A historian’s new look at how Union blockades brought about the defeat of a hungry Confederacy In April 1861, Lincoln ordered a blockade of Southern ports used by the Confederacy for cotton and tobacco exporting as well as for the importation of food. The Army of the Confederacy grew thin while Union dinner tables groaned and Northern canning operations kept Grant’s army strong. In Starving the South, Andrew Smith takes a gastronomical look at the war’s outcome and legacy. While the war split the country in a way that still affects race and politics today, it also affected the way we eat: It transformed local markets into nationalized food suppliers, forced the development of a Northern canning industry, established Thanksgiving as a national holiday and forged the first true national cuisine from the recipes of emancipated slaves who migrated north. On the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Fort Sumter, Andrew Smith is the first to ask “Did hunger defeat the Confederacy?”. Food scholar Smith (Hamburger: A Global History, 2008) considers how food shortages contributed to the demise of the Confederacy. Introducing geographical patterns of American agriculture at the outset of the Civil War, Smith sets up the South�s vulnerabilities in food production and distribution. Before the war, for example, its grain came from the Midwest, and its salt, vital for preserving meat, was imported from Wales. The Confederate government�s various attempts to replace such commodities denied it by Union naval supremacy attract Smith�s astute explanations of their general failure. Rebel officials resorted to printing money, price controls, and confiscations, which may have reflected their resolve to solve supply problems but not an understanding of economics. Inflation, hoarding, and speculation spread widely, as did riots against food shortages. In addition to the way hunger depleted civilian morale, Smith recounts the deleterious effect on Southern armies of the Union�s destruction of farms and railroads; in fact, Lee surrendered when Grant captured his supplies. Smith gives an intriguing and readable response to the ever-popular question of why the South lost. --Gilbert Taylor ANDREW F. SMITH is a faculty member at the New School and editor-in-chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. He lives in New York. 1   Lincoln’s Humbug of a Blockade   Abraham Lincoln was elected the sixteenth president of the United States on November 6, 1860. He opposed the extension of slavery into new territories, and his election convinced many Southerners that it was time to leave the Union. By the time of Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven slaveholding states had seceded, immediately expropriating as much Federal property as they could, including arsenals, forts, military camps, and the United States Mint in New Orleans. Eight other slave-holding states remained in the United States, but any precipitate action by the new administration might tip them into seceding as well. The Lincoln Administration confronted many crises, but the most volatile was what to do with a few remaining Union-held forts in states that had seceded. Fort Sumter was the flashpoint: It controlled the entrance to Charleston, South Carolina’s largest port. The fort was garrisoned by a small army detachment commanded by Major Robert Anderson, a pro-slavery, former slave owner from Kentucky. Anderson attended West Point, where he met Kentucky-born Jefferson Davis and tutored a Creole from Louisiana named Pierre T. G. Beauregard. In 1861, the commander of the Confederate troops stationed in Charleston was Beauregard, who under orders from Jefferson Davis, then the provisional president of the Confederacy, refused permission for Anderson’s garrison to buy food and supplies in Charleston. Instead, Davis and Beauregard demanded that Anderson surrender the fort. Anderson refused. By early March 1861, the fort began to run out of provisions. Anderson told the War Department that “unless we receive supplies I shall be compelled to stay here without food, or to abandon this post.”1 All Loyal Citizens Lincoln’s cabinet was divided about whether to send provisions to the garrison. William Seward, the U.S. Secretary of State, favored withdrawal, as did Simon P. Cameron, the Secretary of War, and Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy. Relieving the fort, they argued, would require an army and a navy that the United States just did not have. Others disagreed. Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, and Montgomery Blair, the Postmaster General, thought that surrendering the fort would be treason, and any such action would dampen the morale of the many Unionists who lived in the slave-holding states. Others feared that withdrawal would be tantamount to official recognition of the Confederacy. Lincoln concluded that if the Union troops evacuated Fort Sumter, the nation would be irrevocably split in two. At a cabinet meeting on March 28, 1861, h