of the firees out pit and you start scrubbing. Had very nicemen teeth because of that. If they keep 30. Nice pearly whites because that is one of the best ways to train your teeth in the field. A lot of the hard core guys have done it. Ashes from the fire, put a little bit of water on there, and start scrubbing. With tooth powder, they. May not have it at the time you may not be near a town where you can get it. Usually they would have one guy who would put it in their pack. Then it got everywhere and all over everything. They decided to just deal with the ashes and the fires. In our collection, we do have tooth powder. I was always intrigued by it. Then i found out what the leading ingredient was. It was chock. Chalk. Mr. Yang either way you are going to have a gritty taste in there. Inanother question that came , it is very relevant, that speaking of back at the beginning, the museum wanting to be relevant, bringing in history , how about toilet paper . You talked a little bit about the trains. Latrines. There are all kinds of ways to get that job done. There is a lot of paper floating around. You could find paper readily available. To using therted old corncob way of doing things when it was in season. Times, sad to say, some men did not do it enough. That is what could create that smell around camp, the fact that they were not keeping themselves properly clean. You could find ways to do it. The old leaf is a good way if you are running out of paper. It was all in what you get. There were different ways of doing it. You see different people commenting on it once in a while. But it is a rare thing. It was something they took for granted. They are not going to put it in their journal, how they did that. It is a great question. It all depends on locale, what is around. Cityis fundamentally the civil war in general. Whatever there was to use. Thank you. I dont think about that often. I worked at the civil war medicine museum. We talk a lot about poop. That is what i did not talk about. As the toilet paper shortage that we all experienced in the , for the first time, i heard about people corncob saying. I was mildly disturbed by that. You eat the corn first. Dont ruin the corn. I have heard of people doing that in the depression. That was used during the civil war as well out in the field. Go to target or walmart to get our toilet paper. They went to the kitchen and got whatever they needed. I know you are most interested in the food. I want to keep the questions back to food. Question about peanuts. Terms of rations and food. Can you speak a little bit about that . Peanuts were definitely around. I heard that song too much. Peanuts were definitely around. Men were chomping on them as much as they could. It is like the old sunflower seed habit. It was something to pass the time. And throw at each other. When we have a mix of Something Like a trail mix, that was peanuts to them. That is what they were eating in their downtime. You could find men with handfuls of peanuts and their sex sacks. That is where they kept their food. That is only for food. You keep your plate in there if you like. Men would have stuff in there by the handful sometimes. Bags that often they would keep coffee in order peanuts. Whatever they found along the road. That is all going to slowly start to gel together after a while. The sack was disgusting after a while. I cant even imagine. A lot of what we talked about today is just the smells. It is one thing to look at this but try to imagine the smells. If only we could have, i know some institutions and museums have smelly machines. I think it would be too offputting for someone to walk in there. They would not spend much time in the display. It is all of these things we were talking about today. They have a hospital. A soldier died of gangrene. They made the decision to smell like gangrene. It is a memorable experience. They do a wonderful job down there interpreting smells. Many of the other smells associated with the war. Probably be too repulsive to our modern sense abilities. That is something we do not get. We dont understand that kind of thing. Everyone has just date that morning before going out to the event. We dont get the smells. War field is civil concerned, there are a lot of people looking at sensory issues. We have had an uptick in environmental histories and sensory histories. I think that is fantastic. Now we are seeing it in book form. I am really happy to see that. That will bring this alive to a lot of people. You are in support of the scratch and sniff Civil War History book. We should be able to do that. [laughter] someone probably is working on it somewhere. I have a feeling. About nasty smells, immediately made me think of this question. Been doingu have living history and interpreting for 25 years. Immediately i go to the best and worst. What was the worst meal you ever had during your living history events . Undercookedd chicken. Undercooked. Sly we were so hungry. That took a toll on a lot of us. That weree issues kind of like dysentery. There were about 10 of us who aided. This entire company is out of commission right now. We are grumbling and groaning because our stomachs hurt and we are going to the bathroom a lot. You already mentioned blueberry cobbler, which sounds good. That was my creation. We were doing a confederate living history. We were doing a road march and i saw blueberries. An english mass 10 mess tin and i had cornmeal and molasses. I thought, we can make a blueberry cobbler in no time. That really showed us how sometimes we get lucky. We make something really cool. I would have to think of what else we made really well in the field. We basically stuck with the necessities. Made in thing i ever the field was actually during a mexicanamerican war event. I did steamed mussels in the