The Battle for Christmas

by Stephen Nissenbaum

  56. CMS to Katherine Sedgwick, Dec. 28, 1825 (CMS I, Box 1.9). This passage was a postscript to a letter otherwise addressed to young Katherine’s father, Charles Sedgwick (Catharine’s youngest brother). Catharine Sedgwick herself had sent this same niece a present of books.

  57. What is just as striking (but not apparent from the above description) is that the woman who sent the present, “Aunt Speakman” (Jane Sedgwick’s aunt on her mother’s side) was a Bostonian. One of the lingering ambiguities of the Christmas season (it would not be resolved for another generation) was when to open presents—on December 25 or January 1? Ultimately, it was all the same thing, inasmuch as the date was less important than the sheer fact of the gifts (indeed, as we shall see, the first Christmas trees in the Sedgwick family would be set out on New Year’s Day). But it is striking nonetheless that New York was the city that held out for New Year’s, while December 25 was more customary in Boston.

  58. Elizabeth B. Sedgwick (Mrs. Charles) to CMS, Dec. 31, 1827 (Sedgwick IV, Box 5.3: misfiled because misdated 1828—“Episcopal style”); Susan Sedgwick to Jane M. Sedgwick, Jan. 5, 1828 (Sedgwick V, Box 14.1—“the most entire satisfaction”).

  59. Susan R. Sedgwick to Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., Jan. 6, 1828 (Sedgwick II, 7.8).

  60. Elizabeth E. Sedgwick to her father, William Ellery, Jan. 12, 1828 (Sedgwick V, Box 14.1).

  61. Elizabeth E. Sedgwick to William Ellery, Jan. 3, 1829 (Sedgwick V, Box 14.7).

  62. Jane Sedgwick to her brother William Minot, Jan. 1, 1830 (Sedgwick V, Box 15.1).

  63. Katherine Sedgwick [Minot] to CMS (from Lenox), Jan. 1, 1830 [a postscript to a letter otherwise written by Charles Sedgwick (Sedgwick IV, Box 5.7).

  64. Elizabeth Ellery Sedgwick to her father William Ellery, Jan. 5, 1830 (Sedgwick V, Box 15.1).

  65. Elizabeth E. Sedgwick to her father, Wiliam Ellery, Jan. 9, 1831 (Sedgwick V, Box 15.11).

  66. “Lizzy Sedgwick” to Katherine Sedgwick, Jan. 2, 1831 (Sedgwick IV, Box 5.7). Three years later, Catharine Sedgwick teased Lizzie on the morning of New Year’s Day: “Lizzie woke with the first ray of light—jumped into my bed & I quizzed [i.e., teased] Sue & her unmerci[full]y with a descrip[tio]n of the Tables [of presents] awaiting them—boxes of pills, doses of castor-oil, crust of bread, mug of water, &c.” CMS to Kate Sedgwick, Dec. 29, 1834–[Jan. 2, 1835] (CMS I, Box 1.17).

  67. Charles Sedgwick to CMS, Dec. 24, 1832 (Sedgwick IV, Box 5.12). See also the letter Theodore Sedgwick received in 1824 from his two children, apologizing for not having bought a present for him.

  68. Charles Sedgwick to his daughter Katherine Sedgwick [included in a letter from his wife], Jan. 1, 1834 (Sedgwick IV, Box 5.17).

  69. Elizabeth Sedgwick (Mrs. Charles) to her daughter Kate Sedgwick, Jan. 7, 1836 (Sedgwick IV, Box 6.5). The missing presents turned up the following evening. For other examples, see Susan R. Sedgwick to her son Theodore Sedgwick III, Dec. 16, 1830 (Sedgwick II, Box 7.14), and Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., to Theodore Sedgwick III, Dec. 17, 1832 (Sedgwick II, Box 7.19).

