The Battle for Christmas

by Stephen Nissenbaum

  19. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 578 (John Pierpont). See also Allen Parker, Recollections of Slavery Times (Worcester, Mass., 1895), 67. Several historians report that slave marriages were sometimes “grouped” at Christmas. See Blake Touchstone, “Planters and Slave Religion in the Deep South,” in John B. Boles, ed., Masters & Slaves in the House of the Lord: Race and Religion in the American South 1740–1870 (Lexington, Ky., 1988), 124; and Ulrich?. Philips, American Negro Slavery (New York: Appleton, 1918), 213. This claim is backed by the accounts of ex-slaves (e.g., Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 221–222) as well as by plantation records. One plantation diary from 1859–60 records seven slave marriages at a single Christmas (Easterby, Allston, 453–454).

  20. Ravitz, “Pierpont,” 384–385; Thomas Bangs Thorpe, “Cotton and Its Cultivation,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 8 (1854), 447–463 (449: “saturnalia of the Romans”); Hall, Frank Freeman, 102–103 (“grand saturnalia”). For a concise account of slave revelry, see Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 224.

  21. For example, a Florida newspaper argued in 1857 that it was foolish to believe that the “idle, lounging, roving, drunken, and otherwise mischievous [Christmas] week fits the Negro in the least degree for the discharge of his duties.” (Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the AnteBellum South (New York: Knopf, 1956), 170.

  22. Quoted by Stampp, Peculiar Institution, 170, from De Bow’s Review 13 (1852), 193–194.

  23. Douglass, Narrative, 75–76. I would agree with Eugene Genovese in taking issue with Douglass’s claim: “Douglass was right in thinking that the holidays … undermined the revolutionary impulse of the slaves, but he was wrong, I believe, in thinking that the cause lay in the slaves’ being trapped in triviality and self-degradation.” Rather, Genovese suggests that the counterrevolutionary effect of such “big times” was that they developed in slaves a patriarchal sense of “community with their white folks” (Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 580). On this issue I disagree with Genovese, and I would add another point: Douglass was very much a man of bourgeois principles—for him, the loss of self-control through drinking and sexual excess signified a loss of self-respect. Finally, Douglass’s rhetoric was bound to appeal to the temperance-minded audience that constituted a substantial part of his intended Northern readership.

  24. Parker, Recollections, 67–68; Smedes, Southern Planter, 161–162. Alexander Barclay wrote in 1828 about slave life in Jamaica: “Such dances were formerly common, or I should rather say universal, at Christmas; but of late years have gone much out, owing to an idea impressed on the minds of the negroes, principally I believe by the missionaries, that the season ought rather to be devoted to religious exercises. It is now considered more becoming to attend the places of worship, or to have private religious parties among themselves; and in passing through a negro village on a Christmas night, it is more common to hear psalm-singing, than the sound of merriment. Alexander Barclay, A Practical View of the Present State of Slavery in the West Indies (3rd ed., London, 1828), 10–11.

  25. Phillips, Slavery, 315; Jacob Stroyer, My Life in the South (Salem, Mass., 1879), 35.

  26. Parker, Recollections, 67–68; see also Phillips, Slavery, 316–318. The music at these revivals was limited to the human voice (and other parts of the body); musical instruments were prohibited for religious reasons.

  27. Report by Harriet Ware, Dec. 26, 1862; quoted in Elizabeth Ware Pearson, ed. Letters from Port Royal, Written at the Time of the Civil War (Boston, 1906), 124; Sallie Holley, A Life for Liberty: Anti-Slavery and Other Letters (New York, 1899), 229–230.

  28. Yetman, Selections, 193 (also quoted in Jones, Child of Freedom, 70). See also Charles L. Perdue, Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Philips, eds., Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves [Charlottesvile: University Press of Virginia, 1976], 229. Stampp, Peculiar Institution, 166, offers good examples from the 1850s. The gifts on one plantation were unusual enough to become a subject of humorous comment: “Every woman got a handkerchief to tie up her hair. Every girl got a ribbon, every boy a ballow [i.e., Barlow] knife, and every man a shin plaster. De neighbors call de place, de Shin Plaster, Barlow, Bandana place” (Yetman, Selections, 59).

