On April 9, 1865, General Ulysses S. Grant accepted General Robert E. Lee’s surrender of his Army of Northern Virginia at the village of Appomattox Courthouse. This ended four years of tragic bloodshed that pitted brother against brother. This war, like those that followed in the 20th century, had a profound effect on consumer demand for tobacco in America.

TOBACCO IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA[i]

In mid-19th century America, men with refined tastes smoked fragrant blends in expensive pipes. A developing working-class celebrated rowdy activities like boxing, drinking, and chewing tobacco - deemed vulgar by the upper and middle class. However, chewers like Presidents Andrew Jackson and Zachary Taylor embraced working-class chewing. In Europe, chewing tobacco carried two major perceptions – it was essentially American, and it was vile; only men who worked at manual labor chewed and spat tobacco.

However popular, in the years leading up to the Civil War, the upper classes still linked chewing to degeneracy in American men. As in Europe, chew was branded as vulgar. One lady wrote her impression of tobacco chewing in the South, “Store tobacker is flat black plug, but these fellows mostly chaws the natural leaf twisted. When they borrow a chaw, they don’t generally cut it off with a knife, but they set the plug in between their teeth, and gnaw with their teeth and tug at the plug with their hands till they get it in two.”

The cigarette probably came to Northeastern America through European sailors. But cigarettes were also native to Latin America, and the cigarette migrated north to the deep American South. The Latins never understood the American way of smoking. “You English throw away your smoke after a few puffs.” The Spaniard smoked the “last burning puff of a cigarette when the bit of paper all but scorches your lip."

In America, cigar production was a Northern business, and Conestoga, Pennsylvania, became a cigar rolling hub, coining the slang term “stogies.” By 1860, nine of the ten leading cigar manufacturing centers were in the North.

TOBACCO’S ROLE IN THE WAR

“War …. groups the maximum material and speeds up its action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get.”

Ernest Hemingway

The Civil War was one of Hemingway’s “accelerating” events. It threw together Americans from every region, social class, racial, and cultural background. These men, women, and children, smoked, spat, and snuffed. Just as in the great World Wars in the next century, the young soldiers found nicotine to be a great comfort.

The Civil War came at an important moment in the evolution of tobacco: the aristocratic obsession with snuff was fading (Eighty years earlier, Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III was known as ‘Snuffy Charlotte.’ Not a flattering image of the lady for whom my home city is named.) Cigar, pipe, and chewing tobacco reigned supreme, and the cigarette was in its infancy. When men from the deep South went to war in 1861, they introduced cigarettes to their fellow Confederate soldiers and citizens.

As the War began, the Northern middle class already associated chew with immorality and regarded it with disgust. But even as the Yankees imagined their Rebel opponents as “miserable spitters,” middle class Northern soldiers were shocked to find it amongst many of their new comrades. Middle class men, conditioned to condemn chewing tobacco and regard its users with wariness, carried these conceptions with them into the military.

The collision of Northern soldiers and Southern civilians forced another shift in the view of chewing tobacco and its users. Northern soldiers were horrified when they saw Southern women “dipping snuff.” To Yankee soldiers, Southern female use of tobacco showed the superiority of Northern women. A Major stationed in Tennessee wrote home that Southern women “don’t know much of anything excepting to ‘chew’ and ‘dip’.”

The North was never tobacco starved during the war. As more tobacco producing regions of the South were conquered, they passed their products to the North. Many Southern planters did not wait for conquest but started illicit trade with the North for greenback Yankee currency. Indeed, tobacco was more of a problem than an asset for the South during the War. The Union Navy blockade cut off the huge cash flow from tobacco exports to Europe, yet planters consistently refused to plant crops instead of tobacco. To staunch food price inflation, eventually the Confederate Government acted to force farmers to grow food crops rather than tobacco.

