Enemies in a bitter civil war see each other’s humanity during one of its bloodiest battles in the Christmas Season.
Now That Should Be A Movie.
Short Pitch
It’s called God Rest Ye Merry, Soldiers
It is a War Drama
In the vein of Joyeux Noel
It is like Little Women meets All Quiet on the Western Front
It follows the common Billy Yanks of The Army of the Cumberland
And the common Johnny Rebs of the Army of the Tennessee
As they battle the elements, their officers, and each other to survive a meatgrinder of a war.
Problems arise when they are thrown against each other at one of the bloodiest battles of the conflict.
Together, their shared humanity, mutual respect and the Spirit of Christmas will help them rise above the brutality of war and show each other grace and kindness.
The idea came to me when I was reading God Rest Ye Merry, Soldiers and was astonished at how mortal enemies showed each other more respect than people removed 150 years from the events do, and how the message of peace and forgiveness as shown by the soldiers Blue and Gray is one our nation desperately needs to hear right now.
My unique approach is a war movie set at Christmastime but takes place after Christmas Day during the 12 Days of Christmastide and in which the changing cultural meaning of Christmas is a major element in the story’s healing climax.
A set piece would be the night before the battle when the regiments of the Confederate and Union armies are lined up and facing each other. The musical bands of each regiment try to outplay the other with different songs. The Northern bands play “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and their version of “The Battle Cry of Freedom.” The Southern ones play “Dixie” and their own version of “The Battle Cry of Freedom.” Then a band starts playing “Home, Sweet Home.” Every band takes up the tune. Then every tongue, Blue and Gray, takes up the chorus. Soon the entire battle lines of both armies are singing the song in unison. When it ends not an eye is dry.
Target audiences would be men and women (30-70), military veterans, military service members, history buffs, war movie fans, Civil War reenactors, Civil War enthusiasts, military aficionados, music students, Christmas movie fans, and Tennesseans and other Southerners.
Audiences would want to see it for its themes of kindness, grace, humanity, forgiveness, healing, regeneration, and the true meaning and spirit of Christmas set against an epic battle and major historical events.
Today’s book I would like to pitch as a movie is God Rest Ye Merry, Solders: A True Civil War Christmas Story by James McIvor, from Viking Press.
ACT 1
Beginnings / Prologue (Pages 1-10)
Christmas in America was much different in 1862 than it had been in 1861. Both Confederate and Union camps during the first holiday season of the American Civil War were festive, with brass bands, sports, foot races, mock parades, and feasts of turkey, mince pies, eggnog and other delicious food and drinks. Soldiers had received packages from home with socks, boots, and cakes. The youth of the nation had still been filled with romantic and adventurous notions about war. By their second December of war those notions had cooled after both Billy Yank and Johnny Reb had seen hundreds of thousands killed by bullets and sickness and maimed for life during the destruction of battle.
The soldiers our story focuses on are the Union Army of the Cumberland and the Confederate Army of Tennessee. Union soldiers in the 9th Kentucky camped near Nashville, Tennessee, try to holler “Hurrah for Christmas,” but are stopped with orders to go on picket duty. Nearby Ohio troops are ordered to march on Christmas Day. Men of the 19th Ohio attempt merriment but it gives way to mumblings about families and home. Encamped 40 miles away near Murfreesboro, a soldier of the 34th Alabama writes home that no drill was the only thing different on December 25 from any other day.
Most soldiers cannot celebrate with sugar, flour and other sweets and goodies since they are too expensive due to inflation and price gauging. The men of the 45th Tennessee, also camped at Murfreesboro, were recruited from Middle Tennessee, and allowed to have furloughs back home. They return with homemade pies and cakes. A snowball fight is arranged between the men of the 20th Tennessee and the 45th. While the men of the 45th are distracted by the fight, the camp is raided by members of the 20th who steal many of the cooking utensils and baked goods. In a movie these scenes of Billy Yank and Johnny Reb can be used to introduce the audience to regiments and individuals who will play important parts in the battle of Stones River.
