December 29, 1864---A Peace Conference?

DECEMBER 29, 1864:     

Confederate President Jefferson Davis receives a letter from Northern Unionist Francis Preston Blair Sr., who invites himself to Richmond in order to "explain the views I entertain in reference to the state of the affairs of our Country."  Blair wants to sound Davis out on peace terms. The meeting has the silent blessing of President Lincoln, who knows it will come to nothing but needs the politically powerful Blair’s help to corral conservative Republican votes for the Thirteenth Amendment. 

 

The Blair townhouse in Washington D.C. is today the official guesthouse for the White House.

Elsewhere in the world, the National Association of Ireland is founded in Dublin to obtain Irish independence by fostering cooperation with English radicals.      

December 28, 1864---"Strange Christmas weather you will say."

DECEMBER 28, 1864:     

The first schools open for Freedmen in the Sea Islands of South Carolina. This daring experiment granted the newly-freed slaves land and tools to work the land. Northern teachers came to the Sea Islands to educate the blacks in the 3 Rs. In their wake, however, came abolitionist Congregationalist missionaries who tried to woo the slaves away from the Southern Baptist sect most of them knew. This caused stress between the freedmen, the teachers, and the missionaries. W.J. Richardson, one of the leaders of the education movement wrote a letter to a supporter, which reads in part:

Beaufort S. C. Dec 28, 1864

Rev. M. E. Striety [ ]

Dear Brother,

Your letter of the 16^th . . . was duly recvd. . . . [O]ur first installment of Freedmen from Gen Sherman’s army came in to Beaufort on Sunday eve 700 strong, [and] many more are expected to follow. Most of them will be located out of town on the various Plant[ations]. Whether they will enlarge our schools so that more teachers will be needed is more than I can now tell . . . They are about to establish schools on several of the “School Farms” under their own control . . . This transfer will doubtless be best, where all parties can agree, rather than have strangers come into these schools . . . Your construction of my call for teachers is correct . . . 

I hope to visit Savannah soon and see what is wanting there . . . Sherman’s glorious march . . . fills us all with joy and thanksgiving. I have seen numbers of his men and several of the chaplains, they all speak of their march as a “pleasure excursion”. I think Gen Sherman has an army of invincibles. His men have the utmost confidence in him and are ready to do whatever he asks of them.

Our weather is like May now. Frogs, Birds and crickets are singing to cheer us and the Thunder is rolling in the heavens as I am writing. Strange Christmas weather you will say

Yours in love

W. J. Richardson

December 27, 1864--- ". . . a drop in the bucket . . ."

DECEMBER 27, 1864:       

Walt Whitman sends a letter to the editors of The New York Times and The Brooklyn Daily Eagle decrying the continued cessation of prisoner exchanges. Such exchanges had ceased when it was discovered that the Confederacy was enslaving or re-enslaving United States Colored Troops rather than paroling them. 

The cessation of the exchanges was undoubtedly morally right, but for Union men taken prisoner it meant that they faced starvation and epidemic conditions in rudely constructed and chaotically managed Southern Prisoner of War Camps. 

Whitman clearly felt that the policy regarding U.S.C.T. cost the Union too high a price, calling their numbers "a drop in the bucket" and ignoring the especial brutalities they experienced as Southern captives. And so Whitman wrote passionately but blindly:

What Stops the General Exchange of Prisoners of War—Three-fourths of Our Men Already Exchanged by Death, or Mental and Bodily Ruin, and the Rest will soon Follow.

