NEW YEAR’S DAY,

THE JANUARY 2019 ISSUE

OF THE

CIVIL WAR REPORTER VOLUME NUMBER 22 ISSUE NUMBER 7

NEW YEAR'S DAY, 1864

BY ELIZABETH R. VARON OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

It is easy enough to conclude in hindsight that 1863 was a year of "turning points" -- the Emancipation Proclamation, Gettysburg and Vicksburg most prominent among them -- on the Union's road to victory. Indeed, the sesquicentennial commemorations of 2013 featured a wide array of programs, articles, symposiums, forums and blogs with "turning points" as their theme. But as the year draws to a close, we should pause to remember how uncertain "the situation" still looked to Northerners in the first days of 1864.

Then as now, the dawn of the new year brought a wave of public retrospectives and private reflections on the lessons of the old one.

To survey such assessments from the winter of 1863 and 1864 is to be reminded that the Northern public was deeply divided, and that partisan allegiances formed the lens through which observers took stock of the progress of the war.

Predictably, supporters of Lincoln's Republican Party attributed the great successes of the year, among them securing of the border states, Tennessee and the Mississippi River, to the administration's policies.

John Bell Hood was a U.S. military officer who served as a Confederate general during the Civil War (1861-65). A graduate of West Point, Hood joined the Confederacy in 1861 and gained a reputation as a talented field commander during the Peninsula Campaign and the Second Battle of Bull Run in 1862.

Hood served as a division commander at the Battles of Antietam and Fredericksburg, and lost a leg and the use of one of his arms after being severely wounded at the Battles of Gettysburg and Chickamauga in 1863.

He was then promoted to full general in 1864 and served as independent command over the Army of Tennessee during the Atlanta Campaign.

His aggressive tactics ultimately proved futile against William T. Sherman's larger Union force, and later suffered a series of bitter defeats during the Franklin-Nashville Campaign in late 1864.

The trust Lincoln had reposed in Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, the demoralizing effect of the Emancipation Proclamation on the Confederate war effort, Lincoln's enforcement of the Conscription Act -- these had made "the progress of the last year ... most marvelous," as the Revered T. A. Goodwin put it in a Jan. 1, 1864, letter to The Christian Advocate and Journal.

Abolitionists took a special pride in the nation's "change of moral position" over the course of 1863; the Union's embrace of emancipation marked "the beginning of the end" of the slaveholders' rebellion, according to a retrospective published in The Atlantic Monthly in January 1864.

The antislavery press took note of AfricanAmerican commemorations of the first anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. "True Freemen we stand/ To-day on this land/ With our destiny linked to the nation's," proclaimed a poem read on New Year's night 1864 at Israel Bethel Church in Washington.

These themes are captured in Thomas Nast's rendering of "New Year's Day" for Harper's Weekly in January 1864: the print contrasts the flourishing state of the Union Army, and the joy of slaves at their emancipation, with the dire conditions in the Confederacy.

a

NEW YEAR'S DAY DURING THE CIVIL WAR BY THOMAS NAST 1864

And yet this pride in the progress of the war effort did not translate into a consensus that victory was imminent. The Northern public had learned too well of the Confederates' tenacity -- as Lincoln's secretary William O. Stoddard put it in one of the dispatches he sent anonymously to The New York Examiner, the "rebels are to have a long winter in which to recuperate their failing energies ... the returning spring will find us still in the field, with armed masses of rebels in our front." History shows, "if it teaches us anything," he continued, "that a nation ... will endure a vast amount of mere everyday hardships and privations."

As Stoddard noted, the Union rank-and-file was even more cautious than civilians in essaying predictions about the close of the war.

Josiah Marshall Favill, an officer in winter quarters with the Army of the Potomac, wrote in his diary in January of 1864: "There is not much talk of the end of the war," for the Confederates had "prolonged the contest so unexpectedly that one is loathe to express any opinion respecting the ultimate collapse." He added, somberly, "They will no doubt, fight to the death, in the last ditch."

Looking forward to 1864, Lincoln's supporters were hopeful that the Union victory would eventually come, but only if the Union had "another year of progress like the last," to quote Stoddard. And the prospects for such a year were clouded, not only by Confederate resilience but by the recalcitrance of Lincoln's opponents in the North. War Democrats and conservative Republicans marked the turn of the new year by noting the signal victories of 1863, but they argued that such victories had come "despite all the blunders committed at Washington" by Lincoln and the War Department, a Jan. 1, 1864, editorial in The New York Herald insisted.

The emphasis among this loyal opposition was on the missed opportunities of 1863 -- those particularly Gen. George G. Meade's failure to follow Gen. Robert E. Lee's army after Gettysburg and destroy it.

For the Union to prevail, a New Haven Democratic newspaper editorialized, looking forward to the fall presidential contest, the "conservative masses" in the North would have to effect "a change in the personnel of the federal Administration." Lincoln's leadership had plunged the nation into debt, abrogated the civil rights of white Northerners, and covered "the land with desolation and mourning." Only a Democratic president could "rescue what is left of our fair country from parricidal hands," the editorial concluded.