This gloom around Christmas was due to the fact that many of the troops, both North and South, had not seen their families for sixteen months, and were contrasting the Christmas with those from years past, which could be shown in flashbacks as major characters are introduced. The meaning of the holiday had been changing in the past few decades from one condemned in puritanical New England and one of laziness, drunken excess, and rowdiness in the South to that of family gatherings and religious observations. Harper’s and Godeys’ Lady’s Book, whose editor, Sarah Hall, believed the national holiday should be Thanksgiving, used articles and illustrations to spread the message that the holiday should be about spending time with one’s family, innocence, and childhood joy, and popularized customs and decorations like Christmas trees. By 1860 every state had, including those of New England, made December 25 a public holiday. By 1862 the cards and cartoons of Thomas Nash that had been jolly the previous year now expressed longing for home and innocence in contrast to death. Not even Santa Clause was left unscarred by the war. For example, the Southern Illustrated News contained this poem
This happened one Christmas. I’m sorry to write,
Our ports are blockaded, and Santa, to-night
Will hardly get down here; for if he should start
The Yankees would get him unless he was smart.
They beat all the men in creation to run
And if they could get him, they’d think it fine fun
To put him in prison, steal the nice toys
He started to bring our girls and boys.
But try not to mind it – tell all your jokes –
Be gay and cheerful, like other good folks;
For if you remember to be good and kind,
Old Santa next Christmas will bear it in mind.
In a movie about the Battle of Stones River a character who will play an important part in the fight, like Patrick Cleburne, who deserves a movie, could be introduced reading the poem. The poetry for the soldiers, who had lost their child-like and innocent ideas about war, are more somber. “A Soldier’s Christmas Eve” appeared in the Poughkeepsie Telegraph on December 27, 1862, and could be read by a Union soldier, like Colonel George B. Roberts of the 42nd Illinois, with a voice over during a montage of the camp life and the maneuvers of the Army of the Cumberland
“In a southern forest gloomy and old,
so lately the scene of a terrible fight.
A soldier, alone in the dark and cold,
is keeping the watch tonight.
Moans loud through the branches black and bare,
he is thinking now of the little band,
in his boyhood home, whose faces bright
are beaming with happiness as they stand.
Round the Christmas tree tonight,
and he seems to join with the happy throng
in each innocent game and mirthful song.
Ah! vision as bright as fairy land!
Like a broken dream, it will not stay,
he raises his weather-beaten hand
and dashes a tear away.”
A soldier in the Army of Northern Virginia wrote “Christmas Night of ’62.” A Confederate soldier or unit that who plays an important part in the fight, like Johnny Green of the Orphan Brigade, Kentuckians who could not return to their homes behind Union lines, could be introduced reading the poem with a montage of life in the Army of Tennessee.
The wintry blast goes wailing by,
the snow is falling overhead;
I hear the lonely sentry’s tread,
and distant watch-fires light the sky.
Dim forms go flitting through the gloom;
The soldiers cluster round the blaze
To talk of other Christmas days,
And softly speak of home and home
My saber swinging overhead,
gleams in the watch-fire’s fitful glow,
while fiercely drives the blinding snow,
and memory leads me to the dead.
My thoughts go wandering to and fro,
vibrating ‘twixt the Now and Then;
I see the low-browed home again,
the old hall wreathed in mistletoe.
And sweetly from the far off years
comes borne the laughter faint and low,
the voices of the Long Ago!
My eyes are wet with tender tears.
I feel again the mother kiss,
I see again the glad surprise
That lighted up the tranquil eyes
And brimmed them o’er with tears of bliss
By now the soldiers, both Blue and Gray, are seeing each other less and less as the enemy and more like fellow victims of a natural disaster. War is a pestilence plaguing the whole nation. And the generals are the biggest carriers.
