The Battle for Christmas (32 page)

There is no document about the Christmas tree that corresponds to Clement Clarke Moore’s verses about Santa Claus. Instead, there are only various legends that describe how the Christmas tree came to America. One of these legends is about Hessian soldiers during the American Revolution (it dates the real event too early); another is about Queen Victoria and her German-born husband, Prince Albert (it dates the event too late).

What is probably the most famous of the legends, and the one with which we shall begin, has it that the first American Christmas tree was set up in Massachusetts, in 1835, by Charles Folien, a German immigrant who had become an American citizen and a Harvard professor. The source of that legend is a popular book written by a very famous British visitor to the United States, a woman named Harriet Martineau, who happened to witness the Follens’ tree while she was touring New England. As Martineau wrote, “I was present at the introduction into the new country of the German Christmas-tree.” Though this was not the
first
American Christmas tree, it is certainly true that Charles Folien set up a Christmas tree in Martineau’s presence for his son and namesake, an endearing
5-year-old whom everybody called “little Charley.” It is time to visit the scene.

The tree (actually the top portion of a fir or spruce) had been placed in the front drawing room of the house. A toy hung from every branch, and when Martineau arrived Charles Folien and his wife were just adding the seven dozen little wax candles. As little Charley and two older companions approached the house, the adults quickly closed the door to the front drawing room and moved into an adjacent room, where (as Martineau put it) they sat around “trying to look as if nothing was going to happen.” After the visitors were served tea and coffee, a round of parlor games was played in an effort to distract the children’s attention from the front drawing room, where Charley’s parents were now busy lighting the candles. (The element of
surprise
was crucial here, and as we shall see it was something that distinguished the Christmas tree ritual from other modes of presenting children with their gifts.)

Finally, the double doors were thrown open and the children poured in, their voices instantaneously hushed. “Their faces were upturned to the blaze, all eyes wide open, all lips parted, all steps arrested. Nobody spoke, only Charley leaped for joy.” After a few moments the children discovered that the tree “bore something eatable,” and “the babble began again.” The children were told to take what they could from the tree without burning themselves on the candles. (Martineau reported that “we tall people kept watch, and helped them with good things from the higher branches.”)

After the children had eaten their fill of the edibles, the evening continued with dancing and mugs of “steaming mulled wine.” By eleven, all the other guests had gone home; little Charley was in bed; and Harriet Martineau herself was left alone with the boy’s parents, Charles and Eliza Folien. It had been a delightful evening, and Martineau concluded her account by predicting that the Christmas tree ritual would surely become an established American tradition.
²

Harriet Martineau’s story of little Charley Follen’s Christmas tree was accurate enough, even if this was not the first American Christmas tree. But in an important way the story was misleading. For when Martineau reported the episode, she placed it in a context that implied that she had simply stumbled upon it during the course of her travels. The episode appeared as part of a catchall chapter in Martineau’s book, a chapter she called “Hot and Cold Weather,” about seasonal phenomena in New England.

Martineau’s evening with the Follens was anything but an accident of travel, and it hardly took place as part of the ordinary New England seasonal cycle. Martineau and the Follens had met only a few months earlier, but in the course of those few months they had become fast personal friends and political allies in a cause that was changing the course of their lives. Harriet Martineau had gone to visit the Follens that evening to chart their mutual plans at a moment of crisis, a crisis that was forcing them to make a difficult choice between their personal principles and their professional careers. The issue that precipitated the crisis was nothing less than the movement to abolish slavery in America. It is a story that bears telling in some detail.

I
F
C
HARLES
F
OLLEN HAD
not died in 1840 at the age of 43 (in the explosion of a steamship), he would in all probability be remembered today in connection with something more important than the American Christmas tree. Even as it stands, however, Follen’s career is fascinating. Somewhat like Thomas Paine before him, he was a radical on two continents. Even before coming to America in 1825 in his late twenties, Follen had been exiled from Germany, and then from Switzerland, for his revolutionary activities.

Karl Follen, as he was named at birth, was no simple product of German folk culture. He was a scion of the German elite, the son of a respected judge—almost the German equivalent of Clement Clarke Moore. But early in his life Follen moved in a very different direction than Moore. He became a youthful revolutionary, a representative of the emerging liberal nationalist movement in Germany. As a university student, Follen authored an incendiary political song and was actually arrested for complicity in a political murder (he was acquitted). Appointed a member of the faculty at the University of Jena in 1820 (at the age of 24), Follen continued his political activities and was forced into exile in Switzerland, where he received another professional position; but four years later he was compelled to flee once again (in the face of new charges that he had organized a revolutionary cell). This time Follen found refuge in America. He arrived in New York, having learned English during the voyage and bearing letters of introduction from another European revolutionary, the aged Marquis de Lafayette, who suggested that he try to find employment in the Boston area. Follen followed that advice, and headed for Cambridge.
³

Even before he arrived on New England soil, Folien stopped off in New York to meet a woman we have already met, the writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick, whose novel
Redwood
was the first book he had read in the English language. Catharine Sedgwick obviously admired Follen’s intelligence and culture, his gentility, and his republican principles. The following summer she invited him to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to meet the rest of the Sedgwick clan. Then, that fall, Sedgwick introduced Folien to one of her oldest and most intimate friends, Eliza Cabot of Boston. Two years later Folien and Cabot married, and in 1830 they had a child, who was christened Charles after the English version of his father’s name.
⁴

Charles Folien (as he was now being called) had fallen in love with the United States, a nation that promised to fulfill the republican values for which he had been striving vainly in Europe. He worked hard to make a new career in his new home, and in this he was eminently successful. Living in Cambridge, Folien authored books on the German language (as yet little studied in the United States) and taught German part-time at Harvard. He even established and ran a gymnasium in the Harvard area. Above all, he formed close ties with the liberal Unitarian establishment that dominated Harvard and Boston. Folien was a deeply religious man as well as an enlightened republican, and he found Unitarianism wholly compatible with his own progressive Christian beliefs.

