Last night I thumbed through "Uniforms of the Civil War" By Robin Smith & Ron Field from Lyon Press 2004 (Paperback) and found a photo of a pair of Union Boys smoking pipes on page 128. Of course there is no way to tell the material of the pipes from the photo, but they are slightly different one having a straight sided bowl and the other a rounded belly on the bowl. Both are of what apears to be a dark material with the begining of the stem the same color, what appears to be a metal band (lighter color) and then a darker stem/ mouth piece. The men are holding the pipes with their mouths and not hands.
THere is a photo on page 187 showing a group of Georgian Corn-fed-erates several of whom are smoking pipes, but between the smoke and the long exposure time/movement the pipes are hard to discribe. One appears straight stimmed and another a bow stem. The picture was ttaken in Macon Ga 10 May 1861.
Before anyone asks, No I do not post pictures from copyrighted material and you will have to look them up yourselves.
If the long stemmed clay pipes from colonial times were more common than more modern pipes in the ACW it seems odd that the few pictures I am finding are of more substantual pipes. On the other hand having a likeness made was a pretty big deal, an event where one might want to impress folks, so a more valuable pipe might be more likely to be seen than a common clay one. The field photos might be somewhat the same as they are almost uniformily staged.
Perhaps some one seeking a Master in history might choose to do an original paper on pipes of the War of Northern Aggression.
It seems that folks I have seen with a recognizable cigar tend to be officers. As pre rolled cigars would be fragile compared to a poke of 'baccy I would imagine them to be a good deal more expensive in the field. One pictured Confederate Company grade officer had a tightly rolled cigar not much greater in diameter than his finger. I wonder if the pictures of Union Field grade officers with very thick stogies might be a result ofthe cigar moving during the takeing of the photo. Or they could be that thick and just a tobacco pacifier, as I call the cigar my Brother in law is chewing on, un lit at any moment.
As a kid I worked in the Shade tobacco business, that is the type of tobacco used to make cigar wrappers before paper made from trash tobacco became common. The smell of an un lit cigar or pipe tobacco is still appealing to me though I do not smoke or chew or dip, or sniff, and don't care fro the smell of burning tobacco.
-Bob Hollingsworth