On Christmas Day 1862, an epic feast for wounded, ill soldiers

A ward in Washington's Armory Square Hospital, where a Christmas dinner was held for patients in 1862.  (Library of Congress)

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On Christmas Day 1862, a grateful nation showed its appreciation for the sacrifices of the U.S. Army with dinners for thousands of sick and wounded soldiers in military hospitals in and near the nation's capital. President Lincoln and the first lady attended the event — one of the more extraordinary of its kind during the Civil War. 

"Nowhere else in the world than in America," a New York newspaper wrote, "could have been the sight which has made this holiday in Washington remarkable and memorable — the banqueting of 35,000 wounded and sick soldiers upon a Christmas dinner, spread by the hands of individual benevolence."

Elizabeth Smith, wife of President
 Lincoln's Secretary of the Interior,
was a driving force behind the
Christmas Day dinner for soldiers.
(Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection)

Financial contributions for the event — organized by Elizabeth Smith, wife of the Secretary of the Interior — poured in from individuals, businesses, states and elsewhere. (Indiana contributed $700 while Philadelphia collected $2,500.) 

"A grand Christian event," a newspaper called the dinner, greatly aided by contributions from other "noble ladies."

Food came from throughout the Union. Pennsylvania and Maryland shipped an "immense amount" of poultry. "Ever-generous" Albany, N.Y., provided 300 turkeys, "cooked and ready to eat." Four carloads of poultry arrived from Chicago. Volunteers served the feasts in hospital wards decorated with Christmas trees, evergreens, green holly, crimson berries, wreaths and red roses.

"[T]he whole was prepared in a style to please the most epicurean taste," a newspaper wrote about the fare served at College Hospital in Georgetown. Topped with flowers, a pyramid of seven large cakes stood near the door of the hospital near the Potomac River. Desert included ice cream for at least one dinner.

Volunteers decorated hospitals with patriotic touches. 

At Dumbarton Hospital, patients found red, white and blue ribbons displayed in "lavish profusion" and the motto "Union" prominently displayed. At Presbyterian Church Hospital, crossed muskets on each side of the altar gave the room "somewhat of a military appearance." A large American flag "gracefully festooned" another part of the room. "Union" and "Constitution" formed in cedar twigs appeared  beneath it. Mini-national flags decorated the Finley Hospital dining hall.

President Lincoln visited military
 hospitals in Washington with
 his wife on Christmas Day 1862.
(Library of Congress)

Apparently with no regard for soldiers' suffering, senators, congressmen and members of President Lincoln's cabinet "made speeches happily fit for the occasion." Then they mingled with soldiers. Entertainers serenaded soldiers with songs of home or country. At Stone Hospital, music by a glee club of patients enlivened the dinner.

Abraham and Mary Lincoln visited at least two hospitals. 

"In one or two the President found time to bring excitement and sunshine with him among the bandage and becrutched revelers," according to a newspaper account. "Mrs. Secretary Smith," the event's organizer, visited at least a half-dozen hospitals.

At Judiciary Square Hospital, which accommodated 500 patients, attendees took in an impressive scene. In the dining hall, portraits of George Washington and Secretary of the Interior Caleb Blood Smith looked down from the walls. "Merry Christmas" in blue letters appeared on a large banner. "The Union must and shall be preserved," read another sign near the dinner table, which was "furnished in a style of actual magnificence." Stacks of chickens and turkeys formed "perfect" pyramids — one of the gobblers reportedly weighed 25 pounds. The fare also consisted of roast beef, mutton, hams, oysters, chickens, "side dishes of all sorts" and pies.

As Lincoln was about to depart Judiciary Square Hospital, a short carriage ride from the White House, an elderly gentleman approached the president. "Notwithstanding your extensive public duties," the man told the president, "you managed to hold your own."

"Yes," the tall and lanky president replied with a laugh, "but I have not got much to hold."

Volunteer waiters eagerly served wounded warriors. They first fed soldiers too injured or sickly to be moved to a dinner table. "The feasting of this army," according to an account, "was a touching sight."

