Vices on the Home Front

VICES ON THE HOME FRONT: AN OVERVIEW

Adrienne M. Petty

GAMBLING

Aileen E. McTiernan

ALCOHOL

Anurag Biswas

SMOKING AND TOBACCO

Adrienne M. Petty

Vices on the Home Front: An Overview

In December 2006 the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board voted against a plan to open a casino near the historic Gettysburg battlefield, one of the most sacred sites of the Civil War. The plan failed, in large measure, because of public opposition: Modern-day residents of Gettysburg feared that the casino would tarnish the battlefield's legacy and harm its appeal as a family tourist attraction (Foster 2006). This controversy is in many ways similar to how people living during the Civil War responded to activities that were considered bad habits at the time. Although some people freely indulged in gambling, smoking, and drinking alcohol for fun and to escape the uncertainty of war, others decried these vices as outside the boundaries of respectability.

Gambling

During the colonial era and early nineteenth century, public lotteries were an accepted and common means of raising money for cities, states, and even Protestant churches. Revenue generated in lotteries helped these institutions complete essential but costly building projects such as schools, bridges, roads, and jails. Denmark Vesey, the former slave in South Carolina who planned a slave insurrection in 1822, had purchased his freedom with $1,500 he won in a lottery intended to support work on East Bay Street in Charleston (Fabian 1990, p. 126).

People also gambled in more informal ways. As eighteenth-century aristocrats had done, Southern slaveholders organized and bet on horse races, cockfights, and card games. Among the Northern working class, betting on dogs, cocks, cards, and dice was a common pastime in urban taverns. At public gatherings such as markets and fairs, professional gamblers even made their livings by swindling unsuspecting people out of their money (Fabian 1990, pp. 1–2).

By the late 1830s, however, reformers had begun to argue that the social and moral cost of lotteries far outweighed the benefits. They also argued that gambling threatened the very foundations of the American republic. In addition to undermining people's personal well-being, they argued that gambling was dangerous to public welfare and the Protestant work ethic because it falsely deluded people into thinking that they could make a quick buck. In the 1840s and 1850s Northern newspapers focused particularly on gambling by African American men and women who engaged in "policy play." Policy dealers let poor people wager pennies or nickels on the numbers drawn in official and unofficial lotteries (Fabian 1990, p. 136). Opposition to policy play and other forms of gambling waned during the Civil War era, but picked up momentum during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

On the American frontier, gambling thrived because of the unsettled nature of life there. Many in gold rush California made their fortunes not from frugality and hard work, but from taking on enormous risk that generated lucky windfalls. Even those who did some of the most demanding jobs found amusement in gambling. In their leisure time, cowboys and sailors gambled in cattle towns and port cities (Fabian 1990, pp. 5–6).

The Civil War was a watershed moment in the history of gambling in the United States. With the consolidation of capitalism during the Civil War, people turned to new forms of gambling. Angry farmers began to decry the greed of those who profited from speculations in agricultural commodities. According to Ann Fabian in Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America, farmers alleged that these traders were the direct descendants of evil gamblers who "lived as parasites on the productive economy" (1990, p. 9). Despite the efforts of reformers, gambling flourished before, during, and after the war. Gambling continued in private even though laws against it had become widespread by the 1890s. In the early twenty-first century, of course, gambling is legal and prevalent.

Smoking

Just as gambling became a target for reformers during the 1830s, tobacco use also rankled reformers, particularly in the North. It was offensive because it was considered unhealthy, rude, and a waste of money. At the same time, many Americans, particularly Southerners, did not attach any social stigma to tobacco. During the nineteenth century chewing tobacco and cigar smoking were the dominant forms of tobacco consumption among men of all classes in all regions of the country. In 1850 Americans bought ten cigars per capita; by 1860 they were buying twenty-six cigars per capita (Burnham 1993, p. 88). Women in the South had a penchant for pipe smoking and dipping snuff. Many Union soldiers expressed amazement in their letters and diaries over the extent to which women in the South used tobacco.

Cigarette use started in the nineteenth century as a practice among people who were considered deviant. People characterized cigarettes as effeminate, and argued that no "real man" would be caught smoking them. Robert Sobel in They Satisfy: The Cigarette in American Life quotes a writer in 1854 New York who criticized women on the fringe of society who "are aping the silly ways of some pseudo-accomplished foreigners in smoking tobacco through a weaker and more feminine article, the cigarette" (Sobel 1978, pp. 9–10).

But after the Crimean War (1853–1856) and Civil War, soldiers who had turned to the quick smoke of cigarettes on the battlefield continued to use them when they returned home, helping to spread the habit. During the 1880s, dramatic changes in manufacturing and marketing secured the place of cigarettes as the most popular form of tobacco consumption (Burnham 1993, p. 89). Reformers warned about the temptation that cigarettes posed to young people, but they never succeeded in outlawing them. In contrast to gambling, which became socially unacceptable and illegal by the early twentieth century (only to regain legitimacy by the end of the twentieth century), tobacco use continued to be regarded as a minor vice until the late twentieth century, when health concerns made cigarettes less socially acceptable.

