General Sherman's Christmas

Excerpt

Voting With Their Feet
 
 
Few in the embattled Union states early in 1864 had Savannah on their minds.
Rather, they wondered whether Abraham Lincoln should be nominated for a
second term, let alone keep the White House. In the South, however, the
Savannah News confidently expected to see "the North torn by internecine
feuds, and utterly demoralized in the Presidential election." The results
augured otherwise.
 
By Thanksgiving Day, November 24, newspapers from Confederate Richmond
picked up in occupied towns and railway stations offered complete results of
what was being described, because of its unique military dimension, as the
"bayonet vote." Via the Rebel press, the news reached Major General William
Tecumseh Sherman's troops pushing across Georgia toward Savannah.
Preliminary tallies, including balloting by troops in the field, had been
wired down soon after the polls closed. Unwilling to open what might be an
aborted campaign if the opposition candidate had won, Sherman had awaited
the certainty of Lincoln's reelection before ordering telegraph wires
severed to insulate his army from both North and South.
 
Christmas Eve was a month away. Sherman planned to have his campaign
completed by Christmas. The merry excesses of a plantation holiday were
already diminished by the dark uncertainties of looming Southern defeat.
Traditionally, approaching Christmas meant the festive firing of guns and
their symbolic equivalent, firecrackers, alluded to by a younger Robert E.
Lee when he wrote, wryly, to a recently married lady about her wedding
night, "Did you go off well like a torpedo cracker on Christmas morning?"
Now, as Confederate commander, the harassed Lee heard the crack of guns
daily in Virginia and was unable to send any of his thinning gray line
farther south to contain further Federal encroachments into Georgia.
 
En route eastward, Sherman's bluecoats would have to harvest their own
festive Thanksgiving from "secesh" country. Although the holiday had
originated in colonial Massachusetts in 1621, Lincoln had declared the feast
of turkey and pumpkin pie a national observance in 1863, only the year
before. Confederate president Jefferson Davis preempted what he could of the
occasion the following year by proclaiming November 16, 1864, a day of
prayer for divine guidance, "to restore peace to our beloved country,
healing its bleeding wounds and securing to us the continued enjoyment of
our right of self-government and independence."
 
As the Federals foraged their way eastward, the secession South, harassed
and hungry, now had even less for which to be thankful, and the holiday was
ignored where sweet potatoes, corn, and cotton grew. Bluecoats less remote
from the North were beneficiaries of what Assistant Secretary of War Charles
A. Dana, former managing editor of the New York Tribune, described as "the
great turkey movement"-locally run campaigns to furnish "Thanksgiving boxes"
for the army.
 
From General Sherman's Christmas by Stanley Weintraub
 
GENERAL SHERMAN'S CHRISTMAS. Copyright (c) 2009 by Stanley Weintraub. Used
by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.