A major difference in the 1860s is that nobody would have seen cannabis as a bad thing

Did You Know? is a new series from The Growth Op exploring the most interesting stories from years past about cannabis. Today, we’re reliving the magic of the Doomsday Seed Vault, tucked away on a Norwegian Island, where more than 20,000 cannabis seed varieties are safely stored for future generations. What pot tale should we explore next? Let us know in the comments.

Union general Ulysses S. Grant famously fought the civil war in an alcoholic haze.

The North is believed to have won battles for the singular reason that, unlike the blockaded South, they could get their troops absolutely blasted on coffee.

The war also left an estimated 400,000 injured soldiers addicted to morphine. One of them, John Pemberton, would later try to kick smack by inventing a cocaine-laced tonic named Coca-Cola.

But amid the drifting musket smoke of the War Between the States, there is evidence that at least a few of the blue and the gray may have been high on cannabis.

The evidence is a series of 1860s American newspaper advertisements for “Hasheesh Candy.” “A pleasurable and harmless stimulant,” read one 1862 ad in Vanity Fair.

One particularly long-winded advertisement in the Good Samaritan and Daily Physician touted hasheesh candy as a cure-all beloved by both sides of the bloody conflict.

The company claimed they had received a letter from Ulysses Grant praising hasheesh candy as “of great value for the wounded and feeble.”

Grant’s Confederate rival, Robert E. Lee, even praised hash as a strategic advantage. “I wish it was in my power to place a Dollar Box of the HASHEESH CANDY in the pocket of every Confederate Soldier, because I am convinced that it speedily relieves Debility, Fatigue and Suffering,” he allegedly wrote.

There were no advertising standards councils in the 1860s, so these quotes should be accepted with a hefty dose of skepticism. For one thing, they appear in no official biographies of either Lee or Grant.

And, with a civil war to fight, it seems unlikely that either general had time to be sending fan mail to an obscure candy drug company.

But hasheesh candy was just one of a handful of patent medicines from the era boasting about the benefits of “extract of cannabis indica.” A product called James’ Extract of Cannabis Indica claimed to purify “all the fluids of the human system.”

Meanwhile, it’s entirely likely that some raw cannabis was getting into military ranks, particularly in the Confederacy. The South was the only side of the warring states that shared a border with Mexico, where “marihuana” was already being rolled into cigarettes.

A century later, cannabis would emerge as a much more influential factor in the Vietnam War. According to a 1971 U.S. Department of Defense report, more than half of the Vietnam-era U.S. military had used marijuana.

A major difference in the 1860s is that nobody would have seen cannabis as a bad thing. The United States of 1860s at the time had some incredibly suffocating social strictures by the standards of today. But when it came to drugs and privately owned weapons almost everything was fair game.

There were consumer benefits to this pre-FDA world: A Civil War-era American could walk into a general store and buy anything from moonshine to cocaine to cheap, uninspected bacon without so much as flashing an I.D. card.

But then again, a total lack of regulation also had some pretty severe downsides. In 1902, a tainted tonic called Orangeine is estimated to have killed more New Yorkers than the September 11th attacks would a century later.

• Twitter: TristinHopper | Email: thopper@nationalpost.com