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While Christmastime celebrations could appear to supply momentary respite from the divisive politics which have roiled American life for the previous a long time, Christmas traditions have lengthy been political fodder. Indeed, “Lost Cause” accounts of enslaved Christmas experiences nonetheless have political penalties right this moment—together with for the MAGA motion and Donald Trump’s presidency.
The “Lost Cause” was a political venture waged by white Southerners after the Civil War to venerate Confederate generals and the bravery of Confederate troopers, whereas downplaying their treasonous effort to protect and develop slavery in America by destroying the Union.
What is usually ignored, nonetheless, is that the “Lost Cause” has additionally been a software to excuse and even glorify the Black slave labor system that the Confederacy fought to perpetuate, and that Christmas customs within the South earlier than the Civil War have been persistently featured in that propaganda. Nostalgic descriptions of pre-Civil War Christmases on Southern plantations are simply one of many methods Lost Cause proponents obscure the horrors of human bondage in Dixie, permitting politicians to faucet into neo-Confederate rhetoric and insurance policies to win the assist of white Southern voters.
Following the Civil War, and particularly after a brief Reconstruction second through which Black males gained the vote and received elected workplace, white southerners regained political energy by the tip of the 1870s. To bolster their authority, white southern women and men churned out a flood of publications—memoirs of pre-Civil War experiences, historical past books and articles, novels, brief tales, poems, and speeches—delivering a really pernicious message: that slave life usually was gratifying and wholesome. The proof? The slaves’ apparent ecstasy through the vacation, evidenced by their fawning expressions of appreciation for his or her homeowners’ kindness and humaneness, particularly the items they obtained from them.
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According to this propaganda, which took little account of African American views, each Christmas, southern white “masters” and “mistresses” bestowed upon their Black staff extremely lavish events, wealthy meals, thoughtfully-selected presents, and freedom to journey wherever they wished close by, whereas refraining from whipping or in any other case punishing them. These accounts portrayed enslaved folks, no matter plantation, experiencing a type of nirvana for your entire Christmas interval—completely grateful for the generosity of their enslavers.
In actuality, enslaved folks had been offered and whipped over the Christmas vacation. But these warped tales conveyed the impression that southern slavery was a humane system of human relations 12 months spherical. For occasion, in keeping with many memoirs by former enslavers revealed after Reconstruction, come Christmas morning annually earlier than the Civil War, masters and family slaves at all times collectively participated in a playful sport through which they competed to be the primary ones to yell the phrase “Christmas Gif’” at one another, with the loser having to cough up a present of some sort to the winner. Afterwards on Christmas morning, in these vignettes, slaves generally wished homeowners a merry Christmas and lengthy life as they had been doled out eggnog treats on the mansion verandah.
Indeed, and right here’s the place folklore is available in, the size of the Christmas vacation for slaves relied on the burning of specifically chosen “Yule logs” that enslaved folks chosen. According to this legend, the log should burn in two earlier than the grasp might name off the festivities and ship his laborers again to the fields. This course of would possibly eat wherever from per week to a month, since slaves cleverly selected hardwoods like gum timber fairly than rapid-burning softwoods for reducing as Yule logs, after which soaked their logs in swamps and streams so they’d burn slowly.
Allegedly, enslavers colluded in it, purposely overlooking the trickery even once they caught wind of what was occurring. Others merely had been so dimwitted they by no means realized that they had been fooled. The vital factor is that the enslavers by no means obtained indignant and whipped slaves for these pranks, and typically they’d even snort about their very own victimhood—all, in fact, giving the impression that these enslavers, who thought of Black human beings their authorized “property” and offered and traded them at will, had been at coronary heart “good guys.”
In fact, there may be apparently no eyewitness account—and presumably as few as three questionable second-hand accounts—from earlier than the Civil War that this Yule Log customized ever took maintain on a single Southern plantation a lot much less throughout your entire South.
It is feasible that not even one enslaved particular person ever obtained an additional day of the Christmas vacation as a result of a Yule log burned further stubbornly. Yet, the story, doubtless due to its cuteness and humor, has change into so embedded in our nationwide folklore that it pops up not solely on innumerable web pages, but additionally throughout guided excursions of southern historic plantations and in Christmas vacation books, cookbooks, youngsters’s books, scholarly books about slavery, and in all types of miscellaneous and typically very surprising publications. It may even be present in a Christmas again situation (December 1979) of the Journal of the U.S. Army Intelligence & Security Command.
It’s a reminder of how insidiously pervasive the Lost Cause has been in American life. And it helps make clear why Trump supported “each side” through the violence in Charlottesville in 2017 and why early this 12 months, he got here out for reversal of a 2022 renaming of a U. S. Army fort in North Carolina, in order that it could as soon as once more assist its authentic designation honoring Confederate normal Braxton Bragg. The Confederacy, the parable tries to persuade Americans, wasn’t that dangerous.
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There is not any approach to measure what number of fewer votes he would have received had he by no means championed that fantasy. But that ideology’s persevering with maintain on the Southern states virtually actually performs a task within the area’s political leanings.
What is definite is that Donald Trump wouldn’t be our incoming president with out Southern backing, and that mythologies about Christmases on southern slave plantations are embedded within the fashionable cultures of the previous Confederacy. These mythologies contribute to the continuing “anti-woke” campaign in opposition to educating the realities of slavery, which dangerously misinforms Americans in regards to the precise historical past of human bondage. But they’ve been part of our political world and fashionable tradition because the late nineteenth century, and Christmas is an acceptable time to solid a crucial eye on these legends. They have penalties.
Robert E. May is Professor of History Emeritus at Purdue University. He is the writer of the simply launched Debunking the Yule Log Myth: The Disturbing History of a Plantation Legend (Roman & Littlefield Press).
Made by History takes readers past the headlines with articles written and edited by skilled historians. Learn extra about Made by History at TIME right here. Opinions expressed don’t essentially mirror the views of TIME editors.
