BATTLE OF THANKSGIVING

 

I don’t understand why anyone believes any of the popular myths about Thanksgiving. The truth is our Puritan forefathers were a humorless bunch who showed their devotion to God by going hungry, not by eating. And the only feasts they had were in the late  summer, when food was plentiful.  By late November they were already deep into their grain stores, and watery stew.  These Christian pessimists would only say thanks if they were staving to death!

The real mother of Thanksgiving was actually the widow who wrote “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and other innocent poems, Sarah Hale. She was the 19th century version of Martha Stewart. For forty years Sarah was the editor of the prestigious “Godey’s Lady’s Book” magazine. And each November Sarah would bombard her 150,000 subscribers with recipes for Roast Turkey, Turkey stuffing, Turkey gravy, and Turkey stew. Now a lot of selling and some kitchen chemistry was required because 19th century turkeys were scrawny and almost exclusively dark meat. Sarah championed the turkey because her middle class homemakers were on tight budgets, and per pound the randy, strutting bird-brain turkey cost less than half what a chicken might.

But the real revolution came when, in 1934, the United States Department of Agriculture discovered the key to making turkeys palatable; artificial insemination.  In 1932, before the breeding revolution, the average American ate just two pounds of turkey a year. Today, that amount is closer to twenty pounds. Turkey farmers across America, are very thankful for that big government intervention. So are most turkey eaters, although they don't seem to know it.

But the increased popularity of turkey has come at a price - no sex for the turkey.  Today’s buxom white breasted Tom Turkey is too obese to climb atop an equally buxom white breasted hen. Without human intervention, the Thanksgiving turkey would have have gone extinct - Ah, ceste se la guerre. But this brings us to my real topic, which is the year when Thanksgiving became a political de la guerre; 1939

It was the third year of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second term as president. And Republicans were determined (read terrified) that he might want to seek a third term. However they were not in a good position to prevent it, holding only 177 seats in the House of Representatives (to 252 Democrats) and a paltry 23 seats in the Senate (to 69 Democrats). But then in August, Roosevelt handed Republicans an early Christmas present.

In July Franklin had received a visit from Fred Lazarus (above), head of the Federated Department Stores, at the time the single biggest retail chain by volume in America. He controlled Macy’s and Bloomingdales department stores in New York City, Filenes in Boston, and Strauss in Brooklyn. Fred pointed out to the President that in 1939, November would have five Thursdays; the second, the ninth, the sixteenth, the twenty-third and the thirtieth. And Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation calling for a day of Thanksgiving -  first issued after the battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and re-issued by Presidents every year since - specifically designated Thanksgiving as the final Thursday in November. That final Thursday would be, in the case of 1939,  the 30th . The previous time Thanksgiving had fallen on the fifth Thursday in November had been 1933. 

That year the Christmas shopping season, which traditionally began the day after Thanksgiving, was just 20 shopping days long, and had proven disastrous for retailers. Of course, the Great Depression had also bottomed out that year, but retail business folks are like farmers, they always worry about the rain. Did it come too early, or too late? Is it too much, or too little? Anyway, Lazarus wanted Roosevelt to move the Turkey Day back one week, to give merchants another week to tempt their customers into spending on Christmas. The President had also heard from lobbyists at the National Retail Dry Goods Association, as well as executives from Gimbels and Lord & Taylor.

Being a long time politician, Roosevelt listened to the business community. And at a Press Conference held on Monday, 14 August,   he made a little speech.  “I have been hearing from a great many people", he began, "complaints that Thanksgiving came too close to Christmas”. Roosevelt reminded the press corps that Thanksgiving was still not an official holiday, and that each year the President picked the date for it.  And, since business "experts" believed that adding another week to the shopping season would increase sales by 10%,  Franklin announced that this year of 1939,  he was moving Thanksgiving to Thursday,  November 23rd., the fourth Thursday in November. Not the last Thursday.

