They did almost all the grueling household and field labor that kept these places going, often sleeping and cooking in primitive cabins and working in unhealthy conditions under the threat of the whip. Instead, he reported, the tour guide mostly related “stories about the white men, women and children who woke up to Christmas in the mansion’s plush bedrooms.”īy the American Civil War, nearly 4 million slaves in all toiled in the Southern states, and about a million lived as servants in mansions and as field hands on large plantations with 50 slaves or more. When the black historian Brandon Byrd visited Belle Meade, a mansion in Nashville, Tennessee, for its Christmas tour a few years ago, he was shocked that the slave community and their harsh realities were barely mentioned. Few make a serious effort to tell what Christmas was like for the enslaved workers at these plantations before the American Civil War.
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