Book Review: Feeding Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia
Feeding Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. By Michael C. Hardy. El Dorado Hills, California: Savas Beatie, 2025. Hardcover, 176 pp. $27.95.
Reviewed by Sam Flowers
It is believed that Napoleon Bonaparte was quoted as saying, “An army marches on its stomach.” Whether this is accurate or not, the takeaway is that soldiers and their dependence on food can make or break an army. Michael C. Hardy’s latest book seeks to argue in favor of this logic.
In Feeding Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, Hardy examines the connection between the common soldier and their complex relationship with food. Although perhaps a shorter book than one might expect about a subject so often mentioned by the soldiers, the author packs in numerous primary sources, including a healthy mix of wartime diaries and letters combined with post-war memoirs. Hardy acknowledges that until rather recently the historiography on food and the Civil War has been sparse, but is slowly gaining momentum. As such, it allows Hardy to lean heavily on soldier accounts as evidence rather than secondary sources.
According to Hardy, the Army of Northern Virginia and food make for a complicated relationship. He points out that various circumstances throughout the war determined whether soldiers in the army were properly provisioned or starved. Military logistics, infrastructure, home front care packages, and foraging are some of the subjects he examines to explain how the enlisted men and non-commissioned officers understood and dealt with shortages.
He argues that when it comes to food there are a lot of nuances to consider depending on the individual soldier and the moment of the war under consideration. In camp, improvised supplemental rations and the occasional care packages from home (which often arrived spoiled) were particularly key in the early months of the war as soldiers faced tests in their new roles and with the challenging experiences that came with it. This, in turn, forced many men, both in camp and on campaign, to buy from and trade with local civilians for food. In some cases, like the 1862 Maryland Campaign and the 1863 Gettysburg Campaign, where supply lines stretched past their limits, foraging by force from surrounding towns and farms became almost imperative.
Hardy explains that one of the reasons why the Army of Northern Virginia rarely received rations on a consistent basis was because of Lucius Northrop, head of the Confederate Commissary Department. However, when discussing Northrop, Hardy remains fairly neutral, neither praising his efforts nor criticizing him as a cause of the Confederacy’s downfall. This balance is perhaps a compromise, acknowledging Northup’s performance shortcomings, but also recognizing the governmental limitations that he had to work under. Hardy uses the vast correspondence between Robert E. Lee and Northrop to allow the reader to better understand the army’s troubling supply situation up to Northrop’s removal from office in February 1865. Soon after Isaac St. John replaced Northup, things improved, but by then, the end was near.
Although most of Hardy’s study focuses on the common soldier, he also highlights how officers within the Army of Northern Virginia dealt with their own food issues. Better pay allowed officers more options to obtain consistent and satisfactory amounts of food that was also usually of higher quality. They were also more likely to receive invitations from local civilians to partake in meals than enlisted men.
Another chapter looks briefly at camp servants and enslaved individuals who operated as cooks for the army. Some free men of color received pay for their labor, while others toiled for their soldier enslavers without compensation. While Hardy details how these men cooked and obtained and paid for supplies, their efforts to free themselves, as witnessed in numerous runaway advertisements for camp servants in Confederate newspapers, receives much less attention. Aside from some examples from the Confederate officers’ perspective expressing anger and frustration, the agency of African Americans in the Army of Northern Virginia who sought out freedom was not as well covered as one might expect.
Overall, Feeding Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia is perhaps short in its expected page count, but it is full of pertinent sources regarding food that tap into the morale, emotions, mindset, and sustainability of the common soldiers and officers serving in the Confederacy’s premier fighting force. Readers looking for a quick and fascinating read on a lesser-known but still significant Civil War topic will find Hardy’s study informative.
Sam Flowers is an assistant professor and teaches history at Louisburg College. He received his B.A. from UNC-Charlotte and graduated with his M.A. from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington under the guidance of Angela Zombek, PhD. His thesis looked at the importance of the Overland Campaign from the lenses of military significance, common soldier experience, and memory and memorialization. He is researching multiple topics, including the Third North Carolina Infantry as its war service transitioned, perpetuating Confederate myth and memory. He is also in the process of collaborating with Gene Schmiel in the hopes of creating a revised version of his book, The Civil War in Statuary Hall.