Only 100 of the 280 patients were well enough to eat at the dinner tables at Douglas Hospital 
in Washington  on Christmas Day 1862. This is an undated wartime image. (U.S. Military Institute)

In two editions after Christmas, the Evening Star of Washington published detailed, hospital-by-hospital reports of the festivities:

• At Trinity Church Hospital, a small Christmas tree rested on each of the four tables in the dining area. The smell of flowers and cedar filled the air, and an organist played The Star-Spangled Banner and Gloria In Excelsis, surely inspirational songs for all in attendance.
• At Stanton Hospital, wives of Indiana's two senators supervised the dinners. "They had the assistance of a large number of other ladies, whose beauty and smiles were enough to gladden the hearts of the brave men who are amongst the unfortunate of those who have volunteered to sustain the nation and its honor," a newspaper reported.
• At Douglas Hospital, only 100 of the 280 patients were well enough to eat at the dinner table. Wounded from the Battle of Fredericksburg, fought two weeks earlier, had arrived there only recently.
  
• At Emory Hospital, the 1st Michigan Cavalry band played "eloquent music," and the sick and wounded who couldn't eat at the table enjoyed food "bounteously supplied by the ladies — those angels of mercy who ever to delight to soothe the sufferings of our honored soldiers."
  
• At Camp Parole in Alexandria, Va., across the Potomac River from Washington, nearly 15,000 convalescents and paroled prisoners were served. A toast to the men and women who provided the meal drew a warm response.
  
• At Union Chapel Hospital, those at the gathering asked Dr. Joseph Hubbard of the National Observatory to speak. Apparently uncomfortable as a public speaker, he refused. "Doctor," the patients shouted, "tell us about the stars!” He complied.
  
• At Fourth Presbyterian Church Hospital, 50 of the 150 patients could not leave their beds. Every sick and wounded patriot, however, received a pint of ale. So, too, did each of the 500 patients at Finley Hospital. Christmas cheer, indeed. 

At Convalescent Camp, near Alexandria, Va., the Christmas Day dinner was delivered late.
(Library of Congress)

Not all the dinners went smoothly, unsurprising given the scale of the event. At Convalescent Camp, near Alexandria, soldiers did not eat until late in the evening because the late delivery of food. And at Armory Square Hospital, tables in the wards were "devoid of all attractive embellishment." Worse, hospital attendants and nurses, who ate off "china plates," received their meals first.

The "invalid soldiers were obliged to wait until a long while after before they were supplied," the Evening Star reported, "and then the dinner was served to them on tin plates, and in such a manner as to convey with it no pleasing thoughts whatsoever." (Surgeons, attendants, clerks, wardmasters and others at the hospital complained the account was fake news, but the newspaper stuck by the story.)

Mary Lincoln, the president's wife,
contributed food for the dinner
at the Contraband Camp
on Christmas Day.

At 2 p.m., volunteers served Christmas dinner at the Contraband Camp at 12th and Q streets, the temporary home of about 500 escaped slaves and other African Americans. The feast included turkey, chicken, roast beef, boiled ham, vegetables and candy, mostly contributed by Mary Lincoln. Afterward, each child received a toy. Earlier that morning, volunteers distributed clothing to grateful adults and children.

Soon after the Christmas dinner, soldiers and others sought contributions to buy Elizabeth Smith a "magnificent present" for her excellent work. They quickly raised several hundred dollars. 

Newspapers touted the event. The Evening Star called it “a bright day for all,” a rare moment when generosity briefly eclipsed the war’s misery. 

And the National Republican understood why it mattered: “This war,” it wrote, “will develop a great many manly, Christian and noble qualities in our people that the times of peace can never bring out.” 

For thousands of wounded and ill soldiers — and for the volunteers who made the dinners possible — Christmas Day 1862 proved it.

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Have something to add (or correct) in this post? E-mail me here.

