'Extravagant expectations' of freedom: rumour, political struggle, and the Christmas insurrection scare of 1865 in the American South

Past & Present, Nov, 1997 by Steven Hahn

So unruly could the frolicking appear that slaveowners nervously warned of the need for greater vigilance. Not surprisingly, a substantial portion of the ante-bellum slave insurrection panics fixed on the Christmas interlude; all the more so after Jamaican slaves launched a massive rebellion on 27 December 1831. When the Civil War broke out, these apprehensions only intensified. `As far as the memory of man can go, there has existed among the negro population a tradition which has caused us many sleepless nights', a planter in St Charles Parish, Louisiana, wrote in December 1862. `They imagine they are to be freed by Christmas. Vague reports are spread about that they intend ... to come in vast numbers and force the federal government to give them their freedom'.(33)

In their preoccupation with the potential consequences of revelry in the quarters, worried planters tacitly admitted the limits of their paternalist sway while supplying lurid visions of social inversion that the slaves preferred to enact symbolically and metaphorically, eventually lending further substance to rumours of a momentous change in the making. Like dependent classes in other pre-industrial societies, the slaves used holidays such as Christmas not only to strengthen the threads binding their communities, but also to ridicule the pretensions of their betters and conjure up a world in which relations of subordination might be negated or inverted.(34)

The most ritualized manifestations of these symbolic inversions and appropriations of white prerogatives were to be found in eastern North Carolina and southern Virginia, where Yuletide brought what was variously called `Jonkonnu', `John Canoe', `John Kuner', or `John Canno', replete with threateningly costumed slaves, cacophonous serenades, `extraordinary' dances and highly choreographed exchanges.(35) Elsewhere in the South, though less elaborately and agonistically, the slaves also took satirical jabs at their masters, simultaneously mocked and challenged the structure of plantation authority, transgressed the customary spatial boundaries of slave life and enacted rites of reciprocity rather than submission. The slaveholders may well have been amused, and the festivities undoubtedly provided a relatively safe release for accumulated social tensions, not to mention a chance for the slaves to engage in rivalries of their own. Yet in these special ways, the slaves also nourished collective sensibilities of their self-worth, of their masters' false claims to rule and of the possibilities of organizing the world in an altogether different fashion.

If the freedpeople could see in the rumours of a Christmas property division the hand of a truly just and sovereign authority acting against the pretenders and usurpers, they imagined in the results less a wholesale inversion -- when masters would become slaves and slaves masters -- than a rearrangement or reconstitution of social relations. And although representations of the process could be rather vague, expectations and claims derived from the concrete experiences of enslavement. Many African-Americans in plantation districts, and especially in areas long-settled and relatively stable, therefore anticipated obtaining control, not just of any land, but of the estates on which they lived and laboured. Their attachment to their `old homes' or the `old range' was, as white observers widely commented, deep and powerful. It expressed not only a sense of place and of `right to the cattle and hogs that they have raised and taken care of, and the [crops] they have raise', but also a commitment to maintaining and reinforcing the networks of kinship, friendship and customary practice that had sustained them under slavery and informed the sense of right itself. Indeed, along the coast of South Carolina, where slave communities had especially extended generational roots, the freedpeople might even reject opportunities to pre-empt or take title to tracts of land if doing so necessitated relocation.(36)