Hearing Moral Reform: Abolitionists and Slave Music, 1838-1870

by

Karl Byrn

A thesis submitted to

Sonoma State University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

III

History

Dr. Steve Estes

r Z- /Li ,/zO rL Date Copyright 2012

By Karl Bym

ii AUTHORIZATION FOR REPRODUCTION OF MASTER'S THESIS/PROJECT

I grant permission for the reproduction ofparts ofthis thesis without further authorization from me, on the condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction absorb the cost and provide proper acknowledgement of authorship.

Permission to reproduce this thesis in its entirety must be obtained from me.

iii Hearing Moral Reform: Abolitionists and Slave Music, 1838-1870

Thesis by Karl Byrn

ABSTRACT

Purpose ofthe Study:

The purpose of this study is to analyze commentary on slave music written by certain abolitionists during the American antebellum and Civil War periods. The analysis is not intended to follow existing scholarship regarding the origins and meanings of African-American music, but rather to treat this music commentary as a new source for understanding the abolitionist movement. By treating abolitionists' reports of slave music as records of their own culture, this study will identify larger intellectual and cultural currents that determined their listening conditions and reactions.

Procedure:

The primary sources involved in this study included journals, diaries, letters, articles, and books written before, during, and after the American Civil War. I found, in these sources, that the responses by abolitionists to the music of slaves and freedmen revealed complex ideologies and motivations driven by religious and reform traditions, antebellum musical cultures, and contemporary racial and social thinking. In order to establish more specific historical frameworks for these influences, I surveyed secondary sources on several related topics of nineteenth-century intellectual, cultural, and reform histories. This research included established as well as more recent scholarship on these topics, and where possible, a reading of biographical material on the individual subjects of this study. Because this thesis involved inquiry into how the responses ofindividual listeners followed larger historical patterns of thought and action, each chapter focused on a particular aspect ofreform culture and posited the music reports of a specific reformer or reformers as examples of that cultural influence.

Findings:

Abolitionists who heard slave music had agendas for moral reform action when they first encountered slaves and former slaves. The music they heard often seemed indescribable; however, they became involved with this music as they "heard" moral arguments that inspired them to take action in relation to the music. These actions became confirmations of abolitionist commitments. By taking actions towards slave music, abolitionists formed connections between that culture and their own moral traditions. These reform actions followed two primary paths: efforts to change or improve slave music, and efforts to share or promote the value ofthat music.

iv Conclusions:

The abolitionists in this study "heard" moral reform in slave music when that music triggered moral responses based on their reform agendas. Involvement with slave music became, for these abolitionists, a way to fulfill their self-appointed mission of stewardship ofslaves and freedmen, and a way to advocate for African-American culture in the post-war society. Rather than being confused by or detached from slave music, abolitionists become involved with slave music in order to respond to their generational crises. The abolitionists' process of hearing music as an argument for moral reform action additionally suggests further inquiry into "moral" listening and involvement by later folklorists and musicologists.

Chair: Signa re

MA Program: History Sonoma State University Date: r 2. / <-/­

v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my thesis committee at Sonoma State University, Dr. Amy Kittelstrom, Dr. Steve Estes, and Dr. Michelle Jolly, for valuable guidance during the completion ofthis project. I profited from their insights into the diverse topics covered in this study, from their recommended readings, and from their directions on ways to strengthen my writing and my argument. Additionally, I would like to thank Dr. Kathleen Noonan and Dr. Lynne Morrow for providing insights into the subjects and processes of my work. Thanks are also due to Karen Kukil and the staff at the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith Col1ege in Northampton, Massachusetts, for assistance with my archival research with primary documents. Final thanks belong to my wife, Frances Byrn, for providing inspiration to pursue and complete this work.

vi TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Hearing Moral Reform: Abolitionists and Slave Music, 1838-1870 ...... 1

I. "Displeased me not a little": Frances Anne Kemble and the Moral Imperative Against Slavery ...... 24

II. "Would catch the ear ofany musician": Lucy McKim, Dwight's Journal ofMusic, and the Shared Culture ofAntebellum Music ...... 54

III. "When the grown people wanted to 'shout,' I would not let them": Port Royal Educators and the Ring Shout...... 91

IV. "They are all natural Transcendentalists": Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Spiritual Activism ...... 113

V. "Civilized in its Character": William Francis Allen and Racial Thinking...... 137

VI. Conclusion...... ,...... 161

Bibliography...... 166

vii 1

Hearing Moral Reform: Abolitionists and Slave Music, 1838 to 1870

When Northern abolitionists encountered slaves on plantations during the antebellum and Civil War periods, they took a particular interest in the music they heard.

In the spirituals, folk songs, and "ring shouts" of slave communities, Anglo-American abolitionists heard something they found to be strange yet somehow familiar, something they considered "barbaric" yet "beautiful," something full of "noise" yet also full of

"genius." Most abolitionists had never heard plantation music or encountered enslaved

African-Americans prior to this contact. However, just as abolitionist literature had encouraged them to imagine the degraded conditions of slavery, contemporary religious awakenings and lingering Enlightenment ideals had inspired them to imagine a place for

African-Americans in an egalitarian and moral society. Slave music in many ways challenged abolitionists to realize these ideals. Northern abolitionists documented slave music during the years surrounding the war in part to process newly experienced cultural sounds. They also felt that slave music demanded not just commentary, but attention and action. These reformers brought an agenda for moral reform action to their contact with slaves, and engaging with their musical culture became one way that abolitionists came to terms with slavery as well as their own hopes for the freedmen.

Abolitionists who heard slave music in the years surrounding the Civil War became more personally involved with that music than the casual and dismissive observers of the colonial and early Federal periods. Before the nineteenth century, listeners such as itinerant evangelical clergymen, European travelers, ship captains, travelling schoolmasters, and plantation owners recorded sporadic and fragmentary 2 observations of slave music. Eighteenth century Anglo-American listeners tended to marginalize slave music along the poles of "savage noise," or if heard in church,

"wonderful singing," and these earlier accounts showed little interest in an active relationship with the music. I By the antebellum era, however, listening conditions had changed. Revivalism and expanded transportation had increased racial integration in the new nation's religious and social spheres, antislavery activism had accelerated, popular and sacred music styles had become interconnected, and slave music itself had evolved into a reflection of shared spiritual and musical cultures. The generation of reformers who heard slave music in the war years had been trained to advocate for the civic potential of

African-Americans, and they had a clearer familiarity with a shared musical vocabulary.

Rather than continuing the clerical disdain and cultural indifference that had previously been paid to African-American music, these abolitionists connected that musical culture to their own moral culture. As they became involved with African-American music, they found ways to confirm their beliefs about slaves and freedmen as well as ways to act on their convictions.

What moral reform agendas did abolitionists bring to their encounters with slave music? How did their listening experiences stimulate those values and intentions, and how did they become "morally" involved with this music? Witnessing and hearing what they often found to be "indescribable," these Anglo-American abolitionists initiall¥ confronted the same challenge previous listeners had of finding rational terms for

I An extensive bibliography of primary sources containing comments on slave music from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries is available in Dena Epstein, Sinfit! Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University ofIllinois Press, 1977). Similar sources are used to discuss African survivals and acculturation in Samuel A. Floyd, The Power ofBlack Music: Interpreting Its History/rom Ali'ica 10 the United States (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Eileen Southern, The Music oj' Black Americans: A llistorv (1971. Third Edition, New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997). 3 understanding what they heard. The terms of engagement they found were drawn from complex and related contemporary ideals of liberal religion, racial egalitarianism, the civic value of communal music, the relationship between self and society, and the imperatives of a post-emancipation social order. Hearing something meaningful inside the "noise" of slave music, these Northern activists were then compelled do something about what they heard, and they responded according to their personal backgrounds in the complex spiritual and social foundations of nineteenth century American reform.

As products ofa socially-conscious and literate reform culture, the abolitionists who became involved with slave music in the years surrounding the war developed an incipient sense of slave music by reading abolitionist literature and contemporary slave narratives. In his 1845 biography, Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave who became the most influential African-American spokesman of the nineteenth century, challenged his

Northern abolitionist audience to think twice about earlier listeners' dismissals of slave songs. "The mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery," he insisted regarding common misperceptions of contentment in slave singing, "than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do." Douglass recalled that as a enslaved child, "I was myself within the circle," a position from which he "neither saw nor heard" the broader implications of slave music "as those without might see and hear." As a free man, he came to believe that

"anyone who wished to be impressed" could hear the implications of slave music, and he suggested to "those without" that they "might see and hear" meaning that potentially connected to their own antislavery crusade. 2

2 Frederick Douglass, Narrative olthe Lile olFrederick Douglass. An American Slave, Written by Himself, 2nd ed., David W. Blight, ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003): 51. 4

This thesis is a study of "those without," that is, Anglo-American Northern abolitionists, intellectuals, and activists of the era, and ofwhat these outsiders did when they were finally able to "see and hear" slave music on plantations. Since the 1970s, historians and musicologists have been extensively tracing the broad meanings and forms of slave music. 3 My current work is not a continuation of that analysis, but is instead an investigation into how and why particular meanings were assigned to slave music by particular abolitionists, and ofhow and why they became involved with this music. The commentary on slave music written by members of the mid-nineteenth century reform generation relayed information about a newly experienced musical culture, and scholars of slave culture have relied heavily on these first-hand descriptions. More importantly for my study, the reactions of the commentators also relayed crucial information about the larger cultural backgrounds and imperatives ofthe listeners themselves. Read in this way, antebellum and wartime commentary on slave music speaks even more clearly about

Northern reform culture than about the culture of slave music.

My central argument in this study is that these abolitionists "heard" a moral argument in slave music that prompted a response and subsequent action based on their personal moral reform agendas. The difference between their hearing experiences, and those ofearlier observers, was the very centrality ofa moral reform agenda in their comments and a moral action in their responses. Abolitionists who wrote about slave music moderately well-known figures ofthe era such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson

3 In addition to the slave musie studies by Epstein, Floyd, and Southern dted in the first footnote, see also Lawrence W. Levine, Black Cu/tllre and Black Consciousness: A/i-o-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom, (Oxford, London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Shane White and Graham White, The Sounds o/SlavelY: Discovering A/i-icon American History Through Songs. Sermons, and Speech (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005); and Robert Darden, People Get Ready' A New History olBlack Gospel Music (New York, London: Continuum, 2004). 5 and Frances Anne Kemble, as well as largely unknown figures such as Lucy McKim and

William Francis Allen - invariably came from a background of moral reform ideals, that is, from specific nineteenth century cultural and intellectual foundations in which personal religious imperatives demanded social action. These abolitionists brought specific reform agendas to their contact with slave communities - spiritually and civically driven agendas for self-development, benevolence, and the transformation of society ­ and those moral agendas fueled and focused their particular reactions to slave music.

The connections abolitionists made with slave music were to a large extent connections they made with their own inherited moral imperatives. I specifically argue in this study that a historically based moral agenda drove each reformer to respond with a particular moral action towards the music itself. As we will see, these self-conscious

"moral" reform actions towards slave music followed two primary paths. On the one hand, some abolitionists reacted to slave music with a paternalistic impulse to change or improve the music. This response was based on an activist desire to change the institution of slavery and a perfectionist desire to improve the individual and American society. By contrast, other abolitionists responded to what they heard with a romantic impulse to share and promote the music itself as an example of the extant moral and civic worth of its creators. Unlike the first response, which involved the redirection ofAfrican­

American culture according to Anglo-American standards, the second response impe1led reformers to identify signs of worth within African-American musical culture. With this action, reformers presented evidence to counter their adversaries and convince their a1lies in the contemporary and contentious Anglo-American debates over African-American character. In these two modes of reform action towards slave music, acting on what they 6 heard became a way for abolitionists to not only process sonic aesthetics, but more importantly, to frame their new relationships with slaves and freedmen in terms of their own moral intentions.

The increased involvement of abolitionists with slave music followed an antebellum escalation of moral righteousness in the antislavery movement. Early listeners had heard

African-American music as unsettling or curiously quaint, but neither hearing experience had triggered a morally driven response. Wartime listeners, however, had been conditioned for involvement by the explosive, evangelically inspired antislavery rhetoric ofthe 1830s. When William Lloyd Garrison began publishing The Liberator in 1831, his strategy of Hmoral suasion," or a moral appeal to individual conscience, posited slavery as the ultimate sin against God, Christian ethics, free society, and most dangerously, against both personal and national conscience.4 Events such as the formation of the

American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 and Britain's abolition of Caribbean slavery that same year amplified the moral self-assurance of the movement. Accelerating abolitionist moralism drew much inspiration from the popular and widespread evangelical fervor for the perfection of self and society. Evangelicalism'S call for immediate salvation prompted reform activists to redirect the gradualism ofearlier American antislavery sentiment into a moral crusade for immediate abolition. During the 1850s, the conviction of antislavery crusaders often became violent. After three decades of escalating moral urgency, antislavery rhetoric and action had prompted wartime listeners to hear slave music as

4 The influence of "Garrisonian abolitionism" on the subjects of this study is evident in the moral urgency and ideological absolutism of their reactions to slave music, as well as in personal connections they shared with Garrison in abolitionist and reform circles. For an introduction to Garrison's strategies and ideologies as seen in his own writings, see George M. Frederickson, ed., William Lloyd Garrison (Englewood Cliffs, Nl: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968). 7 more than quaint noise. As Douglass had suggested, abolitionists could instead hear the music as part of a larger moral argument.

Just as the evangelically inspired perfectionism of the 1830s created a new context for connection with slave music, currents of liberal New England Protestantism, particularly Unitarianism and Transcendentalism, also provided wartime listeners with new terms of engagement. Unlike earlier listeners, antebellum and wartime reformers were able to engage with slave music in part due to newer liberal theosophies that linked individual divinity to a universal and shared divinity. Liberal Protestants and freethinkers of late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had extended Enlightenment free will ideals to a faith in man's innate "moral agency," that is, the individual's natural inclination to choose moral action through reason. Abolitionist responses to slave music were also anchored by the liberal principle of"self-culture," a principle that espoused the self-cultivation ofpersonal moral agency. The revered Unitarian clergyman William

Ellery Channing forwarded this principle in an 1838 address, in which he described self- culture as the "care which every man owes to himself, to the unfolding and perfecting of his nature." Channing believed more importantly that "self-culture is social," that personal development also involved "our political relations and duties," and that the ultimate result ofpersonal moral cultivation would be the elevation of"universal good­ will" in social connections. 5

5 William Ellery Channing, SellCulture (Boston, 1838), http://www.americanunitarian.org/selfculture.htm (accessed March 3, 2011). That same year, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a former Unitarian minister, also advocated a form of self-culture in a controversial "split" from formal religious doctrine forwarded in his Harvard "Divinity School Address." Unlike Channing'S goal of a socially connected "universal good-will," however, Emerson's address was an individualist summons "to go alone." Ralph Waldo Emerson, Divinity School Address (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1838), http://www.emersoncentral.com/divaddr.htm (accessed November 10,2012). Both Channing and Emerson, like Garrison, had a powerful impact on abolitionists who wrote about slave music. Of the eight primary subjects in this study, six were Unitarians, and three of them came from the Unitarian pulpit. Channing also wrote an influential antislavery tract in 1835. 8

Along with ideals of self-development as the key to a perfect society came paternalistic concerns for fostering self-development in slaves and freedmen. Abolitionist benevolence often carried prevalent nineteenth century racial notions of Anglo-American superiority and duty to lead. Many abolitionists believed that their moral duty extended beyond ending slavery to the stewardship offormer slaves. In order to perfect society, the moral crusade meant not only freeing the slaves, but also directing them towards independent citizenship by reinforcing the moral and civic values ofNew England

Protestantism. Antislavery reformers often believed that the validity and progress of their own moral self-culture could be demonstrated by their involvement with the progress of the oppressed race. However, when they acted to alter African-American musical culture, these reformers sometimes failed to hear the self-culture and agency that was already present in that culture. Involvement with slave music became an opportunity for abolitionists to apply personal moral agency towards "universal good-will" and social perfection, and also an opportunity to confirm their role as paternalistic stewards.

Social activism, spiritual awakenings, and paternalistic benevolence combined to make it possible for abolitionists, unlike previous listeners, to "hear" opportunities for moral reform in slave music. The Civil War itself provided the arena of physical contact.

By far, the heaviest concentration of abolitionist hearing, commentary, and action on slave music occurred during and after the war on the coastal Sea Islands of South

Carolina. These coastal plantations held the South's highest ratio of slaves to Anglo­

Americans. As these islands were also isolated from mainland plantations, the local population held more African retentions in cultural practices, such as their music and the

Gullah dialect. Following the November 1861 Union naval occupation of Port Royal, a 9 strategic natural port located between Charleston and Savannah, local plantation owners fled inland and left more than 10,000 slaves on those plantations. Federal agents, military men, missionaries, and educators, all ofwhom had their own agendas for dealing with the former slaves, followed the Union army and began what historian Willie Lee Rose has called a "dress rehearsal for Reconstruction.,,6 The "Port Royal Experiment" became a test of the potential of freedmen to become free laborers and effective soldiers. For the missionaries and educators who came to be known as "Gideon's Band," the experiment became an opportunity to connect their moral reform agendas to the moral agency and self-culture they hoped to find in the freedmen.

Religious culture became the primary point of abolitionist connection with slave music at Port Royal. In her formative narrative, Rehearsalfor Reconstruction: The Port

Royal Experiment, Rose describes the experience of "Gideonites" hearing local music at

Port Royal as "troubled" and even repulsed regarding African survivals but also

"romantic-minded" and intensely attracted regarding "familiar hymns," patriotic anthems, and Christian sentiments. The missionaries and educators, Rose notes, "promptly understood that religion was the central fact in the lives" of the former slaves." Hearing the "wisdom and fitness of the slave's spiritual life as expressed in song," the reformers, in spite of aesthetic confusion, recognized in local religious music something akin to their own notions of an active and moral community. Coming to terms with their perceptions of"sacred" religious music and "secular" African survivals would become one of the keys to the Gideonites' future relationships with African-Americans.7

6 Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsallor Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), xi, 3-3\. 7 1bid., 90-97. 10

Music historian Dena Epstein considered the involvement of abolitionists with slave music at Port Royal so crucial to later understandings of African-American music that she devoted four chapters to this process in her source-rich study, Sinful Tunes and

Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War. s Epstein identifies both of the moral reform actions towards music that I have discussed though she does not identify them in the terms I am using in the racial dynamics at Port Royal. "A few (reformers) responded to the slaves' music with sensitivity and perception," Epstein reports, but many more remained "narrow in their interests and conventional in their tastes."

Educators and missionaries often followed the first reform action of changing or improving musical culture. They introduced Northern hymns as they sought to instill "the correctness of their own ideas" as well as to enact "their noble mission" and confirm their own self-culture by "bringing knowledge and culture to the benighted ex-slaves.,,9

On the other hand, many Port Royal reformers made crude attempts to transcribe the lyrics and, when their own talents allowed, the melodies of slave songs. These efforts, following the second reform action of sharing or promoting, would result in the groundbreaking 1867 publication of Slave Songs ofthe United States, an unprecedented collection of 136 slave songs in standard musical notation. The three abolitionists who edited the collection, Epstein says, displayed a paternalistic and romantic "concern for a music that they could not fully understand." Although the academic disciplines of folklore and musicology had not yet emerged in the 1860s, the editors nonetheless

"recognized (African-American music) as valuable, attractive, and eminently worth

g Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals, chap. 13-16. 9 Ibid.. 296-300. 11 preserving from the hazards of time and historic change."IO The Slave Songs collection, in its first edition, received little attention outside of reform circles. However, due to its editors' "moral" action ofpreservation, the availability ofthese transcriptions would later influence the development of the early gospel music style.

While the Slave Songs ofthe United States collection has proved invaluable to scholars ofAmerican music, my current study, as I have indicated, is not a continuation ofthat scholarship. Instead, my research follows a lead suggested by sociologist Jon

Cruz, who analyzed the processes and results of Anglo-American responses to slave music in his monograph, Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of

American Cultural Interpretation. Where Rose and Epstein narrate "history as it happened," Cruz conducts a hermeneutical investigation into "the appropriation of black music" by "disenchanted intellectuals" during the nineteenth century. I I Antebellum upheavals in religion and politics had initially stimulated what he calls "ethnosympathy," and had given the reformer-interpreters the chance to "recognize their own sympathetic consciousness as a moral virtue.,,12 However, during the wartime and post-bellum periods, "viewing the crisis ofblack subjects through a moral and political lens" gave way to a preservationist "treatment ofblacks through cultural artifacts" such as spirituals, shouts, and folk songs. 13

This interpretive and relational shift, Cruz argues, marked the beginning of "the modem separation between moral reflection" inspired by "romantic anti-modernism,"

10 Epstein, Sin/ill Tunes and Spirituals, 304. II Jon Cruz, Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise olAmerican Cultural Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, J999), 11. 12 Ibid., 62. 13 Ibid., 193. 12

and "knowledge management" inspired by "rational social science." 14 As the "disengaged engagement" ofcultural preservation finally eclipsed the reformers' initial "vital and cognitive connections between slave music, social content, and the desire of former slaves and radical abolitionists for even greater social and institutional transformation,"

Cruz says, reformers became "less concerned with actual black lives" than with "finding

5 authenticity on the edges ofmodernity." I Cruz concludes that the scientific, ethnocentric process ofinterpreting and edifying what they heard ultimately separated abolitionists from African-Americans. Though my study has relied on Cruz's inquiry and perspectives, I will conversely argue that the very process of taking moral reform actions towards slave music indicated that these reformers sought increased involvement with slaves and freedmen.

Abolitionist involvement with slave music exposed the critical urgency of spiritual and civic duty in nineteenth century reformers. Recent works by scholars such as Leslie

Butler and John T. Cumbler, as well as earlier studies by Robert H. Abzug and George

M. Fredrickson, have emphasized the importance of personal crises in advancing individual reformers beyond evangelical millennialism and liberal self-culture to action in larger reform communities.) 6 Antebellum reformers interpreted religious and social

14 Cruz, Culture on the Margins 5, 193. 15 Ibid., 122, 150. Historians Shane White and Graham White draw more conventional conclusions regarding Anglo-American distance in their recent monograph, The Sounds a/Slavery: Discovering African American History Through Songs. Sermons, and Speech (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005). Connecting to slave music was never a moral option or an interpretive choice, they suggest, because reformers simply lacked the necessary lenses to grasp what they heard. While my analysis, like Cruz's, identifies junctures of connection, White and White's work remains valuable for its reliance on reformers' observations and for their regular juxtaposition of African-American context and meaning with Anglo-American confusion and misunderstanding. 1(; See Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); John T. Cumbler, From Abolition to Rightsfor All: The Making ora Reform Community in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York, 13 upheavals as final events in a "cosmic drama" between good and evil, Abzug says, and the compulsion for urgent public action was evident in "how closely becoming an abolitionist resembled the experience that lay at the core of religious conversion.,,17

Action was essential for antebellum and wartime reformers because they saw themselves as responsible social agents - who themselves needed salvation as much as society did ­ in a cosmology ofmoral extremes.

Butler, Cumbler, and Fredrickson all stretch their discussions ofcrisis-driven moral action from the pre-war into the post-war era, examining ways in which antebellum intellectuals and activists continued to "seek something worth doing" as antislavery urgency diminished. ls Frederickson concludes that Northern thinkers and activists, motivated by uncertainty over traditional leadership roles during the pre-war crisis, became complacent conservatives after the war. Butler and Cumbler conversely argue that such leaders continued to be active in new causes and ongoing reform communities.

They continued to believe, as they had in the antebellum and wartime periods, that

"people of conscience had a duty to respond with action," Cumbler says, because in the pre-war era, "abolitionist work [had already] taught them how to organize to affect a political end.,,19 The post-war duties ofreform-minded intellectuals, Butler suggests, were the shaping of public opinion to keep reform from going backwards, as the

"clarifying sense ofduty" that had struck them in the antebellum era continued motivating them "to set the country on a nobler path.,,2o The continuous call of this

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); and George M. Fredrickson. The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis ofthe Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). 17 Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling, 153. 18 Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War, 72. 19 CumbJer, From Abolition to Rights/or All, 12.29. 20 Butler, Critical Americans. 18. 14

"nobler path" drove abolitionists to "hear" moral reform in slave music before, during, and after the war.

Moral duty had already been central in the early transatlantic development of the antislavery movement. David Brion Davis explains that as church-based antislavery agitation evolved in Britain and the United States, the belief that "slavery symbolized all the forces that threatened the true destiny ofman" stimulated the obligation for legal 2 reform. I In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, British legislative battles preceded and outpaced American immediatism, but nevertheless set the stage for civic- minded antebellum moralism in America. Christopher Leslie Brown has recently argued that the urgency of transatlantic abolitionist morality began with a post-Revolutionary

British identity crisis, a crisis that demanded a strengthening of "the moral character of imperial authority" due to "the obligations of empire.,,22 Gilbert H. Barnes has similarly claimed that the American Anti-Slavery Society, upon its formation in 1833, became part ofa "benevolent empire" in which the institutional duties of emancipation "continued to be a moral issue" in spite ofschisms in the movement. 23 The abolitionist imperative, that is, was an imperative for the civic demonstration of personal as well as national moral

21 David Brion Davis, The Problem o.lSlavery in the Age ofRevolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1975). 44. See also David Brion Davis, In the Image olGod: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage ofSlavery (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2001).198. 22 Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: FOlll1dations o/British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of NOJ1h Carolina Press, 2006), 161. Although Brown's treatment stresses the primacy of a national quest for moral credibility - a quest remarkably similar to that of American antebellum reformers - it is not an elevation ofpurely religious impulses. Instead, Brown more specifically links but subordinates religious obligations to imperial political duties. 23 Gilbert Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse 1830-1844 (Gloucester, MA: The American Historical Association, 1933), 18-34, 197. 15 duty. "Hearing" moral reform in slave music became, for the wartime generation, one demonstration of that social duty.24

Spiritual and civic imperatives did not by themselves determine abolitionist involvement with slave music. Inherited and contemporary perceptions of race, and of music itself, were unavoidable factors in the hearing process. Scholars such as George

Fredrickson, Winthrop Jordon, Thomas Gossett, David Roediger, Matthew Jacobson

Frye, and Nell Irvin Painter have examined various contentious contradictions in prevalent nineteenth century Anglo-American notions ofracial hierarchies.25 Though abolitionists and reformers tended to eschew popular "scientific" theories of racial differences and to instead embrace ideals ofracial egalitarianism, they nonetheless perceived their benevolent mission through rigid racial lenses that might shock modem listeners. The strongest prejudice that affected abolitionists who heard slave music was what Frederickson calls "romantic racialism," that is, the projection of distinct and

24 While my study follows Davis and Barnes, and to a lesser degree Brown, in treating the abolitionist impulse as a morally-driven civic imperative, scholars of slavery and antislavery have sharply disagreed on the importance of moralism in ending slavery. Eric Williams soundly rejects the historical focus on morality as "confusion" and instead casts the fall of slavery as a function ofdiversifying economic industrialism. Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (New York: The University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 211. In a departure from morality and economics, Robin Blackburn treats antislavery progress as a function of purely political concerns. He stresses shifting international relations that gave Britain command of the Caribbean and highlights the importance of slave revolts. Like Williams, he discounts the role of religious morality, arguing somewhat narrowly that antislavery thought "did not rely upon any appeal to divine providence or to the conscience of the slaveholder." Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow ofColonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London, New York: Verso, 1988),520-539. More recently, Seymour Drescher has also interpreted early antislavery progress as a shift in politics, explaining that conceptual moral boundaries that had once permitted colonial slavery began to come undone following both the American and Haitian Revolutions. Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History ofSlavery and Antislavery (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 109. 25 See George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image In The White Mind: The Debate on A/ro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York, Harper & Row: 1971); Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History 0/an Idea in America (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963); David R. Roediger, The Wages 0/ Whiteness: Race and the Making o/the American Working Class (London, New York: Verso, 1991), Matthew Jacobson Frye, Whiteness o/a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchem,V o.tRace (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1999); and Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York, London: W. W. Norton and Company. 2010). 16 inherently "noble" cultural traits onto specific racial groups. Romantic racial projections assigned African-Americans superior religious and musical capacities, and also assigned them lesser or "feminine" abilities in intellectual and social areas where Anglo-

Americans supposedly excelled. Through this process, Frederickson explains, antislavery reformers "acknowledged permanent racial differences" but managed to skirt "the notion of a clearly defined racial hierarchy. ,,26 Abolitionists were thus romantically drawn to slave music when they heard "natural" morality in "natural" musical expressions.

These romantic prejudices concerning African-Americans and their music were confounded by the widespread popularity ofminstrel theater and song. Minstrelsy mimicked and satirized African-Americans and distorted Northern conceptions of plantation music. Although the primary audience for minstrel shows was working class, immigrant, anti-abolition, and anti-reform, moral reformers were readily exposed to minstrelsy'S distortions. Robert Nowatski has recently shown how "the racial attitudes of many white abolitionists" and "minstrelsy's depictions ofblack people" often "paralleled and informed each other" through the shared use of sentimental and melodramatic imagery. Minstrelsy's belittlement of African-Americans, he argues, was akin to the abolitionists' paternalistic sense of their own virtue.27 However, despite the fact that most popular minstrel songs were written by Anglo-American composers like Stephen Foster, minstrel theatre had in fact absorbed plantation elements such the "patting juba" dance and instruments such as the banjo and jawbone. Foster's biographer Ken Emerson notes that minstrel songs "became increasingly complicated" as they "drew on and distorted black music." Urban African-Americans and mobile plantation musicians in turn heard

26 Fredrickson. The Black Image In The White Mind, 107. 27 Robert Nowatski. Representing Aji-icon Americans in Transatlantic Abolitionism and Blackface Minstrel.l), (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 3-20. 17 and "took up minstrel tunes and remade them their own.,,28 When abolitionists finally heard real plantation music, their romantic and paternalistic prejudices were further confounded and also stimulated - by the presence offamiliar musical elements from minstrel theatre.

