PREFACE

SONGS OF SLAVERY AND EMANCIPATION IS, FIRST, A COLLECTION OF SONGS composed and sung by slaves either preparing for or commemorating revolt and resistance. To this collection is added songs of the abolitionist movement dedicated to eradication of the slave system. Many of the abolitionist songs were composed by fugitives escaping slavery or free Black people and were widely disseminated in the northern states between the American Revolution and the Civil War. To bring these songs to life, I have chosen a representative sample, arranged musical accompaniment, and made recordings. The result is a musical and historical document available for the first time to the general public. What began in 2015 with my discovery of a song composed by slaves planning an insurrection in 1813 has come to fruition with two hours of recorded music, a film documentary, and publication of this book. In the pages that follow, the story of that discovery and the journey that led to finding all thirty songs in this collection will be recounted. The contributions of Robin D. G. Kelley and Kali Akuno provide historical background and contemporary relevance.

As is well known, the Atlantic trade in African slaves lasted four hundred years. From beginning to end and throughout the Americas, enslaved people organized resistance, escape, and open rebellion. Sustaining them in this long struggle was their music, some examples of which are sung to this day. Historically and musically, this took particular form in the United States. Yet, while the existence of slave songs, especially “Negro spirituals,” is widely heralded, their character is often obscured by misunderstanding. Slave songs were not only lamentations of suffering or a beseeching of God for deliverance. Nor, conversely, were the jovial banjo and fiddle tunes for which the slaves were so admired and imitated only distractions from a life of misery. The evidence presented here shows that, at least as early as the American Revolution, there were slave songs openly calling for liberty and revolution. Furthermore, there are songs celebrating heroes such as Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner, as well as, and above all, songs celebrating the Haitian Revolution.

While the foundation and driving force were always the struggle of enslaved people themselves, the fight for freedom included free Black people and their white counterparts. This broad effort brought forth a second group of songs that were widely disseminated at the time but are now largely forgotten. These are the songs of the abolitionists, the first of which appeared in the eighteenth century and continued to be written and sung until the Civil War. Following the American Revolution, the abolitionist movement expanded rapidly, publishing songbooks to be used at public meetings. These songs not only express outrage at the condition of slavery, but call for militant resistance and the ultimate destruction of the slave system. Many such songs had musical accompaniment presented in tablature and can thus be reconstructed and performed as originally intended. There can be no doubt as to their purpose: the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of African American people, and a clear and undeniable demand for equality and justice for all humanity.

Part I

Introduction

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds.

—FREDERICK DOUGLASS, NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS

The only thing they had that couldn’t be taken from them was their music. Their song, it was coming right up from the fields, settling itself in their feet and working right up, right up into their stomachs, their spirit, into their fear, into their longing. It was bewildered, this part in them. It was like it had no end, nowhere even to wait for an end, nowhere to hope for a change in things. But it had a beginning, and that much they understood…. it was a feeling in them, a memory that came from a long way back.

—SIDNEY BECHET, TREAT IT GENTLE

WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE OF THE FACT THAT HUMAN BEINGS HELD AS PROPerty are responsible for the Americas’ greatest cultural and artistic gift to the world? That America’s modern freedom songs can be traced directly to enslaved Africans and the men and women dedicated to destroying human bondage? Given the sheer volume of music created by Africans held in captivity, fugitives, and their abolitionist allies throughout the Atlantic World, it is not an exaggeration to claim that “American” folk music was forged in the crucible of slavery. And what has been recovered and documented represents just a fraction of the music created by the enslaved. Lost are the many thousands of songs improvised in slave coffles, in the holds of ships, by work gangs on plantations and waterfronts—songs sung in Hausa, Ki-Kongo, Bambara, Yoruba, Ibo, Fante, Wolof, Twi, Mende, Krio, or creolized versions of these languages synthesized and mixed with French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and English.

On the other hand, we’ve all been taught that the slaves sang, and sang well, courtesy of racist stereotypes of Africans as naturally musical people. From antebellum minstrel shows to technicolor movies, American popular culture peddled images of Black bodies dancing and singing in cotton fields, in the master’s house, at makeshift prayer meetings. Ironically, the hypervisibility of the singing and dancing slave contributed to the erasure of the African’s repertoire, reducing the full breadth of music to select tunes—mostly spirituals: “Steal Away,” “Go Down, Moses,” “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” “Brothers, Don’t Get Weary,” and the like. Scholars and educated folk singers know better; thanks to their efforts there is a fairly small body of recordings and book-length studies of these original freedom songs.¹

Enter Mat Callahan. An extraordinary musician, social critic, activist, Mat came of age in the San Francisco Bay area during the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, shaped by antiwar, anti-imperialist, and antiracist struggles for a more just world. Through a variety of bands and collectives, including Red Rock, Prairie Fire, the Looters, and Komotion International, Mat sought to roll back the right-wing ascendance of neoliberalism with music and protest. He watched in horror as popular music increasingly became the expression of this new order, dulling minds and promoting unbridled consumption as the new religion. And he responded with a powerful manifesto, The Trouble with Music (AK Press, 2005), and a deep dive into the radical legacy of American antislavery music.

Without repeating the story he tells below, I will note that this book and the accompanying film and recording project were inspired by a 1939 pamphlet by the late historian Herbert Aptheker titled Negro Slave Revolts in the United States, 1526–1860. ² In its pages Mat encountered “A Hymn of Freedom,” sometimes known as “The Negro Hymn of Freedom,” most likely the earliest known example in North America of a song by enslaved people openly calling for rebellion. Aptheker himself discovered the song while perusing Benson J. Lossing’s massive The Pictorial Field Book of the War of 1812 (1869).³ The call for revolution by means of armed struggle is precisely what caught Mat’s attention, propelling him on this journey to discover the clandestine repertoire that was never intended to be discovered, collected, and catalogued until freedom came, alongside the abolitionist songbook whose clarion call deliberately set out to break slavery’s hold in the presumptive land of liberty.

