Tattered historian about Civil War Soldier nutrition and hygiene. He describes what type of food would have been in the rations, how they might have cooked it, and access items like to take and toilet paper. The National Museum of civil war medicine provided his video. Thank you all for joining in with us. We are here with the tattered historian himself, i great friend. I just want to get in a little bit before we dive into the topic we are covering today which is hygiene and nutrition Civil War Soldiers, can you 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. Istarted out as a historian, earned my ba from Shippensburg University of pennsylvania and i went on one side the u. S. Army corps of engineers as an archivist. About a year into that i began the tattooed historian on facebook. I used it as a way to showcase some of the archival things we were finding, and i was really enjoying the process because we were doing what was called and archival assessment, going through the archives and trying to see what was in the archive and the condition it was in. I was taking photographs of and papers,tifacts documents, stuff like that to showcase to the public who may not be able to go and check those things out. Strangely enough, this thing blew up and i wasnt expecting that. I was expecting to get maybe 100 people to follow along and to also maybe find my next job. As time went on, lincoln was not a sexy thing, so i was using facebook. Everyone was on facebook. It builds upon, more and more, and i started getting on a couple more plant ones, started reading twitter instagram. I went fulltime with this project in april of 2018. So ive been doing it fulltime for two years now. And what i wanted to do is to make history accessible, and have what i call frictionfree history, no pay to play kind of ring. I also wanted to give a platform to historians. I didnt want it to be me showcasing what i know all the 9010, wanted to be like i want to have people on who had done historical work 90 of the time, and showcase something they were doing, and 10 of the time, it is me showing you a historical site or something. With all that being said, i really want to dive into todays topic. Im going to step away, im still going to be here, but im going to turn over the floor to , and you can tell us a little bit about hygiene and nutrition in Civil War Soldiers. Before i go into the screen sharing portion of this presentation, i want to let everyone know that this all started off basically years and years ago, i was a historical interpreter, reenactor for years. A quarter of a century, which makes me feel agent. The one thing that i love to do in the field as i love to cook and i love to talk about rations. It was something everyone can connect you. About also talk cleanliness and trying to stay clean because i was a pretty hardcore campaigner, and my best friend at times was lye soap. With our hang out comrades and our friends out there, doing great and. And it seemed like i was always the guy that got to cook for everybody in the little mess, three or four people hanging out together. Even a time were redone blueberries on the side of the road and i made a blueberry cobbler. I thought maybe i should look at food history a little bit and jake asked me to come on and speak about food and hygiene. So what im going to present to you today is a little bit of a background on each in, especially the food portion, since that is my go to a lot, and i love to eat. Im going to be talking about that a lot. But this is by no means an overarching great narrative of it. This is an introductory piece, this is the spark your curiosity. Hopefully, you can reach out in the comments with any questions that you may have. If i cant answer, maybe jake can later on, because this is a partnership and we are working together to give you the best possible livestream that we can. With that in mind, im going to start my Powerpoint Presentation and forgive me if my screen sharing ability is a little rusty right now. Ive been doing so many interviews that im mainly used to speaking with someone and not giving a screen share. Hygiene in the civil war is just an awesome topic edit something that we often take for granted, especially the food portion. What did they it, how do they survive . Hygiene, we can talk about in general as an overarching theme of the project. Fieldhese men are in the and they are out among comrades and obviously, in the photo, they are not social distancing, the full campaign ration of wase men in this lithograph one pound of heart attack, three quarter pounds 100 part tack, k, one part of hard tac salt, sugar, coffee. This equates to roughly 4000 calories. You are looking at the caloric intake of water modern troops should be getting, about 4000 calories or so per day. But on campaign, which is when you are marching, you are camping for the night, maybe moving the next day, moving around a lot on campaign, take that 4000 calorie intake and lets look at, for instance, the Gettysburg Campaign, july. June, july, 1863. The average soldier at gettysburg and the campaign overall is going to ingest about 1800 calories per day. Theyre not getting half of what they are supposed to be getting per day. This causes fatigue, it causes men to drop out of ranks, etc. I believe taking hundred calories today is basically what the caloric intake is of those who live currently in the congo. Its about 2000 calories. At least Civil War Soldiers are ingesting each day. List oflings wrote a what he received during his service, which i actually have a tattoo of a lithograph out of hard tack and coffee. Not surprising in the least. Wrote saltlings pork, fresh beef, rarely they , the occasional onion, florida, flour beans, desiccated vegetables. Sugar, molasses, vinegar, candles, soap, pepper and salt. That is what he said he saw throughout his service in the union army during the civil war. Indianar with the sixth said his comrades were starved into walking skeletons, pale, sickly looking, so weak they could stagger as they walked. A captain of a hundred 40th pennsylvania said i have