field for veracruz. And we made guacamole in the field before it was a hipster thing. It was great. We were the original hipsters. We did not have toast so we made guacamole in the field. Wearing 1840 stuff. That makes me think, the inspiration, you guys legit do your research. There are some primary sources. Eating avocados down there in mexico. There is a great book called chronicles of the gringos. It is a classic mexicanamerican war book. We go into these resources and we pool these little snippets out to be like, lets try this this weekend. After a while, i sold my musket because i would rather do this. Some interesting things according to foodstuffs. We had gotten so many of these primary sources out. I like to try to cook in the field over an open fire. You can definitely find it from time to time in the primary as far as what they are eating. We found out they were smoking tobacco out of corn husks. So we were doing that for the weekend to try it and see what it was like. I love applying history like that. Boats inat is in these the siding, lets go see what this is like. It gets you a little bit closer to that. I know authenticity is a big word for you. I dont have too much familiarity with the mexicanamerican war. I am trying to fix that. Lots of lessons in there for those interested in the civil war. If you like a lot of mexican dishes, this is where americans start to find out what that actually is. This was a Training Ground for the guys in the american civil war. They are learning about their experience in the 1840s and the battlefield and the kitchen. What are they going to make . It is the one part of the movie gettysburg that i love. Talking about his service way back when. There is an old guy in your unit who is exactly like that. They had an old sergeant who was in the first gulf war. It is the same thing. It is a timeless story. Talking about food and how to properly take care of yourself and the military is a timeless story. It goes back to ancient times. That is why a presentation like this is so important for your viewers and my viewers. Think about the operational history, the tactics and all of that. We tend to forget about, what are these guys actually eating and how is what they do on the battlefield . I think it is an awesome subject. That is why i was so attracted to food in the field. Figure out, how do they do it . Other food related question that came to mind, i have not done any living history myself. Will in the summertime was a big thing for me. I am not doing it. I will enjoy the comforts of a 21stcentury life. The desiccated vegetables . I have not personally had it. I know really good living historians are starting to make it before they go out in the deal. I never had desiccated vegetables. I know that if you have. Quite a few in the campaign or. Back in the day we never tried it. I would try it just to see what it is like. It. W when they made it did not look appealing at all. Cite try it just to say i tried it. I have not seen it done. Like that food is more acceptable to me. I feel like i would try most of this food. But the whole get up and that life, living history, it is not for me. Whatever goes for you. I got to the point where my back started hurting too much and i needed to retire. The young guys started calling me pop. [laughter] you have seen it all before. We are a little overtime. Thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate you coming on and chatting with us. Thank you so much. Thank you. It is always a pleasure working with you. Learn more about the people at events that shaped the civil war and reconstruction, every saturday at 6 00 p. M. Eastern. Sunday, at 7 00 p. M. Eastern, we will show an interview with a korean war veteran, who shares his experiences on two tours in korea with the u. S. Marine corps between 1950 and 1953. It is from the Korean War Legacy Foundation oral history foundation. Here is a preview. , as youe way out probably know by now, it was just one road, a real thin road, you could not pass most of the time. You went down that road, that was the way out. We were ambushed several times. Ambushed with my part of the convoy. We did not know they were there. They hit us all at once. In, i was in the backseat at the time, it stops the engine. It hit the gas tank. Tire. Ctured the rear i was sitting in the backseat. Nobody in the jeep was hit. But we all jumped out. They started coming over the Railroad Tracks on the other side. We had a pretty good firefight. I had a rifle. About the second tour third round, it jammed. There i was in the middle of a firefight with a jammed rifle. I looked around. He was not moving. I said something to him and he did not say anything. Gun, went to his pocket and got some ammunition, and continue to fight with it. , with about 50 or a hundred men together in this one section, our sergeant said, who is in charge here . And i said, i am a lieutenant. I dont know if there is anyone senior to me or not. He said, you are it, what we do . Watch this full interview sunday at 7 00 p. M. Eastern, fork 4 00 p. M. Pacific. Every saturday night, American History tv takes you to College Classrooms across the country for lectures in history. Why do you know who Lizzie Borden is . Raise your hand if you had ever heard of this murder trial before this class. Meaningll find the true of the revolution and the transformation that took place in the minds of the american people. We will talk about both sides of the story. The tools, techniques of slaveowner power. We will also talk about the slate tools and techniques of power that were practiced by enslaved people. Watch history professors lead discussions with their students. History on cspan3, every saturday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern. And available as a podcast. Next,