The Battle for Christmas

by Stephen Nissenbaum

  “Winter Holydays in the Southern States.” This woodcut illustrated a pro-slavery story that appeared in the December 1854 issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. The accompanying text offered this description of the activities shown in the picture: “[T]he [white] ladies of the family interest themselves in the amusements and entertainments of the negroes, giving superintendence to the making of pastry, the adornment of the tables, and whatever else will add to the refinement of the festivity. On such occasions, the ‘stately mistress’ and her ‘aristocratic daughters’ may be seen assisting, by every act of kindness, and displaying in the most charming way the family feeling and patriarchal character of our Southern institutions; while the negroes, on their part, never feel that they are duly and affectionately remembered unless the white family, or most of its members, are present, to witness and participate in their enjoyments.” (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

  It is difficult to say who is master. Of course, it was not difficult at all. But what is interesting is that these words were published in an article on the “Management of Servants,” not a propaganda piece but a set of rules intended solely as “in-house” advice, so to speak, for the use of the writer’s fellow slaveholders. Believing that such occasions of ritual inversion actually took place is not by any means tantamount to succumbing to nostalgia or pro-slavery ideology. Neither does acknowledging that this was the case mean that the slave system was benign or even fundamentally paternalist. What it does mean is that many slaveholders wished to believe that it was paternalist and benign, and that they were willing to act out their wish on this one, symbolically charged occasion—an occasion that lasted for only a few days each year.

  In other words, it was far easier to act out a ritual that produced a symbolic representation of a paternalist society than it was to produce the actual society. And acting out the ritual brought real returns, not just material advantages (in the form of a more pliant workforce) but psychological benefits. By permitting a season of misrule, and performing the requisite gestures of deference, slaveholders were able to affirm that they had fulfilled their personal obligations within a paternalist order. In turn, this permitted them to affirm the paternalist humaneness of the slave system itself, in the face of external attacks (and, sometimes, of their own inner doubts). All this was a big payoff, and at relatively small cost. Consider this extraordinary passage, from a private letter written by a Louisiana slaveholder in 1836:

  We have had a “right merrie” Christmas; and I do not know where I have seen such an expression of content and happiness, as my negroes exhibited during the festival. Some of them seem to have their countenances perfectly set to an expression of good humor, and all of them meet me today with a smile and a “happy new year to you, master.” I am much more reconciled to my condition as a slaveowner, when I see how cheerful and happy my fellow creatures can be in a state of servitude, how much I have it in my power to minister to their happiness, and when I reflect that most of the evils of slavery neither result inevitably from it, nor as a consequence, nor are invited by the interest of the master, which is always in accordance with the welfare of his subjects.42

  Or this striking statement, presented to the 1824 North Carolina state legislature by Dr. James Norcom of Edenton, North Carolina:

  During the Season of Christmas our Slaves … have been in the habit of enjoying a State of comparative freedom…. These festivities are not only tolerated by the whites, but are virtually created by them; for without the aid voluntarily contributed by their masters, their servants would be destitute of the means of making or enjoying them. At such a season, instead of driving these wretched creatures, with cold and unfeeling sensibility from our doors, the heart of charity dilates toward them, & the angel of humanity whispers in our ears that they are entitled to a part of those blessings which their labor has procured us….43

  I cite Dr. Norcoms statement for an additional reason: One of his own slaves was none other than the aforementioned Harriet Jacobs, whose autobiography would later describe the Christmas she spent hiding in the crawl space of an Edenton house. And it was from Norcom himself that Jacobs was hiding—he was the man who had tried to force her into sexual slavery. It is not pleasant to think that people like James Norcom were “sincere” in their paternalist commitment to the “freedom” that slaves enjoyed during the Christmas season. But accepting such a possibility sheds some light on how real slaveholders were able to accept the slave system.

