Salt

by Mark Kurlansky

  Four days after the war began on April 12, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln ordered a blockade of all southern ports. The blockade was enforced until the war ended in 1865. The North was able to put enormous resources into maintaining it. At its height in 1865, 471 ships with 2,455 guns were being used exclusively to enforce the blockade.

  The blockade caused shortages and the accompanying high prices of speculators for not only salt but many basic foods. In 1864, potatoes cost $2.25 a bushel in the North and $25 a bushel in Richmond. Initially, the high prices posed more of a problem than scarcity. This recipe for salted beef appeared early in the war, when salt was still available but pork was unaffordable.

  When Bacon gets too costly.

  A gentleman who has tried the following recipe warmly recommends it: Cut the beef into pieces of the proper size for packing, sprinkle them with salt lightly, and let them be twenty four hours, after which shake off the salt and pack them in a barrel. In ten gallons of water, put four gallons salt, one pound saltpeter, half pound black pepper, half-pound allspice, and half gallon of sugar. Place the mixture in a vessel over a slow fire and bring to a boil. Then take it off and, when it has cooled pour it over the beef sufficient to cover it and fill the barrel. After the lapse of three or four days, turn the barrel upside down to be sure the beef is all covered by brine. If the beef is good, it will make it fit to set before a king. The beef will keep for a good long time. During the scarcity and exorbitant price of bacon our readers might try the recipe and test its virtue.—Albany Patriot, Georgia, October 31, 1861

  When salt first started to become scarce in the Confederacy, owners of large plantations in coastal areas reverted to the Revolutionary War practice of sending their slaves to fill kettles with seawater for evaporation. But it soon became apparent that both the blockade and the war were to be far more serious than had been imagined. The small amount of salt produced from these kettles was not going to solve their problems.

  At the outbreak of war, a 200-pound sack of Liverpool salt sold at the pier in New Orleans for fifty cents. After more than a year of the blockade, in the fall of 1862, six dollars a sack was considered a bargain in Richmond. By January 1863, the price in Savannah, a major port until the blockade, was twenty-five dollars for a sack.

  The Union quickly realized that the salt shortage in the South was an important strategic advantage. General William Tecumseh Sherman, one of the visionaries of a modern warfare in which cities are smashed and civilians starved, wanted to deny the South salt. “Salt is eminently contraband, because of its use in curing meats, without which armies cannot be subsisted.” he wrote in August 1862.

  When the war finally ended, and Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee sat down to talk, Lee said that his men had not eaten in two days and asked Grant for food. According to some observers, when the Union supply wagons were pulled into sight, the defeated soldiers of the famished Army of Northern Virginia let out a cheer.

  IN 1861, THE western counties of Virginia organized into West Virginia, and Union general Jacob Dolson Cox marched in from Ohio up the valley of the Great Kanawha River. By July 1861, he controlled the entire valley, including the saltworks. It was one of the first major blows to the South. But in the fall of 1862, Confederate loyalists asked for volunteers to liberate the saltworks, and in a surprise attack a force of 5,000 Confederates drove the Union soldiers back to the Ohio River so quickly that they did not have time to destroy the saltworks before they retreated.

  The Union learned a lesson from this: In the future, when they captured saltworks, they destroyed them. If the saltworks were brine wells, as in Kanawha—which Cox retook in November 1862, never to be retaken by the South—they broke the pumps and shoved the parts back down the wells. This contrasts with the Confederates, who when they took a saltworks celebrated having captured it and went into production.

  A clerk in the Confederate War Department, blaming Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s lack of resolve for the loss of Kanawha, wrote in his diary:

  The President may seem to be a good nation-maker in the eyes of distant statesmen, but he does not seem to be a good salt-maker for this nation. The works he has just relinquished to the enemy manufacturer: 7000 bushels of salt per day—two million and a half per year—an ample supply for the entire population of the Confederacy, is an object adequate to the maintenance of an army of 50,000 in that valley. Besides, the troops that are necessary for its occupation will soon be in quarters, and quite as expensive to the government as if in the valley. A Caesar, Napoleon, a Pitt, and a Washington, all great nation-makers, would have deemed this work worthy of their attention.

