← Civics & Coffee: A History Podcast
Civics & Coffee: A History Podcast
History Detective: Debunking the Yule Log Myth with Dr. Robert May
00:57:18
Loading summary
Transcript25 lines
- [00:01]
A
Welcome to Civics and Coffee, a history podcast. The show all about United States history delivered to you in the time it takes to enjoy your morning cup of coffee. I'm your host, Alicia, a historian trained in United States history with a passion for telling both the known and unknown parts of America's past. So grab your coffee and get ready for some bite sized history. Hey, everyone. Welcome back. Have you ever read a historical text and wondered how the historian came up with their topic or how they came to their conclusions? This Week's conversation with Dr. Robert May dives into all of that and more. Settle in and enjoy the conversation.
- [00:48]
B
Hello, everyone.
- [00:50]
A
Joining me today is Dr. Robert May. He is a professor emeritus of history at Purdue University and is known for his books about the effort of pre Civil War Southerners to expand slavery into Latin America. He has written several books, one of which was a finalist for the prestigious Gilder Luhrmann Lincoln Book Prize. His latest book, debunking the Yule Log Myth, takes a detective approach to uncovering the truth behind a historic legend, which will be the focus of our conversation today. Welcome, Dr. May.
- [01:25]
B
Thank you for having me. It's good to be here.
- [01:27]
A
Thank you so much for coming on. Let's dive right into this fantastic book. What is the Yule Log Myth and what prompted your decision to investigate it?
- [01:37]
B
Okay. The Yule Log Myth is a story. And the story says that at Christmas times, the slaves, before the Civil War, the enslaved people in the south had a marvelous holiday. And the marvelous holiday included all sorts of stuff. It included an unusual amount of freedom to go wherever they wanted. They could go into a city, they could visit relatives on faraway plantations, all sorts of freedom to travel. They also got all sorts of gifts from their enslavers. They got parties thrown for them, dances with decorations, live music, of course, and big barbecues and many Christmas gifts of all kinds. And. And sure, most of them were things that they would have needed just to survive. Winter clothing, blankets, things of that sort. But some of them were frivolous. Some masters and mistresses even went into town to buy toys for the slave kids and things like that. So they had this wonderful slave Christmas. And the best part of it all was the time they got off from work. Because after all, we should never forget that enslavement in virtually all countries is based on heavy labor, heavy manual labor. And they got a long time off. What I was interested in, and the reason I got interested in this was because I wrote a prior book that looked at Christmas as a whole in the south it's called Yuletide and Dixie. And when I got done with that book, I kept encountering this tale about how their. The length of their Christmas holiday was determined. And according to this tale, the slaves were given permission to pick a yule log to burn, usually in the master's fireplace in the kitchen or the hallway or bedroom or wherever. And their Christmas was determined by how long this one log burned. And it was known as the Yule log, which is a descendant of English culture in particular, but European country. And it would. It would burn. And they would see to it. The slaves would see to it that it would burn as long as possible. And they did this essentially by tricking the master. The master. Since. Since slaves did all the work, the masters would assign the slaves of cutting the yule log the job of cutting the yule log. And so the slaves would go out into the woods and they'd find the greenest wood that they could. And they. They would cut down the hardest wood they could. They would always look for something like a gum tree, which is hardwood and takes a long time to burn. And so they've got green wood. Cause it's just been cut and it's a hardwood to boot. And they would measure the log size they needed beforehand by going to the master's bedroom, because they wanted to make sure it was maximum size with just a little bit of wedge room. So they could get it into the fireplace. And so it's a huge log. And then they would soak it in the nearest body of water. It might be a swamp, a pond, a river, a stream, whatever. And they would soak it for a lengthy amount of time. And the tales vary. Sometimes they say they soaked it for a few weeks or a few days, sometimes for the entire year. Literally, they would cut it basically the day after the Christmas season ended, and they would soak it for the whole year. And then it would burn. And according to most legends, it burned for about a week. So it got them past New Year's. But in some cases, people claimed it went for a couple weeks or a month and they had wonderful vacations. The masters, of course, had to sacrifice their labor during this period, taking a little bit of a financial hit. And that's the tale. And I ran into it and I treated it briefly in Yulet, Tide and Dixie. But I was really curious about the tale. I couldn't say it didn't happen because I had no proof that it didn't happen. But I was skeptical from the start because all the evidence cited in the books about it were from sources dating well after the Civil War, decades after the Civil War, and of course, decades after the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which emancipated the slave. So I was very, very suspicious of it. And when I was done with my previous book, I decided what. What I needed to do was really explore it and search for sources just on this topic, really, to figure out if the story was true. And so that's what I've been doing. I've been hunting down the real story. Did slaves burn Yule logs and did they get extra days of vacation because of it? And I decided to go from the colonial years, following the early settlements, right up to the present. And I've. I've got to say what really piqued my interest in this story was how widely it's been disseminated. I have run into this tale in cookbooks, in travel books, in Christmas holiday books. I've run into it in professional articles and books about Christmas by professional scholars, and I've also run into it in encyclopedias. I've seen it promoted at historical sites. Even Williamsburg has talked about the Yule log traditions. Many historical sites ran special ceremonies where the slaves would bring in the yule logs and the docents would tell the visitors all about the Yule logs and how they determine these happy, wonderful Christmas times for slaves. So it was a combination of suspicion and the fact that I had already been exposed to this legend. It made me want to look into it closely. And I've got to say that part of my suspicion derived from the fact that I was aware of other legends about enslavement that simply aren't true. The most obvious one was a decade or two ago, people started promoting this idea that the slaves escaped by using quilts. That is to say, they used quilts to access the underground railroad. People on the underground railroad, usually other blacks, but sympathetic whites, would hang quilts. Slaves would sew quilts that would have designs with signals on them as to where they could go to find the next safe house. And there. There really isn't any proof to this at all. And it just seemed like I wanted to do this. I wanted to play detective.
