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Coffee helped the Union in the Civil War
The North’s fruitful partnership with Liberian farmers fueled a steady supply of an essential beverage
But secession created an opening, and right away, Benson began lobbying the U.S. government to extend “treaties of friendship and commerce” that would allow Liberian farmers to bring in coffee on equal terms with other coffee-producing countries. At the end of August 1864, the Alexandria Gazette in Virginia lamented that the Union troops in Sherman’s siege of Atlanta had “destroyed 500 sacks of genuine Rio coffee” intended for Confederate consumption—about 55,000 pounds in all. Some say that enslaved Northeast Africans—captured and forced across the Red Sea during a 1,300-year period of slave trade that began in the seventh century—may have carried such sustaining snacks onto ships, accidentally transporting the crop to another region that calls itself the birthplace of coffee: Yemen.
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