The Battle for Christmas

by Stephen Nissenbaum

  Without personal labor… a life of ease and idleness … awaiting the millennium … waiting for the jubilee. For white Southerners these were also code words. What they meant was that many blacks had not returned to work for their old masters at war’s end (in fact, the crops of the 1865 season had largely gone unharvested), and that they were refusing to sign degrading labor contracts with their former masters for the coming season. Alabama landowner Henry Watson reported that “Not a solitary negro in the country has made a contract for next year. The soldiers told them not to make them, that if they did they would be branded and become slaves again!”71 Their refusal posed a serious threat to the regional economy and especially to the well-being of the planter class.

  It also indicated that the freedmen might be politically organized. Whites tended to interpret the hopes of the freedmen as aggressive and threatening, a sign that they were ready to turn to violence. And whites, like blacks, looked to the Christmas season as the time when matters would finally come to a head. Interpretations varied as to precisely how, and for what reason, violence would break out. Some whites thought it would happen spontaneously.72 An Atlanta newspaper warned that the holiday might start out as a “frolic,” but that it would soon turn into something considerably more menacing. Emboldened by alcohol and encouraged by “bad white men,” the blacks could be easily “persuaded to … commit outrage and violence.” A planter from South Carolina told a visiting reporter that “some families will be murdered and some property destroyed,” and he concluded ominously, “It will begin the work of extermination.”73

  The fears of the one race commingled in a volatile fashion with the hopes of the other. As December approached, an increasing number of Southern whites became convinced that the freedmen were actively plotting an organized insurrection. All across the South, “apprehensions” of such an insurrection during the Christmas holidays were reported (and spread) by newspapers. In mid-November a Louisiana newspaper reported that “there is an increasing dread of what may turn up in the future. The negroes are, by some means, procuring arms, and are daily becoming more insolent.” Toward the end of the month the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer headlined a story “A NEGRO CONSPIRACY DISCOVERED IN MISSISSIPPI” and explained that “a conspiracy had been organized among the blacks, extending from the Mississippi River to South Carolina, and that an insurrection was contemplated about Christmas.”74 Such stories were printed and reprinted by newspapers throughout the South. Some of the rumors were quite detailed. A letter printed in the New Orleans True Delta cited a “reliable” report that blacks would collectively revolt “on the night before Christmas” and “wreak their vengeance” on whites whose names had already been chosen. The victims were to be identified to their attackers “by signs and marks placed on each house and place of business”—these marks would consist of coded numbers, as well as the letters X and O “set in chalk marks.”75

  IT WAS largely to the Freedmen’s Bureau that there fell the task of persuading the freedmen that Christmas would not be ushering in the “jubilee,” that further disruption of the Southern economy would harm them as well as whites, that the signing of labor contracts was now their best available recourse—and that insurrection would be futile. Under orders from President Johnson himself, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General O. O. Howard, spent the late fall touring the South in order to communicate these points. On November 12, General Howard sent a policy statement to his staff:

  It is constantly reported to the Commissioner and his agents that the free [d] men have been deceived as to the intentions of the Government. It is said that lands will be taken from the present holders and be divided among them on next Christmas or New Year’s. This impression, wherever it exists, is wrong. All officers and agents of the Bureau are hereby directed to take every possible means to remove so erroneous and injurious an impression. They will further endeavor to overcome other false reports that have been industriously spread abroad, with a purpose to unsettle labor and give rise to disorder and suffering. Every proper means will be taken to secure fair written agreements or contracts for the coming year, and the freedmen instructed that it is for their best interests to look to the property-holders for employment….76

  On another occasion, General Howard warned the freedmen directly that there would be “no division of lands, that nothing is going to happen at Christmas, that… [you] must go to work [and] make contracts for next year…. [I]nsurrection will lead to nothing but [your] destruction.” Most agents of the Bureau dutifully (if reluctantly) passed along the word that the freedmens Christmas hopes were nothing but a pipe dream—or, as a Memphis newspaper put it, “a la mode Santa Claus.” Colonel William E. Strong, the bureaus inspector general, addressed a group of Texas freedmen in plain language:

  I have been sent here from Washington, to make a speech to the colored people. I have little to say, and that is in plain words. Winter is coming on—go back to your former masters, work, be obedient, and show that you are worthy of freedom. You expect the Government to divide your late master’s lands out to you, and about the first of January you will get buggies and carriages; but you are mistaken. You will not get a cent. It all belongs to the former owners, and you will not get anything unless you work for it. It is true that rations have been given to some of you, but you will not get any more. You have had good masters, I know. I have been through here long enough to find out for myself.77

  But white Southerners were skeptical about whether such a cautionary message would be heeded by the black community. What was needed, one newspaper argued (in a sarcastic reference to the abolitionist leanings and the New England background of many Freedmen’s Bureau officials) was straight talk from “imposing” men “who were born at least one thousand miles distant from Cape Cod.” Of course, the planters themselves reiterated the message to their ex-slaves. But the slaves would not heed their warnings, either. As one Mississippi newspaper conceded, “It amounts to nothing for former masters and mistresses to read these orders to negroes…. They do not believe anything we can tell them.”78

