I wouldn’t say that you can understand the Confederate defeat from studying Christmas in the Confederacy, but you can southerners tried to create a national identity that was partly molded around Christmas. Many of the figures who were involved in the coming Civil War spoke out on Christmas on one side or the other. we really want to understand why America’s bloodiest war occurred in the first place, we must recognize the important part Christmas played in Civil War causation. What is the value of looking at Christmastime as a lens to study this period of slavery during the Civil War and in the antebellum period? Here, he talks to TIME about the most shocking examples and how unpacking Lost Cause myths can help tell a fuller picture of the history of slavery. May reviewed plantation owners’ diaries, periodicals, memoirs, as well as oral accounts from those formerly enslaved to see what really happened on plantations at Christmas. Some like Henry Bibb picked Christmas Day in 1837 to escape to freedom in his 1849 memoirs, he writes about deciding to make “a bolt for Liberty or consent to die a Slave” by paddling across the river from Kentucky to Ohio after his plantation owner gave enslaved persons some time around the holiday to work for themselves.įor his 2019 book Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory, historian Robert E. Many enslaved people spent the holidays worrying about getting sold or faced violence like whippings. But the myth couldn’t be further from the reality.
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