Co-opted for the Union war effort, Santa delivered Jefferson Davis hanged in effigy.
As the leader of a divided nation, Abraham Lincoln knew he had to find ways to unite the American people and bring a successful end to the Civil War. As a lawyer and politician skilled in the art of persuasion, he recognized that to change minds usually requires first changing hearts. And hearts are often changed with imagery. With the help of an artist friend, Lincoln used Christmas as a means of attaining his goal.
The Birth of a Holiday
As an Illinois legislator in 1834, Lincoln had opposed making Christmas a holiday because “it would be wasting taxpayers’ money if we took the day off.” His view matched that of most Americans at the time. William Bushong, historian of the White House Historical Association, has observed that it was “the New Year’s Day reception, and not Christmas, that was a really big deal at the time.”
When Lincoln was sworn in to his first term as president, only 18 states recognized the holiday. Lincoln biographer David Reynolds found that many Americans in the Northern part of the country in that era, especially New England’s Puritans, regarded Christmas as “a vestige of paganism that was not mentioned in the Bible,” which made them seek to suppress it as a holiday.
It was the Southerners who liked to enjoy Christmas with great festivity, Reynolds wrote, making it a day to “give alcohol to the people they enslaved and encourage wild celebrations.”
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That’s why Frederick Douglass saw Christmas as “drunken revelry” and a “sop contrived by masters to distract from their oppression.”
Though Clement Moore penned his famous poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (opening line: “’Twas the night before Christmas”) in 1823, and Charles Dickens released A Christmas Carol in 1843, they weren’t enough to create a national holiday.
Moore’s poem moved the needle a little by appealing to childhood and creating a vivid description of a “right jolly old elf” with twinkling eyes, merry dimples and a little, round belly.
Santa Claus was hardly the ubiquitous messenger of Christmas he is today. Before the Civil War, mentions of him were scarce and varied. Washington Irving’s 1809 satire, Knickerbocker’s History of New York, included a character named Nicholas flying in a wagon, delivering gifts to children. In 1821, a children’s book by William B. Gilley included a poem about “Santeclaus.” But the mythology hadn’t yet crystallized and images of the jolly fellow had not been widely used in print.
The Man from the North
After Lincoln’s presidency began, and the Civil War had raged for more than a year with Confederates winning all the major battles, he decided midway through 1862 that Northerners needed a new source of inspiration. He thought he could do it by reframing the basis for why the Union had to prevail in the war, and his new approach to energize the North centered on his issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, which would make the war effort a moral cause, not just a political one.
Lincoln found an eager partner in Thomas Nast, the era’s leading political cartoonist, whose work was featured in Harper’s Weekly. Nast had first connected with Lincoln by drawing 1860 campaign posters.
When the war started a month into Lincoln’s presidency, Nast’s early pictures from the battlefront had shown Confederate soldiers bringing horrific violence upon the Union army, which so outraged Northerners that many enlisted. Lincoln called the cartoonist “our best recruiting sergeant, whose work has never failed to arouse enthusiasm and patriotism.”
To heighten public support for the Union effort in the new year, after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on Jan. 1, Lincoln asked Nast to create cartoons that would engender stronger support for the war effort, and he even gave the artist suggestions about what to draw.
Nast came through for the president in the Jan. 3, 1863, issue of Harper’s Weekly, with two powerhouse illustrations. For the journal’s cover, he titled his drawing “Santa Claus in Camp.” Santa sat on a sleigh, his face matching Moore’s description of St. Nick, but instead of being dressed in fur, he wore the Union flag’s stars and stripes. And the gift being delivered to Union soldiers was a puppet of Confederate President Jefferson Davis with a rope around its neck.
Lincoln scholar David J. Kent assessed that the drawing succeeded in causing “Santa to become propaganda for rallying the Union war effort.”
“Christmas Eve” appeared in Harper’s Weekly during the Civil War. (Image published with permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.)
Nast’s second piece in the Jan. 3, 1863, Harper’s Weekly, was titled “Christmas Eve.” It featured two main images. On the left, a wife and mother in the room where her sleeping children lay, praying on her knees while looking out the window. On the right, her soldier husband, alone in his camp, leaning against a tree, musket by his side, gazing with sorrow at a picture of his family.
In the smaller drawings around the two large images, borrowing from Moore, Nast placed Santa entering a chimney, presumably at the family’s home, and Santa in his reindeer-led sleigh tossing gifts to Union soldiers in a field.
