By Troy Turner
Southerners associate black-eyed peas with good luck in their New Year’s Day meals. Interestingly, it all started in a myth tied to a food staple important to slaves, and to one of the more infamous military operations that took place during the American Civil War.
Or so the story goes.
What’s true about the black-eyed pea, which in agricultural terminology is actually a bean, is that it originated in the Far East or Africa, and then later, slaves in North America considered it an important part of their diet.
Black-eyed peas also were used for feeding livestock. Thus, it wasn’t necessarily given high value by many Southerners at the time. But that soon would change.
Despite the ravages of horrific fighting and the suffering from attrition, many Southerners in the late stages of the Civil War still thought the Confederacy could win its independence. However, following the Union’s victory and conquest of Atlanta, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman began his infamous “March to the Sea.”
Beginning Nov. 15 until Dec. 21, 1864, Sherman led 60,000 Union troops split into two wings on a 285-mile march of devastation across Georgia from Atlanta to Savannah. The orders were simple: Take, burn or destroy anything that could be of value to the Confederate Army, and deflate the Southerners’ will to continue the war.
Sherman’s troops obliged. The soldiers stole food, stole or killed livestock, burned homes and barns, looted and did anything they could to deter the South’s ability and desire to continue the fight.
The North was “not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people,” Sherman explained. Thus, he felt it necessary to “make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.”
Yet, according to legend, for some reason the Union troops ignored or missed the black-eyed pea seeds or stored peas, which normally are sown in the spring. They require minimal watering and fertilizing, and are considered heat and drought tolerant. Whatever the Union Army missed or undervalued and left behind therefore supposedly saved the day for the hungry people left in the wake of its march.
Good luck is all it was, said the Southerners, and beginning with that New Year’s Day in 1865 only days after Sherman had moved onward, black-eyed peas suddenly had new significance, in stomachs and in superstition.
Many military historians place little trust in the story, pointing out that even if the peas were good only for livestock, the Union Army required such a food supply for its own needs and therefore would have plundered the pods of peas just as eagerly as the ears of corn they found.
But why let that do away now with a legendary practice of seeking good fortune? Not to mention, a tasty bite to eat.
The tradition continues today: With most New Year’s Day meals in the South, it’s a good bet that black-eyed peas for good luck will be on the menu.
When it comes to that fact, true story or not, most Southerners share a bit of folklore in common.
Like peas in a pod.
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Troy Turner is the editor-in-chief and senior consultant for AlaDefense.com. He can be reached at [email protected].
Photo credit: Sherman’s march to the sea, November-December 1864. (Felix Octavius Carr Darley/J. P. Finch,1883, via Library of Congress)