Abolitionist familiarity with minstrelsy highlights the importance of a shared musical culture in their moral actions towards slave music. A collectively experienced antebellum musical culture - shared in churches, theaters, parlors, and at patriotic festivals - worked against racial and social hierarchies, and created a democratic musical vocabulary that music historian Charles Hamm says was "familiar to Americans in a wide variety of forms and at different culturallevels.,,29 Ordinary working and middle class Americans shared with the socioeconomic upper classes a collective belief in music's power to serve a moral and social purpose. Nicholas Tawa has shown how lyrics in popular antebellum songs often reflected a "conviction that certain specific ways of conducting one's life accorded with national custom and feelings ofrightness.,,3o These collective moral impulses - expressed in parlor songs, sacred songs, and topical antislavery songs helped antislavery reformers define themselves as moral agents in relation to an oppressed people.

An expansive antebellum musical culture combined with contemporary religious renewals to foster in reformers what Vicki Eaklor describes as a faith, derived from the

28 Ken Emerson, Doo Dah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise ofAmerican Popular Culture (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998),97. For more on the complexities of musical borrowing in minstrelsy, see William J. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 29 Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1983),23-78. 30 Nicholas Tawa, A Musicfor the Millions: Antebellum Democratic Attitudes and the Birth ofAmerican Popular Music (New York: Pendragon Press, 1984), 47. 18

Puritan tradition, "in music's power to improve humans spiritually. ,,3 I In her exhaustive collection ofabolitionist songs and hymns, Eaklor argues that activist music was "a truly

'natural' adjunct to racial and social reforms because of the powers considered intrinsic" in both sacred and secular music. The collective national obsession with and "desire for freedom" linked moral and musical cultures because Americans believed that music not only "could appeal to this quality but forward its cause as well." The force of the abolitionists' "assumptions that appropriate music and poetry not only could, but should, serve humans in their quest for 'righteousness'," Eaklor argues, "places them squarely within the mainstream" of antebellum musical and spiritual thought and practice. 32

Through involvement with African-American music, abolitionists drew that music into their own moral world of activism.

Abolitionists were trained to "hear" moral reform possibilities in their encounters with slave music by a combination ofthe movement's early origins in religious moralism, the escalation of 1830s immediatism, the ideals of self-culture, romantic racialism, a shared musical culture, and personal imperatives that demanded social action. Given these common backgrounds, how did individual reformers come to their own personal actions towards slave music? While the larger historical backgrounds that facilitated the hearing ofmoral reform will set the thematic framework for this thesis, my study is ultimately about the responses of individuals. My chapters, therefore, highlight the experiences of selected historical "listeners" whose "moral" actions towards slave music

31 Vicki Eaklor, "Roots of an Ambivalent Culture: Music, Education, and Music Education in Antebellum America." Journal ofResearch in Music Education, Vol. 33, No.2 (Summer, 1985),96. 32 Eaklor, American Antislavery Songs: A Collection and Analysis (New York, London, Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1988), xx-xxii. 19 demonstrated major themes ofmoral reform. Each chapter, that is, focuses not only on a particular broad theme, but also on an individual "star" or "stars" who exemplified that theme. Since this thesis is not only about ideologies, but actions, the chapters follow a chronological arrangement according to the time when action towards slave music was taken. Some primary documents were published after the time of hearing and acting; in other cases, when individuals heard slave music at the same time in the same location, publication at a later date was a principle part of the action taken.33

As I have indicated, the capacity to hear the moral implications of slave music intensified in the wake of Garrisonian abolitionism in the 1830s and peaked at Port Royal during the war years. While the bulk ofmorally driven listening and action occurred during the Port Royal Experiment, chapter one will begin this study on the nearby

Georgia Sea Islands with Frances Anne Kemble's encounters with slaves in the 1830s.

This chapter will explore the arc of abolitionism's early religiously driven moral imperative. Kemble, a popular British actress and moderate abolitionist who came to

America and inadvertently married an absentee slaveholder, provides us with three crucial reference points for beginning this survey. First, her commentary on slave music in her document, Journal ofa Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-1839, bridges the gap between the casual observational styles of earlier accounts in travel narratives and the moral urgency of the wartime abolitionists. Though coming from the travel narrative tradition, her commentary is embedded in a larger, persistent polemic against the sin of slavery and slaveholders. This polemic, inspired by William Ellery Channing's notion of

33 For example, Frances Anne Kemble's Journal ofa Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-1839 was not published until 1863, after other primary documents in this study, but her actions to improve music occurred when she wrote her diary. On the other hand, Thomas Wentworth Higginson heard slave music at the same time as other Port Royal reformers, but his action of promoting music in his Atlantic Monthly article "Negro Spirituals" occurred after the war, in 1867. 20 self-culture, was written as tensions mounted between earlier antislavery gradualism and emergent immediatism. Kemble's observations, secondly, marked a tum towards hearing and describing slave music in European musical terms. Finally, Kemble provides our first example ofmoral action to change or improve slave music as a means of stewarding

African-Americans.

Chapter two will delineate aspects ofthe shared antebellum musical culture that affected the Northern ear for slave music, including music in churches and common schools, popular parlor songs, opera, antislavery hymns, and blackface minstrelsy.

Central to this chapter will be articles on slave music and African-American performers published in the era's preeminent classical music publication, Dwight's Journal ofMusic.

Publisher and amateur musician John Dwight - a former Unitarian clergyman and member of the utopian Brook Farm community who wrote for the transcendentalist publication The Dial - did not write about slave music himself, but he did publish a series ofarticles during the 1850s that revealed an increasing public consideration ofAfrican­

American music. Dwight took the second path of moral reform action by promoting the discussion of this music to his sophisticated Northern audience. This chapter will culminate with the most influential of those music articles, a November 1862 letter by a young second-generation abolitionist, Lucy McKim, entitled "Songs of the Port Royal

'Contrabands'." McKim's terse promotion ofslave music was unique both for its immersion in purely musical details and for its celebration of the music itself rather than a social or political agenda. With her moral focus on sharing music and later on publishing slave songs, McKim, the only professional musician in this study, would become the catalyst for future preservation ofslave songs at Port Royal. 21

The civic imperatives of educating the freed slaves at Port Royal will be the focus of chapter three. The observations and subsequent actions recorded in the wartime diaries, letters, and articles ofthree ofthe volunteer "Gideonites," Charlotte Forten, Laura

Towne, and Harriet Ware, provide an opportunity to examine tensions in the antislavery impulses for philanthropic stewardship and free citizenship. In these reform efforts, benevolence intended for the improvement of the freedmen often contained a sense of order and control that recognized African-American agency in sacred and patriotic music but dismissed that agency in other indigenous expressions. The educational mission, for all three of these women, included repressing the boisterous and popular African survival known as the "ring shout." Forten, Towne, and Ware considered the ring shout to be not only savage, but also childish, and their sense of moral duty demanded that they replace the ring shout with properly taught and properly sung New England hymns.

Chapter four will demonstrate how Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the most well known figure in this study, engaged with slave music in order to locate African-American agency. Higginson sought to locate this agency in part due to his assignment as commander of the First South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment of former slaves, who had been assembled as an experimental answer to the controversial Northern question of

African-American worthiness for military service. Higginson also looked for this agency

- which his background as a socially active transcendentalist had led him to believe was both personal and collective - in part to confirm his own instincts as a militant abolitionist and social activist. Reform advocacy remained important to Higginson in his ongoing post-war activism, and he promoted the music of his regiment in his post-war memoirs, particularly in an 1867 article for the Atlantic Monthly entitled "Negro 22

Spirituals," and later in his 1870 book, Army Life in a Black Regiment. Taking the refonn action of promoting the moral value ofAfrican-American music, Higginson also sought to promote the moral value ofAfrican-Americans themselves in the new social order.

This thesis culminates with a look at the action that culminated the abolitionist hearing ofslave music at Port Royal, that is, the publication of 136 African-American songs in the 1867 publication of the Slave Songs o/the United States collection. In chapter five, I will finally examine nineteenth century views on race, as seen in the introduction and song annotations by William Francis Allen, the collection's principal editor. Allen struggled, in this large-scale and groundbreaking involvement with and preservation ofslave music, to understand a cultural fonn he respected but sought to define within boundaries of Anglo-American hierarchy. Allen's editorial work followed both paths ofrefonn action towards music, as he both judged African-American music according to its capacity to be Anglicized, and also sought to promote songs that the freedmen themselves were abandoning. Slave music merited the moral intervention of post-war preservation, Allen believed, not only because that music spoke of African-

American perseverance and genius, but also because it spoke of antebellum abolitionist righteousness.34

Allen's struggles, like the varied attempts of other individuals in this study to

34 Allen's editorial commentary provides an explanation of a key term in this study that requires definition, namely, the term "slave music" itself. Ifso much interaction with African-American music occurred after the Union occupation of Port Royal, was the music no longer "slave music" but in fact "freedmen '5 music"? The former slaves at Port Royal were not technically "free" until the Union victory that ended the war brought about the ratification of the 13 th Amendment. In this context, only music heard after the war, during the curatorial efforts of the Slave Songs editors, can be considered "freedmen's music." However, Allen identified the body of music according to its historical cultural origins. "Our title," he notes in the book's introduction, "was selected because it best described the contents ofthe book," that an artistic body of work "inspired by slavery." William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, Slave Songs ofthe United States (New York: A. Simpson and Co., 1867), xix. I continue using the term "slave music" during the wartime chronology of this study where Allen's logic of origin applies to music as a cultural form. In cases involving the contemporary activities and expressions by the freedmen, I use the term "freedmen's music." 23 change or share slave music, were finally efforts to come to terms with the amorphous and changing realities of a society that abolitionist moral actions had created - an

"indescribable" society that included newly freed African-Americans. In the historical arc that moves from earlier casual dismissals of musical "noise" to the moral action of musical preservation, antislavery reformers learned to hear African-American music as a summons for commitment to their own moral culture. Religious historian Leigh Eric

Schmidt has suggested that in the midst ofantebellum upheavals, "the ear, indeed, was a crucial guide to social harmony, discord, and concord.,,35 Abolitionists who heard slave music became involved with that music because their moral culture had taught them to imagine possibilities of future harmony and concord within contemporary discord.

Schmidt concludes that the historical "stories that hold the imagination are about the opening ofcommunicative spaces within local and national communities - discursive spheres in which the people, all the people, will finally have a voice and be heard.,,36

Stories about people's voices finally being heard, ofcourse, are also stories about other people - "those without" - finally listening. My hope is that this thesis tells one of those stories.

3S Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, J1/usion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000), 67. 36 Schmidt, Hearing Things, 248. 24

"Displeased me not a little": Frances Anne Kemble and the Moral Imperative Against Slavery

Not long after marrying Pierce Butler on June 7, 1834, Frances Anne Kemble realized the gravity ofher mistake. The popular British actress, who had just completed a successful two-year tour of America, possessed a fiery sense of independence as well as nascent antislavery views. However charming the wealthy Philadelphia businessman may have appeared during their courtship, he quickly made clear his expectations of complete submission to his legal rights as husband. He reneged on his premarital promise to allow

Kemble to continue her acting career and insisted that she remove antislavery comments from her 1835 book, Journal ofFrances Anne Kemble, which she had contracted to publish before their marriage. Butler's authoritarianism was a particularly acute blow to the charismatic young actress because he was noticeably her intellectual inferior, showing none ofher passion for discourse, religion, high society, and Romantic literature.

Complicating these blows to her sense ofselfhood and morality was the realization that the Butler family wealth derived from ownership ofthe second largest plantation in

Georgia, a reality Kemble could no longer avoid when, in 1836, Pierce and his brother

John inherited Sea Island plantations that included upwards of900 slaves.)

Kemble grew distressed by the realization that she was dependent on a simple­ minded tyrant, as well as by the knowledge that her own well-being and that of their

1 I have consulted several Kemble biographies for this study. Unless otherwise noted, biographical data concerning dates, persons, places, and events has largely been drawn either from Catherine Clinton, Fanny Kemble's Civil Wars (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); from an anthology annotated by Kemble's great-granddaughter, Fanny Kemble Wister, Fanny, The American Kemble: Her Journals and Unpublished Leiters (Tallahassee, FL: South Pass Press, 1972); or from John A. Scott's lengthy introduction in Frances Anne Kemble, Journal oia Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839, Ed. by John A. Scott (1863; reprint, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984). 25 two daughters - depended on a institution she considered to be grossly immoral. 2 She determined to make the experiential leap of witnessing slavery that escaped many abolitionists. Kemble pressed Butler to take her to the Georgia plantations, and for some time, he refused. According to Kemble biographer Catherine Clinton, in Butler's mind,

"as long as Kemble remained in the North, shielded from grim details, her amorphous abolitionist leaning would not take shape.,,3 Butler finally reasoned that his wife's escalating moral reform agenda might be checked ifgiven the chance to witness what he considered his family's brand ofbenevolent slaveholding. He miscalculated. "Assuredly 1 am going prejudiced against slavery," Kemble insisted in the introduction to the journal she kept of her trip in November 1838, adding the moral qualifier, "1 am an

Englishwoman, in whom the absence ofsuch a prejudice would be disgracefuL,,4 Having initially developed vague antislavery sentiments as a young woman in Britain during the triumph of that country's antislavery reforms,5 Kemble had now gained moral clarity and

2 Exactly when Kemble learned of Butler's status as a slaveholder, and to what extent she processed the knowledge, is unclear. Most accounts indicate she knew shortly after the marriage and well before Butler's inheritance. Kemble herself wrote, "When I married Mr. [Butler] I knew nothing of these dreadful possessions of his," a statement Deirdre David has interpreted to mean that Kemble knew of the Butler plantations but not of Pierce's pending inheritance or the conditions ofplantation life. Kemble, 138, and Deirdre David, Fanny Kemble: A Performed Life (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 140. An earlier biographer, Margaret Armstrong, somewhat implausibly suggested that Kemble was too naIve to understand that plantations implied slaves. Margaret Armstrong, Fanny Kemble: A Passionate Victorian (New York: MacMillan Company, 1938), 189-190. In her dual biography on Kemble and her sister Adelaide, a famous opera singer, Ann Blainey more plausibly explains that Kemble "had shown a certain ambivalence in her attitude toward slavery during her earliest years in America. While part of her deplored the keeping of slaves, she had married Pierce probably knowing that a large part of his family's wealth came from slave labor. It was only in the first months of marriage, when she was stung by Pierce's authoritarianism, that her distaste for slave-owners blazed into active hatred." Ann Blainey. Fanny & Adelaide (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001). 152. Blainey's idea that Kemble's abolitionism was a reaction to Butler's control is less generous than, but corresponds with, the more useful views of Clinton and Scott that Kemble's growing awareness of the Butler wealth sharpened her growing antislavery views. Clinton, 83­ 112, and Scott, xviii-xxxiv. J Clinton, Fanny Kemble's Civil Wars, III. 4 Kemble, Journal ofa Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 11. S That is, between Britain's abolition of the international slave trade in 1807 and their emancipation of Caribbean slaves in 1833. 26 had become prepared, as the American wife of a slaveholder, to embrace the abolitionist cause as her own.

Slave music provided Kemble with evidence that plantation life was not a happy and benevolent utopia. What she heard triggered her moral reform action ofchanging that music to improve the lives of slaves. Taking this action then provided her with confirmation of the moral righteousness of her paternalistic reform mission. Her primary concern was that the slaves appeared to lack the initiative ofself-culture. Unable to convince Butler to free his slaves, Kemble instead assumed the self-appointed duty of teaching the slaves self-culture. Butler had ineptly imagined "that if Fanny could see the darkies dancing and singing like children, she would realize," biographer Margaret

Armstrong surmised, "that the abolitionist tales were lies, or, at best, exaggerations.,,6

Instead of affording a relaxed view ofslavery, however, the singing and dancing of slaves stimulated Kemble's escalating moral reform agenda. She took a romantic fancy to pleasant music that evidenced creative potential, and in this manner, seemed to be promoting the value ofthe music. However, when she didn't like what she heard - wild performances, mournful songs, self-demeaning songs, or songs she considered to be undeveloped "nonsense" - her own path of moral self-development led her to dismiss or even repress that music, an action she believed would then stimulate higher self- development in slaves.

At first, Kemble retreated from music that conflicted with her moral goals. She graciously attended a "ball" the slaves threw upon her arrival, but found herself unable to navigate the boundaries between her culture and theirs. Claiming that she brought to the

6 Margaret Armstrong, Fanny Kemble: A Passionate Victorian (New York: MacMillan Company, 1938), 190. 27 ball "as much sympathy for rejoicing" as her morally indignant "sympathy for sorrow had left me capable of," she succumbed to moral paralysis. Sympathy and rejoicing quickly gave way to distress. The ball left Kemble confused by "the things these people did with their bodies ...the languishing elegance" ofsome performers, and the

"painstaking laboriousness of others." More than anything she heard or saw, she struggled with "the feats of a certain enthusiastic banjo player, who seemed to me to thump his instrument with every part ofhis body at once." This musical performance, she reported, "at last so utterly overcame any attempt at decorous gravity on my part that I was obliged to secede.,,7 In this initial encounter with slave music, Kemble heard something that seemed to speak of slavery's immoral dehumanization. In spite ofher moral agenda, she was not yet prepared to be involved with slaves or to take action to reform their music.

Kemble's struggle to adjust ideals of moral sympathy to the real experience of disheartening music was exacerbated in a religious setting. Hearing hymns and prayers at a funeral service in the quarters, Kemble was overwhelmed by compassion, but was again morally paralyzed. Her account of this performance revealed a deep spiritual connection as well as grief over her inability to act:

Presently the whole congregation uplifted their voices in hymns, the first high wailing notes of which - sung all in unison, in the midst of these unwonted surroundings - sent a thrill through all my nerves. When the chant ceased, [the black preacher] began a prayer, and all the people knelt down in the sand, as I did also. Mr. [Butler] alone remained standing in the presence of the dead man and of the living God to whom his slaves were now appealing. I cannot tell you how profoundly the whole ceremony, if such it could be called, affected me ...this fairly overcame my composure, and I began to cry very bitterly.s

7 Kemble, Journal ola Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 131. ~ Ibid., 147. Kemble was not the only "compassionate" slaveholder to retreat from moral action when confronted by the depth of African-American spirituality. Mary Boykin Chesnutt, the wife of a South Carolina Senator who served on Jefferson Davis' cabinet, relayed a similar story of grief and inaction. Chesnutt, a Confederate who condemned the inhumanity of slave auctions and approved of Uncle Tom's 28

Though moved to tears and religiously sensitive, Kemble still heard the hymn as a

"chant" that could barely be called a "ceremony." Her disengagement from the ball and distress at the funeral revealed more than displeasure with boisterous performances or disappointment with Butler's lack of moral concern. These initial encounters with slave music indicated that she was beginning to hear the conditions of slavery in slave music, and as a result, was also beginning to hear a moral summons to change those conditions.

The moral agenda that Kemble brought to her stay on Butler's plantations - an agenda for stewardship that ultimately did lead her to take action towards slave music ­ had its origins in the religious moralism of the early antislavery movement. Just as

Kemble moved gradually from aesthetic distaste and spiritual distress to moral action, the moral imperative of emancipationist thought and action advanced slowly over time from gradualism to immediatism. In the 1830s, as Kemble gained clarity on her own religious and social views, the urgency of the religious argument against slavery reached its boiling point in the moral absolutism ofWilliam Lloyd Garrison and his followers. Kemble's first-hand study of slavery, Journal ofA Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838­

1839, was part of abolitionism's religious tradition of excoriating slavery as a sin and slaveholders as sinners.

In order to explain how Kemble's reactions to slave music had their roots in abolitionism's tradition ofreligious moralizing, I will devote the first portion of this chapter to tracing the escalation of antislavery morality in key religious tracts that condemned slavery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This tour of abolitionism's religious roots and Kemble's connections to those roots will, in tum,

Cabin, wrote in her diary at the outbreak of the Civil War that she once "wept bitterly" and was compelled to leave when she heard powerful hymns at a slave worship service. Mary Boykin Chesnutt, A Diary From Dixie (1905: reprint, New York: Barnes & Noble, 2006), 129. 29 infonn our understanding of later moral refonn actions taken by other individuals in this study. Though steeped in this language of moral absolutism, Kemble's Journal ofA

Residence on a Georgian Plantation was most directly influenced by the rational gradualism of Unitarian divine William Ellery Channing's 1835 book, Slavery, as well as by Channing's notions of moral agency and self-culture. Taking her cue from Channing's argument that "the slave should not have an owner, but he should have a guardian," 9

Kemble developed, in the words of biographer Ann Blainey, "a vision of black rehabilitation, with herself as the chief rehabilitator." 10 Kemble heard slave music that displeased her as the product of sinful degradation - an immoral condition that, like the degraded slaves themselves, seemed to demand her moral action of improvement and correction.

Though shifting political and economic conditions contributed to the eventual fall of slavery, religious moralism was at the heart of early as well as later antislavery activism. Correspondence with the American abolitionist Quaker Anthony Benezet was a factor driving abolitionist Granville Sharp's involvement in the Somerset case of 1772, which effectively if ambiguously ended slavery in Britain. Mentoring from Anglican

Evangelicals John Newton and John Wesley brought MP William Wilberforce to the cause for a series of failed Parliamentary initiatives in the 1790s. The moral imperative had certainly become part of public consciousness in Britain and America by the time

Kemble was a young woman in the early nineteenth century, and the moral imperative

9 William Ellery Channing, Slavery, Boston, 1835, http://www. vcu.edulengweb/transcendcntalisrnlauthors/wechanning/slaveryl.html (accessed March 5, 2012). 10 Blainey. Fanny & Adelaide, 153. 30 was an unavoidable point ofdebate in the high society circles in which Kemble found herself travelling upon arriving in America in the 1830s.

Apart from isolated humanitarianism, antislavery ideologies, not to mention activism, did not exist in force until the Revolutionary era. Slavery had existed since antiquity with little moral condemnation. Plato and Aristotle both justified the institution as a reflection of ordering in the natural universe. Christian ethics renounced this ancient concept of innate human hierarchy, but the new faith also extended a justification for slavery through the spiritual metaphor and literal practice ofservitude. Centuries passed before the necessity of reconsidering slavery's validity arose, when Enlightenment thinkers confronted the awareness that the slave was capable ofreason and action.

Espousing notions of natural liberty and equality, Enlightenment thought forced to the center ofdiscourse the conundrum of slavery's diminishment ofsentient and rational individuals. Viewing slaves as equals in natural rights, of course, conflicted with other

Enlightenment ideals that supported slavery, such as personal property rights, orderly social contracts, and the "science" of racial superiority.

John Locke, the most revered voice of the Enlightenment, offered an apology for slavery on the grounds that, as a relationship derived from violent conquest, it existed outside the domain of natural law. Further Enlightenment reasoning, however, led to an understanding of slavery's implicitly counter-Enlightenment fallacies. Political and economic philosophers denounced slavery as a counter-intuitive institution. The French thinker Montesquieu critiqued slavery as a form of bad government in his 1748 tract,

L 'esprit des Lois (The Spirit ofthe Law), mocking the hesitation ofso-called civilized nations to make a moral commitment to end the slave trade. Thinkers of the Scottish 31

Enlightenment, with their emphasis on reason and virtue, articulated the moral imperative against slavery even more sharply. Francis Hutcheson's 1755 work, System ofMoral

Philosophy, caned for moral leadership in the guidance of economic relations. Adam

Smith's 1759 treatise on character, The Theory ofMoral Sentiments, suggested that men possessed a natural benevolence, while his influential 1776 tract on economics, The

Wealth ofNations, addressed the inefficiency of slavery as damaging to the more prosperous market system of independent entrepreneurship. Georg Wallace's 1760 tract,

System ofthe Principles ofthe Law ofScotland, argued that human liberty was not a commodity available to commerce. These works, though progressive in offering moral arguments against slavery, operated in the sphere of political and economic theory, and did not directly demand or stir abolitionist action. 11

Evangelical revivals and Protestant reforms would, over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, bring an escalation of antislavery moralizing.

These appeals were most often only summons to reform the cruelties of slavery or to

Christianize slaves. Nevertheless, the evangelical challenge to Calvinist predestination, with its emphasis on immediate salvation and spiritual brotherhood, also provided the greatest challenge to slavery apologists. The pro-slavery rationale that Christian

Europeans were rescuing heathen African souls from a godless existence ironically played directly into the hands of this new religious moralizing. The evangelical refutation of original sin argued that redemption of the soul was possible through the act of conversion. If the slave had a soul that was worth saving for the Christian world, as apologists claimed, and could make the choice for salvation, as evangelicals claimed,

II For a more thorough analysis of Enlightenment antislavery moralizing, see Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age ofRevolution, 164-212, and Blackburn, The Overthrow ofColonial SlavelY, 33-63, 32

then logic dictated that such a soul, in the degrading condition of slavery, had been

damned by other men, not by preconditions or personal choice. Enlightenment arguments

for natural liberties combined with evangelical conversion possibilities to make a moral justification of slavery impossible. Evangelicalism and Protestant reforms also gave rise to a humanitarian ethic ofbenevolence, in which Christians "increasingly transformed the quest for salvation from a sinful world into a mission to cleanse the world ofsin.,,12

Frances Kemble's actions towards slave music, she believed, were part of this effort to cleanse the world of sin.

In America, one of the first publications to condemn slavery was Puritan clergyman Samuel Sewall's 1700 pamphlet, The Selling ofJoseph. This controversial tract served early notice of the crucial role Scripture would play in the contentious debate. Using the Old Testament story ofJoseph's illegitimate sale into bondage at the hands ofhis brothers, Sewall used Biblical logic in a point for point refutation ofpro- slavery arguments. "Originally, and Naturally," Sewall argued in Enlightenment-style

language, "there is no such thing as slavery." Sewall's moral edge included the assertion that Africans were "the Brethren and Sister of the Last Adam, the Offspring of God," and that as such, "they ought to be treated with a respect agreeable." Sewall's pamphlet, however, must be read as a text on gradualism, as he also expressed concern for the potentially disruptive effects of abolition on Anglo-American society. 13

12 Davis, The Problem ofSlavery in the Age olRevolution, 46. U Samuel Sewall, The Selling ofJoseph (Boston: 1700), 1-3. http://www.masshist.org/objects/2004september.cfm (accessed March 5, 2012). Sewall's unambiguous antislavery stance merits comparison to the slaveholder gradualism of his fellow Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather, who promoted benevolent reform by arguing both that slave owners had a duty to God to "teach your Negroes the Truth of the Glorious Gospel," and also that slaves could serve Christ by obeying their masters. Cotton Mather, The Negro Christianized. An Essay to Excite and Assist that Good Work, the Instruction ofNegro Servants in Christianity (Boston: B. Green, 1706),2. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu!cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article= I 028&context=etas (accessed March 5, 2012). 33

Gradualism also affected the antislavery development of the Quakers, the sect that

most visibly aligned itself with antislavery reform. George Fox, the English founder of

Quakerism, had expressed concerns over slavery in 1657 at an early meeting ofthe

Society ofFriends. However, the Quakers' core belief in an inner light within each

person did not prevent scores of Quakers from remaining active and successful participants in the slave trade throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In

1688, the Germantown, Pennsylvania Annual Meeting asked members to renounce

slavery, but in the absence of enforcement, few Quakers who held slaves chose to

abandon their source ofincome. Jean Soderlund's statistical analysis of Society Yearly

Meeting records has revealed how Quakers were, in spite oftheir modem reputation as

committed abolitionists, "confronted [by] the same choice between conscience and

socioeconomic concerns" that afflicted other denominations "when challenged by

abolitionist thought.,,14 The Society ofFriends tolerated slave trading and slaveholding

for over a century, until the London Yearly Meeting finally forbade members from

owning slaves in 1761. American Quakers finally followed suit in 1776. 15

Ifthe Quakers were not unlike other denominations in their initially ambivalent

handling of slavery, they would eventually outpace other denominations and become a

significant force in popular petition drives in Britain in the 1780s and 1790s. American

Quaker Anthony Benezet was the first major antislavery advocate to write profusely on

the topic throughout his lifetime. Benezet's numerous attacks signaled an increased

urgency to the moral imperative. His 1762 tract, A Short Account ofthe Part ofAfrica

14 Jean R. Soderlund, Quakers & Slavery: A Divided Spiril (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985),2. 15 Ibid., 3-12. 34

Inhabited by Negroes, was state-of-the-art antislavery, combining Enlightenment legal

language, Sewall's model of Scriptural counter-argument, and evangelical universalism:

The European Whites, and the African Blacks, are all under the same Moral Law, the eternal Law of Reason, which God hath written upon the Table ofMan's Heart. We and they are Members of one and the same great Society, spread over the Face of the whole Earth, under one and the same Supreme Law-giver and Judge; and are joined together, by the close and strong Ties of human Nature, common to us all ...Our being Christian does not give us any worldly Superiority, or any Authority whatever, over those who are not Christians. Christ's Kingdom is not of this World; neither does Christianity dissolve or free us from the Obligations of Justice, Equity, and Benevolence towards our Fellow Creatures of the same Species, be they Jews, Mahometans, or even black-skin'd Heathens. 16

Benezet added descriptions of slavery's horrors to this synthesis, and he forwarded

Montesquieu's swipe at moral hypocrisy. "The Europeans, forgetful oftheir Profession

and Duty, as Men and Christians," he noted, "have conducted in such a Manner; as must necessarily raise in the Minds of the Thoughtful and well-disposed Negroes, the utmost

Scorn and Detestation of the Christian Name."l7 Benezet's increased moral urgency was not, however, a sharp break from moral hesitation; A Short Account discusses the practicality of slaveholder compensation and the necessity of registering free blacks.