  Dr. James Norcom. This resident of Edenton, N.C., plays two roles in our story: He was the impassioned defender of the right of slaves to perform the John Canoe ritual, and he was the owner of Harriet Jacobs, a woman he pursued relentlessly in an effort to force her to become his mistress. (Courtesy, North Carolina Division of Archives and History)

  And it also serves to illuminate the larger meaning of Christmas. For it is worth wondering whether this was not the same role that Christmas has played in other societies as well, nonslave societies from early-modern Europe to present-day America. A key reason for the enduring popularity of this holiday may well be that it has provided a profoundly ritualized means of helping people to come to terms with their own complicity in a larger system that they realize must breed injustice. That may be as true for a member of the seventeenth-century English landed gentry as it is for a Southern planter. Or, for that matter, for a modern plutocrat who makes generous Christmas donations to a deserving cause.

  CHRISTMAS IN THE QUARTERS: SLAVES AS ACTIVE AGENTS

  In most of the cross-race rituals I have just described, the slaves themselves appear to be little more than the passive objects of their owners’ largesse. But there is more to it than that. What is intended by the patrons is not always what is taken by the clients. And it should not be surprising that slaves attempted to play a more active role in those rituals, to turn symbolic privileges into real ones—to “appropriate” them, in modern parlance. Two distinguished scholars who have examined similar forms of popular revelry and carnival misrule in early-modern Europe—Natalie Zemon Davis and E. P. Thompson—have shown how European peasants and apprentices appropriated similar rituals, in a process that involved tacit “negotiations” carried on in the context of an unequal set of power relationships. There are indications that the very same thing happened on the slave plantation.

  “Christmas Gift!” and Other Games

  The form taken by the slaves’ “appropriation” usually involved the dynamic of the gift exchange itself, the exchange of gifts for goodwill. There is a spectrum of ways in which such a ritual can be sealed—from the meekest expressions of thanks and goodwill upon the receipt of a gift (“Sarvant, Master; merry Christmas to you, an all de fambly, sir!”) to the most aggressive combination of demands and threats, in which goodwill is contingent upon one’s demands being met (“Come, butler, draw us a bowl of the best / … /But if you draw us a bowl of the small, / Then down will come butler, bowl, and all.”) While slaves in the antebellum South were not in a position to operate at the most aggressive end of that spectrum, they were sometimes able to approach it.

  In the most inoffensive form, slaves (house slaves, at least) might simply enter a room in the Big House on Christmas morning, wish the their masters family a “Merry Christmas,” and wait, becomingly, for their gift. As early as 1773, a Northerner temporarily employed in Virginia recorded such a practice (making it sound—and the parallel is surely no coincidence—much like a bellhop who has just shown some guests to their hotel room):

  Nelson the [slave] Boy who makes my fire, blacks my shoes, does errands &c. was early in my Room, drest only in his shirt and Breeches! He made me a vast fire, blacked my Shoes, set my Room in order, and wish’d me a joyful Christmas, for which I gave him half a Bit [i.e., 5½ shillings]. Soon after he left the Room, and before I was Drest, the Fellow who makes the Fire in our School Room, drest very neatly in green, but almost drunk, entered my chamber with three or four profound Bows, & made me the same salutation;
I gave him a Bit, and dismissed him as soon as possible.—Soon after[,] my Cloths and Linen were sent in with a message for a Christmas Box, as they call it; I sent the poor slave a Bit, & my thanks.—I was obliged for want of small change, to put off for some days the Barber who shaves and dresses me.44

  Slaves commonly made gestures that were more overtly aggressive, if still ostensibly friendly. Often this involved startling the master’s family by making noise in front of the Big House, generally at the crack of dawn. Typically, they did so by shouting “Merry Christmas!” The goodwill latent in that phrase could always be subverted by the manner in which it was expressed. Indeed, this seems to have been a ritually sanctioned way for slaves to get away with rousing white people from a night’s sleep. One white visitor reported in Harpers Monthly:

  Just as the light appears they form themselves into a procession, and preceded by a fiddle and a variety of rude instruments, above all of which is to be heard boisterous singing and laughing, they march round the house, crying out at intervals, “Wake up! wake up! Christmas has come!”45

