How the True Meaning of Christmas Taught Former Slave Frederick Douglass to Love Slaveholders
The American Civil War destroyed slavery, but the battle to shape public memory of the institution continued for decades thereafter.
In the late 19th century, for instance, an avalanche of antebellum memoirs rolled off the presses. Masters, mistresses and their descendants used every conceivable device — including the plantation’s holiday season — to depict slaveholders as benevolent and thereby conjure wistful feelings for the Old South.
Frederick Douglass, the runaway-slave-turned-civil-rights-leader, penned one of the few dissenting accounts of Christmastime on the plantation. And he could do this, in part, because he understood what Christmas really means.
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