Would we have Coca-Cola without the Civil War’s final battle?
Two weeks ago, I shared the story of the Civil War’s final battle, the Battle of Columbus, and how a freed slave named Horace King had designed and built the bridge that enabled Union troops to easily win. It was a battle that almost didn’t happen because General Lee had already surrendered seven days earlier, but neither side had heard the news yet.
In telling that story, I didn’t have room to talk about another way that battle had global implications. Without the Battle of Columbus, we may not have Coca-Cola today.
Among the Confederate soldiers defending Columbus that Easter Sunday 1865 was John Stith Pemberton, a local doctor and pharmacist. While he was leading a cavalry unit on the banks of Chattahoochee River, he was shot, and a Union soldier slashed his torso with a sword. In the days that followed, Pemberton turned to morphine to cope with the pain, like many wounded Civil War soldiers. As a pharmacist, he had ready access to it, but he also knew well its addictiveness and side effects. He soon began mixing various medicines and plant extracts to find an alternative — a quest that would ultimately consume the final two decades of his life.
He sold various concoctions in his downtown Columbus pharmacy before moving to Atlanta in 1869 to broaden his work. By the mid-1880s, he had landed on a recipe that combined wine, kola nut extract, and a recently imported plant extract from South America — cocaine. In the Atlanta Journal, he wrote, “I am convinced from actual experiments that coca is the very best substitute for opium…. It supplies the place of that drug, and the patient who will use it as a means of a cure, may deliver himself from the pernicious habit.” Little did he know just how addicting this new substance would also be.
When Atlanta outlawed alcohol in 1886, Pemberton replaced the wine with a sugary syrup, and his bookkeeper named the new recipe, “Coca-Cola.” On May 8, 1886, he sold the first Coca-Cola from Jacob’s Pharmacy in downtown Atlanta.
For Pemberton though, the accomplishment was anti-climactic. Two years later, as he battled stomach cancer and financial straits, Pemberton sold the rights to Asa Candler for $1,750, who would grow it into an international icon in the decades ahead. Pemberton died months after the sale, ironically spending much of that money to feed his still unconquered morphine addiction.
Imagine a world in which Union troops had gotten word of Lee’s surrender the week before and not attacked Columbus. Imagine if the battle hadn’t resulted in a wounded and morphine-addicted pharmacist who devoted his life’s work to finding an alternative pain reliever.
In Atlanta alone, it’s hard to picture the city without the influence of Asa Candler, long-time company president Robert Woodruff, and others. On a personal level, the organization where I work, Achieve Atlanta, provides need-based college scholarships and is funded from an endowment set up from the early era of Coca-Cola. And more globally, Coca-Cola has brought enjoyment and jobs to many, while also diabetes and obesity for many as well.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget how small, split-second actions — like a soldier stabbing Pemberton on the banks of the Chattahoochee in Southwest Georgia more than 150 years ago — can influence the world for generations.
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PS — For those wondering, Coca-Cola fully removed cocaine from the recipe by 1929.
Sources: The Civil-War Roots of Coca-Cola in Columbus, Georgia by Richard Gardiner; New Georgia Encyclopedia entry on John Stith Pemberton; Wikipedia entry on John Stith Pemberton
