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Salt
of the South
by Clay Coppedge
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LOMETA
- The Civil War
has been called by some historians "The War Between the Salts" because
salt was only slightly less important to the Union and Confederate
armies than ammunition.
The Union had plenty of salt but the South did not. As a result, you
might say that the North salted away the South. Or you may say nothing
of the kind.
Much of the salt used by the Confederate Army was produced about eight
miles south of where Lometa is now, at a place called Swenson Salines.
Before that it was called Salt Creek, one of about two dozen so-named
creeks in the state.
Salt was a precious commodity long before the Civil War. The City
of Jericho was founded almost 10,000 years ago as a salt trading center,
and the demand for salt established the earliest trade routes. Marco
Polo used it like money. Homer called it a "divine substance." The
English word "salary" comes from the Latin word "salarium," which
was a soldier's pay in salt.
Military leaders from Napoleon to George Washington learned, often
the hard way, the value of salt to an army, which was also used as
a medical disinfectant; Napoleon lost many soldiers during his retreat
to otherwise simple wounds because his army had run out of salt.
Salt was used in the Civil War as part of a soldier's diet and for
the cavalry horses and work horses that hauled supplies and artillery.
The herds of livestock necessary to feed an army also depended on
salt.
"Salt is eminently contraband, because of its use in curing meats,
without which armies cannot be subsisted," Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman
wrote in 1862.
By 1865, when the Southern cause was all but lost, the Confederate
manual had this bit of advice for its soldiers: "To keep meat from
spoiling in the summer, eat it early in the spring."
The
Confederate Salt Works at Lometa
operated in a manner common to France and Germany but almost unheard
of in the south. next
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