Gary L. Knepp

Gary L. Knepp

Some things just seem to go together: bacon and eggs, ham and cheese, yin and yang and hardtack and coffee. People of the 21st century might very well ask, “What in the heck is hardtack?” If you were a soldier in the Civil War, you would know very well what it was. It was so ubiquitous that John Billings, a Massachusetts artilleryman, immortalized it in the title of his wartime memoir, Hardtack and Coffee.

This 3-inch by 3-inch biscuit was made of wheat flour, water and a dash of salt. It was baked hard, very hard, and was commonly called hardtack. It was also called pilot bread, sea biscuit, cracker and more derisively, molar breakers, tooth dullers and sheet iron crackers. Each man was given ten pieces of hardtack as part of his daily ration. For the soldier with poor teeth, and there were many, eating hardtack was a challenge.

But not to worry. The American soldier has always been innovative. It didn’t take him long to find alternative ways to consume his ration. The simplest way was to brew up a tin of coffee and drop a cracker in the cup to soften it. Sometimes, the bread became moist enough to hatch out boll weevils. The larvae ate holes in the bread, “building” structures known as “worm castles”. The men plucked the little squigglers out, ate their bread and drank their coffee.

Camp “Chefs” concocted a new dish featuring hardtack called “skillygalee.” It was simple to make: Fry up some bacon grease or lard and drop in water-softened hardtack and season. A popular variation called for pouring coffee into the skillet, crushing the crackers into small pieces before soaking them in water and adding them to meat and other ingredients which produced “hell-fired stew.”

Those with a sweet tooth, and a little extra cash, could buy a can of condensed milk from the sutler for 75 cents and soak the cracker. Others made a sort of pudding by soaking the hardtack in whiskey, adding brown sugar, and frying the mass.

The Confederates often lacked wheat flour. They substituted corn as the basic ingredient and called the bread “corn dodgers” and “Johnny cakes.”

Two Clermont soldiers, while in training at Camp Dennison, found a unique use for hardtack. One of the men saw his “pard” putting a couple pieces of hardtack into the coat pocket over his heart. Asked what he was doing, his friend replied that he was ordered to guard duty that night and had heard there were bushwhackers about and wanted to protect himself from any bullets that might come his way. His friend grabbed a couple of pieces for himself.

The boys so loved their hardtack that they wrote songs to express their feelings. The chorus of one song went like this:

‘Tis the song and sigh of the hungry,

“Hard crackers, hard crackers come again no more!

Many days you have lingered upon our stomachs sore.

O hard crackers come no more.

If bread was the staff of life, then coffee was the elixir for the Civil War soldier. It was the octane that powered the movement of millions of men across the country. For most it was quantity rather than quality that mattered. Some men routinely drank as much as 2 quarts or more per day, the blacker the better.

The soldier didn’t just sidle up to the coffee bar and order an espresso or a cocoa latte. Distributing coffee to the men was a solemn event. A senior, respected sergeant in the company took a poncho and rolled it out upon the ground. With great care, he measured out the ration of coffee grounds and sugar and formed them into small mounds. Each man walked by and scooped up his little mound of coffee and put it into a cloth bag.

Brewing the coffee was a simple affair: Boil the water in a tin cup over the campfire, dump the mix into the tin and cook to taste. For those who wanted milk, they took it fresh on-the-hoof.

The army supplied a product known as “essence of coffee” made up of extracts of coffee, sugar and milk. It came in half-gallon tins and, according to one observer, looked like axle grease. There weren’t many takers of this early try at instant coffee.

Civil War soldiers, both North and South, can be admired for their many sterling qualities. They also should be respected for their incredible iron guts. Perhaps for that reason alone they should be known as America’s first “Greatest Generation.”