Thanksgiving: An Abolitionist Propaganda Holiday?

Listen to this podcast episode by one of our advisors, Dr. Louis A. DeCaro, Jr, on the winter holidays through a John Brown lens

If you haven’t listened to every episode of John brown Today at least three times, you should. It is a podcast by Dr. Louis A. DeCaro, Jr., the most prolific biographer of John Brown, living or dead (fortunately for us, he is living), and one of the John Brown Project’s Historical advisors. In this episode, he opens his notebook on how The Old Man celebrated the winter holidays and how the holidays were viewed in the divided “United” States of America in the 19th century.

Podcast transcript:

Did John Brown celebrate Christmas? The short answer is, kind of. After chasing Brown's letters for 20 years, I've never seen Brown himself make direct reference to Christmas or the celebration of the holidays. There are one or two extant Brown letters that are actually dated close to December 25th, but even these have no Christmas greeting or any reference to the Christmas season at all.

Judging from John Brown's letters alone, it's almost as if there was no such thing as Christmas. But don't worry, boys and girls. After scouring my files, I've managed to come up with a handful of Christmas references, each of them with a tale of their own that relates to the John Brown story. Consider it my gift to you, and whether or not you celebrate Christmas, I hope you'll enjoy my holiday meanderings through the archives.

These are my John Brown holiday notes from New York City. This is Louis A. D. Carroll, Jr., and this is John Brown Today.

US holiday cage match: Thanksgiving vs. Christmas

In the early to mid-19th century, two holidays were still catching on in this country, and in a way, they capture a sense of the difference between the North and the South in the antebellum era. In John Brown's time, in fact, it was Thanksgiving that was a more popular holiday to celebrate in the North, especially among Protestants and particularly among anti-slavery people.

I know a lot of people are offended by Thanksgiving these days, and they tend to associate it with the suppression of Indigenous people as if this tragic episode was the origin and basis of our contemporary Thanksgiving holiday. In fact, the idea of a Thanksgiving celebration is part of the larger Protestant history, particularly the custom of Puritans in Europe, and naturally, European Protestants brought this custom with them to North America.

In the 19th century, Protestants in the North celebrated Thanksgiving at different times and on a state-by-state basis, sometimes even on a city-by-city basis. For instance, in an article entitled Thanksgiving Day in the New York Herald, published on November 24th, 1859, it is noted that 27 states observed Thanksgiving, especially New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York, but also Maine, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, Wisconsin, and some western states from Indiana to California.

But by 1859, some southern states had begun to pick up the practice of Thanksgiving too—places like Georgia, the Carolinas, Kentucky, and even Florida. However, the South not only accepted Thanksgiving slowly over the first half of the 19th century, but in the 1850s, many in the South had begun to choke on Thanksgiving because of its association with the North.

Southerners thought Thanksgiving was woke

In an article by journalist Jenny Jarvey, published in the Los Angeles Times on November 23rd, 2017, she quotes James C. Co, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Georgia, who says quote, "With the whole prospect of a showdown over the expansion of slavery, there was more and more rhetoric coming out of the South, charging that Thanksgiving was pretty much a Yankee abolitionist holiday, and to many in the South, Thanksgiving smacked of New England Yankee abolitionists."

According to Jarvey, as anti-slavery sentiments swelled in the 1840s, many Northern clergy took the opportunity of Thanksgiving to rail against the moral wrong of slavery. And so the anti-Thanksgiving reaction in the South was particularly vivid, especially in Virginia. In 1859, the year of John Brown's raid and hanging, Virginia refused to celebrate Thanksgiving, although apparently citizens in Alexandria and Norfolk, Virginia, persisted in the holiday observation.

Virginia had refused to celebrate Thanksgiving as far back as 1853, the argument of then-Governor Joseph Johnson being that it was upon the principle of church-state separation that Thanksgiving was being defied. By 1859, Virginia's Governor Henry Wise, who had almost literally a hand in hanging John Brown, also dismissed Thanksgiving as what he called a "theatrical national claptrap."

