The Other Christmas Truce

The holiday season usually comes with promises of peace on earth and goodwill toward men. And yet, in the whole of human history, there has likely never been a single Christmas celebrated free from war worldwide. Perhaps that is why stories of a wartime “Christmas Truce” tend to capture our attention, offering the promise of peace amid even the bloodiest of conflicts, if only for a short while.

The most well-known holiday ceasefire is likely the Christmas Truce of 1914, which was actually a series of small truces that occurred sporadically and spontaneously across the Western Front during World War I. In most recountings, German, French, and British soldiers held burials and prisoner swaps. In rarer instances, soldiers met in the middle of No Man’s Land, sharing provisions and drinks, singing carols and, according to some disputed claims, even playing soccer.

But while cinematic in its scale, the famous Christmas Truce of 1914 was not the first holiday armistice to take place during wartime. Cessations in hostilities have happened — both officially and otherwise — throughout history and across nations, including on American soil.

Cue the Ken Burns documentary music: We have a Civil War story for you.

Christmas Day, 1862. Less than two weeks earlier, the Union and Confederate armies had fought street-by-street, hand-to-hand in the first Battle of Fredericksburg. Repelled by the South, Union troops were forced to retreat to the other side of the Rappahannock River, while the Confederates occupied a decimated Fredericksburg. Union forces began digging in, building log cabins and hunkering down in their winter quarters.

While the encampments might have been similar — scant food, little warmth, and questionable housing — the morale was drastically different. It was a dismal and depressing Christmas for the Army of the Potomac.

Adding insult to their loss at Fredericksburg, many Union soldiers lamented the absence of letters or packages from home, delayed by wartime logistics. On the other side of the river, buoyed by their hard-fought victory just days earlier, Confederates feted the holidays with large bonfires, gunfire and camp music.

Regimental histories note that numerous unauthorized truces and fraternizing with the enemy happened up and down the Rappahannock River that Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Eve. From shouting greetings across the river, to celebrating together around a bonfire, to trading supplies, these moments during an uneasy peace were spontaneous and the stuff of movies.

That’s not hyperbole: a fictionalization of one such Christmas truce made its way into the 2003 movie “Gods and Generals,” where “Billy Yank” and “Johnny Reb” yell across the river, first trading jokes and then coffee and tobacco in the middle of the Rappahannock.

The most notable account of a Christmas truce, however, comes from an essay by Rev. John Paxton and published in “Harper’s Weekly” nearly a quarter century after the end of the Civil War. An enthusiastic and idealistic young man who left college to enlist in the Union Army, Paxton recalled finding himself on duty on Christmas Day, cold, hungry, wet, and having recently witnessed atrocities and survived the Battle of Fredericksburg.

In the midst of feeling sorry for himself, Paxton recalled that he heard a Confederate call to the Union soldiers on picket duty. Through a congenial back-and-forth, according to his account, they discovered that each side had something the other desperately missed. The Confederates had “parched corn” and tobacco, while Paxton had coffee, sugar and pork.

The Union soldiers produced small whittled boats that they stuffed with goods and sent across the swiftly moving river. The Confederates raced into the water to retrieve the boats, then refilled them with “ripe persimmons,” tobacco, and the corn before returning them.

The men on both sides spent time enjoying their clandestine bounty — and what a treat it must have been. A Union blockade made coffee extremely rare across the South, raising the price of coffee beans outrageously and ruining morale in the military and civilian communities.

Southerners desperately experimented with other products to produce something similar to coffee, including sweet potatoes, peas, chicory, rye, sugar cane seeds, peanuts and even asparagus seeds. In the North, tobacco was harder to come by than it had been during peacetime. While the Union produced tobacco as an agricultural product, its yearly yield of 50 million pounds was far below the Confederacy’s 225 million pounds.

Reflecting on “Christmas Day in ‘62,” Paxton noted that, “At the very front of the opposing armies, the Christ Child struck a truce of us, broke down the wall of partition, became our peace. We exchanged gifts. We shouted greetings back and forth. We kept Christmas and our hearts were lighter of it, and our shivering bodies were not quite so cold.”

Days later, on January 1, 1863, President Lincoln would sign the Emancipation Proclamation. The document freed enslaved people being held in Confederate states that had seceded and were not under Union rule. The document “fundamentally transformed the character of the war” by explicitly codifying the Union Army as a tool of human rights, backing the personhood of enslaved people with the might of the U.S. government, and allowing Black men to enlist in the Federal Army and Navy. While those who enlisted may have had varying reasons for doing so, they were now fighting not only to keep the country together but to break the chains of slavery and end the white Southern way of life.

When the next truce came to the Rappahannock River in May 1863, it was far less festive. Under fierce fighting during the Second Battle of Fredericksburg, a truce was negotiated for Union forces to evacuate their wounded and collect their dead. Less than a week later, the fray ended in a decisive Union victory.

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