- [08:37]
A
Well, and that kind of segues perfectly into my. My next question is you. You kind of lay the foundation in the opening pages of your book about, you know, what drew you into this research. And you, you do. You refer to the layers of mythology that underlay our historical understandings and public debates. And, you know, you. You've. You referenced the quilts. Is there other places that we maybe see this as it relates to American history?
- [09:05]
B
Well, we see myths all over the place. Some of them are small, and some myths have partial truth to them. I mean, some verify the adage, where there's smoke, there's fire. And so, for instance, there's the John Henry legend that he beat the steam drill and the tunnel and all that. And one of my favorite songs growing up. And a historian named Scott Nelson decided to investigate it, and he found out that there really was a John Henry, and he even found out where he was buried, and he found the whole story of John Henry. So some myths are based on at least partial truth, but many others are totally fabricated. And there. And there are many big myths. The big myth that this was an empty continent, so we simply settled it instead of took it over. And that the indigenous peoples who somehow were displaced, that they were really just savage roamers who didn't cultivate the land, who had no culture, et cetera, et cetera, and therefore they deserve to be uprooted, is the underlying logic of all that. Well, we know a lot more about indigenous culture now, but those were. The kind of myths were very prevalent when I was growing up. There are myths about the south, of course, the big myth being that the Civil War was caused by states rights and had nothing to do with slavery. But somehow Southerners just absorb states rights as their ideology, and it was kind of genetic in them, which is just totally absurd. And all you have to do is look at what's going on today. Right now, you have states rights being proclaimed the most in states like California and Minnesota that are resisting the Trump immigration policies. So there's nothing intrinsically Southern about states rights. But it was a nice way to. To hide the fact that white Southerners wanted to preserve slavery forever in America and that they wanted to expand it to the west, and as I've written about, to Latin America. So that's another one. So that's. That's really what inspired the book. And my thinking, well, and then.
- [11:22]
A
So you're diving into this. You're. You're kind of culling through the archives. You're looking through the research. And one of the individuals that you research in your book is Daniel Pratt. And so who was he, and why did he factor so heavily in your research?
