How Coffee Fueled the Civil War
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
He was sent to war after a quick training lasted just a few weeks, and I guess that without taking some kind of drugs, the average 20 years old guy wouldn't be able to fight a war without going crazy.
Could be side effect of 'plain' amphetamines, which were used heavily by all sides in that war. Wouldn't be surprised at all if that or similar substances are still being used today: when not considering the disadvantages, it will make a person better at certain war-related tasks.
I doubt he was being dosed with anything more exotic than that. (not to trivialize it: I wouldn't want to handle a gun after drinking that kind of alcohol) What your grandfather described, starting to not care about the suffering surrounding him, is a very natural and human thing.
I know my grandpa is not a 100% reliable source, after all we're talking about facts that happened 70 years ago, but I'm pretty sure this can be a true story.
Regarding the psychological thing, you or I wouldn't ignore a friend's extreme suffering the first time. The fifth or sixth? I believe this is referred to as loss of affect. I understand it as an imperfect defense mechanism against some of the even more horrible things that can happen to a person's psyche in those conditions.
In any case, I'm happy your grandpa made it through the war ok.
Balzac on pleasures and pains of coffee.
A generation before the Civil War but interesting to see how coffee was used experimentally to spur creativity and production. He mentions other artists with similar experiments.
To say we are addicted to coffee or tea is not just to talk of the dependence on caffeine but the whole set of rituals around it. It draws my attention and I love articles like this. I also love to learn how other people make tea or coffee (though I reserve the right to be very judgemental in that regard).
Last week I sat down to watch a movie randomly picked from the Critereon Collection on Hulu. "Jeanne Dielman..." by Chantal Ackerman. Blew me away. 3.5 hours of very little action and a central scene where she does little more than make coffee
Coincidentally I was sitting and reading this while grinding coffee. 2 morning rituals: HN and fresh ground coffee.
What can his desert woman do for a Duke except serve him coffee? she asked herself. She brings him no power, no family."
I always was fascinated by Herbert's use of coffee in Dune. A civilization so far removed from our own, by thousands of years and possibly light-years. Yet along with all the Dukes and Barons, you get coffee.
But who knew that the American soldier can be a machine for converting coffee into freedom?
Or perhaps if you define freedom precisely as that which you fight for in the name of America.
Being a Southerner, I think the view that the civil war was fought over states' rights is the romantic view.
Anyway, the two really aren't mutually exclusive, it was both.
And no, I don't define freedom in such a dumb way, why would I?
P.S. Properly speaking, only individuals have rights. States do not have rights, neither does the federal government. Of course this was not understood fully by the Founding Fathers and it's also not true in a legal sense, only a moral one.
In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
(emphasis mine)
It's not an either-or situation. The Civil War was about some states having the right to do things that other states found immoral. In that way, if it hadn't been slavery, it'd been something else. States' rights was the principle, but the fuel that the fire burned was slavery.
I'm happy that it ended the way it did, but I see no need to demonize the south or glorify the north. Slavery was unfinished business from the founding that caused hard feelings for decades. Both sides were eager for a fight to finish it, and that's what they got.
Once you move beyond the moral issue, it's pretty obvious that what was going on was that a rural, agrarian, spread-out country was becoming a centralized industrial one. This was the true benefit of the war: taking the nation into the modern age. Slavery is just a red herring. A moral crusade tacked on to a pre-existing war of consolidation.
This is another can of worms. Once the federal government concentrated its power and became more centralized, one of its first acts was subsidizing the railroads, passing the high distribution costs of large, centralized industrial firms on to taxpayers.
This effectively crowded out more decentralized methods of production that could have been more effective, using networks of small rails or canals to more cheaply distribute local goods, for example. The concentration of capital of centralized industries continued to increase under this regime, with the state being used as a blunt force instrument to distribute external costs of large industrial firms to the public.
This relationship between the state and industry continued to mutate into the corporatism we have today, with the corporate form now being massively privileged and protected by the state through subsidizing infrastructure (transportation, communications, etc.), limiting legal liability, tariffs, patents, copyrights, etc. The state acts as a blunt force instrument for concentrating capital in the hands of a few, on behalf of legal fictions called corporations.
This is the modern age, and in many ways it seems like there are more slaves today than there were before, despite the so-called efficiencies of centralized industry.
