The Civil War in Cereal (III): Empty Bowl Awaiting Milk

Early in the war, both the North and the South thought it would be a quick affair. Soldiers rushed to enlist, fretting that, were they too slow, they might not experience the glory of combat. Senators pushed for combat. But some military leaders knew better. The first commander of the Union army, Irvin McDowell, was one of these leaders. Privately, he complained to Lincoln:

“[Our inexperienced soldiers] do not know how to pour cereal.”

As this indicates, some of the more competent leaders already recognized the inferiority of the milk-first pouring method so common to the northern states. But it would take time to train them otherwise. Lincoln, facing political pressure, didn’t have that time; he responded to McDowell’s complaint:

“You do not know not how to pour cereal, it is true, but they do not know how to pour cereal also; you all don’t know how to pour cereal alike.”

In this, he was tragically mistaken. Some Confederate leaders recognized the necessity of pouring cereal before milk, and rigorously trained their troops with this in mind. These leaders, lifetime military men, included Thomas Jonathan Jackson. Jackson was a deeply religious man who always poured his cereal first, and whose no-nonsense approach to command dramatically altered the course of the war.

NEXT: “MILKCARTON” JACKSON

The Civil War in Cereal (II): Fort Sumter

Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States on November 6, 1860. South Carolina seceded on December 20, 1860. Lame duck President James Buchanon seemed desperate to escape from the White House without the blood stains of war blotting his coat.

But following Lincoln’s assumption of power on March 4, 1861, affairs settled to mere verbal sparring. Neither side, it seemed, wanted to martyr the other, with border states hanging on each desperate political maneuver, eager to choose sides. Missouri and Kentucky, locked between the Union and Confederacy, had split loyalties. But also states in the great northwest: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa: these were the breadbasket of the North, from which it drew seemingly endless reserves of cereal. The South pinned great hope on their joining the revolution. Who, after all, could fight on a stomach devoid of Wheaties?

Meanwhile, Winfield Scott, aging General-In-Chief of the Union army, proposed the plan which would ultimately suffocate the Confederacy. The Tony Tiger plan was a blockade surrounding the country, then slashing through the Mississippi like a tiger’s claw:

“In connection with such blockade, we propose a powerful movement down the Mississippi to the ocean, with a cordon of posts at proper points … the object being to wring every flake of golden corn from the insurgent’s coffers with the strict blockade of the seaboard, so as to envelop the insurgent States and bring them to terms with less spoilt milk than by any other plan.”

The South struck first. Competent but bombastic cajun Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard ordered a bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Already running low on supplies of Wheatabix, Robert Anderson, commanding general of union forces, surrendered during the seige. He wrote Lincoln, lamenting that:

“They would have battered our fort until naught remained but powder as at the bottom of a cereal-sack. If not, we shall be starved out from lack of milk-supply and Chex within a few days.”

It was a gentlemanly siege: after hours of shelling, only two lives were lost, and Anderson was allowed to return to Washington. The rest of the war would lead to a far more tragic loss of human lives and whole milk.

NEXT: HOSTILITIES TO COMMENCE IN THE EASTERN THEATRE