The Copperhead press offered up even bleaker and more bitter assessments of the "situation" at the dawn of 1864. The Wisconsin Daily Patriot editorialized on Jan. 2, 1864, that the "wasted, distracted condition" of the Union was attributable to the "wild, reckless, piratical crew" in charge of the government, and lambasted War Democrats for deferring, in search of patronage spoils, to the Republicans.

Not to be outdone, C. Chauncey Burr, the editor of the Peace Democrat journal The Old Guard, lamenting on the state of the Union, wrote: "The people are blindly drifting through blood and horrors unparalleled, into social anarchy and utter ruin." Invoking the longstanding charge that the Republicans were disunionists who willfully brought on and then extended the war to advance their radical social agenda, Burr

insisted that Lincoln and his followers were implacably hostile to the very idea of peace. War was the vehicle of their "avarice and revenge"; peace would end their "malice and plunder." And so peace was impossible so long as Lincoln's "mongrel" oligarchy, which had "corrupted and broken down the natural distinctions of race," remained in power.

The coming year would prove Burr and his ilk to be poor judges of the state of Northern public opinion, and particularly of the Union soldiers' frame of mind. For while they were loath to predict victory and peace, countless soldiers greeted 1864 by renewing their pledge to see the war out.

Stephen Rollins, an Illinois infantryman stationed at Vicksburg, Mississippi, wrote, presciently, on Jan. 2, 1864:

"My heart sickens at the thought of our once happy country, now wrenched by civil feuds, and weltering in the blood of brothers. But still I would not give up one single principle of our free institutions to stay this carnage of human life, but rather would carry on the war a hundred years than sacrifice principle for the sake of peace ... The work is not yet done. Many a hard-fought battle must be added to the historic battle-grounds of the '61 war, ere the bloody strife shall cease."

Northerners at the dawn of 1864 did not trust in "turning points." Instead they struggled in vain to glimpse victory, through the veils of grief, loss, rivalry and mistrust.

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NEW YEAR'S DAY DURING THE CIVIL WAR BROUGHT LITTLE

CELEBREATION

BY TOM EMERY

New Year's Eve and Day mark the traditional end of the holiday season and are celebrated by millions of Americans. But in the Civil War and other American conflicts, there was little cause for celebration as the calendar changed from one year to the next.

On the last day of 1862, thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers clashed in the first day of battle at Stones River, Tenn., one of the bloodiest engagements of the western theater. After a successful effort on December 31, southern commander Braxton Bragg sent a telegraph during a respite on the following day proclaiming "God has granted us a Happy New Year."

Bragg's declaration proved premature, as the Federals responded on January 2nd. to end the battle in a draw. Some 12,900 Yankees and 11,700 Confederates were lost in the two-day fight.

Elsewhere in Tennessee that December 31, a small army of Federals handed a rare defeat to notorious Southern raider Nathan Bedford Forrest at the battle of Parkers Cross Roads.

Though the Union enjoyed crucial victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in 1863, the end of that year brought scant pleasure. Near Vicksburg on January 2, 1864, Stephen Rollins of the 95th Illinois Infantry lamented that "my heart sickens at the thought of our once happy country, now wrenched by civil feuds, and weltering in the blood of brothers."

Those on the homefront also struggled for comfort. In North Carolina, Catherine Edmondston wrote in her diary on January 1, 1863 of New Year's dinner and "a quiet chat over glove knitting." The menu included "goose, wild ducks (and the)...luxury of a Pudding." With a nod to food shortages, Edmondston added that "a dinner of four courses is ... a rarity now-a-days, but the New Year must have a face to welcome it.

Edmondston's celebration reflected the Southern cause. "We wound up the old year with all the customary honors, had our Egg Nog, and the attendant good wishes," she wrote as the man of the house wished the servants "Happy New Year, Good Luck, and death to the Yankees."

The press reflected the concerns of the day. Eight months into the conflict, the New York Times declared on January 1, 1862, that "the darkest and gloomiest year in our country's history has passed away."

On the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation, which became effective on January 1, 1863, many blacks spent the day and evening awaiting their freedom. In their honor, Watch Night is still celebrated by some African-Americans across the country.

As the next year concluded and with the fortunes of the war turning, the Richmond Examiner in the Confederate capital sadly reported that "today closes the gloomiest year of our struggle." The tide of the war never turned back in the South's favor, and as 1865 dawned, the men of William T. Sherman's army relaxed in Savannah in the glow of their wildly successful March to the Sea that fall.

Not the Only Conflict

The Civil War was hardly the only American conflict that brought suffering at the turn of the calendar. On the last day of 1944, tens of thousands of American soldiers struggled with frigid conditions at the Battle of the Bulge in France and Belgium.

A few years later, American troops similarly grappled with bitter cold during the Korean War. In the 1960s and early 1970s, thousands of Americans marked the New Year in the jungles of Vietnam.

