Savannah {Or} a Gift for Mr. Lincoln

PREFACE Between the burning of Atlanta in November 1864 and the burning of Columbia in February 1865, there occurred one of the most remarkable yuletides in American history.Late in November, William Tecumseh Sherman, nemesis of the Confederacy, launched out from Atlanta in a campaign still written about in books and studied in military colleges. He cut his lines of communication, literally disappeared off the Union's war map and, with his army of sixty thousand, marched across Georgia to the Atlantic. It was a march rife with pillage and arson, civilian suffering and martial excess. Sherman professed a hope of shortening the war by ?making Georgia howl.' Those caught in his path called him the new Attila. Yet when the Yankees reached the sea in December, a curious interlude followed. Sherman captured and occupied Savannah and remained there throughout the holidays. It was a Christmas like none that had ever been and none that ever would be: not quite war but not quite peace, forever remembered by those who lived it and those who came after. Through the eyes of a few?Yankees and Confederates, men and women, and one special girl'this narrative spins a tale of that Christmas. Thanksgiving Afternoon, 1864 Little Ogeechee River Thanksgiving was a holiday not much observed in the failing Confederacy. It was suspiciously Northern in origin, but more important, Abe Lincoln had lately promoted it to boost home-front morale. Anyway, there was precious little to be thankful for. The air was biting. Last night it snowed, although the white dusting melted away by noon. The tidal waters had a flat, cold sheen; thick windrows of spartina grass on the islands dotting the marshes had lost their summertime brilliance. The worst was unseen: Somewhere out beyond the autumnal forests and farmsteads was the trampler, the looter, Sherman.Two youngsters, together with a starving pig named Amelia, whiled away the afternoon beneath a straggle of sable palms on the bank of the Little Ogeechee, just where the Grove River flowed in from upstream. Neither youngster came from a poor family, but you wouldn't have known it, given the patched and threadbare state of their clothes. ?You having anything good for dinner? asked the boy, Legrand Parmenter. He was fourteen but looked older because of his bony height and craggy jaw. The girl, twelve, pulled her patched shawl more tightly around her shoulders. The girl's name was Harriet Lester; all in the neighborhood, including her companion, knew her as Hattie. She was approaching the doorstep of womanhood but was not quite there yet. ?Same as yesterday,? she said. ?Blue crabs I caught this morning with mullet heads. Mama's boiling them. I have to pick the crabmeat before we can eat.' ?Don't act so peeved about it. You're lucky. We get possum.' A silence. Food was a prickly subject. After the hateful Union general drove the citizens of Atlanta out of their fair city early in November, then torched it, conditions along the seacoast had deteriorated to previously unimaginable depths. Railroads no longer ran. A few provision schooners sneaked down the Savannah or the Ogeechee, but what little they carried was fought over by mobs in the city's public market. Hattie and her mother, Sara, were never in town to get any of it. In front of Hattie and Legrand, the river curved prettily through rice lands long ago cleared of tupelo and pine and palmetto. Behind the children lay square fields where generations of Lesters had dug out stumps, burned brush, built dikes and trunks; a house; and a rice barn. Hattie's great-grandfather had named the place Silverglass late one afternoon at candle-lighting, when the confluence of the Grove and Little Ogeechee shimmered and shone like enchanted metal. The county seat, the charming old city of Savannah, lay roughly ten miles northeast. The boyJakes, John is the author of 'Savannah {Or} a Gift for Mr. Lincoln', published 2004 under ISBN 9780525948032 and ISBN 0525948031.