- [11:39]
B
No one today, except for some professional historians and maybe a few people in. In central Alabama, have ever heard of Daniel Pratt. But the fact is he actually gets into this mythology, too, because the. The big myth about the south is that one of the reasons the planners Were kind to their slaves was that they. They. They didn't care about the money. And so if you don't care about the money, if your. Your goal is just to live the good life, sit on a recliner on your porch, you know, that kind of thing, and rock back and forth, if that's your image of what planters were then, and that's what the region was about then, they didn't have to work the slaves all that hard because they didn't have to squeeze profits out of them. Like to make another modern analogy, think of Amazon today and how it handles many of its workers. And so, you know, where. Where does this all fit in? Well, the truth of the matter is that the south had much more industry than the stereotype holds, and that the capitalist ethic prevailed far more than we would think in the. In the South. And so you have this. And the south, in fact, was something like the third most industrial country, I think, in the world. If you treated the south as a country, it was very industrialized, despite all the plantations. And so you have factories throughout the South. And Alabama had one of the biggest ones. This New Englander named Daniel Pratt comes down there and he sets up a factory town that was sort of like the new England textile villages. And it had a grist mill and a sawmill and a blacksmith shop, and it had the biggest cotton gin factory in the whole south. And that's a really important industry because it's the cotton gin that made the profits, that enabled southern white people to ship their cotton all over the world and make big bucks. So Pratt sets up this industrial village. Now, it enters my story by serendipity. I wouldn't have thought of checking anything out about Prattville, the name of this factory town in Alabama, had it not been that I was doing a search of newspapers before the civil war to find out really what was the newspaper closest to the civil war that even hinted at a yule log story? And by the way, almost every yule log story comes from after the civil war. But there were three documents I found that date from before the civil War. And I don't think any of them prove it because they're all secondhand sources. They're not from someone who says, I saw a yule log burning somewhere and that it gave the slaves their holidays. But at any rate, I was looking at this column about Christmas in a Kansas newspaper that reprinted a report from an Illinois newspaper. An Illinois editor had gone on a southern travel trip and was reporting on it the winter before the civil war started. And he's down there in November and December of 1859, and he visits Prattville. And he basically says, the people down here tell me that the slaves get a Christmas holiday as long as the yule log burns and that they soak the logs or something like that. He never says who told him this story. He never says whether it was more than one person who told him the story. He never says anything about it, but in a few sentences lays out the legend. And so he becomes important just because I try to be honest with my readers. And as you've indicated, I try to kind of take them through my research process step by step. And I say, okay, so there are three pieces of evidence before the Civil War, but they're pretty flimsy. And they all occur between, I think it's 1847 and 1861 when the war starts. And this is three pieces of evidence, none of them attributed, none of them documented. When you consider that slavery has been going on In America since 1619, we're dealing with two and a half centuries basically before the Civil War. And in this whole time, I can't find any other evidence. And since the book's come out, no one's written me and said, boy, you're really stupid. I've seen this in all sorts of documents before the Civil War. And I read lots of planters diaries. I read travelers accounts, people who went to the south on holiday or to write a book. And so they did a travel journal, all sorts of newspaper evidence. I looked at overseers journals. I looked at planters instructions to overseers, which sometimes said how long they should give them for Christmas. I had never seen it. So I try to be honest. I tell my readers, yeah, there are these three really weak sources before the Civil War, even if they're honest, even if somehow in Prattville there were a few planters who gave slaves holidays, we don't know that those holidays went on for more than a few years before the Civil War. You're dealing at the time of the Civil war with nearly 4 million slaves. And if five or 10 of them got Christmas holidays, according to yule log, which I actually doubt, I'm not sure they did, but let's say they're five or 10 or even a hundred. This is just real chicken feet. It's like a speck of sand on a beach. 50 or 100 of them got their Christmases by eulogy, well, more power to them. But I think it's. It's totally irrelevant.
- [17:50]
A
And so kind of going along this idea of More than likely, this is a tall tale. What role did Southern white women play play in perpetuating the Yule log story?
- [18:03]
B
Okay, so the Yule log story, I really date 1877. I date it to 1877 because that year a poem was published in a Virginia, in a Maryland newspaper, rather. And it was then widely disseminated, widely reprinted for decades. And it was about a slave named Uncle Ned. Uncle Ned is on this plantation, and what it's about his big laugh. And he gets a big laugh. Well, how does he get his big laugh? Totally fools his master. He is given the Yule log assignment, gets some slaves to cut down a Yule log. They soak it, and it burns so slowly that the masters gets frustrated because he wants to put his slaves back to work. And so in the poem, eventually, Uncle Ned goes to the back of a cabin and starts laughing about how he had fooled the master. Of course, you can't laugh if you're an enslaved person in the south in front of the enslaver, because that's considered surliness. It's considered anger. It's bellicosity. You might get yourself sold down river. You might get your family broken up over it. You had to be careful when you got your laughs in. So he laughs in private. But meanwhile, the master is fuming. And finally, the master has a plan. At Christmas, it was