SOURCES

• New York Tribune, Dec. 26, 1862
• The Evening Star, Washington, D.C., Dec. 26, 27, 1862
• The National Republican, Washington, D.C., Dec. 15 and 25, 1862
• The Pittsburgh Gazette, Dec. 24, 1862
• Washington Evening Star, Dec. 27, 1862

Death of 'Uncle John': Souvenirs and trashing Mrs. Lincoln

John Sedgwick (standing center) with his staff at the Farley plantation house 
at Brandy Station, Va., in 1864. (Library of Congress)

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Decades after a Confederate sharpshooter killed John Sedgwick at Spotsylvania Courthouse, Va., on May 9, 1864, a witness to the death of the beloved Union major general wrote of gathering a souvenir from the tragedy. John G. Fisher, then a lieutenant in the 14th New Jersey, claimed he cut down the bush upon which Sedgwick bled, let it dry in the sun, sliced off a five-inch section that formed a "Y" and carved into it the date "May 9." After the war, he kept it on his mantle, "a reminder of the cold-blooded manner in which our gallant commander was killed."

Another view of John Sedgwick at
Brandy Station, Va., in 1864
(Library of Congress)

Here are 10 other notes about the death of "Uncle John," the highest-ranking Union general to die during the war:

Ulysses Grant's reaction: "I do not think I ever saw Grant so much moved as he was then, except once in Burlington, N.J., when we received a telegram from Mr. Stanton, telling of Mr. Lincoln's death."
--  Frederick Dent, Grant's aide-de-camp. who wrote he plucked a violet from the spot Sedgwick died.

The body man: Thomas Holmes, the man who embalmed Sedgwick in Washington, is known as the “Father of Modern Embalming.” He received a commission as a captain in the Army Medical Corps during the Civil War and was assigned to Washington. He resigned his commission when he realized the commercial possibilities of embalming. (He charged $100 a body.) He also embalmed President Lincoln.

"A singular pertinacity" After Sedgwick's embalming, his remains were visited at Holmes' establishment on Pennsylvania Avenue by a "large number of persons," the Washington Star reported three days after the general's death. At least one of them was a souvenir hunter. "A lady exhibited a singular pertinacity," the newspaper reported,  "to procure a memento of the fallen hero by clipping two buttons from his coat."

Mary Lincoln

Simply appalled!  On May 25, 1864, the Richmond Dispatch trashed Mary Lincoln, wife of the president. The First Lady's offense? Her signed card attached to a bouquet of flowers lay on Sedgwick's breast during a viewing of the general's remains in New York. Wrote the newspaper:

"The Yankees love of notoriety is a passion which prevades all classes of Yankee society and is equally distributed among both sexes. It flourishes in situations where it could not be expected to exist -- it rages even in the presence of death -- it finds food for gratification in the very honors which are paid to those whom the Yankees are to extol as heroes. Is there a Southern woman so lost to propreity, so destitute of modesty, so entirely divested of that delicacy which should characterize the true lady, as to append her name to an offering so sacred as this ought to have been, upon an occassion so solemn?"

Major donation: In 2017, effects of the Sedgwick aide who escorted the general's body home to Cornwall Hollow, Conn., were donated to the Frederickburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. Captain Richard F. Halsted's frock coat and kepi were to be displayed there, according to the Free-Lance Star of Fredericksburg, Va.

A final goodbye:  As the general's coffin was lowered into his grave in Cornwall Hollow six days after he was killed, "a peal of thunder like the roar of distant artillery reverberated along the heavens, sounding his requiem and the tired soldier rested," according to a Sedgwick family history.

THEN & NOW: Vets pose at John Sedgwick's monument at Spotsylvania Courthouse.(Large format Then & Now photos here.)
"Detestable" roads: On May 12, 1887, thousands attended the dedication of the Sedgwick monument at the spot where the general was killed 23 years earlier. Getting there from Fredericksburg, about 12 miles away, was a chore for some of the attendees, who included 300 veterans from Sedgwick's VI Corps. "It was not the army's fault the roads in Virginia were detestable [during the war]," an account noted. "They were still detestable, and it was only after more than three hours of the roughest sort of journeying that Alsop's farm was reached."

