The “Social Dip”:
Tobacco Use by Mid-19^th Century  Southern Women* 

by Vicki Betts 

According to numerous observers of the time, the most distinctive characteristic that set apart many southern women from their Northern sisters was their fondness for tobacco.[1]  Time and again, Federal soldiers commented about encounters with snuff-dipping or pipe-smoking women and girls in the Confederacy, and the habit occasionally prompted remarks from regional sources as well.  While not encouraging modern reenactors to pick up a health-threatening activity for authenticity’s sake, this article will provide the historical background for women’s tobacco use, and offer alternatives, if desired, for particular personas.

 
                When Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World, he found the natives already using tobacco for both ceremonial and medicinal purposes.  By 1612 settlers were cultivating the plant in Virginia, and it soon became the chief trade commodity with Europe.  After the American Revolution, the cash crop spread into Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri, where a rich culture featuring tobacco followed the crop into the frontier, both North and South.  Earliest usage centered around the pipe, with inhaled snuff gaining popularity among the upper classes soon after the French and Indian War.  The emergence of Andrew Jackson in the early 19^th century prompted the “common man” to reject snuff as effete, and he turned to chewing tobacco instead.  Cigars joined the “chaw” after the Mexican War (1846-1848) when United States soldiers encountered Latin Americans enjoying this form of smoking.  Cigarettes were still almost unknown by the time of the Civil War, being limited to “the few natives who had acquired the habit during a residence abroad, and to foreigners, French, Italian, and Cuban settlers, who followed the practices of their youth.”  The earliest documented cigarette in the Virginia-Carolina area is mentioned in an 1868 letter from Samuel Schooler, a young man associated with the leading families of Virginia, who noted that it “is unheard of in these parts.”[2]
                Women did not pick up the cigar in a century increasingly concerned with maintaining distinctive spheres for male and female.  However, many among the older generation, occasionally in the rural North, but particularly in the rural South, continued to smoke pipes, including Mrs. Andrew Jackson and Mrs. Zachary Taylor, both presidents’ wives.  When Kate Stone’s middle-aged mother refugeed with her family from Louisiana to Texas during the Civil War, one of the most common questions she was asked was, “Don’t you smoke?”  Governor Henry Allen of Louisiana, meeting with two “country-women—soldiers’ mothers” in Shreveport to discuss their needs, was “too courteous a gentleman not to conform immediately to the customs of ‘Ladies.’  So, as he rather enjoyed a pipe, he would join them very sociably” since “these people are never seated five minutes anywhere, without drawing out this panacea for all their ills, and ‘taking a smoke.’”[3]
                In the country, pipes were often made from materials at hand, including wood, clay, stone, bone, metal, or corncobs.  By 1860, New Yorker Virginia Penny noted that many of the store-bought white clay pipes were imported, due to lower labor costs abroad.  Many were made in Germany.  They sold for one penny each.  The steamboat Arabia, which sank in 1858, and the Bertrand, which sank just after the war, included numerous small red clay pipe bowls and reed stems.  The Bertrand’s were identified as coming from the Pamplin area of Virginia.  Other areas of the South also produced clay pipes, usually as a secondary product of a potter.  Interestingly enough, in upper East Tennessee and in Burke County, North Carolina, pipe manufacturing appeared to be an older woman’s profession.  Sally Michaels used soapstone molds, fired her white clay pipes in the fireplace, and marketed them in nearby Morganton, North Carolina, before, during, and just after the war.[4]
                Harper’s New Monthly Magazine praised the corncob as “the true American pipe. . . This rural pipe is undoubtedly the most agreeable of all others, for a new one is used at every sitting, and the cob, from its dryness and sponginess, draws out, in the process of combustion, all the pernicious oil of the tobacco, and the pith actually increases the fragrance of the tobacco itself.”  Production was easy, with all necessary materials near at hand.  According to Shucks, Shocks, and Hominy Blocks, pipemakers would

age cobs and cut them into blanks (two or three from each cob).  The soft cob centers were removed, and inside and out, the pieces were trimmed and burnished down to the hard, woodlike barrel or cylinder.  Bottom plugs were fixed in the bowls, and then were ready for drilling stem holes and inserting stems.  Hollow plant stems from wild honeysuckle, elderberry, or the easily replaceable dried goldenrod served well as pipe stems.[5]