very common for the masters, unlike other times of the year, to give enslaved people as much booze as they wanted to drink. This master decides he's going to get Uncle Ned totally plastered. So he gets Ned plastered. And then he says, now, Ned, you know the log's been burning a long time. I want you to tell me how you did it. And Ned fesses up, and he basically tells him how they soak the log and so on and so forth. Well, this poem was written by a Confederate veteran, and it sort of starts the thing rolling. You get quite a few Yule log stories in the 1890s, some in the 1880s, and then quite a few in the early 20th century. And they keep going for a long time. I think the most important one after World War II was in 1956, when Harnett Kane wrote his Southern Christmas book. Harnett Cain's written a lot of absurdly undocumented books, so he's just great at telling legends about the Old South. At any rate, this Confederate soldier writes the Uncle Ned poem. But what I noticed was most of the Yule log stories after that, I'd say at least two thirds of them, maybe three Quarters of them were by women. Now some of them were in the form of memoirs. Women who claimed they had experienced yule log occasions before the Civil War or that their mothers or fathers or grandparents told them about this. But two thirds to three quarters of them were by women. A lot of them were memoirs, but a lot of them were short stories or novellas. They went. And so the thing was, why would women write these stories? And if you get into the literature on the Lost Cause and women after the Civil War, you have to remember that anything that make slavery look good is an indirect way of glorifying the Confederacy. Because ex Confederates did not want to admit that they were evil, unethical, sordid people. They wanted to claim that they fought the war for political principles like states rights and local defense. And they kind of usually brushed over enslavement as the cause of the Civil War. Well, the Yulog story plays into that. It's kind of a pleasant tale. And at this time, starting with Reconstruction, in some ways they were more vocally pro Confederate than men who wrote about it. You have to remember that after the Civil War, if men spoke out and there were Union troops around, they might get in trouble for trading or writing pro Confederate literature or propaganda or speeches or what have you. Women were more likely to get a pass from Union occupiers when they said things that were pro Confederate or wrote things that were pro Confederate. You also have to remember that women before the Civil War often maintained family documents like the family Bible, and made inscriptions in them. They were allowed to get involved in historical work. And after the Civil War, they were allowed to be public speakers. They were allowed to, to be authors at a time when many, when they were losing much of their access to the workplace, they could be schoolteachers. I mean, there were certain things they could do. But during the Civil War, they played an important part in the war and had worked in Confederate factories and so on and so forth, all the nursing and so on. And some of those opportunities dry up during Reconstruction and afterwards. Some of them wrote for income and they also got satisfaction. This was one way of establishing their self worth, was speaking out for their people, their native region as they looked upon it, and so on. And many of them have self indoctrinated themselves to believe that enslavement was good. I mean, I think when you get into a bad cause, and on top of that, the bad cause is traitorous. And really Southerners were very fortunate that none of them were executed for treason. After the Civil War, not a single Southerner was executed for the crime of treason. You can get where this is going, but at any rate, Southern women take up this story. But the most important figures in this are Southern women. And the best example I can give is a woman named Sarah Rebecca Cameron, or Rebecca. She usually went by Rebecca. Rebecca. And I bring her up because she wrote a piece for the Ladies Home Journal. Part of the problem of evaluating myths and how they get disseminated is you have to look at the means of dissemination and the sources of dissemination. And it's very important that she. Sarah Rebecca Cameron publishes her reminiscence of the Yule Log story in Ladies Home Journal for the Christmas season. Now, I would guess the Christmas issue probably sold more than other issues. And Ladies Home Journal was one of the most popular magazines in America, and it still exists. And here she is in 1891 for the Christmas issue, and she writes this wonderful memoir, and it tells all these stories about Christmas on her grandfather's plantation. She makes it very clear in it's her grandfather's plantation on the Cape Fear River, Lower Cape Fear river in North Carolina. And we know she did have a grandfather who had a plantation buquoy on the Cape Fear River. And she talks about the Yule log, and she talks about how the slaves all hunted for the Yule log and soaked it and brought it in. And these slaves sing the song. Christmas comes but once a year, Orang Durango and stuff like that. And it's. It's. It's really colorful. And she tells about all the Christmas customs. But she's very important in disseminating this tale. And it gets republished and it gets cited. So other people, when they tell the same tale, other women. I found one case of an Arkansas woman who disseminated it and basically said, all my evidence. She was basically plagiarizing. She said, all my evidence comes from Sarah Cameron's story. It's the only thing she cited. So I don't think really the Yule Log story would have stuck had it not been for Southern white women after the Civil War, anxious to defend their region, anxious to portray slavery not necessarily as good as. But as you may, none of them that I can think of actually say we should reinstitute slavery, that if we ever get power again, we should enslave people. They don't quite go that far, but they paint such a rosy picture of Christmas that you almost wish you were there. And that goes for both the white families and the black families. It's a good time. Everyone's happy, everyone's singing everyone's exchanging gifts.
- [27:09]
A
So we have these individual women kind of elevating the story. How did the United Daughters of the Confederacy help Southern women elevate the Yule log myth?
