Lew Powell's Frostbitten Feet

[Bill Richter]

From my book the Historical Dictionary of the Civil War and Reconstruction:

DIET AND MALNUTRITION. Lloyd Lewis, a newspaperman-turned-historian who had just finished a biography of Union general William T. Sherman (q.v.) and was beginning on a similar, monumental study of Ulysses S. Grant (q.v.), got to thinking about the diet of Southern soldiers and wondering if it and semi-tropical disease (q.v.) might not have had wider implications for the whole Confederate war effort. Although Lewis died before he could finish his study of Grant, he wrote regular letters to his editor that were collected and published for the benefit of other scholars.
In these letters Lewis mused over how the Rebels would win the first day’s battle and then almost inexplicably seem to falter. Examples are startling: Gettysburg, Shiloh, Perryville, Corinth, Stone’s River (qq.v.)—the names go on and on. He also observed how first person accounts would describe how Confederate soldier often went berserk when they captured Yankee camps, wagon trains, and warehouses, looting the myriad foodstuffs that Union quartermasters specialized in providing for their men in the field.
Lewis theorized that Southern troops were undernourished even when supplied by their own commissariat, so much so that it affected their performance on the battlefield. Perhaps their defeats were caused by a lack of stamina caused by the traditional diet of the poor (white and black) in the South—the three Ms of meat (pork fatback), cornmeal, and molasses. The Yankees, on the other hand, fed on bacon and wheat hardtack, real sugar and coffee, not to mention the beans, desiccated vegetables, canned fruit, and canned milk that adorned their diets at regular intervals.
Lewis posited that the longer the campaign, the more likely a Union victory, especially as the war lengthened. “I wonder how much of it was pure physical weariness,” Lewis mulled, “born of the lack of consistent food, imposed upon physiques not nurtured properly from infancy. They weren’t lazy in battle, but they were called lazy in succeeding generations as visitors described them in their upland or swamp houses.” It was all in the nutrients common to each section of the nation