The Battle for Christmas

by Stephen Nissenbaum

  Charles Folien (as he was now being called) had fallen in love with the United States, a nation that promised to fulfill the republican values for which he had been striving vainly in Europe. He worked hard to make a new career in his new home, and in this he was eminently successful. Living in Cambridge, Folien authored books on the German language (as yet little studied in the United States) and taught German part-time at Harvard. He even established and ran a gymnasium in the Harvard area. Above all, he formed close ties with the liberal Unitarian establishment that dominated Harvard and Boston. Folien was a deeply religious man as well as an enlightened republican, and he found Unitarianism wholly compatible with his own progressive Christian beliefs.

  In 1830, five years after his arrival in America, Folien reached what would prove to be the pinnacle of his new life. That year he was made a minister in the Unitarian Church, and he became a U.S. citizen. Most important of all, he was appointed to a full-time faculty position at Harvard, a new professorship of German literature that had been given five years’ funding by a group of his admirers, with the expectation that Harvard would pick up the tab thereafter. Little Charley was born in 1830, too, and the next year the family moved into a new house. Folien was flying high.5

  But within less than five years, the radical commitments that had brought him to America in the first place brought him down once again. This time the issue was slavery, a subject that was just beginning to arouse feelings of urgent intensity in a handful of Americans. In 1831 William Lloyd Garrison began publishing his abolitionist journal, The Liberator, in Boston, where, that same year, he organized the American Anti-Slavery Society. Folien quickly sensed the parallels between the antislavery movement and the principles he had stood for in Germany; by 1834 he had become one of the most dedicated of Garrison’s followers. He even helped organize a Cambridge Anti-Slavery Society, based at Harvard. But radical abolitionism did not sit well with most Northerners, even with the Boston Unitarian establishment, whose members were offended by what they regarded as its vulgar style as well as its constant insistence that abolition be total and immediate. William Lloyd Garrison was regarded by most of Follen’s acquaintances as a crazy man, and a rather uncouth one at that. (Even Follen himself was occasionally critical of Garrison’s style, though never of his principles.)6 Charles Follen was warned that becoming an active abolitionist would surely jeopardize his professional prospects, but he was too much a man of principle to let that get in the way. Anyway, he had been through it all before, back in Europe.

  Charles Follen. This engraving, the only known likeness of Follen, appeared as the frontispiece to the biography that Eliza Follen published in 1841, just a year after her husband’s tragic death in the explosion of the steamship Lexington. (Courtesy, Harvard College Library)

  His fall was heroic. In early 1834 Follen became an active member and officer of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. He did so against the urgings of his Harvard colleagues, who warned him that it would cost him his position. (The professorship would expire in 1835, and only at that point would it be made permanent—or else terminated. In effect, Follen would be coming up for tenure.) Follen’s friends were of course correct. Early in 1835 he learned that his appointment would terminate at the end of the spring semester.7 He and his family (little Charley turned 5 that year) would be left high and dry, with no source of income. (Eliza Follen may have been born into the prominent Cabot family, but she had few resources of her own, and the family did not come to her assistance on this occasion.)

  For the moment, though, Follen was rescued by his remaining admirers, who arranged for him to have what appeared to be an ideal position. He would oversee the education of the two children of a wealthy Boston merchant, James Perkins, who had recently died (and whose widow was emotionally incapacitated). In return for this part-time work, Follen was to have the use of the Perkinses’ house, and he would be paid the comfortable annual salary of $2,000. “The fortune of the Follens seems like a Fairy-tale,” Catharine Sedgwick wrote when she learned the good news.8

  This time it was Follen’s educational principles that got him into trouble. Follen took the teaching of children seriously indeed. He was committed to a progressive pedagogical strategy, derived largely from the work of the Swiss reformer Johann Pestalozzi. Pestalozzi assumed that children were intrinsically perfect creatures to begin with, and that education should therefore consist in the cultivation of those attributes that were already present in their young souls. Follen wrote (in what amounted to his job proposal) that he intended to “study their natures,” so as to “awake every dormant energy” the two boys already possessed.9 This was the kind of approach that struck many people (including many Unitarians) as leading inevitably to an indiscriminate parental indulgence of children in their immature desires and whims.

  What happened next is not wholly clear. But it appears that Follen’s political enemies used his progressive educational ideas against him, and when Follen, predictably enough, refused once again to retreat from his principles, he learned that he was once again out of a job. The bad news arrived in mid-December 1835, just a couple of weeks before Christmas.10

  As if that were not enough, Follen’s personal crisis was part of a larger crisis in the abolitionist movement. The last months of the year 1835 witnessed a series of verbal and physical attacks on the abolitionist movement (abolitionists later referred to this period as a “reign of terror”). In October, William Lloyd Garrison was physically assaulted by a mob which dragged him through the streets of Boston with a halter around his waist. Most Bostonians were convinced that Garrison’s own behavior had brought on such treatment, and indeed that additional steps had to be taken to prevent the abolitionists from provoking further public disorder. With additional pressure coming from Southern quarters, the Massachusetts legislature was soon considering a law that would effectively ban most abolitionist activities.

  Charles Folien played a role in that episode, too. Early in 1836 he testified against the proposed antiabolitionist bill at a public legislative hearing. On that occasion he was silenced by the committee chairman and threatened with charges of contempt. Through these trying hours, as always, Folien maintained his characteristically calm, patient demeanor, but he did not retreat a single inch.11 He was a man of extraordinary principle and tenacity, an intellectual who was above all an effective moral leader—a genteel counterweight to William Lloyd Garrison. But he was also a man without a job. And it was in connection with all these troubles, just in time for the end of the Christmas season, that Harriet Martineau came to visit.

  HARRIET MARTINEAU’S STORY

  Her visit was no coincidence. Martineau herself had been born (in 1802) into an English Unitarian family, though one less distinguished socially than the Sedgwicks or the Boston Unitarian establishment. By the time of her American tour Martineau had become a famous writer. She had arrived in the United States in mid-1834, coming (with a publisher’s travel advance) with the express intention of writing a book about life in the new nation.12

  At first, as she traveled around the country, Martineau was welcomed and feted everywhere. Because of her connection with the Unitarian community, one of the Americans to whom Martineau received an introduction was Catharine Sedgwick (whose literary renown made her one of the best-known American Unitarians), and Stockbridge was the first place Martineau visited outside the New York City area. The two women quickly became friends. Martineau was offering her “love” to Sedgwick as early as December 1834, and urging the American writer to join her the following summer on a trip to the western states. (Sedgwick initially agreed, but had second thoughts and backed out because she was seeing a new book through the press.13)

  Harriet Martineau spent part of the summer of 1835 in Stockbridge, where the Sedgwicks once again were her hosts.14 Returning to Boston during the autumn, she met and quickly befriended Charles Folien. It was in some measure in response to Follens urging that Martineau attended an abolitionist women’s meetin
g, held in Boston on November 19, in the midst of the “reign of terror.” She came to this meeting in the role of a reporter, but by the time she left she had become an avowed abolitionist. In the course of the meeting a note was passed to Martineau, asking her to express her opinion of what she had heard. Martineau did so, but only with great reluctance, because she found that she was in agreement with the abolitionists, principles and knew that making a public gesture of solidarity with them would have the effect of alienating her from most of her American acquaintances—and thereby cutting off her access to most of the contacts on which she depended for the book she was writing. As Martineau later put it: “I foresaw that almost every house in Boston, except those of the abolitionists, would be shut against me; that my relation to the country would be completely changed, as I should suddenly be transformed from being a guest and an observer to being considered a missionary or a spy….” As she would acknowledge twenty years later, “[t]he moment of reading this note was one of the most painful of my life.”15