Alcohol

In their cautionary tales against the evils of gambling, ex-gamblers of the nineteenth century often connected gaming with alcohol and cigars. It is not surprising, then, that reformers viewed these minor vices as part of the same problem. Although alcoholic beverages were socially acceptable and even preferred during the early 1800s because they posed less of a threat to people's health than polluted water, reformers began to define them as morally unacceptable by the mid-nineteenth century. The years before the war witnessed the spread of temperance societies devoted to either decreasing or totally eliminating alcohol manufacturing and use.

During the war, the temperance movement lost some of its momentum because reformers were preoccupied with the more pressing work of either fighting as soldiers or aiding the war effort. At the same time, the use of alcohol among civilians paralleled soldiers' use of spirits. In addition to seeking an escape from the cruelty of war, Union and Confederate soldiers drank to prove their man-hhood. The ritual of drinking also became important among working-class immigrants in the North. The Civil War reinforced opposition to alcohol consumption by unleashing an increase in its popularity as a means of escape (Burnham 1993, p. 59). Use of alcohol among soldiers and civilians during the Civil War was one of several factors that contributed to passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the Prohibition movement during the Progressive Era.

Despite reformers' efforts to curb this constellation of vices—gambling, tobacco use and smoking, and alcohol use—Americans indulged in them before, during, and after the Civil War. Even with the successful defeat of efforts to build a casino near the hallowed Gettysburg battleground, Americans now, as then, continue to gamble and engage in other pastimes as an escape from the sometimes brutal realities of life.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burnham, John C. Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History. New York and London: New York University Press, 1993.

Fabian, Ann. Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Foster, Margaret. "Gettysburg Casino Denied." Preservation Online, December 21, 2006. Available from http://www.nationaltrust.org/.

Sobel, Robert. They Satisfy: The Cigarette in American Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978.

Adrienne M. Petty

Gambling

Throughout the Civil War, gambling was perceived by the majority of the populace as an immoral and pernicious practice. Still, roulette parlors, gambling saloons, and secret card rooms operated across the country from New York to San Francisco. Opponents criticized gambling as "the most dangerous of all vices" (Daily Cleveland Herald, January 10, 1862), arguing it posed nothing but a nuisance to the nation. In accordance with public perspective, the legislature elevated the vice to criminal status. In fact, in March 1864, the Daily Miners' Register reported gambling was an indictable crime "in every loyal State and Territory of the Union, except Colorado, New Mexico and Idaho."

Public Opposition

Public condemnation of gambling stemmed from the belief that it served no purpose besides contaminating society by promoting a lifestyle of crime and obtaining money by illegitimate means. An editorial from the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin addressed the evils of gambling; the author attributed a laundry list of moral damages that society has suffered to the existence of gambling establishments:

…the sudden and unaccountable failures among business men, resulting on account of their suddenness in injury to creditors and the impairing of the general credit; the coming, unforeseen, of utter desolation upon the happy homes of love and plenty; the degradation and disgrace of honorable men; the hopeless ruin of many a promising youth; the following of suicide upon suicide in rapid succession; and worst of all, because fraught with all the ills society is heir to—the alarmin increase among us of gamblers and other thieves and robbers. (1862)

The same newspaper reflected (February 3, 1863) on the prevalence and the perils of gambling since the settlement of the Lower Mississippi Valley. The appeal of games of chance was pervasive: gambling sites ranged from public hotels to private homes, sparing no segment of society from the resultant catalogue of crimes. Such common-law crimes as murder, robbery, larceny, and arson threatened to corrupt society, sparking a "crusade against the evil" of gambling (Daily Evening Bulletin, December 18, 1862). The apparent menace of wagering was continuously pointed out, but warnings did little to eradicate the practice.

Mysterious gambling rooms hidden from the public allowed obscure card and roulette games to be conducted very quietly behind secret walls within legitimate establishments. Conducting business under such underground pretexts sparked speculation about what occurred behind closed doors—causing the public imagination to assume only the worst. In San Francisco, the ground floor of an old gambling hall was rumored to conceal a deadfall, a trap in which men were entombed after being robbed and murdered. When the hall was demolished in 1864, however, the Daily Evening Bulletin disappointed its readers' expectations by reporting that no bones or human remains were found (May 25, 1864).

