Originally aired on August 09, 1996 - In part 102 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson says that no item sparked more negative opinion than the official bread ration of the Union Army: hardtack.
#102 – Hardtack
No item in all of Civil War army life sparked more negative opinions than hardtack. So many statements – outspoken and outlandish – were made about the official bread ration for the Union armies that the facts about this particular food are still questionable. One thing is certain: any soldier who ate hardtack had strong ideas about its quality.
The basic army rations of the 1860s were bread, meat, and coffee. Hardtack was not bread in the modern sense. It was a three-inch-square cracker, half an inch thick, and supposedly weighing 1 ½ ounces. Cooked in Northern bakeries, the crackers underwent a wondrous transformation enroute to the army camps: they petrified and could turn as hard as stone.
A New England soldier asserted that to break one of the biscuits was impossible. “Water,” he said, “made very little impression on it. I saw some that had been soaked twenty-four hours; when scraped with a knife, just a little could be started from the outside.”
The hardtack was packed in wooded boxes marked with the letters “B. C.”, signifying “Brigade Commissary”. Billy Yanks insisted the designation meant that the crackers had been baked “Before Christ” and were just getting to the front lines.
Ten crackers formed a daily ration. Some men admitted that hardtack was quite palatable when fresh, but most soldiers never recalled getting a fresh shipment. Stone-like in texture, the biscuits were usually stale in taste. Some shipments were covered with mold. As often as not, a new supply was worm-infested.
A mathematically-inclined Massachusetts volunteer claimed to have counted 32 worms in what he called one of his 3 x 3 “worm castles”. A compatriot told the homefolk in November, 1862: “All the fresh meat we had came in the hard bread…and I, preferring my game cooked, used to toast my biscuits.”
Two methods existed to – shall we say – stomach contaminated hardtack. One procedure was to eat the bread in the dark. That left the diner not knowing what he had ingested. The other way to endure the crackers was to eat large quantities of hardtack on a regular basis. With habit, a man could bite heartily into a cracker without wincing over what he might encounter.
Men in the field did a variety of things with hardtack. Some soldiers crumpled the crackers in coffee; others soaked them in bacon fat and broiled them over an open fire. One camp favorite was to pulverize the crackers, mix them in cold water with any foodstuff available, then cook the concoction in pork fat. Many men simply cooked their biscuits over an open fire. The baked bread was considered good tonic for diarrhea, as undoubtedly it was.
The majority of Billy Yanks ate the crackers as they came from the box. This accounts for such nicknames given to hardtack as “sheet-iron crackers” and “teeth-dullers”. Many Northerners swore that attempting to eat hardtack made their teeth and gums so sore that they had difficulty eating anything thereafter.
Exaggerations, of course, abounded over this foodstuff. A Virginia artillery battery supposedly used a captured shipment of hardtack as paving stones in their encampment. In the autumn of 1862, an Illinois soldier informed his wife: “We live on crackers so hard that if we had of loaded our guns with them we could of killed (Confederates) in a hurry.”
The man had a point. The following spring, a Johnny Reb told of a battle in which a shell struck two cartons of hardtack. Crackers flew over the field and seriously wounded a number of men,
This leads to an inescapable conclusion: hardtack made an impact on the Civil War, as any soldier at the time would attest.
