Food rations in the military were delivered to Union soldiers by volunteers in the United States Sanitary Commission. The purpose of the commission was to ensure that <span>Civil War soldiers </span>were fed healthy and nutritional meals to prevent malnutrition and food poisoning.
An African-American army cook in City Point, VA
Since the focus was on health and nutrition, not culinary delight, and there were around 2 million soldiers to feed, the food tended to be bland, basic and simple. Each soldier’s daily rations included:
1. Three-quarters of a pound of pork or bacon, or one and one-quarter pound of fresh or salt pork
2. Eighteen ounces of flour or bread or 12 ounces of hardtack
3. One and one-quarter pound of cornmeal
Hardtack, also known as “army bread,” was type of hard, dry biscuit that soldiers had to soak in water and fry in grease or pork fat in order to eat.
Each unit was also given a food ration in addition to each soldier’s individual ration. A 100 man company was given:
1. Eight quarts of peas or beans, or 10 pounds of rice
2. Six to 10 pounds of coffee or one and one-half pounds of tea
3. Twelve to 15 pounds of sugar
4. Two quarts of salt
Vegetables, dried fruits, pickles and pickled cabbage were sometimes issued to prevent scurvy but only in small quantities. Other foods soldiers occasionally ate included baked beans, hardtack pudding, ashcakes and milk toast.
When weather or nearby fighting interrupted food deliveries, soldiers often had to forage for food. In extreme cases, such as during the Battle of Vicksburg, the soldiers had to eat rats, cats, bullfrogs and dogs, according to the book The Civil War Book of Lists.
The Confederate army provided its soldiers with the same rations as Union soldiers but food shortages in the south, caused by blockades of southern harbors, often made many of the ingredients hard to come by which forced many of the soldiers to hunt or forage for food.
As a result, boiled peanuts, which were an abundant crop in the south, became a staple of the Confederate army’s diet.
Here is some information to help youWhy Do Priests Need Philosophy?
DECEMBER 27, 2014 BY FR. JAMES V. SCHALL, SJ
When he (Aquinas) was not sitting, reading a book, he walked round and round the cloister, and walked fast and even furiously, a very characteristic action of men who fight their battles in the mind. (G. K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas.) 1
Here we are touching on what is the most important difference … between Christianity on the one hand, and Islam as well as Judaism on the other. For Christianity, the sacred doctrine is revealed theology; for the Jew and the Muslim, the sacred doctrine is, at least primarily, the legal interpretation of the Divine Law. The sacred doctrine in the latter sense has to say the least, much less to do with philosophy than the sacred doctrine in the former sense. It is ultimately for this reason that the status of philosophy was, as a matter of principle, much more precarious in Judaism and in Islam than in Christianity: in Christianity, philosophy became an integral part of the officially recognized and even required training of the student of the sacred doctrine. (Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing.) 2
Over the years, I have been invited to speak at a number of seminaries—to St. Charles in Philadelphia, to Notre Dame in New Orleans, to the seminary in Bridgeport, to St. Patrick’s in Menlo Park, and I once taught at the Gregorian University in Rome. Looking back on my own studies, I have often considered the three years we spent in philosophical studies at Mt. St. Michael’s in Spokane to be the most interesting and formative ones of my many years of clerical and academic studies. In recent years, I have heard a number of professors in Catholic colleges tell me, though this is by no means universal, that much more real faith and theology exist in the philosophy department than in the theology or religious studies departments of their school. An army chaplain also told me recently that a Catholic chaplain has an advantage over the protestant chaplain who relies on scripture alone to explain everything. Very often the problem is one of reason and good sense, one that is more amenable to reason than to faith, as such. It belongs to Catholicism to respect both reason and revelation as if they belonged together, which they do.
Here I want to talk about philosophical studies for the priesthood. I take as my models Msgr. John Whipple and Msgr. Robert Sokolowski, both diocesan priests in the school of philosophy at the Catholic University of America, both good priests and fine scholars. But first I would like to recall the lecture that I gave at the Bridgeport seminary several years ago. It was later published as an appendix to my book, The Life of the Mind. The lecture was called “Reading for Clerics.” In 2011, at the Theological College at the Catholic University of America, I gave a talk, entitled “Liberal Education and the Priesthood.” It was later published in the Homiletic & Pastoral Review.3
In both of these lectures, I wanted to point out something that I learned in a most graphic way from C. S. Lewis’ book, An Experiment in Criticism.4 The philosophic enterprise begins, I suppose, when we first take seriously the admonition of the Delphic Oracle. Socrates often quoted it, namely, that we should “know ourselves.” To “know ourselves” also means taking up Socrates’ other famous admonition, in the Apology, that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” But let us suppose that we, in fact, do know and examine ourselves, clearly no mean feat, as it is so easy to deceive ourselves about ourselves. Even with a good insight into ourselves, we still would not know much, even if we were Aquinas who seemed to know just about everything. We all remember that shortly before St. Thomas died, he stopped writing. He looked at all that he had written and realized that, compared to God, all he knew was “but straw,” as he quaintly put it.
We could go two ways with this incident from Aquinas. We could decide that it was not worth the effort if, after a lifetime of study, we knew very little even about our specialties, let alone about ourselves and others. Or, as is much the better way, we could be delighted in knowing what we did learn, however minimal it might be, compared to everything out there available to be known.
The correct answer is the first option.
The Great Depression was maybe the most devastating economical periods in the 20th century for the United States. After the stock market crash of 1920 the effects were widely felt. The people blamed the United States government for the crisis and they expected them to interfere and fix it. <span />
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