Three important facts to know about Black Americans and the New Year
On Heartbreak Day, "Freedom Day" and Watch Night
There’s no way around it. 2024 has been a shit year. And 2025 looks like we might soon miss the good ol’ days of 2024. Personally, I can’t be certain of what the New Year will bring, but I do know, historically speaking, Black Americans have likely been through worse. And we’ve managed to persist as a people, regardless. To that point, here are three important facts you may not have known about Black Americans and the New Year.
Heartbreak Day
According to abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, “Of all the days in the year, the slaves dread New-Year's day the worst of any.” This was because during slavery, New Year’s Day was when enslavers would sell or rent out enslaved folks to other enslavers. It was also called “Hiring Day” or “Heartbreak Day”, depending on who you asked. Families would be separated. Husbands, wives and even children could be split up and sent to different locations, potentially never seeing each other again.
In her 1861 book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, abolitionist Harriet Jacobs documented what she witnessed on a Heartbreak Day.
“On one of these sale days, I saw a mother lead seven children to the auction-block. She knew that some of them would be taken from her; but they took all. The children were sold to a slave trader, and their mother was bought by a man in her own town. Before night her children were all far away. She begged the trader to tell her where he intended to take them; this he refused to do. How could he, when he knew he would sell them, one by one, wherever he could command the highest price?”
“Freedom Day”
"I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the States where it exists. I believe that I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."
Abraham Lincoln said that shitty thing in his 1861 inaugural address. Just about a year later, he said, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it,” another wildly shitty thing to say. A little more than a year after that in September of 1862, he announced the Emancipation Proclamation, which he would sign on New Year’s Day 1863.
Unfortunately, contrary to popular belief, the Proclamation did not end slavery. In fact, it exclusively applied to states “in rebellion against the United States”. Since Lincoln was not the president of the Confederacy, his legal proclamations over that different country didn’t mean too much. What made it worse was that in states where Lincoln was the president—namely Kentucky, Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee and West Virginia—slavery was allowed to continue without so much as a disapproving glance.
Now, the thing is, enslaved Black people had been freeing themselves since the beginning and since the Union had strongholds in much of the South at this point, Black folks saw more opportunity to self-emancipate. Black folks also began joining the Union army under the encouragement of leaders like Frederick Douglass. It is in this spirit that a New Year’s tradition began…
Watch Night
In Luke 6:12-13, Jesus stays up all night praying before choosing his disciples the following day. And so, on December 31, 1862, in anticipation of the Emancipation Proclamation, Black American Christians gathered—countless in secret, as religion was outlawed for many of the enslaved—to pray all night for what might come from Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation the following day.
Frederick Douglass spent that first Watch Night in Boston at Tremont Temple. He later wrote of that night, “The occasion, therefore, was one of both hope and fear. Our ship was on the open sea, tossed by a terrible storm; wave after wave was passing over us, and every hour was fraught with increasing peril. Whether we should survive or perish depended in large measure upon the coming of this proclamation. At least so we felt.”
We celebrate Juneteenth, 1865 as the end of slavery, but it didn’t “officially” end until the passing of the 13th Amendment in December of that year. Illegal slavery kept on for years after, I’ve written before about the Exceptions Clause and Mississippi didn’t even ratify the 13th Amendment until 2013. Yeah. But Watch Night itself became an important New Year’s tradition in the Black church and it still exists today. It’s a night that brings community together and keeps kids off the streets during a potentially troublesome night.
Again, I don’t know what this next year will bring, but if there’s a lesson to be learned from how the ancestors acknowledged the New Year, it’s that watching over and watching out for each other is the only way forward.
https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation/transcript.html
https://www.loc.gov/item/mal4233400/
https://samuelj.substack.com/p/my-top-5-runaway-slave-ads
https://valley.lib.virginia.edu/mem/FM0055
https://samuelj.substack.com/p/the-13th-and-the-19th
https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/clarke/support1.html
https://billmoyers.com/2013/01/17/frederick-douglass-on-abraham-lincoln/2/
May it be for you and yours, at least a slightly less shitty year. Feel like that's about the best we can hope for.