Poor Joseph Plumb Martin. The Connecticut private had been at it again—eating something a bit iffy to deal with his hunger. This time, it was “an old ox’s liver” that Martin had procured from camp butchers before chucking it into his kettle. The more he boiled it, “the harder it grew,” he recalled, but he ate it anyway. The next morning, Martin’s stomachache drove him to the doctor, who gave him “a large dose of tartar emetic.” After taking the medicine and exercising to encourage it to do its work, Martin promptly “discharged the hard junks of liver like grapeshot from a fieldpiece.”[1]Martin ate a fair amount of offal throughout his service. He sampled “A sheep’s head which” he “begged of the butchers,” and an ox’s milt, or spleen—which also made him vomit.[2] Not all soldiers shared Martin’s predilection for what chefs today refer to fondly as “the nasty bits,” but during the Revolutionary War, British and American soldiers suffered from the curse of bad army food.
Hunger affected people in different ways during and after the War for Independence. Martin’s empty belly drove him to eat food he knew might make him ill. He found hunger such a pervasive problem that he personified it, referring to “The monster Hunger” in his retrospective account of the war.[3] Martin’s memoir offers historians a useful starting point for considering the way that white, male soldiers experienced food deprivation while fighting in places like New York and Connecticut. The fact that his narrative has been published makes the source more accessible to our students, too. As this episode of Doing History makes clear, however, the war stretched from Florida to Nova Scotia and from Boston to the Mississippi, and its chronology creeps backward into the 1750s and 1760s, and forward at least to the 1790s.