“After being camped there a few days, a detail of fifteen men was called to go to Richmond, Louisiana, to watch Gen’l Grant’s movements, whose army was camped at Milliken’s Bend. I put a piece of pork, salted and peppered, with lots of lard, in a skillet and sweet potatoes all around; it turned out very nice.” (Civil War Memoirs of Philip Sartorius, 15th Louisiana Cavalry, Co. B.)
Pork and lard were staples in the diet of the Civil War soldier. While prevalent on both sides, salted pork was undoubtedly the primary preserved meat provision of the Confederate soldier when such a ration was available to be issued. After curing,
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January 7-8, 2017
salt pork was safe to eat, traveled well and the fat content provided the lion’s share of the tremendous number of calories needed for the exertion of continuous marching and fighting. Also, pork was relatively easy to produce for farmers because pigs were largely self-sustaining. That is, they did not need to be kept in pasture (like cattle) but were set loose on the countryside to forage for their preferred diet of nuts and roots. Then in November, or whenever the weather turned cold, the pigs were rounded up for slaughter and subsequently processed and sold.
The Southern diet of “hog and hominy” (pork and corn) was standard farewell before the Civil War began. A traveler in antebellum South Carolina reported on his limited meal options at the Inn where he stayed:
“The husband returned from hunting with a hog and his wife
took a half gallon of white cornmeal, added boiling water to it and shaped it into small pones… supper consisted of pork and cornpones. The inn at Georgetown, South Carolina supplied hog and corn cake for breakfast; waffles, hog and hominy for dinner and then hog, hominy and corncake for supper.”
While this kind of diet was considered lacking in variety by a visitor from the North, the attitude in the Southern States was “…plenty of hog and hominy at all times and we don’t want for better or other things.” It is also worth noting that fresh pork was distinctly different in flavor and method of preparation from the preserved varieties such as cured ham, smoked bacon and salt pork. Hence, the meals prepared from different parts of the pig can yield a fair amount of variety on the plate even if it is all “hog.” However, for Civil War soldiers on campaign, there is no doubt that the monotonous ration of salted pork was a constant source of complaints.
While the exigencies of the Civil War put Southern civilian kitchens in shambles, the hog continued to provide sustenance as well as needed replacements for items no longer available elsewhere. After most of the beef cattle had been slaughtered by both invading and local armies, butter and dairy products became difficult to come by. If not a good
substitute for milk or cream, lard often filled in well for butter. A more pressing matter was the shortage of salt for preserving meat. After Union troops (in 1862) had destroyed a major salt works on the Chesapeake Bay it caused immediate difficulties for both civilian and military concerning meat preservation. Civilians scrambled to find enough salt to preserve their meat. There are recorded incidents of civilians trying to recover the salt from the drippings on the ground of the smokehouse. Whatever the challenges were with meat, lard has always been an important cooking and baking staple in areas where pork is a regular item of table fare, as it was (and is) in the Southern states.
Cincinnati was supplanted by Chicago during the Civil War as the largest meatpacking area. Most meatpackers sold their animal fat by-products to other companies which refined them into lard, soap or candles. No Chicago enterprise during the Civil War-era achieved greater success than the N.K. Fairbank Company, the so-called “Lord of Lard.” Fairbank entered the lard refining business in 1855 when he invested in Smedley, Peck & Company, then continued the operation under his own name beginning in 1864. The business soon employed one thousand workers in their Chicago operations. It would be another twenty years before large scale meatpackers like Armour and Swift caught on and began their own lard refining in-house. The by-products of meatpacking were proven greater in profit potential than the meat itself. The saying at the time went that “God made the meat, but man makes the lard.”
The New York Times article from the mid-19th century reported the following:
“A prospective ‘Lord of Lard’ has been discovered in the person of N.K. Fairbank of Chicago… He is daily buying hogs in such quantities as are obtainable.”
