Since this year marks the sesquicentennial of the Civil War’s beginning, it seems appropriate to look back at how some of those soldiers spent their holidays.
We begin with the accounts of two men in the 84th Illinois Volunteer Infantry who wrote about their experiences in the fall and winter of 1863. It had been a tough time for the group. They had spent September through November in battles.
First they had fought at Chickamauga, Tenn., which was the war’s second deadliest battle. The Union was trying to repel Confederates, but lost and retreated to Chattanooga. The Confederates attacked them there and battled for two months. The south nearly encircled the Union troops and shut off their supply lines, so the Union’s leader halved his soldiers’ rations.
Then the 84th fought the Confederates up Tennessee’s Lookout Mountain, only to lose again.
James P. Suiter, a private with the 84th from Eldorado, recounts the rest of the story, which is chronicled in his diaries that are now in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (ALPL).
On Nov. 30, with just a few days’ rest after the Lookout Mountain loss, Suiter’s brigade started marching 10 miles back to Chickamauga “to bury the dead who had lain there for more than two months without burial…The battlefield was a sad spectacle and burying the remains of our dead was the most melancholly [sic] duty I ever performed.”
On Dec. 2, Suiter’s group marched to camp at Whiteside Station, Tenn., where they remained until May. There his days became a monotonous blur of “going on picket,” regimental inspection, reading, letter writing, and “usual duties.” Christmas Day was no different.
“December 25 – Cloudy day – Dull.
Christmas – Dined on bean soup, pork and ‘Hard Crackers’ at noon.” (“Hard crackers” were likely the ubiquitous “hardtack” crackers that were a staple of soldiers’ diets.
Unfortunately, the crackers were often months old and as a result were hard as a – yes, tack.)
Three days after Christmas, Suiter received what might have been holiday gifts from home: one pair of socks and 13 postage stamps.
Hiram P. Roberts was a chaplain for Company E of the 84th. Six days before Christmas he wrote his daughter, Nellie, back in Quincy, for her birthday. He told her that he was looking at photographs of her and her mother as he wrote.
On Christmas Day, he wrote again:
