War in a time of Peace on Earth.

Since the very first settlers to the new world brought their holiday traditions with them, this has been a very special time of year for Americans. In the intervening centuries, these holiday traditions have grown and evolved in spite of wars, depressions, recessions, and natural disasters. Maintaining holiday traditions through difficult times is one of the ways that we maintain a sense of normalcy, and the Civil War was no different.

In the period of the Civil War, Christmas was probably second only to Easter as the most celebrated holiday of the year. The American holiday calendar looked a little different in the 1860’s. There was no official Thanksgiving Day until President Lincoln declared the last Thursday of November as a national day of thanksgiving in 1863. July 4th was celebrated as a holiday, but again, not in any official capacity. The relatively small Jewish population of the time, about 100,000 out of a total 31.4 million, and the suppression of African traditions under slavery led to the predominance of the Christian religious holidays.

Of those holidays, Christmas most reflected America’s immigrant heritage. By the 1860’s, the American Christmas celebration was an amalgamation of several Christmas traditions from all over Europe. The Christmas tree had come over from Germany. St. Nicholas came from the Dutch. Mistletoe, Yule logs, greens, and the Christmas feast all came from the English. Most of the Christmas imagery that we are familiar with that pre-dates the Coca-Cola Santa and the TV specials dates from this period. By the time the Civil War broke out in 1861, Christmas was a firmly established American tradition.

The first Christmas of the war, December 25th, 1861, came just about six months into the conflict. For most of the volunteer soldiers fighting in both armies, it was their first Christmas away from home. But, according the book We Were Marching Christmas Day by Kevin Rawlings, many of the soldiers were still caught up in the initial wave of war spirit and were full of vigor and enthusiasm. Letters to and from the front often had the tone of festive correspondence with distant relatives away for Christmas.

But by Christmas of 1862, the tone had changed. The previous year had been heavy with battle and loss. Shiloh, the Seven Days, Perryville, 2nd Bull Run, Antietam, and Fredericksburg had drained the enthusiasm from both the soldiers in the field and their family and friends back home. In dull winter camps or on ships at sea, the men in the service of their country had little to do but reflect on Christmases past and miss home desperately. At home, there was little to for which to be joyful. The war was no closer to over, and too many households had experienced loss.

But as is so often the case in our history, despair leads to action. Those who could not bring the soldiers and sailors home for Christmas sought ways to bring Christmas to those whom they could. Hospitals were decorated for the season, Christmas dinners were held (the bill of fare from one such dinner at the Broad Street Hospital in 1864 is pictured above), and care packages were prepared and sent to the front. For their part, the fighting men of the North and South sought to keep the Christmas spirit with dinners, dances, festivals, and decorations throughout the camp.

Christmas would pass twice more before the end of the war. Each came and went with a measure of the sorrow and homesickness of the year before. Slight changes in the locations where the holidays were observed marked the passing of the war. In 1864, William T. Sherman and the men of his army toasted each other Merry Christmas in Savannah, Georgia, having marched there from Atlanta over the summer and fall. That last Christmas of the war brought faint hope to some, and creeping dread to others that the war may soon be over.

In December of 1865, the Harper’s Weekly newspaper printed a holiday cover that was the first that did not portray some aspect of the war for the first time in four years. Everywhere, men and women, boys and girls, young and old, gathered round table and hearth to sing songs and raise glasses to peace. And even though the Civil War generation has long since passed away, it is still easy to imagine them, huddled in front of fires and candles, reading letters of Christmases past and present, dreaming of loved ones far away and hoping for the end of war.

Today, such scenes are repeated in far away places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where American men and women gather in tents and huts to dream of holidays and home. And here, those who love and miss them wish with all their might for a holiday season when all are home safe.

So, it is with a memory of those in the past and appreciation for their kindred spirits in the present that I and everyone here at the Civil War Museum of Philadelphia would like to wish all of you, and all of your loved ones the very Happiest of Holidays and the hope for peace on earth.

That document, continued.

Above is a 20th Century painting of the meeting between Grant and Lee at Appomattox Court House by Kieth Rocco. To the left, Colonel Charles Marshall and Colonel Eli Parker compare copies of the April 9th surrender agreement in Grant's manifold book.

When I last left you, we had just done an Associate Press story on a document from our archives we believed to be the Confederate copy of the terms of surrender signed at Appomattox Court House on April, 10th, 1865 (see last post)...

What we had not anticipated was the huge national interest that the story of the surrender document might generate. When the story hit the AP wire, it was picked up by newspapers and Internet sites all across the country. I was completely unaware that the story was growing and spreading until the day of our final open house when a friend of mine told me we were on the front page of Yahoo news. Within a few days, we were popping up everywhere. Newspapers from Miami to Montana, Washington, D.C. to Washington State were running the story with a pretty awful picture of me with my mouth open (never let yourself be photographed while you’re talking). Pretty soon, we were getting calls from local television stations and newspapers wanting to do stories on the document. I even got a call from a student who worked for a college newspaper in Virginia who wanted to do a story while he was home on break.

It was all very exciting for a while, but we were soon confronted with a couple of problems. First, we had begun the move of the artifact collection out of our old building in earnest, and all the media requests were becoming a distraction. After being accommodating for a few days, our CEO Sharon Smith and I decided to shut down access to the document. Second, we had never intended the story to be any kind of formal press announcement about the document. But the enormous media attention the story received became like a press announcement in spite of our intentions, and we were forced to defend our theories about the document before we were ready.