  But the commonest form of this ritual was the game of “Christmas gift!” This was essentially a variant of the wake-up call. A former slave described one version of the game: “The cock crowing for sunrise is scarcely over when the servants steal into the Big House on tiptoe so they can catch everybody there with a shouted ‘Christmas gift!’ before the kitchen fire is even started or the water put on to boil for the early morning coffee.” In response, each member of the white family who is thus “captured” must hand over a gift to the slave who has “caught” him or her. Susan Dabney Smedes describes the game with similar affection:

  On Christmas mornings the servants delighted in catching the family [i.e., the owner’s family] with “Christmas giffl Christmas giff!” betimes in the morning. They would spring out of unexpected corners and from behind doors on the young masters and mistresses. At such times [she adds in explanation] there was an affectionate throwing off of the reserve and decorum of every-day life.46

  The recollections of a onetime Georgia field hand named James Bolton suggest that the custom was not always limited to house servants: “We runned up to the big house early Christmas morning and holler out, ‘Morning, Christmas Gift! Then they gave us plenty of Santy Claus, and we would go back to our cabins to have fun till New Year’s Day.”47

  Unlike the practice of simply waiting for gifts to be distributed on Christmas Day, the game of “Christmas gift!” offered the slaves a symbolic moment in which they themselves actively turned the racial hierarchy upside down—an opportunity to step outside their servile roles, to shout at their owners and make a direct demand for gifts. Within the extraordinary limits imposed by the system of chattel slavery, this must have seemed a powerful, if brief, gesture of autonomy.48

  What gives the ritual even more interest is its malleability. Within the black community, for example, it became something of a game between the generations rather than the races, with children using it to beg from their elders. And the game also moved from the black to the white community, from the slave quarters to the Big House, as white children imitated black children, waking their own parents on Christmas morning by shouting the words “Christmas gift!”

  By the 1830s “Christmas gift!” had become a common intergenerational ritual between white children and grown-ups even outside the South. We have already encountered it in Philadelphia, in Mrs. G.’s story “The Christmas Tree” (see Chapter 5). In the South, Thomas Nelson Page recalled it as a chief pleasure of Christmas in antebellum Virginia. Amanda Edmonds, who lived in Virginia, participated in the practice regularly over a ten-year period, and recorded it in her diary (we have met her before, in connection with getting drunk on Christmas morning). In her 1863 entry, for example, Edmonds wrote: “‘Christmas Gift’ rings louder this morning than for several years. I catch everyone and set the most complete and successful trap for my friend, Mr. Triplett; after his saying last night, he knew I could not catch him for he had a trap for me.”49

  Amanda Edmonds was no child at this point; in 1863 she was 24 years old. But—and this is the key—she was still single, and for that reason she continued to occupy the role of a “young person.”50 For the sole determinant of who could appropriately go “begging” at Christmas seems to have been that of dependent status. (For a more detailed discussion of this subject, see Chapter 3.) “Christmas gift!” was, after all, a “domesticated” version of that rowdier, more public custom—which was itself a variant of the old wassail ritual—in which roving bands of youths startled householders at night with gunshots and shouted demands for food and drink. That may be why it proved to be so malleable.

  SLAVES SOMETIMES WENT beyond even this ritual in stepping out of character. Planter’s daughter Susan Dabney Smedes phrased this in idealized terms: At Christmas “there was an affectionate throwing off of the reserve and decorum of every-day life.” To demonstrate her point, Smedes herself offered the following anecdote: “One of the ladies of the house had heard an unfamiliar and astonishingly loud laugh under her window, and had ventured to put an inquiring head out [emphasis added].” What the woman saw didn’t quite make sense. It was “one of the quietest and most low-voiced of the maidservants.” The quiet maidservant, realizing that her mistress wished to know what was going on, replied to her tacit question “in a voice as loud as a sea-captain’s.” The words she used only confirmed the point already made by the unfamiliar sound of her voice. They were: “Hi! ain’t dis Chris mus?”51

  “Putting on Airs”