  AS THE WAR went on, the Union army attacked saltworks wherever it found them, from Virginia to Texas. The Union navy attacked salt production all along the Confederate coast. At first, saltworks prospered on the Florida Gulf Coast because the area was largely untouched by the war. By the fall of 1862, the Union noticed the size and importance of Florida Gulf salt production along the entire coast, but especially between Tampa, on the mid–gulf coast, and Choctawhatchee Bay, on the western end of the panhandle, near Alabama. The saltworks were usually hidden a few miles up inlets and were barely visible from the gulf. Even if detected, the inlets were difficult for gunboats to navigate.

  On September 8, 1862, the Union vessel Kingfisher approached the saltworks at St. Joseph Bay on the panhandle under a flag of truce and gave the Confederate salt workers two hours to abandon the site. Taking with them four cartloads of salt, the workers left. Three days later the Union navy destroyed the works.

  An illustration from Harper’s Weekly of workers on the Florida Gulf Coast fleeing with salt as the crew of the Union ship Kingfisher is about to destroy the saltworks on September 15, 1862. Collection of the New York Historical Society

  On October 4, 1862, marines from the Union gunboat Somerset, moving farther down the coast, raided saltworks near Cedar Key on Suwannee Bay. After about twelve shells were fired, the salt workers raised a white flag. A landing crew met no resistance and destroyed several saltworks. But when they approached the one from which the white flag was flying, twenty-five men concealed in the rear of the building opened fire. Half the Union forces were wounded before reinforcements arrived from a nearby Union steamship. After driving the Confederate fighters into retreat, the Union landing party destroyed the boilers, an odd assortment of makeshift contraptions, and set the houses on fire. Some of the boilers and kettles were made of such thick iron that they had to fire howitzers at them to blow them apart. “The rebels here needed a lesson, and they have had it,” said the commander of the Somerset.

  The Union navy continued to attack saltworks on the Florida coast, burning houses, blowing apart equipment. By 1863, it had destroyed more than $6 million worth of saltworks back up at the panhandle in the St. Andrews Bay area. But saltworks, although easily destroyed, are just as easily and inexpensively rebuilt. In three months, many of the destroyed works were back in production.

  Northern salt was smuggled into the South along with weapons, especially in Tennessee. Salt was also a common item of blockade runners. Liverpool salt was shipped to the Mexican port of Veracruz and from there to Brownsville, Texas, and into the Confederacy.

  Mississippi governor John J. Pettus came up with an elaborate scheme to import 50,000 sacks of French salt in exchange for cotton brought to the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. The exchange was to be one bale of cotton for ten sacks of salt, arranged through the French and British consuls, to whose governments the Union blockade largely meant a loss of commerce. But though 500 bales of cotton were turned over to France, the French never delivered the salt.

  WORKING CONDITIONS AT the improvised wartime saltworks of the Confederacy were even worse than those at Kanawha had been. At the saltworks that sprung up along the Tombigbee River, a few miles north of Mobile, Alabama, new wells were dug every day by people who had come from as far away as Georgia. During the war, southerners traveled hundreds of miles to the se
acoast or a brine spring to make salt. The area along the Tombigbee, protected by a Confederate fort in case the Union took Mobile, was marked by a vast traffic jam of carts and wagons filled not only with pots and boilers and other potential salt-making equipment but with poultry and other food—anything that could be traded for salt. Overseers drove the mule teams, and slaves followed behind on foot.

  Some slaves chopped wood for fuel, the air shaking with hundreds of axes thudding into wood, while others dug fifteen-foot wells. In the beginning of the war, anyone could come and spend a few weeks making salt, but by 1862, leases regulated by the Alabama legislature were required. By then the woods had been thinned out, and there was a fuel shortage. Shallow pans were designed for more efficient evaporation over two-foot-high furnaces with grates and iron doors. This equipment could make twenty to thirty-five bushels of salt a day, depending on the salinity of the water. Salt makers found that the deeper the well, the saltier the water, and began boring deeper into the bottoms of the original wells.

