Carnival as another Baby Jesus con game

[Krafft, John M.]

Chapter X of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American
Slave, WRITTEN BY HIMSELF contains the following anecdote.

The days between Christmas and New Year's day are allowed as holidays;
and, accordingly, we were not required to perform any labor, more than
to feed and take care of the stock. This time we regarded as our own,
by the grace of our masters; and we therefore used or abused it nearly
as we pleased. Those of us who had families at a distance, were
generally allowed to spend the whole six days in their society. This
time, however, was spent in various ways. The staid, sober, thinking
and industrious ones of our number would employ themselves in making
corn-brooms, mats, horse-collars, and baskets; and another class of us
would spend the time in hunting opossums, hares, and coons. But by far
the larger part engaged in such sports and merriments as playing ball,
wrestling, running foot-races, fiddling, dancing, and drinking whisky;
and this latter mode of spending the time was by far the most
agreeable to the feelings of our masters. A slave who would work
during the holidays was considered by our masters as scarcely
deserving them. He was regarded as one who rejected the favor of his
master. It was deemed a disgrace not to get drunk at Christmas; and he
was regarded as lazy indeed, who had not provided himself with the
necessary means, during the year, to get whisky enough to last him
through Christmas.
	From what I know of the effect of these holidays upon the slave, I
believe them to be among the most effective means in the hands of the
slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection. Were the
slaveholders at once to abandon this practice, I have not the
slightest doubt it would lead to an immediate insurrection among the
slaves. These holidays serve as conductors, or safety-valves, to carry
off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity. But for these,
the slave would be forced up to the wildest desperation; and woe
betide the slaveholder, the day he ventures to remove or hinder the
operation of those conductors! I warn him that, in such an event, a
spirit will go forth in their midst, more to be dreaded than the most
appalling earthquake.
	The holidays are part and parcel of the gross fraud, wrong, and
inhumanity of slavery. They are professedly a custom established by
the benevolence of the slaveholders; but I undertake to say, it is the
result of selfishness, and one of the grossest frauds committed upon
the down-trodden slave. They do not give the slaves this time because
they would not like to have their work during its continuance, but
because they know it would be unsafe to deprive them of it. This will
be seen by the fact, that the slaveholders like to have their slaves
spend those days just in such a manner as to make them as glad of
their ending as of their beginning. Their object seems to be, to
disgust their slaves with freedom, by plunging them into the lowest
depths of dissipation. For instance, the slaveholders not only like to
see the slave drink of his own accord, but will adopt various plans to
make him drunk. One plan is, to make bets on their slaves, as to who
can drink the most whisky without getting drunk; and in this way they
succeed in getting whole multitudes to drink to excess. Thus, when the
slave asks for virtuous freedom, the cunning slaveholder, knowing his
ignorance, cheats him with a dose of vicious dissipation, artfully
labelled with the name of liberty. The most of us used to drink it
down, and the result was just what might be supposed; many of us were
led to think that there was little to choose between liberty and
slavery. We felt, and very properly too, that we had almost as well be
slaves to man as to rum. So, when the holidays ended, we staggered up
from the filth of our wallowing, took a long breath, and marched to
the field, -feeling, upon the whole, rather glad to go, from what our
master had deceived us into a belief was freedom, back to the arms of
slavery.
	I have said that this mode of treatment is a part of the whole system
of fraud and inhumanity of slavery. It is so. The mode here adopted to
disgust the slave with freedom, by allowing him to see only the abuse
of it, is carried out in other things. …
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