The Battle for Christmas (58 page)

71.
William Knapp, “An Hymn on the Nativity,” in Thomas Walter,
The Grounds and Rules of Musick Explained
(Boston, [1760]). The other songs were William Tans’ur, “An Anthem for Christmas Day,” in [Daniel Bayley,]
The Royal Melody Complete
(Boston, 1761); “An Hymn for Christmas Day,” in Daniel Bayley,
A New and Complete Introduction to the Grounds and Rules of Musick
(Newburyport, Mass., 1764); William Knapp, “An Anthem for Christmas Day;” anon., “A Christmas Hymn;” and Joseph Stephenson, “O Zion that Bringest,” all in Joseph Flagg, ed.,
Sixteen Anthems
(Boston, 1766); Stephenson, “An Anthem, Out of the Second Chapter of Luke;” Stephenson, “Hark, Hark;” “Boston, A New Hymn for Christmas Day;” “Great Milton” (“Joy to the World”); and Stephenson, “An Anthem Out of the Fortieth Chapter of Isaiah” (“O Zion that bringst glad tidings”), all in Daniel Bayley and A. Williams
The American Harmony
(2 parts, Boston, 1769).

72.
In chronological order of publication, these were: “An Hymn for Christmas or Charlston [sic]” and “Boston, for Christmas,” both published in
The New-England Psalm-Singer
(1770); “Boston” (same music as “Boston, for Christmas,” but with a different text), “Judea,” and “Bethlehem” (all in
The Singing-Master’s Assistant)
[1778]; “Emmanuel for Christmas” (in
The Psalm-Singer’s Amusement
[1781]); “Shiloh, for Christmas” (in
The Suffolk Harmony
[1786]); and “An Anthem for Christmas” (in
The Continental Harmony
[1794]). In addition, Billings may have been asked in 1782 to compose an elaborate Christmas hymn (also on a Watts text, but for soloist, chorus and organ) for Trinity Episcopal Church in Boston. (See David P. McKay and Richard Crawford,
William Billings of Boston: Eighteenth-Century Composer
[Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975], 132–133. A discussion of Billings’s Christmas songs can be found ibid., 141–146.)

73.
Isaiah Thomas,
Worcester Collection of Sacred Harmony
(Worcester, 1786), 188–194; Daniel Read, “A Christmas Anthem,”
The Columbian Harmonist No. III
(New Haven, 1785), 9–13. Technically, the “Hallelujah Chorus” is not a Christmas song, and
Messiah
itself was not written or initially performed as a Christmas oratorio. In 1795, Thomas would publish, as a separate imprint, a “Christmas Anthem,” with music by Isaac Lane—to a text by Isaac Watts. (See Isaac Lane, “Christmas Anthem” [Worcester, 1785]).

74.
F. B. Dexter, ed.,
The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles
(3 vols., New York, 1901), II, 103).

75.
Ibid., II, 315.

76.
The Yale community seems to have been a center of Christmas activity in the 1780s. In 1786 the Yale College Chapel was the site of a performance of a large-scale Christmas cantata, “An Ode for Christmas,” composed specially for the occasion and subsequently published in a New Haven musical magazine. This “Ode” was sung by three separate four-part choirs (each representing one of the shepherds) and an additional three-part choir (in the role of the angel Gabriel). The published version of this elaborate piece indicated that it had received “universal applause.”
American Musical Magazine
(New Haven, 1787), vol. 1, 27–30; microfilm in American Periodicals Series I: Reel 6.

77.
Francis G. Walett, ed.,
The Diary of Ebenezer Parkman 1703–1782: First Part, 1719–1755
(Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1974), 160 (1747), 195 (1755).

78.
Manuscript diary of David Hall, in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts Diaries, Massachusetts Historical Society: Microfilm 5:1. (Entries are missing for many of the years in the 1750s.) Hall composed extended Christmas meditations in 1763, 1768, and 1769. He is not to be confused with the historian David D. Hall.

79.
John Birge manuscript Daybook (Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association Library), p. 62. This document was unearthed by Carrie Giard, an undergraduate student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. (Birge’s final comment—“I cannot see why it was much better than Burglary”—implies that other people did
not
think of such Christmas
intrusions as burglary, and supports the idea that this kind of seasonal misrule operated just at the boundaries of acceptable behavior.)