And he attributed it to "thousands of Northern pulpits" that had begun preaching what he called Christian politics instead of, quote, "humbly letting the carnal kingdom alone and preaching singly Christ crucified," end quote. According to Jarvey, Southerners also opposed Thanksgiving as, quote, "part of a bigger 1850s push by Southern leaders to discourage Southerners from sending their kids north to Ivy League universities, subscribing to Northern publications, or hiring Yankee tutors for their children." According to Professor Cobb, Thanksgiving became part of that "checklist of Northern ideas we could do without." Southerners would rethink the implications of Thanksgiving simply because they were already more attuned to the idea that the South was dependent on the Northeast for manufactured goods and intellectual guidance.

To put it to the tune of today's political rhetoric, to celebrate Thanksgiving in the 1850s was to be "woke," and reacting against it was to be a pioneer of the "All Lives Matter" set. Same mentality, different generation. But what about Christmas? Well, according to Jarvey's article, some editors in the Southern press complained that Thanksgiving was an attempt to unseat the traditional religious holiday of Christmas.

An editor in the Richmond Daily Dispatch opined, "The grand festival of the South is Christmas, and we hope it will never be thrown into the shade by any festival of modern invention.” Some Southerners went so far as to accuse Northerners of concocting Thanksgiving as a reason to indulge in liquor drinking and dissipation.

Lincoln established Thanksgiving as a national holiday

Of course, Thanksgiving became a national holiday in the United States in 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation on October 3 declaring that the nation would set apart the final Thursday in November every year as a day of national Thanksgiving. To no surprise, Southerners continued to resist Thanksgiving after the Civil War.

It was only after Black people were betrayed with the downfall of Reconstruction and white unity once again prevailed in the United States in the later 19th century that Southerners began to celebrate Thanksgiving along with their Northern white cousins. As you may have guessed, the popular celebration of Christmas in the United States did not predominate across the country until later in the 19th century.

The reason for this is layered and extensive, but we can say that for Protestants in the North, the same folk who celebrated Thanksgiving, Christmas festivities, and celebrations were associated with Roman Catholicism. And anti-Roman Catholic prejudice was a strong and widespread sentiment in the United States until perhaps the mid-1960s if that.

So you can imagine why the old-style Christmas you might imagine was not taking place in many locations in the Presbyterian and Congregational North. Indeed, the earliest Christmas carols and Christmas celebrations were carried down through Roman Catholic worship and religious culture, and the Virgin Mary was venerated along with "tiny baby Jesus" to use the words of Will Ferrell's Ricky Bobby.

So, with all the pomp and festivity surrounding Christmas, it's probably no surprise that the baby of Christmas celebration was thrown out with the Roman Catholic bathwater, so detested by Protestants, who were especially the heirs of the Puritans of New England. In fact, Oliver Cromwell, one of John Brown's historical heroes, had outlawed Christmas during his time of influence in England in the 1600s.

Puritans were not into Christmas

Now, keep in mind, too, that the Puritans did not come to the shores of North America to find escape from religious persecution. That was the Pilgrims. The Puritans came from England to Massachusetts primarily to set up a purely Protestant kingdom, that "city on a hill" that would show the Church of England and the Anglicans back home how it's done.

And for them, how it was done was to vacuum up and dispose of every fiber of papal worship. No wonder they weren't celebrating Christmas in New England. In contrast, the slave South celebrated Christmas quite widely. This seems to be due to the fact that many slaveholders were Anglicans, or as they were called Episcopalians, after the rebellion of 1776, not to mention Roman Catholics in places like Maryland.

Now, neither the Anglican nor Roman Catholic churches ever took a position against slavery. The Methodists, which were an offshoot of the Anglicans, were opposed to slavery, but Methodists in the South succumbed to slavery in the 1840s, as did the Baptists. So, while Thanksgiving was viewed by the South as an abolitionist conspiracy, it's probably the case that Northern Protestants viewed Christmas as a papal conspiracy and one associated with the slave state.