- [27:22]
B
Well, the stories already out there when the United Daughters of the Confederacy is founded in 1894, and these are women related to Confederate veterans who are even more fanatic about defending the south and why it went to war. And so they found chapters all over the south, lots of chapters. Thousands and thousands of memories of memories. And they meet and they have speeches, and they have state conventions, and they have national conventions. And these stories get shared. And a lot of the women who disseminate the Yule log stories are, in fact, connected with the Daughters. United Daughters of the Confederacy. And they're presidents of chapters, even they're chapter historians. They give talks. I think Sarah Cameron. Sarah Rebecca Cameron's an excellent illustration of this. She becomes a president of a. Of a UDC chapter and so on. And she's very active. She goes to conventions. And in fact, her two sisters. One of her two sisters. She's two sisters, Emma and. And Anna. And Anna also tells Yule log stories, which, by the way, I don't think Sarah said it was these stories come from their grandfather's plantation, but their grandfather was dead by the time they were both born, and so she claimed she had observed these things on her grandfather's plantations. I really am doubtful. Maybe stories were passed on to her and she was just embellishing. At any rate, they were all involved in the United Daughters of the Confederacy in one way or another. But Anna Cameron also told those similar Yule log stories. So these women help spread it. And I think they're very important, because when these stories eventually get into African American culture, you have to realize that they've been circulating for decades in white culture in books and magazine articles that get widely read. And although I'm sure the overwhelming number of readers for this stuff were white, I'm sure that many black Southerners read these stories in one form or another.
- [30:01]
A
Yeah, well, that actually kind of segues to my next question, which was, I know I was kind of surprised to read the next name, which was, how does Booker T. Washington factor into the evolution of the Yule log story?
- [30:16]
B
Well, one of the things that I found most important was that I couldn't find a single black source that verified this tale or even mentioned it. It would have been helpful if I wanted to vindicate the myth, to find a black source, if not from before the Civil War, from soon after the Civil war, when memories of enslavement were fresh. And I read Frederick Douglass and I read all sorts of other accounts by blacks before the Civil War. And I did this for my first book. I never saw any reference in a black source to Yule logs. And once I decided to really study this problem, I decided to cast my net more. So I did digital searches of black newspapers. For instance, before the Civil War, we the. The stereotype is that all blacks in America before the Civil War were illiterate slaves. And we all know the story. It was against the law to teach slaves how to read and write. Well, that's. There's again smoke in that case, but there's not fire. The truth is that some slaves learned how to read and write, and some of them became amazingly articulate, like Frederick Douglass, who was so articulate that many attendees to his speeches felt he was too articulate, that people wouldn't believe in print that he had actually said these things. There were all these African American slaves who expressed themselves verbally and in print before the Civil War, but there were also hundreds of thousands of black people who lived in the north as free men and women. And they told stories and they edited newspapers and so on. And so we have quite a few black newspapers from before the Civil War. And some of them talked about slavery. But I couldn't find any mention of Yule logs, that is to say of the legend that they were soaked and that they determined enslaved Christmas experiences. When I did see Yule logs mentioned at all, which was very rarely, I really don't think you logs were on anyone's mind before the Civil War, for the most part. So there are no black sources that I can find. After the Civil War, even more enslaved people published their. Or formerly enslaved people published reminiscences about their times in the old south and their treatment and that kind of thing. You have more and more memoirs, but still, like the ones before the Civil War, none of them mentioned black newspapers are founded in much greater numbers. I think in. I think the year was 1898. Maybe there were like 88, maybe it was 88, but there were 88 black newspapers founded in one year. That's a lot of black newspapers, a lot of newsprint. And yet if you do a digital search, at least you're not going to come up with eulog stories about enslaved people. And so. So here no one said anything about black people and enslavement. No blacks are riding on it until all of a sudden in 1901, in the 20th century, Booker T. Washington writes this autobiography, up from Slavery. In his time, he was beyond any doubt the most important black American between the death of Frederick Douglass and the rise of W.E.B. du Bois influence and the founding of the NAACP. And Booker T. Washington was the principal of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. And he parlayed this into great national