In the dining room might be a series of flickering candles and stockings full of candy hanging on the walls. Outside, the men would gather around barrels of cider or whiskey, celebrating their week off, while the women would prepare a turkey dinner. After eating the food and drinking the liquor, the men and women would find their partners and dance to the cheerful tunes of banjoes and fiddles. Christmas cheer was especially important for these people, for they were slaves on a large southern plantation, and this would be one of the only days when they were free to celebrate as a community of families.
Yet beneath the drinks, dancing, and decorations was a darker side to the holiday. Both slaves and slave owners manipulated the Christmas holiday in their constant struggle for freedom or power. The former used Christmas to assert their basic humanity, while the latter twisted holiday traditions to prevent slave rebellion.
One of the most scathing critiques of Christmas in bondage comes from the narrative of black leader and former slave Frederick Douglass. In his narrative, Douglass wrote that Christmas was nothing more than a tool for oppression.
Douglass argued that plantation owners used the holiday season and the weeklong break from hard labor to stifle slave rebellion. Douglass, born into slavery in 1818, came of age in a slave system wealthy planters had perfected. They knew how to mold nearly every small interaction and grand institution to serve their interests. Christmas would have been no different.
As Douglass recalled, the temporary respite from hard labor allowed slaves to tolerate their condition. Masters also used the holiday more directly, encouraging slaves to binge drink hard liquor: “One plan is, to make bets on their slaves, as to who can drink the most whiskey without getting drunk; and in this way they succeed in getting whole multitudes to drink to excess.” Binge drinking not only asserted the dominance of the slave owner, but according to Douglass, it also made working in the fields more attractive: “We felt, and very properly too, that we had almost as well be slaves to man as to rum. So, when the holidays ended, we staggered up from the filth of our wallowing, took a long breath, and marched to the field,–feeling, on the whole, rather glad to go.”
Masters relied on Christmas as a way of fracturing slave solidarity. As Christmas approached, they threatened to withhold gifts or even cancel Christmas completely. This system of holiday-based reward and punishment encouraged obedience, productivity, and disunity. Slave owners also waited until the holidays to dismantle families and sell slaves. The news that a son, daughter, or spouse was to be sold away often prompted heartbreaking acts of violence, including suicide and self-mutilation, and slave owners believed that the jovial holiday spirit could smooth the process.
Yet the slave experience during Christmas is more complex than Douglass might lead us to believe. Masters might use the holiday to reinforce their control, but slaves used Christmas in their physical, psychological, and cultural resistance to slavery.
On the most basic level, Christmas allowed slaves to endure the rigors of slavery. Even Douglass mentioned that Christmas meant gifts of food and clothes. Slaves took advantage of the free time, tending to their gardens, hunting for wild game, and crafting items for trade. Slaves also embraced Christmas for its psychological benefits. They travelled to neighboring plantations to visit friends and family, sometimes taking advantage of the lax rules of the season to stay away for weeks. As large groups came together, slaves celebrated through song and dance. These dances became a means of creating and preserving African-American culture.
Most important, slaves saw these small moments of community and joy as a demonstration of their humanity. Harriet Jones, a woman born into slavery in 1844, discussed Christmas in her memoirs. She recalled that her master helped lead the Christmas dances, calling to his slaves to swing their partners. Jones relished the opportunity to dance intimately and openly with her significant other, remembering how passionately the various couples danced. It is unclear what the observing owners thought, but many slaves saw these Christmas dances as a chance to display their romantic love in a society that otherwise disregarded and disparaged it. During the dances, men wore clean shirts and women placed ribbons in their hair. Central to the preparation was the act of removing, literally and symbolically, the confining field shoes, as the shoes were notoriously bad for dancing.
How do we reconcile Douglass’s memories with these acts of resistance? Perhaps the two accounts are not as antithetical as they seem. Christmas was an effective means of control precisely because it allowed for greater displays of resistance on one designated week a year. Ironically, occasionally affording slaves rest and freedom helped slave owners to maintain power.