Predicament / Inciting Incident (Pages 10-20)
The war in 1862 had been a meat grinder that had mired into a stalemate. In Virginia 13,000 Union soldiers became casualties throwing themselves against Confederate-held heights at Fredericksburg. In Mississippi Grant’s campaign for Vicksburg stalled after his supply lines were cut and destroyed by Confederate cavalry. And in heartland of Tennessee and Kentucky Braxton Bragg, commander of the Army of the Tennessee, had nearly captured the Blue Grass state and destroyed the Union army before retreating, “catching defeat from the jaws of victory.” The commander of the Army of the Cumberland, Don Carlos Buell, had also failed to inspire confidence by giving up territory too quickly and moving too slowly after the retreating rebels. “Our poppycorn generals kill men as Harold killed the innocents,” a Massachusetts private wrote home. Rumors about the south surrendering spread like wildfire among the Northern soldiers and a popular ditty could be heard in the camp.
Abraham Lincoln, what yer ‘about?
Hurrah! Hurrah!
Stop this war. It’s all played out.
Hurrah! Hurrah!
Abraham Lincoln, what yer ‘bout?
Stop this war. It’s all played out.
We’ll all drink stone blind.
Johnny fill Up the Bowl!
There was also discontent in the Confederate camp over the ground that Bragg, who had little respect for his volunteer soldiers, had too easily given up. Despite the Christmas Season, executions by firing squad were still carried out for crimes like desertion. Bragg was a stickler for discipline, and few convicted by court-martial were ever pardoned.
Jefferson Davis responded to the complaints of the troops by traveling to Murfreesboro and telling the officers and men of the Army of Tennessee that he had full confidence in Braxton Bragg. Abraham Lincoln responded to the complaints of the Army of the Cumberland by removing Buell and replacing him with William Rosecrans. But even “Old Rosey” had a case of the “slows” [literally second thoughts in screenwriter terms] according to Lincoln, who needed a victory to discourage European recognition of the Confederacy and to enforce military might behind the propaganda ploy he was set to sign on January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation.
Second Thoughts / Climax of Act 1 (Pages 20-25)
In Murfreesboro a week of Christmas festivals for the social elite kicks off with the wedding of a local girl and Confederate cavalry officer John Hunt Morgan, whose life and raid into and escape from Indiana and Ohio could be a movie. The 1st Louisiana and 6th Kentucky put on a grand ball at the courthouse that only generals and colonels and their ladies are permitted to enter. Lesser officers are restricted to the festivities outside. Bayonets hold he candles, and evergreens, bearing the names of Confederate victories, adorn the corners of the rooms and the windowsills. Spencer Talley, a captain, is loaned his colonel’s uniform and attends the dance. The Christmas Eve party is broken when a rider burst in with the news of a Yankee advance. Rosecrans had met with his officers on Christmas Day and declared “We’ll fight them! fight them! Fight, I say!”
On December 26th – Second Day of Christmastide, Saint Stephen’s Day, Synaxis of the Theotokos – the Union troops move out of Nashville. Despite a cold snap, no fires are allowed. By the night of December 28 – Fourth Day of Christmastide, Feast of the Holy Innocents – the armies begin to maneuver into battle lines.
Act II
First Obstacles (pages 25-40)
But first, due to the nature of the season, the pickets on both sides mutually consent to lay down their arms and meet in No Man’s Land to exchange coffee, tobacco and newspapers, and talk about their homes and families. Unofficial truces like this between the common soldier blue and gray occurred across the country throughout the war.
Then the night before the battle – sixth day of Christmastide – the regimental bands of both sides strike up songs up and down the line in a sort of 19th century rap battle. The Confederate bands play “Dixie,” “The Bonnie Blue Flag” and their version of “The Battle Cry of Freedom.” The Union bands played “Hail Columbia,” “Yankee Doodle” and their own version of “The Battle Cry of Freedom.”
The Southerners start off
Our gallant boys have marched to the rolling of the drums.
Shout, shout the battle cry of Freedom!
And the leaders in charge cry out, “Come, boys, come!”
Shout, shout the battle cry of Freedom!
Our Dixie forever! She’s never at a loss!
