Coffee

Library of Congress

In this sketch by Edwin Forbes, Union soldiers lag behind their marching comrades to prepare coffee.

“[C]offee accomplished more toward suppressing the rebellion than any other one article, unless it be gunpowder itself…. [I]t gave strength to the weary and heavy laden, and courage to the despondent and sick at heart.”

—Fenwick Hedley, 32nd Illinois Infantry, in his memoirs

USAHEC

Civil War era coffee cup.

“Our coffee has arrived. We have eaten nothing since yesterday, are streaming with perspiration, and the coffee is very hot; yet how delicious, how delightful it is to taste it. Within a fort of dead men, and sitting over human blood and brains, yet all calmly sip their coffee.”

—James H. Clark, 115th New York Infantry, on a pause during fighting at Petersburg, Virginia, in his diary, July 30, 1864

A Little Fifer’s War Diary

Sketch of three Civil War soldiers making coffee over fire.

“It was coffee at meals and between meals; and men going on guard or coming off guard drank it at all hours of the night, and to-day the old soldiers who can stand it are the hardest coffee- drinkers in the community, through the schooling which they received in the service.”

—Massachusetts artillerist John D. Billings, in his memoirs

“I found a considerable quantity of coffee thrown out on the ground, and have picked up enough to last me some days. I drank a pint this morning, and wished you were here to share it with me. It excites me almost as much as whiskey.”

—John C. West, 4th Texas Infantry, on what he and his comrades found in an abandoned Union army camp in Lenoir Station, Tennessee, in a letter to his wife, November 21, 1863

Library of Congress

A group of Civil War soldiers waiting for coffee at camp.

“They and their ‘women folks’ seemed half crazy for ‘Yankee coffee.’ They would swap anything except their muskets for it. A pound of Yankee coffee was the most acceptable present one of them could send back home to his mother or sweetheart. It was not often that one of them had the self-denial to do this. He wanted it too badly himself.”

—Henry Harrison Eby, 7th Illinois Cavalry, on the interest Confederate pickets had in obtaining coffee from Eby’s comrades, in his memoirs

Related topics: food and drink