The Yuletide season was an unquiet time throughout the nation on the brink of the Civil War ”“ and not just among black Americans. Judging from period newspapers, Christmas 150 years ago was just as politicized as it is now, if not more so. With the nation splitting in half (South Carolina had seceded on Dec. 20), each side of the Mason-Dixon Line tried to claim the holiday as its own.
In the South, the Augusta Chronicle accused the Yankee Puritans of being joyless Christmas-haters: “Our broad Union is divided between the descendant of the Norman Cavalier reverencing Christmas, and the descendant of the Saxon Puritan repudiating it ”¦ Let us hear no more of a “Cotton Confederation” but let us have instead (what may sound like a jest, but which has something of seriousness in it) a Confederation of the Christmas States.”
Meanwhile, several hundred miles closer to the North Pole, the same day’s Philadelphia Inquirer called Christmas a “good old Yankee custom” and added: “If Charleston growls and, playing the Scrooge, would curse our Christmas carol, let us hope that the Marley’s Ghost of her old patriotism will soften her by and by.”
The St. Louis NPR affiliate had a piece with the curator of the Lincoln Library in Springfield (our fair See city), who stated that in the 1860s, American society had not fully transitioned to an acceptance of celebrating Christmas, although the Puritan holdouts were in the minority, and considered to be old-fashioned. Lincoln was one of those holdouts. When he was a member of the State Legislature, he regularly voted against resolutions for the Legislature to be in recess, and when on the losing side of this issue (as he invariably was) would spend the day reading and catching up on work.