On January 1st, they would be rented out again and the master would pick out their new employer. And they did win over a lot of hearts with it.Īnother thing that’s never pointed out in these fictional accounts later is that a large percentage of enslaved people were rented on one-year contracts and often allowed to return home to original master on Christmas. They aren’t just about Christmas, but Christmas was a major focus-one of the most important components of these works trying to defend slavery and southern customs before the Civil War. Scores of authors would devote whole chapters to Christmas in memoirs, novels, and short stories. The United Daughters of the Confederacy would give these warm-hearted appraisals of the Christmas experience of the South’s enslaved peoples. They were defending the way of life of the old South. They felt very defensive, and so they wrote these very mellow accounts of slave times. In the 1890s, southerners were trying to reclaim national power in Washington D.C., and a part of was to fight back ideologically. This was during the time when white southerners created the so-called Lost Cause to justify the Confederate lifestyle. Ninety-to-ninety-five percent of this is a product of the period from about 1880, a few years after the North stopped enforcing Reconstruction, to about 1929 when the stock market crash occurred. I got the sense from your book that there was a bigger spectacle made over Civil War Christmases in the war’s aftermath than during it. Read more: The Surprising Story of Christmas in the United States were rounded up rumors of these insurrections and, without any real evidence at all, were executed by vigilante groups.

And of course, some enslaved people in the U.S.

Yuletide in Dixie by Robert E May