Thanksgiving has an on-again-off-again history. The first U.S. President, George Washington, was all about it. Third President Thomas Jefferson, not so much. And Abraham Lincoln’s October 3, 1863 call for a Day of Thanksgiving to be observed on the last Thursday of November – during one of the bloodiest periods of the country’s bloodiest war – was greeted with sentiments both hot and cold.
Northerners were quick to get onboard. Union newspapers were widely supportive. Festivities set for November 26 north of the Mason-Dixon line included special church services, plays, parades and musical entertainment. Banks took a holiday. Curiously, Southerners in the rebel enclave of Charleston, S.C. also embraced the enemy president’s proclamation by giving thanks that Union forces had recently been repulsed from their neck of the woods. In other places, though, the call for Thanksgiving was ignored or verbally blasted to smithereens.
European editors called Lincoln’s proclamation “a blasphemous irony” and anguished sentiments were oft-reprinted, here in the Carolina Watchman of Confederate-held Salisbury, N.C.: “Thanksgiving for what! For civil war, the greatest of calamities; for the destruction by rude hands of a Constitution which has been regarded a master piece of human wisdom; for the loss of liberty; for the death and mutilation of hundreds of thousands of human beings; for the increase of exasperation and hatred; for the devastation of large territories; …and for the tenfold miseries which the war has hitherto inflicted upon the black race as well as the white – these are the things for which President Lincoln would have to thank Providence …”
New Bern in 1863 was part of a federal footprint in eastern North Carolina. The Brooklyn Union reported November 25 that Union General Benjamin Butler, newly-named commander of the Departments of Virginia and North Carolina, along with his staff, had arrived at New Bern from his Norfolk, Va. headquarters. The Baltimore Sun added that Butler’s wife and daughter had come, too. Also on the excursion was U. S. Navy Rear Admiral Samuel P. Lee, who bore a striking resemblance to his cousin, General Robert E. Lee, a top leader of forces of the breakaway South. Adm. S.P. Lee had been placed in charge of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron in late 1862, the force responsible for stopping all ships bound for Confederate ports. The Brooklyn newspaper rained on the Union commanders’ Thanksgiving parade a bit by chiding: “General Butler and Admiral Lee will both find a hint for future action in the announcement that the cargoes of seven large steamers which ran the blockade off Wilmington in one night are advertised in the rebel papers for sale.”
by Edward Ellis, Special Correspondent
Eddie Ellis is the author of New Bern History 101 and other works about Craven County’s rich heritage. He can be reached at flexspace2@aol.com.
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