The police proved rather ineffective at suppressing gambling establishments, and were often compensated for turning a blind eye to any activities they did observe (Fayetteville Observer, October 19, 1863). While some men were arrested and indicted for illegal gambling, Judge Blake observed that gambling prosecutions were not sufficiently representative of its prevalence in San Francisco. In his charge to a grand jury in 1862, he further lamented: "I do not suppose that gambling can be entirely prevented, but it may be reduced to a small proportion and compelled to hide itself in that obscurity which becomes its ruinous and demoralizing tendencies" (Daily Evening Bulletin, November 10, 1862).

Gamblers and Gambling Establishments

Gambling dens were frequented by prominent middle-and upper-class businessmen as well as by men engaged in professional gambling. Some entertained gambling as a sport—or even a fashionable social activity. Noting the appeal of the element of risk over the financial aspect of the game, the New Haven (CT) Daily Palladium reported that it had become "fashionable" to form exclusive clubs of wealthy men to play cards for small stakes, using the money merely "to give piquancy to the game" ( July 27, 1864).

In South Carolina, the Camden Confederate, described the bifurcation in gambling practices in the city of Richmond. The so-called House of Lords was strict about admitting only invited guests, and only those in possession of considerable wealth, including quartermasters and commissaries. The House of Commons, less luxurious yet more accessible, was maintained for those of less extravagant means; it welcomed congressmen as well as army and naval officers (October 23, 1863). Though congressmen were not considered to be heavy gamblers themselves, according to the Daily Evening Bulletin, the gamblers in the Western states executed considerable control over their cohorts in the lobby: they were the ultimate manipulators of the legislature (March 8,1864).

Yet wherever gambling had been sanctioned by law, inevitably misguided laborers could be found squandering their savings. Destroying the honest independence of men, and embodying the very essence of sin, gambling halls threatened to corrupt society. Gamblers cheated and robbed each other on a regular basis. In fact, a stranger entering into a certain gambling den in Cleveland "was as sure to be plundered as if he were found on the highway and robbed with a pistol at his throat" (Lowell Daily Citizen and News, January 21, 1863).

Every gambling hall had its professionals—regulars permanently residing there. The Daily Evening Bulletin relayed the chronicle (originally reported in the Territorial Enterprise of Virginia City, Nevada) of a gambler appearing as a witness at trial. Inquiring as to the witness's profession, the judge was rather astonished to hear his response:

"Rough gambling!" repeated the Judge—"I would ask you, sir, what you mean by 'rough gambling!" "I means, yer Honor, that my style is, where the run o' the cards doesn't fetch me a feller's money, I knocks him down and takes it anyhow." (February 27, 1864)

Some of these professionals utilized gambling as their sole source of income, though many lost everything they had and more. Thinking they could win back their life savings if they had just another hundred dollars—then another hundred, then another—many men found themselves homeless and penniless upon departure. The tale of one inveterate gambler was recounted in the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel: after losing every penny he had, followed by his land, his house, and his furniture, he lost his young and beautiful wife in a game of cards (July 28, 1863).

Gambling and the Churches

While social gambling was publicly denounced across the country, fairs and raffles organized for the benefit of religious institutions created much contention. In 1862 the Boston Investigator denounced church festivals—only decades prior these gatherings had been "patronized only by the worst characters" (December 24, 1862). Such religiously sponsored lotteries or gambling involved such prizes as doll-babies, plum cakes, or paintings to raise money for "heathens," orphanages, or other virtuous causes. In 1861, an editorial in the Boston Investigator epitomized the irony of the practice, noting: "[t]he principle is certainly the same, whatever the form of the game or the object of the stake" (May 22, 1861; emphasis in original).

Objections to gaming under the guise of the religious institutions included the preservation of the innocence of youth. Impressionable children attending such religious fairs would be misguided by the fascination and the pleasure of games of chance and their associated transgressions. Church-sanctioned gambling was condemned as worse than "the lowest gambling hell," due to its nature as "sugar-coated, heaven-liveried, and hence all the more fascinating and dangerous," reported the Boston Investigator (December 24, 1862).

By 1863, the Church was treated no differently than public or private establishments that promoted lotteries; church festivals or bazaars employing such games were required to take out a license for the practice. The license for practicing lottery games required a fee of one thousand dollars, but the penalty for failing to obtain the license cost three thousand dollars (Vermont Chronicle, April 14,1863).

Even with lotteries, raffles and games of chance sanctioned by clergymen and regulated by the government, the practice, though frequented by the majority, was not universally sanctioned. By 1864, with the Civil War well underway, some Christians sought to raise money to aid the suffering soldiers through games of chance. Such pretenses were endorsed by the New York Times, but the Vermont Chronicle objected, emphasizing, "We are not under obligations to do it in any particular way [especially such means as are] subversive of the great principles of morality and religion" (February 6, 1864).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"Early Lessons in Gambling." Boston Investigator, December 24, 1862.

"Gambling." Camden (SC) Confederate, October 23, 1863.

