Civil War Union Generals Tobacco Trading Cards 1889 Edition

The Duke Tobacco Company was the cigarette industry leader in the late 1880s. It was a time of increasing nostalgia for the Civil War Era. Duke stepped in to market its cigarettes wrapped in that nostalgia. Natalie Sweet writes in her essay in the recently published Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America that:

Duke capitalized on Civil War nostalgia and the spirit of national reconciliation as a marketing tool by featuring portraits and histories of Civil War generals in cigarette package inserts. These capitalized on moralistic tales of wartime heroism that also took an ecumenical approach.

Although Duke Tobacco’s founder was a Confederate veteran, the company tried to balance Union and Confederate “Heroes.” Younger Americans were looking for stories of bravery on both sides, and Duke wanted to market tobacco to New York as much as to Richmond. The company had pioneered the trading cards earlier by putting in cards of attractive young women, but these were met with a backlash by religious-minded folks.

The Civil War Generals series differed from the cards showing comely women because they folded out to tell the life story of the general depicted. Using the latest printing technology, the cards depicted the generals and scenes from the war in color. Twenty-five Union and twenty-five Confederate military leaders were the subjects of the cards. While all of the usual suspects were included like Grant, Lee, and Sherman, a number of less widely known figures also appeared. For example, Franz Sigel had his own card. Braxton Bragg might seem an unlikely trading card subject, but at least his card noted that he seemed “to have outlived [his] fame and usefulness.”

The company collected the cards into an “album” that could be obtained by purchasing 100 packs of cigarettes and sending in coupons from each pack.

The Duke Tobacco Company Heroes of the Civil War album can be found here. It includes the brief biographies of each general or admiral.

Here are the Union Generals trading cards as they appear in the Album. Note that all images, including the feature image of Lee and Grant, are from the Album. The Confederate Heroes can be found here.