In 1830, five years after his arrival in America, Folien reached what would prove to be the pinnacle of his new life. That year he was made a minister in the Unitarian Church, and he became a U.S. citizen. Most important of all, he was appointed to a full-time faculty position at Harvard, a new professorship of German literature that had been given five years’ funding by a group of his admirers, with the expectation that Harvard would pick up the tab thereafter. Little Charley was born in 1830, too, and the next year the family moved into a new house. Folien was flying high.
⁵

But within less than five years, the radical commitments that had brought him to America in the first place brought him down once again. This time the issue was slavery, a subject that was just beginning to arouse feelings of urgent intensity in a handful of Americans. In 1831 William Lloyd Garrison began publishing his abolitionist journal,
The Liberator
, in Boston, where, that same year, he organized the American Anti-Slavery Society. Folien quickly sensed the parallels between the antislavery movement and the principles he had stood for in Germany; by 1834 he had become one of the most dedicated of Garrison’s followers. He even helped organize a Cambridge Anti-Slavery Society, based at Harvard. But radical abolitionism did not sit well with most Northerners, even with the Boston Unitarian establishment, whose members were offended by what they regarded as its vulgar style as well as its constant insistence that abolition be
total
and
immediate
. William Lloyd Garrison was regarded by most of Follen’s acquaintances as a crazy man, and a rather uncouth one at that. (Even Follen himself was occasionally critical of Garrison’s style, though never of his principles.)
⁶
Charles Follen was warned that becoming an active abolitionist would surely jeopardize his professional prospects, but he was too much a man of principle to let that get in the way. Anyway, he had been through it all before, back in Europe.

Charles Follen
. This engraving, the only known likeness of Follen, appeared as the frontispiece to the biography that Eliza Follen published in 1841, just a year after her husband’s tragic death in the explosion of the steamship
Lexington. (Courtesy, Harvard College Library)

His fall was heroic. In early 1834 Follen became an active member and officer of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. He did so against the urgings of his Harvard colleagues, who warned him that it would cost him his position. (The professorship would expire in 1835, and only at that point would it be made permanent—or else terminated. In effect, Follen would be coming up for tenure.) Follen’s friends were of course correct. Early in 1835 he learned that his appointment would terminate at the end of the spring semester.
⁷
He and his family (little Charley turned 5 that
year) would be left high and dry, with no source of income. (Eliza Follen may have been born into the prominent Cabot family, but she had few resources of her own, and the family did not come to her assistance on this occasion.)

For the moment, though, Follen was rescued by his remaining admirers, who arranged for him to have what appeared to be an ideal position. He would oversee the education of the two children of a wealthy Boston merchant, James Perkins, who had recently died (and whose widow was emotionally incapacitated). In return for this part-time work, Follen was to have the use of the Perkinses’ house, and he would be paid the comfortable annual salary of $2,000. “The fortune of the Follens seems like a Fairy-tale,” Catharine Sedgwick wrote when she learned the good news.
⁸

This time it was Follen’s educational principles that got him into trouble. Follen took the teaching of children seriously indeed. He was committed to a progressive pedagogical strategy, derived largely from the work of the Swiss reformer Johann Pestalozzi. Pestalozzi assumed that children were intrinsically perfect creatures to begin with, and that education should therefore consist in the cultivation of those attributes that were already present in their young souls. Follen wrote (in what amounted to his job proposal) that he intended to “study their natures,” so as to “awake every dormant energy” the two boys already possessed.
⁹
This was the kind of approach that struck many people (including many Unitarians) as leading inevitably to an indiscriminate parental indulgence of children in their immature desires and whims.

What happened next is not wholly clear. But it appears that Follen’s political enemies used his progressive educational ideas against him, and when Follen, predictably enough, refused once again to retreat from his principles, he learned that he was once again out of a job. The bad news arrived in mid-December 1835, just a couple of weeks before Christmas.
¹⁰

As if that were not enough, Follen’s personal crisis was part of a larger crisis in the abolitionist movement. The last months of the year 1835 witnessed a series of verbal and physical attacks on the abolitionist movement (abolitionists later referred to this period as a “reign of terror”). In October, William Lloyd Garrison was physically assaulted by a mob which dragged him through the streets of Boston with a halter around his waist. Most Bostonians were convinced that Garrison’s own behavior had brought on such treatment, and indeed that additional steps had to be taken to prevent the abolitionists from provoking further public disorder. With additional pressure coming from Southern quarters, the Massachusetts
legislature was soon considering a law that would effectively ban most abolitionist activities.