Like the Quakers, the Methodists were a new sect that advanced antislavery

theology and social reform. Methodist founder John Wesley, like his more well known

evangelist friend George Whitefield, was trained as an Anglican clergyman at Oxford,

and like Whitefield, he came as a missionary to the colony of Georgia in the 1730s. Both men advocated benevolence and the education of slaves in the gospel. However, unlike

Whitefield who was himself was a slave owner who campaigned for its legalization in

Georgia - Wesley possessed a deep abhorrence for the institution and a commitment to its

16 Anthony Benezet, A Short Account ofthe Part ofAfrica Inhabited by the Negroes (Philadelphia, 1762), 39. http://archive.org/streamlshortaccountofthOObenerich#page/nO/mode/2up (accessed April 9, 2012). 17 Ibid., 23. 35 condemnation. His 1774 tract, Thoughts Upon Slavery, amplified the urgency of

Benezet's moral edge by linking immediate emancipation to the action ofpersonal conversion. "To-day resolve, God being your helper, to escape for your life," Wesley warned slaveholders oftheir dangerous sin. "Regard not money!," he implored.

"Whatever you lose, lose not your soul: Nothing can countervail that loss. Immediately quit the horrid trade.,,18 He went on to defend the dignity of the slave, to warn against cruelty leading to slave revolts, and to condemn justifications ofEuropean superiority as sinful:

[Africans] were in no way remarkable for stupidity while they remained in their own country: The inhabitants ofAfrica, where they have equal motives and equal means of improvement, are not inferior to the inhabitants of Europe; to some of them they are greatly superior .... Their stupidity, therefore, in our plantations is not natural; otherwise than it is the natural effect of their condition. Consequently, it is not their fault, but yours: You must answer for it, before God and man. 19

In spite ofhis progressive moral immediatism, Wesley was a Tory who remained committed to law and order. The Methodists, unlike the Quakers, would never adopt an official ban on slavery. In America, the denomination would undergo splits over the issues ofSouthern slavery and discrimination against free blacks in the North.

Nonetheless, Wesley's method ofcastigating the individual slaveholder's sin would recur in much of dawning moral edge ofAmerican abolitionism. Frances Kemble was one of many writers who would similarly condemn slaveholding as a sin. Her efforts to correct and remove "sinful" and degraded music were part ofthis damnatory moral tradition.

Presbyterian minister George Bourne admired Wesley enough to write a biography on the Methodist evangelist in 1807. Bourne's own moral assault on slavery,

IX John Wesley, Thoughts Upon Slavery (London, 1774), http://new.gbgm­ umc.org/umhistory/wesley/slaveryl (accessed March 5, 2012). 19 Ibid. 36

in his 1816 piece, The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable, would cost him his Virginia

pulpit. Bourne continued to tum up the damnatory moral heat with accusations that

slavery was a crime, and he additionally demanded immediate emancipation without

slaveholder compensation. The very title of his book signaled a drastic sharpening of

moral purpose; Bourne didn't identify his work, as previous antislavery writers had, as a

system, theory, account, or thought, but instead as an absolute moral truth. He drew

heavily on the Bible and also used the Declaration ofIndependence and Bill of Rights as

evidence, and he judged the hypocrisy of allegedly Christian "Man-Stealers" and "Slave-

Tyrants" - as well as the enabling ambivalence of gradualism - with contempt:

The Mosaic Law declares every Slave holder a THIEF ...among the highest criminals .. .the most guilty of all thieves ...no man can have a sincere desire to 'flee from the wrath to come,' unless he refuses to enslave, buy and sell human flesh ... Therefore, every man who holds Slaves and who pretends to be a Christian or a Republican, is either an incurable Idiot who cannot distinguish good from evil, or an obdurate sinner who resolutely defies every social, moral, and divine requisition ...Moderation against sin is an absurdity. Can any man conjoin stealing and honesty, or dare he admonish a headstrong transgressor partially to desist from his ungodly practices? Such sermonizing would be approved by every reprobate.20

Bourne's abrasiveness provoked violent retorts from slaveholders and also alienated

antislavery moderates. His aggressive hardening ofthe line between gradualism and

immediatism made moral absolutism the battlefield that would be taken by William

Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Weld, Lydia Maria Child, Angelina Grimke, and other pious,

religiously driven radical abolitionists ofthe 1830s. Not only did Garrison acknowledge his debt to The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable, but as a result of the association the two men shared in the American Anti-Slavery Society, Bourne wrote many ofthe

20 George Bourne, The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable (Philadelphia, 1816), reprinted in John W. Christie and Dwight L. Dumond, George Bourne and The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable (Wilmington: The Historical Society ofDelaware, 1969), 105-106. 37

"anonymous" articles and letters that appeared in Garrison's publication, the Liberator, in the early 1830s.21

Garrison himself had started as an advocate of gradual emancipation, initially supporting, in the 1820s, the efforts ofthe American Colonization Society to relocate free blacks to Liberia. His conversion to immediatism suggests some degree ofmalleability between the moral positions, and highlights their overlap in the strategy of"moral suasion," that is, the appeal to the individual slaveholder's conscience. For some, immediatism could mean an immediate recognition of sin followed by immediate action towards the process of emancipation, while gradualists also espoused conscious urgency in taking moral agency towards reform. The difference, for the 1830s American radicals, was a Wesleyan and Bourneian religious invective fueled by the fervor ofevangelicalism.

Just as "the revivalists called for total commitment to Christ," historian Merton Dillon has observed, "Garrison demanded total commitment to the abolitionist cause.,,22 This sustained level of moral extremism ensured that immediatism would remain a minority position. The efforts ofWeld and his "Seventy" field agents to convert ministers to abolitionist preaching largely failed, leading Garrison to his contentious anti-clerical stance, yet even this unrealistic tactic ofconverting moderates and Southerners "was nonetheless consistent with evangelical faith.,,23

lmmediatism also functioned, more than a coherent social philosophy, as a badge of the individual abolitionist's moral purity. Garrison confessed in his inaugural editorial in the first issue ofthe Liberator that he had previously "unreflectingly assented to the

21 Bourne, The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable, 66-67,83-86. 22 Merton L. Dillon, The Abolitionists: The Gmwth ofa Dissenting Minority (DeKalb, II: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974),50. 23 Ibid.. 64. 38 popular but pernicious doctrine of gradual abolition." His immediatist absolutism became an "opportunity to make a full and unequivocal recantation, and thus publicly to ask pardon ofmy God, ofmy country, and ofmy brethren the poor slaves, for having entered a sentiment so full oftimidity, injustice and absurdity." He reported, with righteous relief, that "my conscience is now satisfied.,,24 Frances Kemble's antislavery adamancy and her resulting reform actions towards slave music suggest that she "heard" an opportunity to advance her own moral cleanliness.

For moderate antislavery reformers, the browbeating extremism ofthe

Garrisonian immediatists was itself a sin, egregiously capable of dismantling support for the cause and likely to incite slave revolts and increased slaveholder cruelty. For the respected Unitarian clergyman William Ellery Channing, the proper application of

"moral suasion" was not condemnation, but an appeal to reason and individual moral agency. Like Wesley before him, Channing'S moral revulsion would not derail his sense ofsocial order and the eminence ofpersonal conscience. In a sermon delivered in

Baltimore in 1819, Channing eloquently linked the Bible to the Constitution in an argument for gradual and lawful reform.25 Channing'S most influential antislavery moralizing came in his 1835 book, Slavery, a tract that followed many ofthe enlightened arguments advanced by Benezet, Wesley, and Bourne. However, in place of their stem emotional anxiety, Channing spoke with cool and rational patience, and was alone in detailing post-emancipation reforms.

24 William Lloyd Garrison, "To The Public," Liberator 1 (January 1, 1831). 25 David Brion Davis, Challenging the Boundaries orSlavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 35-59. 39

Slavery offered a liberal alternative to 1830s evangelical absolutism, as Channing promoted benevolence and respectfully - if unrealistically - sought to en1ist slaveholders in the moral imperative rather than alienate them from it:

How slavery shall be removed is a question for the slave-holder, and one which he alone can fully answer. He alone has an intimate knowledge of the character and habits of the slaves, to which the means ofemancipation should be carefully adapted. General views and principles may and should be suggested at a distance; but the mode of applying them can be understood only by those who dwell on the spot where the evil exists. To the slave-holder belongs the duty of settling, and employing the best methods of liberation, and to no other. We have no right of interference, nor do we desire it.26

Channing also addressed the divisive passions of Northern immediatism by suggesting that righteous indignation be replaced with principles and civilized discourse:

Some readers may perhaps be disappointed, that, in speaking of the means ofremoving slavery, I have suggested nothing which may be done for the cause by the friends of emancipation in the Free States ...Our proper and only means ofaction is, to spread the truth on the subject ofslavery; and let none contemn this means because of its gradual influence. It is not therefore less sure. No state...can at the present day escape the power of strong, deep, enlightened opinion. Every state, acknowledging Christianity, encouraging education, and holding intercourse with the civilized world, must be pervaded by great and universally acknowledged truths ...Let, then, the friends of freedom and humanity be true to their principles, and commend them by wise inculcation to all within their influence. From this work let it be their constant care to exclude the evil passions, which so often bring reproach and failure on a good cause. It is by calm, firm assertion of great principles, and not by personalities and vituperations, that strength is to be given to the constantly increasing reprobation ofslavery through the civilized world. 27

Channing's gradualist appeal spoke of the contrast between the Unitarian emphasis on rational faith and the evangelical emphasis on immediate emotions. Frances Kemble's responses to slave music spoke of both. Through their friendship as well as her close reading ofSlavery, Kemble had come to understand that the individual slaveholder must be awakened to personal moral action. However, when Kemble moved beyond the casual

26 William Ellery Channing, Slavery (Boston, 1835), http://www. vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalismlauthors/wechanning/slaveryl.html (accessed March 5, 2012). 27 Ibid.. 1835. 40 travel narrative tradition in Journal ofA Residence on a Georgian Plantation, she stepped

firmly into the tradition of emotionally charged religious moralism. As we have seen, slave music that displeased her affected her on a deep emotional level. Kemble couldn't take moral reform action to free Butler's slaves; but she reasoned that she could take moral reform action to guide slaves, and correcting the music of slavery seemed - among

other benevolent actions - to be a rational moral alternative.

Born in London on November 27, 1809 to Charles and Maria Therese de Camp,

'Fanny' Kemble was a member of the established and beloved "first family" of British theatre. Her aunt was the famous Shakespearean actress Sarah Siddons, and her father

Charles became the manager and proprietor of Covent Gardens. Kemble spent tumultuous years in French boarding schools, but emerged with a love for Romantic

literature, especially Byron, as well as a restless desire for her own writing career.

Clinton notes that Kemble "was fond of society," an attraction owing "especially [to] its

capacity to foster intellectual discussions.,,28 When she debuted in Romeo andJuliet in

1829, she became an overnight sensation with staying power. Kemble had mixed feelings about fame, and considered acting a craft far inferior to literature and opera. She took up

acting only to ameliorate the dire condition ofthe family's finances. This financial imperative brought Charles and Frances to America in 1832 for a two-year touring engagement performing the works of Shakespeare.

The Kemble name and Fanny's charisma drew the father-daughter duo into high social and political circles in antebellum America. Kemble discussed culture and politics with admiring luminaries such as John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Louis Agassiz,

28 Clinton, Fanny Kemble's Civil Wars, 30. 41 and Nathaniel Hawthorne. "Fanny had from a very young age been familiar with political life in London," Clinton informs us, but American society taught Kemble to keep her distance when encountering new - and especially "lower" - social persons and cultures. In

America in the early 1830s, Kemble witnessed "republican values at work in the breakdown of class barriers in everyday encounters," yet as a socialite ofmodest and tenuous means, she felt "a mixed response to this leveling atmosphere.,,29

The tension between Kemble's cultural hesitation and her cultural sympathy - a tension that surfaced in her corrective involvement with slave music - is evident in a diary entry published in 1835 in her Journal ofFrances Anne Kemble. In a manner similar to her later reactions to slave music, Kemble asserted her own authority as she simultaneously acknowledged and dismissed egalitarian possibilities:

These democrats are as title-sick as a banker's wife in England ... [my father] spoke of the lower orders finding their level; now this enchants me, because a republic is an anomaly; there is nothing republican in the construction of the material universe; there be highlands and lowlands, lordly mountains as barren as any aristocracy, and lowly valleys, as productive as any labouring classes. The feeling ofrank, of inequality, is inherent in us, a part of the veneration ofour natures; and like most ofour properties seldom finds its right channels - in place ofwhich it has created artificial ones suited to the frame of society into which the civilized world has formed itself. I believe in my heart that a republic is the noblest, highest, and purest form of government; but I believe that according to the present disposition ofhuman creatures, 'tis a mere beau ideal, totally incapable of realization.30

The poles of Kemble's cultural engagement swung between moral outrage at racial barriers and aristocratic outrage at impropriety. When her father gave theatre tickets to an

African-American servant only to be informed by the man that his family would only be allowed seating in the gallery, Kemble was incensed and remarked with crude sympathy,

29 Clinton, Fanny Kemble's Civil Wars, 56-57. 30 Frances Anne Kemble, Journal ofFrances Anne Kemble (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, & Blanchard, 1835; reprint, New York: Benjamin Bloom, Inc. 1970),60-61. 42

"I believe I turned black myself, I was so indignant.,,3) However, the next day, she was

instead displeased by "familiar" and "insolent" immigrant servants who "fancy that they elevate themselves above their condition by discharging its duties.,,32 These tensions between sympathy and disengagement were early indications of how Kemble's moral

agenda - taking stewardship to cleanse sin - would lead her to supervise slave music.

Through the press of social elites and new admirers, ofcourse, came suitors.

Kemble eventually married the wealthy Philadelphia businessman Pierce Butler at Christ

Church in Philadelphia in 1834. The couple settled on an estate in nearby Branchtown in

1835. Though an Anglican bishop married the couple in an Episcopalian church,

Kemble's spiritual life in America actually began when Butler took her, during their courtship, to the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia, a congregation that was under

the guidance of the abolitionist Reverend William Henry Furness. One of Kemble's

closest American friends, the novelist and abolitionist Catherine Sedgwick, had already

introduced her to the Reverend William Ellery Channing in New York in 1833. Kemble

and Channing began a correspondence and remained friends for years. She attended

Channing's Federal Street Church when visiting Boston; he attended her Boston performances and visited her at the Butler's Branchtown home when in Philadelphia.

Kemble had been avidly reading Channing's works since discovering his article, "The

Moral Argument Against Calvinism," on a trip to Edinburgh in 1830. When Channing wrote Slavery in 1835, he may have personally given Kemble a copy. She wrote her own

31 Kemble, Journal ofFrances Anne Kemble, 120. 32 Ibid., 126. 43

response as part of her 1835 Journal, though due to Butler's insistence on its omission, no text has survived.33

While discovering Channing and other re1igious works in Edinburgh, Armstrong

surmised, "Fanny became aware of an inner and spiritual grace. Re1igion became real to her." As a result, Kemble "made up her mind to be good" even before embracing abolitionist views, and in return for moral devotion, "she hoped, and expected, that God would make her completely and permanently good.,,34 Channing'S moral influence became particularly evident in Kemble's Journal ofa Residence on a Georgian

Plantation in 1838-1839?5 His prescription for reform emphasized the rehabilitation and education of slaves, first by placing their "domestic relations on a new ground" of respect

for familial permanence a permanence that had been thwarted by slavery - and then by rewarding the virtues of industry and self-culture so that the "industrious and thriving...would have immense moral power" on others in their community.36 Gradual

self-sufficiency, that is, would be the goal of immediate paternalistic benevolence.

Kemble deployed this program ofpaternalistic reform during her stay on the

Butler plantations, as she estab1ished an infirmary, cleaned slave homes, taught hygiene, taught literacy, rewarded initiative, and forwarded slave entreaties to Butler until he forbade her from hearing them. More than simply bemoaning the unnatural degradation

33 Every biographer of Kemble has made some mention of her contact with Channing and has suggested the influence of Slavery on her antislavery ideals. For the most intimate accounting oftheir friendship and his spiritual influence on Kemble, including samples of their correspondence, see Wister, Fanny, The American Kemble, 118-122, 135, 153,207, and 221. "I have finished Channing'S sermons," Kemble wrote in her journal, "which are most excellent," and she later noted, "how much I have valued the privilege of intercourse with such a mind." See also Scott, ed., Journal ofa Residence, xxix-xxxv; Clinton, Fanny Kemble's Civil Wars, 83; and Dorothy Marshall, Fanny Kemble (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1977),93. 34 Armstrong. Fanny Kemble: A Passionate Victorian, 66-67. 35 This journal was written in the form of a series of imagined letters to Elizabeth Sedgwick, Catherine's sister-in-law and Kemble's closest friend in the abolitionist Sedgwick family. Due to Butler's repression of the work and Kemble's hesitancy to appear antagonistic during their divorce proceedings, it was not published until May of 1863. 36 Channing, Slave/y, 1835. 44 of slavery and admonishing the sin of slaveholding, as previous religious abolitionists had done, Kemble also "hoped to improve [the slaves'] conditions," Clinton said, "by her

Christian charity and example.,,37 Through her benevolent stewardship of slaves, Kemble eventually came to believe - like the many morally adamant abolitionists who sought to reform the national sin by freeing themselves and others from it - that she had finally found a way to make herself "permanently good."

Kemble's moral imperative was both rational and emotional, and was grounded in abolitionism's religious activism. Her actions towards slave music were also a mix of reason and emotion, and were also grounded in moral urgency. Initially, however, before she took those actions, her contact with slaves and their culture was an ambivalent jumble ofcompassion, caution, and dismissal. As Armstrong has noted, "Fanny laughed almost as often as she cried over the slaves, their doings and sayings.,,38 As soon as the Butler family arrived on the plantations in November of 1838, Kemble reacted to the sonic expressions of slaves in a manner that predicted both her displeasure at the ball and her sympathy for hymns at the slave funeral. Hearing "shouts," "vociferations," and especially "interjectional shrieks, whoops, whistles and grunts," Kemble found the purity of her agenda upset by uncertainty and guilt:

The strangeness of the whole scene, its wildness ...the rapid retrospect which my mind hurried through the few past years of my life ...the affectionate shouts of welcome of the poor people, who seemed to hail us as descending divinities, affected me so much that I burst into tears, and could hardly answer to their demonstrations of delight.39

37 Catherine Clinton, ed. Fanny Kemble's Journals (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2000), 14. 38 Armstrong. Fanny Kemble: A Passionate Victorian, 230. 39 Kemble, Journal ofa Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 47-48. 45

Moments later, however, this profound sense of complicity in a sin she abhorred - a sense of grief that had somehow been triggered by the slaves' shouts, whoops, and whistles ­ was replaced, as she heard more celebration, by her aristocratic tendency to mock impropriety:

As we neared the bank, the steersman took up a huge conch, and in the barbaric fashion of early times in the Highlands, sounded out our approach. A pretty schooner...began to be crowded with Negroes, jumping, dancing, shouting, laughing, and clapping their hands (a usual expression of delight with savages and children), and using their most extravagant and ludicrous gesticulations to express their ecstasy at our arrival. . .I believe I was almost frightened; and it was not until we were safely housed, and the door shut upon our riotous escort, that we indulged in a fit of laughing, quite as full, on my part, of nervousness as of amusement.40

Kemble was not yet ready to take moral action. However, her religious sensitivities and her agenda of deploying Channing's reform program of guardianship would later lead her to that action. She would eventually find herself challenged to reconcile her mixed reactions of pleasure and distaste for slave music - that is, her aesthetic as well as social discomfort - with her personal religious imperative.41

Kemble's immersion in the spiritual rhetoric of abolitionism had taught her that slaves were unique spiritual beings with their own moral potential for self-culture. She knew that slavery itself, not the predetermination of race, was "answerable for all the evils that exhibit themselves where it exists." She also observed that individual slaves

40 Kemble, Journal ofa Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 49-50. 41 In his classic study of Unitarianism, Daniel Walker Howe offers a description ofa spiritual-social dichotomy that is instructive in understanding how Kemble initially processed slave music through a lens of moral ambivalence. The Unitarians, Howe argued, were highly moral citizens "ofmany paradoxes. Religious liberals and social conservatives, at once optimistic and apprehensive, nationalistic and cosmopolitan, they were elitists in a land dedicated to equality, proponents of freedom of conscience who supported a religious establishment, and reformers who feared change." Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy. 1805-1861 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 12. 46 possessed unique capacities for intelligence and industry.42 Ifslaves were individual souls worthy ofrespect, she sensed, their culture might also be worthy of respect. "I have the greatest desire to attend one of [the slaves'] religious meetings," she remarked after hearing the "extemporaneous exhortations" of a certain black preacher, "but [I] fear to put the people under any, the slightest restraint." She mused in a respectful spirit of egalitarianism, "I shall see by-and-by how they feel about it themselves.,,43 Sometimes, she heard a cultural agency in slave music that spoke of independence from Anglo-

American aesthetics. At the same ball where she heard the "enthusiastic banjo player," she also witnessed song and dance that gave her an awareness of Northern minstrelsy's distortions ofAfrican-American creativity:

I have seen Jim Crow - the veritable James; all the contortions, and springs, and flings, and kicks, and capers you have been beguiled into accepting of him are spurious, faint, feeble, impotent in a word, pale N orthem reproductions ofthat ineffable black conception.44

Short ofoffering an endorsement ofthis performance, Kemble nonetheless recognized that slaves possessed a capacity for cultural agency however foreign to her that, like the integrity of their worship, might merit consideration on its own terms.

More often, though, Kemble's moral agenda ofcondemning slavery and stewarding slaves away from its degradations led her to question this agency. Slavery had crushed the slaves, and Kemble carne to believe it had crushed their cultural initiative as well. When slave music pleased her, she qualified her praise ofmusical worth with doubts about moral worth. After hearing singing oarsmen rowing Butler across the

Altamaha River to plantations on S1. Simons Island, Kemble acknowledged the value of

42 Kemble, Journal ofa Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 61. 43 Ibid., 92. 44 Ibid., 131. 47

the "peculiar characteristics" of the music she heard. "The tune and time they keep," she remarked of the oarsmen and their unison singing, were "something quite wonderful; such truth and intonation ofaccent," she confessed, "would make almost any music agreeable.,,45 However, she quickly retreated from this appreciative high ground, qualifying her acknowledgment of worth with an assertion ofAnglo-American superiority. Slave music, she said, rather than offering evidence of self-culture or moral potential,

almost always has some resemblance to tunes with which (slaves) must have become acquainted through the instrumentality of white men; their overseers or masters whistling Scotch or Irish airs, of which they have produced by ear these rifacciamenti. The note-for-note reproduction of'Ah! vous dirai-je, maman?' in one of the most popular of the so-called Negro melodies with which all America and England are familiar, is an example of this very transparent plagiarism; and the tune with which Mr. B(utler)'s rowers started him down the Altamaha ...was a very distinct descendent of "Coming Through the Rye.' The words, however, were astonishingly primitive, which when it burst from their eight throats in high unison, sent me into fits oflaughter. . .1 have never heard the Negroes ...sing any words that could be said to have any sense.46

Here, Kemble's assessment ofplagiarism succumbed to the same cultural misunderstanding of Northem minstrel melodies that she had previously and astutely

critiqued. Her cultural prejudice continued as she asked the oarsmen to explain the meaning of their lyrics, only to conclude - in spite ofsome of the tragic answers they

gave - that many "words that seemed to promise something sentimental. . .immediately went off into nonsense verses.,,47 This was almost tantamount to a moral condemnation of

the slaves themselves. Abolitionism's religious ideal of spiritual equality had enabled her to hear a "truth" that was "quite wonderful" in the music of the oarsmen. Rather than

45 Kemble, Journal ofa Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 163. 46 Ibid, 163-164. A rifacciamenti is a recasting or adaptation ofa literary or musical work. 47 Ibid., 164. 48 stimulating moral sympathy, however, the oarsmen's singing once again triggered fits of laughter and disregard.

In other cases, Kemble heard meaning in slave music, even if the source and nature of that meaning escaped her. She credited slaves with the capacity for higher learning, but she was also wondered about the merits ofwhat the master class was teaching:

You cannot think (to return to the songs ofmy boatmen) how strange some of their words are: in one, they repeatedly chanted the 'sentiment' that 'God made man, and man makes' - what do you think? - 'money!' Is not that a peculiar poetical proposition? Another ditty to which they frequently treat me they call Caesar's song; it is an extremely spirited war song, beginning 'The trumpets blow, the bugles sound - Oh, stand your ground!' It has puzzled me not a little to determine in my own mind whether this title of Caesar's song has any reference to the great Julius, and, if so, what may be the Negro notion ofhim, and whence and how derived.48

Kemble already knew that slaveholders were teaching slaves a distorted version of

Christianity and an immoral sense of innate inferiority. Here, she saw that slaves had also learned from their masters to conflate moral rewards with capital.

At some point, between her sympathy and misunderstanding, Kemble began to hear the potential for moral reform. She had come to Butler's plantations believing that slaves were spiritual beings who could be moral agents - and should be moral agents - if given moral elevation out ofslavery's sinful repression. Similarly, she came to believe that some slave music had an inherently wonderful potential that could be elevated out of its crude conditions into higher and ostensibly more "moral" - European standards.

Kemble even went one step further, suggesting that Euro-Americans could learn from slave music as they helped to improve it:

48 Kemble, Journal ofa Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 260. 49

I thought I could trace distinctly some popular national melody with which I was familiar in almost all their songs; but I have been at quite a loss to discover any such foundation for many ...The high voices all in unison, and the admirable time and true accent with which their responses are made, always make me wish that some great musical composer could hear these semi-savage performances. With a very little skillful adaptation and instrumentation, I think one or two barbaric chants and choruses might be evoked from them that would make the fortune of an opera. 49

Was this suggestion ofmusical improvement a quest for appreciation or appropriation?

If the imperative ofher Channing-inspired impulse for reform and rehabilitation was based on encouraging agency and self-culture, why couldn't she believe that the

"admirable time and true accent" ofthe slave melodies were already worthwhile? Kemble felt that the music needed a "great musical composer" for the same reason that Channing felt an emancipated slave needed a "guardian." Her desire for aesthetic elevation, in this sense, was Kemble's artistic equivalent of her moral imperative to improve the world of the slave by encouraging progress out of slavery's present state.

Not all the music Kemble heard triggered a moral quest to steward improvement.

She was quite satisfied with songs sung in her praise. Such songs did not present Kemble with cultural discomfort or force her to consider the cultural potential ofslaves, but instead afforded her a sense of her own social status and moral goodness:

There is one privilege which I enjoy here which I think few Cockneyesses have ever had experiences of, that of hearing my own extemporaneous praises chanted bard-fashion by our Negroes in rhymes as rude and to measures as simple as any illustrious female of the days ofKing Brian Boroihme listened to. Rowing yesterday through a beautiful sunset. .. my two sable boatmen entertained themselves and me with alternate strophe and anti strophe of poetical description of my personal attractions, in which my 'wire waist' recurred repeatedly, to my intense amusement. .. Occasionally I am celebrated in these rowing chants as

49 Kemble, Journal ofa Residence on a Georgian Plantation. 259-260. 50

'Massa's darling' ...the other day, however, our poets made a diversion from the personal to the moral qualities of their small mistress.50

These singing slaves not only entertained Kemble, but they also spared her from hearing discomforting conditions that demanded moral reform action. Assured of her own worth, she could avoid grief over her complicity in slavery, and could resist the impulse to mock the impropriety ofa lower class. Most of all, these complimentary songs allowed Kemble to believe that slaves recognized a higher moral culture in her.

