Christmas 1861 – The Freedom of the Seas and A Season of Hope
- Jeff Brewer
- Dec 18, 2023
- 7 min read
“I pray that on this day [Christmas] when only peace and good-will are preached to mankind, better thoughts may fill the hearts of our enemies and turn them to peace.” ― Robert E. Lee
In the mid 19th century American South, Christmas was a season of festivity that had its origins seated firmly in Olde England. The Confederacy, made up largely of English, Scotts, French, and to a lesser degree Germans, Irish, and some Spanish, all had roots in cultures that celebrated the Christmas season in one fashion or the other. Within the multi-national European peoples who settled the American South, the Africans inhabiting the larger plantations also adopted many of the customs and traditions of Christmas as they became Christianized over the years. The North, also populated by transplanted Englishmen with a fair number of Germans and an increasing number of Irish, throughout much of the country shunned Christmas due to the heavy Puritan influence of the early colonial days. Puritan hatred for all things Roman Catholic dismissed the celebration as just another apostate act of popery and so determined to have nothing to do with the holiday. That mindset was beginning to change but even as late as the Civil War one would be hard pressed to find anything resembling a “Dicken’s Christmas” in much of the North.
However, in December of 1861 among the Southern social circles there was a heightened air of optimism that adorned the festive merry making. From public gatherings, large or small, to humble home front tables of the middle and lower-class family farms, to soldiers enjoying homemade ginger cakes by firelight, talk was often a verbal rehearsal of the year's accomplishments in Arms. In April General Beauregard had forced the surrender of Major Robert Anderson and his garrison at Fort Sumter. Then of course there was the Battle of Manassas in July. A stunning victory over Federal forces in the first major battle of the war almost on Washington’s doorstep. Shortly afterwards in August there was the Confederate victory at Wilson’s Creek in Missouri, then another at Ball’s Bluff in Virginia and another, back in Missouri at Belmont. There were Northern victories too, but none carried the weight in the arena of public opinion that the Southern victories did. So too Southern morale was bolstered in the extreme by what can only be described as “hero worship” of General Albert Sidney Johnston. Recently arrived from California, he had taken his post as the highest ranking officer in the expansive Western Department which also made him the second highest ranking General in the entire Confederacy. Jefferson Davis echoed much of the Southern sentiment when he remarked of Johnston, “I hoped and expected that I had others who would prove generals, but I knew I had one, and that was Sidney Johnston.” Later Davis said of Johnston that he “was the greatest soldier, the ablest man, civil or military, Confederate or Federal, then living.” At six feet, two inches tall, and two hundred pounds, erect frame and distinguished streaks of gray in his head of dark hair and a military record unmatched by any in the country North or South, the fifty-eight-year-old Johnston looked every bit the martial savior the South needed. On his shoulders, the General carried the hopes of the Southern people that were confident, with Johnston now bearing the sword on behalf of his native South, they simply could not lose.
Still, for all the inspiration General Albert Sidney Johnston instilled in the Southern cause, there was an entirely different source of optimism that had taken hold. At Christmas gatherings this year throughout the South there was much excitement from an ongoing drama that had arrested the attention of the world. At the more affluent socials among the “wilderness of mince-pies...forest of patties and petties, cocoanut and cranberry...deserts of island and trifle...seas of jelly and mountains of blanc mange [sic]”, as William Simms in ‘The Golden Christmas’ described such a gathering, the conversation was increasingly cast three-thousand miles across the Atlantic to the royal court of Victoria, Queen of England. Encouraged early in the war by England’s acknowledging to the Confederate States of America the rights of a belligerent, the “mother country” now seemed poised to actually enter the war on the side of the South. Little studied since the conflict and all but unknown to many today, the threat to the Lincoln Administration of having to fight a war on two fronts in December of ‘61 was a very real one indeed.
An offense on the high seas
What precipitated this dire situation for the North was the incident known as the Trent Affair(1). On November 8th while sailing off the coast of Cuba in the Bahama Channel, the British mail packet RMS Trent was overtaken by the United States warship USS San Jacinto. Firing two shots across the bow, the San Jacinto then hauled alongside and lowered its longboats into the water. Armed boarding parties rowed across the waves, climbed aboard the Trent, and physically apprehended two Confederate overseas emissaries, James Murray Mason assigned to London, England and John Slidell dispatched to Paris, France. This act seen as openly hostile by England was, to her, a clear violation of the international doctrine known as ‘The Freedom of the Seas’(2). Captain Wilkes of the San Jacinto then sailed for Boston with his newly taken prisoners where they were turned over to Fort Warren as traitors to the United States.