The first challenge to our conclusions came from the National Historic Park at Appomattox Court House. The historian there was interviewed for the original AP article on the document. At that time, he expressed doubt that we had an original copy, believing that what we had was more likely a Photostat copy or a souvenir copy. This was not unexpected, as we had considered those options ourselves when the document first surfaced. What I did not expect was that with a day of the AP story breaking nationwide, he emailed the reporter scans of the Maryland Historical Society copy of the surrender document and claimed that theirs and ours were exactly the same.

When the AP reporter called me with this particular revelation, my heart sank. It was one thing to be wrong about the document, but it’s a whole other thing to be wrong about it the day after the story went national. I certainly did not want the Museum to be embarrassed because I had failed to look at all the evidence. But even with this development, I did not think we were wrong.

I had talked to the historian at Appomattox about his concerns, but I had not seen the Maryland Historical Society scans, so I could nott comment on whether they looked exactly alike or not, but if they did it would create a huge problem with our theory. I was a little annoyed at the people at the Maryland Historical Society because I had spoken to them twice about the document and no one ever indicated to me that there were scans of it available. Had I known, I would have requested them at that time. So I had to see these scans.

It took several days to get a look at the scans due to the fact that the move was still going on and I was fairly out of touch. What I encountered when I finally did see them was worse than we had feared. The Maryland Historical Society copy did not just look like our copy, it looked exactly like our copy. We had to go back to square one a look at the document again.

The fact that the documents were exactly the same ruled out one of the possibilities first suggested by the historian at Appomattox, that it was a souvenir copy. It is impossible that two hand written and signed documents could be identical, even if they were written at the same time by the same people. So, the other option is that it is some kind of duplicate. I had very good reasons to believe that it was not a Photostat copy. For one thing, there were those pen marks on the paper. A Photostat would not leave pen marks of any kind. There was also the issue of access to the document to make a Photostat copy. Gibbon states in his memoirs that he gave his copy to the Maryland Historical Society. The memoirs were published posthumously in 1928, but Gibbon himself died in 1896. This means that the document was already at the Maryland Historical Society by 1896. Photostat technology did not exist at that time, so anyone making a Photostat copy would have had to do so at the Historical Society. Photostat copying was not common until World War II, and even then the machines were extremely large and ungainly. So a Photostat copy was not impossible, but unlikely.

Still, there was no question the documents were exactly the same. So we began to think that the most likely way that the documents could be exactly alike is that they were made at the same time. So we began to research the methods of document duplication that were available in 1865. I can safely say that in the process, I’ve learned more about the history of document duplication than I ever wanted to know. But the research led us to two duplication technologies that were available at the time; the polygraph and the manifold writer.

Most of us are familiar with the polygraph (though the name has been co-opted in modern times by the lie detector). The polygraph is a machine with two pens, the user writes a letter with one pen and the other pen copies it onto another paper. Thomas Jefferson is often credited as having invented it, but in truth Jefferson perfected one he ordered from Europe (it is on display at Monticello). The problem with a polygraph for our purposes is that it is fairly ungainly and we could find no evidence that they were carried in the field during the Civil War.

The manifold writer was simply a primitive form of carbon paper. The carbon paper was slipped in between two or more sheets of paper. The idea being that when you wrote on the top sheet, several copies could be made. Manifold writers were not uncommon in the Civil War, and were often used by staff officers who had to write multiple copies of orders frequently. The Museum has a manifold order book in its archival collections. A manifold order book had thin sheets of tissue like paper with carbon paper inserts. The user can slip several sheets of plain paper into the book with carbon paper in between. Using a stylus, the author writes the original order on a tissue sheet, making a permanent impression. The carbon produces two or more copies, and the tissue serves as the file copy in the book.

One of the difficulties of researching these copying devices is that the name manifold writer is sometimes used to describe a polygraph. As I said, we could find no indication that someone had lugged a delicate and awkward polygraph machine to Appomattox Court House and used it to make copies of important documents. But we did find evidence that at least one manifold writer was present and used for copying some of the most important documents of all.

The evidence comes to us through the memoirs of Horace Porter. Porter was aide-de-camp to General Ulysses Grant, and was in the McLean parlor went Grant and Lee had their historic meeting on April 9th. Porter recalls a key point in that historic meeting:

“’Very well,’ replied Grant, ‘I will write them out.’ And calling for his manifold order-book, he opened it, and laid it on a small oval wooden table which Colonel Parker brought to him from the rear of the room, and proceeded to write the terms. The leaves had been so prepared that three impressions of the writing were made.”

So we have proof that a manifold writer was at Appomattox Court House and was being used to make copies of important document pertaining to the surrender. This by no means proves our case that our document was produced on a manifold writer, but it certainly adds a great deal of credibility to the theory. If General Grant wrote the preliminary terms of surrender on a manifold writer, would it not make sense that the formal terms of surrender would be written on one as well?

So where are we now? Well, we have a great deal more to learn. We need to have the document analyzed to determine if it is the product of a manifold writer. It will be difficult to prove, but it would be a tremendous coup if we could prove that either General Gibbon or one of his staff officers had a manifold writer or used it at Appomattox Court House. We certainly need to know more about Bruce Ford and the provenance of the document.

The odyssey of our surrender document is not nearly over. As you read this I am probably doing more research in the Gibbon papers or some other such thing. But the effort has already been rewarding in the new insights and information it has made me gain. Its has also provided a health dose of the kind of mystery, that peering into the dark feeling, that draws all of us to history in the first place. We will certainly keep working until we solve the puzzle, and I’ll keep you posted every step of the way.