  Slaves on long shifts kept the wells operating twenty-four hours every day. The saltworks were so close to each other that the area became a single undulating gnarled mass of slave labor. Land was set aside for a graveyard, which quickly filled as shivering slaves fell over from malaria or smallpox. Shoving and bumping against each other as they frantically labored to produce salt, slaves slipped and fell into boiling pans. Some died a quick death, but others died only after days of pain.

  There were few white workers because most of the white men were drafted into the Confederate army. A handful of supervisors were draft rejects or wounded discharged veterans. As the war went on, more and more works were supervised by wounded veterans, usually amputees. In April 1862, when the first Confederate draft was declared, there were no exemptions for salt makers, but by August Jefferson Davis revised the conscription to exempt them. Making salt became a way to avoid military service. Deserters also drifted to the saltworks, hoping either to be safe in the swamps or to earn an exemption as a salt worker. In the last year of the war, the army searched wagons headed for the salt-works, looking for deserters among the exhausted slaves, the amputees, and the draft dodgers. By then, so many had deserted the Confederate army that there was even an organized deserter association in Virginia.

  Refugees from attacked areas came to saltworks hoping to find a way to survive. Soon gamblers added themselves to the mix. Baptists and Methodists sent ministers to this increasingly iniquitous labor camp.

  THE SHORTAGES IN the South presented opportunities to speculators. One way to earn a considerable fortune was to buy up a salt-producing area and control the local salt price. A single proprietor in Apalachicola controlled all of West Florida. To prevent such schemes, laws were passed in Georgia restricting coastline ownership.

  Salt workers wanted to be paid in salt rather than money so that they too could profit from the inflated prices. Officials in the central government at Richmond, realizing the declining value of their money and the rising value of salt, stored large quantities of salt for possible barter arrangements.

  A small packet of salt became a fashionable and much-valued gift. One such packet was a wedding present to George Edward Pickett, who later reached the most northerly point of any Confederate in combat when, on July 3, 1863, he led a ruinous charge up a sloping Pennsylvania field—the climax of the Battle of Gettysburg.

  By 1862, Governor John G. Shorter of Alabama said, “The danger of a salt famine is now almost certain.” From Mississippi, Governor Pettus wrote to Jefferson Davis that meat was being wasted and vanishing from diets because there was no salt to preserve the animals after slaughter.

  A woman in South Carolina wrote:

  It happened that my host at Radcliffe, just previous to the breaking out of hostilities, had ordered a boatload of salt, to use upon certain unsatisfactory lands [for fertilizer], and realizing that a blockaded coast would result in a salt famine, he hoarded his supply until the time of need should come. When it became known that Senator Hammand’s salt supply was available, everyone from far and near came asking for it. It was like going down into Egypt for corn, and the precious crystals were distributed to all who came, according to the number in each family.

  Family salt supplies were carefully hidden like a stash of jewels. Cheap salts cut with such substances as ash went on the market.

  Tallahassee Sentinel warns its readers of the folly of buying the dark and impure salt that is brought along the coast. It The will not save meat but spoil it. We are informed that some of the salt makers, who are making for market, make an inferior article, for which they charge six and eight dollars a bushel. It were better to give twelve dollars or more per bushel and get a good article, than to buy that which is comparatively worthless at half the price. If our people will refuse to buy the inferior article it will soon induce salt makers to make a good salt. Pure salt is white, and that which is best for saving meat is large-grained. A word to the wise is sufficient.—Southern Confederacy, Atlanta, August 28, 1862

  Rumors spread of possible salt substitutes. In 1862, there was a rumor of a substitute for curing bacon and beef. A newspaper in Alabama reported that pyroligneous acid, a vinegar made from hard wood, could preserve meat. A phenomenally popular British book of the period warned against it.

  A very impure variety of pyroligneous acid, or vinegar made from the destructive distillation of wood, is sometimes used, on account of the highly preservative power of creosote which it contains, and also to impart the smoke-flavour; in which later object, however, the coarse flavour of tar is given, rather than that derived from the smoke from the combustion of wood.—Isabella Beeton, Beeton’s Book of Household Management, 1861

  One southern publication suggested three ways to preserve fish without salt:

  With oil: Put the fish in jars and pour over them salad oil until they are covered, then tie them up air tight. This is a rather expensive method in this country, but for fish that is afterward fried, it is excellent.