not eaten enough to keep a sick kitten alive. Often we get a meal a day, oftener a meal in two days. One soldier said they were boiled in camp kettles which were also used for boiling our dirty clothes, which will go over in a little while. But as he see before you on the screen is the meet ration, one of my favorites, salt pork, and you can see why it is called salt pork. Company cooks tended to boil salt pork. Many simply poked it with sticks to see if it was done or not and it usually was not, it was usually undercooked, and that caused many problems. Men on campaign tended to fried it would some of actually be drawn between two pieces of hard tack, so you can imagine what is going to happen when theyre eating this raw. Billings says many of us have since learned to call it the indigestible ration, but we ignored the existence of such a thing as a stomach in the army and regarded pork as indispensable. When sultan port wasnt available, substitutions would be made. Some men had to learn to deal with poorly prepared meat all the time. One soldier stated ive learned to eat fat bacon raw and to like it. At times, soldiers simply set out a supply of the meat in the sun, simply taking that the sun could bake it and it would be fine. Ones that biggest everyone talks about, hard tack. We also have soft red and cornmeal. Basically, the other indispensable ration. It has been around since the 18th century, it was called a ship this get an later on with the known as hard tack. We issue it to our troops in the u. S. Army all the way of the first world war. This isnt just a civil war thing, this is something that goes over three centuries. Boxes,lly came in large stenciled with bc for brigade commissary. Many men sport actually is the date of when the stuff was manufactured, before christ. Men in the union army would receive about nine crackers per ration issue. You are getting nine of these things to ingest. Is it gets into your makesh and expands, it you feel like youve eaten more than you actually have. These can be prepared in different ways. It was soaked and fried in greece, the way i used to eat it in the field, and im still alive, thankfully. Probably got bad calories from it and high cholesterol, but i used to soak it when i was a living history instructor, i would put it in a cup of water and soak it. When i was done frying the salt pork, you throw in the slightly soften hard tack and it is kind of like fried bread. Hellfire still was another one. You crushed it and soaked it, and then it friday. Another one is salt pork, hard tack and whatever is available in stew. You had to guess what is inside it. When hard tack wasnt available, flour or soft bread was usually issued. In 1861, there was a small time when soft red was baked soft side was baked on the west of the terrace of the Capital Building of washington, d. C. These could produce about 16,000 loaves of bread per day, so you could imagine the logistical issues going on with all these. Grant had asses s. Bakery operation at city point, virginia. These were staffed by professionals, and they produced 123,000 for the union army. Cornmeal was often issued to confederate troops in great numbers, many varieties of recipes came out of this essential ingredient of their diet. However, as the war progressed, the quality of the cornmeal declined, and one rebel stated at the time of the Gettysburg Campaign that cornmeal was nothing more or less than a mixture of corncobs, husks, and sawdust. Full rations consisted of a pound of this and a quarter pound of fat pork. This one gets a lot of attention. Desiccated vegetables. What are desiccated vegetables . Well, lets go back to billings. Billings says this consisted of a small piece per man, one ounce in weight, and two or three inches cubed of a sheet or block of vegetables which is been sanitaryand dried as fodder for the soldiers. He went on to say that when it expanded in water, it seemed to show, and i think really did show, the lakers of cabbage leaves and turnip tops with sliced carrots, turnips, other unknownsome vegetable quantities with a large residual of insoluble material which appeared to play the part of warp to the fabric. Even they could not come up and understand what the heck was in this stuff. Many soldiers just started calling it desecrated vegetables instead of desiccated vegetables. Armyy was rampant in the due to these poor vegetable diets and lack of fruits. It wasnt until 1864 that will troops started to see a large influx of fresh fruits and and this was mostly supplied by the u. S. Sanitary commission, who came in and cleaned up a lot of the camps which we go over in a little bit, and also helped out with the food storage and foodstuffs. All, coffee. Ite of the biggest morale booster in the world. I went to get my coffee this morning and they werent open yet, and my morale dropped. You can imagine how in the field what it is like. Thaturgeon in 1864 stated they seem to have little or no power they had no coffee before they went into battle. Some surgeons told men to drink coffee instead of water because which healthier for them led to many cases of dehydration. If you are just ingesting coffee overtime, youre going to get dehydrated. However, soldiers were known to get water anyway they could, even if it was detrimental to their health. On july 2, members of the fourth fill their canteens in a nearby ditch. Would be at water pulse of the soldiers simply pushed the green scum on the service aside and flapping the service to sink the bogs in the whitworth to the bottom, they plunged their canteens to fill them up. Said im fairly convinced that a pint of good coffee is a better beverage for a soldier than all the bourbon, brandi, or any alcoholic nostromo that ever flowed from a worm, and has no evil as preparation for a hard days march nor any restorative afterward. Coffee and sugar we kept in a bag together, and when we wanted a cup of coffee, we put two tablespoons of the mixture in a cup of water and placing the cup with some hot coals beneath it, let it oil. The confederates had a harder. Ime because of the