The Battle for Christmas (68 page)

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,
Incidents
, 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.

67.
See William McFeely,
Yankee Stepfather: General O. O. Howard and the Freedmen
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968); Eric Foner,
Reconstruction America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877
(New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Carter, “Anatomy of Fear;” William C. Harris,
Presidential Reconstruction in Mississippi
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 88–89; Claude F. Oubre,
Forty Acres and a Mule: The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Land Ownership
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), esp. pp. 1–89. The Civil War origins of a potential land-reform policy are discussed in LaWanda Cox, “The Promise of Land for the Freedmen,”
Mississippi Valley Historical Review
45 (1958), 413–440.

68.
Henry Watson to his daughter Julia Watson, Dec. 16, 1865, ms. in Frost Library, Amherst College. This letter was brought to my attention by Wesley Borucki. Watson added that “The [black] women say that they never mean to do any more outdoor work, that
white men
support
their
wives and they mean that
their
husbands shall support
them.”
Such hopes to abandon “outdoor work” suggest intriguingly that these freedwomen harbored bourgeois aspirations—i.e., to work in the home and be supported by their husbands.

69.
Carter, “Anatomy of Fear,” associates the “Christmas Riots of 1865” with the long history of rowdy behavior on this holiday but does not go on to associate the holiday with gestures of paternalist largesse on the part of whites.

70.
Texas State Gazette
[Austin], quoted in
The Daily Picayune
[New Orleans], Nov. 21, 1865 (“waiting for the jubilee”—the writer had traveled through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana);
Daily Picayune
, Dec. 27, 1865 (“their old masters”).

71.
Henry Watson to Julia Watson, Dec. 16, 1865. “As for work,” one South Carolina planter told a visiting reporter, “[T]he freedmen were doing absolutely nothing. He had overheard one of his girls saying that she hadn’t seen any freedom yet, she had to work just as hard as ever. And that was the feeling of a great many of them. Then, as he had said, they were waiting for January, and nothing could be done with them till they became convinced that they must work for wages”
(The Nation
I [1865], 651).

72.
For example, the provisional governor of South Carolina, James Lawrence Orr, wrote: “[During] Christmas week, which has always been a holiday for the negroes they will congregate in large numbers in the villages and towns where they will get liquor and while under its influence I fear that collisions will occur between them and the whites. When once commenced no one can tell where the conflict will end” (Orr to Gen. Daniel Sickles, Dec. 13, 1865; quoted in Carter, “Anatomy of Fear,” 358n).

73.
Atlanta Daily Intelligencer
, Dec. 21, 1865; quoted in Carter, “Anatomy of Fear,” 358);
The Nation
I (1865), 651.

74.
Shreveport Gazette
, reprinted in
Cincinnati Daily Enquirer
, Nov. 23, 1865 (“growing more insolent”); ibid., Nov. 24, 1865. For other reports, see the following (all 1865); ibid., Nov. 28 (Louisiana, Texas); ibid., Nov. 30 (Georgia); ibid., Dec. 23 (Texas, citing
San Antonio Gazette);
ibid., Dec. 23 (Virginia);
National Intelligencer
[Washington], Nov. 29 (Mississippi);
Washington Evening Star
, Dec. 26 (Mississippi, citing the
Vicksburg Journal); Cincinnati Enquirer
, Nov. 28 (Texas).

75.
New Orleans
True Delta
, Dec. 15, 1865, reprinted in
National Intelligencer
[Washington, D.C.], Dec. 30, 1865.

76.
The Daily Picayune
[New Orleans], Nov. 14, 1865.

77.
General Howard’s address to the freedmen was printed in the New Orleans
Times
, Dec. 10, 1865, and quoted in Carter, “Anatomy of Fear,” 360. McFeely,
Yankee Stepfather
, 105, quotes “a la mode Santa Claus.” Colonel Strong’s speech was quoted in
The Daily Picayune
[New Orleans], Nov. 28, 1865. (Colonel Strong was General Howard’s inspector general; he had been sent to Texas by Howard himself.) Not all agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau were willing to do this dirty work. At least one, Thomas Conway of the New Orleans office, continued into the fall to advise freedmen that they could apply for free land through the end of December (McFeely,
Yankee Stepfather
, 179; Oubre,
Forty Acres
, 34). And another, General Edgar Gregory—formerly a radical abolitionist—was reported to have given a somewhat incendiary speech to Texas freedmen, telling them that they were entitled to free land and urging them not to sign unfavorable labor contracts
(The Daily Picayune
[New Orleans], Nov. 28, 1865). It was agents such as these that the Southern press regarded as the “bad white men” who were corrupting the black population. For the official mission of the Freedmen’s Bureau, see Carter, “Anatomy of Fear,” 360.

78.
Columbus [Miss.] Sentinel
, reprinted in New Orleans
Daily Picayune
, Nov. 28, 1865. See also ms. letter of Henry Watson to Julia Watson, Dec. 16, 1865, Amherst College Archives.

79.
John S. Garvin to Governor Parsons; quoted Carter, “Anatomy of Fear,” 361. Many blacks were arrested and otherwise harassed during the weeks before Christmas.

80.
Unpublished memoir of Sally Elmore Taylor, quoted in Joel Williamson,
After Slavery
, 249–250. For another expression of white fear, see ibid., 251 (a white planter, watching his former slaves slaughtering a hog on December 4, “shuddered … to see the fiendish eagerness in some of them to stab & kill, the delight in the suffering of others”).

81.
National Intelligencer
[Washington, D.C.], Dec. 30, 1865.

82.
Alexandria Gazette
, Dec. 28, 1865 (“too much whiskey”);
Washington Star
, Dec. 30, 1865 (“much bad whiskey”);
Richmond Daily Whig
, Dec. 29, 1865 (“some colored men”);
National Intelligencer
[Washington, D.C.], Dec. 28, 1865 (“no political significance”).

83.
Richmond Daily Whig
, Dec. 27, 1865.

84.
The Daily Picayune
, Dec. 31, 1865.

85.
Ibid., Dec. 27, 1865. In any case, the
Picayune
noted, readers could take heart from the knowledge that “the negro population will be found, as it has always been found in the South, to be docile.”

86.
Richmond Daily Whig
, Dec. 25, 1865.

1.
Booker T. Washington,
Up from Slavery: An Autobiography
(New York, 1901), 133. (He added, referring to the turn of the century, “This custom prevails throughout this portion of the South to-day.”) The following material appears ibid., 133–136.

2.
This paragraph and the following ones are from Ira de A. Reid, “The John Canoe Festival: A New World Africanism,”
Phylon
3 (1942), 349–370; see also Lawrence
Levine,
Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 150 (it is Levine who explains the term
dicty)
.

3.
William Carleton, “The Midnight Mass,” in his
Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry
(2 vols., Philadelphia, 1834), 1, 13–102 (esp. 46–54).