Ifslave music stirred in Kemble conflicted responses ranging from aesthetic disdain and moral distress to aesthetic respect and moral reassurance, the music ultimately triggered her moral imperative for benevolent reform action. Reforming slave music became one way to improve the conditions of slavery, and Kemble found it necessary - as she did with her efforts to teach self-respect and cleanliness - to assert her moral authority. She continually sought to explain to slaves "that I had no ownership over them," because "I held such ownership sinful."Sl But the moral imperative to cleanse sin brought her to a porous edge between the sin ofslaveholding and the absolutism of religious righteousness. She wouldn't allow herself the sin ofruling - unless by the rule of a moral imperative for reform:

One of their songs displeased me not a little, for it embodied the opinion that 'twenty-six black girls not make mulatto yellow girl'; and as I told them I did not like it, they have omitted it since. This desperate tendency to despise and undervalue their own race and colour, which is one of the very worst results of their abject condition, is intolerable to me. 52

50 Kemble, Journal ofa Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 141-142. King Brian Boroihme was an eleventh century Irish king who consolidated power in confrontations with local rivals, eventually driving Norse conquerors off the island. 51 Ibid., 60. 52 Ibid., 260-261. 51

Moral reform, for Kemble, had come to mean changing what she considered to be immoral music. This was one of the few moral actions at her disposal. Kemble had learned, by witnessing Butler's hardening during their visit, that the gradualism of moral suasion enabled apathetic slaveholders "to justify their deeds before the tribunal oftheir own conscience [and] God's law.,,53 Late in the visit, she fell into despair over falling into the rhetorical evangelical antislavery trap of "a mere desire to be delivered from my own share" in the sin.54 Slavery and slavery-induced songs displeased her, and she had reasoned that, to save herself, she could at least change the songs.

Kemble remained genuinely compelled to resist and reform the slaves' "desperate tendency to despise and undervalue" themselves. Improving their musical diet, her reform instincts told her, was one way to improve their "abject condition." To this end, she concurred with the practice of masters and overseers who "prohibit melancholy tunes or words, and encourage nothing but cheerful music and senseless words."

I think it a judicious precaution enough ...deprecating the effect of sadder strains upon the slaves, whose peculiar musical sensibility might be expected to make them especially excitable by any songs of a plaintive character, and having any reference to their particular hardships ...these poor slaves are just the sort of people over whom a popular musical appeal to their feelings and passions would have an Immense· power. 55

By complicitly and explicitly repressing the "immense power" and uncomfortable moral truth of slave music that she otherwise often admired, Kemble had become a reluctant slaveholder who - in spite of the higher call ofher religious background - had denied slaves their own self-culture. In her mind, however, these actions confirmed that she was a benevolent guardian and an absolute crusader against sin.

53 Kemble, Journal ofa Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 190. 54 Ibid., 233. 55 Ibid., 164. 52

What do we learn by placing Frances Anne Kemble's moral reform actions towards slave music into the historical arc ofthe religious imperative against slavery?

Kemble's responses to slave music had moved past the casual and dismissive earlier observations of the travel narrative tradition and had joined the morally urgent abolitionist polemic that would eventually, as we will see, drive all the subjects of this study. Her seemingly conflicted involvement with slave music was, in fact, a deliberate extension ofher moral agenda to condemn the sin ofslavery and to steward slaves out of sinful conditions. However, her moral ideals and actions -like those ofthe religiously driven antislavery moralists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries spoke of a much larger and more complex tension between idealistic absolutism and practical applications. The line between immediatism and gradualism often sounded hard, but was not complete or decisive. Enlightenment thinkers lacked antislavery activism; the

Quakers were not monolithically singular abolitionists; evangelicals caused schisms and alienated moderates with their condemnations and extreme passions; and moral suasion, both in its self-righteous and rational applications, was a method ofreform that did not work. In the midst of the moral polemic that grounded her Journal ofA Residence on a

Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839, Kemble was painfully aware that her privileged status as a slaveholder's wife was at odds with her deeper religious sensibilities. Her "moral" responses towards slave music were important, then, because they were "moral" actions.

Involvement with slave music was not merely an escape for Kemble. In the words ofher most recent biographer Deirdre David, working through jumbled spiritual and cultural ideals in the familiar world of aesthetics gave Kemble "a way if not to accept what she witnessed then at least to endure it." Acting on slave music, in effect, gave 53

Kemble the means "to negotiate her complex moral position."S6 Kemble's moral reform actions towards slave music were more than ways to deal with her cultural distaste, her distress over the immorality ofslave degradation, or her dissatisfaction with her own dependency on being Mrs. Pierce Butler. Those actions were ways to connect her own quest for self-culture to the imperative of fostering self-culture in slaves. She had "heard" ways, she believed, in which she could make herself - and others - "permanently good."

56 David, Fanny Kemble: A Performed Lile, 155. 54

"Would catch the ear of any musician": Lucy McKim, Dwight's Journal ofMusic, and the Shared Culture of Antebellum Music

The music that Frances Anne Kemble heard on her husband's Georgia plantations summoned her to take moral action. Her desire to improve the music of slaves stemmed from the religious antislavery agenda of benevolent involvement on behalf ofslaves.

However, even though Kemble heard and appreciated "something quite wonderful" in slave singing, her cultural distance and her paternalistic terms ofengagement - had conditioned her to understand what she heard as nonsense produced by an immoral environment. By the outbreak ofthe war, however, developments in music had provided abolitionists who heard slave music with new listening tools. During the 1840s and

1850s, a public marketplace of popular music had emerged that encouraged familiarity with cultural sharing. Kemble, with her references to opera, minstrelsy, and European folk melodies, had begun to vaguely sense this shared musical culture in 1838.

Americans knew and expected a variety of music by the early 1850s, when Swedish opera sensation Jenny Lind toured the nation performing to fanatical sold-out audiences, and when composer Stephen Foster found success with his best-selling sentimental minstrel song "Old Folks at Home." Antebellum listeners, particularly those in urban areas and the North, heard a musical culture that fostered familiarity with multiple influences, including church hymns, Irish folk songs, European symphonies and operas, parlor songs, concert band music, abolitionist message songs, minstrel theatre, and plantation music itself

This new musical culture grew from tensions between republican virtue and democratic inclusion, as various reformers elevated the moral power ofsacred and 55

cultured music over the market debasement oftheatre, festivals, and sentimental songs.

More fundamentally, however, antebellum musical culture was a culture of borrowing

across genres and hierarchies, of songs, melodies, and themes blending into a widely

performed and diverse national repertoire that was familiar to a broad spectrum of

Americans. Popular and parlor songs borrowed melodies from hymns; church hymn reformers and music educators adapted folk tunes while advocating European standards; minstrel theatre copied opera scenes and arias; abolitionist songs paired new moral and

political lyrics to minstrel melodies; minstrel composers heard and copied slave music just as slaves, in urban areas and ports, heard and borrowed from all these traditions. By

wartime, American ears had been tuned to hearing a newly American mix ofshared song

and sound.

This shared musical culture was also part of the moral culture of abolitionists who heard slave music at the time of the Civil War. How they came to inherit this familiar and moral musical culture is evident in the story of a little known young abolitionist, Lucy

McKim, and her brief letter describing slave music that was published in Dwight's

Journal ofMusic, a respected Boston journal that promoted the highest standards of

European symphonic music. The nineteen-year-old Pennsylvania woman, who married

William Lloyd Garrison's third son Wendell after the war, brought a shared American musical aesthetic South in the spring of 1862, when Northern reformers and government

agents went to the recently Union- occupied coastal Sea Islands of Port Royal, South

Carolina. For three weeks in early June, Lucy accompanied her father, abolitionist

lecturer and field agent James Miller McKim, who was making reports for the

Philadelphia Port Royal Relief Association. While there, the musically trained younger 56

McKim studied and transcribed several of the folk songs, spirituals, and boat songs of the newly freed people. Documenting and promoting the music became her moral reform action, and this action would eventually lead to the 1867 pUblication of the groundbreaking American folk music collection, Slave Songs a/The United States.

Writing to Dwight's Journal in the fall of 1862, McKim submitted sheet music for one folk song, "Poor Rosy, Poor Gal," and indicated her intentions to further publish an unprecedented series of eight slave songs. In her letter, which was published under the title "Songs ofthe Port Royal 'Contrabands'," McKim described what she heard in terms of sacred anthems, harps, birds, and Venetian gondoliers. She declared that the "striking originality" of the African-American melodies "would catch the ear of any musician."

Principally, she desired a chance to reproduce the music for others:

My chief object in writing to you is to say that having accompanied my father on his tour to Port Royal, and being much struck with the songs of its people, I reduced a number ofthem to paper; among them, the ballad referred to ("Poor Rosy, Poor Gal"); I send you herewith a copy ofit, hoping it may interest you. Whether to have the others printed, is as yet a question with me. I

McKim was "hoping it may interest" John Sullivan Dwight, the most exacting, conservative, and well-respected classical music critic of the era, and she was seeking his approbation on the question of furthering her sheet music series. She also wanted to impress the journal's musically literate Northern audience. "Songs of the Port Royal

'Contrabands'" was the latest in a string of pieces on slave music, minstrelsy, and free

Northern black performers that Dwight had sporadically printed during the 1850s.

Dwight did not normally comment on these pieces, but he did introduce this letter, with an endorsement of McKim's taste and her project:

I Lucy McKim, "Songs ofthe Port Royal 'Contrabands'," D,vight's Journal ofMusic 21, (November 8, 1862),254-255. 57

We have reeeived No. 1 of"Songs ofthe Freedmen ofPort Royal, collected and arranged by Miss Lucy McKim," with the following interesting letter ...The melody has a simple and touching pathos, a flavor of individuality which makes one desire to know more of these things; and we trust that "Poor Rosy" will be followed by other specimens as genuine.2

What does McKim's promotion of slave songs to a cultured Northern audience tell us about her framework for hearing and about her moral agenda? What does Dwight's promotion ofLucy's transcribed slave songs tell us about antebellum musical culture and about his moral agenda? How did a fluid musical culture make it possible for Dwight to suspect, and Lucy to confirm, that something familiar - and morally worthwhile - existed in African-American music? McKim grew up in prominent abolitionist and feminist circles, and was employed as a music instructor in an era ofbroad musical literacy and diverse public taste. Dwight traveled in literary and utopian circles, and promoted a vision of symphonic music as transcendent art that would redeem society. Like the travelers, teachers, and evangelists who sent reports of slave music to Dwight's Journal ofMusic during the 1850s, McKim knew that a new egalitarian language for hearing music had become the American way ofhearing music. The growing national awareness ofslave music that Dwight documented for his cultured readers culminated with

McKim's unusually descriptive assumption of familiar listening.

To explain how this connection between McKim and Dwight, in a public discourse on slave music, revealed connections between moral agendas and musical familiarity, I will review five components ofantebellum musical culture that contributed to the prevailing Northern "ear" for shared song and sound. Abolitionist musical sensibilities,

2 Quoted from Dwight'S editorial passage introducing Lucy McKim, "Songs of the Port Royal 'Contrabands'." McKim only published one more song in her series, the hymn "Roll, Jordan, Roll." Dena Epstein, in a biographical journal article on McKim, suggested that McKim was publishing the series herself and terminated the series due to poor sales. Dena J. Epstein, "Lucy McKim Garrison, American Musician," Bulletin ofthe Nell' York Public Librar)" Vol. 67, No.8 (1963), 539-540. 58 foremost, were grounded in the moral and civic tradition ofProtestant hymnody. Early folkloric psalm singing was refined through the efforts ofchurch reformers and music educators, who by the nineteenth century had embraced new secular standards of

European harmony and art music. Secondly, popular and parlor songs built a great common denominator from the reuse and redistribution of opera arias and Irish melodies.

Antislavery songs and hymns formed a third listening framework. This music, which blended church, popular, and folk traditions, advanced the hearing of moral reform while also borrowing from minstrelsy. Minstrel or "blackface" theatre, which distorted popular

Northern understandings ofAfrican-American, created a more unavoidable listening reference. Northerners often mistook minstrel song to be ofplantation origin. Adding to the distortion was the fact that these "plantation" melodies reached the ears of slaves, who reinterpreted the tunes and words. Plantation music itself formed a final hearing context, with music unique to the slave experience but also related to Euro-American traditions. These overlapping contexts - church music and public music education, popular songs, abolitionist songs, minstrelsy, and plantation music - formed the aesthetic and moral framework abolitionists shared that fostered familiarity with slave music.

Cultural historians have confirmed that antebellum music was a shared culture by showing how this connected culture later became increasingly stratified. Lawrence

Levine's examination ofthe popularity of Shakespeare, opera, and symphonic music in nineteenth century America reveals how antebellum Americans experienced "greater cultural sharing in the sense that cultural lines were more fluid, cultural spaces less rigidly subdivided, than they were to become" after the war. 3 Public entertainment in the

3 Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence olCultural Hierarchy in America. (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1988), 9, 233. 59 first half ofthe century, experienced in fonnats such as theatre and patriotic festivals, was a "kaleidoscopic, democratic institution presenting a widely varying bill of fare to all classes and socioeconomic groups." Hierarchy set in later, when critics such as John S.

Dwight institutionalized what Levine calls the "sacralization ofculture," that is, the glorification and canonization ofhigh art for its moral superiority to mass art.4 Michael

Broyles similarly argues that "musical idealists" ofthe socioeconomic elite had begun to tighten an otherwise flexible antebellum listening culture by the second half ofthe nineteenth century. "Attitudes about high and low culture had not yet hardened" in the antebellum period, Broyles reports in his study of Boston's nineteenth century musical societies. Only after refonn-minded leaders with strict tastes asserted control ofpublic music - for the ostensible moral good of society - did a "dichotomy between idealism and populism [become] apparent. ,,5

Even though an initially flexible musical culture underwent hierarchical constriction later in the century, popular song played a vital role in sustaining cultural and social egalitarianism during the antebellum period. Music historians such as Charles Hamm,

Nicholas Tawa, and Ken Emerson have shown how early American songs emerged from competing European styles to fonn a national repertoire that forwarded the new nation's democratic ideals.6 During the era ofJacksonian democracy, popularizing song trends such as simplified and recycled melodies, increased sheet music distribution, nationalism, and sentimental verse indicated the arrival ofa mass market for music. Tawa argues that

4 Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 21, 86, 102-122. 5 Michael Broyles, Music ofthe Highest Class: Elitism and Populism in Antebellum Boston (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1992),21,91. 6 See Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1983),23­ 78; Nicholas Tawa, A Music for the Millions: Antebellum Democratic Attitudes and the Birth o,j'American Popular Music (New York: Pendragon Press, 1984); and Ken Emerson, Doo Dah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise oj'American Popular Culture (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998). 60 this new music market "enabled contemporary American song to have a general currency among the educated and uneducated alike.,,7 Vicki Eaklor also identifies this general musical currency, and suggests that the widespread "diversity of even the favorite popular tunes that [ were frequently] re-used" reflected egalitarian access to assumed musical familiarity. 8 By advancing democratic culture, a popular musical repertoire also forwarded moral and civic agendas. Lyrics in popular antebellum songs, Tawa explains, often embodied a collective belief"that certain specific ways ofconducting one's life accorded with national custom and feelings ofrightness." Popular song's unifying importance "derived from its ability to charm [while] it expressed this national consensus" regarding moral and public duty.9

Congregational psalmody in Puritan New England provided an early model for moral mandates in shared public music. Worship hymns emphasized simplicity and congregational inclusion because the responsibility for singing the psalms "was a duty to be performed by all."lo The imperative to include all members ofthe community, including the illiterate both of word and music, led to a process that James Keene has called "the folklorization ofpsalm singing." I I In 1681, church leaders in Plymouth introduced the new English practice of"lining out" the verses ofhymns, a method ofrote teaching in which the pastor recited one or two simple lines that were repeated by the congregation. The popularity offugue singing, or "singing in the round," kept New

7 Tawa, A Music for the Millions, 2-21. 8 Vicki Eaklor, American Antislaverv Songs: A Collection and Analysis (New York, London, Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1988), xxxvii. 9 Tawa, 47. 10 Vicki Eaklor, "Roots of an Ambivalent Culture: Music, Education, and Music Education in Antebellum America." Journal olResearch in Music Education, Vol. 33, No.2 (Summer, 1985),90. II James A Keene, A Histol), ofMusic Education in the United States (Hanover, London: University Press ofNew England, 1982), 11-58. 61

England hymn traditions simple, accessible, and central to public morality throughout the eighteenth century. 12

The early worship music ofNew England was democratic, but church leaders feared that egalitarian and later evangelical music expression threatened their control ofworship piety and the quality ofthe spiritual experience. "Folklorization ofpsalm singing" caused deterioration in hymn quality as sacred melodies were distorted and forgotten. 13 The quest for a more controlled, elevated worship music led eighteenth century church reformers to establish popular "singing schools" for elementary and advanced vocal training. Singing schools, though operated privately, aimed to revive hymn practice by teaching "regular singing," or singing by note and rule. Hymn reform and music education combined, in this way, to pull away from communal and evangelical models.

American listeners were introduced to stricter musical standards. By the second half of the eighteenth century, the duty ofhymnody was often delegated to select choirs ofthe most gifted singers, who were needed to perform the more complex anthems and sacred choral music coming from European composers such as Handel, Mozart, and Haydn.

Even though eighteenth century hymn reformers created an aesthetic hierarchy in worship music practice, nineteenth century social reformers continued to propagate the original sacred vision of shared music as a tool for collective moral uplift. Eaklor has

12 Keene describes the fugue tradition ofNew England psalm singing in terms that have been characteristically used to describe slave songs: "allied with certain native folk idioms, such as a natural affinity for the minor mode, an irregularity ofphrase, and a pronounced rhythmic vi tality." Keene, A History ()fMusic Education, 29. 13 By the late seventeenth century, the number of tunes in common use in Puritan psalmody had fallen from 39 to less than a dozen. Keene, 4-11. Broyles also notes that the Ainsworth Psalter, which the Plymouth Pilgrims brought with them in 1620, contained 39 hymns with "long, relatively complex tunes in a variety of meters." By 1698, the ninth edition of the Bay Psalm Book had simplified the repertoire to only "thirteen tunes, with little metrical variety." Broyles questions, however, the extent to which the diverse selections in the Ainsworth Psalter were used, and he instead treats hymn simplification as a facilitation of civic duty. Broyles, 36-37. 62 explained that when "the religious impulse was 'secularized,' or channeled into causes slightly more broad but still based in Christian-American morality" - such as the temperance, common school, and abolitionist movements - "musical ideas and uses followed.,,14 Lowell Mason, an evangelical Bostonian who worked as a singing schoolmaster in Georgia in the 1820s, led pioneering and successful efforts to add music to the Boston public school curriculum in 1838. Mason, the most popular hymn writer and prolific hymn compiler ofhis day, championed cultivated taste and European harmonic standards, yet he also adapted folk melodies and taught with the new

Pestalozzian method ofpractical experience before theory. Confident in music's democratic function in a Christian republic, Mason advocated the universal accessibility of vocal training over the limited applications of instrumental training. IS As music educators transitioned from singing schools to public schools, they continued to forward moral and civic ideals "regarding the nature and purpose ofmusic" in the improvement of society, ideals they "inherited from the sacred music tradition.,,16

Reform ofworship music in the direction of cosmopolitan standards, combined with increased access to musical training, also served to create a secular American musical culture outside the vocal traditions ofthe churches. Musical instrument imports had risen increasingly in America throughout the eighteenth century, and by the tum of the century, continental turmoil had driven an influx of European music instructors to the new nation ­ particularly from Germany who were versed in harmonic theory and contemporary vocal and instrumental methods. These immigrant music instructors offered the

14 Eaklor, American Antislavery Songs, xxxv. 15 Eaklor, "Roots of an Ambivalent Culture," 87-99. Lowell Mason is an almost unavoidable figure in studies of antebellum music whose presence consistently demands attention. For more on the importance of Mason's role in hymn reform, see Broyles, 62-91. For more on his role in education, see Keene, 98-123. 16 Ibid., 95. 63 opportunity for wealthy families to provide their children with specialized instrumental training as a supplement to the singing schools and common schools. 17 Rather than strictly appealing to a small elite class, however, the lure of cultured European classical and romantic music inspired many Americans to imagine their own musical identity.

America's first amateur and semi-professional musical societies were born in this era, such as the Boston Handel and Haydn Society in 1815, the Boston Academy ofMusic

1832, and the New York Philharmonic Society in 1842. Concert programs that featured mixed selections of sacred, symphonic, and military band music came into vogue following the War of 1812, as Americans sought to experience their new selfhood by connecting to a diverse musical repertoire that was widely enjoyed at outdoor festivals and patriotic jubilees.

Pride in a new national identity and the virtues of civic participation were also stimulated by the growth ofpopular song. More so than church hymns or concert music, popular song brought new influences to an experience that was shared by Hmen and women from every walk oflife," Tawa explains, from "laborer and slave to rich and mighty," including listeners both "sophisticated and unsophisticated.,,18 A briskly expanding national environment ofheightened transportation and communication increased the demand for and spread ofpopular songs, the availability of musicians to perform them, and the breadth of the listening public. An early music business featuring published songs and touring performers developed in earnest in America at the turn ofthe

17 Keene, 11-29. For additional references to European music instructors and the market for musical instruments, see also Broyles, 92-151, and Eaklor, "Roots of an Ambivalent Culture," 87-94. Music historian Eileen Southern has also identified that in addition to the emigrant European music instructors, some singing schoolmasters and instrumental teachers were free blacks. In the brisk antebellum musical culture, she explained, "America wanted music teachers, and in some places the color ofa person's skin was Jess important that the ability to impart instruction." Eileen Southern, The Music a/Black Americans: A History (1971. Third Edition, New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997),67-70,99. l~ Tawa, 2-11. 64 century, and sheet music sales of nostalgic parlor songs soared during the 1820s, bringing this repertoire into ordinary American homes. 19 In the 1850s, Stephen Foster found success as the first American to make a ful1-time living as a song composer, rather than song performer.20

Popular American songwriters borrowed heavily from Italian opera arias, British stage song, and Irish and Scotch folk melodies. The sensual "bel canto" melodies ofthe era's great Italian opera composers, such as Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini, reached

American listeners through cultural1y diverse population centers such as New York,

Charleston, and New Orleans. Opera arias became hits, as they were made accessible through English-language adaptations?1 Americans heard arias not only in full theatrical productions, but also in the mixed repertories ofpopular touring singer/composers such as the British performer Henry Russell. Songwriters and performers alike also drew deeply from the multi-volume editions ofThomas Moore's Irish Melodies, published between 1808 and 1834, which transcribed traditional folk tunes into musical notation with verse. The sentimental and nostalgic themes ofMoore's Irish Melodies appealed powerfully to the pride and restlessness ofearly nineteenth century Americans, and would come to occupy the "center of much of the American song literature for a good fifty years" and beyond.22

Sacred vocal music, public orchestral music, popular operatic songs, and sentimental folk melodies all contributed to the contemporary, collective American "ear." By the first

19 Tawa, 2-17, and Hamm, 21. 20 For more on the early music business in antebellum America, see Ken Emerson, Doo Dahl, 42-71. 21 Some observers felt English translations of operas elevated taste by allowing greater, more democratic participation in a higher musical culture. Others felt English translations demeaned that higher culture. On lohn S. Dwight's opposition to English translations, see Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 102-122. 22 Hamm, 42-61. 65 half of the nineteenth century, refonned sacred music had begun to sound "virtually

indistinguishable from the secular songs of the day.'.23 Broyles illustrates this point with a comparison of three popular antebellum melodies, Stephen Foster's sentimental minstrel/parlor hit "Old Folks at Horne," Lowell Mason's hymn standard "Nearer My

God to Thee," and Mason protegee George Root's ballad "Hazel Dell." All three compositions made use of similar two-measure phrases in similar two-part patterns over a one-octave range, with a similar subdominant bridge section and near identical rhythmic endings. This closeness ofcomposition revealed shared influences and agendas. Foster, the most popular songwriter in nineteenth century America, was inspired by Moore's

Irish Melodies as well as contemporary partisan tunnoi1.24 Root, a successful protegee of

Mason, wrote both sacred choral cantatas and patriotic parlor songs that attained popularity during the Civil War. Broyles concludes, from these connections, that Mason, the great music education refonner who demanded both high standards and democratic access, wrote sacred hymns in the idioms ofa shared musical culture dominated by secular tunes.25 Moral and civic imperatives had once again united in song.

A new popular music market with links to traditional refonn values created an audience for abolitionist hymns and songs. Expressive revival-style music played a crucial role in spreading the abolitionist message during the 1840s and 1850s, providing both the republican morality desired by the upper classes and a familiar musical culture fueled by the middle and working classes. In abolitionist songs, new polemical and sentimental verses were set to traditional hymns, folk songs, and popular opera arias.

23 Keene, 56. 24 Hamm, 214-219. See also Emerson, 45-47. 25 Broyles, 89-91. Broyles notes that although wealthy policy makcrs and learned cultural taste makers lauded Mason's educational accomplishments and philosophies, they considered his compositions inferior to those of European hymn composers. 66

Prominent abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Parker, Maria Weston

Chapman, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Lydia Maria

Child all wrote antislavery poems and verses that were set to traditional melodies in abolitionist songbooks.26 Moral sentiments in the "words of the anti-slavery songs were all-important," music historian Eileen Southern notes, and in the abolitionist song tradition, it became "essential that only well-known tunes be used" in a recycled and familiar repertoire "so that audiences would give all their attention to the texts.,,27

The most widely heard and influential abolitionist music came from the Hutchinson

Family Singers, a popular quartet of singing siblings. The Hutchinson Family Singers

"were abolitionist and they were extremely popular," says biographer Brian Roberts, arguing that the near universal spread of their tours and music sales throughout the

Northeast placed them "not on the 'radical' margins of American politics or society but at the very center of American popular culture.,,28 The Hutchinsons' music of moral reform

"reached the mainstream in the North, a starkly divided region," historian Scott Gac explains, and their "cultural work" stretched across hierarchy, "from the group's female supporters in Lowell's factories to their fans holding national political office.,,29 The siblings were raised as farmers in New Hampshire, singing Isaac Watts hymns in the

Milford Baptist Church, and elder brother Joshua attended Lowell Mason's singing

26 These are some of the many active abolitionists whose names appear among the vast collection of verses and lyrics in Eaklor, American Antislavery Songs: A Collection and Analysis. Maria Weston Chapman published her own collections of antislavery song lyrics, Songs ofthe Free and Hymns 0/Christian Freedom, in 1836. Free black abolitionist William Wells Brown also published his own book of lyrics, The Anti-Slavery Harp; A Collection o/Songs/or Anti-Slavery Meetings, in 1848. 27 Southern, 142. 28 Brian Roberts, "'Slavery Would Have Died of That Music': The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Rise of Popular-Culture Abolitionism in Early Antebellum America, 1842-1850." Proceeding ()fthe American Antiquarian Society 114, no. 2 (2004): 310,368. 29 Scott Gac, Singing/or Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Antebellum Reform (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 14. 67 school in Boston during the 1830s. In their early incarnation as the Aeolian Singers, the

Hutchinsons promoted the temperance movement. Their sentimental ballad "The Old

Granite State" brought national admiration in 1843, and their controversial tum to abolitionism, "Get Off The Track!," was a best-selling hit that became the official Liberty

Party anthem in 1844.30 They were endorsed by William Lloyd Garrison, traveled to

England with Frederick Douglass, performed at the Brook Farm utopian commune, insisted on entertaining integrated audiences, and toured with the free black abolitionists the Luca Family Singers? I

In addition to setting moralizing verse to recycled hymns and folk tunes, abolitionist songs often redeployed popular tunes from the highly anti-abolitionist "blackface" minstrel tradition. "Get OffThe Track!," the Hutchinson Family's pivotal hit, is an exact melodic copy of the minstrel favorite "Old Dan Tucker.,,32 Songwriter Jesse Hutchinson had ironically but astutely "lifted a blackface tune for what would be widely recognized as the most blatant and radical abolitionist anthem ofthe era.,,33 African-American abolitionists also borrowed from the minstrel genre. Joshua Simpson, a free black musician from Ohio, wrote abolitionist hymns and worked as a conductor on the

Underground Railroad. His tragic parlor song "The Final Adieu" borrowed the melody of

Stephen Foster's jaunty "Camptown Races," and his sentimental ballad "The Son's

Reflections" copied Foster's nostalgic "Old Folks at Home.,,34 These examples of

30 Roberts, 315-317; see also Gac, 124-125, 165-182, and 206-214. 31 Gac, 177-180 and 206-212. For more on the Luca Family Singers, see Southern, 106-107. Gac also notes that Lucy McKim's father, James Miller McKim, sold tickets to a Hutchinson Family concert in Philadelphia in 1844. Gac., 166. 32 Eaklor, American Antislavery Songs, xxxviii. This connection is also reported in Roberts, 350-351, and Gac, 177-180. Copyright laws regarding musical compositions had only started to take shape in the 1830s, and international copyright laws did not materialize until the 1890s. See Emerson, 43. 33 Roberts, 350. 34 Eaklor, American Antislavery Songs, 382-394. 68 borrowing across seemingly incompatible genres are further evidence that antebellum musical culture was built on a language of assumed familiarity.

Minstrel music itself was a microcosm ofAmerica's cultural connections and social agendas. The theatre of"Ethiopian delineation," in which Anglo-American thespians and musicians caricatured and mocked African-American behavior and dialect, depended not only on familiar music but also on familiar racial imagery. Minstrelsy began as an entertainment form in the 1830s, with solo acts like Thomas Dartmouth Rice performing blackface interludes on larger, more diverse entertainment bills. By the 1840s, minstrelsy had risen into such high demand that singing quartets such as the Virginia Minstrels and the Christy Minstrels were able to tour with entire programs in blackface. Like much of the era's popular song, minstrel song was primarily based on Irish folk melodies, British theatre music, and opera.35 Minstrelsy succeeded in part because minstrel composers

"commodified the art ofexcerpting, condensing, and recasting easily assimilated hits from all forms of American culture.,,36 In part, the form also succeeded because it commodified racial hierarchies, reflecting cultural connections as well as social divisions.

