The fact that slaves themselves took their Christmas experiences so seriously suggests that we might, too. Indeed, by exploring the meaning of this holiday in a slave society, we can deepen our understanding of what happened when a familiar set of rituals were practiced under conditions of extreme inequality. For these rituals do turn out to be familiar, though they emerged from the very different world of early-modern Europe. The examination of Christmas rituals in a slave society therefore provides an intriguing lens through which we can view similar rituals in the peasant cultures of European society. It allows us to see more clearly how Christmas rituals there, too, could serve as underpinning for enormous inequalities of power and wealth. It brings us, in a sense, full circle from the place where we began.
A WHITE CHRISTMAS: HOLIDAY SEASON IN THE BIG HOUSE
When we think of Christmas in the Old South we commonly think of elegant dinners and romantic plantation balls. Just as Washington Irving’s evocative stories about Christmas on the fictional English estate at Bracebridge Hall helped define the image of a traditional Christmas for generations of Americans, so, too, did scores of postbellum Southerners write nostalgically of what Christmas had once been like in old Dixie. Several Southern writers actually used Irving’s sketches as their models. One even attempted to convey the flavor of a typical Christmas dinner in colonial Virginia by quoting verbatim a passage from Irvings picture of Christmas dinner at Bracebridge Hall!2
The romantic associations of Christmas in old Dixie are misleading not only because they usually ignore the experience of the slaves but also because they misrepresent the experience of white people. Like the inhabitants of early-modern Europe, or of any agricultural society in a nontropical climate, planters in the antebellum American South took late December as their major season of heavy eating, boisterous drinking, and letting off steam. The harvest was complete, there was relatively little work to be done, and plenty to eat and drink. Once again, the parallels to Washington Irving are telling. Irving’s account of Christmas at Bracebridge Hall, like the myth of Christmas in old Dixie, retained the drinking; but the drunkenness was gone. The elaborate paternalist rituals of the gift exchange remained, but the aggressive stepping out of ordinary behavioral bounds and social roles had been forgotten. Wassailing was preserved, but it had been transformed from a rowdy begging ritual into jolly songs of goodwill.
But Christmas meant carnival in the antebellum South. As early as 1823 a rural white Southerner attacked the Christmas season for being a “general scene of dissipation and idleness.” Some folk spent the time making “rough jokes.” “Apprentice boys and little negroes” fired guns and crackers. And everyone—“parents, children, servants, old, young, white, black, and yellow”—drank hard. “And if you inquire what it is all for, no earthly reason is assigned …, except this, ‘Why man! It is Christmas.’”3
At the time, everybody commented on how much Southern whites drank during the Christmas season. Northern visitors (especially those of a temperance bent) were particularly offended by it. One of them claimed that “[sjudden calls for the doctor to attend cases of delirium tremens … were numerous during Christmas.” But Southerners reported it themselves, in diaries, letters, and newspapers. It is clear that people—women among them—commonly began drinking at breakfast. Amanda Edmonds of western Virginia did so year after year in the late 1850s and 186os. In 1861 the first thing she did in the morning was to have “a joyful eggnog drink—I really got tight. The first signs of Christmas that I’ve seen.” Nor was the drinking restricted to adults, as one Northerner reported: “The good cheer of the occasion descended almost to dissipation, and I, unaccustomed to the conviviality that prevailed, looked on with apprehension, when egg-nog, punch, and toddy were freely served to the children.”4
The drinking was still going on in Norfolk, Virginia, in the 1870s, where the local newspaper regularly commented on the number of arrests made for disorderly conduct on December 25. Part of the reason was that alcohol (and food) was being served gratis, in an unmistakable example of the “open house” long expected of British landlords and tavern keepers at Christmas. Even the local newspaper was offended: “The various barrooms and restaurants in the city treated their customers to egg-nog, apple toddy, lunch, &c.”