The cigar industry flourished in the North. The cigar was an essential manly accessory during the War, both in daguerreotype studios and on the battlefield. A stogie became an important symbol of a young soldier’s manliness. American depictions of chew, cigars, and cigarettes during the Civil War, show an awareness of the unique relationship that tobacco had with its users.[ii]

The cigar was a stiffener for the smoker. Nicotine sharpened the senses, soothed frayed nerves, and gave trembling hands something to do. Smoking cigars when under fire became a ritual. Officers lit up during battle to calm their nerves and show their emotional control. No man was more influential in this than General Grant. His image was that of a frumpy Ohioan on horseback, chewing a cigar, and inspiring every soldier who saw him. He exuded coolness under fire. By 1864, he was smoking, twenty cigars a day.

Other soldiers and officers followed suit, capitalizing on the manly image of the cigar. At Gettysburg, the colorful Yankee General Dan Sickles suffered an abrupt leg amputation via cannon ball. But when he was carried off the field, he gamely smoked a cigar and urged his men to keep fighting. [iii]

While the War made it difficult for the public to obtain tobacco, both Confederate and Union soldiers found it plentiful. Since much of the fighting took place in the tobacco rich regions of the South, soldiers often helped themselves. For years the U.S. Navy had supplied its sailors with tobacco rations. In February 1864, the Confederate government followed suit and included tobacco as part of the army's rations. Often, in the quiet moments between battles, Confederate and Union soldiers would exchange goods. The traditional swap was Northern coffee for Southern tobacco. Tobacco habits also revealed class distinctions in the South. Confederate officers did not receive the tobacco ration granted to soldiers, and the officers favored the more fashionable cigar.

Americans thought of cigarettes as uniquely potent, seductively foreign. Cigarettes were an intriguing form of tobacco to Civil War era Americans. Most were wary of the cigarette because of its foreign origins, and its addictive power, but few felt threatened by it. During the 1860s, the cigarette began to work its way between American fingers, and people began rolling cigarettes for the first time.

WAR’S END AND THE RISE OF BIG TOBACCO

North Carolina hosted many battles and skirmishes between the Union and the Confederacy. During Sherman’s march through the South in 1864-65, soldiers from both sides in North Carolina raided shops and farms. At Bennet Place in Durham, soldiers looted the tobacco factory of John Ruffin Green. Green must have thought his business was ruined by the ravages of this War. But nothing could have been farther from the truth. Soldiers found this local bright leaf to be the mildest smoking tobacco in the country.

Soon after the war, soldiers sent letters to North Carolina begging for bright leaf tobacco. This word-of-mouth marketing morphed Green’s small and locally known Bull Durham brand into a household name.

Green and William Thomas Blackwell partnered to create W.T. Blackwell & Co. in 1868. From this partnership Bull Durham Tobacco became the first nationally marketed tobacco brand, and then a global brand. North Carolina tobacco began to emerge as a national industry.

With Green’s success came competition. Washington Duke - a Confederate soldier returned to his farm near Durham after the war. Duke found a little tobacco that the marauding troops hadn’t touched. He began to make his own smoking tobacco. From 1870 to 1890, his company expanded from a shed on his farm to a factory in downtown Durham. His sons took over the business, and by 1900 son Buck Duke controlled one of the largest and probably the most profitable business in America, the American Tobacco Trust. Washington Duke went on to found Trinity College (which would become Duke University).

In 1875, 25-year-old Richard Joshua Reynolds rode his horse from Virginia to the small North Carolina town of Winston to start his own tobacco company.[iv]

[i] I have included an abbreviated version of a scholarly paper by Benjamin M. Roy at Gettysburg College. It is an excellent description of the American view of tobacco in the first half of the 19th century. The reader might find the entire article of interest. [“Close, But No Cigar: Tobacco Usage During the Civil War Era.”]

[ii] Three Soldiers Smoking Cigars

[iii] “General Sickles was one of the most colorful and controversial officers in the Civil War. He was involved in politics, murder, and scandals long before and after the War. [Dan Sickles Link]

[iv] The History of Tobacco in North Carolina — The Civil War and the Rise of Big Tobacco

Reflections on "Going Down Tobacco Road" and Investing

TOBACCO GOES TO WAR – AMERICAN CIVIL WAR