Contrary to our modem image ofthe cultural disingenuousness of Anglo-American

"plantation" imitations, however, minstrel theatre included actual plantation elements, such the dance known as "patting juba" and instruments such as the banjo and jawbone.

"Elements we now know to be related to African American musical culture," William

Mahar explains, were absorbed into minstrelsy, and were also through the fluidity of

35 On the influence of British drama and Irish folk music in minstrel theatre, see Robert Nowatzki. Representing African Americans in Transatlantic Abolitionism and Blackface Minstrelsy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 42-79. On minstrelsy'S foundation in opera and burlesque, see William 1. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early B/acklace Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University ofIllinois Press, 1999), 101-156. 36 Mahar. 6. 69 antebellum music - received back into the plantation folk tradition because "white and black musicians shared a number of common musical repertories.,,3? Stephen Foster's biographer Ken Emerson has further argued that minstrel music "became increasingly complicated as it drew on and distorted black music," and became even more complex as urban African-Americans such as stevedores, and mobile slaves such as plantation musicians, in tum heard and adopted minstrel tunes and "remade them their own.,,38

Minstrelsy commodified hierarchy, but as a shared culture, also broke it down.

Although the primary demographic for minstrel shows was largely working-class immigrants who were largely anti-abolitionist and anti-reform, the spread ofminstrel song to a broad audience affected the listening framework and racial perceptions of many abolitionists. As we have seen, Frances Kemble knew of "Jim Crow" and was confused by minstrelsy's melodic borrowing. By the 1840s, however, the Hutchinson Family

Singers sought out minstrel hits and embraced melodic borrowing. We will also see, later in this chapter, that Lucy McKim was familiar with minstrel instrumentation. Robert

Nowatzki has recently argued that minstrelsy'S belittlement ofAfrican-Americans paralleled and informed the abolitionists' paternalistic embrace oftheir own moral agenda. Melodramatic themes, such as the broken slave family and the aspiring free black, were employed in both blackface song and abolitionist polemics and stimulated similar "racial attitudes for different purposes.,,39 Emerson's analysis of Foster's mass appeal supports N owatzki' s argument that early minstrel song offered images ofslaves

37 Mahar, 331-340. Dena Epstein similarly surmises that from the colonial through the antebellum periods, "descriptions ofAfrican and European music and dancing existing side by side," the demand for black musicians at private entertainments, and ads for runaway slaves with specific instrumental talents all revealed a "process by which acculturation" led to a racially-shared repertoire. Dena 1. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977),37. 3g Emerson, 97. 39 Nowatzki. 3-20. 70 that were compatible with antislavery rhetoric. In Foster's nostalgic parlor songs, "the sentiment [often] suggest[ ed] that blackface could appeal to feelings among whites not just of superiority, but ofsympathy, too.',40 Even hearing minstrelsy's distortions, abolitionists could still hear moral reform.

Church hymns, music education, concert music, Irish melodies, popular abolitionist songs, and blackface minstrelsy all trained abolitionists to hear reform possibilities in a culture ofshared music. The public experience and idealized content of these related hearing frameworks instilled in Northerners an ear for borrowing and inclusion. When abolitionists finally heard actual slave music, they had been prepared to hear familiar sounds and to understand music's role in moral arguments. I contend that abolitionists who heard slave music, in spite of their common use of descriptive adjectives such as

"weird" and "wild," actually received what they heard more readily than they, or we, may have suspected. They found slave music to be "indescribable" when it aesthetically challenged their cultural tourism. However, when it triggered their moral instincts, they found this strange - and strangely familiar - music to be a summons to action.

The music of slave communities in many ways sprang from and paralleled the developments of a shared and participatory antebellum musical culture. Levine suggests that "there were important cultural parallels" between Anglo-American and African-

American cultures - particularly similarities in religious compulsions and duties of social connections - and these parallels left "wide room for syncretism" between mainstream

40 Emerson, 65. Frederick Douglass even approved of sentimental evocations in minstrel songs. Speaking in 1855 at a meeting of the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass described Foster's songs "Lucy Neal, "Old Kentucky Home," and "Uncle Ned" as "allies." "They awaken the sympathies for the slave," Douglass said, "in which anti -slavery principles take root and flourish." Quoted in Emerson, 107. 71 antebellum music and slave music.41 During the first half of the nineteenth century,

Southern likewise explains, "African and European traditions" had become "blended in such a way as to produce a new music genre," that is, a body of "distinctive African-

American folk music" that was noticeably spiritual, motivational, and democratic.42

Certainly, slave music contained African sounds and survivals that did not join the lingua franca of shared antebellum music, such as antiphonal improvisation, polyrhythm, irregular accents, and the circular dance-chant ofescalating religious ecstasy known as the "ring shout" that was popular in slave communities.43 How, otherwise, was slave music familiar to the abolitionist ear? Hymns and "spirituals" formed the most direct connection, both as music and as a moral agenda. African bondsmen had received training in Protestant psalmody as early as the 1720s in New England. In nineteenth century revival camp meetings, "blacks and whites worshipped and sang together in an atmosphere highly charged with emotion," in which "the participants were mutually influenced" by each other's music.44 By the 1820s, sacred music concerts at urban black churches in the North were attracting integrated audiences. 45 Abolitionists heard echoes oftheir own religious musical culture in recycled hymns, evangelical expressivity, and the inclusive "call and response" pattern of slave spirituals that paralleled the participatory mandates of"lining out" in New England psalmody.

41 Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thoughtfrom Slavery to Freedom (Oxford, London, New York: Oxford University Press, ]977), 444-445. 42 Southern, 204. 43 The ring shout, and the difficulty Northern educators experienced with its more purely African nature, will be discussed at length in chapter three. 44 Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals, 199. 45 Southern, 75-80. Southern has also noted the importance of the Reverend Richard Allen, the first black minister to be ordained in America and co-founder in 1816 of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, in the connection between Protestant hymns and slave music. Allen's ]801 hymn book, A Collection ofSpiritual Songs, collected simplified hymns popular with his congregation, and contained the first printed examples of "wandering refrains," or reusable choruses. Southern astutely reported, regarding this connection, that the "verses of some ofthe songs in the [1867] Slave Songs collection can be traced back to Richard Allen's historic hymnal of 180 I." Southern, 181. 72

Popular song also formed a connection. Slave songs offered abolitionists more of the pastiche ofrecycled melodies they were already hearing elsewhere. The slave spirituals, with their persistent theme of reunion with family members in an afterlife paradise, reminded abolitionists of a theme that was similarly persistent in Anglo-American parlor songs. Tawa's comparative analysis of the contrasting themes of"serious" and "comic" songs in popular antebellum music is particularly useful for imagining how abolitionists might have understood similar themes in secular slave songs. African-American folk songs, like antebellum popular songs, dealt with serious themes ofdisplacement, death, and longing as well as comic themes of buffoonery, trickery, and triumph, and were similarly built around short, repetitive, emotional, and symbolic verses.46

Most importantly, abolitionists would have recognized their own moral tradition in the slaves' centralization ofmusic as a vehicle for communal improvement. This moral imperative for uplift through music was the inherited context in which John S. Dwight, during the 1850s, introduced slave music to his sophisticated readership. This was also the context in which Lucy McKim developed her moral agenda and took her moral action - to promote the value ofa shared musical culture.

John S. Dwight's moral reform vision stretched from Puritan utilitarianism to abstract romanticism. More than any other critic, he set the tone for musical opinion in antebellum America.47 Dwight's Journal ofMusic, published from 1852 to 1881, was read by powerful political leaders as well as working musicians, and became the principal

46 Tawa, 63-160. See also Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 10-33. 47 For the conservative views of another influential antebellum music critic, see also Vera Brodsky Lawrence, Strong On Afusic: the New York Music Scene in the Days ofGeorge Templeton Strong, 1836­ 1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 73 arbiter of classical music opinion in the North. Dwight's nineteenth century biographer

George Willis Cooke referred to him as the part-time "musical dictator of Boston," whose presence in a culture ofreform and discourse mattered because "what he approved ofwas accepted as right and good.',4g Born in 1813, Dwight was a Harvard Divinity School graduate who co-founded the Harvard Musical Association. His dissertation, "The Proper

Character of Poetry and Music for Public Worship," was reprinted in the progressive journal, the Christian Examiner, in November of 1836. An amateur musician and occasional music instructor, Dwight was most in demand as a literary translator, lecturer, and contributor ofmusic articles. He dabbled in liberal religion and practiced communitarian reform, first as a Unitarian clergyman and later as a transcendentalist and full-time resident of the associationist Brook Farm utopian community. When Brook

Farm folded in 1847, Dwight returned to his passions, the translation of German literature, publishing, and music criticism.49

Dwight haughtily heralded the great Romantic composers, particularly Beethoven, and he believed passionately in the power of symphonic music in particular to elevate society to a state ofperfection and order. Dwight believed music in general was sanctified as an "abstract religious expression," and he preached a vision in which "all music was inherently sacred.,,5o At the same time, he bemoaned Stephen Foster, the

48 George Willis Cooke, John Sullivan Dwight: Brook Farmer, Editor, and Critic ofMusic - a Biography (1898. Reprint, edited by Kenneth Walter Cameron, Hartford Transcendental Books, 1973),66. 49 Ibid., 9-12,28-43, and 62-68. Cooke reports that Ralph Waldo Emerson asked Dwight to replace him in the pulpit at the largely antislavery East Lexington Unitarian church in 1837, and that Dwight translated volumes of poems by German poets such as Goethe and Schiller that were edited by his best friend, Brook Farm founder and transcendentalist George Ripley. Dwight also taught music at Brook Farm and wrote for its journal, the Harbinger, as well as for the transcendentalist journal, the Dial. For more biographical information on Dwight, see Irving Sablosky, ed., What They Heard: Music in America /852-188/, From the Pages o.fDwight's Journal ofMusic (Baton Rouge, London: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), I­ n; also Broyles, 6-10, 29,129-143. 50 Broyles, 308. 74

Hutchinson Singers, English translations of opera, and minstrelsy.51 Like church music reformers before him, Dwight believed that music's central role in forwarding a moral republic required training musicians and listeners in the highest, noblest standards. This meant expecting the democratic masses to adjust their tastes to those ofthe socioeconomic elite in charge ofmusic institutions.52 Writing in 1845 for the Brook Farm publication, the Harbinger, Dwight insisted that morally conscious critics "shall not say much of mere musical trifles." Instead, reform minded critics should embrace a duty

"constantly to notice and uphold for study and for imitation music which is deep and earnest." As opposed to sentimental popular tunes and minstrelsy, Romantic symphonic music, Dwight asserted, "does not merely seek to amuse," but was morally superior because it represented "the most enlightened outpouring of the composer's life."s3

Dwight's elitist disdain of popular music was more than a case ofrigid hierarchical taste. Rather, his purism reflected a deep and genuine concern for social progress. Like many antebellum reformers, Dwight believed the nation was in rapid transition towards a new era of spiritual awakening. A moral musical culture, Dwight believed, was essential to national progress because it worked as a universal and stabilizing force. In 1852, in the first issue ofDwight's Journal ofMusic, he articulated a sterling vision of a shared yet elevated musical culture:

51 On Dwight's aversion to Foster, see Tawa, 177-178. On his dislike of the Hutchinsons, see Broyles, 264. On his opposition to opera translations, see Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 102-122. On his distrust of minstrelsy, see Sablosky, ed., 11. 52 Dwight's influential contemporary at the Boston Academy of Music, Samuel Eliot, held similar views regarding the necessary elevation of public taste to the standards of the gentry. For more on Eliot, See Broyles, Music o/the Highest Class, 182-214,224-226,266-268, and Michael Broyles, "Music and Class Structure In Antebellum Boston," Journal o/the American Musicological Society. Vol. 44, No.3 (Autumn, 1991),467-490. 53 Quoted in Cooke, John Sullivan Dwight. 33. 75

We felt that music must have some most intimate connection with the social destiny of Man, and that, if we but knew it, it concerns us all ... Whoever reflects upon it must regard it as a most important saving influence in the rapid expansion of our democratic life. Art, and especially music, is a true conservative element, in which Liberty and Order are both fully typed and made beautifully perfect in each other. A free people must be rhythmically educated in the whole tone and temper of their daily life; must be taught the instinct ofrhythm and harmony in all things, in order to be fit for freedom. And it is encouraging, amid so many dark and wild signs ofthe times, that this artistic sentiment is beginning to ally itself with our progressive energies, and make our homes too beautiful for ruthless change."s4

Dwight's insistence that the public "must be taught the instinct ofrhythm and harmony" to be "fit for freedom" contained both the participatory mandates of Puritan holy duty and the patriotic mandates ofrepublican virtue. Additionally, his particular moral agenda indicated that he connected progress with an expanded public experience of music.

As he championed the civilizing transcendence ofcultivated art music, Dwight also began, in the 1850s, to offer his readers accounts of slave music, minstrelsy, and the music offree blacks. "The existence of an Afro-American musical culture," Irving

Sablosky notes of this uncharacteristic promotion of folk music, "appears in Dwight's pages as a sudden discovery, almost a revelation.,,55 Dwight held strong antislavery convictions, and he ran two editorials in the Journal praising the Emancipation

Proclamation.56 However, his consideration of slave music had less to do with abolitionist activism than with enhancing discourse on a cultural topic that was of evident interest to his readers. In doing so, he complimented his own moral and social idealism without threatening his lofty musical standards. Dwight abstractly romanticized "the slaves' musical accomplishments as evidence of their humanity, cruelly violated in the South,"

54 Quoted in Cooke, 45. 55 Sablosky, ed .. 11. 56 Thomas Riis, "The Cultivated White Tradition and Black Music in Nineteenth-Century America: A Discussion ofSome Articles in J.S. Dwight's Journal ofMusic." The Black Perspective in Music 4, no. 2 (July, 1976): 157, 164, 174. 76 and his editorial curiosity reinforced "sympathetic interest" in the popular notion "that blacks were 'a musical people. '" As a music reformer interested in social progress,

Dwight therefore suspected, just as Kemble had, that African-American music possessed

"susceptibility to European 'civilization' .,,57

Dwight did not write about African-American music himself, but letters and articles he featured on the topic spoke for his knowledge of the multiple layers ofsharing as well as his agenda of moral improvement through music. On February 26, 1853,

Dwight published an anonymous "Letter from a Teacher at the South," in which the correspondent, in response to a previous letter from another Southerner criticizing

Southern music education, instead attacked Northern popular music culture and placed blame for Southern deficiencies on the ready exchange of minstrel melodies:

I have known girls in New York and Boston, who have studied under the best masters, "do nothing beyond strumming a waltz or Polka on the piano, or singing a negro melody;" yet in those cities they are surrounded by music all their lives at home or at school, at church and at play. There is music for the mass as well as the few ...that [this underachievement by Northern students] is the fault of teachers exclusively, I carmot believe. Whilst "Negro Vocalists," "Ethiopian Serenaders," and low priced third and fourth rate concerts are patronized by cultivated people, it would take a legion ofteachers to raise the musical taste of all their pupils to a high standard. Here [in the South], the early advantages are greatly inferior [the Southern students'] domestic music is made by the Negro ... Although first published in the North, you there know nothing of the power and pathos given [minstrel tunes] here. The whites first learn them - the negros catch the air and words from once hearing, after which woods and fields resound with their strains - the whites catch the expression from these sable minstrels - thus the Negro Melodies have an effect here not dreamed of at the North ... We might teach all the New England songs ever published ...without the effect that one of these simple melodies has.58

This retort offered a condensed summary of the connections by which a fluid antebellum musical culture was disseminated, as well as a statement of the expectations for music's

57Sablosky, ed., 11. 58 reprinted in Sablosky, ed .. 260-261. 77 moral and civic role. According to this Southern music teacher, private music lessons,

European waltzes, church music, common schools, public concerts, and readily available sheet music had all failed in spite of their ubiquity - to elevate the abilities and tastes of

Northern students. The democratic effect of"music for the mass as well as the few" had in fact degraded music's moral mission. This Southern teacher was further disillusioned by the "power and pathos" of minstrel tunes and plantation songs, which clearly expanded through ethnic reciprocity. While confirming that regional, class, and racial hierarchies existed, the letter more pointedly indicated that music was diminished by popular exchanges. Dwight's acknowledgement of these exchanges, and of the teacher's disillusionment, suggested that he too feared debasement of music's moral mission.

Another anonymous letter, which Dwight reprinted from a contemporary religious journal in 1856 and again in 1859, took a brighter view of cultural exchange. "Songs of the Blacks," attributed only to a Northern "Evangelist," was foremost a racial romanticization of innate slave musicality and religiosity. Like the Southern music teacher, the Evangelist considered Northern music culture fallible, and confirmed the ease of musical borrowing and recycling:

Here at the North we have teachers in great numbers, who try to graft the love of music upon the tastes of our colder race ...Singing masters itinerate from village to village, to give instruction in the tuneful art, but the most they can muster is a score or two of men and maidens to sing in church on Sunday ...Compared with our taciturn race, the African nature is full of poetry and song. The Negro is a natural musician. He will learn to play on an instrument more quickly than a white man. They have magnificent voices and sing without instruction. They may not know one note from another, yet their ears catch the strains of any floating aire, and they repeat it by imitation. The native melody of their voices falls without art into the channel of song ... But it is in religion that the African pours out his whole voice and soul. .. No voices of well trained choir in church or cathedral, no pealing organ, nor mighty anthem, ever moved us like these voices ofa multitude going up to God.59

59 reprinted in Sablosky, ed., 263-265. 78

This Northern "Evangelist" went a step further than assuming the preeminence ofblack musical talent and religious conviction. Unlike Kemble's actions to improve slave music, or Dwight's promotion ofimproved taste in an elevated society, the evangelist implored his readers to improve and elevate their own self-culture from within:

Let us not be ashamed to learn the art of happiness from the poor bondman at the South. If slaves can pour out their hearts in melody, how ought freemen to sing! If that love of music which is inborn in them, could be inbred in us, it would do much to lighten the anxiety and care which brood on every face and weigh on every heart.60

Through this summons for cultivated Anglo-American adaptation to slave standards,

Dwight, who ran the piece twice, was able to reiterate his own equation of shared musical transcendence with dutiful free citizenship and collective moral progress. Dwight suggested, by running this piece a second time in 1859, that the moral nature ofslave music held a solution to the national crisis.

Dwight was aware that "the general public ...regarded 'negro' as a synonym for

'humorous,'" and that his readers, notes Thomas Riis, "considered even the serious black performer as a buffoon until proven otherwise.,,61 Dwight "kept a wary eye on the popular minstrel show," less for its disconnection from his idealized image of slave music than for its "threat to the musical taste he wanted to see cultivated." Nonetheless, he allowed minstrel music, like slave music, into his public discourse. In May of 1859,

Dwight reprinted a piece from the New York Evening Post that praised the songs of

Stephen Foster and reported the recycling of Foster's melodies on plantations. A week later, he printed a letter that praised a hugely successful white minstrel show in Hartford.

60 reprinted in Sablosky, ed., 265. 61 Riis, 173. One Northern concert reviewer, in an 1854 review ofa Boston concert by the free black opera singer Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, remarked that the singer "is a decided African ... [who] has profited by her stay in Europe." Riis also reviews a number of articles that showed curious if not morbid interest in a blind slave piano prodigy, Blind Tom. 79

Dwight acknowledged his readership's shared exposure to minstrel music, however, "as to its connection with genuine black music, he was as unclear as anyone else.,,62

In the spring of 1862, the exposure of slave music to Northern listeners expanded dramatically beyond minstrelsy and Dwight's Journal, when antislavery forces came to

Port Royal, South Carolina. Following the Union blockade and occupation of Port Royal and the surrounding islands, plantation owners and their families fled inland, leaving thousands ofslaves on their own in the region of the South most densely populated by slaves. Into this void of white authority and abundance of slave culture came educators and philanthropists, funded by private organizations in Boston, New York, and

Philadelphia, as well as Union troops and federal government agents eager to secure the lucrative cotton crop. As we will see, the "Port Royal Experiment" would yield the most concentrated involvement ofabolitionists with slave music.

James Miller McKim spoke ofthis new contact with slave music in a report delivered to the Philadelphia Port Royal Relief Society on August of 1862. John Dwight printed the musical commentary from this speech in his Journal ofMusic under the title

"Negro Songs." "Recitals of this kind one will hear enough of," Miller McKim said of the music he described, "for these people, having now, for the first time in their lives, sympathetic listeners, pour out their hearts in narrations which nothing but flint could resist.,,63 He expressed some confusion regarding odd shifts from the major to the minor key and the "Africanized sort ofEnglish" in the lyrics, but he generally found the music to be purposeful and accessible. Describing the song "Poor Rosy, Poor Gal," which his

62 Sablosky, ed., 11,266-270. 63 James Miller McKim, "Negro Songs." Dwight's Journal a/Music 21 (August 9, 1862), 148-149. 80

daughter Lucy would later transcribe and send to Dwight's Journal ofMusic, the elder

McKim could have been describing a typical antebellum parlor song:

[Negro songs] are all exceedingly simple, both in sentiment and in music; and yet as they sing it, in alternate recitatives and choruses, with varying inflections and dramatic effect, this simple and otherwise monotonous melody will, to a musical ear and a heart susceptible ofimpression, have all the charm ofvariety.64

Abolitionist rhetoric had trained Miller McKim to feel sympathy for slaves and to hear

moral possibilities in their music. Antebellum musical culture had trained his ear to the

familiar sounds ofsimplicity, sentiment, and variety.

Lucy McKim inherited both this abolitionist rhetoric and this culture of musical

familiarity. Who was this young musical abolitionist?65 According to Laura Towne, one

ofthe educators at Port Royal who we will see again in chapter three, "Lucy is a very

nice girl and she is busy collecting facts.,,66 Those "facts" included slave music, and Lucy

kept "busy" involving other Northerners in her interest. She asked Towne for help

collecting slave songs in 1862 when they first caught her ear, and again in 1867 when

working with William Francis Allen and Charles Pickard Ware "to publish words and

music ofall the freedmen's songs they can collect" in the Slave Songs ofthe United

64 James Miller McKim, "Negro Songs," 148-149. 65 From the few records of Lucy McKim Garrison's life, only two thorough biographies have been attempted. Epstein provided the primary biography in "Lucy McKim Garrison, American Musician," Bulletin ofthe New York Public Library, Vol. 67, No.8 (1963), 528-546. Margaret Hope Bacon followed this narrative and included additional data in "Lucy McKim Garrison, Pioneer in Folk Music," Penn~ylvania Histmy, Vol. 54, No.1 (January, 1987), 1-16. Secondary literature only mentions her in passing as an editor of the Slave Songs ofthe United States collection. Harriet Hyman Alonso's recent monograph, Growing Up Abolitionist: The Story ofthe Garrison Children (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. 2002). is valuable in establishing a context for Lucy's story. Additionally, I conducted my own research with Lucy's correspondence in the Garrison Family Papers, housed in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, on July 2 and 3, 2012. 66 Laura Towne, Letters and Dimy a/Laura M Towne, Written From the Sea Islands o(South Carolina 1862-1884, (1912; reprint, Negro Universities Press, 1969), 68. 81

States book.67 Lucy's biographer Dena Epstein says the young musician was an

"impressive example ofthe capacity of 'second-generation' abolitionists for broad cultural interests and genuine creativity.,,68 Willie Lee Rose, who mentions Lucy only once in passing in her formative study of the Port Royal experiment, identified Lucy as someone "to whose understanding ofmusic posterity is indebted for much ofits knowledge ofNegro slave songs.,,69

Music and abolitionism were Lucy McKim's passions, and her work with slave music at Port Royal "awaken[ed] in her the possibilities that an activist life could hold.,,70

That life began on October 30, 1842, when Lucy was born in Philadelphia to James

Miller McKim and Sarah Speakman. Miller McKim started his career as a Presbyterian minister, but left the pulpit in 1836 to join Theodore Weld's radical "Seventy," a group of abolitionist field lecturers and organizers, before settling down two years later as the publishing agent for the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. Speakman came from a prominent local Quaker family that was socially connected to the prominent Quaker abolitionist and feminist Lucretia Mott. From 1857 to 1859, Lucy attended the

Eagleswood School at the Raritan Bay Union utopian community in Perth Amboy, New

Jersey, a progressive and integrated co-ed school run by Weld and his wife Angelina

Grimke. These professional and familial connections provided Lucy with a moral reform foundation as well as her two closest life companions. As a child, Lucy developed an enduring friendship with Ellen Wright, Mott's niece, and the best friends became sisters­

67 Towne, 181. See also Epstein, "Lucy McKim Garrison, American Musician," 539, and Bacon, II. 68 Epstein, "Lucy McKim Garrision, American Musician," 530. 69 Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsallor Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 78. 70 Alonso, Growing Up Abolitionist, 195. Reading through McKim's correspondence in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, I observed a palpable leap in emotional intensity in the letters she wrote from Port Royal. During those three weeks, Lucy McKim truly came alive. 82 in-law when Ellen married William Lloyd Garrison II and Lucy married Wendell Phillips

Garrison in 1865.

The younger McKim knew and experienced antebellum music as a shared culture and a moral commitment. Philadelphia was one of the nation's centers of music publishing in the antebellum years, as well as a center for professional black musicians.71

Lucy perfonned at public recitals, attended operas and patriotic jubilees, and was familiar with dance repertoires, hymns, and minstrelsy. She was also a successful product of the supposedly debased Northern music education culture the anonymous Southern music teacher and Northern evangelist had criticized in Dwight's Journal ofMusic. While a student at Eagleswood, Lucy was also a piano instructor at the school, teaching as many as ten students in 1858.72 Lucy was a "serious and sensitive musician" with high technical standards, for whom music was not simply "a polite accomplishment suitable for a well-bred young lady, but hard, unremitting practice and a deep joy.,,73 Rather than turning her into a cultural elitist, however, rigorous European music gave her a sense of music's moral possibilities. She transcribed the compositions ofher violin instructor, the respected Gennan musician Frederick Mollenhauer, and yet in spite ofhis inability to notate music, she considered him a "prodigy" because his lessons always left her

"astonished at some new quality virtue ofmind or ofheart.,,74 McKim's deeper penetration into music as virtue embodied the moral basis ofantebellum music instruction. The training ofmusic teachers, described by Jewel Smith in her recent case

71 Southern, 68, 92-107. n Lucy McKim to Ellen Wright, November 12, 1858. Garrison Family Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. 73 Epstein, "Lucy McKim Garrision, American Musician," 534. 74 Lucy McKim to Ellen Wright, July 9, 1859. Garrison Family Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. This is one of several pre-war letters in which Lucy described diverse recital and theatre programs at Eagleswood. See also LM to EW, November 1858; and LM to EW, March 3, 1859. 83

study ofpiano instruction for antebellum women, emphasized a larger moral agenda, in

which "the first priority was to develop spiritual sensitivity within the student.,,75

Sensitivity to music's moral properties prepared Lucy McKim for moral action

towards slave music at Port Royal. So did exposure to early wartime reports of slave

music. As early as August 4, 1860, Lucy's uncle John L. McKim of Delaware had sent

her a rough copy of an unknown slave song he had heard performed by local blacks,

requesting that she use her talents to render a truer version. The American Anti-Slavery

Society's publication, the National Anti-Slavery Standard - for which James Miller

McKim served as the Philadelphia correspondent - had early in the war published reports

of"contraband" singing at Fort Monroe, Virginia. Included in these reports was a letter

by the Reverend Lewis Lockwood that described the singing ofthe spiritual, "Go Down,

Moses." Lockwood made one of the first known attempts at transcribing slave music, publishing sheet music and lyrics for "Go Down, Moses," in December of 1861. Copies

ofthe song were available for sale at the Philadelphia AASS offices by March of 1862,

and the elder McKim, later that month, reported hearing a performance of the song at a 76 contraband schoo1.