The first alarm went off  the very next day, when Fred Lazarus ran into his younger brother. Simon Lazarus was ranting over the change because it had disrupted his Ohio State Universities’ Thanksgiving day football game. “What damn fool got the president to do this?” Simon barked at his brother, who, in fact, was the damn fool himself. But that was just the beginning.

The Republican attorney general for Oregon, turned to poetry. “Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November; All the rest have thirty-one; Until we hear from Washington.”  A shopkeeper in Kokomo, Indiana preferred to protest in prose. He put up a sign in his shop window which read, “Do your shopping early. Who knows, tomorrow may be Christmas.” 

Republican Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire urged the President to simply abolish winter by fiat. And Methodist minister Norman Vincent Peal got very outraged, charging it was  “…contrary to the meaning of Thanksgiving for the president of this great nation to tinker with the sacred religious day with the specious excuse that it will help Christmas sales. The next thing we may expect Christmas to be shifted to May 1st to help the New York World’s Fair of 1940.”  Did anybody point out to Norman, that the bible never mentioned which Thursday Thanksgiving should fall on?  If they did, it seems Norman was not paying attention.

Twenty-three governors went with the President’s switch, and twenty-two did not. Texas and Colorado couldn’t make up their minds and recognized both days as the holiday in question, although the Republican Governor of Colorado, Ralph Carr, announced he would eat no turkey on the 23rd. 

The 30th was labeled as the Republican Thanksgiving, while the 23rd became the Democratic Thanksgiving, or, as "Nucky" Johnson, the recently indicted Republican mayor of Atlantic City called Franklin Roosevelt’s holiday, “Franksgiving”.

There were a few real problems hidden under this haze of invented political outrage. Calendars could not be changed in time for the 1939 switch over. And schools were suddenly uncertain of vacation schedules. Some families found their bosses forced their holiday dinners to be split between the two dates. But it turned out that the real problem had been identified by Simon Lazarus, the angry brother - American football.

The headline in the New York Times said it all; “PRESIDENT SHOCKS FOOTBALL COACHES” The coach of Little Ouachita college in Arkansas warned, “We'll vote the Republican ticket if he interferes with our football.'” Chairman of the Athletic Board at New York University wrote to Roosevelt, “…it has become necessary to frame football schedules three to five years in advance, and for both 1939 and 1940 we had arranged to play our annual football game with Fordham on Thanksgiving Day…” And then Roosevelt had changed the date!

A Gallup poll found that 62% of Americans wanted the President’s decision reversed. But it was too late for Roosevelt to change his mind in 1939. And FDR was too stubborn to admit defeat in November 1940, which also had five Thursdays, and was a Presidential election year. Despite the addition of even more politics into the mix, in 1940 nine states switched from the Republican Thanksgiving (the fifth Thursday) to the Democratic one (the fourth Thursday). 

That left just sixteen celebrating the “old” Thanksgiving. And that seems to have been enough of a victory for Roosevelt, that looking ahead to November 1941 (which surprisingly also had five Thursdays), he asked New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia to study the sales figures. Was that extra week of shopping really helping the economy? In fact it had, but not very much; certainly not enough, considering all the angst and confusion the move had cost.

In early May of 1941, LaGuardia’s report informed the White House that “the early Thanksgiving date has not proved worthwhile".  So on  20 May 1941, Roosevelt set Thanksgiving 1941 back to the last Thursday in November. And in a rational world, that would have settled that. But, of course, politicians are not rational beings, anymore than the people who vote for them.

Being lawmakers the politicians in the House of Representatives decided to get involved by writing a law. House joint resolution 41 justified itself by pointing out that there was nothing to designate the day as a holiday except the annual President's Proclamation (which Roosevelt had mentioned at the start of this mess!). Henceforth, said the Representatives, the last Thursday in November would legally be Thanksgiving.  But when HR 41 got to the Senate, those gentlemen felt compelled to improve upon the fix.  

They did this by changing one little word. Thanksgiving would now be not the last Thursday in November as the House had intended, but the fourth Thursday in November, as Fred Lazarus had wanted.  As Connecticut Senator John A. Danaher pointed out, in four out of five years, the last Thursday in November was the fourth Thursday in November, anyway. The House went along and Roosevelt signed the new law into effect on 26 December, 1941. And amazingly, since that date, the Republicans had been determined not to notice that Roosevelt and the merchants had won.

