Echoes Forward

While we are reeling from the Christmas season, and lamenting over the things we didn’t receive, I think it would be a good time to remind ourselves that getting the best presents wasn’t always the top priority during the holidays. For three of Harriet Tubman’s enslaved brothers, the only thing on their Christmas wishlists in 1854 was freedom. And dangerous as it was, they got it. But before we talk about Harriet’s daring expedition to give her brothers that gift, let’s set the scene for what exactly Christmas meant to enslaved people.

The time around Christmas and up until the New Year was a time of relative ease compared to what was usually expected of enslaved people. Not only was it a time of rest for religious reasons, it also marked the end of the harvest season, so it presented a perfect time for a break before prepping for the next year of labor. Frederick Douglass wrote about this time “off” in his autobiography: “This time we regarded as our own, by the grace of our masters; and we therefore used or abused it nearly as we pleased. Those of us who had families at a distance were generally allowed to spend the whole six days in their society.”

It wasn’t until the 1830s that Christmas was formalized as a government-recognized holiday, with the states of Alabama, Louisiana, and Arkansas first declaring it a state holiday. Though it was certainly observed for decades prior to this, it was around this time that the traditional activities of Christmas became widespread and encouraged; traditions like singing certain hymns or carols, decorating, having time off to be with family, preparing specific meals, and of course, gift-giving. Rather than be left out of the camaraderie, most enslavers included their slaves in these traditions, but not for very holy reasons. In fact, it was a calculated routine to further exercise ownership and authority over their enslaved peoples.

History Professor Robert E. May explains that leading up to the season, slaveholders would purposefully increase the frequency and/or severity of beatings or other punishments. This was a precaution used to demonstrate power and scare enslaved people into submission. As we’ll discuss more later, Christmastime was much looser than the rest of the year, and enslavers wanted to ensure their slaves did not take liberties with their free time to raise rebellions or attempt to escape. For similar reasons, enslavers purposefully set up a rigorous schedule of slave auctions or hirings out of their slaves for on or around New Year’s Day. This routine forced enslaved people to dread New Year’s, which became known to them as “Heartbreak Day”, as they were painfully aware they or their loved ones could be sent elsewhere if they did not behave.

In between these dark days of punishment and separation, enslavers often treated their slaves “well.” But again, this usually wasn’t out of the kindness of their own hearts. Historical writer Stephen Nissenbaum argues that as enslavers were giving gifts of “luxury” items to their slaves (things like shoes, toys, or money), they were actually asserting their dominance, making the enslaved people permanently indebted to them since they were unable to purchase gifts in return. One of the Southern plantation owners that Nissenbaum used to demonstrate this wrote in his diary: “I killed twenty-eight 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.” Basically, sacrificing a bit of money and adherence to the rules during Christmas was a better form of control than whippings. Other enslavers wrote about the self-serving nature of this fake benevolence, bragging about the praise and thanks they received from their slaves after doling out their gifts.

But still, this time between Christmas and New Years was pretty much universally recognized as the best time to escape from slavery. This is true for many reasons. On the religious side, Christmas reminded enslaved people about their faith in God and sometimes motivated them to run towards their rightful place in liberty with God as their protector. On the logistical side, Christmas occurs on the same day every year, making it one of the only dates that slaves could accurately pinpoint to plan their escape. It was also extremely dark out, and it stayed that way longer. Supervision was more lax as slaves received the rare written permission needed to travel alone to visit their families, and slaveholders were busy entertaining or travelling themselves. In the same vein, slaves were not expected to be in the field, so there was little to no way to tell if everyone was accounted for. And if there was any way to ensure your family remained intact after “Heartbreak Day”, running away together was as close as you could get, so long as you weren’t caught.

This leads us to Harriet Tubman’s famous Christmas rescue in 1854. Tubman herself had fled alone in Fall of 1849, after a first failed escape attempt with her brothers Ben Jr. and Henry. The men could reportedly not bear the idea of abandoning their wives and children they had left behind in enslavement, so the whole party was forced to turn around. But by late 1854, Tubman heard these same brothers were included in those their enslaver was planning to sell, so she made it her mission to come back for them.

Tubman started by sending an encoded letter to Jacob Jackson, a free Black farmer who lived near Tubman’s parents, Ben and Rit Ross. The letter, which she had a literate friend in the North write and sign under an alias, began with random jargon, but at the end said “read my letter to the old folks, and give my love to them, and to tell my brothers to be always watching unto prayer, and when the good old ship of Zion comes along, to be ready to step aboard.” Since Jackson was already on thin ice for being suspected of aiding freedom seekers, white officials had to open, read, and clear the letter before Jackson could even see it. Thankfully, they passed it off as unclear rambling and let him read it, to which he told them it must not have been meant for him because it made no sense. But in truth, he knew exactly what it meant, and he told Tubman’s brothers to prepare to flee.

The three men were given passes, as expected, to travel to their parents’ cabin in Poplar Neck, below Preston. Ben Ross was technically free by this time, although still employed by his former enslaver, Anthony Thompson. Ben was well aware of his daughters’ plan to return and take her brothers to freedom, but they collectively decided not to tell Rit, for fear she would make a scene. In a very bittersweet situation, Harriet and her party of escapees sat silent in a corn storage shed and waited for dark, while Rit toiled just yards away making Christmas dinner and wondering what was taking her children so long to arrive. Ben wore a blindfold when he interacted with his children that day to uphold his honesty when he was inevitably questioned about whether he’d seen them. As planned, they fled that Christmas night on foot.

Tubman, Ben Jr., Robert, Henry, and Ben Jr.’s fiancée arrived at William Still’s anti-slavery office on December 29, 1854. From there, Tubman took her family all the way to Ontario, Canada, as that was the only way to ensure they could not be kidnapped and sent back into slavery. Still wrote physical descriptions of the freedom seekers in his journal, along with the new names they had decided to go by in freedom. He also wrote that their enslaver, Eliza Ann Brodess of the Brodess plantation in Cambridge, was “very delivish.”

Harriet Tubman was far from the only freedom seeker to use the holiday buzz to escape enslavement. If you enjoyed this article, I would also recommend doing some research into the escape plot of the Crafts, a man and wife who also fled around Christmas with a particularly unique strategy. But even if you don’t go out of your way to learn about this depressing era of history, I hope you’ll at least appreciate that your Christmas (hopefully) did not involve running hundreds of miles into the dark, cold unknown.

And in case you’re looking for the happy ending or wondering what happened to poor Rit, she did eventually get to see her children again in Canada after her own journey North, and was finally told why they never showed up to Christmas dinner.

A special thanks to the National Parks Service, Secrets of the Eastern Shore, the Washington Post, History.com, Ark Republic, multiple higher education institutions, and many other individuals and organizations who’s research, archives, and publications were used to compile this piece.