Civil War Primer — by Pat Granstra

 The 1861 Christmas season held few bright spots for Americans on either side of the conflict.

By December of 1861, citizens and soldiers, Union and Confederate, faced the sober realities of a divided nation.  Battles at Manassas in Virginia and Wilson’s Creek in Missouri had resulted in more than five thousand dead, wounded, or missing soldiers.  Smaller engagements, disease, and accidents added to the casualties.  

 Despite these circumstances, Americans observed Christmas.  Newspaper editorials encouraged maintaining traditions to boost morale:  Soldiers would be cheered by receiving gifts from home and knowing that their families, especially their children, had enjoyed the fellowship of the holiday. 

Wives, mothers, and sweethearts sent Christmas packages to their special loved ones; women’s organizations sent boxes filled with food, books, and clothing to companies and camps.  Richmond resident Sallie B. Putnam wrote in her memoirs, Richmond during the Civil War, that the ladies of the Confederate capital diligently knitted socks, mittens, and scarves for soldiers.  According to Putnam, ante bellum Richmond had become so dependant on manufactured goods that most young women had not been taught to knit but gladly learned as their part in the war effort. 

December found the Confederates in relatively good spirits because of rebel victories in the major battles of 1861.  In addition, the Union blockage of southern ports had had little effect on some cities, such as Augusta, where storekeepers advertised imported necessities and niceties in local newspapers.   

Other southern cities, however, were less fortunate.  Charleston, where the war began, was tightly blockaded, and most of its businesses had been destroyed by a fire on December 11.  Richmond also struggled under multiple pressures.   Its population had exploded after the city became the capital of the Confederacy.  Thousands of soldiers in training camps around the city drew sutlers, shysters, and prostitutes.  Government officials, reporters, office-seekers, and spies poured into town.  Large military hospitals and prisons stressed the city’s resources, as did the influx of refugee families following battles in northern Virginia.  

Sallie Putnam observed that Richmond families prepared holiday dinners and children received presents in 1861 but that neither the fare nor the gifts compared to those of pre-war years.  An editorial in the Richmond Dispatch urged children not to complain if  “Kris Kringle does not fill the stockings to repletion” but to be  thankful that he kept “the Yankee wolves from their doors . . . enabling them to eat their Christmas dinner in peace and security.”  

For some Virginians, the “Yankee wolves” were already at their doors, or at least too close for comfort.  In One of Jackson’s Foot Cavalry, John H. Worsham tells of a Western Virginia woman who, fearing her home might fall into enemy hands,  decided to protect her family by moving to her mother’s home farther south. She and her five children undertook the journey on a horse.  Two children rode behind her, two others were stuffed into large bags hung on either side of the horse, and she held the fifth in her arms. Marching from Stauton to Winchester with the 21st Regular Virginia Infantry, Worsham met her when she was fifty miles from her destination.    

In a Christmas tradition unique to the South, owners exempted their slaves from most duties between Christmas and New Years, gave them better provisions, and permitted them to assemble to hold their own festivities.  In many cases, slaves were permitted to travel to nearby plantations or homes to visit relatives.  This practice was continued in 1861 because owners feared omitting it could lead to their worst fear, a slave revolt.  With most young white men in the army, slave labor was needed to maintain vital functions for civilians as well as for the military.  Slaveholders hoped that continuing the Christmas tradition, coupled with  propagandizing about brutal, depraved Yankees would engender loyalty among the blacks. 

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People in the North generally did not suffer the material deprivations of their Southern counterparts, but they suffered nonetheless.  They, too, missed their young soldiers and endeavored to send them Christmas boxes. Collectively they suffered from a loss of pride; it seemed incomprehensible that the newborn Confederacy could have so resoundingly and repeatedly bested Union soldiers in battle.  The tally of the first months of the war left northerners feeling vulnerable.  Following a November event, vulnerability turned to fear.

On November 8, the USS San Jacinto stopped the British mail ship Trent en route from Havana to St. Thomas and removed two Confederate envoys from her, later depositing them at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor.  The envoys, James Mason and John Slidell, had been on their way to England where they hoped to negotiate British recognition of the Confederacy.  

