What Was Christmas Like for America's Enslaved People?

[left-of-center2012]

How did Americans living under slavery experience the Christmas holidays? While early accounts from white Southerners after the Civil War often painted an idealized picture of owners’ generosity met by grateful workers happily feasting, singing and dancing, the reality was far more complex.

In the 1830s, the large slaveholding states of Alabama, Louisiana and Arkansas became the first in the United States to declare Christmas a state holiday. It was in these Southern states and others during the antebellum period (1812-1861) that many Christmas traditions—giving gifts, singing carols, decorating homes—firmly took hold in American culture. Many enslaved workers got their longest break of the year—typically a handful of days—and some were granted the privilege to travel to see family or get married. Many received gifts from their owners and enjoyed special foods untasted the rest of the year.

But while many enslaved people partook in some of these holiday pleasures, Christmas time could be treacherous. According to Robert E. May, a professor of history at Purdue University and author of Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas and Southern Memory, owners’ fears of rebellion during the season sometimes led to pre-emptive shows of harsh discipline. Their buying and selling of workers didn’t abate during the holidays. Nor did their annual hiring out of enslaved workers, some of whom would be shipped off, away from their families, on New Year’s Day—widely referred to as “heartbreak day.”

Still, Christmas afforded enslaved people an annual window of opportunity to challenge the subjugation that shaped their daily lives. Resistance came in many ways—from their assertion of power to give gifts to expressions of religious and cultural independence to using the relative looseness of holiday celebrations and time off to plot escapes.

https://www.history.com/news/christmas-slavery-american-south

[Butterflylady]

1. I am in the process of reading a good number of books

About slavery. A few that were authored by slaves themselves, such as Harriot Jacobs under the name of Linda Brent. I, in fact am rereading her story. Frederick Douglas and Booker T. Washington have also recorded their stories that give the reader heart rendering stories.

Yes, the holidays were a time of joy for the enslaved in 1700s and the 1800s. But then again it was an agonizing time for they knew how the time would end on New Years day. The enslaved in the northern slave states were weary of being sold to southern slave states the treatment of slaves was much more horrendous. A lot of families were tore apart where mothers and fathers would have their children sold away to far off states never to be seen or heard from again. Heartbreaking to say the least.

Another good read are books about the UGRR better known as the Underground Railroad that led to the fame of Harriot Tubman. I have a now a much needed lesson about that time.