The Battle for Christmas (48 page)

Often, slave owners provided much of the food and drink that made the slaves’ festive parties possible. Alcohol was standard at these frolics, often as much as the slaves could consume during the course of the holiday. William Aliston’s agent in Charleston wrote in 1815: “I send also two Demijohns of Whiskey for the Negroes at Christmas….” (Remember that alcohol in any amount was forbidden to slaves except on this occasion.) Gifts of food, often fine food, usually accompanied the liquor. Former slaves remembered with pleasure, even many years later, the special food they had received at Christmas. “Oh, what a time us Niggers did have on Christmas Day!” recalled Georgia Baker during her old age in the 1930s: “Marse Lordnorth and Marse Alec give us everything you could name to eat: cake of all kinds, fresh meat, lightbread, turkeys, chickens, ducks, geese and all sorts of wild game. There was always plenty of pecans, apples and dried peaches too at Christmas.” Solomon Northup, a free black who was kidnapped into slavery in Louisiana and later wrote an account of his misfortunes, was willing to wax nostalgic over the wonderful food with which he and his fellow slaves had been “furnished” on Christmas: In addition to biscuits, fruit preserves, and all kinds of pies, Northup remembered that “chickens, ducks, turkeys, pigs, and not infrequently the entire body of a wild ox, are roasted.” For one wealthy South Carolina planter a single ox was not enough: “On the morning of Christmas, Col. Alston gave orders that as many beeves might be butchered as to supply all with meat, which as a general thing is not allowed them. No less than 21 bullocks fell sacrifices to the festivity.”
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What these accounts make plain is that what many planters did for their slaves at Christmas was exactly what landed gentlemen in Europe had long been expected to do for their dependents on this occasion: offer them the
best
food, food from the private stock, the same food that would ordinarily be shared only with family and invited guests. An 1857 article on “Christmas in the South” that appeared in
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
was certainly exaggerating the picture, but not inventing it, when it reported that the slaves consumed the kinds of dishes “that would create a sensation at a palatial residence wedding party”:

On these occasions the culinary resources of the “great house” are brought into requisition, and “young mistress” spends many hours in the kitchen superintending the production of rich cakes and other delicacies which now garnish the plentiful board of festive plantation life.
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One former slave later recalled that “On Christmas de marster would give us chicken and barrels o’ apples and oranges.” (But he went on to put the matter in cooler perspective: “‘Course, every marster weren’t as free handed as our’n was…. I’se heard dat a heap o’ cullud people never had nothin’ good t’eat.”) Still, slaves eagerly awaited their Christmas gifts. One later recalled his feelings of intense anticipation in terms that almost had the ring of “A Visit from St. Nicholas”:

Of course, the intensity of that longing also suggests what the slaves’ diet was like the rest of the year. One slave made it plain that the meat he and his fellows received on Christmas constituted their entire annual allotment: “they never had meat except at Christmas, when each hand on the place received about three pounds of pork.” Another told an interviewer that he had “‘not tasted meat since last Christmas.’”
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And the expectation of special gifts (like the expectation of holiday time itself) raised hopes that could be used for purposes of social control, by the threat of withholding some or all the gifts if the planter’s rules were broken. The historian Kenneth Stampp notes that “the value and quantity of the presents often depended upon their conduct during the past year.” And planters themselves openly confirmed the point when they listed the rules they used to regulate the lives of their slaves. One noted that if he discovered any of his slaves drinking alcohol during the year, the standard punishment he imposed was “a whipping and a forfeiture of… five dollars next Christmas.” Another planter punished
all
his slaves at Christmas for petty thefts that had been committed during the previous year: “if a depredation is committed,
no matter by whom
, my negroes are [collectively]
responsible for it, and double its value is deducted from the Christmas present.” This planter’s standard gift for his slaves consisted of corn, so he was able to boast that “a few barrels of corn are made the means of saving my property to perhaps ten times the amount the whole year; and I am also spared the painful necessity of frequent chastisements.”
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That dismissive comment about “a few barrels of corn” suggests another, equally cynical use of Christmas gifts—when planters used the ritual of Christmas gift-giving to provide their slaves with necessities (winter clothing, for example). The historian Norrece Jones has pointed this out, adding that “[p]lanters could thus arrange to appear loving and magnanimous before ’their people’—even when furnishing basic necessities.”
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But even when the presents were more special than that (and they usually were), some whites knew very well that this generosity also worked to protect their own interests. Here, again, the dynamics of Christmas in the slave South help to illuminate those in Europe, where, too, the landed gentry expected to get something in return for their generosity: the goodwill of their dependents. (Remember the verses of the old English wassail songs, wishing “master” and “mistress” good health and fortune in the coming year.) E. P. Thompson has shown that landed gentlemen could always try to use a generous handout at Christmas as a way of making up for “a year’s accumulation of small injustices.” In the slave South, one white overseer showed how clearly he understood the meaning of the Christmas gift exchange when he wrote to the planter who employed him: “I killed twenty-eight head of beef for the people’s Christmas dinner. I can do more with them in this way than if all the hides of the cattle were made into lashes.”
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If anyone had cared to accuse Southern slaveholders of resorting to such a cynical strategy, most of them would certainly have rejected the charge. They would have insisted that their actions were wholly sincere, and that their gifts were intended as expressions of goodwill, a demonstration that they considered slaves to be members of their household rather than mere pieces of property. And to prove their paternalist sincerity, they could have pointed out that there was more to their generosity than the gifts themselves, and that the actual distribution of the gifts involved a significant set of gestures dictated by the special nature of the Christmas season—gestures of symbolic deference in which they momentarily became the servants of their own slaves. Ultimately, and in hindsight, the matter of “sincerity” makes little difference. But the gestures are worth examining nonetheless.