  Martineaus foreboding was correct. The Boston papers reported (and ridiculed) her avowal of abolitionist sympathies, and those reports were quickly reprinted throughout the United States. By the following spring she was forced to change the itinerary of her postponed western trip in order to avoid the prospect of encountering personal danger. (As it turned out, she ended up taking this trip in the company of the Follens themselves—and using it not simply as a professional tour but also as an opportunity to engage in abolitionist activities.) Martineau had transformed herself from a journalist into an activist. She would always recall her American sojourn as a profoundly transforming episode in her life. For a time, she seriously considered returning permanently to America to engage in abolitionist work. She regarded Charles Follen as her “very nearest friend, guide, and guardian,” and to the end of her life she kept his portrait (next to one of William Lloyd Garrison) in her parlor.16

  In the meantime, soon after her political coming-out in November 1835, Martineau returned to Boston (she had meanwhile taken a brief tour of some nearby communities) in order to spend New Year’s with the Follens.17 Both of them were under heavy pressure just then; Martineau had just lost her social credibility, and Charles Follen had just lost his post as tutor to the Perkins children. The visit would be a time for mutual commiseration, and also a chance to plan a strategy for what would be (it was now clear) the abolitionist focus of the rest of Martineau’s American visit, including the western trip that she would take several months later in the Follens’ company.

  A few days before their holiday reunion (it actually took place on New Year’s Eve), Follen wrote to Martineau in mock-conspiratorial language: “I rejoice in the prospect of having you with us next Friday, to settle the affairs of this nether world at least, at this Congress of our Holy Triple Alliance [i.e., Charles and Eliza Folien and Martineau herself].” A week or so earlier, Folien sent her a more serious letter, deeply personal in tone. In that letter Folien articulated to Martineau what the two of them had recently done. They had each “stepped out of the safe vessel of selfish indifference, and ventured to walk on troubled waters of philanthropic enterprise.” As a result, both of them were suffering the fate of principled radicals of all ages and cultures, being either “shunned with silent condemnation as abolitionists, democrats, agrarians, or hailed with the cries of’Crucify! crucify!’ as fanatics and incendiaries.” Folien went on, however, to assure Martineau that in their own deepening friendship they could both find an oasis of intimate serenity: “But if the world separate itself from us, it leads us to find a world in ourselves and each other….”18

  At their reunion, Charles Folien went out of his way to seal his intimacy with Martineau, and also to offer the promised oasis of serenity, by setting up little Charley’s Christmas tree in her presence. (The Follens had postponed the ritual until New Year’s Eve in order to accommodate Martineau’s schedule.) The tree was a success, a time of joy for the grownups as well as for little Charley and his friends (these friends were in fact none other than the Perkins children; indeed, the whole event took place in the Perkinses’ house, where the Follens were still living). The rest of the agenda—the commiseration and the political planning—could presumably wait until the next morning.

  IN HER PUBLISHED ACCOUNT, Harriet Martineau took pains to conceal all this, or at least to dissociate it from the story of little Charley’s Christmas tree. She did not even identify the Follens by name in her account, referring to them only as “Charley’s father and mother.”19 But it should be clear to us that Martineau’s experience of what she believed to be the introduction of the Christmas tree into America was actually embedded in a thick matrix of political controversy. Little Charley’s Christmas tree was a carefully planned moment of domestic peace in the midst of crisis and scandal.

  Those connections make for an interesting story, and one that has not been told. But from another angle they point to broader developments. First, they confirm something that historians have recently come to notice: There were important similarities between the antislavery sensibility and the new attitude toward children. Abolitionists and educational reformers shared a joint empathy for people who were powerless to resist the wrath of those who wielded authority over them—slaves and children, respectively. (Both types of reformers had a particular abhorrence of the use of the lash as a form of punishment.)20

  Second, we can view the juxtaposition of the two stories (the Christmas tree and the political crisis) as a telling instance of another phenomenon that historians have been pointing to: the way that middle-class people in the early nineteenth century went about creating for themselves a private space, radically cut off from the pressures of the world outside and centered around the happiness of children.21 In fact, what Charles Follen did in 1835 is similar in that sense to what Clement Clarke Moore had done more than a decade earlier, although his reasons—Moore was a reactionary, Follen a radical—were profoundly different. But both men had reason to feel alienated from their respective communities, and both responded by turning inward, to their own children, and using Christmas as the occasion for doing so.

