Christmas 1864 would be the last Christmas of the United States Civil War. The war had taken an ominous turn for the so-called Confederacy long before the winter solstice. President Abraham Lincoln's Triumvirate, Generals Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, and Philip Sheridan, and their armies were unleashing total war, demonstrating to Southerners that Johnny Reb could not protect them and their property from Billy Yank as he rolled through Northern Virginia, coastal Georgia, and the Shenandoah Valley employing a "scorched earth policy" to inflict maximum psychological, economic, and tactical damage. Moreover, the Republicans triumphed in the 1864 elections with Lincoln securing four more years in the White House. Lincoln's reelection doomed Southern hopes of establishing an independent slave republic rooted in white supremacy. A Republican triumph at the ballot box and the trail of destruction left in the wake of advancing Union armies devastated Southern morale.
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| New York Times, Dec. 26, 1864 |
By mid-December, Sherman's army reached the outskirts of Savannah, completing his "March to the Sea," a 285-mile trek across Georgia that had begun in Atlanta on November 15. He prepared for a siege of the city; however, Southern forces managed to escape Savannah on December 21, thus forcing the city's residents to surrender one of the last major ports that remained open to the Rebels. Sherman wired Lincoln the next day with a message notifying him that he had captured Savannah. Sherman's message was published in the December 26 edition of the New York Times. It read:
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Telegram from Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman to
Abraham Lincoln,
December 22, 1864.(National
Archives Identifier: 301637 ); Series: Telegrams Sent by the Field
Office of the Military Telegraph and Collected by the Office of the Secretary
of War., 1860 - 1870; Records of the Office of the Secretary of War; Record
Group 107; National Archives.
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President Lincoln replied to Sherman in a letter dated December 24: “Many, many thanks for your Christmas-gift—the capture of Savannah. When you were about leaving Atlanta for the Atlantic coast, I was anxious, if not fearful; but feeling that you were the better judge, and remembering that ‘nothing risked, nothing gained’ I did not interfere. Now, the undertaking being a success, the honor is all yours.” The end of the Southern rebellion was in sight.
But first, Sherman, Lincoln, and the Republican Congress moved against slavery by taking the first steps towards making emancipation a reality. On January 16, 1865, Sherman issued his Special Orders No. 15, which seized a strip of coastline stretching from Charleston, South Carolina to the St. John's River, Florida, including Georgia's Sea Islands and the mainland thirty miles in from the coast. The order redistributed some 400,000 acres of land to approximately 40,000 newly freed black families in an effort to break the Southern slaveholders' power. From Sherman's perspective, the policy, dividing southern lands into forty acre segments, was intended primarily for military expediency, to free his army from the problem of black refugees. But the policy, long advocated by the more radical, racial egalitarian elements of the Republican party, was also favored by most Republicans who viewed it as a solution to sustaining the freed people's newly won liberty by providing them with forty-acre tracts of land as they prepared for the transition from the cradle of slavery to freedom. Meanwhile, Lincoln, working hand-in-hand with the Republican Congress, pushed for the 13th Amendment, thereby making emancipation of slavery law of the land when Georgia ratified the amendment on December 6, 1865, becoming the 27th of 36 states (then in the Union) to ratify the amendment thus meeting the three-fourths constitutional requirement. With the federal government beginning to take the first steps towards safeguarding the freedom of the South's nearly four million slaves, the Rebels faced two options: either continue the war under the risk of total annihilation or accept peace under the laws of the United States. A divided Union with slavery was no longer an option.
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It was here at the Green-Meldrim Mansion that General
William Sherman set up headquarters and offered Savannah as a Christmas gift to
President Lincoln. It was also that the site that Sherman, after meeting with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and twenty
leaders of South Carolina's African American community, issued Special Field Orders
No. 15 at this location.
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"Lincoln's Christmas Box to Jeff Davis" (Phunny Phellow, 1864)
Abraham Lincoln gestures toward two boxes, offering Jefferson Davis a choice. One box reads, "Four Years More War. Extermination. Confiscation. U.S. Soldiers to Have Your Lands. Death to All Traitors. No Armistice. Slavery and Rebellion Will Fill the Same Grave."
The other box reads, "Peace and Union. No Slavery. Surrender Your Arms to us and Obey the Laws of the United States."