  70. CMS to Kate Sedgwick, Dec. 17, 1832 (CMS II, Box 1.9).

  71. Jane Sedgwick to CMS, Jan. [prob. 4], 1834 (CMS III, Box 4.1).

  72. Elizabeth D. Sedgwick (Mrs. Charles) to Kate Sedgwick, Jan. 1, 1834 (Sedgwick IV, Box 5.17).

  73. Kate Sedgwick to CMS, Jan. 1, 1830 [postscript to a letter from Charles Sedgwick (Sedgwick IV, Box 5.7).

  74. Elizabeth D. Sedgwick to her daughter Katherine Sedgwick, Jan. 1, 1834 (Sedgwick IV, Box 5.17).

  75. CMS to Kate Sedgwick, Jan. 7, 1833 (CMS I, Box 1.15). Or again, CMS to Katherine Sedgwick, Dec. 29, 1834[-Jan. 2, 1835]: “Your Aunt & E. rec’d handsome wax flowers from the Rod[ha]ms & mingling a few fresh geranium leaves with them they passed with these artifi[cia]l New Yorkers for as natural as mine. Do you believe they’d know a live lion from a dead dog?” (CMS I, Box 1.17.)

  76. Susan Sedgwick to Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., Dec. 30, 1835 (Sedgwick II, Box 8.5).

  77. CMS to Kate Sedgwick, Dec. 17, 1832 (CMS II, Box 1.9).

  78. CMS to her sister Frances Watson, Dec. 23, 1831 (Sedgwick IV, Box 5.9).

  79. CMS to Kate Sedgwick, Jan. 7, 1833 (CMS I, Box 1.15).

  80. Jane Sedgwick to CMS, Dec. 22–24, 1833 (CMS III, Box 3.14).

  81. All the above from CMS to Kate Sedgwick, Dec. 31, 1830 (CMS I, Box 1.13).

  82. “Major Longbows Description of Jos. Bonfanti’s Fancy Store,” American Antiquarian Society. This verse was printed sometime between 1824 and 1837, probably during the mid-1820S. Bonfanti published another Christmas verse-advertisement during the 1824 Christmas season, sixteen verses describing the shop’s most alluring gifts—but without any reference to Santa Claus (this appeared in the New York Advertiser, Jan. 1, 1825).

  83. Daily Cincinnati Gazette, Dec. 24–18, 1844. This same newspaper printed the following editorial notice on Dec. 24: “SANTA CLAUS. This renowned friend of good boys and girls held a grand levee at LOUDERBECK’S yesterday, and was waited upon by hundreds of the little people of the Queen City. Hearing of what was going on, we called around just about sun-down, but were rather late. The old gentleman, with his arms full of Christmas presents, was on the eve of retiring for the night. Seeing us however, he paused a moment, although he had one leg down the chimney, and allowed us to scan his features. He is very certainly a benevolent old gentleman, and altogether as comical in appearance as any one we have ever seen. He holds another levee today, and such of our little friends as did not visit him yesterday, should not fail to make him a call” (Cincinnati Daily Gazette, Dec. 24, 1844). The same picture turned up in an 1851 jeweler’s advertisement in Bangor, Maine. (1851 Bangor City Directory.)

  84. [Philadelphia] North American, Dec. 25, 1841, quoted in Alfred Shoemaker, Christmas in Pennsylvania, A Folk-Cultural Study (Kutztown: Penn. Folklore Society, 1959), 46; Philadelphia Public Ledger, Dec. 27, 1841.

  85. Daily Cincinnati Gazette, Dec. 23 and 24, 1844. The earliest reference I have found to a living impersonation of Santa Claus dates from 1833, when a student at the General Theological Seminary in New York (Clement Clarke Moore’s institution, located in Chelsea) attended a church Christmas fair in Morristown, New Jersey, and reported that “[i]t was held … under the auspices of a figure called St. Nicholas who was robed in fur, and dressed according to the description of Prof. Moore in his poem.” Manuscript diary of Francis Prioleau Lee, Dec. 31, 1833, in the archives of the General Theological Seminary. (Sandra D. Hayslette brought this item to my attention while she was an undergraduate student at the College of William and Mary.) It is possible that this St. Nicholas was a constructed figure and not a real person.