No matter what conservative or liberal sympathizers may chortle about on their blog posts, the merchants' got their earlier date for Thanksgiving, and that extra week of Christmas shopping..  They got it by allowing the politicians to choke on their own press releases. Money always wins every political argument. And most moral arguments, too.  And the great political storm of 1939 - 1940 seems quaint and gentle, in a world where the Christmas shopping season begins shortly after Halloween!.

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VICKSBURG Chapter Ninety - One

 

The whistle on the approaching locomotive shrieked in desperation. Angry hands grabbed the big iron “harp switch”, (above, left) and forcefully slammed the flagged handle aside. With a ringing thud the lever shoved the twin iron rails 3 inches, opening the point.

A cheer rose from the men watching round the station. The 4 large drive wheels on the locomotive abruptly stopped turning, and white yellow sparks danced where the iron wheels now slid along the iron rails. One of the thin men shouted, “We are done walking, General!” The rabble cheered again. One of the rebel officers drew his Navy Colt revolver from his belt.

The trouble began after the Army of Mississippi reached the Southern Railroad 12 miles east of Jackson. They had been marching for a week, from Vicksburg to Edwards Depot, to Raymond, 3 more days to the Pearl River, 2 more days to be ferried across and to march north to Brandon. They had been promised that here they would board cars of the Southern Railroad for the 40 mile ride to Enterprise, and then a one day march south to new camps where they would be fed and rested while they waited to be exchanged for Yankee prisoners, and get back into this war.

These 30,000 sick, exhausted Confederate soldiers watched train after train disappear toward Enterprise, carrying everything from supplies to the Mississippi Governor and his state's records. Then, on Wednesday, 15 May the men were told there would be no trains for them. Discipline collapsed.

Private Epram McDowell Anderson, a 21 year old from the First Missouri Brigade, witnessed the riot of weary men. “Efforts were made,” he wrote a year after the war, “by moving the switch, to throw the trains...from the track...officers had to draw and threaten to use their side-arms before the mob could be subdued. (Later) One man got up in the plaza of Brandon and offered to...go and hang (General) Pemberton, the traitor.” And still the dispirited remnants of the Army of Mississippi had to complete their journey via “shank's mare” to the Chickasawhay River and Enterprise, 12 miles inside Alabama.

General “Old Joe” Johnston (above) had to stop the trains, to protect the locomotives. West of the still damaged Pearl River bridge some 90 steam engines had been or soon would be lost by the Confederacy. None of these could be replaced. 

And while the Confederacy did everything it could to keep the Yankees from learning of the Brandon riot, 32 year old William Nugent, one time lawyer and now Mississippi Inspector General admitted in a 28 July letter to his wife Eleanor that, “...after the fall of Vicksburg I entertained the most gloomy forebodings...The great demoralization produced in our army...was enough to make one dispirited.” He hoped, he said, that with time the officers could, “...reorganize and re-discipline our army...”. It was a desperate hope. But with the fall of Vicksburg, the Confederacy had little left but desperation.

Disaster followed upon disaster. On Thursday, 9 July the outpost of Port Hudson surrendered 6,500 men to General Nathaniel Banks. On Friday, 10 July Joseph 'Old Joe' Johnston and his Army of Relief retreated back inside the defenses of Jackson. 

But with the Pearl River Bridge still not repaired, his 28,000 men had no hope of defending the town against the 40,000 Yankees gathering outside its trenches. The weather was hot, General Sherman noted, adding that “...on the morning of July 17th the place was found evacuated. General Steele's division was sent in pursuit as far as Brandon...but General Johnston had carried his army safely off, and pursuit in that hot weather would have been fatal to my command.”

And with that anticlimax, the Vicksburg campaign came to an end. Confederate President Jefferson Davis (above) had no doubt who and what was to blame for the outcome. Vicksburg was lost, he insisted, because of a “want of provisions inside and a general outside who would not fight.” The latter, in Davis' opinion,  being the cranky and passive-aggressive Joe Johnston - whom Davis had appointed. 