"Gambling." Fayetteville (NC) Observer, October 19, 1863.

"Gambling at Fairs." Vermont Chronicle (Bellows Falls, Windsor, and Montpelier, VT), February 6, 1864.

"Gambling for a Wife." Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, July 28, 1863.

"Gambling in Cleveland." Daily Cleveland Herald, January 10, 1862.

"Gambling in San Francisco." Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), February 3, 1863.

"Gambling in San Francisco, and Its Remedy—No. 1." Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), December 18, 1862.

"Judge Blake's Charge as to Gambling." Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), November 10, 1862.

"One of the Gambling Dens in Cleveland." Lowell (MA) Daily Citizen and News, July 21, 1863.

"Police Intelligence: Descent on an Alleged Gambling House." New York Herald, January 9, 1861.

"Progress of Gambling." New York Herald, December 14, 1861.

"Religious Gambling, &c." Boston Investigator, May 22, 1861.

"Rough Gambling." Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), February 27, 1864.

"Saratoga: The Ladies' Fashions—Gambling." New Haven (CT) Daily Palladium, July 27, 1864.

"Transforming an Old Gambling Hall." Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), May 25, 1864.

"Uncle Sam on Religious Gambling." Vermont Chronicle (Bellows Falls, Windsor, and Montpelier, VT), April 14, 1863.

[Untitled.] Daily Miners' Register (Central City, CO), March 1, 1864.

Aileen E. McTiernan

Alcohol

In the early 1800s alcoholic beverages were consumed at levels far above present-day per capita consumption. Milk was often a premium commodity and fruit juices were rare. Water was oftentimes unclean, whereas alcohol was distilled and germ-free. As a result, whisky quickly became a staple. It was made in the mills and while price of production varied according to time and place, especially in the Confederacy, many found the beverage affordable. Most people also believed in the medicinal value of alcohol, as many tonics and elixirs of the time contained a high percentage of alcohol. As industrialization progressed and American cities prospered, saloons became a social hub for the working class. In an effort to draw more patrons, saloons created the "free lunch"—free only after the patron had laid down his money for drinks. As the Civil War dragged on, most American distilleries were closed, as they were considered "nonessential industries" in the war effort (Jahns 2003, p. 11). This led to an increase in the production of illegal alcohol, and moonshining, bootlegging, and the smuggling of alcohol from Canada and the tropics flourished.

Temperance Societies

During the initial decades of the nineteenth century, wine and beer were not looked down upon, but as the mid-century approached, the notion developed that all spirits were sinful and wrong. T. S. Arthur (1809–1885) expressed the sentiments of an increasing number of concerned citizens when he declared in Grappling with the Monster (1877), "[t]he CURSE is upon us, and there is but one CURE: Total Abstinence, by the help of God, for the Individual, and Prohibition for the State" (Furnas 1965, p. 15).

Such beliefs led to the growth of the temperance movement, which held that drinking was a serious threat to family life and that the use of alcohol should be limited, if not banned outright. The U.S. temperance movement originated around 1826, with the formation of the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance. The efforts of this group led to a decrease in per capita consumption of pure alcohol, from a high of more than seven gallons per year in 1830 to just over three per year in 1840, the largest ten-year drop in U.S. history ("Alcohol," 1998 p. 149). Over the next few years, more temperance organizations of a general and national character were formed than during any other period in U.S. history. By 1832 all but three states had societies. The Washingtonian movement, organized in Baltimore in 1840, was followed by the Martha Washington movement in 1841. The Sons of Temperance formed in 1842, as did the Order of Rechabites, and the Congressional Temperance Society of 1833 was revived on the basis of total abstinence (Cherrington 1920, p. 94).

The first state to adopt a law prohibiting the sale and manufacture of alcohol was Maine, in 1851. The famous Presbyterian clergyman Lyman Beecher exclaimed from the pulpit "This thing is of God, that glorious Maine law was a square and grand blow right between the horns of the Devil" (Eddy 1887, p. 425). Soon Delaware, following Maine's example, passed its first prohibition law, only to have it declared unconstitutional the following year. Over the following years, similar laws were enacted in New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Ohio, Illinois, and Minnesota. They met with varying fates, including veto by governors, repeal by legislatures, and invalidation by state supreme courts.

Not all members of the public were opposed to drinking. In the 1850s, citizens of Chicago fought against the enforcement of Sunday closing laws, which prohibited saloons from serving alcohol on the Sabbath. According to Virgil W. Peterson (1949), an armed mob of protesters burst into the city's business district, only to be met by police. Fortunately, the mob was dispersed before the mayor found it necessary to use the cannon he had hurriedly planted around City Hall (p. 120). Conversely, in 1865, women in the town of Greenfield, Ohio, frustrated with their drunk and disorderly men, took it upon themselves to break into the local saloon and wreck the establishment; they then proceeded to Linn's drug store, where they smashed more casks of alcohol (July 28, 1865).

