Why Do Southerners Eat Black-Eyed Peas on New Years?

Cornfield peas have been our staple diet for the last ten days. Mother has them cooked in every variety of style she ever heard of, but they are cornfield peas still. All this would have been horribly mortifying a year or two ago, but everybody knows how it is now, and I am glad to have even cornfield peas to share with the soldiers. –Taken from the diary of Eliza Frances Andrews as printed in The War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1865, pg.209

It was the winter of 1864 when the devil went down to Georgia. William Tecumseh Sherman issued special field order #120 which commanded his soldiers to forage liberally. The 60,000 man army forcefully lived off the people of the South as his demons rode off in all directions looking for loot. Moreover, convoys of goods, foodstuffs and anything and everything of value were stolen and forcefully sent north. According to Sherman’s own estimates, his armies seized over 5,000 horses, 4,000 mules, and 13,000 head of cattle, 9.5 million pounds of corn and 10.5 million pounds of livestock fodder.

Unfortunately, there was more sinister intentions than an entire army stealing food from the people of the South. A scorched earth policy existed to ensure military as well as industrial targets, infrastructure and civilian property were all destroyed to disrupt the Confederacy’s economy and transportation networks. Sherman decided that the time had come to widen the pain with what he called the hard hand of war to include Southern civilians. In the same way he later targeted Indian villages, Southern towns, cities and homesteads were completely laid waste. The horses, cows, pigs and chickens were stolen while Southerners found their homesteads, barns and fields devastated, even burned to the ground.

Originally, planted for livestock, northerners considered black-eyed peas, often called field or cow peas, as not fit for human consumption.  Since the Union Army already stole all the livestock there was no need to take the time nor trouble to destroy all of the animal food. So as Sherman’s troops stole or laid waste to all other crops, luck had it that supplies of black-eyed peas were left standing. The little black-eyed pea soon became a crucial staple for the Southerners to survive.

So this is how the Southern Tradition began, every New Year’s Eve our people still eat a healthy dose of black-eyed peas for good luck…and to always remember.

-By Tex Wood

6 comments

  1. Dear Tex:

    Your ID entry from a year ago about this time was a kind of epiphany for me on this subject. I’m 54 years old, have Southron blood running throughout my veins, have eaten black eyed peas (with a little bacon added for flavor) on New Years all or most of my life, and yet never understood why or how this tradition began until I read your post mentioned above. I thank you for that, sir! It was a real eye-opener, and answered a burning question that I for one had more or less given up on finding answer to years ago.

    As I’m sure you are aware, Miss Andrews mentions the necessity of eating and serving “corn field peas” for weeks on end following Sherman’s army’s depredations numerous times in her memoirs. It wasn’t just Northerners who thought corn field peas were unfit for human consumption; so did Miss Andrews and her younger sister (Metta I think), both of whom nevertheless selflessly consumed more than their rightful share to leave for the hungry Confederate stragglers their family was feeding on a daily and nightly basis what little pork and vegetables from their garden they were also scrounging together and serving at table. There are also other memoirs I have discovered, written by Southern women at the time, that mention the necessity of serving and eating corn field peas as a matter of survival. I’ll have to go back and dig them up (the ones I have discovered – I have no doubt there are many others I have yet to discover) and post them in a follow up comment here.

    I think I might have mentioned (as a comment to the Vanishing American entry linking back to your original ID post) that the Wikipedia article on the subject questions the veracity of claims that the Union Army ignored the cornfield peas growing in the fields because cornfield peas were considered, as you say, “animal food” unfit for human consumption, on the basis that the peas in the field likely would have been destroyed by inclement (winter) weather in any case. So the assumption in that article is that the army left them in the field untouched because they knew they wouldn’t survive the weather in any event. But Miss Andrews gives the answer to the question when she also mentions that the plantations surrounding Washington, GA had stockpiles of harvested cornfield peas for feeding the animals the Yankee army stole or otherwise shot. And it was from these stockpiles (not supplies freshly picked from the fields) that the Andrews’ and others took their “staple diet” for many weeks after the merciless savage Sherman and his Army of foreign mercenaries laid the South to waste on his infamous “March to the Sea.” She also mentions that the blacks had a taste or preference for cornfield peas that their white counterparts hadn’t ever really acquired. This being the case the blacks also had lots of cornfield peas squirreled away in their little cottages. But anyway,…

    Happy New Year to you, sir, and to all the ID readers and contributors! I know our family will be eating a heaping helping of “cornfield peas” at the stroke of midnight tonight, with a little bacon added for flavor, as I said above, and with a whole new view as to why. And not the canned black eyed peas either.