  Some whites consciously manipulated the fear of an insurrection as a way of convincing state and federal authorities to allow Southern whites to rearm themselves—and to disarm (and harass) the freedmen. An Alabama official used just such an argument in a letter to the governor of that state: “I am anxious to organize the local company. It is feared the negroes will be troublesome about Christmas unless there is some organization that can keep them in subjection.”79

  But many whites were truly fearful. The mistress of one plantation near Columbia, South Carolina, later recalled how she was terrified by the nocturnal singing that came from what until recently had been her slave cabins—singing that evoked “expectations of a horde pouring into our houses to cut our throats and dance like fiends over our remains.”80

  It is possible that some African-Americans were indeed harboring thoughts (if not making plans) of a Christmas revolt. But those plans could hardly have amounted to a coordinated conspiracy. What is far more likely is an explanation that places both white fears and black hopes in the context of the intense expectations that normally surrounded Christmas on the slave plantarions. For if Christmas was a time when slaves expected gestures of paternalist largesse, it was also a time when they were used to “acting up.” (In that sense, the Atlanta paper may have been shrewd in suggesting that the Christmas insurrection might begin as a “frolic”)

  What was happening in late 1865 was that a serious, contested set of political and economic issues—issues involving the radical redistribution of property and the radical realignment of power—chanced to converge with a holiday season whose ordinary rituals had always pointed, however symbolically, to just such a redistribution of property and just such a realignment of power. On both sides of the color line there was a shared mythos about Christmas that made the holiday loom with ominous weight in the watershed year of white defeat and black emancipation.

  THERE WAS no in
surrection. Confrontations, yes—even, in a number of cities, violent riots. The most serious of these was in Alexandria, Virginia, where two people were killed. But it soon transpired that the Alexandria riot was actually initiated by whites, and that both victims were black. By December 28 or 29, it was clear that the danger had subsided. “The ides of Christmas are past,” one Southern paper proclaimed, “without any insurrection of the colored population of the late slave holding states. There is no probability of any combination of freedmen for hostile purposes; neither are they likely to combine, at present, for political or industrial objects.” Another paper simply reported that “some cases of collision between blacks and whites occurred on Christmas, but there was no organized demonstration on the part of the former.”81

  It was now possible to reinterpret the events of December 25, to put them back into the old, familiar antebellum categories. Newspapers reassured their readers that such “collisions” as did occur were “isolated” events, and that they were not even political in nature but merely a function of old-fashioned Christmas rowdiness—occasioned by alcohol, not ideology. The Virginia correspondent of a Washington newspaper reported with relief that “a few brawls in Norfolk and Portsmouth were the result of whiskey, and had no political significance whatever.” “Too much whiskey,” claimed one paper; “much bad whiskey,” added another; “some colored men, very much under the influence of bad whiskey,” chimed in a third.82 And the newspapers now reported arrests for drunkenness and disorderly conduct by placing their notices in the police log, not the political columns. The racial identity of the offenders now hardly mattered. On December 27, the Richmond Daily Whig reported that “Christmas was celebrated in this city with unprecedented hilarity.”

  It was more a street than a home celebration. “King Alcohol” asserted his sway and held possession of the town from Christmas eve until yesterday morning. Liquor and fire-crackers had everything their own way. A disposition was manifested to make up for lost time. This was the first real old fashioned Christmas frolic that has been enjoyed in the South for four years. The pent up dissipations and festivities of four Christmas days were crowded into this one day….83

  By December 29, the New Orleans Picayune even chose to use humor as a way of marginalizing the racial content of the violence that had indeed erupted in that city on Christmas Day. Under the heading “EVERY ONE OUGHT? BE ELOQUENT IN HIS OWN DEFENSE,” the paper reported that one white man, arrested on Christmas for rowdy behavior, testified in his defense: “‘Your honor, I am charged with being a disturber of the peace. It is a mistake, your honor. I have kept more than a hundred niggers off the streets these Christmas times. May it please your honor, I have a bad cold.’”The man’s case was dismissed.84

  ?HE CRISIS had passed, and it was now possible for white Southerners to return to the underlying problem—the collective refusal of the freedmen to work for their old masters. That would take care of itself, the New Orleans Daily Picayune explained, as the freedmen came to understand that their “true friends” were the Southern planter class and not the Northern demagogues who had falsely promised them land. When that truth at last dawned upon them—as it inevitably would—“they will learn where to learn their own true interest and duty.”

