What they were giving them to eat.

millerlgt82

Private
Joined
Sep 29, 2012
Location
The north coast
FEEDING BILLY YANK:
Union Rations between 1861 and 1865
By J. Britt McCarley
Quartermaster Professional Bulletin – December 1988

"Who shall have this?" Sergeant John W. Fuller asked in a voice loud enough for all the assembled troops to hear. He stood beside two ordinary army blankets laden with precious contents. One contained forty-five carefully divided mounds of ground coffee, the other an equal number of piles of sugar. Together, they represented a four-day ration of coffee and sugar for Company C of the 100th Regiment of the Indiana Volunteer Infantry.
Sergeant Fuller was pointing to one of the heaps of coffee. No matter how carefully they tried, it was impossible to divide the coffee equally; the company had no scales. As a result, each mound was always a bit larger or smaller than the others. In order to distribute the ration, First Sergeant Sanford W, Meyers, facing away from the coffee and the company, read from the muster roll and called out a name at random. Private Theodore F. Upson stepped forward to claim this most important part of a soldier's ration, then, its sweetener.
Salt pork and hardtack, the rest of the marching ration were to be weighed and issued later by the regimental commissary but that wasn't important now. The company focused its attention on the blankets. The weather in this third week of June, 1864 was wet and unseasonably cool, as it had been for the four previous weeks of the campaign to Atlanta. The source of that next, all sustaining cup of hot coffee, now ranked in importance with the Confederate enemy entrenched less than a mile away - Private Upson returned to the ranks with his fair, if not quite equal share of coffee, and the issue continued, by random name, till each pile of coffee and sugar had been claimed.
 
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I believe this from Quartermaster Professional Bulletin – December 1988.

The Quartermaster Professional Bulletin was published quarterly from March 1988 to September 2009 by the US Army Quartermaster School, at Fort Lee, Virginia. Has some interesting articles, though very few ACW related.

jno
 
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