Believe it or not: During their stay in the area for the dedication, 14th New Jersey veterans went searching for the spot they buried Sergeant Abram Black, a comrade killed at Spotsylvania Courthouse on May 13, 1864. Amazingly, according to this 1887 account, a farmer had plowed up the remains a week before their visit. Black's bones were shipped home and re-buried in a family plot.

VI Corps veterans at the dedication of the monument for John Sedgwick, their former commander.
(Sedgwick Memorial Association, Rife & Co, Philadelphia)

Samuel Pingree

"A dream of long ago": In his speech at the monument dedication, 3rd Vermont veteran Samuel Pingree, a Medal of Honor recipient and former Vermont governor, said::

"This fatal spot was the altar on which he made the last sacrifice that falls to the lot of a brave man to make -- the sacrifice of life that his government and ours might continue to hold a name and place among the commonwealths of the earth. Those scenes and tragic activities of our young lives, once so familiar and so real, are now beginning to seem like a dream of long ago."

"Less shaking of hands": After an effort by Confederate veterans was rebuffed to put a monument near The Bloody Angle at Gettysburg, a Virginia newspaper believed Southerners were slighted and should be less magnaminous toward their former enemies. Two days after the Sedgwick monument was dedicated, the Peninsula Enterprise of Accomac, Va., wrote:

"...We cannot refrain from expressing the opinion, that until our victors learn to be more generous, there should be less shaking hands 'over the bloody chasm,' and less of that gushing effusion of sentiment which our people express every time one who wore blue crosses Mason's and Dixon's line. A monument to General Sedgwick, a federal officer, has lately been erected at Spotssylvania C.H., to which no objection not only was ever made, but in the ceremonies attendant thereon many Confederates participated. Was the memory of such a man deserving of more respect than our own heroes? It is right to forgive our enemies, but until they show less enmity to us, perhaps we should be in the future less demonstrative in our affection for them, and less willing to honor the dead of those, however noble the record made in their lives, who are actuated by such hostile feelings for our dead heroes."

     THEN & NOW: Late-19th or early-20th century photo of vet at Sedgwick monument.
HOVER ON IMAGE TO VIEW "NOW" PHOTO.         (Emerging Civil War blog via Fredericksburg/Spotsylvania National Military Park.)

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 Have something to add (or correct) in this post? E-mail me here.

SOURCES

-- A Sedgwick Genealogy: Descendants of Deacon Benjamin Sedgwick", Page 102.
-- Sedgwick Memorial Association; 6th Army Corps, Spottsylvania Court House, Va., May 11, 12 and 13, 1887, Dunlap & Clarke Printers, Philadelphia, 1887.

Before Antietam, nurse Maria Hall met the Lincolns

In this cropped enlargement of a photo taken at Smoketown Hospital, nurse Maria Hall tends 
to Union wounded  from the Battle of Antietam.  
 (Ely Collection, Edward G. Miner Library, Rochester, N.Y.)

One of the more compelling figures in the aftermath of the Battle of Antietam was a little-known nurse named Maria Hall, whose story is told in my book, "Connecticut Yankees at Antietam." From a prominent Washington D.C. family, Maria (pronounced Mar-EYE-Ah)  rushed to the battlefield from the capital after the fighting was over to help tend to some of the thousands of wounded. A veteran nurse by September 1862, Hall soon was put in charge of a ward at Smoketown Hospital, one of two large tent hospitals near the battlefield. (Crystal Spring hospital near Keedysville was the other.) Many Union wounded later recalled  the loving care received from the 26-year-old nurse. "With untiring perseverance she dealt out to the poor, wounded soldier the delicacies that he could relish, and which, by Government regulations, he could not get," wrote 78th New York Sergeant Thomas Grenan, who had suffered a gunshot wound to his jaw. During a visit to Smoketown in January 1863, more than four months after the battle, an Indianapolis Weekly Sentinel reporter noticed these words written in Hall's honor in a tent in her ward:

Maria Hall cared for President Lincoln's son Tad, 8, after his
 11-year-old son Willie died of typhus. (Photo: Courtesy Powers family)

To Miss Hall, our benefactress:
Your tender care of wounded men
Speaks loud of sympathy
For us on whom misfortune fell
In strife for liberty
Angel spirits revive the hopes
In many an aching heart.
And you, in human form, each day
Do act an angel's part.
Be thanked for it, and do believe
That, in our future days,
Our greatful heart remembers you,
And for your welfare prays.