But what about the general inside, the uninspired and uninspiring Lieutenant General John Clifford Pemberton (above)? He was also Davis' choice. And Davis had advised him not to follow Johnston's' advice. It seemed to be all of a piece, that and Davis' refusal to admit any personal culpability in the disaster, 

The Vicksburg Campaign began in December of 1862 and had lasted 7 months through July of 1863. It cost the Yankees 10,000 dead, wounded and missing, while the Confederacy suffered over 45,000 causalities. 

In just 7 months, Jefferson Davis' insistence on holding Vicksburg and Port Hudson, even after Grant had destroyed the Pearl River Bridge, had cost the Confederate government an entire field army, as well as all but a 12 mile eastern sliver of the state of Mississippi, some 48,500 square miles of sovereignty lost.

Jefferson Davis' culpability in this disastrous campaign proved a damning indictment of his military skills. The President of the Confederacy had no business telling any general where to place his men. But he kept right on doing it.

David Dixon Porter (above),  the 53 year old Admiral of the Yankee brown water navy, had been accused of never praising a superior. And he was never a close friend of Grant's. But he had nothing but praise for the Yankee Major General. 

“No ordinary general could have taken Vicksburg” said Porter. “Some men would have given it up....some would have demanded half the resources of the Union; but Grant never wavered in his determination, or in his hopes of success."

Most important of all to Midwest farmers, a war which had seemed a stalemate 7 months earlier, was now clearly on the path to victory. As Lincoln put it, “The father of waters now ran un-vexed to the sea.”  And that was the achievement of Major General Ulysses Grant.

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VICKSBURG Chapter Ninety

 

The tall, thin, dark haired woman with the lantern jaw raised a flat hand to shade her eyes from the setting sun. She watched the creaking sad wagon pulled slowly on wobbly wheels by the long shadow of a weary mare. Like so many beasts this summer, the filly's ribs showed through her dust covered hide.

Mary's heart rose and then fell when she recognized the familiar hulk of Father John O'Bannon (above)  holding the reins. Her husband had to be in the wagon.  The priest had brought John to her. In the back of an ambulance.

A commission of officers from both armies (above)  had drawn up and supervised the signing of paroles for every rebel soldier in Vicksburg. With that slip of paper soldiers could justify their absence from the battlefield, back home or in transient to home.  

Such a valued prize (above)  brought out the 31,000 who surrendered over the 18 to 20,000 'effectives' Pemberton had mustered to defend the city. That 'missing third' of Pemberton's army were the flotsam that collects around any army, particularly a losing one, particularly a badly run one, trapped in an urban area.

The 400 structures of Vicksburg (above) offered deserters and malingers 400 places to hide. It was relatively easy for men seeking to escape the constant shelling and sniping to find a quiet place to sleep, or even a meal away from the trenches. Considering the quality of the official rations, there was little advantage to staying with their units. Most did, but at least a third chose to fend for themselves. Once surrendered, the starving Army of Mississippi was kept alive by the Yankees, but as soon as they marched unarmed out of Vicksburg, they were consuming their own food again. And Grant's goal was to reclaim his supply lines for his own men only,  as quickly as possible.

Finally, at nine on the morning of Saturday, 11 July, 1863, 7 days after the surrender, the garrison of Vicksburg, “...waved a parting adieu to the scene of that terrible and bloody drama...”, or so remembered 21 year old private Epram McDowell Anderson.  There was the humiliation of spot searches as they left the city, to be certain they took no weapons with them. But after that brief reminder of their helplessness, the Army of Mississippi was sent on their way,  Private's Anderson's 1^st Missouri infantry were the lead regiment on the march, and he wrote, “Never was an army more grateful than ours on leaving Vicksburg. It was like a prisoner who has been unshackled in his cell and turned lose to breath again the pure air....rejoicing in a sense of freedom....” 

