Nuts?

[hiplainsyank]

I searched and couldn't find, so I thought I'd ask.

With peanuts being raised mostly in the Confederacy, is it safe to assume they were primarily a southern/Confederate item? Or were they common among notherners/Union troops?

If not peanuts, what sort of nuts would northerners/Union soldiers eat? What would soldiers have purchased from a sutler? What would people snack on and use in recipes at home?

Thanks for any info you may have!

[JimKindred]

Re: Nuts?

Joanna,

Approach it from this angle, by mid 1863 a very good portion of the Federal Army was right in the middle of peanut country.

[paulcalloway]

Re: Nuts?

Joanna,

Approach it from this angle, by mid 1863 a very good portion of the Federal Army was right in the middle of peanut country.

Precisely right. The peanut was primarily a regional food grown and eaten almost exclusively in the Southern states and in Central America. Many Yankees were first introduced to the peanut during their long march for Mr. Lincoln.

The demand for peanuts in the North came after the war - as the old soldiers returned home.

[Virginia Mescher]

Re: Nuts?

Precisely right. The peanut was primarily a regional food grown and eaten almost exclusively in the Southern states and in Central America. Many Yankees were first introduced to the peanut during their long march for Mr. Lincoln.

The demand for peanuts in the North came after the war - as the old soldiers returned home.

There is a great book on peanuts that is worth getting. It gives the history of peanuts, their use in the US and a recipe section with sources included. The name of the book is _Peanuts: The Illustrious History of the Goober Pea_ by Andrew F. Smith.

The chapters are:
Origin and Dispersion
Slave to Snack Food
Soldiers and Vendors
Doctors and Vegetarians
Unshelled to Shelled
Soup to Oil Nuts
Sweet and Nutty
Scientists and Promoters
War and Peace
Revolution and Transformation
An American Icon and a Global Future
Historic Recipes

[Hank Trent]

Re: Nuts?

Precisely right. The peanut was primarily a regional food grown and eaten almost exclusively in the Southern states and in Central America. Many Yankees were first introduced to the peanut during their long march for Mr. Lincoln.

The demand for peanuts in the North came after the war - as the old soldiers returned home.

What Paul says is certainly the usual summary one sees in secondary sources about the history of the peanut, but what I've found in primary sources is entirely different.

I haven't read Smith's book on peanuts so I don't know what he says, but here are my conclusions. This is long, because I realize I'm bucking the trend of virtually every online history of the peanut, and so feel a greater need to back up my conclusions.

Prior to the 1860s, peanuts were commonly sold throughout the north, and had a particular association with the rowdy city-dwelling lower classes, especially the infamous "Bowery boy" type. Roasted peanuts were typically sold by vendors on trains and in theaters, and wherever crowds gathered, as far north as Maine. There was such demand that they were imported from Africa, as well as the area around Wilmington, NC, which was the antebellum peanut-growing center of the south, from where they were shipped north along the coast, and also of course they were grown to a lesser commercial extent throughout the south.

After the war, peanut-growing took off like wildfire in the devastated south as a cash crop. But peanut-eating had been part of the north for decades before the war, and most any Yankee who had traveled by train or lived in or visited a northern city could have been familiar with them.

Here are some references:

Earliest one I've found mentioning the peanut-Bowery connection, from 1835:

John, my faithful messenger... was directed to deposite the packet in the box-office, then to dart down through Franklin square, full speed--to stay not to buy pea-nuts in the Bowery, but to hurry through Canal street..." (W. Severn, Reminiscences, The New-England Magazine, Nov 1835

Peanuts were also used as a weapon against bad acting:

Insults rang through the house; noisy people pounded with sticks and umbrellas on the floor; and to verbal attack, orange-peel, apples, and pea-nuts soon succeeded. (Putnam's Monthly Magazine, October 1854)

Peanut vending had become so connected with railroad travel in the 1850s that newspapers nicknamed a legal battle over whether passengers had to change trains in Erie, Pennsylvania the "peanut war," because those who sold peanuts and other snacks would benefit the most from travelers who had to lay over in the city. For example, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A610732

American railroad cars had a characteristic "smell of greasy cloth, peanuts, and apples" in 1860. (Editor's Easy Chair, January 1860 Harper's Monthly) Numerous passengers complained of "the enormous quantity of pea-nut shells and fruit skins with which the floor was strewn,... [and] tobacco juice over the whole." (American Gentleman's Guide to Politeness, Conkling, 1860)

On a trip to Chicago, 1854:

I had to walk to my seat through lakes of tobacco juice. ... Here and there, in this odoriferous sea, were small islands of pea-nut shells; while the scattered newspapers, quack medicine, hotel, steamboat, and railway advertisements were not unlike field-ice floating on the ocean." (American Despotisms, Putnam's Monthly Magazine, December 1854)

When the Concord [New Hampshire] Railroad Corporation suspected a conductor of illegally earning extra money in 1865, the subsequent trial in the late 1860s brought to light the business of the peanut boys. The following is from Hearing in the matter of Concord railroad corporation vs. George Clough and trustees, published in Concord NH 1869. The prosecution "propose[d] to show that [the conductor] made money by putting a boy on the cars to sell peanuts; and we claim that all the money he made in these several ways, he made contrary to law, and that it belongs to the corporation." The peanut boy in question (actually two of them) worked for the conductor until about ten years previously. He said, "When the road first opened, I hired and put him on some seven or eight years. I paid the boy from 50 to 75 cents per day. He took from $1 to $6 per day. I think the profit would be about $1.50 per day."
Other testimony on the subject:

Q. Now, Mr. Spalding, about the peanut boy. Have you ever known a time since you knew anything about the Concord Railroad, but that there has been a boy on the train selling candy and sweetmeats, etc.?
A. There is generally some such thing.
Q. Let me ask you if there sometimes have been two? I don't mean that they both sold peanuts; but hasn't there been one that sold peanuts and candies, and one that sold papers?
A. Yes, sir; there have.

Charles Haswell recalled Fourth of July celebrations in New York City in the early 19th Century:

All young people, and many of the elder, residing within a practicable distance of the city, came to it on that day, and added to the observance of the occasion, indulging in roast pig, egg*nog, spruce beer and mead in the booths, and peanuts and oranges in the streets. (Reminiscences of New York by an Octogenarian, Charles Haswell, 1896)

Another author told of similar celebrations in the 1840s:

Powder and pride, fire-crackers and baker's biscuit, friendship and peanuts, headache and spruce-beer, formed the basis of my patriotic enjoyment. (The Future Life, Sweet, 1870)

At a county cattle-show on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, 1857: "Whoever had no baker's gingerbread in his pockets, had peanuts in them." (A Dash at Cape Cod, Putnam's Monthly, January 1857)

At horse races in Charleston, South Carolina, J. Milton Mackie wrote:

I was surprised at seeing that the floor of the saloon wherein they were assembled was, in places, wet with tobacco juice, and sprinkled with nutshells. Lads, whose bringing up in the best families of the town should have taught them better, threw the shells on the floor as unceremoniously as if they had beenin a beer garden, or a cockpit. Even a lady arrayed in ermine, and deep frills of Chantilly lace, who was holding a court, at the moment, consisting of four gentlemen, all in waxed mustaches, suffered two out of the four to stand in her presence munching peanuts. (From Cape Cod to Dixie and the Tropics, 1864)

At a "crowded steamboat landing in New York, soon after the rebellion burst upon the country [was] a table covered by a clean white cloth, whereon was bounteous store of peanuts, gingerbread, and pretzels, intermixed with oranges and penny confectioneries for which all urchins seem to have been born with an undying relish..." (How to Get A Farm, Morris, 1864)

[quote]A Portland [Maine]Yankee, who has become disgusted with the "hull femail sect" [writes] "And when you've stuffed 'em with pea-nuts, and candy, and daggertypes, they'll throw you away as they would a cold tater. Leastways that's been my speriens." (Editor's Drawer, December 1856, Harper's Monthly)

French tariffs had encouraged the growth of peanuts in Africa, and while plenty went to Europe for making oil, the U.S. was also getting a hefty supply from there, mainly for eating roasted.

Nuts are also exported from the Rio Grande, the Rio Nunez, and from Sierra Leone, and the adjoining rivers. And though there are no accounts of the exact quantities sent from each, it is believed that their aggregate amount is fully equal to the exports from the Gambia. Within the last three or four years considerable quantities have been shipped from the Senegal River." (A Cyclopedia of Commerce, Homans, 1859)

Though peanuts were raised domestically, the consumption of imported ones was significant until the post-war years.

Ground nuts are quite an institution with "Young America," eight hundred tuns having been imported into the United States from Gambia in one year. But France is the great market for ground nuts, where they are used for oil, of which they contain large quantities. (Scientific American, Sept. 11, 1858)

Jonatham Periam wrote in 1884 in the Home & Farm Manual, "Until comparatively a few years ago the supply came principally from the East Indian Islands and along the African coast."

Concerning Wilmington, NC as a center of domestic production, though of course they were grown elsewhere in the south as well:

The Ground-nut is one of the great staples of Africa, constituting among many tribes a chief article of food,and over a million bushels, it is presumed, are now annually exported. Within a few years, the cultivation of the Ground-nut has been attempted in the United States, principally in the vicinity of Wilmington, North Carolina, where, from a single tract, 80,000 bushels were carried to the Wilmington market in one year, realizing $1.25 per bushel. (Opportunities for Industry, Freedley, 1859)

Exports of peanuts along the coast from Wilmington ranged from 30,000 to 100,000 bushels annually from various reports in the 1840s through 1860.

All of the above leads me to conclude that northerners before the war who road trains, or attended theaters, state fairs or other gatherings, had ample opportunity to eat and learn to enjoy peanuts, and in cities a peanut-vendor would have been a common sight, and the connection of the Bowery Boy and roasted peanuts was legendary.

However, the story that they only became familiar in the north until soldiers brought them home started quickly. This is from 1870:

We learn from a late report of Mr. Horace Capron, Commissioner of Agriculture, that so trifling an article as peanuts has much importance in the reviving Virginia of to-day. "The greater part of Eastern Virginia," he tells us, "was by turns occupied by both of the contending armies; and, as every farmer raised peanuts enough for his family and some to spare, their merits became extensively known among the soldiers; so that when the armies were disbanded a knowledge of them was carried to every part of the country. So rapid has been its extension that the crop of each successive year has been three-fold greater than that of the year preceding, and at prices fully maintained. The crop of 1868 in Virginia is estimated to have aggregated about three hundred thousand bushels, the average price of which was about $2.75 per bushel." It was probably twice as great in 1869; for when farmers find they can get a hundred and twenty-five dollars' worth of peanuts,--by no means such an unfamiliar luxury in any part of the country as Mr. Capron seems to think,--with easy work, from an acre of land, and only sixty dollars' worth of tobacco, by very hard work, they are likely to try a few more acres of peanuts the next year. This sudden extension of the peanut culture is a curious illustration of the incidental benefits that come sometimes from so desolating an evil as civil war. (Reviving Virginia, James Parton, Atlantic Monthly, April 1870)

The only explanation I can think is that southerners became more aware of a northern market for peanuts when money was scarce post-war, and not realizing that their production was merely replacing what had been imported for decades from Africa, believed the war itself had created a new market that in the north that hadn't been there before.

Hank Trent
hanktrent@voyager.net

[hiplainsyank]

Re: Nuts?

thanks for the replies so far. Great stuff!

$2.75 a bushel for peanuts? That's pretty good, compared to corn and wheat prices of recent years.

[Vuhginyuh]

Re: Nuts?

Pecans are the only true nut that I know of harvested in great numbers in the area around Wilmington NC. 'Wild'' pecan groves still mark the old roads and long lost house sites back home. I'll add any information on bushels traded asap.

In the mean time, chew on this...

Goober Peas

Sitting by the roadside on a summer's day
Chatting with my mess-mates passing time away
Lying in the shadows underneath the trees
Goodness how delicious eating goober peas.

Peas, peas, peas, peas
Eating goober peas
Goodness how delicious
Eating goober peas.

Peas, peas, peas, peas
Eating goober peas
Goodness how delicious
Eating goober peas.

When a horse-man passes, the soldiers have a rule
To cry out their loudest, "Mister, here's your mule?"
But another custom, enchanting-er than these
Is wearing out your grinders, eating goober peas.

Peas, peas, peas, peas
Eating goober peas
Goodness how delicious
Eating goober peas.

Peas, peas, peas, peas
Eating goober peas
Goodness how delicious
Eating goober peas.

Just before the battle, the General hears a row
He says "The Yanks are coming, I hear their rifles now."
He looks down the roadway and what d'you think he sees?
The Georgia Militia cracking goober peas.

Peas, peas, peas, peas
Eating goober peas
Goodness how delicious
Eating goober peas.

Peas, peas, peas, peas
Eating goober peas
Goodness how delicious
Eating goober peas.

I think my song has lasted just about enough.
The subject's interesting but the rhymes are mighty rough.
I wish the war was over so free from rags and fleas
We'd kiss our wives and sweethearts, say good-bye to goober peas.

Peas, peas, peas, peas
Eating goober peas
Goodness how delicious
Eating goober peas.

Peas, peas, peas, peas
Eating goober peas
Goodness how delicious
Eating goober peas.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

I'm a'hunting for the references to the peanut song to post.