Others used sections of switch cane for stems.
                Throughout the South, tobacco was often grown in garden patches for family use, and the leaves spread out on roofs of outbuildings or hung in barns to dry.[6]  Storebought tobacco remained popular, although it is difficult if not impossible to differentiate possible male and female preferences from store ledgers, probate records, and newspaper advertisements.  By the latter 1830s many of the younger generation of Southern women had developed a tobacco practice distinctive to their region, especially when contrasted to the growing anti-tobacco sentiment among reform-minded Northern women.  They did not take snuff, a dry, finely powdered tobacco, in their noses, a method that had largely disappeared in both areas.  Instead, Southern women began to “dip” it into their mouths.  Daniel Hundley in his Social Relations in Our Southern States (1860) described the process:

The usual mode is, to procure a straight wooden toothbrush—one made of the bark of the hickory-nut tree preferred—chew one end of the brush until it becomes soft and pliant, then dab back into the mouth again with the fine particles of snuff adhering; then proceed to mop the gums and teeth adroitly, to suck, and chew, and spit to your heart’s content.  Ah!  it is almost as decent as smoking cigars, and it is fully as distingue’ as chewing tobacco![7]

                Prior to the war, much of the snuff was professionally processed, sometimes including flavorings.  Two company brands dominated Southern newspaper advertisements—Peter Lorillard in New York, a company founded in 1760, and Garrett & Sons.  Lorillard produced the most common brand mentioned in accounts—Maccaboy, a brown snuff.  They also marketed Demagros, Fine Rappee, Coarse Rappee, Pure Virginia, Natchitoches, American Gentleman, and Copenhagen brown snuffs, and Scotch, Fresh  Scotch, High Toast Scotch, Irish High Toast, Fresh Honey Dew Scotch, and Lundyfoot yellow snuffs.  Lorillard sold their product both in bottles and in bulk to stores.  Virginia Penny reported seeing women in factories putting up snuff in jars, bottles, and varnished tobacco stained bladders.  The nicotine habit for women appeared to be growing.  The National Almanac and Annual Report for the Year 1864 stated that in 1859 and 1860, 11,354 pounds of snuff were produced in the United States, rising to 17,703 pounds in 1860 and 1861.  Output dropped, however, to 7,914 pounds in 1861 and 1862, probably due to the elimination of most of the Southern market.  In Philadelphia alone, in 1862, four mills employed fifty hands, at a capital investment of $80,000, no small amount for that period.[8]
                Some snuff was also imported.  Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper carried a running advertisement for “Oco or Dental Snuff,” a “tobac en poudre dentifrice” endorsed by Paris as “the most useful and elegant toilette article in the world,” “divested of its objectionable qualities, and retaining its powers as a disinfectant and detergent.”  It came in two forms—“Silver-Banded Oco, Designed expressly for the Northern market—retains all of its powers as a dentifrice—though greatly reduced in its stimulating properties” and “Golden-Banded Oco, retains all its natural strength and pungency,” presumably for the Southern market.[9]
                The type of wood used for “brushes” was a matter of personal choice.  While Hundley mentioned hickory, the Nashville Dispatch described althea twigs.  An Atlanta newspaperman reported cherry sticks, but Charles Lanman saw soft pine sticks in Alabama.  A recent informal survey among family and friends brought recollections of grandmothers and great-grandmothers using black gum, sweet gum, elm, and peach, with the ladies usually adamant about their preferred species of tree.  When the habit crossed class lines, the quality of the accessory improved.  According to Billings the very wealthy owned brushes with silver tips![10]
                Snuff containers from the mid-19^th century, either jars or boxes, have been difficult to locate and identify, even after consulting the Museum of Tobacco Art and Culture in Nashville.  Period sources simply say “snuff-box,” “very nice round boxes with lids,” “a small bottle of snuff,” “a little open mouth bottle,” “fancy snuffboxes of papier-mache or japanning” and “a rose-wood snuff-box richly inlaid with gold.”  One prime example, however, is currently on display at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia.  Corporal John O. Casler, 33^rd Virginia Infantry, “liberated” a snuff box from the pocket of a dead Federal soldier.  It is made of wood, approximately one inch deep, two inches wide, and three inches long, with a black lacquer finish.  On the lid, lengthwise, is printed in gold “Help yourself,” surrounded by fancy gold pen embellishments and a lined notched rectangle, also gold.  The lip of the lid may identify it as a “planewood snuff box” with a “Laurencekirk hinge” made in Scotland during the 19^th century.  Its size and fragility, along with the lack of a snuff habit among most young Federal soldiers, might indicate that the original location of this attractive container was on a parlor table in a Southern home.[11]
                What sort of Southern woman dipped snuff, smoked a pipe, or even, as a last resort, chewed tobacco?   She could be either black or white.  She also tended to be rural rather than urban, although that eliminated relatively few in this overwhelmingly agricultural region.  Accounts appear from Texas (where Olmstead called it a “Virginia habit”) and Arkansas, all across the South to Georgia and the Old Dominion.  It seemed to be a nearly universal habit in northern Mississippi and Alabama.  A Federal refugee aid worker in Nashville declared that she “could not recall a single instance of women or good sized girls who did not use tobacco in some form.  A young girl, a refugee from Northern Alabama, who was present, was asked if she knew of any women or girls in her section who did not smoke.  Only one—her granddaddy’s folks, she said; the old man was opposed to tobacco; but his was the only family that she knew who did not use it.”   An 1863 commentator estimated that “more than two-thirds of the Georgia women one sees on the railroad and at the hotels, use snuff for chewing, or ‘dipping,’ as it is called.”  John Aughey, a Virginian, estimated that among poor white Southern women in his state “scarcely one in fifty of this class is exempt from the disgusting habit. . . . Every five of these will use a two-ounce paper of snuff per day.”[12]
                As noted, the practice was extremely widespread among the lower classes, although not uncommon among the yeoman, or “second class respectability of the South.”  Even some among “otherwise intelligent members of the Southern Middle Classes” and those “who had in every way the appearance of being ladies” dipped.  Young ladies on trains who upbraided gentlemen for smoking in their presence, had no qualms about dipping and “spurting their tobacco juice through the aperture [window] with all the gusto and nonchalance of a couple of Jack Tars off a cruise.”  Little Celine Fremaux, who refugeed out of Baton Rouge to Port Hudson, stayed at the house of a friend whose new wife had a strange habit.

