If you are curious about what it was like to be a soldier during the Civil War, there's no better place to start than John D. Billings' memoir, Hard Tack and Coffee. Historian Henry Steele Commager calls it "one of the most entertaining of all civil war books."
Subtitled The Unwritten Story of Army Life, this book was published in 1887 by Billings, who served in the 10th Massachusetts Volunteer Light Artillery Battery under General Sickles and General Hancock. It is not a history of the war, and doesn't talk about battles and strategy. Instead, it explains what it was like to enlist in the Union Army, how soldiers managed the every day acts of eating and sleeping, of punishments and pastimes, and what it was like to keep the Army on the move.
Subtitled The Unwritten Story of Army Life, this book was published in 1887 by Billings, who served in the 10th Massachusetts Volunteer Light Artillery Battery under General Sickles and General Hancock. It is not a history of the war, and doesn't talk about battles and strategy. Instead, it explains what it was like to enlist in the Union Army, how soldiers managed the every day acts of eating and sleeping, of punishments and pastimes, and what it was like to keep the Army on the move.
While some of the information in Billings' account is specific to his experiences in the Army of the Potomac, most of it would be useful for anyone who wanted to know about the life of the average soldier. Where else would we learn that troops camped near brooks washed their clothes in the running water until they realized that boiling them got rid of wood ticks and lice much better. To kill vermin, soldiers boiled their clothes in the mess kettles that also cooked their stews and boiled their coffee.
The writing is witty and the humor wry, the more than 200 pen and ink drawings are what really make Hard Tack and Coffee a treasure. The illustrations were created by another Civil War Veteran, Charles Reed, who served as bugler in the 9th Massachusetts Battery. Reed was awarded the Medal of Honor for saving the life of his battery commander at Gettysburg.
Reed shows the reader what a Sibley tent looked like. Invented by the man who left the Union Army to become a Brigadier General in the Confederacy, Sibley tents were used by both the North and the South. They resembled the teepees that Sibley would have seen while fighting Indians on the great plains and in New Mexico Territory, which Sibley invaded in 1862 in an attempt to conquer it for the South. One of my favorite pictures shows an interior view of a Sibley tent, and how the soldiers "spooned," or slept nested against each other in an attempt to keep warm.
General Sibley is a background character in Where Duty Calls and The Famished Country, books 1 and 3 of Rebels Along the Rio Grande, my historical novel trilogy about New Mexico during the Civil War. Reed's illustrations are now part of the public domain.