prestige as president of the Negro Business League and so on and so forth. He was considered the spokesman for the entire African American people in America. Teddy Roosevelt consulted with him on patronage, who he should appoint, what. What blacks he should appoint to office. I mean, it was amazing, the power this man had. And at any rate, in his autobiography, he says that the slaves got the Yule Log holidays. And you have to realize that his autobiography was one of the most important books written by any American in the 20th century, white or black. When the Modern Library ranked the most important books of the 20th century, it put Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery at number three. And so. And that came out in, like, I think it was 1999. So right before the turn of the century. So at any rate, he's very important. And this is republished over and over again. There are incredible number of editions of up from Slavery. It was kind of required reading for many people. It's a charming book. It's kind of a rags to riches. It's a classic rags to riches story. And then to top it off, about six years later, he publishes a magazine article in Suburban Life, which goes even further and brings in the soaking story and gives a lot more detail on the Yule Log. And the Suburban Life story has been reprinted over and over again so that it keeps resurfacing, so that the Booker T. National Monument, for instance, has done Yule Log programming for years. I don't know if they still do. I've tried to inform them about my book, and I don't know whether it's changed their programming in any way. So I think it's extremely significant in the sense that he is the first African American, as far as I know, to tell this story all those years. Now we're dealing with what, over 300, almost 300 years of black history in North America, and no one's told the story from a black perspective. Finally, Booker T. Washington does. Now, the story is repeated afterwards. It's repeated by tour guides at black historic sites in the South. It's repeated during the New Deal by a few, two or three interviewees of the Federal Writers Project and those of your listeners who follow the revolution, you might say, in black historiography. Since let's say the 1950s, when supposedly there were no black sources for black perspectives. Well, all these interviews, the New Deal interviewers, who are mostly writers, went out in the Federal Writers Project. One of the ways the New Deal kept people at work during the Great Depression was sent them out on these interviews. So they interviewed nearly. I think it was something like. I think it was like 2,200 enslaved, formerly once enslaved people who were still alive in the 1930s and asked them what it was like. And they had all these questions they asked them. They often had to do with Christmas. And two of the interviewees gave detailed explanations of how the slaves at Christmas time went out and soaked the Yule log and tricked their masters and so on and so forth. My point is that no one told this story earlier, and I suspect I can't prove that these people did not know the story directly, even though they give the impression they did, that it happened on the plantations where they were enslaved. My suspicion is that they may very likely have either read Booker T. Washington's autobiography or heard about it from someone. You know, when we tell stories, when we tell tales, especially colorful tales, we tend to embellish. I can't prove that the black people who told the story to Federal Writers Project interviewers were lying. I wouldn't accuse them of lying. They may not have even. They may have been telling the truth. Even if they were telling the truth, I can't believe that. It's very significant. Because even if two people remembered that happening on their plantations before the Civil War, the fact is we have. I don't know if it's thousands, but certainly hundreds of planters, diaries and overseers, journals and that kind of thing that actually say in them how many days they give the slaves for Christmas. And they never say. Oh, but it varies. It all depends on how the long the Yule log burns. No, they say, I give, and they always use the word give. It's nothing that's taken from them by a Yule log. I give my slaves three days for Christmas or four days. Three or four days was the standard amount. And it didn't vary by year, not very much in most cases. It was the same every year, and the master decided on it as a matter of policy, had to give some time off or the enslaved people would probably rebel. Everyone has to let off their frustrations. And it was wise policy. You got more labor out of your enslaved people if you gave them some time off, but you didn't let them determine how much time they got off and let them trick you year after year. And they just don't give any evidence that that's the way it was done. And so I think, even if there were a few instances, as I've said before, that yule log somehow performed their Christmas magic. It's so minuscule, you can't even comprehend how few slaves probably had yule log experiences at Christmas. So I try to get at that.
- [40:22]
A
So, as you said, based on your historical research, the evidence just isn't there that this. That this is an actual true story. So why do you think that this yule log myth continues relatively unchallenged?