The incident, known as the Trent affair,  put the United States on the brink of war with Britain.  On December 23, Britain’s minister in Washington presented demands for the release of the envoys and an apology from the United States for violating international law.  As Britain itself had violated some aspects of relevant international law,  Lincoln and his cabinet discussed the demands for three days, including a meeting at the White House on Christmas morning.  On December 26, they agreed to the British terms.  The fear of an international war evaporated.

 First Lady Mary Lincoln sought to provide Washington insiders brief respite from the war by opening the winter social season with a mid-December levee in the newly-redecorated White House.    

According to Horatio Nelson Taft, Christmas Day in Washington was a pleasant day, “not cold enough to freeze.”  Taft noted in his Diary of a Yankee in the Patent Office that his home was noisy because “our three boys and the two Lincoln boys have been very busy fireing off Crackers and Pistols.  Willie and Thomas Lincoln staid to Dinner at 4 oclock.”

The elder Lincolns hosted a dinner for officials and friends on Christmas Day.  Perhaps Oregon senator Edward D. Baker, to whom Lincoln had made a Christmas Eve visit in Springfield the previous year, would have been on the guest list  had he not been killed at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff in late October.  His good friend in the White House still grieved for the only sitting senator to be killed in battle. 

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Winslow Homer depicted soldiers opening boxes of Christmas gifts for the cover of Harper's Weekly.

The quality of a soldier’s Christmas depended on where he was.  Most troops were in winter quarters, but some fighting took place in December, principally in the Western and Trans-Mississippi theaters.  Often far from supply lines, soldiers in those locations generally endured a bleak holiday season.  For example, John Beatty of the Third Ohio Volunteer Infantry recorded the difficulties encountered while moving from a camp near Louisville, Kentucky to Nashville, Tennessee in December. Heavy rain turned bad roads into quagmires.  In his diary, published with the title The Citizen Soldier, Beatty wrote on December 21 that the Third was “short of supplies–no sugar, coffee, candles .”  

Soldiers in the east, nearer to cities, railroads, and highways, were more likely to receive packages and enjoy a hot meal. The boys from Company B of the first Minnesota, responsible for picket duty along the Potomac River in Maryland, made stew from oysters and fresh milk on Chritmas Day.  Private Samuel Bloomer, unfortunately, did not share his messmate’s taste for oysters and had to content himself with eating bread and molasses on what he terms in his diary “a very dull Christmas.” *

Dull may not have been  most  the popular adjective for describing Christmas in 1861, but neither was Merry.

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How Some Notables Spent  Christmas 1861

•  After the morning cabinet meeting and the dinner with guests, the Lincolns enjoyed a private Christmas with their three sons, Robert, Willie, and Tad.  It was the last Christmas they would enjoy together; eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln would die of typhoid in February.
• Jefferson and Varina Davis observed Christmas in the Confederate White House in Richmond with their four children, including a son born on December 6.
• Congressman Alfred Ely of New York was exchanged and released from Libby Prison in Richmond.  Among the many civilians who blithely drove to Manassas in July hoping to see a Union victory, he had taken refuge behind a tree and been captured.   
• Robert E. Lee spent an unhappy Christmas at Coosawhatchie, South Carolina. On Christmas Day he wrote a letter to Mrs. Lee, then living on the Peninsula, urging her to recall the happy times they had enjoyed at her family mansion in Arlington, rather than lamenting its having fallen into Union hands.
• Ulyssess S. Grant, his wife, and children spent the holiday in Cairo, Illinois.  Grant had been appointed commander of the newly-defined District of Cairo five days earlier.
• Stonewall Jackson took a rare leave and enjoyed Christmas dinner with his wife in Winchester, Virginia.
• James Longstreet spent Chritmas in Richmond with his family.  His three youngest children were ill with scarlet fever; all three would die by the end of January.
• In England, Queen Victoria mourned the death of her beloved consort, Prince Albert on December 14.  Despite being terminally ill, Albert had intervened to help mitigate the British response to the Trent Affair. 

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*”A Soldier’s Christmas — 1861.”  Reprinted with permission from Minnesota History 37 (December 1961) : 34, copyright Minnesota Historical Society.