Down with the eagle and up with the cross
While we rally ’round the Bonnie flag, we’ll rally once again,
Shout, shout the battle cry of Freedom!
They have laid down their lives on the bloody battle field.
Shout, shout the battle cry of Freedom!
Their motto is resistance – “To the tyrants never yield!”
Shout, shout the battle cry of Freedom!
Our Dixie forever! She’s never at a loss!
Down with the eagle and up with the cross
While we rally ’round the Bonnie flag, we’ll rally once again,
Shout, shout the battle cry of Freedom!
Then Yankees reply
Oh we’ll rally round the flag, boys, we’ll rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom,
And we’ll rally from the hillside, we’ll gather from the plain,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.
We will welcome to our numbers the loyal, true and brave,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!
And although he may be poor, he shall never be a slave,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!
The Union forever, hurrah! boys, hurrah!
Down with the traitors, up with the stars;
While we rally round the flag, boys, we rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!
So we’re springing to the call from the East and from the West,
Shouting the battle cry of Freedom;
And we’ll hurl the rebel crew from the land we love the best,
Shouting the battle cry of Freedom.
Then, a band, no one knows whose, starts playing “Home, Sweet, Home.” Then, as if by common consent, no doubt due to the magic of the Christmas Season being on the men’s minds and, with the bonding that only warriors who respect the equally brave men that they must kill in the morning, every throat takes up the song.
‘Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home!
A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there,
Which seek through the world, is ne’er met with elsewhere.
Home! Home, sweet, sweet home!
To thee, I’ll return overburdened with care,
The dearest dearest solace will smile on me there,
No more from that cottage again will I roam
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.
Home! Home, sweet, sweet home!
There’s no place like home,
There’s no place…like home!
Not an eye is dry.
Second Obstacles (pages 40-60)
The Confederates attack early the next morning – New Year’s Eve, Saint Sylvester’s Day, seventh day of Christmastide. Some of the Union troops are caught so surprised that their coffee mugs are later found in the hands of their corpses. The entire Union right wing starts collapsing as the Yankees retreats in a rout reminiscent of the humiliation of First Bull Run. Even when gaps appear in the Confederate line, which are quickly filled by the Arkansans and Tennesseans of Patrick Cleburne, the receding blue tide refuses to stop. Only a bayonet charge from the 9th Michigan into the confused mass of soldiers and camp followers along the Nashville Pike brings the stampede to a halt.
As the Union right wing bend backwards, a chief medical officer of one of its divisions, Dr. Solon Marks, asks for doctors to volunteer to remain in a medical tent about to be overrun by the Confederates. When none step forward, Marks dismounts his horse and says he is staying. The other doctors remain and become prisoners of the rebels who did not hinder them in their duties in caring for the Union wounded.
As the Army of the Cumberland continues falling back on itself along the Nashville Pike, creating a salient in which the troops could be caught in a crossfire, Phillip Sheridan and his troops take their stand in a rocky area where 19th century battle formations fall apart. After four hours, the deaths of his three brigade commanders, and one third of his men killed or wounded, he is forced to retreat. So much blood Is running over and through the rocks that soldiers from Illinois say it reminds them of the meatpacking plants in Chicago, earning that portion of the battlefield the name “The Slaughter Pen.”
As the Confederates drive the bluebellies toward the Nashville Pike, Major General B. Franklin Cheatham exhorts his men to “Give ‘em hell! Give ‘em hell!” His division commander, the former Episcopal bishop of Louisiana, Leonidas Polk, encourages his men to, “Give them what General Cheatham says, boys! Give them what General Cheatham says!”
The Union line continues to sling back on itself like a hinge. A pivotal point in the hinge is the Round Forest. In these woods, with encouragement from Rosecrans who rides among his men despite other mounted officers being killed around him, and with massed artillery, the Union troops take their stand. With their back to the river, if the Nashville Pike is taken, the army will be destroyed.