You won’t find your standard work ditties or classic spirituals in Songs of Slavery and Emancipation. Rather, Callahan has selected songs that make demands, expose truths, tell stories of rebellion from Virginia to Louisiana, from Haiti to Curaçao. We owe their preservation to the free Black community, the children of the Civil War who lived long enough to share their memories of slavery with interviewers in the 1930s, the white allies who encountered freedom songs in the heat of abolitionist meetings or on the Civil War battlefield, and those inveterate collectors who looked to Black music for the best traditions of American resistance to injustice.

And yet, to claim that these songs were exceptional, distinct from the larger body of music produced by African people in the New World, would be a grave mistake. We have to understand the power of song as expressions of pain and joy, memory and morality, fear and faith, hope and humor, love, loss, and longing. Their lyrical swords were aimed not only at the Goliath of modern capitalist slavery, but the daily acts of dehumanization it wrought. Enslaved Africans forged America’s first abolitionist political culture—a culture grounded in the realm of everyday life of work, family, religion, art, and a memory of the African past. In other words, they did not need an abolitionist movement to teach them about freedom. They were the first abolitionists, and they emerged out of bondage with a clear vision of what freedom should look, feel, and sound like. Historian Manisha Sinha said it best: “the story of abolition must begin with the struggles of the enslaved.”⁴

ROOTS

Although we tend to associate Africans with the drum, the peoples kidnapped from West and Central Africa came from cultures with a rich tradition of stringed instruments—lutes, koras, bowed fiddles, and what on this side of the Atlantic came to be known as the banjo. Tonal instruments were commonplace and were re-created in some form or another in the Western Hemisphere. These include the balafon (wooden xylophone), fife, panpipe with single and double reeds, mbira (“thumb piano”), and a variety of mouth bows (called the “Jew’s harp” by blues musicians). Drums were certainly important in many African cultures, but their absence did not mean the disappearance of rhythm. Performers kept time on the body by hand clapping, body slapping, foot patting, and dancing.⁵

All music begins with the body. The supreme instrument in every culture is also the oldest: the voice. The voice embodies tone, timbre, sonority, rhythm, messages, ideas, prayers, collective aspirations, and the call and response. Through the voice, Africans heard each other in languages familiar and foreign, in deep tones and pitch-bending falsetto. Because secular songs were generally sung beyond earshot of the master or overseer, their messages were often more explicit: “Run nigger run / the patter-roller get you …” and

Yes, my ole Masser promise me;

But “his papers” didn’t leave me free.

A dose of poison helped him along

May de Devil preach his funeral song …

Not every song was a call to arms, nor did every song carry a hidden message for runaways. Song as expression of a vision of freedom meant that the everyday challenges of living life, loving, raising children, burying the dead, honoring ancestors, and obeying God took precedence over the routinized oppression of slavery. Enslaved Africans were not always obsessed with slave power when they had other powers to contend with—spiritual and magical powers. Christianity did not become the dominant religion among enslaved Africans until the nineteenth century. Nearly half of the Africans transported to North America during the slave trade came from areas where Islam was practiced, particularly in the Senegambia region. By one estimate, almost a quarter of a million Africans brought to the US were Muslim. Ancestor divination and the ritualized use of certain substances, spells, and incantations were also fairly common well into the nineteenth century.⁶

By 1830, most Black people—enslaved and free—embraced Christianity but not the gospel according to the master. The official plantation preachers’ admonitions on slavery as God’s will, submission as a virtue, “theft” as sin, and the desire for liberty as the devil’s work fell upon deaf ears. Black people turned Christianity into a prophetic theology of liberation. Masters were the sinners; the enslaved God’s children and the true believers. The Bible consistently sided with the oppressed and the poor, and the God of the Old Testament had no qualms about employing redemptive violence to purge the land of sin. The enslaved anchored their beliefs in Matthew 20:16: “the last shall be first and the first shall be last.” In the story of Exodus, where Black people identified with the flight of Jews out of Egypt. In Psalm 68, verse 31: “Princes come out of Egypt. Ethiopia stretches forth her hands unto God.” In the idea of “Jubilee” outlined in Leviticus chapter 25, which not only promises the periodic return of land to divine authority (“the land is mine, and you are coming into it as aliens and settlers”) and the cancellation of all debt, but the freeing of slaves. Rebels such as Denmark Vesey, the free Black carpenter executed in 1822 for planning a massive slave uprising in Charleston, South Carolina, found the clearest expression of Jubilee in Isaiah 61:

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me

Because the Lord has anointed me;

He has sent me to bring good news to the humble,

To bind up the broken-hearted,

To proclaim liberty to the captives and release to those in prison;

To proclaim a year of the Lord’s favor and a day of vengeance of our God.

Black people expressed this radical prophetic Christian vision in song, most famously in “Go Down, Moses,” in which Moses threatened to kill the first-born child of the Egyptian pharaoh if he did not free the Israelites. But themes of violence and vengeance appeared less frequently than prophecy and deliverance—which is to say, visions of a post-slavery world or “next world.” Songs such as “No More Auction Block for Me,” “Children, We Shall Be Free,” “This World Almost Done,” “O Brothers, Don’t Get Weary,” “We’ll Soon Be Free/My Father, How Long?,” and “I Want to Go Home” employed metaphors of heaven or judgment day to speak of emancipation or escape, as in this example:

There’s no rain to wet you

O, yes I want to go home

There’s no sun to burn you

O yes, I want to go home….

There’s no hard trials….

There’s no whips-a-crackin….

