The Christmas-box for the soldier in the field was not forgotten; but it was, less bountifully supplied than when the first Christmas dinner [was] dispatched to him to be shared with his comrades in his soldier’s tent. Santa Klaus once more generously disposed of socks and scarfs and visors, to the husbands, brothers, sons, and lovers in the army.

For the Confederate soldier away with the army at Christmas, there was no cure for the nearly incapacitating homesickness the holidays inspired. In a letter to his wife in 1863, soldier Philip H. Power found moving words for some of that lonely feeling:

I do not care to celebrate Christmas until I can do so with my children–and my wife–when will that holiday come…? I hope the children enjoyed themselves yesterday–I thought of them when I first awaked, and their stockings–Fortunate for them they were in Richmond where something could be had from Santa Claus.

Santa Claus apparently had a much easier time visiting homes in the North than those in the South that Christmas. According to a letter Sarah Thetford sent to her brother George, Santa arrived in Michigan dressed in a buffalo coat “with presents fastened to his coat-tail…[and] a corn-popper on his back.” She continued that she had “often heard Santa Claus described, but never before saw the old fellow in person.”

Sometimes Santa Claus worked behind the scenes of wartime savagery to bring a bit of Christmas cheer to those who otherwise had little reason to celebrate. Following Union Major General William T. Sherman’s capture of Savannah, Georgia, and presentation of it as a Christmas gift to Lincoln in 1864, about 90 Michigan men and their captain in turn gave a token of charity to Southern civilians living outside the city. On Christmas Day the soldiers loaded several wagons full of food and other supplies and distributed the items about the ravaged Georgia countryside. The destitute Southerners thanked the jolly Union Santa Clauses as the wagons pulled away under the power of mules that had tree-branch “antlers” strapped to their heads to turn them into makeshift reindeer.

By late 1865 the country was starting to reunite as the horrors of war and the shock of Lincoln’s assassination faded into memory. That December brought the first peacetime Christmas in five years. Most soldiers had been mustered out of the military and were home to celebrate the holiday with their families. Of course, many others had never returned home.

In the South, Christmas was being rediscovered after four years of deprivation. In the North, shops beckoned passersby with window displays full of tempting goods. And Nast illustrated another Christmas issue for Harper’s Weekly with Santa Claus as the centerpiece attraction, though he took a disturbing poke at the beaten South: part of the image showed the heads of several Rebel generals lying at the feet of “Ulysses the Giant Killer” Grant.

On the second page of the issue, however, there appeared a poem titled “By the Christmas Hearth” that was more in line with the nation’s hopeful spirit of reunification. The last stanza especially captures the cheerful holiday mood and eagerness of the American people to put the turbulent conflict behind them:

Bring holly, rich with berries red,
And bring the sacred mistletoe;
Fill high each glass, and let hearts
With kindliest feelings flow;
So sweet it seems at home once more
To sit with those we hold most dear,
And keep absence once again
To keep the Merry Christmas here.

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Kevin Rawlings, a resident of Sharpsburg, Maryland, and the vice president of the Save Historic Antietam Foundation, dons a Thomas Nast-style Santa Claus suit every winter to lecture about Christmas during the Civil War.

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