Civil War Thanksgiving

"Thanksgiving in Camp," sketched on Thursday, November 28, 1861 by Alfred R. Waud, an illustrator for the New York Illustrated News who was with the Army of the Potomac for the length of the war.

What is called Lincoln's proclamation establishing Thanksgiving Day as an annual national holiday was written by his Secretary of State William Seward and merely signed by Lincoln, does not call for annual celebrations but only designates the last Thursday of November 1863 as a day of Thanksgiving, and was not legally binding.  Nonetheless, Thanksgiving Day has been celebrated in the United States on a shared date every year since 1863, whereas it was only intermittently officially recognized, and the dates of local celebrations had varied from one another, in the years prior to then.   What the proclamation did was serve as an acknowledgment that the country itself had institutionalized the holiday already.

Few Americans had spent extended periods of time away from their homes prior to the armies North and South mobilizing 3 million men (and a few hundred women in disguise), so Thanksgiving was an important holiday in army camps.  The folks at soldierstudies.org collect letters from Civil War soldiers and make them available online; one from Charles Morse provides a striking glimpse into Civil War Thanksgiving.

Charles Fessenden Morse was a lieutenant colonel in the Army of the Potomac's 2nd Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, stationed on Thanksgiving Day 1863 outside Tullahoma, Tennessee. The Bob Shaw he mentions in his letter is Robert Gould Shaw, the heroic commander of the equally heroic all-black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.  The two of them had been classmates at Harvard and had fought together in the early days of the war; their steady correspondence since then would go on to provide source material for the film Glory, about Shaw and the 54th.

The three men to whom Shaw asked Morse to give his regards were all killed at Gettysburg the very day Shaw wrote his letter.  Lt. Col. Charles Mudge, the commander of the 2nd Massachusetts, was shot just below the throat while leading his troops into combat; Morse inherited the command when Mudge fell dead. Thomas Robeson and Thomas Fox Jr. were both captains under Mudge; Robeson died of his wounds on July 7, while Fox lingered until July 25.  All told, the 2nd Massachusetts had a casualty rate at Gettysburg of 43%.  Shaw himself was killed at Fort Wagner on July 11 of that year, eight days after writing the letter Morse discusses in this letter, written one hundred fifty years ago today:

We are in the midst of exciting news from the front, yet we have had no particulars.  It is evident, however, that we have taken several thousand prisoners and a large quantity of artillery.

Since the fight at Wauhatchie, there has been no slurring of the Army of the Potomac men.  That little affair was a great thing for us.  By our own and rebel accounts, there is no doubt that our men fought most gallantly there against superior numbers of their old antagonists.

Every train that comes from the South brings a load of prisoners or wounded men, and rumors that fighting is still going on at the front.  It seems to me now, for the first time since the war began, that the rebellion is nearly crushed.  They have not met with any very decisive success for nearly six months, and are now contracted into the smallest territory they have ever occupied.

Atlanta is our important point now; get that, and we have again cut the Confederacy in two, and in a vital place.  What a glorious thing it would be if we could wind up this rebellion before our original three years are out!  It would exceed all my expectations to do this. 

Thanksgiving Day was a very pleasant one, warm and bright as May.  I took an escort of half a dozen cavalry and rode down to the regiment, which is about ten miles from here.  I found them camped very comfortably just outside strong earthworks built to command the railroad bridge over the Elk river.  Colonel Coggswell is in command of the post and has a battery in addition to his regiment.  He has made himself very strong, and could defend the place against a large force.

I took a very quiet dinner with the field and staff.  Of course we could not help thinking of our other Thanksgiving Days in the regiment, and it brought up many sad memories.  At our first dinner at Seneca, Maryland, all our old officers were present; last year there had been many changes, but there were still left a goodly number of the old stock, and we were knit closer together by our losses.  This year I couldn't help a feeling of desolation as I remembered that, of all my friends in the regiment, very few were left.  How little I thought, when we left Camp Andrews, that we should have such a sad experience!

In looking over his trunks for a photograph, Colonel Coggsworth found a letter that had come for me while I was in Massachusetts; he gave it to me, and I found the address was in Bob Shaw's handwriting.  You can imagine how glad I was to get it.  I always thought it a little strange that he had not answered my last letter.  I opened it the first chance I got.  It was mostly a description of his movements to Darien and other places; but at the end he spoke in a very feeling way of our friendship and intimacy, and of his happiness since his marriage.  It was written on the 3rd of July; in it he asked to be remembered to Robeson, Mudge, and Tom Fox; little did he think that, at the moment he wrote, one of them was lying dead on the field of battle, and the other two suffering with mortal wounds.

The men of the regiment had a very pleasant day; they had plenty of geese and turkeys for dinner, and in the evening the brigade band came down from Tullahoma, and gave them some music.  I am glad that our men have each been able to keep this day somewhat as if they had been at home.

I stayed next morning and saw guard mounting done as it is done nowhere else, and then rode back here again. 

Morse went on to serve as provost marshal of Atlanta following the city's Union occupation.  He made it through the war alive, and relocated to Kansas, where he built the Kansas City Stockyards into the nation's second (behind Chicago's) busiest.  Periodically, until his death in 1926 at age 87, he wrote and spoke publicly about his experiences in the war.