However, “I Want to Go Home” and “We’ll Soon Be Free/My Father, How Long?” were collected by the abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson during his command of an all-Black regiment during the Civil War.⁷ Higginson was already a legend in abolitionist circles, having participated in militant efforts to protect fugitives from re-enslavement and helping fund John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. On the battlefield and in the contraband camps, the people he encountered were no longer slaves, and their songs reflected this new reality as well as their determination to remain free. These were the people who had waged what the eminent scholar W. E. B. Du Bois called the “General Strike” that brought down the Confederacy—the escapees who saw war as the opportunity to seize their freedom and confront their masters on the field of battle. These were the Black men who donned the Union blue to bring an end to human bondage. “The Enlisted Soldiers, or The Negro Battle Hymn,” “The Year of Jubalo (Kingdom Comin’),” and “Old Massa, He Come Dancin’ Out,” all included here, are examples of these new Civil War-era freedom songs. The future they imagined, the next world, had arrived, and what they sang in these military camps marked a decisive break from the plantation. The great jazz musician Sidney Bechet captures this change in his memoir, Treat It Gentle:

It was years they’d been singing [“Go Down, Moses”]. And suddenly there was a different way of singing it. You could feel a new way of happiness in the lines. All that waiting, all that time when that song was far-off music, waiting music, suffering music; and all at once it was there, it had arrived. It was joy music now. It was Free Day … Emancipation.⁸

SONGS OF ABOLITION

Songs of Slavery and Emancipation is unique for bringing together the music of the enslaved with what has come to be known as the abolitionist songbook. These repertoires are usually treated as discrete bodies of music—the former the veiled expression of the enslaved, the latter popular ditties and hymns composed for the purposes of mobilizing antislavery sentiment. But Manisha Sinha’s keen observation suggests the line demarcating slave songs from abolitionist songs may not be so sharp.⁹ Abolition begins with the slave rebellion, and as Mat Callahan demonstrates, some of the earliest examples of antislavery songs were accounts celebrating insurrections or conspiracies. Included in this collection are rare songs bearing titles such as “Rebeldia na Bandabou,” “Uncle Gabriel, the Negro General,” “The Dirge of St. Malo,” “Recognition March of the Independance of Hayti,” “The African Hymn,” “Nat Turner,” and “March On.”

Slave rebellions and conspiracies birthed the modern abolitionist movement, not the other way around. The period between the 1780s and 1830s—also known as the era of democratic revolutions throughout the Atlantic world—represented a kind of highwater mark for slave uprisings. The chief inspiration for this wave of rebellions and conspiracies was not the Boston Massacre or the storming of the Bastille, but the Haitian Revolution. That revolution began with a slave insurrection on the island of San Domingue in August 1791 and ended thirteen years later, after all-Black armies led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe, and Toussaint L’Ouverture defeated France, Spain, and Britain on the battlefield. When Haiti declared its independence in 1804, it was the first nation in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery.¹⁰

Events in Haiti shocked the world, leaving whites who believed their own myths about Negro docility in a state of denial.¹¹ It was the stuff of legend and the subject of poetry and song. News about the uprising spread like wildfire to Caribbean and US ports and across the ocean, often carried by Black sailors who embraced an antislavery, antinomian, leveling vision of Republicanism—a vision of the future world far more radical than anything being pursued in Paris or Philadelphia.¹² Virginia, the home of slaveholder and author of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson, felt the reverberations of Haiti almost immediately. Between May 1792 and October 1793, at least half a dozen conspiracies and insurrections broke out in Northampton County, Powhatan County, Richmond, and Norfolk, all of which referenced the slaves of San Domingue. In April 1795, word that the Jacobins had abolished slavery throughout the French empire and that rebels had taken over San Domingue inspired slaves, a few sympathetic whites, and Indigenous people to plan an armed uprising in Pointe Coupée Parish, Louisiana. However, they were betrayed by an informant, resulting in the execution of twenty-three alleged conspirators.¹³

Arguably, elements of the story of the Pointe Coupée conspiracy appear in the song “The Dirge of St. Malo,” included in this book. Based on a poem originally in Creole (“Ouarra St. Malo”), the song has been dated by some scholars back to 1785, making it possibly the earliest known song about a slave conspiracy in North America. The song presumably tells the story of Juan San Malo, also known as Jean St. Malo, a fugitive from slavery and principal leader of a maroon colony in the marshes and swamps outside of New Orleans—present-day St. Bernard Parish. The colony’s ability to remain free and survive through forms of social banditry (mainly raiding neighboring plantations) posed a constant threat to the slavery regime. Spanish colonial authorities sent expeditions to capture runaways and destroy the maroon settlements beginning around 1781–1782, but on one of those expeditions they encountered resistance from San Malo and his compatriots. San Malo and a few of his lieutenants initially escaped arrest and then attacked a boat in a failed effort to free the captured fugitives on board, inadvertently killing one of the slaves. He now had a bounty on his head for murder. In 1784 colonial authorities finally captured San Malo and his band, during which he was shot and seriously injured. The state sidestepped a trial and declared him guilty of murder; he was hanged on June 19, 1784.¹⁴

In truth, there was no insurrection or conspiracy. “The Dirge of St. Malo” does not celebrate San Malo as an insurrectionist but indicts an unjust system. While the lyrics avoid the question of his guilt or innocence, they attribute to him the charges levelled at the Pointe Coupée conspirators. His heroism rests on his refusal to speak, though historian Gilbert C. Din found evidence that he and his lieutenants confessed to authorities about their activities. In fact, Din concludes that the “The Dirge of San Malo” is truer as a representation of the events surrounding the Pointe Coupée conspiracy. Din writes:

Dogs were not used to hunt down San Malo, as the poem asserts; they were useless in the marshes of the St. Bernard district…. He was not dragged into town behind a horse but was brought by pirogue…. The poem asserts that San Malo was hanged on the levee; but in reality, the execution took place in the Plaza de Armas (today Jackson Square), as contemporary documents attest. The New Orleans levee served as the site for the execution of two slaves who participated in the 1795 Pointe Coupée conspiracy. The poem’s allegation that San Malo plotted to cut the throats of all whites in Louisiana fits the Pointe Coupée conspiracy better than it does the cimarron leader’s activities in 1784; there is no proof that San Malo planned a slave uprising.¹⁵

Sylviane A. Diouf, the leading historian of maroonage in the United States, concurs: “In the original Creole version, it is a beautiful ode to St. Malo. But despite its seemingly documentary tone, it strays, significantly, from reality.”¹⁶

