The modern version of Santa Claus arrived in the United States in 1863, when he stopped at an army camp of Union soldiers in the January 3 issue of Harper’s Weekly. Cartoonist Thomas Nast drew Santa wearing striped pants and a jacket emblazoned with stars as he sat in a sleigh under a giant American flag.
The article accompanying the image explained to readers that the “right jolly old elf” that Clement Clarke Moore had described in his 1823 poem “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” didn’t simply visit children. As the picture showed, he was bringing packages to soldiers while they relaxed with athletic games—like trying to catch a greased pig—before their Christmas dinner.
Nast drew Santa holding a puppet that looked much like Confederate president Jefferson Davis, and the article explained that he was “entertaining the soldiers by showing them Jeff Davis’s future. He is tying a cord pretty tightly round his neck, and Jeff seems to be kicking very much at such a fate.”
Nast’s 1863 Santa told a specific story about America in that terrible moment.
Nast had come to New York City from Germany as a child, one of the about 1.5 million German immigrants who arrived in the US between 1830 and 1860. In the 1850s, those immigrants and their native-born sons were a crucial part of the coalition that formed the Republican Party.
Those men threw themselves into the cause of the United States during the Civil War. About 216,000 German immigrants fought for the Union, making up the largest ethnic group among the troops. Another 300,000 native-born men of German ancestry also joined up, for a total of about 526,000 soldiers, about a quarter of the soldiers fighting for the Union. Their support was vital for the survival of the United States.
But by 1863, enthusiasm for the war was flagging. A war that most thought would be quick and easy had dragged on for almost two years, and the early battles had favored the Confederacy. The German-born troops had brought their songs into the army, and it was a small step from honoring those cultural traditions to Nast bringing the Santa Claus from his own childhood in Bavaria to visit the troops of the United States Army at Christmas to raise their spirits.
This was the first visit of Nast’s Santa to the United States, but he reappeared more famously in 1881. In that incarnation, too, he recalled the Civil War armies, but this time he represented what they had won.
The immediate postwar years were unsettled even before the terrible financial crash that began in 1873, but by 1880, Americans were feeling flush and optimistic. The country’s new white-collar workers who kept the record books for the new railroad corporations or sold industrial products to local consumers had money and time to spend on leisure activities…and on their families.
They began to celebrate significant personal events with parties and gifts. Weddings were no longer small affairs in someone’s front parlor; now they were elegant occasions in a decorated church with a reception afterward, where guests ate pieces of a cake that had been decorated to look like the bride’s gown. For the first time, parents held parties for their child’s birthday, and those invited brought gifts for the guest of honor.
In 1881, Nast’s iconic Santa highlighted this cultural change. Printed in Harper’s Weekly before Christmas that year, his image of Santa was one of the widespread American prosperity the Union victory had ushered in. Santa was fat, indicating he had access to good food and lots of it. He was warmly dressed and beaming. He carried an armful of children’s toys, including a military belt with a buckle embossed with the letters “US.”
As Nast’s Santa showed, the new prosperity was a product of the victory of the United States in the Civil War. Just a year before, the 1880 election had seemed to bury the political power of former Confederates once and for all as voters had reaffirmed the results of the Civil War by electing James A. Garfield, a Lincoln Republican who defended Black rights. An assassin ended Garfield’s term shortly after it began, but with Democrats nonetheless recognizing that to win national elections they must turn away from old southern leaders, it seemed the war had finally fallen into the past.
And there was a Santa Claus in Harper’s Weekly that children could dream about, brought to the U.S. by the American soldiers as a skinny immigrant who fought to put down the rebellion that threatened the country’s survival and then grown fat and happy in its aftermath.
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Notes:
Ilse E. Detwiler, “The Treatment Of The Immigration Of Germans To The United States Of America In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries In Widely Used Freshman-Level World Civilization And Sophomore-Level American History Texts,” Internationale Schulbuchforshung, 4 (1982): 124–138.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13507486.2019.1701419
https://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=5909&pid=3
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