- [40:39]
B
Well, I think the main reason is, first of all, you have to like it. I found it lovable when I first heard it. For anyone who's sympathetic to the viewpoint that slavery was not so bad and that we should allow those Confederate monuments to lord over our streets freely and in our parks, you know, that they're good because Confederate white people were defending their homes. It had nothing to do with race oppression and so on and so forth, if that's your perspective. These tales are actually wonderful because they show very generous masters. The masters are giving the enslaved people long holidays. And on top of that, in some of these stories, the masters actually discover what their workers are up to, and they never whip them or punish them. They often laugh. And so they show they have a sense of humor, that they're human beings, they're decent people. So I think that's part of the appeal. Why would a white person object to it? Right. At least someone who supports the quasi Confederate point of view, neo Confederate point of view. And on the other hand, if you're a black American, they're also somewhat appealing because you show the black person really outwitting the master, outsmarting the master, and getting a little vengeance, a little comeuppance. So I think it's appealing to almost everyone who reads it. And we like folk tales. They weather well, I think, in a sense, I don't think we should draw the wrong conclusion from this. I wouldn't want anyone to interpret my book as suggesting even that blacks didn't trick their masters. Blacks tricked their masters plenty. They destroyed equipment. They did work slowdowns. They stole stuff from the mansions, from the storehouses. They did all sorts of things that there were ways of fighting back. And, of course, they sometimes rebelled. And there was enough fear of rebellion in the south that on Christmas holidays, many masters, in fact, didn't give slaves Christmas time off at all. They didn't even give them the three or four days that they usually did because they were afraid maybe that year there's going to be a slave rebellion. We'd better keep them under lock and key, basically keep our eyes on them so they don't go off and. And slash our throats. So there was plenty of black resistance. And that gets into black folklore with the trickster tales and that kind of stuff, the Jack tales and all that. But my point is that when you study history, you have to study it realistically. And if the evidence leads you in a direction that perhaps doesn't feed into a storyline, you have to follow those roads, even if it makes you a little bit uncomfortable. While I don't enjoy destroying a pleasant legend that's still being told at historic sites and on tours and in books and encyclopedias, but, you know, one thing I've found in my years as a historian is that some of the things I take for granted that I think are being told me by authority figures simply have no basis. When I used to go to parks and historic sites and park rangers would relate the story of a battle or the story of a historic home, I literally believed everything they told me. I assumed that they had studied it thoroughly and knew everything that they were talking about. But you know something? The park rangers at a place like the Booker T. Washington National Monument have read Booker T. Autobiography. You know, they get their information from somewhere and a lot of it simply isn't true. And when I became a professional historian, one of the disillusioning things was that I started realizing that. I started realizing how unreliable encyclopedias and reference works are. I was asked to write encyclopedia articles on subjects I knew relatively little about. And I found that encyclopedia articles might be gone over fairly thoroughly and fact checked to some degree, but you never, as a writer for an encyclopedia had to cite a source. And so they don't have footnotes. So if you look at the best works on slavery, they have footnotes. You look at Edward Baptist's book the Half Has Never Been Told, books like that that have come out in recent, but even starting back with some of the best early books on slavery, like Kenneth Stamps, the Peculiar Institution, they always have footnotes. They have to say where they got their evidence from. But almost all the stuff on Yule Logs doesn't cite, none of it cites anything that's a source from actual slave times. And that's very discouraging to me that we take these things as the veritable truths when they're really problematic. And the more you look into these things, sometimes you come up with disillusionment
- [46:43]
A
well, and what do you hope readers take away from your book?
- [46:47]
B
Well, I would hope they would most especially take a critical approach to their reading to their historic site visitations and things like that. They should ask docents questions. They should put them on the spot a bit and get them to admit if they don't really have proof of things that sound problematic. So on one level, I would hope for that. And of course that means absorbing the media. I have great respect, for instance, for Ken Burns work, and I just saw his. His series on the American Revolution, and it's wonderful. But I also co authored an article critiquing his Civil War show, particularly the first episode, which was on the causes of the Civil War, because that's the period I know best. And I felt it fell short and was misleading in many ways. To give you one obvious example, the coming of the Civil War has a lot to say about Frederick Douglass, but it doesn't say anything about Stephen Douglas, the man responsible really in many ways, for not only the Kansas Nebraska act, but the Compromise of 1850. And it was Stephen Douglas's decisions about territorial expansion that had a lot to do with why we had a Civil War in 1861. Even our best history media is problematic. They don't have the time to cite sources, and in fact, they don't even have the time to give you always the kind of complexity that you need because they're compressed. The wonderful thing about Burns is that he does try to give you some context and offsetting points of view and offsetting stories because he has the hours of media time to expand on his themes and to contextualize them and to nuance them and to deepen them. So I do admire him. I don't want to give the wrong impression, but I think we should all take a critical approach to what we see on tv. And then that, of course, extends even more to TV news and to, of course, the web. And now we have AI and all the historical distortions that are. It's so easy to disseminate mistruths or untruths these days. And we should be very skeptical of what we read. And of course, I have a personal interest in what I would call debunking the Confederate