Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory by Robert E. May (review)

Recent historiography and ever intensifying public debates have shown us the depths of memory around antebellum slavery. Robert E. May's Yuletide in Dixie convinces the careful reader not just of the ubiquity of the Lost Cause Christmas, but of its centrality to this larger body of public memory and academic scholarship. His book is by turns exhaustive and compelling, showing both a depth and rigor of scholarly research and keen facility for historical narrative. Far from merely an inconsequential entry in the growing literature of southern memory studies, it is a major and important work that offers crucial insights into slavery and the body of public memory work which has sought to justify, explain, or ignore it since emancipation.

One of the great strengths of May's book is his fresh engagement with primary materials that are familiar, even overused. He manages to find new insights in shopworn sources that make them, and the field of southern history and memory on which they have built, seem vital. His book opens with a reading of the planter-polemicist Edmund Ruffin's Anticipations of the Future. May notes Ruffin's deployment of the commonplace fears of Christmastime slave insurrection as something other than a subplot in Ruffin's secessionist utopian work. Instead, he identifies it as the reflection of a pervasive and central fear of antebellum White southerners. Indeed, May marshals often-familiar evidence to convince the reader that Christmas insurrectionist fears were a central facet for both proslavery defenders and abolitionists.

Similarly, he opens his first chapter with a reading of perhaps the most famous image of an enslaved person, that of Gordon, who made it to Union lines in 1863 during the Civil War. Gordon, he tells us, had his famous scars inflicted on him during the previous Christmas holidays. This opens a larger discussion about the more-than-incidental cruelties of Christmas celebrations in the antebellum South, which is a particularly potent focus of May's work. It forces a reexamination of plantation slavery and lingering arguments about the relative cruelty of the institution. The author chalks up characterizations of slavery as a benign institution to the potent memory work of southern apologists in the aftermath of the Civil War, and offers by contrast a range of testimony to belie such inaccurate depictions from both the planter class and the formerly enslaved. The latter evidence comes largely from later recollections. Formerly enslaved people in the early twentieth century often remembered Christmas holidays-despite some work stoppages, small gifts, and much vaunted largesse of enslavers---as a time of panic and trauma. May smartly marshals evidence to suggest that the number and extent of Christmas celebrations was very likely exaggerated, and that the horrible business of buying, selling, and leasing people actually intensified around the holidays.

He wisely reads both the brief memories of these events and their telling to build an argument around heretofore largely ignored source material, its obliteration in the face of Lost Cause Christmas mythologies, and the lingering trauma of the horrific business of slavery. His best sources, though, come from the contemporaneous accounts of enslavers. Their testimony through diaries, memoirs, and letters reveal profound entanglements in both the business and cruelty of the system, and a still-shocking disregard for the lives they held in their hands. Chapter Three recounts an appalling incident of an enslaved person being gifted for Christmas not like, but quite literally as, a doll.

The tension between these two schools of thought and their contemporary inheritors is at the crux of May's argument. Likewise, it represents one of the great difficulties of his approach, which necessarily relies largely on White-authored sources. May has to contend with Christmas celebrations, the evident joy and enjoyment they sometimes offered, and the meaning that Whites with a variety of positions on slavery made of both real and imagined Christmastime revelries...