Love this !
Great article!!
Sad facts about the cruel hate that was displayed and enforced upon my people! When I think about how we were raped, mentally, physically and morally by a group of people who were only interested in making money through our sweat, blood and tears, I know that only the Lord could have stood with us during that terrible time of testing to bring us through. May it NEVER be repeated! Those who carried out their evil plans will have to stand before our God and face His wrath!
Did you use other outside sources besides Frederick Douglass for this article? If so what were they? Thank you!
Yes, I also used the WPA slave narratives from interviews conducted in the 1930s. That’s a wonderfully rich collection if you have not looked at it before.
This is a poor analysis of Slavery and Plantation life, its openly skewed to vilify the institution rather than considering the actual facets of social behavior that existed between Masters and Slaves. It generalizes a pattern that should not be generalized. It says nothing of benevolence with existed let alone the day to day coexistence between people in the circumstances which they existed.
It is true that slavery was not a monolith. Some enslaved people lived in better circumstances than others. Cities were better than rural labor camps, working tobacco was better than rice, cotton, or sugar, the Caribbean was more brutal than North America, and so on. An enslaved man or woman in relatively better circumstances might raise a family, have more free time and mobility, receive less abuse, and even earn a small income. However, enslavement in the very best circumstances was still horrific. Enslaved people had few to no civic rights in society. Their labor was forced and unpaid, the fruits of that labor stolen by someone else. Enslaved men and women had to constantly witness and fear assault, torture, and murder. They had no way to stop their enslavers from selling away their spouses or children, or assaulting and torturing their spouses and children. They could not choose where they lived or what they did for work, or how hard they worked. Enslaved people possessed no real freedom unless they escaped, risking brutal punishment and perhaps even execution. And that was in the best of circumstances.
Everyone in the 18th and early 19th centuries understood what I’ve just laid out. Many of the same men and women who spoke against British tyranny also spoke, beautifully and passionately, about the horrors of human trafficking and forced labor. Even men and women who supported enslavement as a labor system generally recognized its immorality. They called it a “necessary” evil, but evil nonetheless. The idea that enslaving someone was good did not develop until the 1830s, right at the time when Southerners were restructuring their entire economy, political system, and culture around human enslavement. Any cracks threatened the entire system. So slavery was not immoral or selfish, they argued. Rather, it was a benefit to the enslaved. Enslavers were being generous! This, of course, was patently absurd (one observer put it best: to paraphrase, those who sing the benefits of slavery so rarely volunteer for it), and so Southern politicians crushed free speech and free press rights in the South to silence opponents and prevent dissent. It worked, and by 1860, many white Southerners genuinely believed the “positive good” propaganda, and the idea has lived on in our romanticized stories of the past ever since.
But you don’t have to take my word for it. There’s one piece of evidence that says everything you need to know. Enslaved men, women, and children resisted enslavement in a myriad of ways. One way to fight enslavement was to escape, and so they did, by the tens of thousands Escaping slavery was dangerous, and freedom was no guarantee of a good or easy life. Freed men and women often suffered terribly after seizing their freedom. Many were poor, illiterate, isolated, and fearful. Some froze or starved to death. But tellingly, not one freed man or woman—out of tens of thousands of successful escapees—ever willingly returned to slavery. Not one. Ever. Enslavement offered nothing that could compare to the human instinct towards freedom.
Well spoken…very good…
Well said. Thank you.
While his article lacks depth, it does meet what I assume is his goal. The goal of showing the psychological use of the Christmas holiday to maintain power by the slave owner and a sense of humanity by the enslaved. Chattel slavery vilified itself. From the time the ancestors lost their culture, their language, their religion, and became merely property it has been open to vilification. You sound like some of the former slave owners who could not understand why many left the plantations after they were emancipated. “Why my people love me!”