General Grant had offered rebel General John Stevens Bowen (above)  the option of staying in the city until he had fully recovered, but the southern gentleman insisted on accompanying his regiment in withdrawal, at least in part because, as private Anderson pointed out, “The first day's march brought us to Edwards.”

That winter Mary Lucrecia Preston Kennerly Bowen (above) was 28 years old and about to deliver her third child. With an infant mortality rate of 20% under favorable conditions, she had chosen to hole up on the plantation of “friends” 17 miles to the east of Vicksburg, outside of Edward's Depot, with the wives of 2 of John's subordinates – Colonel Pembroke S. Senteny and Major Eugene Erwin of the 2^nd Missouri regiment - as her midwives.

A native of St. Louis, Mary was an army brat and a fierce daughter of the south - her three brothers were fighting for the Confederacy. In the spring of 1862 Mary had left her children in her mother's care and rushed to Tennessee to nurse John after the general had been wounded at the Battle of Shiloh. John's recovery was confirmed when the couple conceived their 3^rd child. Mary then followed John to his new posting at Grand Gulf, Mississippi. She stayed there until March of 1863, when her “time came”. But on that July evening, Mary already knew that both of her midwives were now widows. And when reunited with her husband that Sunday evening, she came face to face with the  war so many of her generation had sought.

In Vicksburg, John Bowen (above) had consumed contaminated water or food touched by the contaminated hands of another. This had infected him with an alien bacteria, which had then killed most of the native bacteria which digested his food. After that, nothing he consumed reached his cells, but dehydration would kill him long before he starved to death. 

John's eyes were sunken. His mouth was dry, his lips cracked. He had a fever so high he kept passing in and out of conciseness. His belly was bloated. Most of the food and water he forced down was quickly vomited back up. He had little energy to even sit up. His gut kept cramping and he was plagued by the constant urge to defecate. When he did his stools were watery with blood and mucus. It was called the flux, or the bloody flux. In modern vernacular it was diarrhea, and it killed far more soldiers than did guns.

Sunday morning the Confederate army resumed their march, forced south to avoid fouling Sherman's supply lines as he advanced again on Jackson.  After 2 miles the road dropped off the high ground and forked, with the right passage leading another 14 miles to Raymond. But Father O'Bannon realized his patient could go no further. He sought assistance at the Morrison plantation along the Raymond Road, but was informed by the overseer that all the slaves had been marched off to Alabama, leaving no one to help the General. The man suggested they should take the south fork, down the Mount Moriah Road, another 2 miles to home of John Walton.

The single story house was called Valley Farm (above), and had been occupied by John Walton Jr. and his wife Margaret since at least 1850. After they carried the general into the house, Father O'Bannon wrote in his notebook, “July 12, General Bowen was too sick to move any further.” It would be an ugly night. Every hour John became weaker.

By midday on Monday, 13 July, 1863, Major General John Stevens Bowen was dead. Neighbor Robert Dickson supplied a coffin of rough wood. And one of the best hopes the Confederacy had for a second generation of military leaders was buried in Mr. Walton's garden, while Mary sobbed quietly at the graveside.

Monday morning, 13 July, the rebel army continued their march east, fading away a little bit more with every man who, hearing the gun fire from Jackson, and clutching his parole (above),  fell out of the line and started for home. Many would return when they were exchanged for captured Yankees. But many would not. On Wednesday, 16 July, the Army of Mississippi reached the Pearl River 10 miles below Jackson, and crossed into Alabama, back into Confederate held territory.

Mary Kennerly Bowen stayed on in Raymond, to remain close to John. Come the cooler months, she saw that John's body was moved to consecrated ground in the nearby Bethesda Presbyterian Church Cemetery (above).  Then, Mary followed the rebel army, this time to Atlanta. She served as a nurse during that campaign, and was even wounded in the Battle of Altoona. 

In September of 1864, when Atlanta was captured by General Sherman, the red headed Yankee offered an escort to see Mrs. Bowen back to her children in St. Louis. But the unrequited rebel proudly refused.  And so her children remained partners in her war.

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