The Confederate infantry continues attacking throughout the afternoon. Mississippi foot soldiers crossing a cotton field stop to grab the white tufts and stuff them in their ears for protection. By 4:30 P.M. the battle was over. Three thousand dead and fifteen thousand wounded are scattered over the frozen ground. Veterans will recall that Stones River ran red with blood.
Midpoint (pages 60-80)
The night is silent. The bandsmen are helping with the wounded or among the dead. During this lull in the fighting Johnny Reb and Billy Yank still show each other compassion. Informal truces are granted between small groups of soldiers and individuals. They go among the wounded and dead collecting their comrades without interference from the enemy. Colonel William Black of the 9th Indiana will write, “the fierce acerbity of the deadly strife had given place to mutual expression of kindness and regard.” Men give their wounded enemy drinks from their own canteens. Surgeons work on men from both armies. An Illinois soldier tells a dying Alabama soldier that he will take a letter to his mother. A Confederate soldier lights a fire at the feet of a freezing wounded Union soldier despite the fact it might give away his own location to Yankee sharpshooters. The soldiers of the 24th Tennessee so respect the way Union colonel George B. Roberts, under command of Sheridan, carried out his duties until felled by a Confederate bullet that they bury his body with honors. In addition to firing a military salute and sounding taps over his grave, they place a large stone at its head and carve an inscription into the smooth surface.
New Year’s Day – eighth day of Christmastide, Feast of the Circumcision of Christ, Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, Saint Basil’s Day – passes with slight skirmishing as both sides observed the holiday. The hatred that either side carried into battle the previous day has been chiseled away by the hard fighting into mutual respect. Churches and houses in Nashville and Murfreesboro are filled with wounded and the dying. The courthouse in Murfreesboro is converted into a hospital, tables that had recently held punch bowls and served plates of delicacies are now covered with stained bedding and the bloody tools of white aproned doctors leaning over mangled bodies, trying to save lives no matter their rank or uniform color. One of these bodies is Spencer Talley, who had used his colonel’s coat to sneak into the dance there just a week earlier. Evergreen decorations hanging from the windows and walls are the only sign that it is the same place. Another body is brought into the courthouse. It is Talley’s colonel, wearing the same coat that he had borrowed.
On another part of the field, Mississippi soldier J. E. Robuck, goes to a Confederate field hospital to visit his comrades wounded in a charge against Union artillery. Several Union surgeons are in the tent caring for their own who have become prisoners. In the tent Robuck hears an Irish Union soldier arguing with a surgeon, pleading for him not to cut off his leg. Another Union surgeon steps in and says, “I fail to find the necessity for an amputation in this case, Brooks.” That’s when Robuck realizes that Brooks was a fellow student of at medical school in Philadelphia named Tom Brooks. The two students had engaged in a fight after Lincoln’s election. Robuck had never admitted defeat and, with consent from Brooks, who removes his coat and takes a drink of whisky, renews the contest right then and there. During the tussle on the hospital floor, the Irish soldier in blue looks up from the surgeon’s table and encourages Robuck. “Give it to ‘im good, Jonnie Reb! Kill ‘em and save me a leg! Maul ‘im good!”
Despite the heavy casualties, neither side retreats. Bragg believes that victory had been achieved and that the Union army is in retreat. Rosecrans calls for a council of officers. He mentions the word “retreat.” At the sound of that word, Major General George H. Thomas wakes up from his slumbers in the cabin’s corner. “This army does not retreat,” Thomas declares. “I know of no better place to die than right here.” Then he goes back to sleep. Rosecrans admits that the army’s supplies may run short, but if they keep right on and eat corn for a week, they might win the battle.
Rising Obstacles (pages 80-100)
on January 2- ninth day of Christmastide, Repose of St Seraphim of Sarov – Bragg directs former US vice president John C. Breckenridge to attack a Union battery across the river. In less than an hour eight hundred Confederates are mowed down by Union fire as they march a mile to cross the river and charge up a slope. It holds the record for a charge with the highest percentage of casualties until replaced by Picket’s Charge six months later. The Orphan Brigade is particularly devastated. Breckenridge rides among them, declaring “My Orphans! Oh, my poor Orphans!” By the time the battle ends that night nearly 29,000 men are casualties. The Union has lost over 13,000 men out of an army of 41,400. The Confederates have lost nearly 12,000 of their 35,000 men. Percentage wise Stones River is second only to Gettysburg in rate of casualties per men involved. It is a draw.