None of these criticisms render the song any less authentic. On the contrary, precisely because of its presumed post-1795 provenance, “The Dirge of St. Malo” reveals how histories deemed inconceivable to the racial regime of slavery are passed down, linked through memory and storytelling, and refashioned as a river of struggle. Diouf writes:

That a folk song is not an infallible historical source and aggrandizes its hero is a given, but what is significant is the fact that St. Malo was eulogized, that a song to his memory was composed at least a decade after his death, and that he was still remembered a hundred years later. What he represented as a maroon—freedom, defiance, courage, and resistance—struck a chord. As did the ignominious manner in which he and others were treated. No other maroon has been so honored.¹⁷

The rebels who have been so honored, at least in North America, have come to symbolize slave insurrection in story and song. We know their names: Gabriel, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner. Gabriel was born into slavery on a Virginia plantation in 1776. As a skilled blacksmith allowed to hire himself out to other masters in and around Richmond, Gabriel was relatively mobile, literate, and friendly with other skilled workers across the color line. In 1799, he got into a fight with a white overseer who claimed Gabriel and two of his friends were in the act of stealing a pig. Gabriel fought back, biting off part of the overseer’s ear, for which he was convicted of maiming a white man. He was sentenced to public branding and a month in jail. Soon after his release, he deployed his skills to forge weapons and planned a massive slave insurrection that involved taking Virginia governor James Monroe hostage as a bargaining chip to negotiate the complete abolition of slavery. Inspired by the Haitian Revolution, he mobilized about a thousand enslaved people, as well as a couple of white men, and issued a directive to spare the lives of Methodists, Quakers, and Frenchmen since he believed they opposed slavery. The plan was to rise up on August 30, 1800, under the banner “Death of Liberty,” take Governor Monroe hostage, and negotiate the end to slavery. But torrential rains forced Gabriel and his lieutenants to postpone the uprising, and by then other slaves had informed authorities. Gabriel fled but was eventually captured and hanged, along with twenty-five others.

Born Telemaque on the Danish Caribbean colony of St. Thomas around 1767, the man later known as Denmark Vesey was, at age fourteen, purchased by Joseph Vesey, a ship captain and slave trader from Bermuda. Telemaque learned to read and write and worked as Captain Vesey’s interpreter and personal assistant. The captain eventually retired from the business of human trafficking and, with Telemaque still his property, settled in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1799, the thirty-two-year-old Telemaque won $1,500 in a city lottery, which he used to buy his freedom. He began the new century with a new status, a new vocation, and a new name. Working as a free, independent carpenter, he took his former master’s surname and renamed himself “Denmark” in honor of his birthplace in the Danish West Indies.

Denmark Vesey quickly learned that there was no such thing as a free Black person. He married an enslaved woman named Beck but was rebuffed by her master every time he tried to buy her freedom and that of their children. He was required to pay a registration fee to obtain “freedom papers,” and he knew fully well that those papers were insufficient to protect him from possible re-enslavement. He had to navigate a world where “free” Black people could not carry guns without a special license, were denied access to many public accommodations or restricted to certain sections, and were barred from certain skilled jobs and sometimes denied the right to work. He joined the white-controlled Second Presbyterian Church only to endure segregation and daily degradation. In 1817 he helped found the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, but a year later white authorities temporarily shut down the church and arrested 140 congregants for violating laws prohibiting Black literacy and night services for Black congregants and requiring that all churches must have majority white membership. Black congregants were variously jailed, whipped, and fined. The authorities declared the church a hotbed of sedition, and they were not wrong. Vesey had begun to deliver sermons against slavery, insisting that Africans, like all of God’s children, were born free and were entitled to use whatever means at their disposal to gain their liberty. Like Gabriel before him, Haiti was his inspiration. His inner circle included a couple of comrades born in San Domingue whose masters had fled to Charleston. He planned what would have been the largest slave insurrection in US history to begin on July 14, 1822—Bastille Day. When a slave working in his master’s house informed his master about the plot, Vesey moved up the date by a month, but by then it was too late. State authorities arrested 130 Black people (primarily slaves) and four white men. Thirty-six were hanged, including Vesey. The church he helped found was torn down, brick by brick.¹⁸

The mere threat of insurrection led southern legislators to tighten the machinery of repression. They passed laws limiting movement of free Black people and their right of assembly, restricting manumission, prohibiting the enslaved from hiring out their free time, and requiring every free Black person over fifteen to have a registered white guardian who could vouch for their character. In fact, the city of Charleston built the Citadel precisely as a bulwark against potential slave insurrections.¹⁹ Authorities grew particularly wary of the growing free Black population. Even the defenders of gradual abolition believed that the United States could only survive as a white man’s country and therefore free Black people had to be deported. In 1816, with financial support from the US Congress, a prominent group of philanthropists, clergy, politicians, and slaveholders founded the American Colonization Society (ACS) for the purpose of resettling African Americans in the West African colony of Liberia. Its members included James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Sir Francis Scott Key, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster. The ACS enjoyed limited support from a small segment of the Black community who believed they had no future in a nation where racism and slavery appeared to be a permanent condition. But by the 1830s, the majority of Black leaders vigorously opposed the ACS’s masterplan, not because they loved America but because they saw it as a scheme to eliminate the free Black population and considered fleeing to Africa a dereliction of their obligation to free all of their people. Rather than abandon their sistren and brethren in bondage, they chose to fight, organizing local vigilance committees in northern cities to defend fugitives from recapture, printing and distributing broadsides against slavery, and creating institutions and businesses enabling free Black communities to thrive. Such sentiments are poignantly captured in “Colonization Song: To the Free Colored People,” a satirical commentary—possibly composed by Black abolitionist William Wells Brown—on the intolerable conditions for Black people in the land of the free and the ironies of African colonization as a solution:

Will you, will you be colonized?

Will you, will you be colonized?

’Tis a land that with honey

And milk doth abound,

Where the lash is not heard,

And the scourge is not found.

Chorus, Will you, etc.

If you stay in this land

Where the white man has rule,

You will starve by his hand,

In both body and soul.

Chorus.