If you're interested, Kevin Carson puts forth a critical survey of orthodox views on economies of scale in Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, refuting proponents of centralized industry such as Joseph Schumpeter, JK Galbraith, and Alfred Chandler. He provides a strong argument for decentralizing industry as a way to truly lower real distribution costs, by stripping away the many privileges afforded to corporate forms by the state, in preference of freed markets and bringing more wealth into local economies.
The issue was almost entirely economic, and the Southern states couldn't get enough representation in Congress to push through favorable legislation that would have protected them, while Northern states enjoyed considerable industrial protectionism for their economies. Even then, the economics of the situation often made it cheaper to import goods and agricultural products from the better developed European economies than to make and grow things domestically. Without favorable import tariffs, the South had to offset the price differential of European imports. Setting tariffs at the state level would have had no effect since the market competition was in other states.
There's tons of other issues, and a read through of the CSA Constitution can be a really enlightening experience to fully understand the pressures that lead to the civil war.
Among the mistakes the South made, they underestimated the advance of industrialization and the economics of mechanization. If the South had invested in these modernities instead of fighting them, they could have had mechanized agriculture and wouldn't have needed zero-cost labor to do the work.
Another bit of historic timing, the West was opening up and in just a few decades, highly mechanized farming moved profitable agribusiness to there leaving the South without even their own principle economic activity. Being more compliant, the West was also able to better negotiate farming subsidies, a topic still highly controversial today.
Reading that, I was struck by the eerie parallels to many contemporary corporations I see in my consulting work that eschew investing into automation, organizational and other advances and instead focus tremendous managerial efforts and time upon driving labor costs towards zero.
This is a variation on a quote often attributed to Paul Erdős, but supposedly it's actually by his colleague Alfréd Rényi: "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." [1] [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfr%C3%A9d_R%C3%A9nyi#Quotatio...
[2] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s#Misattributed
I love tisanes, what are informally called herbal teas. I find it striking that there are literally hundreds of plants used to make herbal teas with an incredibly long history - mint, chamomile, dandelion, jasmine, red clover, elderflower, passion flower, hibiscus, etc. etc. But none of them have a tenth of one percent of the popularity of coffee or true tea.
Many people who enjoy tea and coffee enjoy the effects of the caffeine. But I'm surprised at the scale of the difference between the popularity of caffeinated and non-caffeinated drinks.
Caffeine in tea, especially green though, produces a wakefulness and alertness more than jitters that coffee produce.
Tisanes are and were popular before coffee and teas spread. A lot of was part of the popular medicines. "Put in these plants in hot water and drink it" was very common.
Not to forget about yerba mate, a caffeineted South American beverage. Very popular (check), not tea and not coffee (check), caffeinated (check). So yes it seems caffeine has a considerable effect in the spread of popularity.
Does anyone know the tricks used to 'settle' the grounds?
edit - found this http://blog.khymos.org/2010/08/04/norwegian-egg-coffee/
"When looking into the chemistry behind this it isn’t as strange as it may sound. Fish skin as well as eggs contain proteins. The addition of proteins while preparing the coffee serves two purposes: 1) it helps the coffee grounds to flocculate, allowing them to sink faster to the bottom of the pot (this effect is probably more pronounced when using eggs) and 2) the proteins bind irreversibly to astringent and bitter tasting polyphenols in coffee to form insoluble complexes that will precipitate. The end result is a clearer coffee with a pleasant and mild taste. The bitterness is only barely noticeable, but the coffee still has enough “body” so it doesn’t feel too thin! "
Thanks for that link
I imagine they mostly decant fairly carefully and just deal with the remaining grounds. There is also some opportunity with the muckets to use the lid to strain some of the grounds and they would have been grinding to a coarseness that suited their brewing method.
> Most people will naturally stop drinking it at the sweet spot.
Putting an "I believe" before a claim like that is insufficient, given the evidence of people who are anywhere but at a so-called sweet spot.
In a high stress startup environment that provides an unlimited amount of coffee and energy drinks and always seems to be in crunch mode, it's easy for your caffeine consumption to creep up to "could kill a horse" levels. I've seen it happen to others. I've had it happen to me. The end results aren't nearly as bad as, say, alcohol addiction, but it's still not something I want to live through twice.
I have one strong moka pot of coffee a day, say 400ml cup. If I stop having coffee for a week or two now and again, I get a headache the first day or so.
That seems a much smaller 300g ration per week. I get through a 200g bag of fine ground coffee in a couple or three weeks at one strong mug a day or there abouts.
I'm on one strong large mug (two ordinary cups) of coffee and one or two teas a day normally. I don't have caffeinated soft drinks at all.