  2. Mr Morris, it was leftists denying the veracity of out black-eyed pea story that led me to research further for this updated article. In doing so I ran across a post from you (on another forum) that mentioned Miss Andrews so I included it as a source of documentation- for that I thank you!

    “There are also other memoirs I have discovered, written by Southern women at the time, that mention the necessity of serving and eating corn field peas as a matter of survival. I’ll have to go back and dig them up (the ones I have discovered – I have no doubt there are many others I have yet to discover) and post them in a follow up comment here.”

    This is an excellent idea! Please do so because it would be absolutely crucial in helping document the veracity of the origins of the black-eyed pea story as part of our history. I will check back and read the comments on this post from time to time. Thank you again for your research Mr Morris…….

  3. Tex:

    I won’t be free to get back to this until early next week given that our married kids, their spouses and our grandchildren are coming in today to stay through the weekend, and that takes precedence for the time being. However, and in lieu of a return to such a worthy project next week, please add to your documentation on the subject a little book titled Life in Dixie During the War, by Mary A. H. Gay.

    Miss Gay devoted several chapters of her book to describing the inhuman conditions Sherman’s army left in its wake in its “March to the Sea” expedition, and her efforts, along with others she often recruited into her service, to alleviate, as much as they could, the terrible human suffering and near starvation of her countrymen (many destitute and helpless elderly and women with small children orphaned by the war) in that wake.

    Below is an excerpt from chapter XXV, pg. 158 of Miss Gay’s book specifically relevant to this topic:

    With the tact peculiar to the refined of every clime and locality, Mrs. Trenholm assumed management of the culinary department, and her dinner-pot hung upon our crane several weeks, and daily sent forth appetizing odors of bacon and peas. How we enjoyed those peas and that bacon, and the soup seasoned with the only condiments at our command—salt and red pepper—and the good hoe cakes!

    Mrs. Trenholm had a large sack of cow peas, and a sack of dried fruit, and other articles of food which she had provided for herself and her family before she left Southwest Georgia en route to her home in Marietta, which she left in obedience to the order of William Tecumseh Sherman, and which she learned, before reaching Decatur, had shared the fate of nearly all other homes which had to be thus abandoned. Although magnanimously proffered, we were averse to sharing Mrs. Trenholm’s well-prepared and ofttimes tempting cuisine, unless our proportion of food equaled hers; and fearing even the appearance of scanty supplies, I set about to gather up “the miners,” so that we might appoint a day to again go lead digging, if that which we left in as many little heaps as there were members of the company had been, in the interim, gathered up by others. (emphasis added)

    Here is a link to the book:

    http://a.co/ggPud5T

  4. “Mrs. Trenholm had a large sack of cow peas, and a sack of dried fruit, and other articles of food which she had provided for herself and her family before she left Southwest Georgia en route to her home in Marietta, which she left in obedience to the order of William Tecumseh Sherman”

    Great quote Mr Morris, I like that it mentions Sherman as the source of her problems and black-eyed peas as her solution all in one sentence.

  5. Here is yet another quotation, from yet another Southern woman’s memoirs (or, in this particular case, as told by a Confederate officer’s wife to a young female friend many years after the war), to add to your list.

    This extracted from ch. XXVI of A Virginia Girl In The Civil War titled “How We Lived In the Last Days of the Confederacy.”:

    For hungry and shabby as we were, crowded into our one room with bags of rice and peas, firkins of butter, a ton of coal, a small wood-pile, cooking utensils, and all of our personal property, we were not in despair. Our faith in Lee and his ragged, freezing, starving army amounted to a superstition. We cooked our rice and peas and dried apples, and hoped and prayed. By this time our bags took up little room. We had had a bag of potatoes, but it was nearly empty. there were only a few handfuls of dried apples left – and I must say that even in the face of starvation I was glad of that! – and there was a very small quantity of rice in our larder. We had more peas than anything else.

    This chapter of the memoirs, as well as the preceding chapter, is filled with references to their reliance on peas as the “staple diet” of their little band of “miscreant” “rebels” and “traitors.” You will note, I trust, that the “abundance” of peas across the swath of General Sherman’s depredatious “expedition” is a common theme in these memoirs regardless of state lines.

    There is more. Stay tuned.

  6. “We had more peas than anything else”…good work Mr Morris. As multitudes of leftists attempt to deny the veracity of our story such detailed documentation is absolutely crucial, excellent find!

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