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

One of the many stories white southerners liked to tell themselves about slavery—and that some still tell themselves—was that Christmas was the one time of year beloved by all, especially enslaved black Americans. Enslaved people, white southerners claimed, were given a full week off and feted with pot roast, biscuits, rum, and whiskey. Field-workers were invited into the “Big House,” showered with gifts, and given permission to travel to nearby plantations. Writing in 1878, the former South Carolina slave owner Celina E. Means described enslaved people dancing to “the sound of the fiddle and the shouts of laughter” during Christmastime as proof of slavery’s decency—as evidence of the “real condition” of enslaved people (202; italics in original).

It is this myth that Robert E. May thoroughly debunks in Yuletide in Dixie, the most exhaustive study to date of enslaved people’s experiences during Christmastime in the Civil War–era South. On the surface, the subject might not seem to demand a book-length study, but May makes a persuasive case for the subject’s significance: white southerners routinely published stories about slaveholders’ Yuletide generosity—before, during, and after the Civil War—in order to justify slavery and postwar segregation. Even today, plantation Christmas tours remain a major moneymaker, offering visitors a sanitized version of the past.

These Christmastime mythologies had, and continue to have, real consequences. Stories of Christmastime benevolence made white southerners particularly defensive against abolitionist attacks, May argues, ultimately hastening their decision to secede from the Union. In addition, during the Civil War, the inability of slaveholders to even modestly provide for their enslaved workforce during Christmastime influenced enslaved people’s decisions to abandon their plantations, contributing to the Confederacy’s defeat. And, finally, scenes of enslaved people’s contentment during Christmastime, a fixture of post-Reconstruction literature, secured the Lost Cause narrative, helping to underwrite white supremacy.

May provides ample evidence to back up these core arguments. Yuletide in Dixie draws heavily on the unpublished journals and letters of slave-holders, as well as slave narratives and the Federal Writers’ Project interviews of formerly enslaved people, to challenge several common claims slaveholders made about Christmas. The practice of giving enslaved workers a week off was the exception, not the rule, May shows, arguing that the average holiday break—never fully “off ”—was probably closer to three days. Whippings and slave sales continued unabated. Slaveholders certainly gave their enslaved workers gifts, but these were, he argues, more often necessities—basic clothing, their monthly food ration, and maybe a little candy, if they were lucky. Ultimately, he interprets Christmas gift-giving as a form of “social control” (57), not planter benevolence, with enslaved people having little choice but to feign gratitude. He also devotes a superb chapter to the ways in which enslaved people used a gift-giving game, called “Christmas Gif ’!,” to subtly pressure owners into giving them a bit more of their basic needs.

May’s most provocative arguments come in the book’s final two chapters. One, devoted to the Civil War, shows how the failure of planters to provide even the smallest “gifts” during Christmastime made enslaved people even “more resentful of their bondage” (178), strengthening their resolve to slow down, escape, or otherwise undermine the plantation economy. Knowing the pride southerners took in their Christmas traditions, Union soldiers occasionally burned down cities during the holiday season. And far from a moment of reprieve, wartime Christmases were times of high anxiety. Planters so feared slave revolts that Confederate generals diverted war materiel to cities where revolts were rumored, contributing, May argues, to Confederate battlefield defeats.

The final chapter, on Christmastime stories published after the war, takes its inspiration from David Blight’s now-classic study of Civil War memory, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001). After the war, May shows that white southerners and northerners published untold numbers of romanticized...