blockade at that plant starts to squeeze the confederacy with its blockade. Many confederates had to substitute coffee. They used potatoes, peanuts, corn and peas to make a copy substitute. You can imagine the quality of that declined as well. Hygiene. I know that for some interpreters out there and reenactors, many of us would not bathe all weekend and after three days, we smelled pretty bad out there. As you can imagine going weeks at a time without getting a bath. Was a surgeon in the u. S. Army at the time who said in great armies in time of war, personal cleanliness is often nonexistent. The men are unwashed, their clothes filthy, bodies full of vermin and heaps of garbage like about. Especially needed was policing the latrines. Shallow, daily covering is not there, the dirt is entirely neglected. Large numbers of the men will not use the sinks or the latrines, but instead, every clump of bushes and every fence water. It is impossible to step outside the encashment without having both eyes and nostrils continually offended. Quotesone of the best about hygiene i ever found out there in the archive. It is just so dramatic and it makes you think of the pungent smells and was going on around you at that time. One inspector went to the union cant and said they were littered with refuge, food, and other rubbish. Sometimes, in an offensive state of decomposition. Slots throughout a broadcast, heaps of manure, and awful close to the camp. Officials and a lot of the officers originally wanted their men to be once per week bathe once per week, what they figured was enough. However, they bathed only when they have the opportunity, like these mentioned the river here. That meant sometimes not only weeks, but months without bathing properly as we would consider it today. Of course, a proper bath was different for everyone. It was due to this fact that these men were not bathe them all the time or at least weekly that you could smell an army before you can see one. Men often had not they in a month or two and now they are camping close together and they are all staying close together, so you can imagine what that smell would have been, or maybe you dont want to imagine. One of the worst, the great acts, and im not talking confederates. Im talking about lice. These would be an issue for the u. S. Army for years and years and years. As a guy who also dabbles in the first world war, this is where the term cooties comes from. Cooties are lice. The men in the civil war were calling them great backs. Graybacks. One soldier recalled i once heard the orderly of a Company Officer relate that he had 52 graybacks from the shirt in one sitting. Seamswould get into the of your clothes and they would nest and you would have to try to dig them out, so you would find soldiers digging lice off of seams these poor sanitary conditions in and around camp caused a host of diseases to pop up in civil war armies. Ravaged, accounting for close to 100,000 deaths. Cases of latrines being too close to water sources, especially early on in the conflict, or prevalent. Contaminated water can be found in thousands of canteens throughout the war. This, as well as poorly cooked rations often led to typhoid , all those cases of dysentery that i just went over. Roughly 30 of those contracted typhoid would perish from it. On the right, this is an enhanced photo of a train a latrine with the law that you would sit on and the shelf behind it. That sink is supposed to be five feet deep, it hardly ever was unless you were in camp for a long time and on the left of the screen, you will see a latrine in the middle of the field with the log that you would sit on, and look at the close proximity of the camp as well. If theres any runoff, a lot of those men are going to be in trouble. Newberry was a doctor with u. S. Senator commission, this is when things started to change. The Sanitary Commission comes in , and they start to clean up a lot of these areas. Newbury sees this stuff in late 1861, and he sees that the latrine is the ground in the vicinity which slopes down to the stream from which all water in the cap is obtained camp is obtained. They are putting these sometimes on Higher Ground and it is running off in the rainwater. Proximity in which the men lived together also permitted measles and tuberculosis to make an appearance in camp. Life was not a clean or safe environment. Some of these men had never been before,hese diseases especially men who came from sparsely Populated Areas of the country. Units who came from densely Populated Areas of the country seemed to have a better time with what we would consider childhood diseases. They had already been through that as a child and had overcome it. Now youre starting to see men from the country come out, farmers and such, who had never been exposed to this around people, but also these childhood diseases. So it starts to ravage the camps in the civil war armies. What this all comes down to what these diseases and dirty conditions, etc. One is overcrowding in camps, including men living together. We have forces on the exterior of this camp line horses. Sometimes horses are put on the high ground, and you can imagine what happens with rainwater. The second is objectives involving the ending of the war a list of precedents over sanitation issues. Just get the war done, we are not going to worry about how clean the camp is. And also poor environmental conditions. They are out in various forms of weather, many times with one blanket, maybe a rubberized like it. Protection, the environment plays key factors in sickening the army, and a lot of these men ended up in hospitals. As jake eloquently puts in many of his presentations, he knows hospital better than i do, obviously, but these hospitals are filled with men who are diseases which could have been prevented because they didnt have proper sanitary issues. Hygiene was not of the utmost importance. Ending the war with the most importance to many of the commanders. It came down to civilian organizations like the Sanitary Commission to try to come in and help these men along. Foodstuffs