For a nuisance you are,

In this land of your birth,

Held down by his hand,

And crushed to earth

Chorus …

But only consent,

Though extorted by force,

What a blessing you’ll prove,

On the African coast.

Chorus.²⁰

In 1829, a Boston-based radical Black abolitionist named David Walker published a small booklet titled Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, which made a biblical argument for the immorality and injustice of slavery, called out the hypocrisy of the United States as a Christian nation holding human beings in bondage, excoriated colonization schemes, and predicted a violent end to the system. Walker, who was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, and lived in Charleston during Vesey’s formative years as a Black leader, was clearly inspired by his example. In 1826, he cofounded Boston’s General Colored Association (GCA), arguably the nation’s first abolitionist organization, and urged free Black people everywhere to build an antislavery movement. Walker’s Appeal incited resistance and sent the slaveholding class and its allies into a panic. Despite a blanket ban on the text throughout the South, Black seamen surreptitiously distributed it in port cities throughout the region. Southern mayors and governors blamed Walker’s Appeal for an outbreak of fires and Black insubordination in cities and on plantations. Anyone possessing the document or caught printing copies was jailed. By 1831, Georgia, North Carolina, and Mississippi had imposed severe penalties for possession of antislavery literature, which for Black people could mean execution. And while it was customary to deny enslaved people education, between 1829 and 1831, several southern states passed strict laws prohibiting literacy instruction to all Black people—enslaved or free.²¹

Northern cities were not much safer. In 1829, Cincinnati reinstated a law requiring new Black residents to post a $500 bond in an effort to deter Black migration to the city. White workers regarded the rapidly growing African American community as an imminent threat to their own job security. When Black leaders attempted to protest the law, white mobs stormed Black neighborhoods, torching homes, schools, and churches and driving some two-thousand Black residents from the city. Hundreds joined a growing exodus to Canada, laying the foundation for what would become a Black abolitionist movement in exile. The Cincinnati riots were also a catalyst for launching the national Black Convention Movement in 1830, in which Black leaders agreed to meet in order to develop a coordinated strategy to end slavery, oppose colonization, and protect the rights of African Americans.²²

This was the context for the bloody Southampton Rebellion led by Nat Turner, the most feared and exalted slave rebel in US history. Turner was born in Southampton County, Virginia, just one week before Gabriel was hanged. A devout Christian encouraged by his master to preach the gospel to fellow slaves, he eventually came to see himself as a prophet and interpreted signs and visions as directives from God. In May 1828 he experienced what would prove to be his most consequential vision: to wage war on the sin of enslavement. Once God gave the sign, “I should arise and prepare myself and slay my enemies with their own weapons.”²³ Following a series of signs and aborted plans beginning in February 1831, Turner succeeded in mobilizing a force of some forty enslaved men and women. Launched on August 22, exactly forty years to the day after the beginning of the Haitian Revolution, the Southampton rebels moved from house to house, killing whites they confronted and marching toward the town of Jerusalem. Ultimately, white militias as well as state and federal troops overwhelmed Turner’s army and captured some of the rebels, but not before they had killed at least fifty-five whites and a few Blacks loyal to their masters. Turner evaded capture for over two months, during which white mobs massacred some two hundred Black people in southeastern Virginia, most of whom had no connection to the rebellion. Turner was finally captured on October 30 and was tried and executed along with fifty-five other Black people implicated in the uprising.²⁴ For Virginia slaveholders, Nat Turner was their worst nightmare. The Southampton Rebellion frightened some masters to back proposals for compensated emancipation coupled with forced repatriation of all Africans back to the continent as their only hope for survival. They turned to the ACS to make America white and to save their skins. The majority of southern slaveholders, however, were not ready to lose their source of wealth. Instead, they proposed more repressive measures and expanded the state’s military capacity. If anyone had to go, they reasoned, it was the free Black population. Rebellious slaves could simply be traded away. For Black people, Nat Turner became a martyr, a folk hero, a symbol of resistance that persists to this very day. One of the songs included here, “Nat Turner,” slyly memorializes Turner and lampoons the master class by using an ingenious pun to say his name:

You mought be rich as cream

And drive your coach and four horse team.

But you can’t keep de world from moverin’ round

And not turn her [Nat Turner] from the gaining ground….

And your name it mought be Caesar sure

And got you cannon can shoot a mile or more,

But you can’t keep de world from moverin’ round

And not turn her [Nat Turner] from the gaining ground.²⁵

While David Walker’s Appeal, the formation of the Black Convention Movement, and the Southampton Insurrection sent the slaveholding class into a panic, they also sparked a resurgent interracial abolitionist movement. Historians usually refer to this as “second wave” abolitionism to distinguish it from an earlier period of abolitionist sentiment during the eighteenth century, inspired by the Quakers, the Great Awakening, the Declaration of Independence, and the rebellions of enslaved people themselves.²⁶ The bestknown white figure of the second wave was the fiery William Lloyd Garrison, who despite his commitment to pacifism praised Walker’s Appeal, hailed the Haitian Revolution, and admired Nat Turner. In 1831, the twenty-five-year-old Garrison founded an antislavery newspaper called The Liberator. The paper could not have survived without Black patronage; during its first year in circulation, 400 of the 450 subscribers were Black. Nor could the paper or the antislavery movement have survived without women. Black and white women formed female antislavery societies throughout the North. They flagrantly violated gender conventions by speaking publicly, participating in vigilance committees, and taking the lead in the campaign to abolish slavery. Black women such as Maria Stewart, Sarah Forten, Sarah Mapps Douglass, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and Sojourner Truth joined with white women Angelina and Frances Grimké, Lydia Maria Child, Susan Paul, Prudence Crandall, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and others to not only build a powerful antislavery movement but lay the foundations for first wave feminism in the United States. In 1833, Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Arthur Tappan launched the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), a national organization calling for the immediate abolition of slavery.²⁷

