“Jingle Bells” Was Written by a Racist Confederate Soldier to Mock Black People
America's most popular holiday song has its origins in Blackface minstrelsy, but many myths have tried whitewash its true history.
Yesterday, I put on a Christmas sweater, took an uber to Medford, Massachusetts, and stood in front of a bronze plaque on High Street. My friend Matt Shearer, a local journalist known for uncovering weird Massachusetts history, had told me I needed to see it for myself.
The plaque commemorates the spot where James Lord Pierpont supposedly wrote “Jingle Bells” in 1850. It mentions a tavern. It mentions sleigh races. It does not mention that the song debuted in blackface, performed by white men in burnt cork, mocking Black people trying to enjoy winter.
America’s most beloved Christmas song started as a racist joke. And almost no one knows.
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The Perpetual Failure Who Found Profit in Racism
James Lord Pierpont was, by most accounts, a failure. Born in 1822 to a prominent Boston abolitionist family, he bounced between careers with little success. He tried daguerreotype photography in San Francisco. The studio burned down. He attempted the dairy business. That lasted two days. By the mid-1850s, Pierpont was broke, living off his father, and desperate for cash.
So he turned to minstrelsy.
The minstrel show was one of the most profitable entertainment industries in antebellum America. White performers would darken their faces with burnt cork and perform caricatures of Black people for paying audiences. The shows depicted Black Americans as buffoonish, lazy, and incompetent. They were wildly popular. And for a man who needed money and had no scruples about where it came from, minstrelsy offered steady work.
Pierpont began writing songs for John P. Ordway’s Aeolians, one of Boston’s most successful minstrel troupes. His catalog included “The Colored Coquette,” “Kitty Crow,” and “Poor Elsie,” songs that used dialect spelling and repeatedly referred to Black people with slurs. He was, as scholar Kyna Hamill puts it, “composing to formula,” churning out content for an industry built on racial degradation.
Blackface on a One-Horse Open Sleigh
On September 15, 1857, Pierpont’s newest composition debuted at Ordway Hall in Boston. It was called “The One Horse Open Sleigh,” and it was performed by Johnny Pell, an “endman” who specialized in playing the blackface dandy, a character type used to mock Black men as vain, flashy, and obsessed with impressing women. The song fit the type perfectly. It was about dashing through snow, picking up girls, and showing off. The original lyrics include the line “laughing all the way,” which echoed a popular minstrel convention known as the “Laughing Darkie,” a routine that caricatured Black joy as simple-minded and absurd.
The song was not written for Christmas. It was written for racist comedy.
Sleigh songs were having a moment in the 1850s. White audiences in the North found it hilarious to watch Black characters, performed by white actors in blackface, attempt “respectable” winter activities and fail. Falling out of sleighs, getting “upsot” in snowbanks, and stumbling through courtship rituals were all standard bits. Pierpont’s song included all of these elements. It was not original. It was a product assembled from existing minstrel tropes, designed to make white audiences laugh at Black incompetence.
In 1859, Pierpont recopyrighted the song under a new title: “Jingle Bells.” He removed the dedication to Ordway, the minstrel hall manager. The new sheet music featured an engraving of bells and snow. No trace of its blackface origins remained.
From Minstrel Halls to Confederate Battlefields
Then came the Civil War, when Pierpont made his racist loyalties clear.
Despite being raised by one of Boston’s most influential abolitionists, Pierpont abandoned his family in the North, moved to Savannah, Georgia, and enlisted in the Confederate Army. He wrote fight songs to rally men defending slavery, including “We Conquer or Die” and “Strike for the South.” He died in the South, estranged from his abolitionist roots, having spent his final years composing anthems for the Confederacy.
His nephew, incidentally, was J.P. Morgan.
How a Minstrel Song Became a Christmas Classic
By the twentieth century, “Jingle Bells” had shed its minstrel past entirely. It appeared in Christmas anthologies. It was recorded by the Edison Quartet. It became synonymous with the holiday season. The song that began as a vehicle for blackface comedy was transformed into a symbol of innocent winter joy.
That bronze plaque in Medford tells you the song was inspired by sleigh races on Salem Street. It does not tell you the song was first performed by a man in burnt cork pretending to be Black. It does not tell you the composer went on to write Confederate war hymns. It does not tell you that “laughing all the way” was part of a racist comedic tradition.
The plaque, like the song itself, has been scrubbed clean. This is how erasure works. Not through dramatic acts of destruction, but through quiet omissions.
I stood in front of that plaque in my Christmas sweater, and I thought about how many times I had sung “Jingle Bells” without knowing any of this. How many of us have? The song is everywhere. It plays in malls. It plays in movies. It plays in our memories of childhood.
None of that changes where it came from.
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References:
Hamill, Kyna. “’The Story I Must Tell’: ‘Jingle Bells’ in the Minstrel Repertoire.” Theatre Survey 58, no. 3 (September 2017): 375–403.
Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Mahar, William J. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
It's equal parts horrifying and crucial to show just how thoroughly racism is baked into the very DNA of so much of this country and its history. Thank you for your coverage.
My GAAAAAWD it’s all so horrible! Thank you Khalil.