The Civil War years were anomalous ones for the temperance movement. Those involved in the crusade against the immoralities of alcohol were either off fighting in the war or too busy aiding the war effort. Upon the war's end, temperance societies once again took up the fight. In 1874, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was founded. The only temperance organization still in operation, the WCTU has worked continuously since its inception to educate the public and to influence policies that discourage the use of alcohol and other drugs ("Alcohol," 1998, p. 149).

Politics and Alcohol

When asked his opinion of whiskey, one Southern senator remarked:

Well, if by whiskey you mean that degradation of the noble barley, that burning fluid which sears the throats of the innocent, that vile liquid that sets men to fighting in low saloons, from whence they go forth to beat their wives and children, that liquor the Devil spawns which reddens the eye, coarsens the features, and ages the body beyond its years, then I am against it with all my soul. But, sir, if by whiskey you mean that diadem of the distiller's art, that nimble golden ambrosia which loosens the tongue of the shy, gladdens the heart of the lonely, comforts the afflicted, rescues the snake-bitten, warms the frozen and brings the joys of conviviality to men during their hard-earned moments of relaxation, then I am four-square in favor of whiskey. From these opinions I shall not waver. (Lowry 1994, p. 6)

These words summarize the contradictory positions many politicians held. The temperance movement shaped political rhetoric, and parties with names such as the "Rum Democrats" and the "Temperance Men" sprang up. When Father Theobald Matthew of Ireland toured the United States from 1849 to 1851, administering the pledge of total abstinence to some 600,000 persons in twenty-five states, he was awarded with a White House dinner and a Senate reception (Couling 1862, p. 326). Ironically, the same government that had praised Father Matthew for his anti-drinking campaign concluded a treaty with King Kameha-meha III of Hawaii in 1850 permitting the sale of liquor in the king's formerly sovereign nation.

If some fought against alcohol, other fought to protect its availability. In response to the repeal of the Maine's 1851 law prohibiting alcohol, John Pendleton Kennedy remarked: "Many quack politicians have been wasting their energies for years, upon the abortive attempt to legislate peaceable families into the disuse of spirituous liquors, by bringing alcohol into platforms and making parties upon it: —but alcohol has gained the day and the Maine Liquor Law has become a dead letter" (Kennedy 1861, p. 37). Temperance advocates such as Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts (1812–1875) and Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy (1816–1891) of Kansas criticized the idea of federal revenues coming from the liquor industry.

With the onset of the Civil War, the federal government reinstituted excise taxes on whiskey and tobacco in an effort to fund the Union army, and in 1862 it imposed a liquor and beer tax. Rates increased several times between 1863 and 1868, and the initial tax of 20 cents per gallon eventually rose to $2 per gallon (McGrew 1972). In response, alcohol producers engaged in mass tax-evasion schemes and organized the first industry lobby—the United States Brewers Association. The Association rapidly launched a legislative campaign and succeeded in 1863 in reducing the tax rate on beer from $1 to 60 cents (Cherrington 1969 [1920], p. 157).

Following the war, alcohol taxes were kept in place as a means to help finance the rebuilding of the nation. Faced with enormous debt, both state and federal governments continued to collect and enforce the whisky taxes. Yet, the federal government noted an interesting phenomenon: As the rates increased, the revenues did not. In fact, the number of gallons reported actually declined. Various attempts were made to enforce the tax laws; for example, in 1868 the sum of $25,000 was appropriated for the detection of violators. Still, fraud continued almost unabated. Liquor was stockpiled to hedge against future tax increases, as taxes were not applicable to liquor on hand. Congress eventually reduced the tax from a high of $2 per gallon to 50 cents in 1869. The happy result was a rise in collections from $13.5 million in 1868, to $45 million in 1869, and $55 million the following year. Taking further precautions, the government stipulated that new stamps be developed for alcohol containers to preclude counterfeiting and tampering (Cherrington 1969 [1920], pp.156–162).

While the Civil War marked a hiatus in nineteenth-century struggles over alcohol consumption, following the war temperance societies resumed and expanded their activities. These activities eventually led to the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol from its passage in 1919 until its repeal in 1933.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"Alcohol." West's Encyclopedia of American Law. St. Paul, MN: West Group, 1998.

Cherrington, Ernest H. The Evolution of Prohibition in the United States of America. Westerville, Ohio: American Issue Press, 1920. Reprint, Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1969.

Couling, Samuel. History of the Temperance Movement in Great Britain and Ireland. London: William Tweedie, 1862.

Eddy, Richard. Alcohol in History: An Account of Intemperance in All Ages. New York: The National Temperance Society and Publication House, 1887.