75 Jewel A. Smith, Music, Women, and Pianos in Antebellum Bethlehem, Pennsylvania: The Moravian Young Ladies' Seminary (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2008),57. Smith's thesis is that the rigorous and often demanding music instruction offered to and expected ofyoung women indicated an impulse to prepare them for a higher moral and social purpose beyond rote familiarity with parlor songs and hymns. Smith, 28, 90, 162. Similarly, Candace Bailey has recently identified this impulse in the South, suggesting that the outbreak ofwar encouraged Southern women musicians to see themselves "as beings who should be useful" through "new possibilities" of social worth, by providing political anthems and social uplift. Candace Bailey, Music and the Southern Belle: From Accomplished Lady to Confederate Composer (Carbondale, Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), ix-xi, 13-18, 158-\64. 76 Epstein, "Lucy McKim Garrision, American Musician," 536. See also Epstein, Sinfill Tunes and Spirituals, 241-251,262. Epstein reports that Lockwood's early attempt replaced slave dialect with genteel language, and that his printed arrangement omitted the organic African-American elements, such as massed vocal entrances and shifts from major to minor keys, which McKim managed to include in her arrangements of "Poor Rosy, Poor Gal" and "Roll, Jordan, Roll." 84

Lucy couldn't wait to take action at Port Royal. When she and her father finally arrived, she was transfonned, writing to her mother with the adamancy of abolitionist morality, and indicating that the freedmen themselves had particularly impressed her:

Everything so far has been beyond my most sanguine expectations ...I can't bear to think of coming back yet ...For the contrabauds, - but that word suggests such volumes that I can't tell you anything now ...The pro-slavery folks were right when they said 'Go South, abolitionists, if you want to have your views changed on the subject of slavery" Mine have been, most profoundly. Henceforth, "Garrisonianism" shall express to me but the positive degree of anti-slavery! How lukewarm we have been! How little we knew!77

In the next letter to her mother, on June 12, Lucy elaborated on the many thrills ofher new experiences away from home in the service of the abolitionist cause. These new thrills featured multiple moments of involvement with the music and dialect of the freedmen:

Five contrabands, viz., old Joe, Jerry, Gabriel, Pompey & John Cole rowed us to Land's End, singing all the way. Whittier's "Negro Boatmau" was builded better than he knew .. J have also copied down a number ofthe wild, sad songs of the negroes, - tunes & words both ... I have been to two "shouts" & one "praise"...Most of all though, we are with the negroes ... they sing and grin all day ... I cannot tell you how interested I am; I have jottings of their talk to tell you when I get back, ifI come! 78

77 Lucy McKim to Sarah Speakman McKim, June 9,1862. Garrison Family Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. 78 Lucy McKim to Sarah Speakman McKim, June 12, 1862. Garrison Family Papers, Sophia Smith collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. I discovered this supposedly "lost" letter during my research at Smith College. Epstein, Bacon, and Alonso use these quotes, but cite them from incomplete excerpts later copied by Ellen Wright, from a letter supposedly written to Wright or another family member. Wright's handwritten excerpts are filed chronologically in a large file of letters sent to her by McKim. The complete original that I discovered was in fact written to Speakman, and is located in a small folder, the last in box 49, file 31, ofthe Garrison Family Papers in the Sophia Smith Collection. In this letter, Lucy almost frantically listed many delights ranging from social contacts to the abundant services ofthe freedmen. One particular thrill was an encounter, during a sudden rainstorm, with an organ at an abandoned white church: "A most delighted half hour was passed there, talking, & playing on the organ, which strange to say, had not been destroyed. I never touched an organ before queer experience to have there for the first time wasn't it?" This is additional evidence ofMcKim's association ofthe Port Royal mission with music. We will see, in chapter four, that Thomas Wentworth Higginson similarly experienced a profound moment regarding the avoided destruction of a keyboard at an abandoned white church. 85

The younger McKim, a professional piano instructor trained according to strict European standards, was comfortable enough with folk idioms and religious fervor to transcribe melodies into musical notation, and was aware enough to distinguish between tragic and comic songs. She was also at ease with the fact of borrowing. Abolitionist poet John

Greenleaf Whittier's popular 1862 verse, "Song ofthe Negro Boatman," had been informed by the dialect and rhythm of minstrel song and was only Whittier's imagined

"conception of what the boatmen ought to sing.,,79 Imagined abolitionist lyrics, written for a polemical purpose and derived from minstrelsy's copy ofplantation music, had given McKim a familiar model for hearing the actual melodies and lyrics of slaves.

By the end ofher three-week adventure, Lucy had begun to take moral reform action to promote the local music. She solicited Laura Towne and others for additions to her budding slave music collection. Those three weeks had been profound for the young abolitionist musician who was eager to make her own contribution to the cause of emancipation and racial egalitarianism. "Life opens so grandly in 1862," she wrote to her best friend Ellen after returning home, "especially when one has been to the Sea

Islands!,,80 In addition to triggering her reform action ofpromoting the moral and civic worth of African-American musical culture, McKim's contact with the freedmen had clarified the connections and differences between minstrelsy and slave music. Writing to

Mary Byrne, the McKim family's closely befriended Irish employee, in October of 1862,

79 Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals, 257. 80 Lucy McKim to Ellen Wright, July 3, 1862. Garrison Family Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. Epstein and Bacon relay Lucy McKim's overall story as one of frustrated feminism. Her enthusiasm for her Port Royal experience, in this letter, included the comment, "One can hardly realize that one lives in a cage, until accident sets you flying outside." My work studying Lucy'S correspondence supports this feminist narrative. However, for the purpose of this thesis, I am concerned with Lucy's musical convictions as she applied them to slave music, rather than her frustrated feminism. Her enthusiasm for her Port Royal experiences, and her efforts to motivate other song collectors, confirms the former. 86

Lucy described her younger brother Charles' simple efforts at minstrel music:

Charlie is just now preparing for an approaching examination, which keeps him close at his books. He is learning to play on the banjo, a real American instrument. Did you ever hear it? He also plays the bones quite wonderfully, almost as well as they do at our negro minstrels. 81

The term "our negro minstrels" in this post-Port Royal letter suggested that McKim knew her brother was performing Northern minstrel music rather than the authentic slave songs she had heard. Her concentrated descriptions of slave music during and after her Southern stay referred to the songs as "ballads" and "hymns," but otherwise, apart from her reference to Whittier, never described slave music in terms of minstrelsy. She did, however, elevate the banjo - an instrument understood to be of African origin - to the center ofthe shared American musical culture.

Lucy's letter to Dwight's Journal ofMusic, in November of 1862, was a statement of assumed musical familiarity that - most importantly in terms of her action to connect slave music to the abolitionist moral argument attempted to elevate slave music to the center not only ofcontemporary musical culture, but also ofnational destiny:

It is difficult to express the entire character of these negro ballads by mere musical notes and signs. The odd turns made in the throat; and the curious rhythmic effect produced by single voices chiming in at different irregular intervals, seem almost as impossible to place on a score, as the singing of birds, or the tones of an Aeolian Harp. The airs, however, can be reached. They are too decided not to be easily understood, and their striking originality would catch the ear of any musician. Besides this, they are valuable as an expression ofthe character and life of the race which is playing such a conspicuous part in our history.82

81 Lucy McKim to Mary Byrne, October 20, 1862. Garrison Family Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. 82 Lucy McKim, "Songs of the Port Royal 'Contrabands'." An Aeolian harp is an instrument of ancient Greek origin that plays itselfin the wind. 87

McKim's insistence that the melodies "can be reached" suggested both accessibility and her own sense of the changing social and racial dynamics ofthe historical moment. What she was really telling Dwight's cultivated readers was that the melodies "should" be reached. Reiterating the comparison to Whittier's poem, she assured Dwight's readers of their own extant familiarity with an inherently patriotic and moral music:

All the songs make good barcaroles. Whittier "builded better than he knew" when he wrote his "Song ofthe Negro Boatmen." It seemed wonderfully applicable as we were being rowed across Hilton Head harbor among United States gunboats, the Wabash and the Vermont towering on either side. I thought the crew must strike up, "And massa tink it day ob doom! And we ob jubilee. ,,83

She also assured readers of the sacred and political significance of what she had heard:

Perhaps the grandest singing we heard was at the Baptist church on St. Helena Island, when a congregation of three hundred men and women joined in a hymn - "Roll Jordan, Roll Jordan! Roll, Jordan, Roll!" It swelled forth like a triumphal anthem. That same hymn was sung by thousands of negroes on the Fourth of July last, when they marched in procession under the Stars and Stripes, cheering them for the first time as the "flag of our country.,,84

These reassurances must have seemed necessary. Aware of complaints against slave music "on the score of monotony," McKim defended the "great deal ofrepetition of the music" with an explanation of the music's utilitarian flexibility - a recyclable quality that

Northern readers would have recognized from their own musical culture:

As the same songs are sung at every sort ofwork, of course the tempo is not always alike. On the water, the oars dip "Poor Rosy" to an even andante; a stout boy and girl at the hominy-mill will make the same "Poor Rosy" fly, to keep up with the whirling stone; and in the evening, after the day's work is done, "Heab'n shall-a be my home" peals up slowly and mournfully from the distant quarters. 85

83 Lucy McKim, "Songs of the Port Royal 'Contrabands'." A barcarole is a Venetian gondolier song, usually written in 6/8 or waltz time. ~4 Ibid. 85 Ibid. 88

Knowing the readership of Dwight's respected publication, and knowing that slave music had only been sporadically exposed to those readers, McKim sought, by using terms of familiarity and moral value, no less than to show this sophisticated and musically literate audience that slave music was a culture they already shared.

As her June 12 letter to her mother indicated, Lucy was not immune to Northern racial stereotypes and social expectations. However, her conclusion to "Songs ofthe Port

Royal 'Contrabands'" told a different story ofrenewed cultural sensitivity and racial advocacy. McKim concluded her letter to Dwight's Journal by reporting her awareness that "there is much more in this new and curious music, of which it is a temptation to write." However, due to her progressive faith in the dignity ofthe freedmen and their culture, she added, "but I must remember that [this music] can speak for itself better than anyone for it.,,86 In other words, her next moral action, after advocating the music, was to make it available for hearing. Earlier observers of slave music had heard the music as a reflection of slavery's immoral conditions. Lucy freed slave music from the confines ofa moral argument by hearing it as worthwhile music. Believing that slave music stood on its own merit, McKim took the reform action ofpromotion because she also believed that the music - like the freedmen who were entering American society - belonged in a shared and progressing moral culture.

After her trip to Port Royal, McKim craved meaningful and moral work, and promoting slave music provided that work. On August 17, 1862, and at least once again in the spring of 1863, McKim sang and played African-American hymns for receptive gatherings in Lucretia Mott's home. Lucy's moral reform actions, at these events,

86 Lucy McKim, "Songs of the Port Royal 'Contrabands'." 89 apparently superseded the Quaker dislike ofmusic.87 After marrying Wendell Phillips

Garrison on December 6, 1865, she continued her mission from his editorial office at the new progressive cultural journal, The Nation. There, she anonymously wrote reviews of popular songbooks that twice pointed readers towards "the unique negro melodies that are reaching us from every part of the South." Through Wendell's publishing and reform connections, McKim ultimately became the "intellectual catalyst who helped bring together a diverse group ofcollaborators" to produce the Slave Songs ofthe United States collection, "a pioneer work in American folk music," in 1867.88

Lucy McKim's willingness to tell Dwight's cultivated readers that slave music

"can speak for itself better than anyone for it" seemed a far cry from Frances Kemble's efforts to improve the "nonsense" ofslave music. Her passion for promoting slave music was inherited from a marriage of abolitionist moral reform agendas and the assumption of familiarity in a shared antebellum musical culture. Hymn reform, public music education, sentimental parlor and folk songs, opera, abolitionist message songs, blackface minstrelsy, and actual plantation music coexisted in an antebellum musical culture that was driven by continuous recycling and blending as well as by mandates ofcivic duty.

This porous and purposeful public musical culture made possible both McKim's descriptive 1862 letter to Dwight's Journal ofMusic, and the positive reception the letter received from the idealistic tastemaker John Sullivan Dwight. Dwight's Journal ofMusic was a high culture classical music publication that dared to discuss what was ostensibly

87 Epstein, "Lucy McKim Garrision, American Musician," 539-540. See also Bacon, 6-7. Bacon also reports that Mott read Lucy's letter to Dwight's Journal and had been involved in favorable discussions of the letter's content. 88 Epstein, Sin/ill Tunes and Spirituals, 318-320. Epstein reports that the Slave Songs collection did not circulate widely outside of reform circles, and was out of print by the time the Fisk Jubilee Singers began popularizing the repertory in the 1870s. The collection was reprinted in 1929 and again in 1951, as scholars and the listening public began developing an increased interest in folk music. Epstein, "Lucy McKim Garrision, American Musician," 545. 90 the lowest form of folk music of the era. Lucy's letter to Dwight was important not so much because she reported having been "much struck with the songs" she heard the freedmen singing; antislavery and proslavery listeners had been struck by slave music before. Her innovation - in addition to initiating a mass transcription and preservation of

African-American melodies - was stressing the musical and historical worth ofslave music in a culture of shared sound. By focusing on purely musical details and "hoping it may interest you," Lucy McKim, a product of moral reform and musical familiarity, took action to reform the cultured Northern ear. 91

"When the grown people wanted to 'shout,' I would not let them": Port Royal Educators and the Ring Shout

Moral reform and musical exchange both played central roles in the dynamics that unfolded on the coastal Seas Islands of South Carolina during the Civil War. Following the Union military occupation of the strategic area surrounding Port Royal Sound on

November 7, 1861, philanthropic societies in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia began sending missionaries to the islands to assist with the immediate physical and long-term educational needs ofthe newly, if ambiguously, freed slaves. Abolitionists seized on the opportunity to work with the freedmen as a means to vindicate their arguments for free labor and the capacities of African-Americans to transcend degradation and become

"good" and self-sufficient citizens. Competing groups of Northerners, including military commanders, soldiers, treasury agents, plantation superintendents, businessmen, clergymen, and teachers all vied for control of the freedmen. The missionaries and educators, who were given the derisive name of "Gideonites" by the often pro-slavery soldiers, quickly assessed the centrality of religion in slave culture as well as the burning desire of the island populace for education. Worship and teaching, they determined, would be the keys to securing the respect of the freedmen. It is not surprising that the

Gideonites, with greater concern for the spiritual needs of the freedmen than other

Northerners, also became more involved with their music. l

I My factual data regarding the narrative of the Sea Islands during the Civil War has been drawn primarily from Willie Lee Rose's formative study. Rehearsalfor Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). Additionally, I have drawn data from Dena Epstein's study of slave music. Sinjill Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977). which devotes three chapters to reports of slave music from the Sea Islands before, during, and after the war. More importantly for my analysis, the following primary sources were invaluable in reinforcing and clarifying those scholars' information: Laura Towne, Letters and Diary ofLaura M To}llne. Written ii'om the Sea Islands olSouth Carolina 1862-1884 (1912; reprint, Negro Universities 92

The abolitionists' ability to hear moral reform possibilities in slave music had changed from the time of Frances Kemble's morally tom visit to her husband's Georgia plantations to the time of the "Port Royal Experiment." As we saw in chapter two, expansive developments in a shared musical culture during the 1840s and 1850s ­ combined with idealistic mandates for music's social role inherited from Puritanism and early republicanism - had facilitated a process in which the gap between reform culture and slave music had begun to shrink. Antislavery moralism itselfhad also changed, from debates pitting immediatism against gradualism to the practical applications necessitated by emancipation. As abolitionists came into increased contact with former slaves, however, their moral concerns for the former slaves and their culture remained, as did concerns for the social role ofmusic in the lives of freedmen. One of the first and most enduring challenges the educators and missionaries faced at Port Royal was that of understanding and "improving" the culture of the people they had come to redeem. Music would, as the Port Royal project progressed, prove to be both a bridge and a barrier in this moral mission.

How did music serve to bring the Port Royal reformers closer to the freedmen?

How did music serve to distance them from the freedmen? How did the reformers' involvement with the musical expressions of freedmen reinforce their mission and encourage them to manifest moral reform instincts? Three of the Northern educators,

Charlotte Forten, Laura Towne, and Harriet Ware, took reform action towards this music

Press, 1969); Elizabeth Ware Pearson, ed., Letters From Port Royal, Written at the Time ofthe Civil War, (1906; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969); Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1997); Charlotte Forten, "Interesting Letter from Miss Charlotte L. Forten," The Liberator 32 (Dec. 19, 1862), 51; Forten, "Life on the Sea Islands, Part I," Atlantic Monthly 13 (May 1864),587-596; and Forten, "Life on the Sea Islands, Part II," Atlantic Monthly 13 (June 1864), 666-676. 93 according to their educational mission of stewarding for the freedmen's dawning potential. Their work included shared music, but more specifically involved what historian Robert Abzug has described as impulses for "sustaining a pious Christian

Republicanism," that is, the reinforcement through public education ofNew Testament values as a means towards the goal ofcreating self-empowered citizens.2 Moral reform instincts brought these three educators pride when they heard the comfortable cultural familiarity of certain religious, folk, and patriotic musical expressions ofthe island population. However, those experiences stood in contrast to their distrust of the mysterious - and seemingly childish - African ceremonial survival known as the "ring shout." Their moral reform instincts, when encountering this unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and apparently un-Christian form of worship and worship music, would once again - as related instincts had for Frances Kemble - suggest to these reformers their necessary role in the beneficent improvement ofslave music.

Benevolent agendas burned as brightly for the educators as educational desires did for the freedmen. Their understanding of their mission reflected William Ellery

Channing's 1835 statement, "the slave should not have an owner, but he should have a guardian," an ideal that, as we have seen, had directly influenced Kemble's perspective on slave music.3 Were it not for the deep and genuine religious components of abolitionist benevolence, Laura Towne's remark that the Gideonites viewed the freedmen

2 Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994),20-24. 33-38. Abzug notes the importance of women and notions of New England exceptionalism in the educational strategies of Christian Republicanism. 3 Willie Lee Rose reports that Frances Kemble's Journal 0/a Residence on a Georgia Plantation in I838­ I839, published in 1863, was widely discussed among Gideonites and served to bolster their polemic against the fugitive plantation masters. Rose, Rehearsal/or Reconstruction, 424. Though multiple observations of slave music were recorded in 1862, it is possible that Kemble's musical opinions and actions affected Gideonite reactions thereafter. This connection also merits consideration in light of Towne's awareness that "Pierce Butler's slaves have just arrived" in a group ofrefugees on January 8, 1864. Towne, Letters and Diary o/Laura M Towne, 148. 94 as "our people" and loved them "not so much individually as the collective whole" could be understood as careless racial condescension.4 However, the moral aims of abolitionist paternalism at Port Royal must be seen in context of the opposition to charity voiced by many prominent abolitionists, notably Wendell Phillips, who rejected the benevolent components of the mission as counterproductive.5 In spite of resistance to moral reform goals, Forten was able to boast in 1864, "although the Government had left much undone," that the reformers' "hearts were filled with an exceeding great gladness" for their role in the former slaves' transition to freedom. 6

In addition to benevolent agendas, Forten, Towne, and Ware brought with them, when they arrived at Port Royal in 1862, a synthesis ofvarious contemporary Northern educational, religious, civic, and musical ideologies.7 Leaders of educational reform movements in this era were often proponents of abolition as well as liberal religion.

Forten, with her background in Quakerism, and Towne and Ware, as Unitarians, all subscribed to the notion that the individual's inner light of divinity was a spark for personal moral agency. This belief in the infinite spiritual potential and practical perfectibility ofman was at the core of educational reform as well as these individuals' work with the freedmen. 8 Forten, Towne, and Ware had inherited the antebellum educational theories of Horace Mann, who advocated universal education as preventative

4 Towne, 47. For more discussion of "benevolent condescension," see Willie Lee Rose, 159. However, it is instructive for this study, when considering motives and commitments, to remember that Towne, Forten, and Ware all remained at Port Royal for the duration of the war, while many from the initial groups of Gideonites returned North after the first spring of 1862. Towne, in fact, founded the important and enduring Penn School on St. Helena Island, and remained there as a devoted educator until her death in 1901. Willie Lee Rose, 162. 6 Forten, "Life on the Sea Islands, Part II," 670. 7 Towne and Ware were among the first group ofGideonites who arrived in April ofthat year. Forten followed with a later group in October. S On the role of perfectionist ideals in education, see James A Keene, A History ofMusic Education in the United States (Hanover, London: University Press ofNew England, 1982),98·99. 95 insurance for a free society, and those of the teaching team of Bronson Alcott and

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who promoted the transcendent spiritual basis ofmultifaceted learning, the stimulation of inner intuition, and the value of early education.9 The trio also inherited Lowell Mason's emphasis on public music education as a tool for religious and civic uplift. Women who were trained for the teaching profession during the antebellum period were commonly expected to have some facility as music instructors, not to pass their students' time with amusement, but rather to deepen their students' spiritual and civic aspirations. 10 In this confluence of ideals, emancipation wasn't the only force that provided the forum for what Forten called "the great work we had so longed and prayed for.")) That great work also involved importing a particular New England based, holistic union of pious civic duty, public education expansion, and musical idealism into a foreign cultural setting.

Moral reform ideals and experiences formed the background ofthese women's lives prior to their work at Port Royal. Forten was born on August 17, 1837, a free black from a family ofprominent Philadelphia merchants and Underground Railroad activists that included her grandfather, the wealthy African-American shipping businessman

James Forten, and her father's brother-in-law Robert Purvis. 12 In 1854, she became the

9 For more on these educational reformers and their ideas, see Robert B. Downs, Horace Mann: Champion ofPublic Schools (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1974); George Haefner, A Critical Estimate ofthe Educational Theories and Practices ofA. Bronson Alcott (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1970); and Bruce A. Ronda, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer on Her Own Terms (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1999). 10 Jewel A. Smith, Music, Women, and Pianos in Antebellum Bethlehem, Pennsylvania: The Moravian Young Ladies' Seminary (Bethlehem, P A: Lehigh University Press, 2008), 28, 57, 90, and 162. 11 Forten, "Life on the Sea Islands, Part II," 670. 12 Forten's presence as a freeborn black in this study may seem to conflict with my emphasis on actions taken by Anglo-American reformers towards African-American music. However, Forten's cultural, intellectual, and religious orientations clearly reflect a background shared with other Northern moral reformers, and her responses to slave music were statements grounded in these shared Northern reform perspectives. Her reactions and her cultural backgrounds simply do not support any sort of racial isolation from other reformers in this analysis. Like the other abolitionists in this study, she encountered slaves as a 96 first African-American student at the co-ed Higginson Grammar School in Salem,

Massachusetts, and later became both a published poet and the first African-American woman to be trained for the teaching profession in Salem's normal schools. Towne, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on May 3, 1825, was raised and educated in Boston. Her attraction to abolitionism was strengthened and solidified when her family later moved to

Philadelphia and joined the congregation of Reverend William Furness' First Unitarian

Church. 13 An associate of James Miller McKim, Towne initially went South as an agent for the Philadelphia Port Royal Relief Committee in charge of supplies. Though she had no previous experience as a teacher, her training in homeopathic medicine quickly endeared her to the freedmen and made her a leader among the Port Royal educators. 14

Ware, a granddaughter of the pioneering Unitarian divine Henry Ware, was born in

Cambridge, Massachusetts on September 9, 1834. Like Forten and unlike Towne, she had been specifically trained for the teaching profession and went South for that express purpose. Although Ware was not a professional music instructor, as was Lucy McKim, she had been trained to play piano and offer vocal instruction. Musical inclination evidently ran in tandem with devotional inclination in her family. Her father, the

Unitarian clergyman Henry Ware Jr., was a hymn writer who co-founded the Harvard

Musical Association with John Sullivan Dwight in 1838. 15

representative of Anglo-American reform culture. When Forten heard moral reform possibilities in slave music, she remained, as Frederick Douglass would have said, one of "those without." 13 Furness' influence formed a hidden but notable connection between several subjects of this thesis. He introduced Kemble to Unitarianism, deepened Towne's abolitionism, and performed the wedding of Lucy McKim and Wendell Phillips Garrison. Forten also heard and admired his sermons. 14 Though Port Royal was Towne's first teaching experience, she possessed at least a rudimentary familiarity with musical language. Describing her first hearing ofboat songs, Towne reported that monotonous refrains were accented by "several very quick notes, or three or four long drawn-out notes," and that one song contained "interjectional" references to heaven, "at every five or six bars." Towne, 4. 15 Regarding Henry Ware Jr. and John S. Dwight, see Epstein, Sinfill Tunes and Spirituals, 310. For more on Forten, see Brenda Stevenson, ed., The Journals ofCharlotte Forten Grimke (New York, Oxford: 97

The reform actions that F orten, Towne, and Ware took towards slave music at

Port Royal were driven not only by progressive educational, religious, and cultural ideologies, but also by the shared culture of antebellum music. The educators were often impressed with and moved by the music of the freedmen because that music often corresponded to their own musical and moral cultures. Modem scholars have missed subtleties of appreciation and have assumed complete confusion based on the frequency ofunsure commentary, such as that ofWare, who reported in a manner typical ofthe reformers that she "cannot give you the least idea" of boat songs and hymns that seemed

"indescribable.,,16 Such commentary, however, spoke ofdescriptive difficulty rather than aesthetic distaste. Towne reported that in spite ofthe lyrical opacity ofthe local Gullah dialect, she felt "very much pleased" with the native melodies ofthe "hymns the negroes spontaneously set up" during worship services. 17 Ware was intrigued by the recyclable utility - a quality we have seen to be typical ofmid-nineteenth century melodies - of hymns that doubled as boat songs. 18 The two songs that Lucy McKim sent to Dwight's

Journal ofMusic, the folk song "Poor Rosy, Poor Gal" and the ubiquitous spiritual "Roll,

Jordan, Roll," were popular favorites not only with the freedmen but with the reformers as welL Towne even made her own attempts to record the words of these songs in May and July of 1862. 19 When McKim later asked Towne for songs she had been collecting,

Oxford University Press, 1988). For more on Towne, see Rupert Sargent Holland, ed., Letters and Diary of Laura M Towne. Written From the Sea Islands ofSouth Carolina 1862-1884 (1912; reprint, Negro Universities Press, 1969). For more on Ware, see Elizabeth Ware Pearson, ed., Letters From Port Royal, Written at the Time ofthe Civil War, (1906; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969). 16 Pearson, ed., 19. 17 Towne, 26. Forten made a similar distinction between unclear lyrics and easily accessible melodies in one native hymn, "Jehovah, Hallelujah." Forten, "Life in the Sea Islands, Part Il," 667. 18 Pearson, ed., 134. 19 Towne, 47, 79. Praise-filled and adoring references to "Roll, Jordan, Roll" by the reformers and other Northerners are so widespread and numerous that citing each would be excessively redundant. 98

Towne, like others, had already been assembling sets oflyrics. The Gideonites, in spite of

cultural gaps, often loved the music of the islanders.

Finding folk songs and hymns "indescribable" did not mean the reformers disregarded them as unattainable. On the contrary, their moral instinct to defend the worth of the freedmen triggered a recurring obligation to attempt descriptions ofthe music, and these attempts became easier over time. Forten's early assessment, in which

she noted that it seemed "impossible to give you an idea" of certain songs and hymns,

must be read in the context ofher remarks that preceded that comment, in which she boasted to musically cultivated Northern readers that the islanders "have really a great

deal of musical talent" and that their "singing was, as usual, very beautifu1." When she

concluded that this music "must be heard to be appreciated," Forten meant, just as

McKim had when she asserted the accessibility of melodic lines, that the folk songs and hymns should be heard because, independent ofher own descriptive difficulties, they 20 could be appreciated.

The reformers were particularly drawn to the freedmen's musical expressions

when that music dovetailed with their own agendas for effecting moral purpose. Initially

apprehensive ofher Southern journey, Forten gained confidence from the enthusiasm of

the freedmen. When she had the opportunity to "listen to their strange songs," the potential for involvement in a righteous mission became "more real to me.,,21 When the

freedmen sang, "with a will" and "with great spirit," such imported Northern anthems as

"My Country 'Tis ofThee," "Marching Along," and particularly, "John Brown's Body,"

20 Forten, "Interesting Letter from Miss Charlotte L. Forten," 51. 21 Ibid. Music provided a literal bridge for Forten at Port Royal. Willie Lee Rose reports that although the freedmen at the Oaks plantation were initially skeptical ofForten's authority due to her skin color, they "dropped their prejudice ... when they discovered her talents" on the piano. Rose, Rehearsalfor Reconstruction, 161-162. 99

the educators understood these expressions to be confirmation of their own purposeful stewardship, and of the freedmen's embrace of their own civic potentia1.22 The educators were also comfortable enough with the moral and civic role ofthe islanders' music that

the program at a July 4, 1863 Independence Day celebration included a mixture of

Northern patriotic anthems with native African-American hymns and folk songs.23 Such exchanges were made possible not only by an extant culture of shared music, but by the reformers' conflation of their benevolent mission with the islanders' profuse religious impulses and pervasive hunger for learning. Ware observed school children singing their

ABC's at a funeral service, and considered the display "another proof they consider their lessons as in some sort religious exercise.,,24 Such public displays served to confirm for the educators their successful stimulation of the inner moral light within their students.

There can be no doubt that this trio of Gideonites appreciated and derived moral confirmation from much of the music they heard at Port Royal. However, they also drew their line of appreciation short ofthe popular African ceremonial survival known as the

"ring shout." The ring shout triggered a moral response quite different from the educators' approval of"beautiful" hymns and spirited patriotic anthems. Rather than hearing the satisfying results ofbenevolence or an argument for the freedmen's potential

as they did in familiar hymns and anthems - the educators heard in the ring shout an

22 Forten, "Life in the Sea Islands, Part I," 588, 594. The frequency ofproud and praise-filled references to these and other patriotic hymns being sung by the freedmen, like the multiple references to "Roll, Jordan, Roll," are too numerous to be effectively cited. Towne noted the freedmen's use of their own original lyrics and rhythms for "John Brown's Body," and though she found these adaptations "very strange," she also noted that they occurred "in the church." Towne, 26. Ofparticular interest, however, are the identical accounts each educator gave for the January 1, 1863 celebration ofthe Emancipation Proclamation, during which the freedmen broke from the order ofthe program and sang an impromptu "My Country 'Tis of Thee" to the tearful delight of the Northerners. This incident will be more closely examined in chapter four, for Thomas Wentw0l1h Higginson's role in allowing this break from the program to proceed. See Forten, "Life in the Sea Islands, Part II," 668; Towne, 98; and Pearson, ed., 130. 23 Pearson, ed., 114. 24 Ibid., 65. 100 urgent summons to enact a "benevolent" change to the freedmen's musical culture. The ring shout contained the local population's most clearly African music that is, in the minds of the educators, the most dangerously "savage" and counterproductively

"uncivilized" music - and what they heard and witnessed led the educators to belittle and even forbid the practice of"shouting."