Hall cared for hundreds of patients at Smoketown until it was disbanded in May 1863, but none was more high-profile than the little boy she cared for seven months before Antietam. On Feb. 21, 1862, one day after President Lincoln's 11-year-old son Willie died of typhus, Hall was asked to go to the White House to help care for the president's youngest son, Tad. Dorothea Dix, the superintendent of army nurses, had recommended Hall. In a letter dated March 27, 1862 -- a transcript of which was graciously given to me by Maria's great-grandchild -- Hall wrote of that momentous day.

 "You may imagine my surprise therefore when (Dix) said "I have a carriage waiting, I wish to take you to the President's," Hall wrote to her friend. "This was the day but one after the death of little Willie, and 'Taddie' was then very ill; Mrs. Lincoln was sick with watching and grief. Such a request (came) from Miss Dix and under all the circumstances I could not refuse to go, thinking that she wanted me only for one night, but when fairly in for it, I found that she expected me to stay until the child was better."

The carriage ride to the White House, Hall wrote, was especially nerve-wracking.

Abraham Lincoln and his son, Tad, in a photograph taken by Alexander Gardner in 1865.
 (Library of Congress collection)

"Picture the pent up excitement with which I rode along Pennsylvania Avenue with D.L. Dix, and in through the gate leading to the entrance where always heretofore I had gone with the gay throng of the nation to greet the President, mid the gayety (sic) and glitter of fashion and pleasure," she wrote. "Now all was silent and in subdued sadness. I saw the bell handle shrouded with crepe and thought how mysteriously death enters upon the heels of pleasure and revelry."

Maria Hall wasn't an admirer of Mary Lincoln, seen here in
 an 1861  photo taken by Mathew Brady.  
(Library of Congress collection)

After entering the White House, Hall was escorted into Mrs, Lincoln's bedroom. The young nurse wasn't a big fan of Mary Lincoln's, writing in a letter to her friend before Willie died that the president's wife was "not of sufficient dignity of character to fill the post at the White House in any time." During Hall's nearly week-long experience at the White House, the grief-stricken Mary Lincoln was sick in bed most of the time. "I doubt not but I saw the best there is in her," Hall wrote. "She is very impulsive, gay and totally undisciplined." The nurse, however, was a huge admirer of the president.

"But what a rare chance I had of seeing 'Uncle Abe,'" Hall wrote her friend, "and let me tell you that I love him and am proud of him more than ever. He is honest, pure-hearted as the sun is bright; his devotion to his child was beautiful; he was only too kind and indulgent for the chlld's good ..." Hall thought "Taddie" was a "spoiled child and quite ungoverned." The president, she observed, would bring his work to Tad's room and sit for hours just to please his son.

"In this way I saw him sign nearly two hundred commissions for army officers," she wrote her friend, "and also my dear he gave me his autograph. Many a cozy chat I had with him before an open fire of wood, and it will be an experience to remember and tell to the youngsters of future years how I saw Old Abe in his child's sick room ... and in his child's bed take care of him if he were a tender woman."

After the Civil War, Hall moved to Connecticut, married a twice-married man named Lucas Richards in 1872 and reared two daughters and a son in a large house in Unionville, 15 miles west of Hartford. Hall, who often spoke to schoolchildren in Unionville about working in the White House, died in West Hartford, Conn., on July 20, 1912 at age 76.

In a letter to the editor of the Hartford Courant published three days after her death, Maria's passing was mourned.

"It will be something for the boys and girls who are now in high school to remember that they have seen and talked with a woman who had the privilege of knowing Abraham Lincoln in every-day life," C.M.H. wrote. (She is) one of the few Civil war nurses, who have lived up to this time."