"Female Riot in Greenfield, Ohio—Putting Down Rum." Washington (DC) Daily National Intelligencer, Friday, July 28, 1865.

Furnas, J. C. The Life and Times of the Late Demon Rum. New York: Putnam, 1965.

Jahns, Art. "The Windsor/Walkerville Connection." Walkerville Times, March 2003.

Kennedy, John Pendleton. The Border States: Their Power and Duty in the Present Disordered Condition of the Country. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1861.

Lowry, Thomas P. The Story the Soldiers Wouldn't Tell: Sex in the Civil War. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1994.

McGrew, Jane Lang. "History of Alcohol Prohibition." National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, 1972.

Peterson, Virgil W. "Vitalizing Liquor Control." Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 40, no. 2. (1949): 119–134.

Anurag Biswas

Smoking and Tobacco

Though they were bitter enemies, at least one thing united many men in the Union with both women and men in the Confederacy: their fondness for tobacco. The plant was the stimulant of choice for soldiers, as well as for southern women on the home front. Over the course of the war, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes became popular among Union and Confederate soldiers. The use of cigarettes on the battlefield laid the groundwork for the mass production and consumption of cigarettes that began during the 1880s and became popular among both women and men by the 1920s.

Tobacco Use before the Civil War

Tobacco, whether chewed or smoked, was an early and popular product of the New World. After learning its use from Native Americans during the colonial period, Europeans who had spent time in North, Central, and South America took the practice back to Europe. Indigenous people in the Chesapeake region of North America often smoked tobacco in pipes. By 1612 English settlers in Virginia were cultivating the plant and it soon became the main export crop of the North American colonies.

The cigarette, in particular, had its origins in South and Central America, where the Maya smoked tobacco wrapped in banana skin, bark, and maize leaves. The Spanish gave these leaf-wrapped tobacco sticks the name "papalettes," and replaced the maize-wrappers with fine paper. By the mid-nineteenth century papalettes crossed into France, where the tobacco monopoly there named them cigarettes.

In the United States people indulged in tobacco even though they suspected it was unhealthy and found it socially unpleasant. One encyclopedia published during the nineteenth century described tobacco as "bitter, acrid, and poisonous." John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) was quoted in the February 25, 1861, edition of the Fayetteville Observer as contending that "abandonment of the use of tobacco would add five years to the average human life." Nevertheless, pipe smoking emerged as the most popular form of tobacco consumption during the colonial period, and it continued into the antebellum era among men in both sections and women in the South. Even president's wives smoked pipes, including Rachel Donel-son Jackson (1767–1828), the Tennessee-reared wife of Andrew Jackson (1767–1845), the seventh president of the United States, and Margaret Mackall Taylor (1788–1852), the Maryland-born wife of Zachary Taylor (1784–1850), the twelfth U.S. president. Members of the elite also dabbled in the use of snuff during the revolutionary era, in imitation of European aristocrats, and took up cigar smoking after soldiers adopted the practice during the Mexican War (1846–1848).

Tobacco Advertising and the Civil War

From the stereotypical Indian chief to the contemporary image of the Marlboro Man, tobacco manufacturers have exploited American iconography to promote their products. It is not surprising, then, that the Civil War, a decisive moment in United States history, emerged as a popular theme in tobacco packaging and advertising. During the war itself, companies targeted tobacco users on both sides of the conflict with advertisements that reflected their divergent political beliefs. In the years following the war, however, manufacturers used advertising images to bring about reconciliation between the North and the South.

As sectional tensions heated up, tobacco companies marketed snuff, chewing tobacco, and cigars to Southerners with package labels that depicted images of slavery and Southern political leaders. An 1859 label perpetuated the myth of the happy slave by featuring a smiling slave family enjoying the father's banjo playing. On another label, a manufacturer of Cuban cigars featured John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina politician who first advocated states' rights and later became the seventh Vice President of the United States (Quigley 2006, p. 55).

During the war, tobacco package labels continued to reflect the allegiances of both sides. A Petersburg, Virginia, manufacturer portrayed cannons on its product labels. One 1862 label featured Union soldiers under the banner, "Our Country's Pride." "The Twin Sisters," an 1863 label by C. S. Allen & Company, depicted profile images of embracing sisters who represented Liberty and Union. Labels intended to appeal to Unionists also used eagles, shields, and the Stars and Stripes as symbols of liberty (Quigley 2006, pp. 55–56).

After the Reconstruction era, manufacturers once again used Civil War images to generate a mass market for the burgeoning cigarette industry. One historian has written that tobacco companies in the North and South used themes of Civil War reconciliation to appeal to consumers. The News and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, published an advertisement containing sketches of Northern and Southern senators accompanied by testimonies about Blackwell's Bull Durham Tobacco (August 2, 1884, col. D).

