Christmas on a slave plantation
“Ibelieve those holidays were among the most effective means in the hands of the slaveholders of keeping down the spirit of insurrection among the slaves.” —Frederick Douglass
On Dec. 20, 1837, just months after she arrived in Georgia, Amanda Beardsley Trulock wrote to her mother, “I am very busy a fixing my negroes for Christmast, that being a hollowday with them, it is one that is much thought of by us all, and as a matter of course everyone must have a new dress, and their Hats newley trimmed & &, and they think that there is no one that can excel their new Mistress in fashions.”
A native of Connecticut, Amanda Beardsley was nominally opposed to slavery until she married James Hines Trulock, who owned a plantation on the Chattahoochee River as well as 30 slaves. Within weeks of her arrival on the plantation, Amanda had adopted the language of Southern paternalism—that plantation slavery was a mutually beneficial system because enslaved people were not capable of governing themselves.
Paternalism is not to be confused with segregationism; paternalistic slave owners were happy to be close physically to the people they enslaved (the examples being widespread sexual relations between white male slave owners and Black female slaves, as well as wet nursing, which in the Trulock household went both ways—when one of Amanda Trulock’s children would not nurse, she nursed a Black infant instead).
Nor should it be assumed that slave owners held absolute power: Slaves had ways of negotiating for power and resisting their owners’ total encroachment on their existence; a major source was insistence upon custom, including Sunday rest and holidays.
Eugene Genovese writes about holidays in “Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made,” the first major modern study of African American culture on slave plantations. Drawing heavily from Louisiana, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia, Genovese concluded that slaves “made the Christmas holidays a time of joy,” and that a four-day holiday was most common throughout the South. Depriving one slave of his Christmas holiday as punishment was considered harsh, and total cancellation of Christmas was unheard of.
Interpretations of the uses of Christmas celebrations by slaveowners vary; Genovese notes that Frederick Douglass’ judgment is the harshest, though it would seem to be confirmed by the overseer who wrote, “I killed 28 head of beef for the people’s Christmas dinner. I can do more with them in this way [than] if all the hides of the cattle were made into lashes.”
On a more moderate note, John Brown of Camden wrote of Christmas 1853, “the family all at home spent the day as usual. The only difference being amoung the servants. It is a human as well as a wise regulation to allow them a few days as a Jubilee, and they enjoy it.”
The Trulock slaves were 40 in number by the time they celebrated their last Christmas in Georgia. On Dec. 29, 1844, the slaves as well as seven members of what Amanda called “the white family” boarded a boat on the Chattahoochee and sailed to the Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans, and up the Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers to their new home downriver from Pine Bluff.
One of the enslaved women gave birth on the steamboat traveling up the Mississippi; Amanda’s infant Felicia died. The family preserved her corpse in whiskey and buried her when they arrived on their new land.
Amanda did not mention any Christmas celebrations in 1845 or 1846, but in December 1847, she wrote, “Christmast is a great day here, amongst the Blacks particularly, they have four or five days, and give great dinner parties, but I have heard but very little said about it this year.” Her comment indicates that on the Trulock plantation, at least, the slaves and not the owners were responsible for orchestrating their Christmas celebrations.
As for the Trulocks’ hired teacher and their boarding students, Amanda wrote, “Miss Kirkwood expects to give three or four days and all of the Misses will go home, and Miss K has an invitation out to spend the day, so upon the whole I think that it will be rather a loansome day to us.” She anticipated by six years the remark by John Brown of Camden indicating that Christmas was a low-key affair among slave owners when compared to the celebrations of the slaves themselves.
By 1852, Amanda, now widowed, was once again engaged in making clothes for the slaves at Christmas. On Dec. 20, she wrote that she and Caroline, her main house servant, had cut out 15 dresses from some calico she bought while visiting home in Bridgeport. The dresses (and other clothes) were intended as a reward:
“Christmast being near at hand, and as that is a season that is thought much of by many, and more particularly by the Coloured Gentry in a Southern clime, and as there are many on this place that are desirous of having a quilting, and giving a great dinner on the occasion, I thought I would try to indulge them; as they have all done so remarkably well the year past.
“I really think they are deserving a great deal of praise, so for their gratification my time has been entirely employed, for two weeks past, in making up that Callico I purchased in B. Port.”
Five days later on Christmas Day, she again wrote of “the Coloured Gentry” and their preparations for a Christmas feast: “They all seem very happy, and are very much engaged in fixing and preparing to give a great dinner next week, which is to consist of various kinds of meats, such as Turkies, Chickens, Pigs, Beef &c with a great variety of Pastry.”
A final detail indicates that the Trulock slaves participated in the broader African American culture of the antebellum South: On “the last of 1857,” a Thursday, Amanda wrote that the previous Thursday (Christmas Eve), “the servants had a great dinner Thursday and a dance in the evening, I might say all night. There was quite a number present. They danced in the kitchen. We went in to see them. Vickie [her daughter Victoria] enjoyed it very much. Charles danced, jump Jim Crow.”
“Jump Jim Crow” was a song and dance first popularized in 1828 by a white minstrel singer. I’m not sure what to make of its being performed almost 30 years later in the kitchen of the Trulock plantation by Charles, a slave, except that culture is funny. Things get passed around.