The alcohol did its usual work, releasing the inner spring of ordinary behavioral constraint. “During the entire day crowds of men and boys paraded the streets—the former drinking at every bar they saw, and the latter firing crackers and torpedoes and blowing those inevitable horns.”5 Noise-making was another essential ingredient of the Southern white Christmas, especially the firing of guns (and firecrackers, their symbolic representations). As early as 1773 one visitor recorded in his diary that “I was waked this morning by Guns fired all around the House.” Two generations later, the practice was still so common that the young Robert E. Lee was able to allude to it when asking a recently married woman friend a rather personal question about her wedding night: “Did you go off well like a torpedo cracker on Christmas morning?”6
The noise-making and the drinking were part of a larger picture, in which normal behavior was forgotten and normal social relationships were turned on their heads. Young women like Amanda Edmonds were permitted to step outside their gender roles and get drunk first thing in the morning; and young men were permitted to step outside their age roles and act as if they dominated space ordinarily allotted to their elders. This is how one Southerner described the scene in 1868:
It was the custom, and still is, in the more isolated communities, for a crowd of young men to band together, and with guns and every sort of instrument of music, or of noise, go “Christmasing” among their neighbors. It was great sport to frighten off the fiercest dogs with their racket. If the proprietor heard them coming and got the first shot it was their treat [i.e., they had to give him a gift]; but they generally stole up quite noiselessly, and opened fire and called out, “Treat! treat!” as they marched around his dwelling with their discordant music. This was called “serenading and shooting up.”7
The writer may not have realized this, but less than a century earlier the British would have given it another name: They would have called it wassailing.
William Nevison Blow, whose family had been the major landowners in an isolated county of antebellum Virginia, remembered from his boyhood the way Christmas transformed virtually every social relationship. The holiday would begin on Christmas Eve, with the preparation and consumption of eggnog. Then, at midnight, the boy would hear the sudden eruption of gunfire from every direction, and the responsive howling of many dogs. Soon “the [entire] County is awake and Christmas has come.” Christmas Day itself would begin with early-morning eggnog and culminate in a semidrunken fox hunt. This was no ordinary fox hunt but a promiscuous episode of misrule that attracted men and boys from the entire county—rich and poor, white and black: “the word Christmas is a talisman that levels all barriers.”
The fox was all but irrelevant to this hunt. The hunters, perhaps 100 in all, along with their 200-odd dogs, constituted a collective mob of noisy revelers, “yelping, howling, shouting, singing and laughing.” By midafternoon the exhausted participants would conclude the hunt and begin the first of an extended series of Christmas dinners that would go on for two full weeks. Each day was structured like the first—a hunt followed by a dinner, each accompanied by alcohol. But with every passing day the leveling process was taken even further. On the second day of Christmas, some of the fox hunters, instead of returning to their homes, would spend the night at the house where they had taken their dinner. Then, the next morning, that group would leave together “to continue the hunt, dine, sleep and dance with another member of the hunt and move on, so that at the end of a week they have visited half a dozen neighbors and find themselves twenty miles from home.” What resulted was a generalized open house that obliterated the boundaries of individual families and reconstituted the entire county as a single vast household.8
As in
the North, such practices came under scrutiny, though less sharply. By the 1840s, and probably earlier, the Southern-plantation gentry had begun to reform their Christmas customs—to replace open houses with more exclusive parties for invited guests. But even among the gentry this change was slow and imperfect. Susan Dabney Smedes, the daughter of a Mississippi planter, remembered that her family’s plantation house “was crowded with guests, young people and older ones too,” and that “no one in the neighborhood invited company for Christmas Day, as, for years, everybody was expected at Burleigh [plantation] on that day.” But it is not wholly clear whom Smedes meant by the word “everybody,” since she quickly added that her father held a second party as well, this one intended specifically for the lower orders: “On one of the nights during the holidays it was his custom to invite his former overseers and other plain neighbors to an eggnog-party [emphasis added].”