Back in England the spirit of the season was in full swing. Ever since Prince Albert had married Queen Victoria, the Christmas season in England had undergone much change. Albert is considered primarily responsible for the overhaul as he imported the traditions of his native Germany the prince had known since childhood. From the Christmas Tree in Windsor Castle to the decorations adorning the narrow streets and doorways of villages and cities throughout England, this was the time and the setting that so stirred the imagination of Charles Dicken’s as he wrote his story of redemption known as ‘A Christmas Carol’ that has been one of the classic works of Western literature ever since. To the English this was certainly the season of perpetual good cheer.
Something must be done
As the Christmas season of December 1861 rang in the festive celebrations across the English countryside, Great Britain enjoyed the status as the reigning world superpower. Although embarrassed in a series of blunders in the recent Crimean War, still Britannia was the victor, and as a result of foreign policy the population was firmly steeped in British nationality. During Victoria’s reign the phrase, “the sun never sets on the British Empire” was more than just a cliché, it was the glory of the British people. It was against this backdrop the Union navy had boldly fired on a British vessel and, with all the impertinence expected of Yankee belligerence, brought the two countries closer to war since the Age of Napoleon. The London Times exclaimed, “By Captain Wilkes let the Yankee breed be judged! Swagger and ferocity, built on a foundation of vulgarity and cowardice, these are his characteristics, and these are the most prominent marks by which his countrymen, generally speaking, are known all over the world(3).” The insult to the British flag was intolerable and something must be done. In an emergency cabinet meeting, British Foreign Secretary Earl Russell and Prime Minister Lord Palmerston both exploded in an anger filled tirade(4). At one point Palmerston threw his top hat across the room and shouted, “I don’t know whether you are going to stand for this, but I’ll be damned if I do!” Soon afterward England loaded transports with 8,000 men and sailed for Canada to reinforce the garrisons already there. Simultaneously Royal Engineers began strengthening fortifications at strategic points along the border between the United States and Canada.
A pretty bitter pill
Tensions continued forcing Lincoln to call an emergency meeting on Christmas Day remarking to cabinet members that they needed only “one war at a time”. Through a lengthy process and much wordsmithing by Lincoln’s Secretary of State Williams Seward, the situation was finally de-escalated, and the Crown was mollified. The smokescreen laid down by Seward did its best to save face for the Administration but what was called by Lincoln “a pretty bitter pill” was rephrased by one of his cabinet members as “downright gall and wormwood” that being the demand by the British government for the immediate release of the Confederate emissaries Mason and Slidell. On January 2nd, both men were released and continued their journey to England and France uninterrupted where they would continue to lobby for foreign intervention in the South’s War for Independence.
In his remarkable trilogy ‘The Civil War – A Narrative’ famed Writer Shelby Foote summed up the national perspective at Christmas of 1861 as follows:
“On this diplomatic note, which opened shrill, then broke into falsetto, the first year of the conflict reached a close. Politically and militarily speaking, its laurels belonged to those who had established a nation with its span and defended that establishment successfully in battle, meeting and turning back attacks against both flanks of their thousand-mile frontier and staving off an advance against the center. McClellan’s gains in western Virginia and the Federal navy’s trident amphibious lunge did something to redress the defeats along Bull Run and Wilson’s Creek, but when those checks were emphasized, east and west, by the route at Ball’s Bluff and the repulse at Belmont, there was a distinct public impression, North and South, at home and abroad, of failure by the Unionist government to deal with the Confederate bid for independence. One side called this bid a revolution. The other insisted that it was a rebellion. Whichever it was, it was plainly a fact, and both sides saw clearly now that the contest between northern power and southern élan was not going to be the ninety-day affair they had predicted at the outset.”
To most of the ardent supporters of Southern Independence, Christmas of 1861 was one of promise and optimism for the future. Their armies seemed more than a match for those “Yankee hirelings” and conventional wisdom held that England would soon embrace the South and join the battle. Money was still available, and the war had not yet taken a recordable toll on southern infrastructure. There were casualties yes, but not a shadow of what was to come. Shiloh was still over three months away and names like Malvern Hill and Sharpsburg were still only known to those who dwelt close by. Christmas of 1861 crowned a year of promise that ended with a beaming positivity of a bright future. It was for the Southern Confederacy a Christmas where there was a very realistic possibility that the South’s bid for Independence would be realized and that she would soon take her place among the table of nations. - JLB
1 "Trent Affair ." West's Encyclopedia of American Law. . Encyclopedia.com. 11 Dec. 2023 .
2 Rappaport, Armin; Weeks, William Earl "Freedom of the Seas ." Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy. . Encyclopedia.com. 11 Dec. 2023 .
3 "Europe's View of the War ." American Civil War Reference Library. . Encyclopedia.com. 11 Dec. 2023
4 https://diplomacy.state.gov/stories/the-trent-affair-diplomacy-britain-and-the-american-civil-war/
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