Garrisonians remained skeptical of electoral politics because they regarded the US as a de facto slaveholders’ republic backed by a proslavery Constitution. They weren’t entirely wrong. Articles I, II, and IV all had clauses that protected slavery and slave-produced commerce, even as it included a sunset provision on the international slave trade. The Constitution was designed to protect private property and defined liberty in terms of one’s ability to control and dispose of property. The Fifth Amendment declaring that no person can be deprived of “life, liberty, or property without due process of law,” in conception and practice, protected slaveholders, not slaves. Enslaved Africans were property, and government-imposed abolition violated property rights. Moreover, the Constitution enacted mechanisms that artificially expanded the South’s legislative power. The so-called three-fifths compromise apportioned congressional representation in the slave states by counting the white population along with 60 percent of enslaved people. Whether we call it a proslavery document or not, it is clear that the Constitution put slavery in the states beyond the reach of federal power. For these reasons, the Garrisonians did not believe abolition could be achieved through Congress and argued instead for dissolving the Union in order to isolate and economically weaken the slave regime.²⁸

Garrison’s ideas did not always sit well with his comrades, especially Black abolitionists who knew fully well that slaveholders also promoted dissolution. The injunction to boycott electoral politics was hard to swallow when the vast majority of Black people could not vote at all, and northern states were beginning to disenfranchise property-owning free Black men while extending the vote to propertyless white men.²⁹ And very few African Americans were prepared to disavow violence or believed that moral suasion could have any significant effect on whites given the depths of American racism. In fact, Black abolitionists were already organizing self-defense groups to resist kidnappers.³⁰

For the hardcore Garrisonians, however, moral suasion was more than a tactic; it was a way of life, an ethical stance that profoundly shaped the movement’s culture. Faced with the constant threat of mob violence and arrest in every state of the union, radical abolitionists relied on solidarity, dedication, and sheer fearlessness for their very survival. Similar to civil rights activists a century later, singing was an essential part of movement culture. Singing reinforced solidarity and instilled activists with courage, and abolitionist songs were an effective form of agitprop in an era when abolitionist literature was considered seditious contraband, even by the US postal service. The all-Black Garrison Juvenile Choir, for example, was seen by some AASS members as their most powerful weapon in the abolitionist movement. One correspondent to the Liberator believed the choir “will do more towards curing people of prejudice … than the best sermon which the most able orator could give.”³¹ Indeed, abolitionists, like the New England transcendentalists and Christian reformers, saw music and poetry as the highest form of communication as well as an effective means for promoting moral and social development.

But just as abolitionists were split over the questions of violent resistance versus nonviolent civil disobedience, pro-union vs. anti-union, and pro-Constitution vs. anti-Constitution, aesthetic tensions over music also divided the movement. Abolitionists generally recognized spirituals as authentic Black expression and evidence that enslaved persons possessed a soul and a human desire for freedom. However, some abolitionists distinguished spirituals from antislavery songs, insisting that the latter necessarily held a higher aesthetic and moral standard. In his preface to The Liberty Minstrel (1844), George W. Clark—singer, songwriter, musician, and poet—envisioned “music of a chaste, refined and elevated style, shall go forth with its angel voice, like a spirit of love upon the wind, exerting upon all classes of society a rich and healthful moral influence.”³² So while the archetypal abolitionist song might be described as slave testimony set to music, the composers were often white abolitionists—figures such as James Russell Lowell, Jesse Hutchinson Jr., William Lloyd Garrison, and John Greenleaf Whittier. Most of the songs in Clark’s collection played on white sentimentality through representations of Black people as victims of brutality, vivid descriptions of the auction block, and lamentations in the voice of an enslaved mother, father, or child bearing witness to the splitting of families or violence meted out to loved ones. Such appeals were succinctly captured in the wildly popular image of the “supplicating Negro”—the image of the kneeling slave, chained at the wrist, an inscription reading “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” The emblem was first designed in London in 1787 as a seal for the Quaker-led Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, though the original artist is unknown. Later that year, the society commissioned one of its members, the eminent industrialist Josiah Wedgwood, to render the emblem as a jasperware cameo at his pottery factory. The cameos were mass-produced and within a year became the hottest fashion accessory among the abolitionist and anti-slave trade elite.³³ The “supplicating Negro” was everywhere in the Atlantic world, in print, on plates and snuff boxes, and in song. Among the many “refined” songs included in The Liberty Minstrel was “Am I Not a Man and a Brother,” set to the melody of “Bride’s Farewell.”³⁴

William Wells Brown’s The Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings (1848), the first abolitionist songbook published by a fugitive from slavery, not only opens with “Am I Not a Man and a Brother,” but includes many lamentations penned by the same white abolitionist composers as in Clark’s collection. But Brown also included at least one song said to be written by “a slave,” “Song of the Coffle Gang,” as well as his own compositions “Fling Out the Anti-Slavery Flag” and “A Song for Freedom.” His inclusion of songs such as “Right On” and “We’re Coming” displayed a fundamental break with moral suasion in favor of militant action and outright revolt. Brown also embraced humor and irony, recasting popular minstrel songs and doggerel to expose the contradictions of slavery in the land of liberty. A startling example is “Jefferson’s Daughter,” whose lyrics were inspired by a newspaper story:

The daughter of Jefferson sold for a slave!

The child of a freeman for dollars and francs!

The roar of applause, when your orators rave,

Is lost in the sound of her chain, as it clanks.³⁵

Brown set his “A Song for Freedom” to the popular 1844 minstrel tune “Dandy Jim from Caroline.” In doing so, he turned a vile, racist attack on Black people into a powerful weapon against slavery and anti-Black racism. The imagined protagonist humorously reflects on the irony of slaves listening to their master boast that America is a land of liberty, the result of a revolution “To save a three-pence tax on tea”—a cause presumably nobler and more consequential than ending human bondage. Brown didn’t simply borrow the melody and the structure. He parodied the original chorus:

For my ole massa tole me so

I was de best looking nigga in de country, O

I look in de glass an found t’was so

Just what massa tole me, O.³⁶

And transformed it into a stinging rebuke of American hypocrisy:

My old massa tells me O

This is a land of freedom O

Let’s look about and see if’t is so,

Just as massa tells me O.

