Tobacco's Civil War: Images of the Sectional Conflict on Tobacco Package Labels

Figure 1.

Defeat is not Dishonor, ca. 1865.

Tobacco doesn't sell itself. Its purveyors have long been pioneers in advertising and marketing techniques. Leaf through the pages of this special issue and you'll find plenty of evidence of that: the provocatively posed photographs of women smoking; the celebrity ball players on cigarette cards; the profits that "Buck" Duke ploughed into marketing; the women parading around the rural South wearing dresses and bikinis made entirely out of tobacco leaves. Ever since the earliest Anglo-Virginians made quick fortunes sending their exotic crop back across the Atlantic, the tobacco industry has used—or invented—just about every promotional trick in the book.

It should surprise no one, then, that tobacco vendors cashed in on the Civil War. Decades before they used sex to sell cigarettes, they were using sectionalism to sell cigars. And fortunately, the Library of Congress has preserved a fascinating collection of tobacco package labels from the Civil War era, a selection of which we reproduce here. All images are courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress; these and other examples can be viewed online at www.loc.gov.

Figure 2.

Southerner Rights Segars, Salomon Brothers, 1859.

Figure 3.

John C. Calhoun, ca. 1860.

Figure 4.

Oh Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny, Robertson, Seibert, & Shearman, ca. 1859.

Slavery and Southern Rights

Even tobacco firms outside the South invoked images of southern rights and romanticized portrayals of slavery, presumably in an effort to market their products to southern partisans. Sometimes, as the respectable-looking African American couple in the first label suggests, they didn't get it quite right.

Figure 5.

X-X Brand, C. A. Butler.

Figure 6.

The Conscript, ca. 1863.

Figure 7.

Our Country's Pride, ca. 1862.

And the War Came

The war made its way onto tobacco package labels in a variety of guises, from sturdy cannons to not-so-sturdy conscripts. The labels, in a similar way to popular songs and poems, became a place to glorify, make sense of, or even poke a little fun at the realities of war.

Figure 8.

Union, ca. 1864.

Figure 9.

The Union Must be Preserved, ca. 1860.

Figure 10.

The Twin Sisters, C. S. Allen & Company, 1863.

Figure 11.

A. Lincoln, ca. 1860.

Representing the Union

For most white northerners, the Civil War, at least at first, was more about preserving the Union than opposing slavery. The iconography of eagles, shields, and, of course, the stars and stripes, gave form to the sometimes abstract concepts for which they fought.

Figure 12.

The National Tobacco, ca. 1868.

Figure 13.

Grant's Tobacco, ca. 1874.

Figure 14.

Reconstruction, ca. 1868.

Reconstruction and Remembrance

The war was over, but it was anything but forgotten. Patriotic images visually expressed the reunification of North and South within a common country. Both sides, however, were determined to remember their wartime heroes in such labels as "Grant's Tobacco," shown here, and "Defeat is not Dishonor," the tribute to Robert E. Lee depicted on the first page.