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Salt is cheap for most of us, and we don’t give it a second thought. So, it may come as a surprise to many that the very same salt was the reason for hard-fought battles in other parts of the world. For Indians, 1930’s Dandi March drives home the importance of salt. But another, older conflict demonstrated just how crucial salt really is for humans.
In 1861, a civil war broke out between the northern and southern United States. There were many reasons, from social to political to economic, including the slavery-based agriculture of the southern states. During the course of that civil war, salt and salt works became quite important. In the days before refrigeration, salt was the most common food preservative. It was also important for curing leather. (Curing reduces the moisture content in leather hides and prevents putrefaction or decay by preventing bacterial growth on the leather.)
Records indicate that it took over 100 pounds, or 50 kilos, of salt to cure 1000 pounds of pork and over 30 kilos of salt to cure 225 kilos of beef. Salt had several other uses, "from tanning leather to the dyes in military uniforms and feeding livestock."
The northern army, known commonly as the Union army (the north wanted to preserve the union while the southerners wanted to break away and form their own "independent" confederacy), realized early in the war that salt was going to be a vital part of their army’s strategy. United States Navy Admiral David Dixon Porter claimed, "It was the life of the Confederate army." They could not pack their meats without it. "A soldier with a small piece of boiled beef, six ounces of corn-meal, and four ounces of salt was provisioned for a three-day march."
Soldiers as well as civilians had to be fed when the army marched south, and salt was a significant part of daily food. Salted beef and pork were staple foods for both civilians as well as soldiers. The average salt consumption in that country at the time was 25 kilograms of salt per person per year. Most of the salt in the US at the time was produced in the northern areas. The north produced over 400 million kilos of salt in 1858. In the same year, southern salt works produced approximately 85 million kilos of salt. In 1862, New York alone produced 225 million kilos of salt.
The Confederate states realized this too. They used over 200 million kilograms of salt themselves and imported most of it. It is estimated that between 1867 and 1860, the port at St. Louis unloaded 350 tons of British salt daily. This difference in demand and supply inevitably led to inflation, and salt in the South cost 12 times more than it did before the war and costing 50 times as much in some places. In some instances, southern families acquired salt by boiling the dirt in areas where they had cured meat earlier; they would dig it out and strain it.
To combat the shortfall, confederate states began building salt works of their own. It is not surprising, then, that those salt works became military targets for the union forces.
By 1862, salt was declared contraband by the north. Contraband means "goods forbidden by law to be owned or to be brought into or out of a country." So, salt was now the target of the north. Their forces attacked and destroyed salt works in the southern states of Kentucky and Virginia. The next year, in 1863, they destroyed another salt works in Texas, and in 1864, they annihilated a large salt mine on Avery Island in the southern state of Louisiana. Witnesses described the Avery Island attack as a "two-day orgy of destruction." That attack was devastating for the Confederate forces and ended much of the salt production in the southern states.
They might have been able to recover if they had taken the time to look for alternatives. Experts have noted that the confederate authorities "never realized that similar structures to the rock salt mine were all along the Louisiana and Texas coasts of the Gulf of Mexico, and therefore salt could have been more easily attained if they had but realized it."
The destruction was determined and ruthless. Union forces hunted down salt-making cauldrons hidden even in the swamps of southern states. They wreaked havoc that caused damage worth millions of dollars to Confederate facilities. That, in turn, caused salt prices to skyrocket, leading to what was referred to by some as a "salt famine." Much of the destruction in the interiors was due to information from slaves who had escaped the salt production facilities. One northern soldier wrote after the raid on a salt production unit in the state of Georgia, "Salt is a scarce article. The more works destroyed, the sooner we shall have peace, for the rebels can’t live without their bacon, and to have bacon they must use salt."
The salt war was a sideshow to the main civil war but demonstrated how important something as basic as salt was to victory and the lengths men will go to in order to make their enemies submit.
