Merry Christmas from the Petersburg Regiment!
Four Christmases
The 12th Virginia, the Petersburg Regiment, existed through only four Christmases, but its soldiers left us with eyewitness accounts of each.
Christmas 1861, Norfolk
Shortly before Christmas, the
Confederates at Norfolk braced for an attack by a Yankee force assembled at
Annapolis—the Coastal Division of Brig. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside. Major General Benjamin Huger suspended the
furloughs that helped make garrison duty tolerable. “The reason for slashing the furloughs is we
exspect to have a battle on the river somewhere but we can not tell where it
will be,” wrote First Lt. Archibald B. Goodwyn of the Hargrave Blues, the 12th
Virginia’s Company I. “The probability
is that it will be in the hampton rivers.”[1] The troops could not attend Christmas parties
because the state of alert prohibited absence from camp after tattoo. Private John Francis Sale of Norfolk, who had
studied architecture in Williamsburg before enlisting in Company H, the Norfolk
Juniors in May, thought the Christmas season “a very dull one.”[2] Almost the whole regiment got drunk on
Christmas Day. “The Guard house was
ramed & cramed with its victims,” wrote First Sgt. James Edward “Eddie” Whitehorne
of Company F, the Huger Grays.[3]
Christmas 1862,
Fredericksburg
December 25 began as Christmas had
ordinarily begun in urban Virginia before the war—with crowds of men firing off
their guns. The racket caused the
detailing of a heavy guard. Several
noisemakers found themselves in the guardhouse.
Somebody got the better of Mahone.
A few days earlier, he had acquired several turkeys. He fattened the fowls in a pen outside his
tent. On Christmas morning he stepped
out of his doorway to pick one for his dinner but found the birds gone. “Who stole Mahone’s turkeys was a favorite
‘conundrum’ in the Division the balance of the war,” Pvt. Westwood A. Todd of
the Petersburg Riflemen, Company E, remembered.
“Our fellows laid it on the Florida Brigade, but I am sure there was
enterprise enough in either brigade to perform such an exploit.”[4] Suspicion fell so heavily upon the Floridians
that the rest of the division nicknamed them “the turkeys.”[5] Even the orphans from Norfolk such as Sale fared better
than their brigadier. Their repast
consisted of baked beef heart, boiled beef, salt pork, turkey, apples and for
dessert some gingerbread. Unfortunately,
to wash down this meal they had nothing better than water.
Christmas, 1863, Culpeper
County
“Our prospects are very hard for a Christmas,”
Sale, now a first sergeant, wrote on December 23. “We can procure nothing scarcely here and
what we can the most enormous prices are charged for them.”[6] But ten wagons were rolling up from
Petersburg. They arrived on a very cold
Christmas Eve. Almost every soldier with
relatives in Petersburg received a bundle.
The townspeople forwarded parcels smuggled through enemy lines from
Norfolk. Through Mrs. Charles E. Waddell,
the wife of the captain of Company A, the Petersburg City Guard, Sale received
a package containing boots, a suit of clothes, a hat, underclothes, socks, soap
and thread, among other items.
“Everything suited to a fraction fitting as if they were made for me, as
well as could-have been done had I been where they were made,” he commented.[7] The boxes for the Petersburg troops far
outdid the bundles for the other men and contained “anything you might name not
forgetting a liberal supply of Liquor,” wrote Sale.[8] The Petersburg soldiers did not wait for Christmas
but promptly got drunk.
Christmas, 1864,
Petersburg
As
usual, happiness at Christmas time depended largely on the degree a fellow had
access to friends and family. The men
from Petersburg fared best. For the
soldiers reliant on the kindness of strangers, luck made the difference between
a big eat or the cornbread and middling camp offered.
Todd,
now a sergeant and acting ordnance officer of Weisiger’s brigade, and Dr. Phil Baker,
a former assistant surgeon of the 12th Virginia, met William Jarvis as they
entered Petersburg to attend Christmas services. Jarvis, the former captain of the Lafayette
Guards, the 12th’s Company D, now served as major in the 3rd Battalion,
Virginia State Reserves. Jarvis invited
Todd and Baker to dine with him at his residence on Old Street. “We accepted, and after church enjoyed a
capital dinner at the major’s hospitable board,” recalled Todd.[9]
Sale,
now a second lieutenant, had gotten in trouble for taking thirty-six hours of
French leave visiting a cousin near Jarratt’s Station during the Apple Jack
Raid earlier in the month. Sale had to
remain in camp and endure its meager fare.
Captives from the 12th huddling in Federal prison camps had it worse
than the men in camp. “It is only since
I have been a prisoner that I have been brought to understand fully that ‘hope
long deferred maketh the heart sick,’” Pvt. James C. Riddle of Company E wrote home. “I...so long to hear from you and the
children.”[10] A Petersburg tobacconist conscripted just in time to be captured on October 27, 1864, he had not received word from his wife since
his capture, though he had written her twice and inserted a personal in the New
York News. Otherwise, Riddle had fared well, gaining an
appointment as a surgeon’s clerk. He
had “a plenty of good wholesome fare a comfortable home and every thing that a
prisoner has a right to expect.”[11]
[4] Ibid.
[5] William E. Cameron, “Chancellorsville,” in George S. Bernard, ed., War Talks of Confederate Veterans, 72-73.
[6] Letter, Sale to Aunt, December 23,
1863.
[7] Letter, Sale to Uncle, December
28, 1863.
[8]Ibid.
[9] Westwood A. Todd Reminiscences, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[10] Letter, James E. Riddle to Wife, December
16, 1864, Virginia Historical Society.
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