Likewise, the Duke Tobacco Company of Durham, North Carolina, published a twenty-nine-page souvenir album in 1889 titled "The Heroes of the Civil War." It featured multicolored images of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Union General Ulysses S. Grant, and other war heroes interspersed between advertisements for the company's various brands of cigarettes. The company's purpose in producing the album was to promote "kindly feeling" between the sections (Blight 2001, p. 201). According to Blight, "those famous generals, dead and alive, depicted in colorful sketches by the Duke Company…had become commodities; their images were salable memories in the name of good will and good business" (Blight, p. 201).

adrienne m. petty

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

"Images of Native Americans in Advertisements. " Available online at http:// www.cwrl.utexas.edul.

News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), August 2, 1884; issue 66; col. D.

Quigley, Paul D. H. "Tobacco's Civil War: Images of the Sectional Conflict on Tobacco Package Labels." Southern Cultures 12 (2006): 53–57.

By far the most common form of consuming tobacco before the Civil War, however, was chewing tobacco. Chewing tobacco was distinctly American and could be found in the mouths of yeoman farmers in the South as well as settlers on the expanding frontier. The practice was especially prevalent in the rural South. "The South Carolina Gentleman," a song included in Songs of the War…, published in 1863, mocked a tobacco-chewing slave owner:

This South Carolina gentleman, one of the present time.

He chews tobacco by the pound, and spits upon the floor,

If there is not a box of sand behind the nearest door;

And when he takes a weekly spree he clears a mighty track

Of everything that bears the shape of whiskey-skin, gin and sugar—brandy sour, peach and honey,

Irrepressible cocktail, rum and gum and luscious Apple-jack (p. 28)

Although they were teetotalers for the most part, some slaves also had a healthy appetite for pipe smoking and chewing tobacco, whether they were working, enjoying leisure time or celebrating a rare holiday. In his classic 1974 book Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, Eugene Genovese explains that slaves traded and bartered goods for tobacco and, if possible, grew their own. They soaked tobacco in sugar and honey in order to chew it.

Another way of consuming tobacco prevalent in the South was snuff, a form of powdered tobacco, usually flavored, that people typically packed between their cheek and gum in a practice known as dipping. The manufacture of chewing tobacco and snuff was based in Richmond, Virginia. The city boasted a sizable slave labor force and convenient access for shipping the finished product to major markets. In his 1996 book Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris, Richard Kluger writes that, on the eve of the Civil War, more than fifty tobacco factories were operating in Richmond, Virginia.

Tobacco Use during the Civil War

The outbreak of the Civil War not only disrupted tobacco production in Richmond's factories but also hampered the growing of tobacco in the southern countryside. In March 1862 the Confederate Congress passed a joint resolution recommending that states plant food crops instead of tobacco. After the First Battle of Manassas, several tobacco warehouses in Richmond were converted into prisons for Union soldiers. These limits on tobacco planting and manufacturing, however, did not curb southerners' robust appetite for it. In account after account Union soldiers unaccustomed to seeing women use tobacco were shocked when they observed women engaged in the practice. Zenas T. Haines, a member of the Massachusetts Forty-fourth Regiment, wrote a letter from Washington, North Carolina, on March 20, 1863, where he and other troops occupied the home of an enslaved woman in order to seek shelter from a drenching downpour. He sat watching "Aunt Fanny" in amazement as she dipped snuff:

Our presence must have caused a large consumption of this consoling article. She transferred the snuff from a tin box to her mouth with a sweet gum wood stick, which she used like a toothbrush, and then left the handle sticking out of her mouth. Aunt Fanny afforded me the first opportunity I ever had of witnessing the operation of "dipping," […] which is said to prevail among the white women as well as the black ones at the South. (p. 87)

Bell Irvin Wiley, author of The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union, quotes soldier John Tallman, who wrote, "thare are some nice looking girls, but they will chew tobacco, Sweet little things. Don't you think 'I' for instance would… make a nice showing rideing [sic] along in a carriage with a young lady, me spitting tobacco juice out of one side of the carriage and she out the other…wall aint that nice, oh, cow!" (1971, p. 101).

Even some Confederate soldiers found tobacco chewing and snuff dipping among women to be unladylike and distasteful, as Wiley notes in The Life of Billy Yank. Philip Daingerfield Stephenson of the 13th Arkansas Infantry and Washington Artillery expressed amazement about the snuff habit of a woman who visited him while he was sick: "I found, oh I found that my pretty Josephine 'dipped!' Dipped snuff! Alas, alas! How rude the awakening. The sweet ideal shattered irreparably. For no conceivable future enchantment could reconstruct that ideal—with a snuff stick in her mouth" (p. 368).

Civilians in the border states indulged in tobacco use too. In a January 7, 1863, article in The Daily Cleveland, it was reported that in Missouri, "tobacco is used among natives in the rural districts indiscriminately by both sexes, children as well as adults, both for chewing and smoking."