I was never so astounded in my life. . . . I afterward found out that they were ‘Dipping,’ a past time indulged in by many ladies in out of the way country places.  Later I heard nice ladies speak of her quite as an equal.  So it was only my narrow mindedness that made me at that time think that ladies were those who were like us, and our circle of friends.[13]

                Courting-age girls and young women more commonly dipped than smoked, which shocked both Northern and Southern soldiers unaccustomed to the practice.  An Illinois captain in Scottsboro, Alabama, called at a house with three young women.  “Each of them had a quid of tobacco in her cheek about the size of my stone inkstand, and if they didn’t make the extract fly worse than I ever saw in any country grocery, shoot me.”  John Tallman wrote from Vicksburg:  “Thare are some nice looking girls, but they will chew tobaco, Sweet little things.  Don’t you think ‘I’ for instance would . . . make a nice showing rideing along in a carriage with a young lady, me spitting tobacco juice out of one side of the carriage and she out the other . . . wall aint that nice, oh, cow!”  Southerner Robert Patrick, riding the train between Atlanta and Dalton, commenced a flirtation with

a very pretty young lady. . . . I noticed that she was constantly spitting some dark colored fluid from her mouth.  I thought she had the toothache, and had perhaps something in her mouth to cure it.  I looked on the floor and there was a great puddle at her feet.  It resembled tobacco juice very much, and by George it was tobacco juice, for I saw her spit out the old chew and put in a fresh one.  I ‘wilted.’  A soldier sitting near me remarked, ‘she is might good looking but she is awful on tobacco.’