The singer and the imagined gathering of enslaved men and women to whom the lyrics are addressed conclude that their best option would be to leave this “Christian” slave country for Canada, where they can secure freedom under the British empire.³⁷

Antislavery songs also reflected key political splits within the movement. In 1840, abolitionists who disagreed with Garrison’s position on electoral politics formed the Liberty Party and ran former-slaveholder-turned-abolitionist James Birney for president. Founding members of the Liberty Party argued that the Constitution did not necessarily sanction slavery since it defined “slaves” as persons held in service rather than property. While conceding that the federal government cannot supersede the rights of states to permit slavery, they argued that the Constitution prohibited slavery everywhere under federal jurisdiction—that is, territories that were not yet states and the high seas. The Liberty Party’s platform, therefore, called for immediate abolition in the territories and the District of Columbia, ending the interstate slave trade, and the ultimate goal of a slavery-free nation. Clark’s The Liberty Minstrel was peppered with songs promoting the Liberty Party and the vote as the chief weapon in the antislavery movement. “Strike for Liberty,” “Liberty Battle Song,” “The Ballot,” “Ode to James Birney,” and “The Liberty Voters Song,” among others, appealed directly to free men to “strike” at the ballot box.³⁸ Despite increased popular support for abolition and growing tension over whether newly acquired western territories would be slave or free, the Liberty Party failed miserably at the ballot box. Its uncompromising opposition to slavery and mild support for Black civil rights were considered too radical. In 1848, a group of moderates left to form the Free Soil Party, whose platform focused entirely on limiting slavery where it existed and ensuring that all new states and territories remained free.³⁹

The other major split in the movement centered on the question of violence. In 1843, at a meeting of Black abolitionists in Troy, New York, a young minister named Henry Highland Garnet stunned his fellow delegates by delivering a speech calling for mass slave insurrections throughout the South. He urged his comrades, “Rather die freemen than live to be slaves. Remember that you are FOUR MILLIONS! Let your motto be resistance! resistance! resistance!”⁴⁰ The speech was met with both vigorous applause and consternation from those who believed his words were incendiary and dangerous. By a margin of one vote, the delegates elected to suppress Garnet’s speech and remove any reference to it from the official minutes. But it opened up a discussion of the limits of moral suasion and the potential of armed rebellion, especially waged by the enslaved themselves. The successful mutinies by captive Africans on the slave ships Amistad (1839) and The Creole (1841) not only demonstrated the effectiveness of slave rebellions but gave legal and moral justification for Africans to use violence in defense of their liberty. These two mutinies, which ultimately resulted in the freedom and repatriation of the rebels, most likely inspired Garnet’s words. His speech underscored what the African mutineers always knew: that they were the real victims of a crime. They did not need a constitution or the so-called blessings of Western civilization to explain what is right, just, and humane.⁴¹

With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, proponents of armed self-defense and resistance were no longer outliers. The new federal law amended the 1793 Fugitive Slave Law, allowing slaveholders or their agents to arrest runaways without due process and without warrants, doubling the reward for capture, and placing enforcement in the hands of US commissioners and marshals. It essentially extended slave patrols to the North since federal marshals were empowered to form a posse comitatus of armed (white) citizens to capture fugitives. But anyone caught helping a suspected fugitive faced up to six years in prison and a fine of $1,000. Lacking legal protections and the right to testify, every Black person risked kidnapping and re-enslavement. The law was the result of a political crisis that had been brewing since the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which theoretically was meant to contain slavery below the Mason-Dixon line as the country expanded west. The idea was to maintain a balance of power between “slave” and “free” states. But all it did was postpone an inevitable war among slaveholders, who believed that no state or territory should have the right to ban slavery; “free soilers,” who believed slavery degraded free labor and undermined farm economies; and abolitionists, who believed slavery should not exist. The abolition of slavery in the French and British empires, the admission of more free states, and the dramatic growth of the abolitionist movement clearly threatened slave power. So, to avoid dissolving the republic, Congress gave slaveholders the Fugitive Slave Law in exchange for admitting California as a free state and allowing New Mexico and Utah to vote on the slavery question.⁴²

The free Black community responded with protests, meetings, more vigilance committees, and an open assertion of their right to armed self-defense. “Death to kidnappers!” became a common slogan, even among the more moderate abolitionists. In August 1850, the New York Vigilance Committee organized a convention attended by nearly two thousand to condemn the imminent passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. The delegates endorsed a statement committing “the great mass of the colored men of the North” to support slave insurrections “with deep-stored and long-accumulated revenge in their hearts, and with death-dealing weapons in their hands.”⁴³ Abolitionists built the Underground Railroad, participated in raids to liberate fugitives held by kidnappers, federal agents, and the courts, and dramatically increased Black emigration to Canada.⁴⁴

The state of emergency that sparked abolitionism’s militant, revolutionary turn also shaped antislavery songs of the era. The leading figure of the era was the Black abolitionist songwriter and poet Joshua McCarter Simpson. A conductor on the Underground Railroad, Simpson composed original antislavery music that was often irreverent and satirical, exposing the hypocrisy of a Christian nation holding human beings in bondage. He often said, “You can sing what it would be death to speak,” though many of his lyrics were probably considered seditious by authorities opposed to abolition. His portraits of the enslaved were a departure from the kneeling, “supplicating Negro.” Like the fugitives he helped shepherd to freedom, the slaves in Simpson’s songs had grit and were determined to free themselves rather than beg whites for their liberty. Two years after passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, the thirty-two-year-old Simpson published Original Anti-Slavery Songs, which included titles such as “No Master, Never.” Set to “Pop Goes the Weasel,” “No Master, Never” is the tale of a runaway who confronts his master on his way to Canada, promising never to return. Simpson’s songs circulated widely in the 1850s and were popular among abolitionists, but many of them were not published until the appearance of his 1874 collection, The Emancipation Car: Being an Original Composition of Anti-Slavery Ballads Composed Exclusively for the Underground Railroad (Sullivan and Brown, 1874). Callahan features several Simpson titles here, including “The Underground Railroad,” “To the White People of America,” “The Voice of Six Hundred Thousand Nominally Free” (set to “The Marseillaise”), and his irreverent take on “America (My Country, ’Tis of Thee)” titled “Song of the ‘Aliened American’”:

My country ’tis of thee

Dark land of Slavery

In thee we groan….