In 2019, The New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik concluded, “In the two drawings featured in the January 3, 1863 Harper’s Weekly, Christmas became a Union holiday and Santa a Union local deity — a positive spirit of Northern plenty and domesticity. … The ‘Christmas Eve’ cartoon overnight became the favorite Northern image of the war. Despite its morbidity, it built morale because it gave Christmas to the North.”
Another Thomas Nast illustration helped solidify Christmas as an American holiday, and Santa’s place in it. (Image published with permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.)
Almost a year later, Nast followed up with a masterpiece titled “Christmas 1863.” In the 12 months between the two issues, the war’s tide turned. The Emancipation Proclamation had inspired 200,000 slaves to run away from their Southern masters and provide needed manpower for the North’s war effort. The Union Army won major battles at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. And Lincoln at last found a battlefield leader in Ulysses Grant capable of doing what it took to win the war.
With all these positive developments occurring throughout 1863, Nast shifted the Union’s momentum into its highest gear with his “Christmas 1863” cartoon. In the central image, the husband and wife separated a year before in the “Christmas Eve” drawing now warmly embrace upon the soldier’s return home on furlough, while their young children climb on dad’s leg and hold his hand. In the smaller picture to the left, Santa has arrived in the sleeping kids’ bedroom with a sack full of gifts. And in the right frame, the kids are pulling down stockings from the hearth and opening gifts as their parents beam in the background.
In three images at the bottom of the spread, a heavenly light shines on the Holy Family in a manger scene; a contemporary family gathers around a feast; and neighbors exchange friendly greetings on a snow-covered street.
As he had done a year before, Nast delivered the message that Christmas belonged to the North.
Campaigning
The following year, 1864, was an election year, and Nast did his part to promote Lincoln’s reelection. The incumbent president faced initially strong opposition from his Democratic opponent, George McClellan, whose party’s platform favored bringing the war to a quicker end by caving to the Confederates on the issue of emancipation.
Nast’s cartoon “Compromise with the South” ran in the Aug. 24, 1864, issue of Harper’s Weekly. Nast’s biographer Fiona Halloran said that “his intention was to paint the darkest possible picture of the results of a Democratic victory. … In the cartoon, a Union soldier, head bowed, reluctantly shakes hands with a beaming Confederate over the grave of Union men who died for a worthless cause. A vote for the Democrats, Nast implies, is a vote that invalidates all our sacrifices. The Republican Party used it as a campaign poster and several hundred thousand copies of it flooded the reading public. It became a hammer blow for Lincoln and against peace.”
“Compromise With the South” took to task Lincoln’s opponents who wanted to end the war quickly by capitulating to Confederate demands. (Image published with permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.)
Lincoln was reelected on Nov. 8, 1864, aided greatly by Union Gen. William Sherman’s capture of Atlanta in early September. Sherman then commenced his “March to the Sea,” culminating with his seizing of Savannah on Dec. 21. In sync with the new national appreciation for Christmas as a gift-giving holiday, Sherman telegrammed the president with the message, “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah.”
As Christmas approached, victory seemed certain and Lincoln’s thoughts proceeded to peace terms and national reconciliation. Again he turned to Nast. The president and cartoonist met at the White House on Dec. 12, 1864, less than a week after the president’s year-end message to Congress had ended with his thoughts on possible peace terms. Another Nast cartoon, titled “The Union Christmas Dinner,” ran on Dec. 31, and it delivered the message that the time had come for all Americans to be reunited, as I have written about before in these pages.
A unified holiday
“During Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, Christmas took on a new meaning. Chiefly responsible was Thomas Nast who created the modern Santa Claus and made him distinctly pro-Northern and anti-slavery,” wrote David Reynolds. “By the end of the war, the holiday reached across sectional and ethnic divisions.”
University of Texas history professor Penne Restad agrees: “The Civil War intensified Christmas’s appeal. Its celebration of family matched the yearnings of soldiers and those they left behind. Its message of peace and goodwill spoke to the most immediate prayers of all Americans.”
Although Lincoln was killed in April 1865 before he could proclaim Dec. 25 as a national holiday, President Ulysses Grant did so five years later.
Today, we continue to be the beneficiaries of what Lincoln and Nast did to bring Christmas to the forefront of our national consciousness near year’s end, every single year.