In the first quarter of the 19th century, John Brown was perhaps brought up in a religious culture that expressed disdain toward any pronounced Christmas celebration. But there is evidence that even Protestants were not indifferent to the holy day remembrance, which was itself deeply rooted in Western Christianity.

Christmas wasn’t really a thing until the late 19th century

Based upon what historians of Christmas culture tell us, it seems that in Brown's lifetime, the Protestantization of the Christmas holiday in the United States was just starting to gear up. For instance, Jingle Bells was copyrighted in 1857, the same year that John Brown was tramping around New England as a Kansas Free State fundraiser.

But Christmas trees, caroling, and decorations were simply not widespread among Northern Protestants yet. One can surmise that strong anti-slavery folks like the Browns might have been very hesitant to make much of Christmas, given that it was associated with the slave South. Even so, Christmas was just not that big of a deal in Brown's antebellum era.

According to one source I consulted, Christmas was first made a state holiday by several southern states in the 1830s. As observed, while Protestants in the North were still promoting Thanksgiving as the foremost Christian holiday because they believed that expressing humble thanks to the deity was more important than celebrations and parties.

As I mentioned, the Puritan theological emphasis upon sin, grace, and salvation by faith alone did not prevail in the South, where penance and holy days were prevalent among many Southerners. I cannot help but wonder, too, whether one of the reasons that Christmas was more popular in the South was because slave masters commonly gave their enslaved people a, quote, "day off" and often encouraged drunken celebrations by the slaves.

Did slave masters also feel a little safer from slave revolts during the holidays? And does this association of Christmas with the South also explain the slower development of Christmas culture in the antebellum Protestant North?

So, did John Brown celebrate Christmas? Like I said, the earliest reference I can find to some kind of Christmas awareness in the Brown family comes from a letter by Anne Brown, his daughter, to that fake John Brown friend Alexander Milton Ross, that I've spoken about on another episode—a letter written on December 15th, 1882.

In this letter, Anne tells Ross that when she was six years old, her father, John Brown, gave her an "Indian bead bag" for Christmas. Now, that would be December 1849, when she was six years old. And at that time, the Browns were living in the Adirondack town of North Elba, New York. Now, where Brown obtained this Indian bead bag is unknown, but it's quite possible it was an authentic product of Native craft.

I would add a footnote to this episode pointing out that Anne's birthday fell on December 23rd, so it's possible that the Indian bead bag was not a Christmas gift but rather a birthday gift, but had become a Christmas gift in her memory by the year 1882.

The next reference I've been able to find dates to a couple of years later, probably the year 1852. According to the Watertown New York Times, a story published in December 1940, based upon an interview with Lyman Epps—really Lyman Epps Jr.—from Lake Placid, New York, near North Elba, the Epps family were one of the free Black families that had settled in the Adirondacks. The Epps family had become very close to the Browns during their first stay in North Elba from 1849 through 1851.

Those of you who have read my biography of Brown will recall that the Browns left their Black friends in North Elba to return to Ohio in 1851, when Brown continued to manage the Simon Perkins Jr. farms on Mutton Hill in Akron, Ohio. Four years later, however, Brown relocated his family back to North Elba after his partnership with Perkins was finally dissolved.

Little Lyman Epps Jr. Sang Christmas Carols to John Brown

I share this as background because the man who was interviewed in 1940, Lyman Epps, was the son of the senior Lyman Epps, who was John Brown's friend. In this interview, a brief vignette is presented that I have nowhere else seen, and it relates to our theme of John Brown and Christmas. Among the reminiscences of Lyman Epps Jr., he related how, as a small boy, he had sat on the knee of John Brown and had sung Christmas songs for the abolitionist. As a reward, the old man gave him candy. John Brown loved Little Lyman Epps, and the affection was mutual.

By the way, Lyman Jr. never left North Elba. He was the last Black man in Essex County out of that somewhat disappointing Black experiment of the 1840s and 50s known as Timbuktu.

In fact, in a letter that Lyman wrote late in his life, he said he would never leave North Elba because he wanted to tend to John Brown's grave. Now, as far as I can calculate, the date of Little Lyman's knee-singing and candy performance was probably December 1852. I can document that Brown, who was still living down in Akron, Ohio, with his family, had come up to visit North Elba. His daughter Ruth and son-in-law Henry Thompson lived there. So, this explains where he stayed in North Elba from mid to late December 1852.

So although Brown liked to sing Blow You the Trumpet with Little Lyman, at least this time, perhaps he listened to a nice rendition of Away in a Manger.

Let's fast forward four years to December 1856. Recall that in 1854 or 1855, a good portion of John Brown's family had relocated to the Kansas Territory. In May 1855, the old man got that famous letter from John Jr. from Kansas, stating his concern over the rise of pro-slavery terrorism and bemoaning the fact that they did not go to Kansas prepared to fight, that they didn't have sufficient weapons to protect themselves.

That's all John Brown needed, and so in June of 1855, he left North Elba for Kansas, carrying a large wooden box full of weapons, including those swords destined for Pottawatomie Creek. So, Brown went to Kansas, always the optimist but also always prepared. If you look at his correspondence from 1855-56, you'd be surprised at how optimistic he actually was that democracy and freedom would win Kansas at the ballot box.

He didn't go there and kill people, contrary to what you may have been told. But in the spring of 1856, pro-slavery terrorism began to assault the territory to destroy the function of democracy and threaten anti-slavery people with violence, especially abolitionist folk like the Browns. In May 1856, having learned of a local conspiracy to guide an assault against his own family, Brown conducted a preemptive strike, taking out five of the local terrorist collaborators.

This preemptive strike rendered him notorious in the territory—a controversial figure despite being admired by most Free State people. Throughout the rest of 1856, the Browns were a besieged and endangered lot. Brown was made famous by capturing the smug Southern journalist Henry Clay Pate in June 1856, and then more so in leading a heroic but losing effort to fight pro-slavery invaders at Osawatomie in August of 1856. For the rest of the year, Brown was a wanted man, and although he eluded capture, he finally left the territory with his family in the fall of 1856.

A “shower of Browns” for Christmas

So, Brown and his sons, with the exception of Oliver, reached Hudson, Ohio, at Christmastime in 1856. Recall that John Brown's own father, Owen Brown, had died that May. So we can imagine he perhaps stood over his father's snow-covered grave for the first time in this return to Hudson in December of '56. He probably stayed with his younger half-brother, the businessman Jeremiah R. Brown, with whom he was very close.

According to Wealthy Brown, the wife of John Brown, Jr., the whole family had Christmas dinner at Jeremiah's house in Hudson. She wrote to her beloved sister-in-law, Ruth Brown Thompson, affectionately calling the dinner a "Shower of Browns." So we have John Brown and his family members enjoying Christmas dinner, at least.

My guess is that’s about all that Christmas was in Hudson that year—a nice dinner. By the way, a famous daguerreotype of Brown that you have all seen was taken while in Hudson. You may remember this image if I describe it to you: Brown is clean-shaven, and his skin looks leathery and worn. He poses with a high white collar, wearing a jacket with his arms crossed. And if you look closely at the picture, you can see that the sleeves are too short for his arms.

My guess is, since he had just come back from Kansas, worn, torn, and broke as it were, probably the whole outfit was borrowed from his brother Jeremiah. And by the way, Jean Libby, who is the master of John Brown photographs, documents this image among the other surviving images in her wonderful book, John Brown Photochronology. You can buy it on Amazon. Buy it as a late Christmas gift to yourself.

So, folks, the Christmas pickings get pretty thin at this point. The few that remain are more referential than directly relating to John Brown, but in my quest to leave no stone—or, in this case, snowball—unturned, here's what's left.