  86. For a stimulating discussion of this paradox, see Karen Hultunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). In the capitalist order, personal relationships were based on competition, limited only by law and contract, while in the domestic order those relationships were founded on affection and loyalty. In retrospect, it is clear enough that capitalism and domesticity went hand in hand with each other. But at the time, people sometimes experienced the two as being in mutual tension, a tension that was resolved by assigning the two to operate in what were sometimes termed “separate spheres.” Domestic values took precedence within the home and family; capitalist values held sway in most of the world outside, the world of business and politics.

  87. New York Tribune, Dec. 25, 1855. Horace Greeley himself had editorially resisted Christmas consumerism throughout the 1840s. For a while he ran annual editorials attacking lavish spending as socially harmful.

  Chapter 5

  1. The first expression of this new concern I have found is a story by Eliza Leslie, the author of “Snow-Balling.” It is “The Souvenir,” in The Pearl for 1830 (Philadelphia), 106–123, a story about a little girl who gives away the Gift Book she has received as a Christmas present.

  2. The scene is recorded in Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western
Travel (2 vols., London and New York, 1838), 1, 178–179; and in Eliza C. Folien, “Life of Charles Folien,” The Works of Charles Folien (5 vols., Boston, 1842), I, 386–387. Harriet Martineau thought this was the Follens’ first Christmas tree, but Eliza Follen’s account indicates that it was probably their fourth.

  3. Follen’s two exiles are described in George W. Spindler, The Life of Karl Folien: A Study in German-American Cultural Relations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1917), 76–84; see also Folien, Works, 1, 3–158.

  4. Ibid., 1, 149 (reading Redwood)’, 150 (1825 visit); 152 (Stockbridge visit); 163 (Sedgwick introduces Cabot to Folien). The Follens’ little boy was particularly fond of Catharine Sedgwick (he called her “Aunt Catharine”), and she returned his affection.

  5. Ibid., 1, 303 (new house). The Harvard position paid only $500 per annum. One of the three men who contributed the money was Eliza Follen’s father. See Douglas Stange, “The Making of an Abolitionist Martyr: Harvard Professor Charles Theodore Christian Folien (1796–1840),” in Harvard Library Bulletin, vol. 24 (1976), 17–24.

  6. Folien, Works, 1, 379.

  7. Ibid., I, 342–346. Douglas Stange argues that the termination was unrelated to Follen’s abolitionist activities, and that Harvard had never planned in the first place to offer Folien a permanent job; he attributes the anti-Harvard interpretation to radical Garrisonian propaganda—the desire to create abolitionist martyrs (ibid., 19–20, 23). I disagree: Stange’s argument is based on a literal interpretation of a letter written by Harvard president Josiah Quincy, a letter that was almost certainly designed to protect Harvard’s interests by ascribing to purely administrative causes what was actually a thoroughly political decision. Compare the following letter from William Minot to Jane Sedgwick, April 14, 1836: “The Follens … are full of prejudices & have communicated … very erroneous notions of the condition of Harvard College as to discipline Sc instruction. They are disappointed in their places & impute the failure to others instead of themselves. The Dr. [Folien] is a learned & very laborious man of good talents, an excellent teacher of the German language, but deficient in the qualifications of an interesting & useful public lecturer, and he & his wife are dissatisfied because the College would not give him the professorship of moral philosophy which has been vacant ever since the death of Mr. Fiske[?], for which he is by no means fit. They have both thrown themselves into the melee of this abolition controversy[,] & by their indiscreet zeal have annoyed their friends & as I think injured the cause of emancipation” (Sedgwick Family Papers V [Massachusetts Historical Society], Box 18.2).

  8. Folien, Works, I, 360–361; Catharine Sedgwick to Jane Sedgwick, Mar. 29, 1835, in Catharine Sedgwick Papers III (Massachusetts Historical Society), Box 4.3; see also Catharine Sedgwick to Eliza Cabot Folien, July 28, 1835, in CMS I, Box 8.8.