On a commercial scale, Fairbanks melted lard in huge tanks with other meat byproducts creating a compound sold as “refined lard.” These byproducts included “beef tallow, bench cuttings, floor scrapings, heads, feet, marrow bones, hearts, legs, kidneys, intestines, etc.” Granted, the rendering was done in different vats and blended later, but to the mind of the 19thcentury consumer, the term refined lard was indistinguishable from pure lard. An investigation by the Chicago Board of Trade revealed this was not the case. The U.S. Congress later intervened, and Fairbanks conceded that it was true some adulterants were added, but only to,”improve the product.” He defended the practice claiming that “…pure lard was not as desirable because it could become rancid sitting on the grocer’s shelf.” The fact is, the adulterants were significantly less expensive as ingredients than rendering pure lard.
Fairbanks resented the intrusion into the particulars of his lard rendering operation. He opined in testimony to Congress that, “It was the duty of inspectors to deal only with the results and not the processes.” The U.S. Congress disagreed. N.K. Fairbanks subsequently agreed to change the name of his primary product to “Refined Lard Compound.” The concerns over impurities in cooking lard subsequently led different forms of vegetable-based oils and shortening to gain a foothold among postbellum American consumers.
In response, Fairbank introduced a substitute for lard made from beef tallow and cottonseed oil in 1868 called “Cottolene.” He later hired David Wesson, a chemist who created a novel method for deodorizing cottonseed oil. It was successful enough that by 1890, N.K. Fairbank had given up on selling hog lard, refined or otherwise. After Fairbank retired, David Wesson went on to found Southern Cottonseed Oil Company in Savannah, Georgia and produced his own vegetable oil blend called Wesson Oil, which is still a prominent brand found in grocery stores today.
Lard did not lose its standing in the South, or at least not as quickly. As far as adulterants in the lard, mid-19th century Southern farms and kitchens had that much less to worry about. Rendering your own lard from pork fat is a simple process, although it was somewhat time-consuming. The fat from the various cuts of meat is cut into squares and placed in a pot with water. As the water evaporates the fat will begin to melt and turn a brownish color. It is then strained and poured into jars where it will “set” after cooling and turn a creamy white color. Cheaper and more readily available than other cooking oils, lard remained a staple of Southern cooking well into the 20th century. It was unimaginable for Civil War-era households to have had decent biscuits or pie crusts without it.
Pictured here is Iris Lee Gay Jordan, the daughter of Lewis Gay, who served as a private in the 4th Florida Infantry Regiment.
Private Gay was captured early in the war and was imprisoned at Fort Delaware. After being exchanged, he returned to his regiment and fought in all the major battles of the western theater. He died at the age of 91 in 1931.
Gay was 82 years old when his Iris was born. Her mother, Gay’s second wife, Minnie McLeod Gay, was 41. Minnie lived until 1973.
Mrs. Jordan is still with us and is quite active. This photograph was taken in 2012 at the dedication of a Confederate monument in Dallas, Ga. On Mrs. Jordan’s left is Stevan Crew, a member of the William J. Hardee Camp # 1397 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which commissioned the monument. On her right is Gould Hagler, the author of Georgia’s Confederate Monuments: In Honor of a Fallen Nation.
PERRYVILLE, Ky. – On the very ground where Americans fought Americans over their discontent for each other, a group of Federal Civil War reenactors put aside differences they might have and resolved to work together to strengthen the hobby west of the Appalachians by forming the Grand Armies of the Republic (GAR).
The goal of the pact is to preserve history and educate the public about the Civil War.
In the spirit of President Abraham Lincoln’s words of binding up the nation’s wounds, this group of reenactors representing nine Midwestern umbrella organizations, intend to mend hard feelings that have festered and eroded the reenacting community.
In a hobby that has grown more divisive through the last two decades, punctuated by groups boycotting other’s events for command and control, this newly formed group pledged to support one another’s events and resolve differences without creating fissures that have weakened the hobby over the years, which has directly resulted in diluting the hobby.
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The group also pledged to work with like-minded reenacting groups with Confederate impressions.
The group plans to support regional and national events. Additionally, the group plans to cooperate to eliminate conflicting regional events that fall on the same weekend, which has the effect of weakening both events.
It is hoped that these efforts will bolster promising regional events, returning them to days when a thousand or more reenactors attended these homegrown history lessons, which now often receive no more than living historians measured in the hundreds.
Participating organizations to date include; Army of the French
Civil War Catalog Featuring a large assortment of Civil War and Indian War autographs, accoutrements, memorabilia, medals, insignia, buttons, GAR, documents, photos, & books.