The white man rules the day

He holds despotic sway

O’er all the land….

And the final verse offers a transformed America through Black collective struggles for justice:

We now “Eight Millions Strong”

Must strike sweet freedom’s song

And please ourselves, our wrong—

Our chains must break.⁴⁵

Simpson’s music comprised the soundtrack for abolition’s most militant generation, the men and women of the 1850s who actually started the Civil War a decade before the slaveholders declared independence from the Union and fired on Fort Sumter. I’m speaking of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Jermaine W. Loguen, William Parker, Frederick Douglass, Henry Bibb, James McCune Smith, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and, of course, John Brown, to name but a few. Stirred by a wave of slave resistance (incidents of arson, flight, strikes, and mysterious deaths of masters and overseers) and a federal government that appeared to be moving with lightning speed toward protecting slavery everywhere, the 1850s generation understood that justice in America was impossible without war. This fact became crystal clear when Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854—essentially obliterating the Mason-Dixon wall against slavery’s expansion and opening up all new territories to human bondage by allowing settlers to vote on the matter—and after the Supreme Court ruled against Dred Scott in 1857.

The case of Dred and Harriet Scott was arguably the most consequential Supreme Court decision of the antebellum period. In 1846, with help from abolitionists in St. Louis, the couple sued for their freedom, arguing that during the 1830s their master relocated to free territory—first Illinois and then Wisconsin Territory (present-day Minnesota). They eventually settled in St. Louis and were hired out while their master, John Emerson, collected their wages. After his death in 1843, his widow, Irene Emerson, convinced the St. Louis county sheriff to take custody of the Scotts while she continued to hold them as property and collect their wages. In 1850, the St. Louis Circuit Court ruled in their favor, but two years later the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the decision, arguing that, despite having spent at least three years in free territory, the moves were temporary. When the case came before the US Supreme Court, it ruled 7–2 against Scott. The outcome should not have been that surprising since five justices, including Chief Justice Roger Taney, came from slaveholding families, and seven justices were affiliated with the proslavery Democratic Party. But the consequences were far-reaching, even beyond Chief Justice Taney’s infamous line in his majority opinion that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The court was less concerned with the fate of Dred and Harriet Scott than with rendering the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional and opening the door to make slavery legal everywhere in the US. The court ruled that Congress never had the power to govern territories and therefore had no power to prohibit slavery, adding that slaves were property and to strip slaveowners of their property without due process was a violation of the Fifth Amendment. Taney’s declaration that Black people were not citizens was bad enough, but the court violated the Constitution and basic principles of jurisprudence by ruling on the Missouri Compromise after declaring that Black people did not have the right to sue in courts. The case should have been dismissed at this point, but the majority ruled anyway because their real agenda was to overturn prohibitions on slavery.

Enter John Brown, the antislavery icon for whom the most enduring abolitionist song (“John Brown’s Body”) was titled. The Dred Scott decision was the reason John Brown decided to wage an armed attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, instead of launching guerrilla raids on plantations as he had originally planned. Why? Because the Dred Scott decision proved to Brown that while slaveholders were morally accountable for holding human beings in bondage, it was the federal government that sanctioned and sustained the institution of slavery. Slavery, in other words, was not a sectional issue but a national crime, and the federal government was slavery’s prime source of authority and protection. In 1858, in preparation for the raid on Harpers Ferry, Brown spent several weeks at Frederick Douglass’s home where he drafted “A Declaration of Liberty by the Representatives of the Slave Population of the United States of America” and a “Provisional Constitution and Ordinance for the People of the United States.” This new constitution was not only the antithesis of Chief Justice Taney’s opinion on Dred Scott; it recognized enslavement itself as “none other than a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion.”⁴⁶

Arguably both the most venerated and the most despised abolitionist in US history, John Brown was born in 1800 to a deeply religious antislavery family in Connecticut. He became completely immersed in Black abolitionist circles after meeting Frederick Douglass in 1847. He participated in the Underground Railroad by hiding and transporting fugitives, helped defend the Black community of North Elba, and organized armed self-defense groups in Springfield, Massachusetts, to protect fugitives from capture. In 1848, he published a pamphlet at his own expense combining David Walker’s Appeal with Henry Highland Garnet’s suppressed speech in Troy, New York. Brown and his sons waged war against slaveholders on the bloody fields of Kansas in 1854 in a vain effort to secure liberty for all. And on October 16, 1859, Brown and a ragtag army made up of sixteen white men and five Black men—Osborne Perry Anderson, John Copeland Jr., Shields Green, Danger-field Newby, and Lewis Sheridan Leary—took on the federal government and the southern planter class in what seemed like a foolhardy attempt to free four million Black people held in bondage. They were defeated, and Brown was hanged; but within two years the entire system of chattel slavery began to collapse.⁴⁷

We can debate the raid’s accomplishments, but what Brown did, in effect, was what the songs collected here were intended to do: force antislavery sympathizers to come off the fence, for there was no moderation or compromise on the question of slavery. For Brown, what was in question was not Black humanity but white humanity—or more precisely whether or not white people could break the shackles of racism and become fully human. Silence and inaction in the face of human bondage meant complicity, and complicity was dehumanizing because slavery was barbarism. To become human required risking life and limb to end slavery. For whites willing to follow Brown, freedom was an unearned privilege in a land of slavery; the act of insurrection was a symbolic repudiation of that privilege.⁴⁸

So when Black people and antiracist organizers continued to sing “John Brown’s Body” over the course of the next century and a half, declaring that his “truth goes marching on,” they recognized that the struggle is not over. Far from it. Mat Callahan and his band of rebels understand this all too well, knowing that these songs are not for posterity, not to be archived or displayed on museum walls or the subject of NPR stories. They are to be circulated, sung, and passed on and, above all, to be the fire that inspires us to act.