  29. Charles Kershaw [a factor] to Charlotte Ann Allston, Charleston, Nov. 29, 1815, in Easterby, Allston, 359. Allston himself, writing in the 1830s, noted: “the plantation stock to furnish … a beef for Christmas” (ibid., 257). Ravitz, “Pierpont,” 384–385); Ronald Killion and Charles Waller, eds., Slavery Time When I Was Chillun Down on Marster’s Plantation: Interviews with Georgia Slaves (Savannah: Library of Georgia, 1973), 11 (Georgia Baker); Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 215–216. See also Sarah Virgil: “On Fourth of July and Christmas, Marster would give us the biggest kind of to-do. We always had more to eat than you ever saw on them days” (Killion and Waller, Slavery Time, 141.) Slaves often provided their own food and drink, from stock they had raised, made, or sold on their own during the year; sometimes they simply stole the master’s food. See, for example, Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (ed. by Lydia Maria Child; Boston, 1861 [Cambridge, 1987 reprint; ed. Jean Fagan Yellin]), 180–181. Compare a Christmas song recorded by Joel Chandler Harris in 1858: “Ho my Riley! dey eat en dey cram, / En bimeby [by-and-by] ole Miss’ll be sendin’ out de dram.”

  30. Thomas Bangs Thorpe, “Christmas in the South,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper 5 (Dec. 26, 1857), 62.

  31. Yetman, Selections, 73 (“barrels o’ apples”); Jones, Child of Freedom, 70, quoted from the Reverend Irving Lowery, Life on the Old Plantation (Columbia, S.C., 1911), 13, 37, 67.

  32. This slave was speaking in the month of June, so he had not eaten meat for almost half a year. His remark was made to Charles Ball, and reported in Ball, Slavery, 79–80. Norrece T. Jones, who has measured Christmas meat in the context of “ordinary” slave diet on one South Carolina plantation, writes that over a period of nine months, “workers received meat from their master during four weeks only” (Jones, Child of Freedom, 49).

  33. Stampp, Peculiar Institution, 166; anonymous Mississippi planter, “Management of Negroes upon Southern Estates,” De Bow’s Review 10 (1851), 621–627; quoted in Breeden, Advice Among Masters, 253–254 (“whipping and forfeiture”); Jesse H. Turner, “Management of Negroes,” in South-Western Farmer 1 (1842), 114–115 (“no matter by whom”); quoted ibid, 257–258.

  34. Jones, Child of Freedom, 70. See also Ball, Slavery in the United States, 206–207.

  35. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 579; E. P. Thompson, “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,” in Journal of Social History, vol. 7 (1974), 382–405 (see esp. 390–394); quoted in U. B. Phillips, “Plantations with Slave Labor and Free,” American Historical Review 30 (1925), 742.

  36. Cicely Cawthon, in Killion and Waller, Slavery Time, 40 (“something else!”); Georgia Baker, ibid, 11–12 (“Marse Alec”). See also Martha Colquitt, in Yetman, Selections, 62: “On Christmas mornin’ all of us would come up to de yard back of de Big House and Marse Billie and de overseer handed out presents for all.”

  37. Smedes, Southern Planter, 161; Bessie M. Henry, “A Yankee Schoolmistress Discovers Virginia,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 101 (1965), 121–132; “take the kitchen” quotation is on p. 129; Blow, “Memoir;” Mariah Calloway, in Killion and Waller, Slavery Time, 142 (“ate from the family’s table”). One planter gave his slaves their gifts in the family kitchen. (Palmer, “Maryland Homes and Ways,” 260). A Jamaican planter reported in the 1820s that “[i]n the evening they assemble in their master’s or manager’s house, and as a matter of course, take possession of the largest room, bringing with them a fiddle and tambourines” (Barclay, Practical View, 10).

  38. For masters who visited the slave quarters, see Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 215: “White people in great numbers assemble [there] to witness the gastronomical enjoyments.”
Another ex-slave later recalled that “[w]hile they danced and sang the master and his family sat and looked on” (quoted in Killion and Waller, Slavery Times, 116). For an extreme version of masters joining in their slaves’ festivities, see Helen Tunnicliff Catterall, Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro (2 vols., Washington, D.C., 1926–37), vol. 2 (1929), 140–141. A misleading summary of this fascinating case can be found in Guion Griffis Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina: A Social History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937): Johnson misinterprets the story as a matter of the owner’s merely inviting the slaves home to perform for the “amusement” of his own family. See below, note 42.

  39. Cameron, “Christmas on an Old Plantation,” 5–8.

  40. Thorpe, “Christmas;” Stampp, Peculiar Institution, 169. Thomas Nelson Page later recalled how his own family decorated the table for their slaves’ Christmas dinner with “their own white hands”! Thomas Nelson Page, Social Life in Old Virginia Before the War (New York, 1897), 102.

  41. Stampp, Peculiar Institution, 169 (“happy as Lords;” quoted from John Houston Bills ms. diary, Dec. 30, 1843); Barclay, Practical View, 10 (“all authority”); Foby, “Management of Servants,” in Southern Cultivator 11 (Aug. 1853), 226–228 (“difficult to say who is master”: quoted in Breeden, Advice Among Masters, 309; partially quoted in Genovese, 579). See also James Benson Sellers, Slavery in Alabama (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1950), 124.

  42. John N. Evans to John W. Burrus, Jan. 1, 1836; quoted in Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 579–580. See also the following slave owner’s diary entry from December 25, 1852: “I have endeavored … to make my Negroes joyous and happy, and am glad to see them enjoying themselves with such a contented hearty good will” (quoted in Stampp, Peculiar Institution, 169). One North Carolina planter was brought to court in 1847 for allowing members of his own family (including his young daughters) to dance with the slaves he had invited into the Big House on Christmas night. The judge in the case acquitted this man of the charges, and in his decision wrote of the defendant’s behavior that “there was nothing contrary to morals or law in all that … unless it be that one feel aggrieved, that these poor people should for a short space be happy at finding the authority of the master give place to his benignity…. It is very possible, that the children of the family might in Christmas times, without the least impropriety, countenance the festivities of the old servants of the family by witnessing, and even mingling in them.” North Carolina v. Boyce, in Catterall, Cases Concerning Slavery, II, 140–141. See above, note 38.

  43. Quoted in Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina, 552–553, from ms. in N.C. Legislative Papers, June 18, 1824. For an account of the murder case that lay behind this statement, see Elizabeth A. Fenn, “‘A Perfect Equality Seemed to Reign’: Slave Society and Jonkonnu,” North Carolina Historical Review, 65 (Apr. 1988), 127–153. Compare Judge Ruffin’s decision in the Boyce case: “It would really be a source of regret, if, contrary to common custom, it were denied to slaves, in the intervals between their toils, to indulge in mirthful pastimes, or if it were unlawful for the master to permit them among his slaves, or to admit to the social enjoyment the slaves of others, by their consent…. We may let them make the most of their idle hours, and may well make allowances for the noisy outpourings of glad hearts, which providence bestows as a blessing on corporeal vigor united to a vacant mind….” (Catterall, Cases Concerning Slavery, II, 139–141; several passages from this quotation are taken from the version that appears in Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina, 555.)

  44. Fithian Journals, 52–53.

  45. Thorpe, “Cotton,” 460–461.

  46. Julia Peterkin, in Charlmae Rollins, ed., Christmas Gif; an anthology of Christmas poems, songs, and stories, written by and about Negroes (Chicago: Follett, [1963]), 33; Smedes, Southern Planter, 162; see also Blow, Memoir; Cooke, “Christmas Time in Old Virginia,” 458; Folsom, “Christmas at Brockton Plantation,” 486 (this involved whites only); Joel Chandler Harris, “Something about ‘Sandy Claus,’” in his On the Plantation: A Story of a Georgia Boy’s Adventures During the War (New York, 1892), 116; Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina, 552.

  47. James Bolton, in Killion and Waller, Slavery Time, 25; see also Blow, Memoir.

  48. Harris, “Something About ‘Sandy Claus,’” 116; Rollins, Christmas Gif’!, 35 (Hurston story). In some places this “game” lasted into the twentieth century. See Harnett T. Kane, ibid., 16. Zora Neale Hurston told a story of a black man who hid behind a stump one Christmas and took God Almighty by surprise with the cry “Christmas gift!” (ibid., 35). There is even a reference to this ritual in William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury. As young Quentin Compson leaves Harvard College in despair and arrives by train in Mississippi on December 25, the first thing that happens to him when he steps off the train—it is what makes him realize he has arrived “home”—is that he is approached by a Negro beggar who accosts him with the words “Christmas gift.”

  49. Page, Social Life, 96; Baird, Edmonds, 9–10 (1857 entry), 177 (1863 entry). See also William Gilmore Simms, The Golden Christmas: A Chronicle of St. Johns, Berkeley (Charleston, S.C., 1852), 143–145.

  50. Edmonds married only in 1870, at the age of 30. One young Virginia married woman claimed the perquisites of both roles: “We [she and her husband] have invitation to a dinner on Wednesday …, and I am invited among the young people to an evening party on Friday—so you perceive I have [both] married and single privileges” (Tyler ms., Swem Library, College of William and Mary).

  51. Smedes, Southern Planter, 162.

  52. Stampp, Peculiar Institution, 366 (“best rigging”: quoted from John W. Brown diary, Dec. 25, 1853); Cameron, “Christmas on an Old Plantation.”

  53. Thorpe, “Cotton,” 460 (“drop their plantation names”); Mary A. Livermore, The Story of My Life (Hartford, 1897), 210 (“almost a burlesque”).

  54. Thorpe, “Cotton,” 460.

  55. Henry, “Yankee Schoolmistress,” 129–130 Bayard Hall reported that slaves mimicked the idiosyncrasies of the whites’ dialogue and mannerisms (Hall, Frank Freeman, 109–110).

  56. Quoted Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina, 145.

  57. Liberator 8 (May 26, 1837, 85. The writer acknowledged that “very few of the blacks were at church,” and added that “the distant sounds of Cooner reached even there.”

  58. Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina, 552–553 (quoted from ms. in N.C. Legislative Papers, June 18, 1824). For an account of the incident behind this statement—the killing of a white man by a John Canoer—see Fenn, “A Perfect Equality Seemed to Reign,’” 127–153. See also Edward Warren, A Doctor’s Experiences in Three Continents (Baltimore, 1885), 198–203.

  59. James Norcom to his daughter Mary Matilda Norcom, Jan. 13, 1838; quoted by Jean Fagan Yellin in Jacobs, Incidents, 277. See also Edward Warren, A Doctor’s Experiences in Three Continents (Baltimore, 1885), 198–203.

  60. Jacobs, Incidents, 180.

  61. Ibid., 179–180.

  62. Dougald MacMillan, “John Kuners,” Journal of American Folklore 39 (1926), 53–57. This verse is quoted by Lawrence Levine, who writes that it was sung by the John Canoe band to “those whites who did not respond to their offerings with generosity.” Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 13. I have found one other (rather inoffensive) fragment of a begging song, recalled years later by a white woman who was raised in the area: “C’ris’mas comes but once er yeah, / An’ ev’y po niggiah arter have ‘e sha’” (Folsom, “Christmas at Brockton Plantation,” 485).

  63. Jean Fagan Yellin quotes from a letter from John W. Nunley to Jean Fagan Yellin suggesting that John Canoe was “a creolized masquerade tradition that has incorporated African and English traditions of masking…. The penchant for rum and the collecting of money by the maskers is also a shared trans-Atlantic tradition” (Jacobs, Inciden
ts, 278–279n). Frederick G. Cassidy claims that the ceremony comes from the “Gold Coast,” though it was widely observed in the New World: Frederick G. Cassidy, “‘Hipsaw’ and ‘John Canoe,’”American Speech 41 (1966), 45–51. On “John Canoe” in North Carolina, see Fenn, “A Perfect Equality’;” Richard Walser, “His Worshipful John Kuner,” North Carolina Folklore 19 (1971), 160–172; and Nancy Ping, “Black Musical Activities in Antebellum Wilmington, North Carolina,” The Black Perspective in Music 8 (1980), 139–160. As far as the ridiculing song, Dena Epstein notes that “the parallel with African songs of derision is evident” (Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977], 131). The song quoted by Lawrence Levine is taken from Dougald MacMillan, “John Kuners,” Journal of American Folklore 39 (1926), 53–57. See also Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness), 12. Ira de A. Reid, “The John Canoe Festival: A New World Africanism,” Phylon 3 (1942), 349–370, argues for the English origin of the ritual. Martha Warren Beckwith, Black Roadways: A Study of Jamaican Folk Life (Chapel Hill, 1929), gives evidence from the 1920s that Shakespearean plays were being used by the John Canoers. (See also the same author’s Christmas Mummings in Jamaica (Pubs. of the Folklore Foundation: Vassar College, 1923).

  64. Epstein, Sinful Tunes, 131.

  65. For an instance, see Catterall, Cases Concerning Slavery, vol. 2, 536: Tennessee cases: “Bowling v. Statton and Swann, … December 1847. ‘[A]ction … for the loss of a negro man … hired … and never returned.’”

  66. Dan T. Carter, “The Anatomy of Fear: The Christmas Day Insurrection Scare of 1865,” in Journal of Southern History 42 (1976), 345–364; “nearly one-third the rumors” is on p. 358. Joel Williamson also notes that in South Carolina “[t]he Fourth of July … and Christmas or New Year’s Day had marked a large number of insurrections or planned insurrections.” Joel Williamson, After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction, 1861–1877 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 250. For a report of an 1835 slave revolt in Louisiana that was planned for Christmas, see Joe Gray Taylor, Negro Slavery in Louisiana (New York, 1963), 218–220. The South Carolina report is from Frederick Law Olmstead, A Journey Through the Back Country (London, 1860), 203; quoted in Joseph Cephas Carroll, Slave Insurrections in the United States, 1800–1865 (Boston, 1938), 176. For the 1856 reports, see Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 347–350. On December 24, 1856, one Virginia slave was discovered carrying a letter concerning an imminent “meeting” that would lead to “freedom;” the letter claimed that soon “the country is ours certain” (quoted ibid., 350). Some revolts were timed for July 4, the other major slave holiday, and one that was also charged with a powerful symbolism of liberation. Nat Turner, for example, originally intended his 1831 rebellion to begin on July 4.