HF No Words

[TallTallMan]

So direct, face to face requests for bolted cornmeal fell on deaf ears? Winder was more of an *** than I thought.

He's the one who marshal-lawed Richmond, go figure!

 

[52ndFandS]

Winder's attitude in the situation was much complained of. However, relative to supplies, unbolted meal was the standard throughout the deep South evidently. There was no source for bolted meal because it was not a common commodity that Winder might not have been able to supply even had his attitude been better.

The Confederate authorities were constrained to provide the same ration to the prisoners as given to Confederate soldiers. However, with the army unable to provide the legal rations to its troops, the commissary general proposed reducing prisoner rations in 1863.

View attachment 531002

And evidently the Southern rations were of unbolted cornmeal.

In June, 1864, Capt. Wirz complained to the colonel commanding the post of Camp Sumter (Wirz only commanded the prison stockade) of the quality of the corn meal, and asked that it be bolted, as to sift it out would short the already scanty rations to the prisoners...

View attachment 531012

Evidently Wirz's request to the post commander and commissary officers fell on deaf ears. Post-war, one of the commissary agents claimed the cause was there was no source for bolted meal. Sifting was all that could be done before baking with the meal...

View attachment 531013
View attachment 531014

Former prisoner Mr. Page records that among the Andersonville prisoners, before the numbers exploded...

View attachment 531003

But that even by August, the rations, scanty as they were included...

View attachment 531004
View attachment 531005

Dr. Mann, in his article, noted that amidst the general inefficiency which pervaded practically every aspect of the Andersonville story, besides being scanty, they were inconsistent in quality, and quantity received by each man daily...

View attachment 531017

Dr. Mann's article can be read here.

The Century illustrated monthly magazine : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Vols. 23-120 also called new ser., v. 1-[98]

archive.org

Mr. J.T. King, in his memoir of Andersonville incarceration noted of the rations...

View attachment 531006
View attachment 531007
View attachment 531008


John McElroy mentions the common Southern un-bolted cornmeal was unappetizing to the Union prisoners in any case...

View attachment 531009

The standard southern unbolted meal was therefore a hardship upon the Union prisoners, many of whom were already sick, etc. Some Southern ladies commented on this in 1920...

View attachment 531010
View attachment 531011


While the prisoners at Andersonville got corn meal, one Union soldier captured by Hood's army of Tennessee in late 1864 recalled the prisoners at the front were not given "corn dodgers" like the rebs, but hard-bread made of rice...

"These were unlike any Yankee hard-tack we had ever tackled. They were made out of ground rice and water without any shortening or salt. There were no molars in our squad of prisoners that could grind them, and the only way we could manage them was by pulverizing them between two stones…" [Smith, On Wheels and how I Came There, 202.]

In the decades after the war, bolted cornmeal became rather common in the South, and this was blamed for a rash of malnourishment among Southern people.

View attachment 531021

In the early 20th Century, Dr. Goldberger identified Pellagra as a common malady in the South, exacerbated by poor nutrition...

View attachment 531022

In 1909, Dr. W. J. Kerr, formerly a surgeon at Andersonville in 1864, stated that based on the new research on the vicious effects of pellagra, it was probably pellagra and not typhoid as presumed at the time, that killed some of the Union prisoners in 1864.

View attachment 531025

View attachment 531024

Spoiled corn does have lots of nasty stuff going on, including fungi etc., but at the present time, it is understood that pellagra itself is caused by a deficiency in Niacin, or B3 vitamin.

I can't tell if he was funnier as Longstreet or as Hood.

I'd have to say... Yes