Talk:Salt in the American Civil War

Comments

I found this article very interesting and I'm going to translate it in french but there should be some adds about the salt in the Union otherwise the article should be renamed "Salt in the confederate states during the American Civil War". By the way if there is some improvement, be sure I will update the french article ;)--Kimdime69 (talk) 17:38, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Apparently salt was not really an an overall limiting factor in the north. AnonMoos (talk) 18:31, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

I was limited to the sources I could find. Anyways, the CSA was always limited in supplies due to Union blockades, something that the Union itself never had to worry about.--Gen. Bedford ^{his Forest} 20:07, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes I can understand that it's not easy to find sources for this kind of subject, but this information is not present in the article and is quite importance, you should simply add a sentence stating that ther was no shortage of salt in the north. An other thing, there was probably some salt smuggling during the war, maybe there is some information about that? --Kimdime69 (talk) 21:26, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Book

Should be some mention of the semi-classic book "Salt as a Factor in the Confederacy" by Ella Lonn (ISBN 0817312692). AnonMoos (talk) 18:31, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Salt in the American Civil War/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

There's something goofy about this sentence "Local court clerks since the salt requests to the state government, which in turn allotted the salt to the counties as requested.[4]" I think the verb was left out. Peter Petesally (talk) 14:07, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Last edited at 14:07, 20 October 2008 (UTC). Substituted at 05:18, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Awful

Last night I watched a PBS program on the Erie Canal. One historian interviewed claimed that one critical factor in the defeat of the Confederacy was the Union's 'capture' of salt manufacturing along the eastern seaboard. This article also claims it was "crucial", but without ANY supporting discussion or references or expansion. My guess is that the Confederate Armies were supplied from depots which in turn were supplied from .... what? factories? which extensively used salt as the preservative to the (canned??) meat. I've no idea if this wild speculation is correct, and I shouldn't have to guess. If this article can't articulate why salt was so important, and it apparently can't, then it should be removed. Also note that the citations are feeble and completely inadequate to justify any claim of the critical nature of the salt shortage. Here's a hint: salt is a food additive (in this case, its use as a tanning aid may be but I'm guessing probably was NOT "critical"). Troops have to eat. Some food can be acquired locally by foraging, but this takes time and disperses the men, and rapidly depletes the local resources. So, as Napoleon famously said: Armies march on their stomachs. And those stomachs had to be supplied. Were they? If not adequately (and I'm presuming that in at least some circumstances they were not) then give examples. This is a subject which should have an overwhelming supply of statistical data available to make its point. Where is it?98.21.243.87 (talk) 19:02, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

The south was less centrally-organized than the north with respect to most things, and relied heavily on forced sales ("impressment") of basic commodities (often taken from ordinary farmers) to the military at below-market prices. AnonMoos (talk) 06:57, 19 October 2017 (UTC)