How Coffee Helped the Union Caffeinate Its Way to Victory in the Civil War

When I was in high school, I always had major anxiety issues. I realized later in life that it was my excessive amount of caffeine I was ingesting on a daily basis.

I mostly cut all forms of caffeine completely out of my diet since January. As as long as I get 6 hours of sleep or more, I find that I can focus better, I have energy throughout the whole day, and the sleep I do get feels like I'm more rested.

Even if I got the same hours of sleep every night, I had a hard time getting up in the morning with caffeine in my daily diet.

It is a very compelling article and nice to read about the Liberian farmer entreprenuer, but the South also had tea, tobacco, and yaupon (black drink) which are all stimulants.

But is the evidence sufficient to refute the null hypothesis, that coffee had no effect on the American civil war? Since the 19th century is behind us, randomized controlled trials is of course impossible, but there may be other evidence. Did Union regiments low on coffee supply fight worse than those with enough coffee?

Afaik, while coffee has been drunk for thousands of years, there is zero evidence of long-term cognitive benefits of coffee.

Caffeine is a very interesting drug that makes capitalism and just daily work bearable. It's interesting that this went all the way to 1800s for the US.

After reading Your Mind on Plants [1], I decided to do an experiment, and stop any caffeine intake for ~3 months. After ~1 month, I felt "normal". Only when you cannot rely on a drug, a clutch, you realize how many pressures you face every day. One might have a deadline, something doesn't work, some part of work is boring... Maybe you just slept badly. Coffee fixes all of those.

Nothing is free though, and soon, you'll discover your sleep is not the best pretty much every day of the week. That, in turn, forces you to consume more caffeine, and thus the addiction cycle begins.

Interestingly, after being 3 months caffeine free, I succumbed to the pressure and started drinking some amount of caffeine again (work needs to be done, caffeine makes it easier to concentrate -> it's really difficult to say no).

I would encourage everyone to examine their relationship with this particular drug. It's insane to me that the population in 1800s was already so addicted to the drug that the lack "plugs" threaten to lose the civil war.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/This-Your-Plants-Michael-Pollan/dp/05...

Why are these threads always full of anti-coffee weirdos?

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/is-coffee...

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2023/02/coffee-ca...

Conversely wouldn’t the south have a near monopoly on nicotine (also a stimulant). I wonder what impact nicotine consumption - if any - had on the war.

Fun article! Particularly enjoyed the anecdotal evidence from individual soldier's writing.

Reminds me of a recent story of how speed kept the germans advancing for days on end in WWII, in the blitzkrieg.

"How Methamphetamine Became a Key Part of Nazi Military Strategy" https://time.com/5752114/nazi-military-drugs/

John Billings Hardtack and Coffee is a detailed account of camp life during the war. Here’s the section discussing rations and (obviously) coffee:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/72532/pg72532-images.ht...

Interesting article, but I wish they would give some numbers. I couldn't find good sources, but it sounds like the total volume of Liberian imports peaked at less than 0.1% of total coffee imports. So the Liberian coffee was an interesting footnote but not important for the actual supply of coffee.

They touch on the political affinities between the Union and Liberia but no so much the Confederacy and Brazil. I wonder if something similar was going on? Brazil still had slavery at that time. After the Confederates lost I recall learning that some slave-owning farmers moved down to Brazil to continue their slavery-driven farming practices. They only had 20 years though because slavery was banned in Brazil in the 1880s.

The traditional ratio is that one pound of coffee is 50 cups. So they drank about 5 cups per day. Though if the coffee came green, it might have been a little lower

There’s a short and fun book called Blitzed about “PED” use in WWII. Covering German pharmaceutical industry’s monopoly over certain stimulants, Hitler’s unlikely doctor who shot him up with everything under the sun, and the ultimate consequences for everyone involved (addiction, exhaustion, insanity).

The union didn't caffeinate their way to victory, the southern men went off to distant battlefields and the morally bankrupted northern generals like (((Sherman))) (who traded letters with his wife wherein they exchanged hopes of driving southerners right into the sea) he led armies to farms and towns populated only by the women and children left behind.

They fire-bombed entire cities "Stop there! Leave this building standing so they see a town once stood here." An actual quote.

This was a war meticulously overseen by Honest Abe himself. No wonder Hillary Clinton likened herself to him for being two-faced: One for public consumption, and one for Satan.

Do you see this tactic of deliberately targeting civilians, children, and infrastructure being employed anywhere else in the world right now?

I never thought of Caffeine as the Pervitin of the civil war… or pervitin as the caffeine of WWII

See also https://antietam.stonesentinels.com/monuments/individuals/wi...

Well, yeah, when you're hella sleep deprived, of course not having a stimulant readily available is a problem.

Sounds like anything to eat or drink would have helped.