Philip Daingerfield, of the 13^th Arkansas Infantry and Washington Artillery, found himself after the Battle of Franklin back in the Tupelo neighborhood of a pretty young lady who had visited him while he was sick two years previously.  “I found, oh I found (accidentally) that my pretty Josephine ‘dipped!’  Dipped snuff!  Alas, alas!  How rude the awakening.  The sweet ideal shattered irreparably.  For no conceivable future enchantment could reconstruct that ideal—with a snuff stick in her mouth.”[14]
                The social acceptability of either smoking or dipping varied from community to community.  Among some young women,

There is nothing that will more surely and quickly bring a stranger into the fellowship and good graces of the ladies than to join them in their pet habit of snuff-rubbing.  It seems to form a bond of friendship which they regard as sacred as the vows of wedlock. . . . “will you dip with me?” is the usual way of putting the invitation, when the box is drawn from the pocket and rapped slightly on the cover, sometimes by all present, who thus signify their readiness to ‘dip,’ then it is repassed open to all, and the ‘dipping and rubbing’ begins in earnest.

If young gentlemen are present, they “generally join them in this unique use of snuff, as they are always sure to be invited and urged if they decline, and to merit their favor of course they must appear social. . . . But the maid is happiest of all when with her lover she sits face to face, and they ‘dip’ together from the same magic plant—tobacco.”  Charles Wills confirmed this was the case in Iuka, Mississippi.

At tea parties, after they have supped, the sticks and snuff are passed round and the dipping commences.  Sometimes girls ask their beaux to take a dip with them during a spark.  I asked one if it didn’t interfere with the old fashioned habit of kissing.  She assured me that it did not in the least, and I marveled.

Thomas Knox found

little concealment practiced in the custom of snuff-dipping.  At one house where they called, a middle-aged woman held her snuff-stick in her mouth all the time she was talking to them, just as a man might hold a cigar there, and an older woman sat by the fireplace smoking a corncob pipe with the utmost indifference to the presence of the young visitors.

Some women smoked in public, but used the “finger and dipping-stick on the sly.”  Others smoked behind the house or dipped only in private.  In Texas during the 1840s, John Lockhart described the women who gathered behind the church after services:  “The elderly ones would draw their pipes from the long calico bag and have a good smoke, while the younger set would draw from their dress pocket the box and brush and have a social dip.”[15]
                Dipping could have some humorous consequences, besides dampening the ardor of a fastidious young man.  When Fenner’s Battery of New Orleans staged an entertainment at  Resaca, Georgia, in 1864, one of the soldiers, costumed as the heroine “Lelia,” “addressing her lover, ‘Rinaldo,’ from the window, vows, among other things, that she loves him better than snuff; and when, instead of ‘Rinaldo’ at the cross roads for the elopement, she is surprised and abducted by the pirate, Zimluco, she goes off struggling with her snuff-stick firmly clenched between her ruby lips.”  Near Memphis, a Federal picket stopped the carriage of a planter and his wife, demanding that they get out and be searched.  The planter cooperated, but the lady kept her seat.  Twice more the captain requested that she step down, and finally the husband insisted.

She obeyed and quite a parcel dropped under her dress.  The captain snatched it up thinking he had captured a lot of quinine, or some other valuable prize, but the husband laughed and said, “She dips, Captain, she dips.”  The captain motioned the blushing woman back into the carriage and then sheepishly handed the lady her snuff.[16]

                The purported health benefit of snuff had been as a dentifrice, imparting to the teeth “that peculiar brilliancy for which the ladies of Southern Europe are so justly celebrated.”  “[I]t is claimed that it whitens and preserves the teeth and sweetens the mouth, and produces a beneficial effect on the lungs, all of which is true or not, just as you choose to believe.”  Others thought that it “gives lustre to the eye and a freshness to the cheek rarely surpassed.”  Old women dipped “as it made them feel young again.”  It “affords an exhilarating pleasure to those who practice it,” “a pleasant sort of mild intoxication.”  “Everywhere I marked only pleasant and soothing effects from the use of tobacco.”[17]
                Even in the mid-nineteenth century, however, others noted tobacco’s harmful effects, including addiction.  Due to snuff, “the gums are inflamed, the teeth are discolored, the lips are shriveled, and the complexion is sallow.  The throat is dry and irritated, and there is a constant desire to expectorate.”  John Aughey agreed, adding that “the habit leads . . . to nervous disorders of every kind.  Those who indulge in it become haggard at a very early age.”  Dr. Thomas F. Green, superintendent of the Georgia State Lunatic Asylum, reported in 1860 that