  It is no coincidence that radical abolitionists were in the vanguard of the new child-centered Christmas. Two years earlier, in 1833, the Anti-slavery Society had formed a children’s chorus, the Boston Garrison Juvenile Choir (its members may have been African-Americans), which gave a public concert on Christmas Day. One of the numbers it performed was “The Cradle Song;” another was titled “The Sugar Plums.” And beginning in 1834 (and continuing each year for more than two decades) the Garrisonians held an annual Antislavery Fair to raise money for the cause—invariably, on the days just before Christmas. In 1836 several abolitionists presented Garrisons own 10-month-old son George with shoes, stockings, mittens, and “a very beautiful gown” that had been offered at that year’s fair. “Pretty well for the young fanatic!” the proud father noted privately—and with uncharacteristically self-deprecating wit.22

  In fact, according to a report published in Garrison’s magazine The Liberator, the very first of these Antislavery Fairs (the one in 1834) displayed an “evergreen shrub” that bore another witty message: “Persons are requested not to handle the articles, which, like slavery, are too ‘delicate’ to be touched.”23 (This was a sarcastic reference to the reluctance of most respectable Americans to discuss the slavery issue.) Humor aside, if any of the articles for sale at the 1834 fair were actually attached to this evergreen shrub (or placed around it), then //would have the honor of being the first public Christmas tree displayed in the United States.

  “Christmas Eve” (1836). This is the first image of a Christmas tree to be printed in the United States. It appeared in Boston in 1836, as the frontispiece to The Strangers Gift, a Gift Book written by a German immigrant named Herman Bokum, a man who had taken over Charles Follens old job of teaching the German language on a part-time basis at Harvard. The tree is illuminated by open candles. The door at the right
suggests that the children have only moments earlier been allowed to enter the room. (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

  Catharine Sedgwick’s Christmas Tree

  Catharine Sedgwick declined to support the abolitionist ideology endorsed by Martineau and the Follens, but she continued to count them among her closest friends. And during the same Christmas season in which Martineau witnessed the Follens’ Christmas tree, Sedgwick published a story of her own, written earlier that year, in which a Christmas tree played a small but distinct part. The story was titled “New Year’s Day.” (Like the Follens’ Christmas tree, Catharine Sedgwick’s fictional tree was set up for New Year’s Day rather than Christmas itself.) Inasmuch as Martineau’s account of the Follens was not published for another two years, it was actually Sedgwick’s story that has the honor of introducing this ritual into American literature.

  Sedgwick’s fictional account resembled Martineau’s report except that here the family that performs the ritual was not German but of old Yankee stock—Yankees living in New York City, as Catharine Sedgwick herself was doing. But this fictional tree was set up at the behest of a German immigrant, the young heroine’s maidservant, Madeleine. The heroine herself has been planning to give Christmas presents to each of her younger siblings (as well as to her father), and the maidservant has “persuaded her young mistress to arrange the gifts after the fashion of her father-land”—that is, by hanging them on a tree secretly set up in the rear parlor, a room the children rarely enter. Together Lizzy and Madeleine hang up Lizzy’s gifts:

  Never did Christmas tree bear more multifarious fruit,—for St. Nicholas, that most benign of all the saints of the Calendar, had through the hands of many a ministering priest and priestess, showered his gifts. The sturdiest branch drooped with its burden of books, chess-men, puzzles, &c., for Julius, a stripling of thirteen. Dolls, birds, beasts, and boxes were hung on the lesser limbs. A regiment of soldiers had alighted on one bough, and Noah’s ark was anchored to another, and to all the slender branches were attached cherries, plumbs [sic], strawberries and peaches as tempting, and at least as sweet, as the fruits of paradise.24