If you read letters or memoirs from the Southern side of the American Civil War, there's one aspect of living through that era that people bring up over and over again: the lack of coffee.
Coffee had established the hold over American taste buds that it still enjoys today by the mid-1800s. But when the Civil War broke out, the North imposed a naval blockade on the South that lasted the duration of the war, blocking imports of all kinds. Coffee, which doesn't grow anywhere in North America, quickly became scarce. Every bean that came in had to be smuggled past the frowning cannons of Union ships.
As you might imagine, coffee-addicted Southerners began to come off the hinges. They roasted and ground pretty much anything that didn't move, looking for a filler ingredient they could use to stretch out their extremely limited coffee supplies. While many fillers were tried -- acorns, okra, chickpeas -- most settled on the root of the chicory plant.
It's important to note here that I have never seen a contemporary account of drinking chicory coffee where the person reported enjoying it. It's always recounted as a disappointment -- a sacrifice the person is making because, hey, there's a war on. Once the war was over and real coffee could be imported again, Southerners dropped their chicory and never looked back.
Except, it turns out, in New Orleans, where they kept right on drinking it for the next 160 years. They still drink it today.
I grew up in New Orleans, and just today I put "chicory coffee and biegnets" on a wishlist, planning a 60th birthday bash. Boiled crawfish and seafood gumbo, and oyster po-boys and...
I read a diary from Vicksburg, MS and they she did indeed go on about the lack of coffee.
Caffeine all day long is a very Southern thing, between the nonstop coffee, iced tea and Coca-Cola. I remember my gynecologist when I was pregnant with my son telling me he couldn't win telling any woman to quit caffeine he just begged his patients to try and moderate.