To the Editor of the New-York Times:

The public mind is deeply excited, and most righteously so, at the starvation of the United States prisoners of war in the hands of the Secessionists. The dogged sullenness and scoundrelism prevailing everywhere among the prison guards and officials, (with, I think, the general exception of the surgeons,) the measureless torments of the forty or fifty thousand helpless young men, with all their humiliations, hunger, cold, filth, despair, hope utterly given out, and the more and more frequent mental imbecility, I have myself seen the proofs of in so many instances, that I know the facts well, and know that the half has not been told, nor the tithe either. But there is another and full as important side to the story. Whose fault is it at bottom that our men have not been exchanged? To my knowledge it is understood by Col. MULFORD, our capital Executive Officer of Exchange, and also by those among us who have had longest and nearest contact with the secession exchange officers, that the Government of the latter have been and are ready to exchange man for man as far as prisoners go, (certainly all the whites, and, as I understand it, a large proportion of the blacks also.)

Under the President (whose humane, conscientious and fatherly heart, I have abiding faith in,) the control of exchange has remained with the Secretary of War, and also with Major-Gen. BUTLER. In my opinion the Secretary has taken and obstinately held a position of cold-blooded policy, (that is, he thinks it policy,) in this matter, more cruel than anything done by the Secessionists. Ostensibly and officially saying he will not exchange at all, unless the Secession leaders will give us, on average terms, all the blacks they capture in military action, the Secretary has also said (and this is the basis of his course and policy,) that it is not for the benefit of the Government of the United States that the power of the Secessionists should be repleted by some 50,000 men in good condition now in our hands, besides getting relieved of the support of nearly the same number of human wrecks and ruins, of no advantage to us, now in theirs.

Maj.-Gen. BUTLER, in my opinion, has also incorporated in the question of exchange a needless amount of personal pique, and an unbecoming obstinacy. He, too, has taken his stand on the exchange of all black soldiers, has persisted in it without regard to consequences, and has made the whole of the large and complicated question of general exchange turn upon that one item alone, while it is but a drop in the bucket. Then he makes it too much a personal contest and matter of vanity, who shall conquer, and an occasion to revenge the bad temper and insults of the South toward himself.

This is the spirit in which the faith of the Government of the United States toward fifty thousand of its bravest young men—soldiers faithful to it in its hours of extremest peril—has been, for the past year, and is now, handled. Meantime, while the thing has been held in abeyance in this manner, considerably more than one-fourth of those helpless and most wretched men (their last hours passed in the thought that they were abandoned by their Government, and left to their fate), have indeed been exchanged by deaths of starvation, (Mr. Editor, or you, reader, do you know what a death by starvation actually is?) leaving half the remainder closely prepared to follow, from mental and physical atrophy; and even then the remnant cannot long tarry behind. So that the Secretary and the Major-General mentioned, may find their policy work out more even than they calculated.

In my opinion, the anguish and death of these ten to fifteen thousand American young men, with all the added and incalculable sorrow, long drawn out, amid families at home, rests mainly upon the heads of members of our own Government; and if they persist, the death of the remainder of the Union prisoners, and often worse than death, will be added.

WALT WHITMAN.

December 26, 1864---"Many, many thanks for your Christmas gift . . ."

DECEMBER 26, 1864:      

Abraham Lincoln telegraphs Sherman in Savannah:

Many, many thanks for your Christmas gift . . . Please make my grateful acknowledgements to your whole army, officers and men.

The legend of Sherman’s cruelty toward Georgia is so ingrained that it is hard to find people who disbelieve it. Yet Sherman spared Savannah in whole (some say because he had a paramour in the city). But he also had spared residential Atlanta, residential Milledgeville, and the residential districts of scores of other towns. Homes, even plantation houses, were generally let be. Inevitably, there was damage and injury done to homes and to the people in them. Sherman was followed by a host of profiteers, sutlers, emancipated slaves, and others who took what they could when they could. His often unsupervised “bummers” also caused harm despite his strict orders, but not to the degree that the collective memory recalls --- at least not in Georgia.

Railways, roads, and bridges were routinely destroyed, as were cotton gins, mills, warehouses, barns, and anything else that might be of use to the Confederate war effort. Sherman would issue no such order for restraint against homes when crossing into South Carolina, the next target of his March.   