  9. Folien, Works, 1, 360–368 (quotation from 362).

  10. For analyzing and dating Follen’s loss of this position, see Catharine Sedgwick to Eliza Cabot Follen and Catharine Sedgwick to Jane Sedgwick, both dated December 19, 1835 [though not postmarked until January 3, 1836] (CMS Papers I, Box 8.8). See also Follen, Works, 1, 374–378.

  11. Follen, Works, I, 387–403; Martineau, Retrospect, II, 165–168. Follen seems to have developed this style early in life: In response to being taunted by his father and brothers, he devised a facade of “perfect self-control” to hide his feelings (Follen, Works, 1, 7–8.)

  12. R. K. Webb, Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian (London: Heineman, 1960), 43–133.

  13. Catharine Sedgwick to Jane Sedgwick, May 3, 1835 (CMS III, Box 4.3).

  14. See CMS to Eliza L. Follen, July 28, 1835 (CMS I, Box 8.8).; Ellery Sedgwick to Elizabeth Sedgwick, July 31, 1835 (Sedgwick Family Papers V [Massachusetts Historical Society], Box 17.11). In September, Martineau visited Newport, where she met Elizabeth Ellery Sedgwick (who reported conversing with her through Martineaus notorious hearing aid—she was hard-of-hearing—which Mrs. Sedgwick called the “dreaded trumpet.” Elizabeth Ellery Sedgwick to Robert Sedgwick, Sept. 10, 1835 (Sedgwick V, Box 17.13).

  15. Harriet Martineau, Retrospectives of Western Travel (2 vols., London and New York, 1838), II, 164. Twenty years later, Martineau wrote: “I felt that I could never be happy again if I refused what was asked of me: but to comply was probably to shut against me every door in the United States but those of the Abolitionists. I should no more see persons and things as they ordinarily were: I should have no more comfort or pleasure in my travels; and my very life would be … endangered by an avowal of the kind desired” (Harriet Martineau, Autobiography [3 vols., London, 1877], II, 30).

  16. Martineau, Autobiography, II, 32–42; Martineau to Fanny Wedgwood, Jan. 17, 1840, in Elizabeth Sanders Arbuckle, ed., Harriet Martineaus Leo Fanny Wedgwood (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1983), 30 (“nearest friend”).

  17. Martineau, Retrospect, II, 173–176.

  18. Follen to Harriet Martineau, Nov. 30, 1835, Works, vol. 1, 381–383 (“if the world separate itself”); Follen to Martineau, undated (but late December), ibid., 385 (“our Holy Triple Alliance”).

  19. Martineau’s publisher, Saunders and Otley, could hardly have been willing to print a book that was so personally revealing—and so politically controversial (for the terms of her book contract, see Webb, Martineau, 156). Whenever she wrote about Charles Follens role in the abolitionist movement (as she did in reporting his stoical performance before the Massachusetts legislative committee in early 1836, an event she witnessed), Martineau kept her own relationship with him completely out of her account. Conversely, whenever she wrote of that personal relationship (as she did in recounting the western trip she took with the Follens in the late spring of 1836, or—to return to the subject of this book—the evening of the famous Christmas tree), she disguised Follen’s identity by referring to him simply as “Dr. F.,” an apolitical figure who, in this guise, invariably played a secondary role to his young son, “my little friend Charley.” The use of “little Charley” was an effective literary device. The boy also served as a rhetorical substitute for his father, and made it possible for Martineau to convey in utterly nonpolitical ways her close relationship with Charles Follen (who appeared in the wholly domestic role of Charley’s father).

  20. Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 13–47.

  21. Lawrence J. Friedman, Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), actually uses as an epigraph the Follen letter I have quoted above.

