Not Enough Salt Helped Kill the Confederacy. It Also Defined Florida's Role in the War
Swamp Cattle as a Desperate Work-Around. Driven by 'Crackers'?
Armies win battles, but wars are won or lost by nations. The founders of the Confederacy rejoiced in soldiers they believed to be superior ass-kickers, while remaining willfully blind to the South’s profound inability—as a nation—to stay on its feet for a full ten rounds.
“It’s the economy, stupid” is a political truism today.
At this point, history buffs might be forgiven for assuming what this story is all about. It’s not about the South’s overall lack of heavy industry. Nor is it about its inability to move its biggest cash crop, “King Cotton,” to buyers in Europe due to a Union naval blockade (which the founders knew, or should have known was inevitable).
Only in hindsight did these men come to realize that one of the great impediments to victory was something so seemingly mundane.
This is a story about salt.
Salt as a strategic mineral—the Union had plenty. The Confederacy was starved for it. A “salt famine” would impede Confederate armies and weaken the cause of Secessionism one hungry family at a time.
Florida’s role in the war was practically defined by it. The term “cracker” may have come into its own as a result of it.
The late Ella Victoria Lonn was a distinguished professor of Southern History. She is considered one of the most important Civil War specialists of her lifetime. She is the author of the book “Salt as a Factor in the Confederacy,” published in 1933.
Lonn began her book with an anectdote. Years after the war, a Southern veteran went to Syracuse, New York, to give a talk. Lonn wrote:
In opening his lecture that evening, he startled his audience with the somewhat remarkable query, “Do you know why you northerners whipped us southerners?” On the surprised ears of his listeners fell the terse answer. “Because you had salt.”
The old soldier may be forgiven for playing to his audience. Syracuse still goes by the moniker “Salt City.” By the mid-1800s, it was the biggest salt producer in America and a supplier to the pre-war American South. The balance came on ships from England and the West Indies. The South itself produced very little.
Lonn politely disputed the notion that with adequate supplies of salt, the South could have won the war, but she went on to produce convincing evidence that the lack thereof “contributed significantly to its defeat.” She quoted the adjutant general of Alabama as saying the South required 300 million pounds of salt a year, and that was less than the pre-war rule-of-thumb of 50 pounds per person per year.
Essential Mineral
Today, it’s difficult to imagine the importance of salt, but we are talking about a society that not only predated refrigeration and freeze-drying technologies but had not even developed the ability to produce canned food like its northern enemy. From Lonn’s book:
An inadequate amount of salt in the ration means the absence of hydrocholroic acid in the gastric juice to further digestion and the lack of sodium choride in the blood. Its very absence as a condiment often turns what would otherwise be a delectable dish into an unwholesome one without savor. Animals have been known to pine and sicken without salt.
Salt, Lonn also noted, was essential to the tanning of leather, material which supplied rebel infantry with boots and its cavalry with saddles.
“An army marches on its stomach,” Napoleon famously remarked. Confederate soldiers marched on a diet whose protein derived from bacon, salt pork and salted beef and fish. But ordinary civilians needed salt to keep meat from spoiling, too. It was an ingredient in every recipe for bread or biscuits.
Competing demands for salt created a crisis on the homefront. Governor John Gill Shorter of Alabama called it a “salt famine”:
A salt famine is now almost certain, and there is scarcely any misfortune which can befall us which will produce such widespread complaint and dissatisfaction. If the destitution could be limited to people at home who can shift for themselves, it would not be so bad, but he families of our soldiers (far away many of them), helpless and poor, appeal to us in language which cannot fail to excite our profoundest sympathies.
Naturally, the price of salt surged upward during he war, varying from $1,25 to $2.50 up to $50 a bushel and more. A bushel of salt weighs 56 pounds, and a U.S. dollar during the Confederacy was the equivalent of about $25 in spending power today. Depending on when and where, a bushel of salt cost more than an ounce of gold in 1863 money.
To subsistence farming families, salt prices would have been heartbreaking. Southern states came up with schemes to ensure that vulnerable folks such as war widows and the families of far-away soldiers were allocated a share of it.
On the Hoof
Without enough salt to go around, emphasis shifted to supplying Confederate soldiers with beef on the hoof, herded over hundreds of miles to the vicinity of its fighting armies.
However, not only had the Union naval blockade limited war materials from being imported to the Confederacy from overseas, but its western component—Union control of the Mississippi River—prevented cattle from Confederate states in the West from supplying armies fighting in the major campaigns east of the river.
