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Starving the South

How the North Won the Civil War

St. Martin's Press, April 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-60181-2, ISBN10: 0-312-60181-6,
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches, 304 pages,
Hardcover, $27.99

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Categories and Subcategories

See All Categories History United States: 1860 to 1900

In Starving the South, Andrew Smith takes a gastronomical look at the war’s outcome and legacy. While the war split the country in a way that still affects race and politics today, it also affected the way we eat: It transformed local markets into nationalized food suppliers, forced the development of a Northern canning industry, established Thanksgiving as a national holiday and forged the first true national cuisine from the recipes of emancipated slaves who migrated north.

Praise

"'An army travels on its stomach,' wrote Napoleon Bonaparte in one of his most astute maxims. That truth certainly applied to Union and Confederate armies in the Civil War, giving a weighty advantage to the normally well fed Federals in their campaigns against enemy armies weakened by hunger. Malnutrition on the home front also sapped the will of Southern people to sustain the war effort, as Andrew Smith demonstrates in this important and readable study."—James McPherson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

"The Mason-Dixon divides the nation's table as certainly as it does its geography, its history, and its cultural identity. Like many Mediterranean cuisines, Southern cooking grew from a combination of rich soil, hot sun, an all but insane obeisance to tradition and, of course, slavery. By following the food, Andrew Smith pushes the reader past easy moralizing and toward the more complicated underlying issues that led the country into war with itself. The result is the best excuse to eat lard-fried chicken I've read in quite some time."—Molly O'Neill, author of One Big Table: A Portrait of American Cooking

"Smith, who previously plumbed the social history of the turkey and the pop culture of popcorn, has rendered good service to those of us engaged in the study of American foodways. He helps us understand the importance of food supply during wartime. In these pages, Union blockades curtail Confederate foodposts to return to family farms, and the 'salt famine' of 1862 compels a clutch of Greenville, Alabama, women to march on the local railroad station, shouting 'Salt or Blood.'"—John T. Edge, series editor of Cornbread Nation: The Best of Southern Food Writing

"The dictum that armies march on their stomachs was never more apt than during the American Civil War, and as Andrew Smith's new book, Starving the South, ably demonstrates, for the Confederacy this rule applied to the home front as well as the battle lines. Every hungry wife and child was a cry to a soldier-husband-and-father to desert and come home, while empty bellies and illness born of malnutrition sapped the physical strength and patriotic will of the men in the ranks. No previous study of the impact of food and food distribution and shortages in the war has delved so deeply into the impact of calories on morale, and Smith reveals in ample detail how the Union served the South a menu for defeat."—William C. Davis, author of Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America and professor of history and director of programs for the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Polyethnic University

"Smith gives an intriguing and readable response to the ever-popular question of why the South lost."—Booklist

"Southern stomachs were even more valuable military targets than Southern armies, according to this absorbing history of the fight for food during the Civil War. Food historian Smith chronicles the devastation wrought by the Union blockade and the cutoff of Northern agricultural trade on the South, whose farm economy was based on cotton and tobacco. (The curtailment of salt imports alone, he notes, made meat preservation almost impossible.) The resulting shortages, abetted by the Confederate government's misguided confiscations from its citizens, hobbled the Southern war effort, Smith contends (surrenders at Vicksburg and Appomattox were dictated by starvation; rioting women chanted 'Bread or Blood!' and plaintive letters from hungry families prompted mass desertions). Meanwhile, the North's booming industrialized agricultural system kept Yankees fat, Smith notes. An 1864 civilian campaign to send every bluecoat a Thanksgiving feast succeeded lavishly, while the Southern riposte could muster only a few bites of hardtack and meat. A corrective to blood-and-guts operational histories, Smith's lucid study gives war production, logistics, and home front morale in the Civil War the prominence they deserve."—Publishers Weekly

About the Author(s)

Andrew F. Smith

Andrew F. Smith is a faculty member at the New School and editor-in-chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. He lives in New York.

Excerpt

1

Lincoln’s Humbug of a Blockade

Abraham Lincoln was elected the sixteenth president of the United States on November 6, 1860. He opposed the extension of slavery into new territories, and his election convinced many Southerners that it was time to leave the Union. By the time of Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven slaveholding states had seceded, immediately expropriating as much Federal property as they could, including arsenals, forts, military camps, and the United States Mint in New Orleans.

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