New Year's celebrations ? or lack thereof ? in American conflicts reach as far back as the Revolutionary War. On Dec. 31, 1775, an American assault on the stronghold of Quebec was turned back, resulting in heavy losses including the death of an American general, Richard Montgomery.

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WHY SOUTHERNERS EAT BLACK-EYED PEAS

ON NEW YEAR'S DAY

BY AMANDA GALIANO

As 1862 drew to a close, the Illinois State Register, in President Lincoln's hometown of Springfield, reported that "not a hearth in the land will be exempt from emotions the most sickening in reviewing this closing year 1862. Its record is blood red."

The final day of 1862 resulted in anticipation for some.

Do you know why it's good luck to eat blackeyed peas on New Year's Day? As with most superstitions, there are several answers to that question. Most Southerners will tell you that it dates back to the Civil War, when black-eyed peas were considered animal food (like purple hull peas). The peas were not worthy of General Sherman's Union troops. When Union soldiers raided the Confederates food supplies, legend says they took everything except the peas and salted pork. The Confederates considered themselves lucky to be left with those meager supplies, and survived the winter. Peas became symbolic of luck. Black-eyed peas were also given to slaves, as were most other traditional New Year's foods.

Let's face it: a lot of the stuff eaten in the South on New Year's is soul food. One explanation of the superstition says that black-eyed peas were all Southern slaves had to celebrate with on the first day of January 1863.

What were they celebrating?

That was the day when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. From then on, peas were always eaten on the first day of January.

Others say that since the South has generally always been the place for farming, black-eyed peas are just a good thing to celebrate with in the winter. Not many crops grow this time of the year, but black-eyed peas hold up well, were cheap and just make sense.

How do you eat the peas?

Some people believe you should cook them with a new dime or penny, or add it to the pot before serving. The person who receives the coin in their portion will be extra lucky. Some say you should eat exactly 365 peas on New Year's day. If you eat any less, you'll only be lucky for that many days. I guess on leap years, you need to eat an extra one. If you eat any more than 365 peas, it turns those extra days into bad luck

Some say you should leave one pea on your plate, to share your luck with someone else (more of the humbleness that peas seem to represent).

Some say if you don't eat every pea on your plate, your luck will be bad.

It's also said that if you eat only peas, and skip the pork, collard greens, and the accompaniments, the luck won't stick. They all work together or not at all.

You may be wondering what hog jowl is as many people have never heard of this cut of pork. It's the "cheek" of the hog. It tastes and cooks similar to thick cut bacon. It's a tough cut that is typically smoked and cured. Hog jowl is used to season beans and peas, or fried and eaten like bacon.

On New Year's Day, hog jowls are traditionally eaten in the south to ensure health, prosperity, and progress. Southerners aren't the only ones who eat pork on New Year's Day. All over the world people use marzipan pigs to decorate their tables, partaking in pig's feet, pork sausage, roast suckling pig, or pork dumplings. Hogs and pigs have long been a symbol of prosperity and gluttony. It's why someone who takes more than their share is "being a pig." Some cultures believe that the bigger pig you eat on New Year's, the bigger your wallet will be in the coming year. So, the "fatter" the pig, the "fatter" your wallet. Spit and pit-roasted pigs are popular New Year's meals.

Why hog jowls? They're a cured meat product that store well for long periods of time. Before refrigeration, cured beef and pork would be very popular in the winter. The tradition of eating the cured hog jowls has persisted and become a part of a New Year's feast.

Plus, it goes well with black-eyed peas and collard greens. It's a good thing the people who made these superstitions up didn't come up with something like snails, cornbread, and black-eyed peas. It might not have caught on.

Want to get rich? In the south, collard greens and cornbread bring the money on on New Year's Day.

It's actually cabbage that is king green around most of the world for New Year's meals. Cabbage is a late crop and would be available this time of year. Collard greens are a late crop too, but they are mostly grown in the south. Traditionally, cabbage was picked and turned into sauerkraut. Sauerkraut, a fermented product, would just be ready to eat around New Year's day.

Cabbage and collard greens both represent "green" money in New Year's tradition, but, historically, cabbage was eaten for health benefits. Cabbage was eaten by everyone from Caesar to the Egyptians to aid in digestion and for nutrition, later for the prevention of scurvy

Aristotle, the philosopher, ate cabbage before drinking alcohol to keep the wine "from fuddling his prudent academic head." Eating collard greens isn't too far off from Caesar and Aristotle. The ancient cabbage those guys ate was probably closer to kale than modern cabbage.

Collard greens (or any greens) sub for cabbage in the South because its plentiful in the late fall. The southern tradition: each bite of greens you eat is worth $1,000 in the upcoming year.

Cornbread represents pocket money or spending money. It's another soul food eaten on New Year's.

The tradition stems from the color of the bread. It's color represented "gold" or "coin" money.

Plus, it goes well with collard greens, peas, and pork.

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