How did Americans living in slavery experience the Christmas holidays? While the early accounts of the White Southerners after the Civil War often painted an idealized picture of the generosity of homeowners met by grateful workers feasting, singing and dancing merrily, the reality was much more complex.
In the 1830s, the great slave states of Alabama, Louisiana and Arkansas became the first in the United States to declare Christmas as a public holiday. It was in these southern states and others during the pre-war period (1812-1861) that many Christmas traditions – giving gifts, singing Christmas carols, decorating homes – took firm hold. rooted in American culture. Many bonded laborers have had their longest break of the year – usually a handful of days – and some have had the privilege of traveling to see family or get married. Many received gifts from their owners and enjoyed special dishes not tasted the rest of the year.
But while many slaves took part in some of these holiday pleasures, Christmas time could be dangerous. According to Robert E. May, professor of history at Purdue University and author of Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas and Southern Memory, Owners’ fears of rebellion during the season have sometimes led to preemptive displays of severe discipline. Their buying and selling of workers did not slow down over the holidays. Neither would their annual hiring of bonded laborers, some of whom would be kicked out, away from their families, on New Year’s Day – commonly referred to as “the day of sorrow”.
Yet Christmas offered slaves an annual window of opportunity to challenge the subjugation that shaped their daily lives. Resistance has come in many ways – from their assertion of the power to give gifts to expressions of religious and cultural independence, to using the relative laxity of the holidays and free time to plan escapes.
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‘Christmas gift!’
Preparation for Christmas (Plucking Turkeys), painted by Francis William Edmonds, 1851.
Heritage Images / Getty Images
For slave owners, the power to give gifts has a connotation. Christmas gave them the opportunity to express their paternalism and dominance over the people they owned, who almost universally lacked economic power or the means to buy gifts. Homeowners often gave their bonded workers things they retained throughout the year, such as shoes, clothing, and money. According to Texan historian Elizabeth Silverthorne, a slaveholder in that state gave each of her families $ 25. The children received bags of candy and money. “On Christmas Day we gave our gifts to the servants, they were very happy and we were greeted on all sides with smiles, smiles and low knots,” wrote one Southern planter. In his book The Christmas Battle, historian Stephen Nissenbaum relates how a white overseer considered that giving gifts to bonded laborers at Christmas was a better source of control than physical violence: “I killed twenty-eight heads of ox for the people’s Christmas dinner “, did he declare. “I can do more with them this way than if all the skins of the cattle were turned into eyelashes.”
Slaves rarely made reciprocal gifts to their owners, according to historians Shauna Bigham and Robert E. May: “Fleeting demonstrations of economic equality have challenged the [enslaved workers] prescribed role of child dependence. Even when they were playing a joint holiday game with their owners – where the first person who could surprise the other by saying “Christmas present!” received a gift – they were not expected to give gifts when they lost.
In some cases, slaves would reciprocate with gifts to Masters when they lost in the game. On a plantation in South Carolina’s Low Country, bonded domestic workers gave their owners eggs wrapped in handkerchiefs. Yet overall, the one-sided nature of the gifts between slave owners and those they enslaved reinforced the dynamics of white power and paternalism.
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Christmas holidays and freedom
For bonded laborers, Christmas time represented a break between the end of the harvest season and the start of preparations for the next production year – a brief slice of freedom in lives marked by heavy labor and bondage. . “This time we considered ourselves to be our own, by the grace of our masters; and so we used or abused it almost as we pleased, “wrote famous writer, speaker and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery at age 20.” Those of us who had families at a distance were usually allowed to spend the entire six days. [between Christmas and New Year’s Day] in their society.
Some took advantage of these more relaxed vacation times to run for freedom. In 1848, Ellen and William Craft, a enslaved married couple from Macon, Georgia, used their owners’ passes over Christmas to concoct an elaborate plan to escape by train and steamboat to Philadelphia. On Christmas Eve in 1854, Underground Railroad icon Harriet Tubman left Philadelphia for the east coast of Maryland after hearing that her three brothers were going to be sold by their owner on Boxing Day. The owner had given them permission to visit their families on Christmas Day. But instead of the brothers meeting their families for dinner, their sister Harriet led them to freedom in Philadelphia.
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John kunering
For slaves, resistance at Christmas did not always take the form of rebellion or flight in a geographic or physical sense. Often it came from how they adapted the traditions of the mainstream society into something of their own, allowing for the purest expression of their humanity and cultural roots. In Wilmington, North Carolina, slaves celebrated what they called John Kunering (other names include “Jonkonnu”, “John Kannaus” and “John Canoe”), where they dressed in wild costumes and went from house to house singing, dancing and beating rhythms. with rib bones, cow horns and triangles. At each stop they expected to receive a gift. “Every child gets up on Christmas morning to see the John Kannaus,” recalls writer and abolitionist Harriet Jacobs in her autobiography. Incidents in the life of a slave. “Without them, Christmas would be deprived of its greatest attraction.”
These public displays of joy were not universally enjoyed by all whites in Wilmington, but many encouraged the activities. “It would be a real source of regret if slaves were refused in the intervals between their sentences to indulge in the joyous moments of the past,” said a pre-war white judge named Thomas Ruffin. For historian Sterling Stuckey, author of Slave culture, Kunering reflected deep African roots: “Given the place of religion in West Africa, where dancing and singing are means of relating to ancestral spirits and to God, the Christmas season has been conducive for Africans in America to continue to attach sacred value to John Kunering. ”
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“ None of the negroes was ever forgotten that day ”
The slaves had long memories of Christmas. They remembered how they used it to mark the time around the planting season. They knew they could count on it for a measure of freedom and relaxation. Their inability to fully participate in the gift exchange – one of the most fundamental aspects of the season – helped strengthen their place as men and women who could not benefit from their work. Some, like Harriet Tubman and the Crafts, saw it as the best time to challenge society as a whole.
Adults remembered the gifts long after their childhood was stolen by this terrible institution. “I didn’t have a Christmas tree,” a former slave named Beauregard Tenneyson said in an interview with the WPA. “But they set up a long pine table in the house and that plank table was covered in presents and none of the negroes were ever forgotten that day.
