Why Did So Many Civil War Soldiers Smoke?

Civil War soldiers smoked so universally that by the end of the war a man without tobacco was the strange one — and the habit most of them picked up in camp followed them home for the rest of their lives, and built an industry. The day is done and you are still alive — that was not promised this morning — and your hands reach into your coat before you have decided anything: a short clay pipe, a pinch of dark tobacco, packed without thinking. You strike a match, and across the tent rows a hundred other embers glow back at you. This is why nearly every man in this war smoked, on both sides of the line — not a vice at the edge of army life but a thing at the dead center of it, doing five real jobs nothing else could do. No battle. One clay pipe, and everything it carried a man through. In this video: Where it came from: the Southern tobacco fields, the sutler's wagon, the package from home The five jobs it did — hunger, fear, the stench of camp, the long hours on picket, and loneliness The picket-line truces: tobacco traded for coffee across a river, on little carved boats with paper sails Durham Station, Bull Durham, and the Dukes — how a surrender site became the center of American tobacco The habit that came home: a generation hooked, and the cigarette that followed New cinematic Civil War history every week. Music: "Gymnopedie No. 2", "Past Sadness", "Disquiet", "Clean Soul" - Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...