Slave Space and Free Space
. On this North Carolina plantation (photographed in the twentieth century), the picket fence next to the Big House marked a racial boundary beyond which field hands were ordinarily forbidden to go. Records show, however, that on Christmas Day the slaves were permitted to cross that boundary and to shake hands with the whites—a gesture that signified equality.
(Courtesy, North Carolina Division of Archives and History)

On many plantations slaves were asked to approach the Big House to receive their gifts in person from their master and his family (along with the family’s best wishes). Former slaves vividly remembered their childhood experiences. “Them Christmas Days was something else!” one slave recalled. “If I could call back one of them Christmas Days now, when I went up to the [big] house and brung back my checkered apron full! Lord, I was so happy! Great big round, peppermint balls! Big bunches of raisins, we put aprons full on the bed and then went back to the house to get another apron full.” Another reported: “Marse Alec would call the grown folks to the big house early in the morning and pass around a big pitcher full of whiskey, then he would put a little whiskey in that same pitcher and fill it with sweetened water and give that to us chillun.”
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On a few plantations the slaves were even permitted to enter the Big House. One Northern visitor to the Tidewater reported that “they take the
kitchen for a ball room and dance all night and sing all day.” William Nevison Blow remembered that “the negroes form a procession leading to the dining room door to greet the ‘old Marster and Missus’ and ‘little Marster and little Missus’ and receive their presents, and the men a dram, for which each returned a toast.” Susan Dabney Smedes remembered that “the negroes in their holiday clothes were enjoying themselves in their own houses and in the ‘great house’ too.” And a former slave reported that on her plantation “on Christmas Day big dinners were given for all the slaves and a few ate from the family’s table after they [the whites] had finished their dinner.”
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More often, it was the other way around: Masters and their families visited the slave quarters to attend the slaves’ own party there. But wherever these scenes took place, in the quarters or at the Big House, some planters and their families used the occasion to make elaborate gestures of deference to their slaves. Frequently they themselves joined in the festivities.
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Just as often, they either prepared the party meal themselves or personally superintended its preparation. Occasionally a master even made the ostentatious gesture of serving the slaves part of the meal himself. One North Carolina slaveholder centered his version of the ritual around the preparation and distribution of eggnog: After the drink was “pronounced right,” it was ceremoniously placed out on the piazza (on a beautiful mahogany table that came from the Big House). At this point the slaves assembled and were ritually handed one glass apiece:

If the white men of the planter’s household sometimes prepared the alcohol for their slaves’ frolic, it was the white
women
of the household who helped to prepare the
food
. According to one report, the “‘young mistress’ spends many hours in the kitchen superintending the production of rich cakes and other delicacies which now garnish the plentiful board of festive plantation life.” More conspicuously, white women sometimes personally served the slaves the food at their dinner. One plantation diary contains the following succinct entry for December 25, 1858: “Spent the day waiting on the negroes, and making them as comfortable as possible.”
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Whites were aware of the symbolic significance of these gestures of deference. They often referred to the unprecedented degree of “familiarity” between masters and slaves on this occasion. One Tennessee slave owner claimed that at Christmas his “people” were “as happy as Lords.” Another man wrote: “Here all authority and all distinction of colour ceases; black and white, overseer and book-keeper, mingle together in the dance.” Another planter stressed how different Christmas was from the only other holiday he permitted his sixty slaves—the Fourth of July: “The one in July is celebrated with a dinner and whiskey. The Christmas holiday is a very different thing. It lasts from four to six days, and during this
jubilee
it is difficult to say who is master. The servants are allowed the largest liberty.”
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