Behind the Christmas Tree by Stephen Nissenbaum

Author:Stephen Nissenbaum [Nissenbaum, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-101-91151-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

IN HER PUBLISHED ACCOUNT, Harriet Martineau took pains to conceal all this, or at least to dissociate it from the story of little Charley’s Christmas tree. She did not even identify the Follens by name in her account, referring to them only as “Charley’s father and mother.”18 But it should be clear to us that Martineau’s experience of what she believed to be the introduction of the Christmas tree into America was actually embedded in a thick matrix of political controversy. Little Charley’s Christmas tree was a carefully planned moment of domestic peace in the midst of crisis and scandal.

Those connections make for an interesting story, and one that has not been told. But from another angle they point to broader developments. First, they confirm something that historians have recently come to notice: There were important similarities between the antislavery sensibility and the new attitude toward children. Abolitionists and educational reformers shared a joint empathy for people who were powerless to resist the wrath of those who wielded authority over them—slaves and children, respectively. (Both types of reformers had a particular abhorrence of the use of the lash as a form of punishment.)19

Second, we can view the juxtaposition of the two stories (the Christmas tree and the political crisis) as a telling instance of another phenomenon that historians have been pointing to: the way that middle-class people in the early nineteenth century went about creating for themselves a private space, radically cut off from the pressures of the world outside and centered around the happiness of children.20 In fact, what Charles Follen did in 1835 is similar in that sense to what Clement Clarke Moore had done more than a decade earlier in his domestic idyll, “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” although his reasons—Moore was a reactionary, Follen a radical—were profoundly different. But both men had reason to feel alienated from their respective communities, and both responded by turning inward, to their own children, and using Christmas as the occasion for doing so.

It is no coincidence that radical abolitionists were in the vanguard of the new child-centered Christmas. Two years earlier, in 1833, the Antislavery Society had formed a children’s chorus, the Boston Garrison Juvenile Choir (its members may have been African-Americans), which gave a public concert on Christmas Day. One of the numbers it performed was “The Cradle Song”; another was titled “The Sugar Plums.” And beginning in 1834 (and continuing each year for more than two decades) the Garrisonians held an annual Antislavery Fair to raise money for the cause—invariably, on the days just before Christmas. In 1836 several abolitionists presented Garrison’s own 10-month-old son George with shoes, stockings, mittens, and “a very beautiful gown” that had been offered at that year’s fair. “Pretty well for the young fanatic!” the proud father noted privately—and with uncharacteristically self-deprecating wit.21

In fact, according to a report published in Garrison’s magazine The Liberator, the very first of these Antislavery Fairs (the one in 1834) displayed an “evergreen shrub” that bore another witty

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