  With acid: Dip them into or brush over them pyroligneous acid and then dry them by exposure to the air. This gives a smoky flavor, but if strong vinegar or pure acetic acid be used, no taste will be imparted. It may be applied by means of a painter’s clean brush over a large surface. Fish and flesh so prepared will bear a voyage to the East Indies and back.

  With sugar: Fish may be preserved in a dry state, and kept quite fresh by means of sugar alone, and even with a small quantity of it. Fish may be kept in that state for some days, so as to be good when boiled as if just caught. If dried and free from moldiness, there seems no limit to their preservation, and they are much better in this way than when salted. The sugar has no disagreeable taste. The process is particularly valuable in making what is called kippered salmon, and the fish preserved in this manner are far superior in quality and flavor to those which are salted or smoked. If desired, as much salt may be used to give the taste that may be required.—Southern Cultivator, Augusta and Athens, Georgia, March–April 1863

  People tried curing beef with saltpeter and bacon with wood ash, neither of which worked very well. Newspapers were constantly revealing alternative techniques for curing, most of which were ineffective. Frequently these newspaper recipes, to inspire their suffering readers, made references to the salt shortages of the American Revolution. In 1861, a Richmond paper told the story of a Tory of Albemarle who had been refused salt because of his political sympathies. Still, his wife made good bacon with only one peck of salt and a large quantity of hickory ashes.

  In applying the ashes, it is well to have a bucket of molasses, and apply a portion with a white-washing brush to each joint. When well smeared, rub on the ashes, which will thus adhere firmly and make an impenetrable cement.—Daily Richmond Examiner, November 23, 1861

  New ideas for salt conservation were a constant topic between neighbors. Those who lived by coasts would cook their starch—rice, hominy, or grits—in seawater, which would provide the only salt in a meal. Wh
en eating salted meat, people would carefully brush off every loose salt crystal for reuse. The brine in troughs and barrels used for pickling was afterward boiled down and made into salt to use again. The earth around smokehouses, made salty from years of drippings, was dug up and placed in hoppers designed for leaching ashes in soap making. This technique yielded a brine that could be evaporated, leaving a dull, darkish bed of salt crystals.

  Coal consists mainly of the carbon in wood, which in burning forms a very dry heat. Most of our readers are familiar with the usual process of barbecuing large pieces of meat over coals. If such meat were too high above the coal-fire to roast, it would soon dry. When dry, a very little salt and smoking will keep it indefinitely. Like cured bacon, it should be packed in tight casks, and kept in a dry room.

  After one kills his hogs, if he is short of salt, let him get the water out of the meat by drying it over burning coals as soon as possible, first rubbing it with a little salt. Shade trees around a meat house are injurious by creating dampness. Dry meat with a coal-fire after it is smoked. You may dislike to have meat so dry as is suggested, but your own observation will tell you that the dryest hams generally keep the best. Certainly sweet, dry bacon is far better than moist, tainted bacon, and our aim is simply to show how meat may be cured and long kept with a trifle of salt, when war has rendered the latter scarce and expensive.—Dr. F. P. Porcher of the Confederate army, Economy in the Use of Salt, 1863

  HOW TO MANUFACTURE SALT FOR HOME USE

  Take a towel, or any piece of cloth—say, two yards long—sew the two ends together, hang it on a roller, and let one end revolve in a tub or basin of salt water; the sun and air will act on the cloth, and evaporate the water rapidly. It must be revolved several times throughout the day, so that the cloth is well saturated. When the solution is evaporated to near the bottom, dip from the concentrated brine and pour it in a large flat dish or plate; let it remain in the sun until the salt is formed; taking it in every night, and placing a cover on it. This is accomplished by capillary attraction, and can be manufactured for $1 per sack, on a large scale. Each gallon of salt water will produce two and a half ounces of salt when evaporated.