80.
[Joseph Green,] “Entertainment for a Winter’s Evening: Being a Full and True Account of a very strange and wonderful Sight seen in Boston on the twenty-seventh of December at Noon-Day” (Boston, 1750), 5–6 (“diverting Christmas tale;” “‘tis love … house of God”), 11 (“eating”). For another modern account of this event, see Steven Bullock’s
Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Order, 1730–1840
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). The Masons celebrated the name day of
two
saints named John; the other was St. John the Baptist, whose name day happened to fall on June 24. In effect, the Masons were celebrating both the winter and the summer solstice. Capt. Francis Goelet recorded three visits to the Freemasons’ Boston lodge, at Stone’s Tavern, all in October 1750. See
New England Historical and Genealogical Register
, 24 (1870), 53.

81.
E. P. Thompson, “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,” in
Journal of Social History
, vol. 7 (1974), 382–405.

82.
Green, “Entertainment,” 12.

83.
“The News-Boy’s Christmas and New Year’s verses” (Broadside, Boston, 1770). The
Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy
for Dec. 23, 1771, printed a devotional poem, “An Hymn on Christmas Day.”

84.
W. W. Newell, “Christmas Maskings in Boston,” in
Journal of American FolkLore
9 (1896), 178.

85.
H. E. Scudder, ed.,
Recollections of Samuel Breck, with Passages from His Note-Books (1771–1862)
(Philadelphia, 1877), 37. Breck was raised as an upper-class Bostonian. From 1780 to 1792 (when he moved to Philadelphia), his family lived in a “remarkably fine” house at the corner of Winter and Common (now Tremont) Streets, with an acre of land. The house was sold for $8,000 in 1792. (Ibid., 37–38.) This was presumably where Breck saw the Anticks.

86.
The [Boston] Mercury
, Dec. 20, 1793. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word
antic
originally meant “a grotesque gesture, posture, or trick.” It was commonly used to refer to “a grotesque pageant or theatrical representation …; hence, a grotesque or motley company.”

87.
The [Boston] Mercury
, Dec. 24, 1793, and the
Columbian Centinel
[Boston], Dec. 25, 1793;
The Diary of William Bentley, pastor of the East Church, Salem
(4 vols., Salem: The Essex Institute, 19–5–14), II, 78. The Anticks were not the only perpetrators of Christmas violence in Boston in 1793. On Christmas Eve
another
mob disrupted religious services in the local Roman Catholic church. (
Columbian Centinel
[Boston], Dec. 25, 1793.)

88.
Massachusetts Centinel
, Dec. 23 and 26, 1789; see also Russell E. Miller,
The Larger Hope: The First Century of the Universalist Church in America, 1770–1870
(Boston: Unitarian Universalist Association, 1979), 321.

89.
Earl Morse Wilbur,
A History of Unitarianism
(2 vols., Cambridge: Harvard University Press:, 1945–52), vol. 1, 400–414. The one marginal exception to the Unitarian front was the Old South Church, which “remained nominally orthodox by the narrowest margin, [although] its minister, Dr. Eckley, denied the supreme divinity of Christ” (ibid., 400).

90.
Boston Daily Advertiser
, Dec. 24, 1817. See also
Independent Chronicle
, Dec. 24, 1817, and
Boston Gazette
, Dec. 25, 1817 and Dec. 29, 1817 (a confirmation that all of this actually happened).

91.
Quoted in Caroline Sloat, “Before There Was Christmas,”
Old Sturbridge Visitor
24 (1984), 10.

92.
See
Boston Intelligencer
, Dec. 12, 19, and 26, 1818;
Boston Gazette
, Dec. 21 and 24, 1818;
Boston Daily Advertiser
, Dec. 22, 1818;
The Idiot
, Dec. 24, 1818;
New England Galaxy and Masonic Magazine
, Dec. 18 and 25, 1818.

93.
Boston Daily Advertiser
, Dec. 22, 1818;
New England Galaxy
, Dec. 25, 1818 (this letter is signed “South End”).

94.
Notice in
Massachusetts Spy
[Worcester], Dec. 22, 1818. Bancroft had the sermon published as “The Doctrine of Immortality: A Christmas Sermon” (Worcester, 1819). Aaron Bancroft was an open Unitarian who had been preaching Christmas sermons each year since 1816. See “The Diary of Isaiah Thomas 1805–1828,” in
Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society
IX (1909), 337 (1816), 368 (1817), 412–413 (1818). The 1659 Massachusetts law was printed in the
Boston Intelligencer and Evening Gazette
, Jan. 2, 1819. For data on the open churches, see
Boston Gazette
, Dec. 24, 1818. The previous year a collection of Christmas hymn texts was printed in Boston (it may have been part of the same movement): G. Carseer,
Hymns for the Nativity of Our Saviour
(Boston, 1817).

