Flora and Fauna of the Civil War: An Environmental Reference Guide

Blackberry

  Blackberry  25 B l ac k b e r ry Corporal Rufus Kinsley of the 8th Vermont Regiment wrote from south Louisiana on April 1, 1863: “Co. returned to Bayou Boeuf, had little to eat but blackberries for three days.”1 Union General Sherman wrote in his memoirs, “I have known the entire skirmish line, without orders, to fight a respectable battle for the possession of some old fields full of blackberries .”2 Of all native plants mentioned in Civil War diaries, journals, and letters , the blackberry (Rubus spp.) was one of the most common. It was so prevalent and so widespread that there is little doubt that this wild fruit was at times an important part of soldiers’ diets. The soldiers were not alone. Along with a host of bird species, bears, foxes, coyotes, mice, and box turtles are attracted to the sweet berries. Deer and rabbits browse the shoots and with others animals find refuge in the thick brambles. Blackberries, members of the rose family, are native to Europe, Asia, and North and South America and consist of hundreds of species. Dewberries and raspberries are in this group. For thousands of year humans have used blackberries for food and medicinal purposes. Confederate surgeon Francis Porcher’s medical treatise lists the plant as a powerful astringent used to treat dysentery, diarrhea, kidney stones, and snakebite. Recipes for Civil War–era blackberry wine and cordials touted “an approved liquor which cheers but not inebriates.”3 The term ecology is often defined as the inter-relationship of an organism with its environment. Although not a typical example, humans in blackberry patches during the Civil War were nonetheless an ecological association. Union Brigadier General Alpheus S. Williams in a letter to his daughters from Warrenton Junction, Virginia, on July 27, 1863: “The fields now are covered with the largest kind of blackberries, both the vine and the bush kind. We have been surfeited with them. For miles and miles in every day’s march since crossing the Potomac the fields on both sides of the road have been at every halt, covered with men gathering these berries.”4 Private John M. King, 92nd Illinois Infantry at Wartrace, Tennessee, on July 4, 1863: “Blackberries were ripe and many of the men strolled in the fields and woods gathering blackberries. Blackberries in Tennessee 26 Flora grow so large and plentiful that it almost seemed as though the army might march on and pick blackberries for a living. Any soldier that wanted to celebrate the Fourth of July, all he had to do was to make a noise by shooting off his gun and then sit down and eat his blackberries and hard tack for a Fourth of July dinner.” Private King wrote again at Kingston, Georgia , on June 24, 1864: “We moved back up and stopped for a day or two on the Resaca battlefield. Blackberries were ripe, and all over the battlefield the berries were growing as if human blood had fertilized the soil. The first time I passed over the field in search of berries I passed by long rows of new dry earth where large numbers of men who had stood shoulder to shoulder in line of battle were now lying shoulder to shoulder in their silent and shallow graves.”5 Private John F. Brobst, 25th Wisconsin Infantry Regiment, near Atlanta , Georgia, August 1864, in a letter to his future wife: “You must not think up there [in Wisconsin] that we fight down here because we are mad, for it is not the case, for we pick blackberries together [with the Confederate soldiers] and off the same bush at the same time, but we fight for fun, or rather because we can’t help ourselves.”6 Corporal Rufus Kinsley, 8th Vermont Regiment, near Des Allemands, Louisiana, on June 5, 1862: “Not much to eat but alligators and blackberries : plenty of them.”7 Sergeant Charles B. Haydon, 2nd Michigan Infantry, near Washington on July 1, 1861: “Many of the men have taken to doctoring themselves & have in several cases cured with the juice of boiled blackberry roots a diarhea which baffled the Surgeon’s skill.”8 Confederate nurse Kate Cumming at a hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee , on June 27, 1863: “We have been busy lately making blackberry cordial and blackberry preserves. I have made about twenty-five gallons of the cordial. I never was any place where there were such quantities of blackberries. The country people bring them in by the bushel.”9...