In fact, Mr. Dabney used the preparation of the eggnog as a ritualized display of paternalist condescension: “In the concoction of this beverage he took a hand himself, and the freedom and ease of the company, as they saw the master of the house beating his half of the eggs in the great China bowl, made it a pleasant scene [even] for those who cared nothing for the eggnog.”9 Here was a quintessential ritual of Christmas social inversion, where the “master of the house” graciously makes a symbolic gesture of deference to his dependents: by inviting them into his house; by publicly helping to prepare the food he serves them; and by offering them a dish that was lavish, rich, and special. (Besides getting people drunk, eggnog was a luxury item, a blend of special ingredients—whiskey, eggs, sugar, and fresh cream.) We shall encounter another instance of the highly formalized preparation of eggnog, and for the same ritual purpose—although the recipients of that ritual will not be white.
CHRISTMAS IN THE QUARTERS: GESTURES OF PATERNALISM
The resemblance between Christmas in the antebellum South and Christmas in early-modern Europe is clear enough. Present in both cases is the same carnival atmosphere, the intense (and extended) season of public revelry, the lifting of ordinary behavioral constraints, the stepping out of ordinary roles in the social hierarchy, the face-to-face giving of presents by the high-in-status to their poorer dependents. But there is one striking difference between Christmas in these two societies: In the antebellum South, the axis along which all these holiday rituals were practiced was, above all, that of race.
Liberty
For the great majority of slaves, Christmas was marked by the same sanctioned relaxation of normal behavioral constraints that we have already encountered among whites. As the New York Times would point out in 1867, Christmas was the one time of year when slaves were released from the obligation to work, usually for several days. They became, in a sense, free—free from labor, free to do whatever they wished, free even to travel off their masters’ property. One Northerner, living on a plantation as a tutor to the owners’ children, reported that “[throughout the state of South Carolina, Christmas is a holiday, together with 2 of the succeeding days … especially for the negroes. On these days the chains of slavery … are loosed. A smile is seen on every countenance.”10
The three days of holiday this man noted were, if anything, at the low end of the normal range, which probably ranged from three days to a full week. But a number of slaveholders went outside this range. Some gave only Christmas Day itself as a holiday;11 a very few allowed no holiday at all.12 At the other extreme, in one part of Missouri (a border state) it was customary to permit more than five weeks of freedom—from Christmas Day until February 1. A slave from this area later recalled: “During Christmas time and de whole month of January, it was de rulin’ to give de slaves a holiday in our part of de country. A whole month, to come and go as much as we pleased and go for miles as far as we wanted to, but we had better be back by de first of February.”13
Of course, the very expectation of holiday leisure could easily be manipulated by slaveholders for their own purposes. The historian Eugene Genovese points out that slaveholders used the promise of Christmas as an incentive to help get the plantation cleaned up after the harvest had been gathered. And there was always the threat of withholding holiday privileges if the slaves displeased their master. But this was done very rarely. Genovese writes: “Throughout the South … the slaves claimed those arrangements sanctioned by local custom and generally got their way.”14*
Frederick Douglass, who had been raised as a slave, offered an explanation of why planters sanctioned this custom. He argued that planters were forced to offer Christmas holidays in order to prevent insurrection, and that the practice actually served white self-interest by providing a safety valve (his own term) to contain black discontent. Douglass wrote:
From what I know of the effect of these holidays upon the slave, I believe them to be among the most effective means in the hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection. Were the slaveholders at once to abandon this practice, I have not the slightest doubt it would lead to an immediate insurrection among the slaves. These holidays serve as conductors, or safety-valves, to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity.15
Douglass was making a large claim for the importance of Christmas in slave society. Whatever the truth of his contention that without such a holiday the South would be gripped by a series of strikes and revolts, Douglass’s argument was based on a broadly shared assumption: Christmas was something that mattered a great deal in the slave community.