What was the ring shout? This widespread, raucous, and highly symbolic worship form has been traced to communal West African holy rituals, and as opposed to other moderate and more syncretistic religious expressions ofslaves derived from Protestant hymnody, is believed to have survived largely in tact in the New World. Though practiced in various forms throughout the South, the ring shout was most central to the culture of the Seas Island region, where the heavy concentration and isolation of African­

Americans encouraged a stronger retention of native dialect and cultural practices.

"Shouts" were frequent and spontaneous affairs held in special meeting places in the quarters, and often followed the more conventional and formal "praise meetings" that were commonly held in official church settings. In the ring shout, participants formed a circle and advanced counter-clockwise in a shuffling manner, dragging their feet while taking precaution not to cross them, as doing so would suggest secular dancing rather than sacred intent. As the holy dance progressed according to morphing and escalating musical patterns, participants reached a state ofbodily and vocal frenzy. One or more

"basers" anchored the melody and rhythm, usually drawn from a popular spiritual, with loud, repetitive vocalizing, handclaps, and thumping on the chest or legs. Every participant made a necessary contribution in the ring shout, responding to the basers with stomping and "moans, grunts ... declamations, interjections, and punctuations" that 101

provided essential connections within a communal religious experience.25

Why did the ring shout engender such heavy distrust among the educators? As an

evident African retention, the shout, quite simply, suggested to the reformers that

slavery's degradations had allowed the slaves to retain their uncivilized African ways.

They heard the shout as a powerful confirmation of their moral argument that slavery was

not the civilizing, Christianizing force claimed by pro-slavery apologists. Shouting, on

the contrary, seemed to prove to the reformers that slavery had retarded the natural

evolution of spiritual beings towards moral and civil self-culture by enabling slaves to

remain heathens. Shouting therefore not only disrupted the Gideonites' paternalistic

mission of moral and civic stewardship, but also thwarted their measurement ofmoral

progress in the new citizens. Finally, as an ostensible step backwards from the educators'

primary agenda of directing the freedmen towards "Christian Republicanism," the

uncontrollable heathenism of the shout complicated the competition the educators

experienced with military and government forces.

If the educators knew that worship and worship music were keys to their

influence on the freedmen, why did they decline to utilize the shout's evident sacred

25 Quote is drawn from Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., "Ring Shout! Literary Studies, Historical Studies, and Black Music Inquiry," Black Music Journal no. 22,42-69 (2002): 52. For more descriptions and interpretations of the ring shout as an African survival, see also Floyd, The Power ofBlack Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995),6,37-45,59-61; Eileen Southern, The Music ofBlack Americans: A History (1971. Third Edition, New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), 180-184; Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom, (Oxford, London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 21, 37-38, 141; and Epstein, Sin/it! Tunes and Spirituals, 124, 232-234, 278-287. On the impact of the ring shout at Port Royal, see Willie Lee Rose, 90-96. It must also be noted that shouts sometimes occurred at praise meetings, and that praise meetings were sometimes held in homes rather than churches. Rather than a distinction ofloeation, that is, the difference between shouts and praise meetings had to do with content, form, the degree of correspondence to or distance from Protestant worship, and the degree of emotional frenzy. 102 basis?26 Their distrust was denominational as well as cultural. Built from impassioned improvisation, spontaneous outbursts, and escalating ecstasy that corresponded to evangelicalism, the ring shout was a significant irritant to the rational Unitarian and

Quaker worship sensibilities ofreformers like Forten, Towne, and Ware.27 For proponents ofliberal religion, this evangelical-style surrender to demonstrative emotional frenzy was seen as a violation of the individual worshiper's inner reason and ability to act as a free moral agent. Furthermore, the shout's abrasion ofrational worship sensibilities highlighted sectarian rivalries with evangelicals in the educators' own ranks. Evangelical educators were more likely than the liberal reformers to understand the islanders'

"emotional conversions as necessary integers offaith." However, in spite of greater tolerance for emotionalism, the evangelical reformers also disdained the ring shout and concurred with the liberals that it disrupted educational and civic imperatives.28Although most Northern observers generally "admitted the strange attraction ofthe shout," as

Eileen Southern has explained, reformers knew "nothing of African traditions" and

26 The refonners could not have been entirely blind to the sacred nature ofthe shout. Willie Lee Rose reports that when one Gideonite, William Channing Gannett, "asked the Negros for their scriptural authority for the 'shout,' they responded plausibly that 'the angels shout in heaven!'" Willie Lee Rose, 93. 27 Hymnody certainly played a large role in Unitarian worship. In the nineteenth-century, Unitarians produced more hymn compilations than any other denomination. However, the fact that these compilations omitted Congregationalist favorites and recycled only existing hymns in which new lyrics reflecting humanism and liberal doctrines could be inserted, underscores Unitarian reservations regarding excessively emotional worship. Jason Shelton, "Changing the Words: A Historical Introduction to Unitarian Universalist Hymnody," 2002, 3-8. http://www.uua.org/documents/sheltonjasonlchanging words.pdf (accessed August 30, 2012). 28 Willie Lee Rose discusses these sectarian rivalries at length. Most of the 35 Gideonites sent from Boston under the auspices ofthe Educational Commission for Freedmen were Unitarians, while most ofthe 53 sent from New York under the auspices ofthe New York National Freedmen's Relief Association were evangelicals. While the New York evangelicals resented the secularization of schools according to New England models of educational reform, the Boston liberals resented the manner in which "moral discourse on duty, truth, cleanliness" tended to fall into secondary interest for the freedmen, who were largely Baptist, "beside the stirring message ofthe crucified Christ." The preference of black church leaders for evangelicalism was made clear to Towne by an "eloquent and ambitious" local preacher, who "found out to his intense horror that I was a Unitarian ... [and said] he expected better things of me." Towne, 127-128. Ultimately, the rival sects, and the local church elders, found themselves united in defending educational priorities over military and labor demands. Rose, 43,71-77,217-229, and 334. 103 therefore "failed to appreciate the two most important elements of the shout," namely, that the shout functioned as a "means of communication with God in the same way as song and prayer" and that "shouters reached the highest level ofworship when the Holy

Spirit entered their bodies 29 The educators simply did not make these connections.

But apart from denominational worship preferences and educational priorities, why were the educators so unwilling to allow shouting, as music, to coexist alongside the mix ofnative and imported music that they otherwise admired?30 Was the shared culture of musical familiarity, so eloquently embodied in Lucy McKim's November, 1862 letter to Dwight's Journal ofMusic, a mere idealistic illusion? We cannot assume the rejection ofa shared musical culture at Port Royal from the educators' distrust of the shout, because the shout was not part ofthe familiarity that characterized antebellum musical culture. Furthermore, we cannot assume that McKim didn't make distinctions between the shout and other more familiar styles. When McKim mentioned to her mother that she had been to "two 'shouts' & one 'praise'," she revealed nothing ofher feeling about the ring shout other than her overall enthusiasm for her new cultural experiences.31 Any single shout, in an improvised mode ofunexpected and raucous variation, would have been impossible for her to transcribe into notation. Unlike the disoriented moral concern unambiguously evidenced in the comments and actions of the educators, McKim did not leave a specific indication of how she felt about the ring shout.

29 Southern, The Music ojBlack Americans, 183. 30 Ware, among other reasons, was uncomfortable with the fact that shouts ran until all hours of the night and were morbidly, in her mind, associated with wakes that lasted until daylight. She complained once of being awakened by a funeral shout at three o'clock in the morning. Pearson, cd., 34, 253. 31 Lucy McKim to Sarah Speakman McKim, June 9, 1862. Garrison Family Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. 104

The absence of moral and aesthetic disdain for the shout in McKim's reports also reflected the different mission that she brought to Port Royal. She had come South as the secretary of her father and had stayed only three weeks, during which time her focus was on reports rather than direct humanitarian aid. Her craving for moral work translated into an impulse to share what she had most personally internalized, that is, a cultural awakening centered on musical language. McKim was a trained professional musician who, unlike Towne, Forten, or Ware, thought in musical terms and ultimately translated her moral reform instincts into ethno-musicological actions. The three educators, on the other hand, came expressly to improve the physical and social conditions ofthe freedmen through education, and they intended on a lengthy stay. Their desire for moral work translated into the more direct actions of ameliorating the conditions of slavery and redirecting the energies ofthe freedmen. When they heard the ring shout, improving the conditions ofAfrican-Americans included, as it had for Frances Kemble, changing certain sounds and activities that they believed perpetuated the degradations of slavery.

Coming from a politically vulnerable position, in which their competition with military men and treasury agents demanded the establishment ofmoral credibility with the freedmen, the Gideonites felt obligated to accept the invitations offreedmen to 'jine praise," and they attended the "praise meetings" and "shouts" of the islanders on a regular basis. While praise meetings and shouts were occasional cultural curiosities for other Northerners, the missionaries and educators consistently attended these events.32

32 It would be mi~leading to say that military men and government agents were not interested in praise meetings and shouts. In the introduction the 1867 Slave Songs ofthe United States anthology, editor William Francis Allen, himself a Gideonite who will be discussed in chapter five, noted that "when visitors from the North were on the islands, there was nothing that seemed better worth their while than to see a 'shout' or hear the 'people' sing their 'sperichills. '" William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, Slave Songs ofthe United States (New York: A. Simpson and Co., 1867), Ii. Forten also reported that her close friend Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, commander of the 54'h Massachusetts, the 105

Due to their educational focus on training inner individual light and divine intuition to

confonn to a path of republican self-sufficiency, the educators naturally made

assumptions and judgments regarding the moral and civic worth ofpraise meetings and

shouts. As indicated in the following early entry from Towne's diary, dated April 27,

1862, the ring shout - unlike the praise meeting - violated not only the aesthetics of

shared musical familiarity and the piety ofNew England worship styles, but also violated the educators' mission of teaching civilized self-culture and literacy:

Tonight I have been to a "shout", which seems to me certainly the remains of some old idol worship. The negroes sing a kind of chorus, - three standing apart to lead and clap, - and then all the others go shuffling round in a circle following one another with not much regularity, turning round occasionally and bending the knees, and stamping so that the whole floor swings. I never saw anything so savage. They call it a religious ceremony, but it seems more like regular frolic to me, and instead of attending the shout, the better persons go to the "Praise House." This is always the cabin of the oldest person in the little village of negro houses, and they meet there to read and pray; generally one of [our] ladies goes there to read to them and they pray.33

This comment offered a terse physical record of the ring shout, but as a reflection ofpride

in a benevolent agenda, is a far cry from other commentary that commended hymns and patriotic anthems as beautiful and pleasing. Towne made a clear-cut distinction here between the "savage" nature of the shout, which she considered an unworthy and regressive "frolic," and the praise meeting, to which "better persons" brought the solemnity ofliteracy and prayer. Moreover, the shout did not afford the opportunity that the praise meeting did for Northern educational supervision. The shout was additionally

first Northern regiment of free black men, was "deeply interested in the singing and appearance of the people." Forten, "Life in the Sea Islands, Part II," 673. However, the preponderance of references to these events that have been attributed to reformers, the repetitive references to these events by reformers themselves, and their painstaking efforts to describe religious, visual, and sonic aspects of these events, suggest the desire for and the practice of a much more intensive and ongoing involvement on their part with this aspect of the freedmen's lives. 33 Towne, 19-20. 106 disturbing, that is, because it did not allow the educators to "read to them."

The next day, Towne was still upset by the ring shout, and she still felt the need to process her distress by again describing the event:

Last night I was at the "Praise House" for a little time and saw Miss Nelly reading to the good women. Afterwards we went to the "shout," a savage, heathenish dance out in Rina's [Towne's cook's] house. Three men stood and sang, clapping and gesticulating. The others shuffled along on their heels, following one another in a circle and occasionally bending the knees in a kind of curtsy. They began slowly, a few going around and more gradually joining in, the song getting faster and faster, till at last only the most marked part ofthe refrain is sung and the shuffling, stamping, and clapping get furious. The floor shook so that it seemed dangerous. It swayed regularly to the time of the song. As they danced they, of course, got out ofbreath, and the singing was kept up principally by the three apart, but it was astonishing how long they continued and how soon after a rest they were ready to begin again. 34

The key elements ofTowne's first description of the event were again repeated in this passage. In addition to her disorientation due to unfamiliar aesthetics and inexplicable physicality, Towne purposefully drew a moral contrast between the "dangerous" and

"furious" heathenism of the shout and the more morally and civically acceptable praise meeting. The important distinction, in terms of Towne's agenda for moral action, was that at the praise meeting, another educator, Nelly Winsor, had been able to promote literacy in pious worship by reading to "good" people. Once again, Towne made it clear that the shout excluded this educational opportunity.

Towne, Forten, and Ware heard folk hymns and patriotic anthems as a cultural bridge and moral confirmation. However, they heard the ring shout as a cultural barrier that not only violated worship piety, but also had the more damaging effect of allowing the freedmen to ignore the duties of self-culture and remain heathens. The ring shout forced the educators to draw another important contrast along with the moral distinction

34 Towne, 22-23. 107 between praises and shouts - that defined their mission. Namely, they tolerated shouting by children and disapproved of shouting by adults. Teaching according to the early education theories of Alcott and Peabody, the trio sought to encourage the natural intuition of children. From this orientation, drawing out intuitive musical expressions from students was essential in fostering self-development. However, the political climate ofcompeting Northern interests at Port Royal - with its varied methods and aims for developing functional citizens - forced the educators to equate diminishment of the shout with progressive goals for responsible adults. Forten found that in some cases, the freedmen themselves, particularly church elders, had already drawn the line between child's play and adult morality:

In the evenings, the children frequently came in to sing and shout for us ...The grown people on this plantation did not shout, but they do on some ofthe other plantations. It is very comical to see little children, not more than three or four years old, entering into the performance with all their might. But the shouting of the grown people is rather solemn and impressive than otherwise. We cannot determine whether it has a religious character or not. Some ofthe people tell us that it has, others that it has not. But as the shouts of the grown people are always in connection with their religious meetings, it is probable that they are the barbarous expression of religion, handed down to them from their African ancestors, and destined to pass away under the influence of Christian teachings.35

The distinction between children's shouts and the shouting of adults corresponded to the

Christian and republican mandates for moral self-culture. Forten's inclusion of the freedmen's own contradictory views ofthe shout in her assessment ofthe style indicated that on some plantations, the islanders also considered the shout a "solemn," "barbarous,"

35 Forten, "Life on the Sea Islands, Part I," 593. Towne also reported on the discouragement of shouting by local religious leaders. Towne, 80. Ware more specifically noted that some elders "did not object to [shouts] in the praise house," but rather particularly "did not like the shout 'out in de world', i.e, before [participants] joined the Church or came to 'strive behind the Elders'." African-American church leaders at Port Royal struggled to maintain control of their own worship services, and their discouragement of the shout indicated a desire not only for moral and civic self-improvement, but also for local authority in civic and religious transitions. Pearson, ed., 26-28. See also Willie Lee Rose, 93, and Towne, 129-134. 108 and perhaps irreligious holdover from Africa and slavery, which they had already abandoned in the name ofspiritual and social progress. For the educators, the preexistence of this distinction within the local culture confirmed their sense that the shout was morally and civically regressive. Most importantly for the educators, this preexisting distinction told them that the shout was in fact "destined to pass away under the influence of Christian teachings." The fact that local African-American leaders also sought this passage thus validated the educators' faith in their own paternalistic role in acting on behalf of that transition.

Ware concurred with Forten's impression that the shouting ofchildren was "very comical." Early in the course of the Port Royal Experiment, Towne had received the ring shout as something "dangerous." Later, by equating the African nature of the ring shout to a childish frivolity unworthy ofadult citizens, Forten and Ware turned the shout into a laughing matter. Their attempts to discredit the ring shout were akin to the "fit of laughing" Kemble had experienced when dismissing the "nonsense" ofcertain slave expressions.36 While Forten trusted that the absence of the ring shout on some plantations indicated a transition to responsible civic morality, Ware took a more active role in enforcing this transition. In response to Towne's sense that the shout violated the confines under which educational authority operated in conjunction with worship piety,

Ware asserted the value ofher own proper musical instruction:

The children sang a number of the songs I have taught them, standing in classes, the smallest in front, their little eager faces irresistibly comic ...when the noise became overpowering, I could stop it for the time being by starting a song, which

36 To be fair, we must remind ourselves that Kemble, Towne, Forten, and Ware were all humbled by more sobering religious moments, and that all resisted the temptation for wholesale laughter at African retentions they considered odd. The Port Royal teachers promoted proper and legally recognized church weddings as an important component in moral reform, and Forten remarked ofone such wedding that as "comical as the costumes were, we were not disposed to laugh at them. We were too glad to see the poor creatures trying to lead right and virtuous lives." Forten, "Life on the Sea Islands, Part I," 596. 109

the children would instantly catch up. Then I let the children sing some of their own songs in a genuine shouting style, a sight too funny in the little things, but sad and disagreeable to me in the grown people, who make it a religious act. .. the children move around in a circle, backwards, or sideways, with their feet and arms keeping energetic time, and their whole bodies undergoing most extraordinary contortions, while they sing at the top of their voices ...We laughed till we almost cried over the little bits of ones, but when the grown people wanted to 'shout,' I would not let them. 37

Through Ware's reform actions, even the children, though given some leeway, were being directed away from the ring shout. This redirection towards "songs I have taught them" reflected, to a large extent, the difficulties the educators had instilling discipline and concentration in their students. Forten remarked that the educators found it "hard to keep [the students'] attention in school," in part because New England primers were foreign tools for students who had been "so entirely unused to intellectual concentration."

When Ware needed to restore order and concentration, she played music. Forten felt such redirection was "necessary" because the students required endless stimulation "to interest them every moment.,,38 Northern school songs provided that stimulation, and shouting was merely an indulgence.

Desirous of moral authority and educational order, Forten, Towne, and Ware heard the shout as something not only uncivilized and un-Christian, but also as something immature and unworthy of developing citizens. They found its African character to be counterproductive to their mission of stewarding the freedmen out of slavery, and as a result, they acted to disempower the shout by directing the freedmen towards music they considered conducive to the best interests of new American citizens. For Christmas of

1862, Forten wrote to her close friend, the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier, to

37 Pearson, ed., 292-293. 3~ "Teaching here," Forten added, "is consequently far more fatiguing than at the North." Forten, "Life on the Sea Islands, Part I," 593. For more on the educators' struggles with discipline, see Rose, 232-233. 110 request a special hymn to teach her students. He responded with "Whittier's Hymn," a poetic vision of how he imagined ex-slaves would connect Christ's birth to their new freedom. Forten believed in the power and worthiness of this musical redirection.

"Whittier's Hymn" restored both the paternalistic civic mission and the culture ofshared music that the shout disrupted, as the students learned it "very easily, and enjoyed singing it" alongside native hymns. The freedmen's musical expressions at this 1862 Christmas celebration became, once again, "wonderfully beautiful." Forten proudly reported that she showed her students Whittier's picture, "and told them he was a very good friend of theirs, who felt the deepest interest in them, and had written this hymn expressly for them to sing." This bridge to paternalistic moral authority "made them very proud and happy."

Noting that such cultural harmony "does one's soul good," Forten decided that "we are going to teach them 'The Song of the Negro Boatman' soon." Whittier's assumed understandings of slave music had thus taken on an additional role beyond the model he provided for Lucy McKim's minstrel-based reception of boat songs. Forten had made

Whittier's assumptions the new model for proper freedmen's music. 39

Did this new, imported musical model create another bridge, or another barrier?

Imported hymns were a type ofbridge between teachers and school children, who relished the infusion of new stimulation in an educational environment they understood, in part, to be religious. For local church leaders interested in establishing autonomous authority, however, such cultural imports most likely created a barrier. In 1864, elders at the St. Helena Brick Church, a Baptist institution, took the bold step offorming their own

39 For reports of the reception of "Whittier's Hymn," see Forten, "Life on the Sea Islands, Part II," 670; Forten, "Interesting Letter from Miss Charlotte L. Forten," 51, and Towne, 96-97. 111 choir without consulting the Northern Anglo-American church members.4o Forten herself was not entirely convinced that new music models meant as much to the locals as they did to the reformers. She acknowledged that native hymns were perhaps more appropriate for the freedmen. In some praise meetings, she reported, the freedmen "sing only the church hymns which the Northern ministers have taught them," and this music, she admitted, was "far less suited to their voices than their own.'.41 She also recognized that the freedmen's own hymns were perhaps, in some cases, superior. After attending a white church service, where "one of the ladies played ...old-fashioned New England church music, which it was pleasant to hear," Forten felt obligated to qualify her listening pleasure with the observation that this church music "did not thrill us as the singing of the people had done.,,42 These comments suggested that local hymns, more so than imported hymns, did the most to bridge the reformers' cultural connections.

As the Port Royal Experiment unfolded, musical bridges as well as musical barriers consistently drove the educators' actions ofmoral stewardship. Charlotte Forten,

Laura Towne, and Harriet Ware processed the musical expressions of the freed people according to benevolent educational imperatives and progressive ideals, and when they heard indications of religious and civic worth in the music of their charges, they were reassured of the successes of moral reform. The "beautiful" hymns and patriotic enthusiasms of the freedmen closed cultural gaps and were allowed to coexist with imported Northern anthems because - in spite of initially sounding "indescribable" - those musical expressions sounded like familiar arguments from the abolitionists' moral culture. The ring shout, on the other hand, violated that grounding in religious and civic

40 Willie Lee Rose, 315. 41 Forten, "Life on the Sea Islands, Part II," 672. 42 Forten, "Life on the Sea Islands, Part I," 590. 112 purpose. The ring shout seemed "dangerous" not only because it was an African retention that stunted progress towards civilized American self-culture, but also because it functioned outside the realm of controlled teaching. Nonetheless, the ring shout also helped the educators confirm their stewardship as they acted to deny its power. Their moral reform instincts told them to expect the best from the freedmen's music because as liberal reformers, they were trained to expect the best from themselves and the best from society. By praising music of religious and civic worth and by belittling and forbidding the "heathen" and "comical" ring shout, these educators validated their own benevolent perfectionism and abolitionist righteousness. They believed, as they made distinctions between worthy and unworthy music, that they were, most importantly, expecting the best from the freedmen. 113

"They are all natural transcendentalists": Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Spiritual Activism

Just as the educators we saw in chapter three heard the music of the Port Royal contrabands according to that music's relationship to their educational mission, Thomas

Wentworth Higginson likewise heard that music according to its relationship to his transcendentalist activism. Like those educators, Higginson had come to Port Royal with the goal of proving that the freedmen possessed the capacity for moral agency and empowered citizenship. The music of the freedmen often provided that proof.

Higginson's stay at Port Royal overlapped with that of the educators; however, when he wrote about this music after the war, his moral action of cultural promotion served a different purpose than the moral action of improvement taken by the educators during the war. For the educators, who had come south to foster literacy while teaching Christian and republican virtues, the African nature of the ring shout was a hindrance that demanded correction. For Higginson, a Harvard intellectual and man of the pulpit who had come south to supervise freedmen in a controversial military experiment, the mysteriously "barbaric" qualities of local music were instead a sign of inner strength and collective spiritual intuition that demanded study. The educators, hearing music in praise houses and schoolrooms, found it necessary to distinguish the "savage" ring shout from civilized music that was "beautiful" and patriotic. Higginson, hearing music in army camps, made no such distinction, detecting instead a holistic quality by which "all their songs were thoroughly religious." He found slave music "essentially poetic," and received it as a "strange enjoyment" that stirred his transcendentalist activism. I

I Thomas Wentworth Higginson, ""Negro Spirituals," Atlantic Monthly (June 7, 1867),685,687. 114

During the war, Higginson had heard moral reform possibilities in the freedmen's music when he listened for signs oftheir self-culture. In the early years of emancipation,

Higginson's reform action of promotion became an argument linking African-American musical and moral agency to his own activist history. While Charlotte Forten, Laura

Towne, and Harriet Ware had heard remnants of an "uncivilized" past in slave music as a summons for immediate and practical reform action, Higginson had heard spiritual striving and collective action that supported his transcendentalist faith in self-culture as a link to higher moral truths. His wartime journal and post-war writings on spirituals and shouts in part had the effect ofrendering the music exotic, but as Leslie Butler has recently suggested, this involvement with the freedmen's music also indicated that

Higginson "imagined an alliance that might build a vision for the future," in which liberal intellectual leaders and the morally empowered freedmen they guided "would unite to push forward ...the good cause ofa completed American freedom.,,2

Higginson, like other abolitionists we have seen in this study, heard possibilities for moral reform in slave music, and he acted towards that music in ways that allowed him to validate his own moral arguments. Social contact with a musical culture that was alternately familiar and unsettling triggered in antislavery reformers desires to apply ideals ofmoral reform to that music. Higginson, like other reformers, responded to what he heard according to his own unique experiences and hopes. Unlike Frances Kemble or the Port Royal educators, his lifelong quest for institutional change and improvement in the lives ofAfrican-Americans did not lead him to change or improve their music. He responded to slave music more in the forward-looking manner of Lucy McKim and John

2 Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 68. 115

S. Dwight, that is, with a desire to reform Northern impressions ofAfrican-Americans by promoting the worth of their cultural expressions. Lucy McKim, a trained professional musician, shared slave music because doing so forwarded what she most valued, namely, the confluence ofmusical and moral cultures; Higginson, with his grounding in European romantic literature and New England liberal religion, promoted slave music because doing so forwarded what he most valued, namely, the transcendentalist promise that personal and intuitive moral cultivation could effect social renewal.

Over the course ofa life that spanned antebellum upheavals and post-bellum reorientations, Higginson's dutiful engagements with movements of spiritual and social renewal were passionate, encompassing, and extensive. "We need more radicalism in our religion," he told his Free Church congregation in Worchester, Massachusetts in 1852,

"and more religion in our radicalism.,,3 He threw himself headlong into militant abolitionism, championed the rights of women and immigrant laborers, promoted physical fitness, took controversial stands in opposition to two wars of imperialism, dabbled with writing romantic poetry and literature before finding a niche in historical biography and cultural criticism, and advanced liberal religion by deploying transcendentalist ideals first through the Unitarian ministry and later through ecumenical free-thinking associations. Before the war, he campaigned on behalf of the Free Soil

3 Quoted in Tilden G. Edelstein, Strange Enthusiasm: A Life ofThomas Wentworth Higginson (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1968), 131. Unless specifically noted otherwise, my biographical data on Higginson has been drawn either from Edelstein's exhaustive narrative; James W. Tuttleton's terser account, Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978); or Howard N. Meyer's more focused account, Colonel ofthe Black Regiment: The Life ofThomas Wentworth Higginson (New York; W. W. Norton & Company, 1967). Additionally, two broader studies that prominently feature Higginson provided valuable biographical data. Leslie Butler's connective biographies in Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007) establish a context for Higginson's development as a reformer in relation to other like-minded New England men ofletters. John T. Cumbler's similar survey, From Abolition to Rightsfor All: The Making of a Reform Community in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) also situates Higginson's personal story in the context of larger currents ofreforrn. 116

Party and the Northern disunion movement led by William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell

Phillips, while after the war, he made the transition from Radical Republican to mugwump Democrat to non-partisan independent.