So popular was tobacco among women and men in the Confederacy that ordinary citizens expressed their appreciation to the troops with gifts of tobacco. Washington Lafayette Gammage, in his history of the Fourth Arkansas regiment, reported that hundreds of "weary soldiers" in his regiment received "shoes and hats and coats and tobacco from the grateful people" as they marched through Lexington, Kentucky, in September 1863.

Northern women also sent tobacco to their loved ones serving in the Union army, but they eschewed the use of tobacco themselves. During the 1830s, in fact, many Northern women reformers became involved in the temperance movement. In addition to condemning alcohol consumption and gambling, these women targeted tobacco use for health reasons and on moral grounds. An 1841 issue of The Emancipator, warned readers, "if your children ever hanker after the vile weed, so as to form any of these slavish disgusting habits, it will, in nine cases out of ten, be your own fault. If you cling even stealingly to the loathsome wormleaf yourself, they will find it out, and you cannot expect to deter them" (Humphrey 1841, p. 172).

Cigarette Smoking after the War

The temperance movement ebbed during the Civil War, but it regained momentum later, when cigarette manufacturing and smoking became more widespread. During the war more and more soldiers turned to cigarettes as a way to achieve a quick escape from the harshness of the battlefield. Many Union soldiers who had become hooked on tobacco during the war exposed civilians to the practice once they returned home. As various manufacturers found ways to market cigarettes after the war, many civilians and veterans alike became prime consumers of the new product. In response, some women's groups in the North stepped up their campaign against tobacco. The Women's Christian Temperance Movement targeted the evils of cigarettes, in particular, and expressed alarm over their growing use not only among men but also among boys. In Connecticut, according to the article "To Be Taught Good Habits" in an 1886 issue of the Boston Daily Advertiser, a temperance advocate named Miss Greenwood secured passage of a bill that authorized teaching public school children the evil effects of using tobacco and liquor. Jerome E. Brooks reprints in his 1954 book The Mighty Leaf: Tobacco through the Centuries a message the temperance movement distributed in a pamphlet:

"I'll never use tobacco, no;

It is a filthy weed;

I'll never put it in my mouth."

Said Little Robert Reed.

"It hurts the health; it makes bad breath;

'Tis very bad indeed.

I'll never, never use it, no!"

Said Little Robert Reed (pp. 242–243)

Although some middle class women in the South increasingly became active in the temperance movement, most rural women continued to crave tobacco. According to an 1896 article in the News and Observer, "In Court for Failing to Provide His Wife with Snuff and Tobacco," a woman in Mooresville, North Carolina, even went so far as to take her husband to court for failing to provide for her needs because he went off and "stayed some two or three days, and not a chew of tobacco or a dip of snuffin the house."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brooks, Jerome E. The Mighty Leaf: Tobacco through the Centuries. Boston: Little, Brown, 1952.

Fayetteville Observer, (Fayetteville, NC) Monday, February 25, 1861; issue 999; col. F.

Gammage, Washington Lafayette. The Camp, the Bivouac, and the Battlefield, Being the History of the Fourth Arkansas Regiment, from Its First Organization Down to the Present Date. Little Rock: Arkansas Southern Press, 1958.

Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974.

Gottsegen, Jack J. Tobacco: A Study of Its Consumption in the United States. New York: Pitman Publishing Corp., 1940.

Haines, Zenas T. Letters from the Forty-fourth Regiment M.V.M.: A Record of the Experience of a Nine Months' Regiment in the Department of North Carolina in 1862-3. Boston: Printed at the Herald Job Office, 1863. Sources in U.S. History Online: Civil War. Gale. Available from http://galenet.galegroup.com/.

Humphrey. "Keep Your Children from Using Tobacco." The Emancipator, February 18, 1841; issue 43, p. 172, col C.

"In Court for Failing to Provide His Wife with Snuff and Tobacco." The News and Observer, (Raleigh, NC) July 21 1896; issue 122 pg. 3 col D.

Kluger, Richard. Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.

Palmer, George Putnam. Soldiers' and Sailors' Patriotic Songs: New York, May, 1864. New York: Loyal Publication Society, 1864.

Songs of the War … , Albany: J. Munsell, 1863. Sources in U.S. History Online: Civil War. Gale. Available from http://galenet.galegroup.com/.

"To Be Taught Good Habits: A Bill to Instruct School Children of the Evil Effects of Alcohol and Tobacco Passes the Connecticut House." Boston Daily Advertiser, February 25, 1886; issue 48, col F.

Wiley, Bell Irvin. The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, [1971].

"Women and Children Chewing Tobacco." The Daily Cleveland, January 7, 1863; issue 5; col C.

Adrienne M. Petty