Climax of Act II (Pages 100-105)
When Bragg orders the Army of Tennessee to withdraw on January 3rd – Tenth day of Christmastide – and Rosecrans occupies Murfreesboro on January 5th – Twelfth Night, Theophany Eve, Twelfth Day of Christmas – it is a morale boost for the Union after the defeats at Fredericksburg and Chickasaw Bayou. It helped prevent European recognition of the Confederacy and gave military weight to back up the, supposed, moral power of the Emancipation Proclamation. Eight months after the battle Lincoln will write Rosecrans, “I can never forget…you gave us a hard-earned victory, which, had there been a defeat instead, the nation could scarcely have lived over.”
Act III
Descending Action (Pages 105-110)
The Sunday after the battle, January 4th – eleventh day of Christmastide, Sunday before Theophany – Rosecrans attends Mass in a small cabin. While holy rites are celebrated, burial parties are collecting and interring the dead as a chaplain reads from Matthew 2:18 , “In Rama was there a voice heard, Lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children. And would not be comforted, because they are not.” Men who had been hardened by battle weep. This could make a great voice over during a montage as one of the first memorials of the war is built on the battlefield and an eighteen-acre National Cemetery is developed at Stones River containing sixty-one hundred graves. On July 15, 1932, The American flag is raised over the cemetery by Sam Mitchell, a former Confederate soldier.
Epilogue (pages 110-115) And Closing Thoughts
McIvor ends God Rest Ye Merry, Soldiers explaining how Christmas helped the nation heal after the war. For displaced people and a migrating population, the holiday was tied to the cornerstones of family and children. Christmas was seen as the holiday to bind the country together due to its message of peace. The “dramatic backdrop [of the war],” writes Penne Restad in Christmas in America. “Against which the silhouette of Christmas sharpened, fixed Christmas in the national Imagination. Christmas held within it a rich preserve for grappling with issues of absence, discord, misunderstanding, forgiveness, and regeneration. It beckoned men and women [into] a domestic haven that was neither Northern or Southern.” Sarah Hale of the Godey’s Lady’s Book, who had lobbied for Thanksgiving to be the national holiday, in December 1865 listed “peace and goodwill to our family of States” as one of the season’s Christmas gifts and wrote that Americans should come “like little children in their feelings of love and gratitude to our Heavenly Father” that Christmas. The Harper’s Weekly 1865 Christmas issue stated that Christmas that year would be more exciting.
Among [the feelings of the Season] hate and vindictiveness have no share. The festival commemorates the birth of Him who died for all men, and thereby proclaimed and sealed their common humanity. And if the Christmas light could show the late enemies…that peace is born only of good will to men, we should all gladly join hands from sea to sea and raise our voice in one vast millennial chorus, the jubilant thunder of which would break all political, moral, social and mental chains in the world, “Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth, good will to men!”
Christmas was declared a federal holiday in 1870.
And soldiers, both Blue and Gray, who survived Stones River returning home to enjoy Christmas with their families in peace is how a movie based on God Rest Ye Merry, Soldiers should end and why I believe it would make a great Holiday Season release. Its timeless message of peace and respect between warring parties is one our country desperately needs to hear right now. If Union soldiers can respect their Confederate counterparts even while they were trying to kill each other, then young people 150 years removed can tolerate statues. It would be an epic way to remember the humanity of history, like Joyeux Noel, a film about the 1914 Christmas Truce during World War 1. Due to the growing independent film community in Kentucky and Tennessee, it could be a mid-budget project filmed on or near the actual battlefield of Stones River.
Because of its timeless message of peace on earth, good will to men during wartime, I believe that God Rest Ye Merry, Soldiers by James McIvor Should Be A Movie.