  22. Liberator, Dec. 21, 1833 (juvenile choir concert); William Lloyd Garrison to his mother, Dec. 24, 1836, in Walter M. Merril and Louis Ruchames, eds., The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison (6 vols., Cambridge: Harvard, 1971–81), II, 194 (“young fanatic”). The annual Antislavery Fairs can be followed over the years in the Liberator. For an African-American participant in many of these fairs, see Ray Allen Billington, ed., The Journal of Charlotte Forten, A Free Negro in the Slavery Era (New York: Norton, 1981), 66, 78, 87, 133, 125–126. See also Debra Gold Hansen, Strained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Anti-Slavery Society (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1993), 123–139; and Deborah van Broekhoven, “Spheres and Webs: The Organization of Antislavery Fairs, 1835–1860,” paper delivered to the American Historical Association, December, 1988.

  23. Liberator, Dec. 20, 1834.

  24. Catharine M. Sedgwick, “New Year’s Day,” in The Token and Atlantic Souvenir: A Christmas and New Year’s Present (ed. S. G. Goodrich; Boston, 1836 [c. 1835]), 11–31 (quotation from 14–15).

  25. Elizabeth E. Sedgwick to William Ellery, Jan. 13, 1834 (Sedgwick V, Box 17.1). On January 1, 1829, bad weather kept the number of visitors down to about thirty. But next year the weather was “absolutely perfect,” and from noon until 4 p.m. she received “a constant succession of guests.” Poor health prevented Mrs. Sedgwick
from receiving visitors the next two years, but in 1834 she was back in form.

  26. Catharine Sedgwick to Kate Sedgwick, Dec. 29, 1834[-Jan. 2, 1835] (CMS I, Box 1.17).

  27. Sedgwick, “New Year’s Day,” 26–28.

  28. Ibid., 28.

  29. Ibid., 18–20. The Christmas tree functioned as a literary device that seemed to take the presents hung upon it out of the realm of the commercial marketplace. It is no accident that Sedgwick described those presents, hanging on the branches of the tree, as St. Nicholas’s “fruit”—as if they were the natural growth of the tree itself (ibid., 17). (It was common for writers to describe the hanging presents with that metaphor, and it may have been why presents were often hung from the tree at this time, and not placed under it in the modern fashion.)

  30. The anticommercial promise of Christmas trees may well have been related to the social position of people like Catharine Sedgwick, who was a member of a prominent gentry family from rural Massachusetts, the kind of patrician who easily associated the fashionable world of New York with an upstart bourgeoisie. A story like “New Year’s Day” was, on the face of it, an attack on the fashionable world written from “above” (Sedgwick makes plain that Lizzy Percival comes from an older and more distinguished family than do any of her visitors). But by associating the Christmas tree itself with Lizzy’s German maidservant, Sedgwick managed to ally herself imaginatively with the world “below”—a world equally detached from bourgeois American culture.

  31. Quoted in Alfred Shoemaker, Christmas in Pennsylvania: A Folk-Cultural Study (Kutztown: Penn. Folklore Society, 1959), 52. In 1824, two years later, a humorous notice in a York (Penn.) newspaper suggests that Christmas trees could still be put to the service of a different Christmas tradition: carnival and courtship. That year a local young men’s club (the Society of Bachelors) announced that—in return for receiving a “Cart load of Gin-gercakes” from any “Old Maids” who would pay them a visit on “second Christmas eve”—they would set up a “Krischtkintle Baum.” (“It’s decorations shall be superb, superfine, superfrostical, schnockagastical, double refined, mill’ twill’d made of Dog’s Wool, Swingling Tow, and Posnum [sic] fur; which cannot fail to gratify taste”—ibid., p. 52.) The rhetoric here suggests that the occasion was to be a young people’s carnival. As for the picture (see page 196) by John Lewis Krimmel (1776–1821): Milo M. Naeve, John Lewis Krimmel: An Artist in Federal America (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), dates this picture to 1819–20; while Anneliese Harding, John Lewis Krimmel: Genre Artist of the Early Republic (Winterthur, Del.: Winterthur Publications, 1994), 45, gives the date as 1812–13.