95.
Boston Recorder
, Dec. 19, 1818. The previous year the approval of this paper had been implicit: ibid., Dec. 30, 1817.

96.
Boston Gazette
, Dec. 23, 1819;
Farmer’s Cabinet
(Amherst, N.H.), Dec. 25, 1819 (the previous Christmas the same paper had reported favorably on the Boston business closings, and two local religious societies actually held devotional meetings in Amherst). See also
New-England Galaxy
, Dec. 24, 1819;
Boston Intelligencer
, Dec. 25, 1819;
Independent Chronicle
, Dec. 22 and 25, 1819.

97.
New England Galaxy
, Jan. 2, 1824.

98.
“On Public Festivals,”
Missionary Herald at Home and Abroad [The Panoplist and Missionary Herald]
(Boston), vol. 16 (Feb., 1820), 57–59;
Boston Statesman
, Dec. 27, 1828.

1.
The episode is recorded by Pintard in a letter written in stages between Dec. 8, 1820, and January 4, 1821 (the passage I have used was written on January 1):
Letters from John Pintard to his Daughter 1816–1833
(4 vols., New York: New-York Historical Society, 1940): vol. 1, 359. I have modernized Pintard’s spelling and punctuation. The revelers who disturbed Pintard’s sleep would have constituted a callithumpian band consisting of young working-class men; by the 1820s, these bands had become a menace in the eyes of more prosperous New Yorkers. See Paul A. Gilje,
The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 254–255.

2.
The Hudson [N.Y.] Weekly Gazette
, Jan. 4, 1787. This item was brought to my attention by Robert Arner.

3.
E. P. Thompson, “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,” in
Journal of Social History
, vol. 7 (1974), 382–405 (see esp. 390–394). The resurgence of paganism in England during this period has often been noted; Thompson’s splendid article places it in a richly subtle context.

4.
E. P. Thompson deals with the English version of the charivari in two articles: “‘Rough Music’: Le Charivari anglais,”
Annales
(1972); and “Rough Music,” in E. P. Thompson,
Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture
(New York: The New Press, 1993), 467–533.

5.
Such employers collectively resisted the ongoing tendency of their workers to treat the month of December as a period of leisure and festivity. An instance of English worker resistance to celebrating Christmas on a single day is reported in J. M. Golby and A. W. Purdue,
The Making of the Modern Christmas
(Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 76. This book offers a very good overview of the history of Christmas in England.

6.
For England, see J. M. Golby, “A History of Christmas” (1981), quoted in Daniel Miller, “A Theory of Christmas,” in Daniel Miller, ed.,
Unwrapping Christmas
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 3. Golby has traced references to Christmas in the
Times
of London from 1790 to 1836.

7. For the transformation of New York, see Gilje,
The Road to Mobocracy;
Christine Stansell,
City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860
(New York: Knopf, 1986); Elizabeth Blackmar,
Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850
(Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1989); Sean Wilentz,
Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); and Raymond A. Mohl,
Poverty in New York, 1783–1825
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). The recorded population of New York City increased from 33, 131 in 1790 to 202, 589 in 1825.

8.
Gilje,
The Road to Mobocracy
, 239 (also 135–213). The best brief account of the transformation of early-nineteenth-century New York is Stansell,
City of Women
, 4–10.

9.
Blackmar,
Manhattan for Rent
, 170–172. According to Blackmar, the poor “used the streets as a common landscape” that provided an opportunity for unregulated, spontaneous encounters with others, encounters that made it possible for them “to gain or supplement subsistence by peddling fruits, oysters, hardware, used clothing, or sexual favors” (or by scavenging, gambling, shoplifting or fencing stolen goods). “No less than foraging on rural common land, the ‘liberty’ of the streets supported the city’s poorest residents.” See also 41–42.

10.
See, for example, letter of Dec. 17, 1828, in Pintard,
Letters
, III, 51–52.