December 25, 1864---Christmas Day; The First Battle of Fort Fisher (Day Three); The Battle of Devil's Gap; A Purloined Leg of Lamb; No Dinner For The Troops

DECEMBER 25, 1864:      

It is the fourth Christmas of the war. People are praying for peace on Earth and goodwill toward men, but for most, particularly in the ravaged South, peace with the Yankees and goodwill toward them both seem afar off.  Thomas Nast publishes this drawing of President Lincoln greeting wandering Confederate soldiers into the White House for Christmas, using Harper’s Weekly to promote reconciliation between the two halves of America. 

Mary Lincoln spends much of the day with her friend, Elizabeth Keckley. It is a difficult Christmas for most Americans. In the North there are far too many empty chairs. In the South, the empty chairs have long since been burned to keep warm.

While Washingtonians, Philadelphians, New Yorkers, and Chicagoans sit down to sumptuous Christmas dinners and speak excitedly about the prospects of a fast end to the war, outside the war goes on. In Georgia, former Atlantans are moving back into their deserted homes for shelter. They spend their days in the ruined downtown searching for food and firewood, and wondering what will come next. A few churches hold Christmas services.

There is little (but some fierce) fighting this day. Overall, this Christmas, which turns out to be the last Christmas of the war, is cold, miserable, and snowy. Virtually everyone spends it hunkered down. People are simply trying to keep warm, particularly the bone-thin Confederates. 

In places on the Richmond-Petersburg line, men in blue begin hollering “Truce! Truce!” and carry food and drink (and even a little purloined liquor) over to their Confederate counterparts:

“Merry Christmas, Johnny Reb!”

“Merry Christmas, Billy Yank!”

“See you in hell, then --- tomorrow.”

“Sure thing --- tomorrow.” 

Someone begins to sing Battle Cry of Freedom and both sides join in with their own words, followed by Silent Night. 

Confederate soldiers for the most part go hungry this Christmas. The Federals by and large, eat well. But there is no cheer this year for the ordinary man in uniform; for most soldiers, Blue and Gray, the day passes drearily. They dream of Christmases gone by. Many men have not been home for Christmas since the tense, secession-haunted winter of 1860. Large numbers of Southerners know they have no homes to return to.

Joseph Cockerham, a Confederate soldier writes to his niece:

Dear Martha,

Your letter came to hand a few days since . . . I have but little news times is very dull out here . . . The soldiers all look sad and lonely.  We have nothing spiritual or refreshing in camp . . . All is calm on the lines in front of Petersburg and Richmond . . .  Rations are rather scanty...

Yours affectionatly, 

Jasper

A Union Private, Levi McCormick, writes home to his wife:

Dear wife  

I will send you a few lines stating how we are  I have bin down with the diarier for about a weak  it has bin the most sevear that I hav ever ha but I feel better to day & I hav washed all of my cloaths & I borrowed some cloathes while mine are drying  I cant write you mutch this time but if I keep wel I will try and write you a interesting leter some of those days  we hav got houses built up wonce more but Christmas was a very dul day hear  we have not had it yet but the war news is good  we have had a despatch from G Shairman  he has done more than we could of asked of him  I hope this will find you all wel  Samey is not very wel  he had a cold  we hav bin very mutch exposed but I dont want to write about   You can sea the reason why I hav not wrote 

I send my love to all from you ever true and loving 

Husband

General John Brown Gordon C.S.A., serving near Petersburg, wrote: 

The one worn-out railroad running to the far South could not bring us half enough necessary supplies: and even if it could have transported Christmas boxes of good things, the people at home were too depleted to send them.

General Josiah Gorgas C.S.A., knowing that the Officer Corps is enjoying hot Christmas dinners while fighting men go hungry and their families starve this winter, wrote bitterly:

A despondent Christmas has just passed, yet people contrived to eat hearty and good Christmas dinners.  The soldiers unfortunately have not even meat, and have had none for several days.  The Commissary General has singly failed in his duties; while there is plenty of food in Georgia there is none here.  There is no sufficient excuse for this.  The food must be brought here, and the means to so provided and organized.