It's December 1857, and by now, John Brown had regrouped. Throughout '57, he had canvassed the Northeast for Kansas supporters and had begun to divulge some version of his Virginia plan as well to some of his men and his newly won supporters in Massachusetts. By late 1857, Brown had begun to sequester some of his men at Tabor, Iowa, where he hoped to have them trained.

In this particular episode, Brown was not present in Tabor since he was traveling about New York State in order to raise funds and align his allies, especially Frederick Douglass and Gerrit Smith. But over in Tabor, however, his son, Owen, was waiting patiently, along with trustee John Henry Caggie, a Kansas associate who would finally follow Brown to Harpers Ferry and die there in 1859.

According to Owen's diary, on Christmas Day, 1857, he and Caggie had a hot discussion. It wasn't about Christmas. The debate seems to have touched on the Mormons and perhaps the policies of the United States government toward this cult. The only other thing that happened on Christmas Day in 1857 in Tabor, Iowa, according to Owen, was that, quote, "Dick shot a rabbit."

Who was Dick? Well, in this case, Dick seems to have been Richard Richardson, a Black man who had liberated himself from slavery in Missouri and had somehow joined up with the Browns in Iowa. Dick Richardson never went to Harpers Ferry with Brown, but it's too bad he didn't leave a memoir. One of the stories he would have told with more detail was about the time he accompanied John Brown and his men to a diner in Chicago.

When the proprietor told Brown that he did not serve Black people, Brown, and the whole party walked out and brought their business to a Chicago eatery that did not practice racial discrimination.

So now it's December 1859, and John Brown has gone to Harpers Ferry, been tried, been hanged, and his body is still fresh in his grave at North Elba. And on Christmas Day, only several weeks after Brown's burial, Mary Brown was invited to the home of B. A. Barrett in North Elba. However, rather than being invited to celebrate Christmas Day with the Barretts, apparently, her hosts actually held an abolition celebration in her honor.

So not only do we see that Christmas was not that big of a deal, but we also see that Mary was being honored by local supporters. And this particular supporter, Barrett, was the man who had literally inscribed the names and dates of Brown and his sons onto that Connecticut marker that now stands as his gravestone at the John Brown farm.

And it just so happens, on that same day—Christmas of 1859—over in Oberlin, Ohio, the grieving family of John Anthony Copeland, who were deprived of his body by the vicious racists of Virginia, held a memorial service for the Fallen Raiders of Oberlin. We know this based on a letter from Mary Copeland to Oswald Villard's assistant, Catherine Mayo, written in December 1905.

It's now 1894, and Anne Brown, whose married name was Adams, was now 51 years old. Anne had not had an easy life, and reading her letters in later years, one may get the impression she was a bit jaded and embittered, perhaps in part by personal and domestic unhappiness.

But Anne's bitterness was also fueled by the digressive social mood of the nation in the later 19th century. Generally, Anne seems to have thought Black people should have been more generous toward her on behalf of her family's legacy. Anne was particularly hard on Frederick Douglass, and although she was doubtless correct that Douglass did not tell everything about his own backpedaling from her father back in 1859, she was not above spreading half-truths and cranky claims.

But Anne had friends, too. She often corresponded with Franklin Sanborn of Concord, Massachusetts, John Brown's second admiring biographer and former member of Brown's Secret Six. And so, on her birthday, December 23rd, 1894, John Brown's daughter wrote once again to her father's old friend, informing him happily that a historical document collector in Chicago had sent along an appreciation.

Thirty-five years after Father’s hanging, Anne Brown Adams got a Christmas gift in the mail for $40; no small amount for 1894. And if my inflation calculator is correct, Anne Brown's Christmas gift had the spending power of about $1,200 today.

To all my listeners, Merry Christmas to all who celebrate the day, and best wishes for a wonderful holiday season to everyone, and a blessed New Year to all.

Stay safe, take care, and remember to ask yourself at least once in 2022: What would John Brown do?

From New York City, this has been Louis A. D. Carroll Jr., and this was John Brown Today.