After the “collapse of the West” in 1863, war planners in Richmond looked to Florida as a solution to its trifecta of ration scarcity—salt, beef and salted meat. Evaporative saltworks were established along the state’s Gulf coast, and their workers were exempted from army service. So were experienced wranglers needed to drive Florida cattle to the armies further north.
In the book “A History of Florida,” author Charlton Tebeau wrote:
As early as October 1863, a commissary agent received an urgent appeal to purchase more Florida beef, being told that General Braxton Bragg’s army was entirely dependent on Florida sources for it. In the same month, Georgia and South Carolina sources were reported used up.
As Florida became the Confederacy’s primary meat market, Richmond’s demands ran up against the reality that Florida harbored a dirty little secret—not everyone was loyal to the Confederate cause. Many of the cattlemen in southern Florida were Union-sympathizers, happy to sell beef to occupying Yankee troops or export it to Cuba. Meanwhile, bands of Confederate deserters too strong to quell were raiding the herds to feed themselves.
From “A History of Florida”:
Settlers and cattlemen often found themselves forced in a corner, hemmed in by the Union soldiers, roving bands of raiders and the Confederate regulators. Those who sided with one had their hogs and cattle confiscated by the other.
In the book “Rebel Storehouse: Florida in the Confederate Economy,” author Robert Taylor wrote:
Despite the amounts of beef Florida provided for the confederate government, the expectations placed on the state by those in charge of logistical planning could never be met. Poorly informed Confederate leaders tended to exaggerate the number of cattle in Florida and made unrealistic demands on the peninsula. Even senior rebel officers with experience in Florida, including…Robert E. Lee, failed to take into account the problems involved with rounding up and driving range cattle.
Cow Cavalry
Tens of thousands head of cattle and hogs were sent north between 1863 and 1865, but never enough. Driving cattle to war was vastly less efficient than sending wagonloads of salted beef, but that was the logistical work-around for a nation lacking the strategic mineral. Sadly, given the effort involved, once the cattle arrived and were slaughtered, the resulting meat was so lean that troops complained that is was barely edible.
Coastal saltworks, established to remediate the problem, were a constant target of raids by the U.S. Navy. These quickly contrived factories were easy to destroy, but just as easy to rebuild, so the two sides entered into a cycle of mayhem and renewal that continued until war’s end.
To shield herds from Yankees and deserters, Florida military authorities created an irregular unit called the Cattle Guard, more often referred to as “Cow Cavalry.” Like their brethren at the saltworks and cattle wranglers, the men of this colorful and highly effective outfit were also exempted from conscription into regular Confederate formations.
Well aware of the Confederacy’s salt-crisis work-around, U.S. Navy ships steamed up the St. Johns River in February 1864 and captured Jacksonville as part of a plan to isolate Florida from the rest of the Confederacy. Union raiding parties scoured the hinterlands, capturing cattle, horses and mules. Florida’s only major Civil War battle happened at Olustee as the Union Army struck toward Lake City in an attempt to cut off Confederate armies from their meat source altogether.
Confederate forces under General Joe Finnegan scored a solid victory at Olustee, driving the Yankees back to the coast, but Union forces continued sorties inland to disrupt enemy supply lines right up until Lee’s surrender.
A ‘Florida Cracker’ Is Born?
The origin of the word “cracker” is in dispute and will probably remain so forever. Nowadays, it’s a pejorative reference to a racist southerner, but not everyone sees it that way. Many rural Floridians and sympathetic historians believe that “cracker” originally referred to Florida’s version of “cowboys,” who guided their herds by cracking bullwhips over the heads of cattle.
It’s a plausible explanation. The Civil War was a period of great upheaval. In Florida, cattle wranglers were in high demand, as Confederate leaders considered their civilian skills essential to the war effort, because starving men cannot fight. The fog and froth of armed conflict may well have given birth to “Florida cracker” as a term of endearment.
Assuming true, think of the term as a cultural artifact from the time that salt deprivation helped put down a rebellion, or as Professor Lonn once wrote:
The fact that salt could be a major problem to the Confederacy reveals strikingly the industrial backwardness of the South, its complete dependence on outside sources for primary needs and emphasizes that fact as the most serious of its disadvantages in the unequal struggle…By diverting men, materials and capital from the first objective of the war—winning battles—the lack of salt was a contributing factor to the outcome of the war between the states.