Mary Chesnut confides to her diary:

Oh, why did we go to Camden? The very dismalest Christmas overtook us there. Miss Rhett went with us - a brilliant woman and very agreeable. "The world, you know, is composed," said she, "of men, women, and Rhetts" (see Lady Montagu). Now, we feel that if we are to lose our negroes, we would as soon see Sherman free them as the Confederate Government; freeing negroes is the last Confederate Government craze. We are a little too slow about it; that is all.

Robert E. Lee and John Singleton Mosby confer together over a leg of lamb which Lee admits ruefully, “must have been purloined somewhere.”  He promotes Mosby to a full Colonelcy.

Union soldier Elisha Hunt Rhodes wrote in his diary:

It does not seem much like Sunday or Christmas, for the men are hauling logs to build huts. This is a work of necessity, for the quarters we have been using are not warm enough. This is my fourth Christmas in the Army. I wonder if it will be my last.

Merry Christmas to you all and thank you to all of our troops past and present who sacrifice the holidays and more for our safety!

At Fort Fisher, the Union continues to bombard the fort all day until late afternoon. Making no headway, finally the assault is called off. Edwin Stanton fumes at the War Department in Washington.  

The Battle of Devil’s Gap: 
      

General Nathan Bedford Forrest C.S.A., covering the slow retreat of John Bell Hood’s men, fights off a pursuing Union column near Pulaski , Tennessee. Forrest, who loses only two fights in the war, is undeterred by the recent reversals in Dixie’s fortunes. A singularly resourceful man, Forrest’s cavalry is warmly dressed, well fed, and well-armed on this day. Forrest habitually ignores the informal cease-fire that usually settles over the Civil War at Christmastime. Forrest was, in fact, a conservative iconoclast. 

Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821-1877) was the son of an upcountry Tennessee dirt farmer who died when he was 17. In 1845, he murdered several men in an honor killing to avenge an uncle who had taken him in when his father died. Although Forrest was no Virginia gentleman (he said “ain’t”, “gittin’ along” and “vittles” in polite conversation) and not formally educated, he was intrinsically brilliant. For a while he was a riverboat gambler; after a time he managed to buy the boat and used the profits to speculate in cotton and plantation land. He was also a slave trader. Eventually, he became a millionaire. These successes presaged his military career. 

General Nathan Bedford Forrest

Using his own money, he enlisted as a private in the Confederate army bringing along with him a fully-equipped squadron of cavalrymen. Immediately promoted to officer’s rank, he showed an innate understanding of military tactics, a compulsion for mobile action, and a propensity to gamble, that was second to none. Several times he bluffed his way into bloodless victories, even capturing Union naval vessels. Northerners called him “That Devil Forrest” but Southerners called him “The Wizard,” and he was both. He had little time for officers and gentlemen unless they fought like demons, and was merciless toward Yankees. It is estimated that he killed at least 37 men in combat, and fought several honor duels with fellow Southerners during the war. When asked how he won so many of his battles, he answered, “I gits there fustest with the mostest.”  

For all his military ability, the man had terrible flaws of character. He was bloodthirsty to a fault, generally incapable of compromise, and reflexively belligerent no matter the circumstances. An inveterate racist, he led his men at the Fort Pillow Massacre, and after the war he became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. He quit this office when the Klan became too violent (he was too conspicuous a leader for what was becoming an increasingly secret society). Interestingly, he later spoke out for reconciliation between the races. In the early 1870s he volunteered for the Union army when a war with Spain threatened. General-in-Chief William Tecumseh Sherman, his old nemesis, agreed to commission Forrest, but the diplomatic crisis of the moment passed off, and the Spanish-American War did not occur until 1898. But for a twist of history, “Forrest’s Rough Riders” might have gone up San Juan Hill.    


Forrest died in 1877 of diabetes. 

But that lies in the future. On this sad day of rejoicing, Forrest stains the Tennessee snow with fresh blood.