  Christmas also offered slaves an opportunity to openly imitate—even mimic—white behavior. Stories abound that tell of slaves “dressing up” at Christmas. For the most part this was surely a matter of looking their best at a time when they did not have to dress for work (and when they had often just received gifts of finery). In 1853 one planter noted that as Christmas approached his slaves were all “brushing up [and] putting on their best rigging.” Whites were characteristically amused by the sight of their slaves dressing like genteel white folk. But it could also become a parody of white manners. To grasp what may actually have been happening, we need to penetrate the invariably patronizing tone in which white reporters described these situations. Rebecca Cameron recalled a family slave known as Uncle Robin, who at Christmas “dressed in my greatgrandfathers regimentals, and looking, of course, supremely absurd.”52 We don’t know what was going on in Uncle Robins mind, of course. But putting on the master’s clothing was surely a gesture that carried profound symbolic implications. One example will make the point. In the course of the Nat Turner rebellion, several black men who had just murdered their owners employed the first moments of their freedom to perform this very ritual gesture—they dressed themselves in the clothing of their dead masters, whose bodies were even then lying in the same room.

  We can get a hint of what “putting on airs” sometimes meant to slaves by looking at the way they sometimes behaved under those circumstances, imitating the manners as well as the dress of genteel white people. A Northern visitor, listening “to the Christmas revelry that sounded from the negro quarters,” summed up her reaction by writing, simply, that “it seemed almost a burlesque of the performances inside the mansion.”53

  The “burlesque” was surely a complex gesture, a mixture of high spirits, mockery, and envy. One patronizing account of Christmas on the plantation, written by a white man in 1854, describes the “assumed refinement” of slaves during the “holiday festivities”:

  In these imitations of “white folks,” some “sable [black] wild flower,” that it was supposed had never looked into a parlor, will put on airs that would be quite impressive amidst ton [i.e., high society] at Saratoga or Newport; while a “field nigger” will hit off some of the peculiarities of master, or of an eccentric visitor, that are instantly recognized, but had never been noticed before.54

  We might well ask, Who is really getting the last laugh here? And what was really going on
in this story, told by Bessie Henry, a white woman from Salem, Massachusetts, in an 1832 letter to her sister back home (Henry was teaching school on a Tidewater plantation near Richmond). After saying the usual things about how slaves behaved at Christmas (“they take the kitchen for a ball room and dance all night and sing all day”), Henry concluded her report by recounting a scene she had just witnessed: “Yesterday I saw one of them pick up an old leaf of a book and fold it up very carefully. I asked him what he was going to do with it. [He replied,] Oh Missus, I jest goin in there [referring presumably to the slave quarters] to hold it up and make tence [i.e., pretense] read and [hear] all the niggers say ‘See, he like white folks, he read.’”55

  “High Life” at Christmas. A white Southerner’s later recollection of the Christmas dance performed by her family’s slaves. The couple in front have dressed in high style and are imitating—or parodying?—the elegant and coy gestures of the white gentry. A report in one antebellum magazine described the slaves’ “high life” at Christmas in this way: “They now drop their plantation names of Tom, Bill, Dick, and Caesar, Moll, Kate, and Nancy, and use, in addressing one another, the prefix of Mister, Mistress, or Miss, as the case may be; and the highest compliment that can be paid them is to be called by the surnames of their masters.” Interestingly, the very same reversals are described in a 1759 British play, High Life Below Stairs, that was often performed at Christmas in England and America well into the nineteenth century. (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

  Bessie Henry reported this story without trying to explain it. The man she wrote about did not do this in order to be observed by white peopie; Henry came upon him as he was taking the sheet of printed paper into the slave quarters. When he was discovered, the slave said simply that he was going to pretend to read. There may have been envy or even ambition in his purpose, but surely there was parody in it (even, perhaps, if this slave really did know how to read). The mimicking of white manners was something whose meaning the whites failed to grasp—just as they failed to grasp the meaning of black spirituals. Both involved what might now be termed “signifying”—a gesture that was intended to appear “cute” to white observers but was laden with an irony that only fellow slaves were able to appreciate.