  The same editorial went on to explain bluntly just what that would mean:

  As the season passes by without bringing them the possessions they coveted, and the license to be idle, which they expected with them, and they learn that they must look for support to themselves—for the government will decline to help those who do not help themselves—the relations of labor to capital will begin to be freed from one of the most perplexing of the elements that have kept them unsettled; and to adjust themselves upon the natural basis of the mutual dependence of planter and freedmen on justice to each other for their mutual prosperity.85

  In other words, the freedmen would soon be forced back into virtual slavery. A newspaper in Richmond even resorted to a nostalgic evocation of the old interracial Christmas rituals, along with a rueful acknowledgment that the planters were unable to perform the role of patrons in the gift exchange. Not only would the freedmen fail to receive their masters’ land, but they might even have to do without the “usual presents” they customarily received on this occasion. But that was an aberration, indicating only that the planters were temporarily impoverished and not that race relations had changed:

  Heretofore every one of these four millions of beings expected and received a Christmas present, and partook of the master’s good cheer. Now, alas, that former master is penniless, and he who depended upon his bounty is a homeless wanderer. The warm blanket, the cheerful fire, the substantial fare, the affectionate greetings, and the gifts they have been accustomed to receive at the hands of old and young will, we fear, be sadly missed.

  The Richmond editor summed up the prospect by referring to the eclipse of an old tradition: “The familiar salutation of’Christmas gift, master,’ will not be heard.” But the real object of this nostalgia was the master’s loss, not the disappointment of his former slaves. That point came across clearly enough in the editor’s concluding shot, an expression of hope that in another year or so things would be back to normal for the freedmen—“that their future condition may be better than their condition is at present, and that the next Christmas may dawn upon a thrifty, contented and well regulated negro peasantry.”86

  Even now, with the Civil War lost and the black population legally free, the capital city of the Confederacy continued to link rituals of Christmas misrule with the maintenance of the antebellum racial hierarchy. A “contented and well regulated negro peasantry” was, after all, just what was needed to sustain a prosperous class of white planters. The cry of “Christmas gift!” would be music to their ears.

  * On the other hand, Charles Ball, a freed black who had for many years been a slave in South Carolina, suggested in 1831 that masters had the upper hand, and that slaves had lost their traditional privileges as a result of the introduction of large-scale cotton production in the early nineteenth century. Ball observed that in South Carolina, Christmas “comes in the very midst of cotton picking. The richest and best part of the crop has been secured … but large quantities of cotton still remain in the field, and every pound that can be saved from the winds, or the plough of the next spring, is a gain of its value, to the owner of the estate. For these reasons, which are very powerful on the side of the master, there is [ca. 1830] but little Christmas on a large cotton plantation. In lieu of the week of holiday, which formerly prevailed even in Carolina, before cotton was cultivated as a crop, the master now gives the people a dinner of meat, on Christmas-day, and distributes among them their annual allowance of winter clothes….” Ball remembered exactly how and when the change had come about: “As Christmas of the year 1805 approached, we were all big with hope of obtaining three or four days, at least, if not a week of holliday [sic]; but when the day at length arrived, we were sorely disappointed, for on Christmas eve, when we had come from the field with out cotton, the overseer fell into a furious passion, and swore at us all for our laziness, and many other bad qualities. He then told us that he had intended to give us three days, if we had worked well, but that we had been so idle, and had left so much cotton yet to be picked in the field, that he found it impossible to give us more than one day; but that he would go to the house, and endeavor to procure a meat dinner for us, and a dram in the morning…. We went to work as usual the next morning, and continued our labor through the week, as if Christmas had been stricken from the calendar.” Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, A Black Man (Lewiston, Pa., 1836), 206–208.

  * Francis Fedric, an escaped slave, claimed that his master actually forced his slaves to get drunk, and that he explicitly told them he did so in order to force them to internalize their enslavement: “About Christmas, my master would give four or five days’ holiday to his slaves; during which time, he supplie
d them plentifully with new whiskey, which kept them in a continual state of beastly intoxication. He often absolutely forced them to drink more, when they had told him they had had enough. He would call them together, and say, ‘Now, you slaves, don’t you see what bad use you have been making of your liberty? Don’t you think you had better have a master, to look after you, to make you work, and keep you from such a brutal state, which is a disgrace to you, and would ultimately be an injury to the community at large?’ Some of the slaves, in that whining, cringing manner, which is one of the baneful effects of slavery, would reply, ‘Yees, Massa; if we go on in dis way, no good at all.’ Thus, by an artfully-contrived plan, the slaves themselves are made to put the seal upon their own servitude.” (Francis Fedric, Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky; or, Fifty Years of Slavery in the Southern States of America. By Francis Fedric, an Escaped Slave (London, 1863), 28.

  EPILOGUE:

  The Ghosts of Christmas Past

  CHRISTMAS IN TUSKEGEE

  IT WAS the cry of “Christmas gift!” that awakened Booker T. Washington one night in 1880, that first winter in Tuskegee, Alabama. But the cry was not music to his ears. Washington and his wife first realized that the holiday season had arrived when, past midnight on Christmas Eve, local black children began “rapping at our doors, asking for ‘Chris’mus gifts! Chris’mus gifts!’” The visits continued almost without pause until dawn: “Between the hours of two o’clock and five o’clock in the morning I presume we must have had a half-hundred such calls.”1

  Those calls were merely a foretaste of the holiday week to come—a week that, as Washington put it, “gave us an opportunity to get a farther insight into the real life of the people.” And Booker T. Washington did not like what he learned: