President Abraham Lincoln finished writing the final draft of the Emancipation Proclamation on the morning of January 1. Later that day he spent three hours shaking hands with well-wishers at the traditional New Year’s reception, after which his own hand ached. But he took care to sign the proclamation in the ensuing ceremony with a steady hand so that no one would be able to say that Lincoln was unsure in his resolve.

The Battle of Murfreesboro in central Tennessee ended the night of January 3 with a Confederate retreat after four days of hard fighting. The Union general William S. Rosecrans claimed it as a victory, though little had been gained. The Southern army, under Gen. Braxton Bragg, still held the road to Chattanooga, and both armies—crippled after heavy losses—were immobilized. “Few Civil War battles,” wrote the historian Bruce Catton, “ever cost more or meant less.”

Early in 1863 the French ambassador in Washington, under instructions from his emperor, Napoleon III, suggested to Secretary of State William Seward that the North and South should parley. Napoleon’s Confederate sympathies were well known; the previous fall he had remarked that if the North rejected a peace proposal from France, England, and Russia, it would give those countries reason not only to recognize the South, but to intervene in the war. But England and Russia had refused to have anything to do with the emperor’s scheme, and Napoleon had to go it alone. On February 6, Seward politely but unequivocally rejected the French ambassador’s suggestion. With far less diplomacy Congress resolved that any foreign government that put forth such proposals was thereby committing an unfriendly act.

On January 25, Brig. Gen. Rufus Saxton wrote Secretary of War Edwin Stanton from South Carolina with the news that one of the Union’s first black regiments was trained and ready for service. Previous efforts in that state to create black regiments had been vetoed by Lincoln, but after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, the President called for four of them. “In organization, drill, discipline, and morale, for the length of time it has been in service, this regiment is not surpassed by any white regiment in this Department,” Saxton wrote of his 1st Regiment, South Carolina Volunteers. “Should it ever be its good fortune to get into action I have no fears but it will win its own way to the confidence of those who are willing to recognise courage, and manhood, and vindicate the wise policy of the administration in putting these men into the field and giving them a chance to strike a blow for the country and their own liberty.” Saxton’s regiment was mustered into service on January 31 and acquitted itself honorably on the battlefield.

Samuel Clemens used his famous pseudonym for the first time on February 3, when he signed Mark Twain at the bottom of a humorous travel story in the Virginia City, Nevada, Territorial Enterprise. A boatman’s term for water that is only just deep enough for safe navigation, the name fit Clemens like a glove. As Huck Finn later said, “Mr. Mark Twain … he told the truth, mainly.”

General Tom Thumb and Lavinia Warren, two midgets employed by P. T. Barnum in his New York museum, were married in the city’s Grace Church on February 10. Their courtship had been brief. After meeting Lavinia for the first time, Tom Thumb ran to Barnum and, according to the showman’s autobiography, exclaimed: “Mr. Barnum, that is the most charming little lady I ever saw, and I believe she was created on purpose to be my wife!” Unfortunately, Commodore Nutt, another midget at Barnum’s, was similarly struck, and a heated rivalry ensued. But Tom Thumb impressed Lavinia with his yachts, horses, and property, and their engagement was soon announced. Thereafter, wrote Barnum, “Lavinia’s levees at the Museum were crowded to suffocation, and her photographic pictures were in great demand. For several weeks she sold more than three hundred dollars’ worth of her cartes de visite each day. And the daily receipts at the Museum were frequently over three thousand dollars.” But the future Mr. and Mrs. Thumb insisted that their wedding be wholly decorous and free from financial interest, and Barnum acquiesced. As he proudly noted in his autobiography, “not a ticket was sold” to the event.

Congress created the Territory of Arizona on February 24, excising it from the western lands of the New Mexico Territory. Local support for the Union was thus rewarded.

After ten years of construction, New York City’s Grand Central Terminal opened to the public on February 2. It replaced Commodore Vanderbilt’s Grand Central Depot with a fully electrified and expanded skein of tracks in the shape of two fans, one on top of another, that spread from Fiftieth Street south to Forty-second and from Lexington Avenue west nearly to Madison. The engineer William J. Wilgus was responsible for the design Underground; the building above was the work of Reed and Stem, a St. Paul, Minnesota, firm that was greatly influenced by the architect Whitney Warren. But what dropped visitors’ jaws at Grand Central was the huge Grand Concourse and its curved ceiling, which had been painted by the popular French artist Paul Helleu. Inspired by a medieval manuscript on astrology, he had painted in gold leaf some twenty-five hundred stars, including those of the zodiac, on the ceiling of the Grand Concourse. A controversy arose over the fact that he had confused east and west; a New York Central PR man helped quell it when he pointed out that “the ceiling is purely decorative; it was never intended that a mariner should set his course by the stars at Grand Central.”

America was introduced to the latest strains of modern art when the Armory Show opened on February 17 at New York City’s 69th Regiment Armory. Sponsored by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, the exhibition was intended to provide a forum for the work of America’s Ashcan school, but in fact the cubist, abstract, and impressionist work from Europe stole the show. Some critics saw merit in the new styles; most were derisive. One ArtNews writer called the room where cubist art was displayed the “Chamber of Horrors,” describing it as “full of mirth-making spectacles, which no one has yet been found to take seriously.” Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase suffered endless mockery; the ArtNews critic called it a “mixture of leather, tin and broken violins,” adding that it drew “shrieks of laughter from the crowds who gather about it eight deep, in their eagerness to discover the lady on the stairway.” Some two hundred and fifty thousand visitors saw the show in New York, Chicago, and Boston. American art would never be the same.

The silk workers of Paterson, New Jersey, went on strike February 25 to protest the introduction into their factories of new machinery that resulted in cut wages and loss of employment. Organized by the Industrial Workers of the World and led by the likes of Big Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Carlo Tresca, the strike lasted five long, bitter months. “The brutality of the police in arresting strikers at any pretense, clubbing them into insensibility when they resisted, and breaking up their picket lines was notorious,” wrote the historian Foster Dulles. But when union funds ran out and workers’ families went hungry, the strike ended, with nothing to show for the broken bones and the time spent in jail. The defeat marked a turning point in the fortunes of the IWW; within five years the union was nearly dead.

Congress was authorized to begin taxing incomes on February 25, when the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. Until then, tariff duties and excises had been the financial mainstay of the federal government. The new tax rate ranged from 1 to 7 percent on individual incomes greater than three thousand dollars.