The Battle for Christmas (47 page)

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:

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.

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

It was Frederick Douglass who voiced the most powerful argument that owners allowed slaves to drink and lose their self-control at Christmas as a means of preserving white hegemony—indeed, that owners actively encouraged such revelry. Douglass acknowledged that the majority of slaves spent the Christmas holidays “drinking whiskey,” and he added that this, as well as other forms of excess, was just what their masters wanted:

Frederick Douglass was by no means alone in believing that Christmas excess was demeaning to the slaves. But most of the African-Americans who shared his distaste chose to express their response in pious Christian terms. On plantation after plantation, religious revivals (run by Baptists or Methodists) vied with festive revels as the activities of choice among the slaves. Allen Parker, a former slave from North Carolina, recalled: “In some other cabin, perhaps on the same plantation, while the young people were dancing, the old ones would be holding a prayer ‘meetin’,’ notice having been sent out as in the case of the dance….” Susan Dabney Smedes recalled a wholesale religious conversion that completely put an end to dancing on her grandfather’s Mississippi plantation. She fondly recalled those Christmases when, all day and all night too, she would hear “the sound of the fiddles and banjos, and the steady rhythm of their dancing feet”:

Some planters shrewdly feared that such evangelical reform could pose a threat to their authority, and they took steps to counteract it. James Hammond of South Carolina reminded his slaves that “[c]hurch members are privileged to dance on all holyday occasions; and the class-leader or deacon who may report them shall be reprimanded or punished at the discretion of the master.” The autobiography of ex-slave Jacob Stroyer suggests that some masters went even further: “A great many of the strict members of the church who did not dance [at Christmas] would be forced to do it to please their masters.” (And, he adds poignantly: “No one can describe the intense emotion in the negro’s soul on those occasions when they were trying to please their masters and mistresses.”)
²⁵

Not surprisingly, the religious meetings attended by slaves bore a certain resemblance to the very revels they were meant to replace. Like the Christmas dances, the Christmas revival meetings often lasted all night;
like the dances, too, they were characterized by ecstatic feelings that were partly generated by rhythmic singing and the stamping of feet.
²⁶
It was for this reason that when New England reformers, attempting to assist liberated slaves during and after the Civil War, encouraged the freedmen to hold religious services at Christmas, these reformers were sometimes shocked by the result. One such person, spending Christmas, 1862, with Colonel T. W. Higginson’s black regiment at the newly liberated Port Royal, South Carolina, was startled at the soldiers’ behavior: “They had no ‘taps’ Christmas Eve or night, and the [enlisted] men kept their ‘shout’ up all night.” As late as 1878, another New England abolitionist who had founded a school for freedmen in Lottsburgh, Virginia, was utterly dismayed by what happened at a Christmas service she had carefully set up for them:

Christmas misrule entailed even more than leisure and “liberty.” It also meant a symbolic turning of the tables between masters and slaves. Christmas was the one occasion of the year at which plantation owners formally offered special presents to their human chattel—the high deferring to the low. It was a rare planter who did not give something to his slaves at Christmas. At a minimum, the gifts were small—the kind of things we might dismiss today as trinkets but which the slaves had good reason to value: sugar, tobacco, or hats; along with ribbons, bandannas, and other decorative items for the women. Some slaveholders distributed money. An especially lavish (and ostentatious) example of this practice was reported by Richard Jones, a former slave from South Carolina, whose account also reminds us of how demeaning such ritualized generosity could be: