RANDOM FACTS
ILLUSTRATIVE OF SOUTHERN SOLDIER CONDITIONS
WE soldiers of the Southern army lacked many things. Sometimes we lacked almost everything. We did not always have clothes, but when we had any, they were apt to be good ones; they were made of cadet gray cloth, imported from England through the blockade. And those Englishmen have a habit of making uncommonly good cloths.
We were often without shoes; but when we had shoes, they also came from England, and were thoroughly good, both in material and make.
But towards the end of the war, we lacked many essential things. We lacked medicines for one thing, and quinine, especially. I remember that one gentlewoman was deemed a peculiar patriot, because she got through the lines with one hundred and forty ounce bottles of quinine hung inside her hoop-skirt.
For lack of that and other drugs, our surgeons had to resort to many substitutions. Some of these were discoveries of permanent value. That is why the medical profession has studied with interest the records of our Southern surgeon-general’s department, now in possession of the war department at Washington.
These records, it is said, contribute more than any other like documents to the science of medicine.
Another thing that we terribly lacked was gunpowder—the one supreme agent of all warfare. Our fire was often compulsorily made as light as possible, in order to spare our cartridge boxes.
To supply this rudimentary need, the women of the country diligently dug up the earthen floors of all their smokehouses, and all their tobacco barns, and rendered out the nitre they contained. Some of them even destroyed their tobacco crops by boiling, in order to extract the precious salt necessary to the destruction of their enemy.
In the cities, our womenkind were requested to preserve and deliver to government collectors all those slops that contain nitre.
It was in this way alone that we got gunpowder enough to maintain resistance to the end. And we had equally to pinch in other ways in order that we might continue to be “fighting men.”