While Christmastime celebrations may seem to offer temporary respite from the divisive politics that have roiled American life for the past decades, Christmas traditions have long been political fodder. Indeed, “Lost Cause” accounts of enslaved Christmas experiences still have political consequences today—including for the MAGA movement and Donald Trump’s presidency.
The “Lost Cause” was a political project waged by white Southerners after the Civil War to venerate Confederate generals and the bravery of Confederate soldiers, while downplaying their treasonous effort to preserve and expand slavery in America by destroying the Union.
What is often overlooked, however, is that the “Lost Cause” has also been a tool to excuse and even glorify the Black slave labor system that the Confederacy fought to perpetuate, and that Christmas customs in the South before the Civil War have been consistently featured in that propaganda. Nostalgic descriptions of pre-Civil War Christmases on Southern plantations are just one of the ways Lost Cause proponents obscure the horrors of human bondage in Dixie, allowing politicians to tap into neo-Confederate rhetoric and policies to win the support of white Southern voters.
Following the Civil War, and especially after a temporary Reconstruction moment in which Black men gained the vote and won elected office, white southerners regained political power by the end of the 1870s. To bolster their authority, white southern men and women churned out a flood of publications—memoirs of pre-Civil War experiences, history books and articles, novels, short stories, poems, and speeches—delivering a very pernicious message: that slave life generally was enjoyable and healthy. The proof? The slaves’ obvious ecstasy during the holiday, evidenced by their fawning expressions of appreciation for their owners’ kindness and humaneness, especially the gifts they got from them.
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According to this propaganda, which took little account of African American perspectives, every Christmas, southern white “masters” and “mistresses” bestowed upon their Black workers incredibly lavish parties, rich foods, thoughtfully-selected presents, and freedom to travel wherever they wished nearby, while refraining from whipping or otherwise punishing them. These accounts portrayed enslaved people, regardless of plantation, experiencing a kind of nirvana for the entire Christmas period—utterly grateful for the generosity of their enslavers.
In reality, enslaved people were sold and whipped over the Christmas holiday. But these warped stories conveyed the impression that southern slavery was a humane system of human relations year round. For instance, according to many memoirs by former enslavers published after Reconstruction, come Christmas morning each year before the Civil War, masters and household slaves always jointly participated in a playful game in which they competed to be the first ones to yell the phrase “Christmas Gif’” at each other, with the loser having to cough up a gift of some kind to the winner. Afterwards on Christmas morning, in these vignettes, slaves commonly wished owners a merry Christmas and long life as they were doled out eggnog treats on the mansion verandah.
Indeed, and here’s where folklore comes in, the length of the Christmas holiday for slaves depended on the burning of specially selected “Yule logs” that enslaved people selected. According to this legend, the log must burn in two before the master could call off the festivities and send his laborers back to the fields. This process might consume anywhere from a week to a month, since slaves cleverly chose hardwoods like gum trees rather than rapid-burning softwoods for cutting as Yule logs, and then soaked their logs in swamps and streams so they would burn slowly.
Allegedly, enslavers colluded in it, purposely overlooking the trickery even when they caught wind of what was going on. Others simply were so dimwitted they never realized they had been fooled. The important thing is that the enslavers never got angry and whipped slaves for these pranks, and sometimes they would even laugh about their own victimhood—all, of course, giving the impression that these enslavers, who considered Black human beings their legal “property” and sold and traded them at will, were at heart “good guys.”
In truth, there is apparently no eyewitness account—and possibly as few as three questionable second-hand accounts—from before the Civil War that this Yule Log custom ever took hold on a single Southern plantation much less across the entire South.
It is possible that not even one enslaved person ever got an extra day of the Christmas holiday because a Yule log burned extra stubbornly. Yet, the tale, likely because of its cuteness and humor, has become so embedded in our national folklore that it pops up not only on innumerable web sites, but also during guided tours of southern historic plantations and in Christmas holiday books, cookbooks, children’s books, scholarly books about slavery, and in all sorts of miscellaneous and sometimes very unexpected publications. It can even be found in a Christmas back issue (December 1979) of the Journal of the U.S. Army Intelligence & Security Command.
It’s a reminder of how insidiously pervasive the Lost Cause has been in American life. And it helps clarify why Trump supported “both sides” during the violence in Charlottesville in 2017 and why early this year, he came out for reversal of a 2022 renaming of a U. S. Army fort in North Carolina, so that it would once again support its original designation honoring Confederate general Braxton Bragg. The Confederacy, the myth tries to convince Americans, wasn’t that bad.
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There is no way to measure how many fewer votes he would have won had he never championed that myth. But that ideology’s continuing hold on the Southern states almost certainly plays a role in the region’s political leanings.
What is certain is that Donald Trump would not be our incoming president without Southern backing, and that mythologies about Christmases on southern slave plantations are embedded in the popular cultures of the former Confederacy. These mythologies contribute to the ongoing “anti-woke” crusade against teaching the realities of slavery, which dangerously misinforms Americans about the actual history of human bondage. But they have been a part of our political world and popular culture since the late nineteenth century, and Christmas is an appropriate time to cast a critical eye on these legends. They have consequences.
Robert E. May is Professor of History Emeritus at Purdue University. He is the author of the just released Debunking the Yule Log Myth: The Disturbing History of a Plantation Legend (Roman & Littlefield Press).
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