The practice of snuff dipping or of rubbing, is by far the most objectionable mode of using tobacco and more certain than any other to interfere, promptly and seriously with a healthy state of the nervous system, and disorder the functions of the most important organs.  Mothers who indulge in this baneful practice, to the extent that some females do, need not be surprised to find their offspring imbeciles in mind and body. . . . If they must use tobacco we advise them to quit dipping and go to smoking, it is less injurious and more genteel.[18]

                The Civil War and the resulting blockade affected tobacco usage even in the South.  Northern sources of processed and flavored snuffs were eliminated, driving up prices as early as 1862.  Kate Cumming, in Okolona, Mississippi, visiting “a very nice family where there were two very pretty girls, both quite young,” listened to their “many lamentations at the high price of snuff.”  In January of 1863 a writer from LaGrange, Tennessee, reported that “the rebel women are suffering grievously for the want of snuff.”   A Mrs. Elkins of Georgia, whose home lay in Sherman’s path, “lamented [the] deprivation of good snuff since [the] war” to Henry Hitchcock, one of Sherman’s staff officers.  “[I]f she could get good snuff [she] wouldn’t begrudge hardly anything else.”  A correspondent of the Chicago Journal with Rosecrans’ army wrote:  “Just here and now, tobacco, and not cotton is king.  Negroes will sing, dance, or cry for it, and the siftings of a soldier’s pocket are eagerly scraped up by the natives, and the little brooms [snuff brushes] speedily ‘raise a dust’ in it.”  With Northern sources largely eliminated, advertisements for Southern mills began to appear, such as J. L. Jones & Brother, Tally Ho, NC, “manufacturers of an excellent article of Snuff.”[19]
                Snuff consumption and pipe smoking picked back up soon after the war and continued among rural southern women into the early twentieth century.  Although many brands of dry snuff are still available in regional grocery stores, the image of a short stick protruding from a woman’s lips is no longer familiar to most people under the age of sixty years.  A mention of the habit of those older, however, often brings a chuckle and a flood of grandmother memories. 

Illustrations—

“Pictures of Southern Life—Snuff Dippers.”  Engraving from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, February 6, 1864.  Photograph by Katherine Wetzel, courtesy of the Museum of the Confederacy.

Photograph—Mid- to late-19^th century clay pipe, reportedly used by Nancy Dawson White (1818-c.1910) or her daughter, Mary Susan White Cook (c.1842-1910), of Crawford County, Missouri.  From the collection of Elizabeth Bowling.  Photograph by Mark Kemph, St. Louis.

Mid-19^th century snuff box with gilt embellishments and “Help Yourself!” on the lid.  Original in the collection of the editor (Susan Lyons Hughes, Frankfort, KY) 

                If tobacco usage is to be part of the interpretation of your character, how can it be done effectively?  If you already smoke cigarettes, switch to a pipe.  Many merchants carry both white and red clay pipes—either color with a reed stem would be appropriate.  Corn cob pipes are easy to reproduce following the instructions given.  Urban reenactors may purchase dried field corn or cobs at many large hardware stores—check the squirrel feeder area.  Even if tobacco is never used, the pipe can serve as an interesting prop, with the excuse that the home patch was raided by the soldiers, and there is no cash to buy any more at the store.  Tobacco pouches can follow the general design used by soldiers and illustrated in many books on uniforms, accoutrements, and accessories.
                Fake snuff can be made of cocoa mixed with sugar, although the blend is usually swallowed and doesn’t make strong dark spit.  The sugar itself is not good for long exposure to the teeth.  Brushes are as close as the nearest tree, species of your choice, and just having the end sticking out of the mouth may be sufficient.  Brass snuff boxes are sold by several merchants, as are very small tin cans with removable lids.  A tight closure is an absolute necessity with either real snuff or cocoa and sugar.  Two original snuff jars are pictured in Civil War Collector’s Encyclopedia (Volumes III, IV, and V) by Francis Lord (p. 169) and these are consistent with other originals examined.
                As a last resort, some women would turn to the manly art of chewing tobacco.  A mint moist snuff is currently on the market that might fill that need.  It would probably also provide a rather satisfying spit for an indignant secesh woman, aimed suspiciously near a pair of shiny black federal boots!