Misrule
Slaves made many uses of their “liberty.” They might merely rest from work or sleep in.16 They might travel, visiting family and friends on nearby plantations.17 They might spend the time attending religious revival meetings. Or they might use the time to take advantage of a rare moment of economic autonomy, making wares that they could sell in the market or selling whatever goods they had managed to produce or grow during the previous year. (This latter privilege was based on an informal tradition that any fruit of a slave’s labor at Christmas belonged to the slave himself—once again, an inversion of ordinary rules.)
But perhaps the activity that was most frequently reported and remembered involved revelry: eating, drinking, dancing, making noise, and making love. Solomon Northup, a free black who was kidnapped into slavery in Louisiana, later wrote of Christmas as “the times of feasting, and frolicking, and fiddling—the carnival season with the children of bondage … the only days when they are allowed a little restricted liberty, and heartily indeed do they enjoy it.” A white Southerner used the same term, calling Christmas “the time of the blacks’ high carnival;” while another white man described the period as “times of cramming, truly awful…. [?]hey stuffed and drank, and sang and danced.” The wife of ex-U.S. president John Tyler wrote in 1845 that the family’s slaves “have from now a four days’ holiday and have given themselves up completely to their kind of happiness—drinking, with nothing on earth to do.” An anti-slavery Northerner was less accepting of the situation and used his disapproval to point a finger: “Ah! white man! [at Christmas] the digger’ gets as drunk as you! Rum is an ultra-democrat—it levels down!” (What this man failed to recognize was that from the perspective of the white Southerner, such leveling-down was one of the ritual purposes of the drinking. And what he did not point out was that on most plantations slaves were forbidden to drink at any other time of the year.)18
It seems clear that the constant drinking and dancing—it often lasted through the night—led to intensified sexual activity. This matter was rarely addressed directly in the descriptive accounts, but it is suggested both by the surviving texts of slave Christmas songs and by the entries in plantation record books that indicate the phenomenon of “grouped” slave marriages during the Christmas season. Young John Pierpont of Boston confided to his diary that “[n]o restraint is imposed upon their inclinations, no lash calls their attention from the enjoyment of all those delights which the most unrestrained freedom proffers.”19
More
than one visitor explicitly described the slave Christmas as a modern version of the old Roman Saturnalia. John Pierpont noted that it “might more than compare with the bacchanal feasts and amusements of antiquity.” A reporter publicly wrote that Christmas was “the great gala season of the negro. It may be likened to the saturnalia of the Romans.” (Then, not wishing to undercut his favorable picture of the slave system by going too far for middle-class tastes, he added that unlike the original Saturnalia, the slaves’ Christmas was “modified by decency and decorum.”) Another writer, too, termed the occasion a “grand Saturnalia,” and suggested something of what this amounted to in language whose euphemisms were not intended to conceal the author’s meaning: “From three to four days and nights are given as holiday, during which every indulgence and license consistent with any subordination and safety are allowed…. [A]ll society seems resolved into chaos….”20 Christmas in the quarters, it seems, was indeed a season of misrule.
Not all slaveholders tolerated such behavior. Some felt that it was unchristian; others considered it a threat to good order.21 But the great majority seem to have gone along, if only because they still accepted the notion that Christmas was a ritual occasion when normal behavior was supposed to change, and when even the “low”—in fact, the “low” especially—were expected to live well. Of course, as anthropologists are well aware, even that notion was based on the understanding that such ritualized inversions of ordinary behavior also served to affirm and reinforce the primacy of ordinary behavior at all other times. In the case of Southern slavery, “ordinary behavior” meant constant sobriety and hard work. Some white Southerners openly argued that allowing their slaves the liberty to engage in seasonal excess was actually a means of maintaining good order and productivity. One Alabamian, writing in 1852, argued: “Some will say that this plan will not do to make money, but I know of no man who realizes more to the hand than I.”22
The Battle for Christmas Page 33