myth. This was not a good cause. I started writing op EDS a long, long time ago. I really believe I was one of the first to start denouncing the displaying of Confederate flags in public settings. And I've always believed that while there's nothing wrong, we should try to remember the Confederacy accurately and its history accurately. We shouldn't make these people into heroes. And when we put up statues in the middle of our towns, we're telling people this is a cause to worship. And we should think about how horrible slavery was, the whippings, the breakups of family, and how few slaves were treated truly humanely. You know, that changes your perspective entirely. And so to give you one final thought on this, I wouldn't want Americans to celebrate Robert E. Lee. The question we should ask is, why are we celebrating this man? And the reason that he has been celebrated in so many different ways in our past, in literature and monuments and so on and so forth, is because he was a Confederate. He was the head of the Confederate Army. He was a very brave general, and so on and so forth. But he was fighting to preserve slavery. That's the main reason we're celebrating him now. He was a great Mexican War junior officer, and he did a lot for the nation in the U.S. mexican War. Now, that in itself is a debatable thing, whether we should be proud of the U.S. mexican War. But the fact is Robert E. Lee was serving the country in the Mexican War, and he did the country proud. Now, if these statues were going up to celebrate Robert E. Lee's role in the Mexican War or his role as superintendent of West Point, that would be great. But in fact, they're to celebrate the Confederacy. To give a counter argument, I'm somewhat offset by all the arguments that we should pull down monuments to George Washington, that we should tear him off the pedestal, so to speak, because he owned black slaves. It's horrific that he owned black slaves, and we know he didn't treat them well, but that's not why we celebrate George Washington. I think Ken Burns made a very strong, objective case for why he's worth celebrating in his masterful series on the Revolution. We would not exist, probably as a republic, have ever exist as a republic with democratic traditions if it weren't for George Washington. He's worth celebrating. We don't celebrate him because he owns slaves. He wasn't a good slave owner. There's nothing that. The very idea of owning slaves is abominable. We don't celebrate him for that, but we. We celebrate him because of what he did for the nation. And so we have to start thinking about history realistically and why are we doing what we do and when is it wrong?
- [52:32]
A
Now, before I let you go, is there anything we haven't covered that you want future readers to know?
- [52:38]
B
I guess I would just say, for one thing, they ought to know that there's quite a bit in the book about lasalle Pickett, who was the wife of General George Pickett of the Confederacy, and her role in promoting the Yule log myth. It was very Major George Pickett was the man who led Pickett's charge at Gettysburg. And I think it's a fascinating story how this war widow, and she was a widow most of her life, she devoted her whole life to promoting George Pickett's memory. And she brings up this Yule log story over and over again in her writing. And I think it's worth reading and a lot of fun. And then I also think it's interesting. I do raise one alternate possibility in the book for why this story originated in the first place. And I got clued in by this, by one of the three sources before the Civil War that mentioned the Yule Log. It was a novel by an English immigrant to America who came to America and wrote this novel called Harry's Vacation. It was published shortly before the Civil War. And in the novel, it turns out that one of the characters has spent a Christmas in the south before. You know, before the novel is set. And he spent it in South Carolina. And so he's talking about his experiences at Christmas in South Carolina. I forget how it goes, but basically he says, you know, in England, the servants got as much ale they wanted for Christmas as long as the Yule log burned. And it struck me that maybe this story, you know, it had to originate somewhere. And maybe the people who wrote the first accounts of it knew about this legend that for as long as a yulog burned in merry old England, where the Yulaug stories, really, a lot of them originate, that maybe the Americans who wrote about Yule logs were appropriating this story, that if you were a worker, a manual laborer in England in the old days, you got as much ale that you wanted to drink as long as the Yule log lasted. And so maybe they projected this English story onto the Old South. And I started looking up, and I found out that, in fact, there were many books published before the Civil War that had this English Yule log story. And Americans were notorious in those days for reading English books because, for one thing, there was no international copyright law. And for another thing, they. They. They felt we were sort of like the unfortunate cousin. Everyone felt that English writers were better. And so it was very hard for American writers, even people like Herman Melville, you know, to get a reading audience. But Americans were, you know, they were pirating English books, publishing them here and selling them cheaply. And it's just possible that Americans borrowed this tale from English literature and then projected it onto slave life, and one thing led to another. So I hope that readers will at least ruminate a bit on that possibility. It had to begin somewhere. It might have begun on some plantation or farm where they got Christmas holidays, because a Yule log lasted a week or 12 days or whatever, but it could have originated with an English story.
- [56:14]
A
Well, to the listeners out there, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Debunking the Yule Log Myth. Not only is the topic one of academic interest and importance, but Dr. May takes you behind the curtain, so to speak, and shows you how historians evaluate sources and think historically. It is a wonderful example of how to research and write like a historian, and it is a book you're going to want to have on your bookshelf. Thank you again, Dr. May.
- [56:47]
B
Thank you very much, Alicia.
- [56:49]
A
My thanks again to Dr. May for sharing his time with me. If you are a student of history or curious about the historical approach, consider picking up a copy of Debunking the Yule Log Myth. Thanks peeps. I'll see you next time. Thanks for sitting down with me as I explored this chapter of American history. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and share with your friends. I look forward to our next cup of coffee together.