Higginson's multiple and shifting moral energies sometimes spoke of a youthful restlessness, as biographer Tilden Edelstein has shown, "to prove his strength" through manly endeavors, and of a lifelong "need to feel his own power" through "intellectual leadership." However, to consign Higginson's reform instincts to adolescent and professional uncertainties - or to the headlong egotism of his New England patrician generation - would limit our understanding of the personal depth and historical breadth of his instincts. Edelstein has also shown that Higginson acted according his Puritan forefathers' tradition of "stewardship as cultivated public leaders," and has more importantly argued that in spite of shifting social conditions, Higginson's compulsion for social activism remained "remarkably consistent.,,4

A descendent ofoutspoken Puritan clergymen5 and civic-minded New England shipping merchants, Thomas Wentworth Higginson was born into a tradition of spiritual activism on December 23, 1823, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the last often children of Stephen Higginson Jr. and Louisa Storrow. Stephen Higginson served a Steward at

Harvard University, and had helped establish both the Harvard Divinity School in 1818 and the American Unitarian Association in 1825. Thomas entered Harvard at the young age of 13, and his sense of direction in his early years, apart from vague notions of nonconformity and a love ofromantic novels, was understandably unclear. When he

4 Edelstein, Strange Enthusiasm, 21-34, 257, 397, 399. 5 Higginson's seventeenth century ancestor, the Reverend John Higginson, invoked the wrath oflocal merchants in 1700 for distributing Samuel Sewall's antislavery pamphlet, The Selling ofJoseph, which I discussed in chapter one. See Edelstein, 4, and Meyer, Colonel ofthe Black Regiment, 3] , 117 graduated in 1841, he seemed to care little for religion and instead entertained ambitions as a poet, a pursuit in which - unlike his later catalytic activism - he would prove to be inconsequentially mediocre.6 After returning to Harvard in 1846 to pursue a program of

"independent" graduate studies in philosophy and literature, Higginson dropped out, only to be readmitted in 1847 with a renewed focus in the Divinity SchooL

Contemporary stirrings that combined spiritual and social radicalism pointed

Higginson to his renewed interest in the possibilities ofthe ministry. During his Harvard years, he was drawn to abolitionism by the moral adamancy ofWilliam Lloyd Garrison's newspaper, The Liberator, and was even more profoundly swayed to the cause by Lydia

Maria Child's controversial 1833 book, An Appeal in Favor ofThat Class ofAmericans

Called Africans. 7 Through his courtship of Mary Channing, a niece ofthe revered Boston

Unitarian leader William Ellery Channing, Higginson came under the influence of a number ofwell-known and controversial Unitarian clergymen. Radical thinkers such as

Theodore Parker, James Freeman Clarke, and Higginson's own cousin William Henry

Channing had embraced the moral imperative of antislavery preaching as well as the ideas of transcendentalism, an emerging philosophy that promoted the essential human impulse for religion rather than specific doctrines of Christianity as a sect. The sermons and ministerial activism of these outspoken men taught Higginson to reject the orthodox

6 That is, until he assumed the literary duty that has most endeared him to history, as the discoverer and mentor ofpoet Emily Dickinson. Higginson edited two posthumous volumes of her unpublished poems in 1890 and 1891. This part of Higginson's career is beyond the scope of my current study. Scholars interested in this relationship should consult Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship 0/Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New York: Anchor Books, 2008). For more on Higginson's influence as a poetry critic, see Ed Folsom's essay, "Transcendental Poetics: Emerson, Higginson, and the Rise of Whitman and Dickinson," in The OxfOrd Handbook o/Transcendentalism, ed. Joel Myerson, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, and Laura Dassow Walls (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 263-288. 7 Higginson also read Child's two volume 1843-1845 series, Letters/rom New York, which swayed him to many social causes such as temperance, women's rights, the amelioration of poverty, the abolition of capital punishment, and the defense of the right of immigrants to practice Catholicism. Edelstein, 48-52. 118 scholasticism of Unitarian rationality in favor ofa more universal, intuitive, and inclusive post-scriptural religion based on inspired self-culture.8

From these transcendentalist radicals, with whom Higginson would share enduring friendships, he also learned to embrace the risks ofostracism for agitating the antislavery agenda from the pulpit.9 From the outset of his first ministerial assignment, at the First Religious Society of Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1847, he preached incessantly on the citizen's civic duty to follow a higher moral law and defy the national sin of slavery. Following a particularly incendiary Thanksgiving Day jeremiad in 1848, in which he castigated the wealthy, conservative Whigs ofhis congregation for helping to elect the slaveholding Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor to the presidency, Higginson regretfully resigned in 1849, convinced that his failure with this congregation verified not the failure ofreligious moral absolutes, but ofinstitutionalized religion. IO

Higginson also developed his synthesis oftranscendentalist idealism and radical individualism from sources outside the church. He was enthralled by the transcendentalist

8 For a recent discussion of the transcendentalists' divergence from orthodox Unitarianism, see Philip F. Gura in American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), ch. 2-3. While there is much existing scholarship that follows this narrative ofdoctrinal separation, Professor Amy Kittelstrom, the chairman ofthis thesis committee, suggested in a recent conversation that this argument has been exaggerated and is need of updating. Kittelstrom notes that important figures such as Frederic Henry Hedge and William Ellery Channing attended meetings ofthe Transcendental Club but remained committed Unitarians. The strident individualism in Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Divinity School Address," she believes, has misled historians into assuming that all transcendentalists shared his rejection of orthodoxy. 9 Among other radical ideas, these clergymen all rejected the then standard practice of congregants paying for reserved seats in pews. Clarke, who had to return to New England after disastrous attempts to preach antislavery in Kentucky, held moderate gradualist views of abolition, but he supported the more radical immediatist Parker in pulpit exchanges when both were shunned elsewhere. Henry Channing boldly embraced the "Christian Socialism" that was practiced at George Ripley's experimental Brook Farm commune. For more on the views ofthese men in the larger connection between transcendentalism and abolitionism, see Sandra Harbert Petrulionis' essay, "Antislavery Reform," in The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism, 210-221 For the inft uence ofthese transcendentalist preachers on Higginson's early career, see Edelstein, 41-67. 10 Some members of this congregation came from wealthy families who had been involved in the slave trade. Tuttleton, Thomas Wentworth H;gg;nson, 27. For excerpts from this Thanksgiving Day sermon and more on Higginson's involvement in the election of 1848, see Edelstein, 84-94, and Meyer, 57-58. Higginson returned to the pulpit from 1852 to 1858, at the nonsectarian, liberal Free Church in the predominantly working class town of Wore hester. 119 nature writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, whose notions of self-reliance, the personal consciousness, and the natural landscape's ability to connect man to absolute truth appealed to the young Divinity student's romantic anti-materialism, as well as his quest for a natural religion free from doctrines ofscriptural revelation.

Reading the works ofEmerson and Thoreau, Higginson came to embrace transcendentalism's fundamental idea of individual intuition, and its metaphysical idea that the mysteries of human and divine essences were most clearly discerned in reflective flashes of poetic insight.

In spite of his own retreats into nature, most notably at the outbreak ofwar prior to his mission to Port Royal, Higginson ultimately considered the detached "egotheism" of Emerson and Thoreau to be a compromise that lacked the engagement with social justice he had come to crave from the examples of Clarke, Parker, and Henry Channing,

Garrison, and Child. II Though most transcendentalists held antislavery views, many avoided radical action and simply conflated the institution with an ideological assault on intellectual and moral freedom. 12 All the transcendentalists, Anne Rose contends in her study of the movement's social component, "chafed at bourgeois restraints" as well as slavery's social and racial oppression, "on ethical grounds." Pursuing communion with nature and the ideologically pure freedom of self-development, Rose argues, constituted,

II Leslie Butler argues that Higginson's choice of ministry "inverted Emerson's earlier vocational crisis," which had lcd Emerson to reject the pulpit. Higginson's anti-materialist "disgust at the corruption of institutions led not to a withdrawal from public life but a more radical intervention in it. His commitment always remained to the spirit rather than the form of any institution." Butler, Critical Americans, 22-25, 57. 12 Although the radical ministers Parker, Clarke, and Henry Channing, along with other transcendentalists such as George Ripley and Amos Bronson Alcott, became committed abolitionists early in their careers, other significant transcendentalists, like Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, took up the cause later as a secondary concern, inspired in part by opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law of J 850. Orestes Brownson, an otherwise committed advocate ofuniversal brotherhood, actually defended slavery and the 1850 law. See Petrulionis' essay, "Antislavery Reform," in The Oxford Handbook o/Transcendentalism, 210-221, which suggests that Emersonian individualism was incompatible with the socially minded collective action called for in other intellectual circles. Conversely, Emerson's eventual turn to the cause is demonstrated by Philip F. Gura in American Transcendentalism, 242-248. 120 for the transcendentalists, a statement ofrebellion as well as an act ofreform. But for

Higginson, his development of private moral insights more particularly and pointedly gave him a "discontent [that] was visceral." Abolitionism, more than transcendentalism, would lead Higginson to pursue a self-culture that demanded his idealism be "burned up in physical culture" and public action. 13

During the escalating tensions ofthe 1850s, Higginson's activist idealism pushed him to be "burned up in physical culture" in more direct and outwardly visible ways than at any other time in his life. Following the enactment ofthe Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, average Northern citizens as well as otherwise detached transcendentalists, sensing an infringement on their own freedoms, turned to antislavery sentiment in increasing numbers. Higginson, whose involvement in politics had already distanced him from

Garrisonian moral suasion and nonresistance, purposefully positioned himself into several highly visible, extralegal efforts to resist the expansion ofslavery. In 1851,

Higginson joined failed efforts by the Boston Vigilance Committee to free Thomas Sims, who had been captured and tried in Boston after escaping from slavery in Georgia.

Disillusioned by the tepid public response to the incident, Higginson turned to physical force in 1854, spearheading a violent mob that broke into the courthouse in an aborted

13 Anne C. Rose, Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830-1850 (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1981), 217. Rose specifically argues that the defining element of the first two decades of transcendentalism involved "boundless visions" of multifaceted reform that conjoined private with public discontent. The abolitionism ofthe 1850s, she contends, made a single issue ofouter directed transcendentalist morality, and that once the "personal rigor" of self-culture became secondary, "reform lost its radical edge and slid toward philanthropy." Rose, 215, 207-225. Philip F. Gura similarly notes that the escalation of nationalistic political abolitionism in the decade before the war diminished the broader transatlantic impulses for self-culture and universal brotherhood evident in early transcendentalism. Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History, 68, 207-239,241-266. However, while Rose casts 1850s abolitionism as a specific temporal marker of a split in an otherwise initially holistic union of private and public reform, Gura argues that the two impulses were consistently bifurcated before, during, and after the war. Gura's concern is not that individualism lost ground to activism in the 1850s, as Rose argues, but that by the century's end, with the advance ofDarwinism, capitalism, and pragmatism, it was instead the "other half ofthe Transcendentalists' dream, of a common humanity committed to social justice, [that] fell by the wayside." Gura, 306. 121 attempt to free the escaped Virginia slave preacher Anthony Bums. Higginson was wounded in the incident and brought to trial on charges of inciting riot, but the District

Attorney dropped the indictment out ofreluctance to give the abolitionist cause any excess publicity.14

Higginson nonetheless considered this public expression ofmoral resistance a successful turning point. His intuitive personal connection to higher moral truth was no longer simply a crusade, but a war. As an agent ofthe Massachusetts-Kansas Aid

Committee, he accompanied New England free soil immigrants to the disputed Kansas territory in 1856, delivering guns and ammunition for their defense against pro-slavery agitators emigrating from neighboring Missouri. In 1859, Higginson acted as one ofthe

"Secret Six," a group of powerful New England radicals who provided financial and logistical support for militant abolitionist John Brown's failed attempt to arm slaves by raiding the federal armory at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. Higginson even attempted to instigate a jailbreak for Brown prior to his hanging for treason, but could not generate enough support. As in the Bums case, Higginson relished the possibility of using the courtroom as a forum for the higher truth of abolitionism, but he was neither arrested nor asked to testify at Brown's triaL 15

In spite of a trajectory that had commuted his transcendentalist spiritual romanticism into militant social moralism, when the sectional war erupted in April of

1861, Higginson considered federal war aims cautiously. Skeptical ofa war to preserve

14 Edelstein, 173. 15 Higginson's mentor in radical ministerial abolitionism, Theodore Parker, was also a member of the Secret Six, along with Gerrit Smith, Franklin Sanborn, Samuel Gridley Howe, and George Steams. Following Brown's arrest, Steams, Howe, and Sanborn fled to Canada and Smith temporarily committed himself to an insane asylum, while Parker died of an illness in Italy_ Only Higginson remained in Massachusetts to face the aftermath. 122 the union ifthat preservation hinged on a compromise to continue slavery, Higginson spent the first year ofthe war in a Thoreau-like retreat into nature. 16 Higginson emerged from this period ofreflection, however, with renewed zeaL He began recruiting and drilling as a captain with the volunteers ofthe 51 st Massachusetts Regiment in

Worchester in the fall of 1862. On November 14 of that year, Higginson received a personal request from Brigadier General Rufus Saxton, the military commander at Port

Royal, to lead the newly freed men ofthe First South Carolina Volunteers, the first federally authorized regiment ofAfrican-American troops in America. 17 After being promoted to colonel, Higginson arrived at Beaufort, South Carolina, on November 24, ready to embrace this controversial challenge of demonstrating the abolitionist argument for African-American worth and self-culture.

The music made by Higginson's troops would provide him with evidence for that argument. In a series of sketches that were published in 1867 in the Atlantic Monthly and reprinted with additions in 1870 as a book, Army Life in a Black Regiment, Higginson consistently referenced music when evaluating the former slaves' character and culture. IS

16 Edelstein, 239-250. Higginson's mood of sullen isolation at this time was also affeeted by the faet that his wife Mary, after suffering years of health issues, had become a complete invalid. 17 Resulting in part, I believe, from the success of the Academy Award winning 1989 film Glory, this distinction is sometimes mistakenly assigned to the 54th Massachusetts, the first regiment of free Northern blacks commanded by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. The 54th Massachusetts, however, was not organized until April of 1863, following the First South Carolina Volunteers' success in the occupation of Jacksonville in March and President Lincoln's subsequent approval for the formation of more black regiments. Edelstein, 270, 279-280. For more on the importance of these regiments and their radical effect on the direction of Union war efforts, see James M. McPherson, The Negro's Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and ActedDuring the War for the Union (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), 165-168, 173­ 178, 183, 188-191. 18 These post-war sketches were drawn from the field journal he used during his service at Port Royal, 1862-1864. See Christopher Looby, ed., The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters ofThomas Wentworth Higginson (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2000). My citations regarding his records of slave music will come either from this journal, the June 1867 essay "Negro Spirituals," or the 1870 book. Looby includes slave songs and spirituals in the "broad and heterogeneous textual universe" that influenced the journal, that is, a set ofliterary and cultural "terms of understanding" that included the work of his essayist contemporaries, antislavery and proslavery fiction, European romantic novels and poetry, travel narratives, feminist writing, ancient classics, and current periodicals. Looby, 10. 123

In their music, he found naturalist poetics and creative spontaneity, religious convictions, virtues and philosophy, and moral and civic agency. Slave songs were essentially religious songs, he remarked, that represented an "other-world trust" in which "the one spirit of their songs" connected individuals to a greater divine. 19 The local music

Higginson heard in camp and elsewhere at Port Royal provided confirmation of his own moral reform impulse to connect spiritual introspection with practical collective action.

Keenly detailing lyrics, dialect, and musical patterns in his Atlantic Monthly essay on

"Negro Spirituals," he insisted that slave music was part of a larger moral culture.

"History cannot afford," he sensed ofthe music's link to something greater, "to lose this portion of its record. ,,20

Higginson heard this music as a naturalist poet, mystic idealist, religious seeker, civic-minded leader, and militant reformer. When Higginson heard his men talk about a

"Gospel army" that was both transcendent and real, he determined that this conceptual instinct, manifested in their "poetic" songs, was "the highest form of mysticism."

Spirituals, shouts, anthems, and even spontaneous sonic expressions told Higginson about a deeper layer of truth, leading him to conclude, as his regimental surgeon had, that his freed men "are all natural transcendentalists.,,21 The lyrical and social aspects of the freedmen's religious music, along with the emotional and boisterous musical performances themselves, were often a "riddle" for the colonel, but he approached these mysterious cultural expressions with a knowing curiosity. He studied spirituals and shouts as "specimens" of a natural religion that avoided doctrine, and he was "impressed"

19 Looby, ed., The Complete Civil War Journal, 86. 20 Higginson, "Negro Spirituals," 689. 21 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 41. 124 that they were full of poetic and political symbolism. The music provided examples that helped Higginson translate this natural religion into terms that suited his militant agenda.

The "mystical effect" of songs suited his romantic spiritualism, and symbols of "spiritual conflict" and "passionate striving" provided him with evidence of the freedmen's agency and moral worth. 22

Hearing this music as a transcendentalist, Higginson was able to understand it as a model ofwhat Swedenborg or Emerson might have called a "correspondence," or a link between the natural world of slave culture and the divine absolute of spiritual truth.

Nature imagery, biblical narratives, and familiar hymn melodies confirmed that individual songs functioned as symbols and examples ofgreater moral and traditional truths. The colonel also felt, in the manner of Hegel or Thoreau, that the local music was an example of how the divine was already immanent in and united with this world. He understood spontaneous, participatory musical expressions as models in which the freedmen were "burned up in physical culture" - as the Colonel longed to be - in public displays of intuitive self-creation and communal patriotism.

The sensual naturalism oflyrical poetry drew Higginson into his men's music more readily than musical aesthetics.23 He found picturesque images and "infinitely quaint" descriptions of nature's power and immediacy in many songs, and he associated those images with the spontaneous experience of both physical and extra-liminal phenomenon. He particularly admired two spirituals, "O'er the Crossing" and "I Know

22 Higginson, "Negro Spirituals," 687, 689. 2J Higginson's musical background appears to have been minimal and perhaps typical of non-musical Northerners, and certainly nothing approaching the distinction or scope of his literacy. His sister played Beethoven on the piano in their home, where she often accompanied a flute trio from Harvard that included a young John S. Dwight. While at Harvard, Higginson befriended abolitionist hymn writer John Greenleaf Whittier and wrote verse for his own imagined "Fugitive's Hymn." At the extradition of Thomas Sims, he was part ofa crowd that sang antislavery hymns. He was also well aware of minstrelsy, opera, and European ballads. See Meyer, 10-11; Edelstein, 60, 117; and Higginson, "Negro Spirituals," 685-694. 125

Moon-Rise," in which he found nature metaphors that confirmed his transcendentalist assumption ofa connection between the immediate and the eternal. "O'er the Crossing" used storm imagery to signify a combination of spontaneous natural activity, intuitive human understanding, and the ultimate resolution of divine connection:

Her dat mournful thunder Roll from door to door, Calling home God's children; Get home bimeby.

See dat forked lightnin' Flash from tree to tree, Calling home God's children, Get home bimeby.24

In this example, spiritual and real transformations have yet to occur, but appear to be imminent in discernable natural processes. The immediacy ofnatural process was even more evident in "I Know Moon-Rise," a song which Higginson deemed "a flower of poetry on that dark soil," because "external nature furnished the images most directly" to its picture ofearthly intuition and eternal truth:

I know moon-rise, I know star rise, Lay dis body down. I walk in de moonlight, I walk in de starlight, To lay dis body down. I'll lie in de grave and stretch out my arms' Lay dis body down

This mix ofnature metaphor and reality, for Higginson, was the highest poeticism.

"Never, it seems to me, since man first lived and suffered," he asserted of this lyrical naturalism, "was his infinite longing for peace uttered more plaintively than in that

24 Higginson, "Negro Spirituals," 688. 126 line.,,25 "I Know Moon-Rise," he said, was an important hymn "as graceful & beautiful as those of Scotland.,,26 This lofty estimate of the song's evocative power was significant consideration, coming from a literate critic whose standards were the romantic works of

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Burns.

Along with identifying naturalist poetry in the spirituals, Higginson also identified the songs themselves as natural objects that were part ofa natural landscape. Musical objects and occurrences became phenomena "which I had before seen as in museums alone," and Higginson approached these sounds as a curious scholar, as ifthey were

"some captured bird or insect" or "strange plant" that he "could now gather on [its] own soil." The details of songs were "a ford or a forest" that offered Higginson intellectual exercise as well as a chance to connect the music of his men with his own sense of nature. 27 Spirituals and shouts were the results of natural processes. One misty evening, he witnessed that when "the foggy air breeds sandflies, so it calls out melodies & strange antics" from his men. 28

His experience ofslave music as part ofa natural landscape also led to a tendency to conflate the creators of the music with the natural landscape. Paul Outka has recently argued that nineteenth century writers often treated nature as a site for racialization, as both a white-identified sublime and a black-identified trauma, in which the ability to produce meaning was a "triumphant mark ofthe subject's intrinsic freedom" and

"whiteness" outside the landscape, while the absence of meaning was "a mark of the

25 Higginson, "Negro Spirituals," 689. 26 Looby, ed., 78. 27 Higginson, "Negro Spirituals," 685. 28 Looby, ed., 56. 127 subject's bondage and degradation" and "blackness" within the landscape.,,29 Higginson made this association, not just between sandflies and strange melodies, but also between boisterous camp drummers and a hostile environment. Seeking something besides "the chilly sunshine and the pale blue river" to remind him ofNew England, Higginson initially defined his civilized distance from what he heard. "The air is full ofnoisy drumming," he noted ofhis preference for a civilized North, adding, "the drumming is chronic. My young barbarians are all at play." 30 By establishing an association of his men's music and his men themselves with an untamed and savage Southern landscape,

Higginson's comments would seem to support Outka's point.

To understand the native poetry of the local music and its makers, Higginson tried to humanize them in terms of moral and religious familiarity. He sought these critical terms in the religion of the freedmen, even though their natural religion challenged his liberal spiritual views and his desire for action. This natural religion was a positive empowering force, he determined, but he also dismissed it as a "vast bewildered chaos of

Jewish history and biography.,,3} Higginson nonetheless respected this strange, Old

Testament driven religion. He expressed an ecumenical "sympathetic admiration" for the freedmen's spiritual culture that he said would have been the same even "if! had a

Turkish command," that is, "not tending towards agreement, but towards co-operation."J2

Passive resignation among the freedmen led him to believe as it had Frances Kemble

29 Paul Outka, Race and Nature/rom Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Pal grave Macmillan, 2008), 3-19, 25, 58. While this literary perspective has historical validity, Outka elsewhere overstates the commitment of Emerson and Thoreau to abolitionism. Outka also discusses a "voyeurism of the traumatic" and "voyeurism of history itself' that is of instructive value in understanding abolitionist views of slave music. In my current study, I am less concerned with voyeurism that would have made slave music commentary a passive "tourism ofthe exotic," because I have focused this study on ways in which abolitionists responded to slave music by taking action. 30 Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment, 6. 31 Ibid., 20. 32 Ibid., 41. 128 and others when they first encountered slaves - that antislavery debates might have

"underrated the suffering produced by slavery among the negroes." However, the strength of their religion suggested instead that abolitionists "had rather overrated the demoralization.,,33 Demoralization had been checked by faith, and he determined that history held "no parallel instance of an oppressed people thus sustained by their religious sentiment alone." The key to this spiritual sustenance was manifested in the vocal beauty of "these songs" that expressed "simplicity," "sublimity," and resigned faith. 34

Higginson came to believe that religious songs had positive as well as negative effects on the freedmen. As surely as slavery had "crushe[d] the upper faculties ofthe head," the institution had made music ofspiritual resignation necessary because it

"crowd[ ed] everything into the perceptive organs.,,35 He knew that religious musical activity gave his men "zeal, energy, [and] daring," but he also held a romantic view that

"religion cultivates the feminine virtues first" and just as readily made his men "patient, meek, resigned. ,,36 This imagined "feminine" religion echoed the contemporary racial notions of inherent African-American religious and musical abilities that were evident in the letter by the "Evangelist" that John Dwight ran twice in his Journal ofMusic.

Furthermore, the paradise theology of the spirituals was another sign ofreligious weakness that dissatisfied Higginson. "The attitude is always the same," he noted of the lyrical sentiments of spirituals in general, "and, as a commentary on the life ofthe race, is infinitely pathetic. Nothing but patience for this life, - nothing but triumph in the next.,,37

33 Higginson, Army Lile in a Black Regiment, 196. 34 Higginson, "Negro Spirituals," 694. 35 Higginson, Army Lile in a Black Regiment, 41. 36 Ibid., 39-41. 37 Higginson, "Negro Spirituals," 687. 129

This was certainly not the liberal religion of self-culture and moral reform action that

Higginson had come to expect of himself.

Higginson began hearing spirituals and shouts as products ofan active culture when he tried to contextualize them as cultural descendents of Methodist hymns or

Anglo-American ballads. Higginson was, like Kemble, concerned with tracing the

European origins ofslave songs?8 He attributed some melodic and textual similarities to his beloved Scottish and Scandinavian ballads, but sometimes had to fruitlessly "wonder where they obtained a chant ofsuch beauty" before recognizing the freedmen's melodic originality.39 In the essay "Camp Diary," he described a ring shout where he heard

"negro-Methodist chants," and although he became determined to investigate if one of the freedmen's "favorite songs .. .is not, 1 think, a Methodist tune," he later admitted, "1 cannot find [the song] in the Methodist hymn books.,,4o He continued to identify songs in terms such as "a sort ofIrish yell," "Scotch songs," "some Romaic song," "operatic and rollicking," and "indigenous ...Border Minstrelsy.'.41 As he sought to connect African-

American music to a larger moral and musical culture, however, he eventually heard an original culture that evidenced its own potential.

Original music, though mysterious, provided Higginson with signs of agency in

African-American culture. The "wild" ring shout was for Higginson, as it had been for the Port Royal educators, a local practice that maintained its own identity independent of his supervisorial mission. He heard spontaneous shouts almost nightly in his camps, sometimes jotting down lyrics and phrases, and he observed that this "rhythmical

38 As we will see in Chapter Five, this search for European origins was also a driving concern for William Francis Allen when he edited Slave Songs o{the United States in 1867. 39 Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment, 16. 40 Ibid., 13-18, and 167. 41 Looby, ed., 190, and Higginson, "Negro Spirituals," 685-691. 130 barbaric dance" was composed of "incomprehensible Negro Methodist, meaningless, monotonous, endless chants, with obscure syllables." The ring shout, he said, was the cultural product of a "mysterious race of grown-up children," and he processed it as something "half pow-wow, half prayer meeting," allowing only that the public, participatory ceremony was "half bacchanalian, half devout." However, unlike the educators, who could not apply their educational mission to the shout without belittling it,

Higginson did not discourage his men from shouting. Possibly, he tolerated the ring shout because he recognized the motivational value of the mystical "spell" cast by "rhythmical excitement," and because this indigenous stimulation always provided his men with

"general sighing and laughter." 42

In place of a docile religion of resignation, local assertion of musical content and practice indicated choice and action. Ifunclear on the origins of slave hymns and the merits of the ring shout, Higginson was astute enough to know the difference between

Northern minstrel songs and actual Sea Island music. He described an incident in which some freedmen from Savannah, "who were comparatively men of the world, [who] had learned some of the 'Ethiopian Minstrel' ditties, imported from the North," came to his camps and tried to teach these tunes to his men. He reported with some pride that these songs "took no hold upon the mass," who preferred their local hymns and folk tunes. This distinction between Northern minstrel tunes and native favorites also made Higginson aware of something that had caught Forten's attention, that is, the fact that the freedmen's pride in their own music made that music more emotionally convincing. His men showed their disinterest in Northern hymns and "sang reluctantly, even on Sunday, the long and

42 For extended descriptions of shouts, see Looby, ed., 56-57,218; Higginson, "Negro Spirituals," 685-686; and Higginson, Army Lile in a Black Regime11l, 13-14. 131 short metres of the hymn-books." Instead, he observed, the men were "always gladly yielding to the more potent excitement oftheir own "spirituals".43

Poetic and melodic originality, the ring shout, and the assertion of local preference made it possible for Higginson to look past spiritual fatalism and began hearing slave music as a site ofAfrican-American agency. Spirituals and shouts became places where Higginson heard arguments supporting his military mission of proving the worthiness offormer slaves to assert their own self-development. He made a point throughout his journal and post-war essays to advocate the empirical worthiness ofblacks as soldiers, praising them for courage, discipline, enthusiasm, and especially temperance.

The spiritual singing and chanting of his men had been part of a useful system ofmorale during wartime, and in his post-emancipation reform action of promotion, this music became more than a poetic object in an untamed natural landscape. "Such a picturesque medley of fun, war, and music," Higginson recalled of the spiritedness and discipline of marching, "I believe no white regiment in the service could have shown.,,44 He came to recognize that local and spontaneous music, by fostering a participatory sense ofmoral duty, was in effect a spiritual and intuitive form ofsocial activism.

With the educators at Port Royal, Higginson assumed the mission of stewarding the freedmen into their new status as moral citizens. Charlotte Forten knew ofHigginson through abolitionist circles in the North, and had seen him drilling with his original 45 Anglo-American regiment in Massachusetts in the summer of 1862. She admired

43 Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment, 173. 44 Ibid., 102. 45 The Higginson Grammar School in Salem, Massachusetts, where Forten had received her secondary education, had its origins in a writing school that had been founded by one of Higginson's ancestors, Nathaniel Higginson, in 1712. Although this detail is absent in the biographical material on Thomas Wentworth Higginson that I consulted for this chapter, I confirmed my suspicion ofthis connection by consulting Duane Hamilton Hurd, ed., History o{E.'ssex County, Massachusetts: With Biographical 132

Higginson's zealous commitment and believed his moral authority made him, "of all

fighting men, the one best fitted to command a regiment ofblacks.,,46 As she was hearing her own opportunities to work with Port Royal's freedmen through music, Forten also became particularly impressed by Higginson's paternalistic interest in his new charges.

"His soldiers are warmly attached to him," she reported ofthe First South Carolina men, and "he evidently feels towards them all as ifthey were his children." She praised

Higginson for his dedication, and for his embodiment of"the grand, knightly spirit of the

olden times," a trait that he demonstrated through "pity for the weak, [and] chivalrous devotion to the cause of the oppressed." 47

Higginson's assumed role as a champion of the freedmen extended to moral action on behalf oftheir musical culture. His "knightly spirit" was evident in his handling ofa piano found in an abandoned plantation house on a supply raid with his men up the

St. Mary's River. Entering the house after chasing away Confederate pickets, Higginson

and his men found "most articles of furniture were already" plundered. Ordered to bum

the abandoned picket house, he experienced a tangible flash ofinsight regarding a

potential future for the freedmen's educational development:

The only valuable article was a piano-forte, for which a regular packing box lay invitingly ready outside. I had made up my mind, in accordance with the orders given to naval commanders in that department, to bum all picket stations, and all villages from which I should be covertly attacked ... and as this house was destined to the flames, I should have left the piano in it, but for the seductions of

Sketches ofMany ofIts Pioneers and Prominent Men, Volume 1 (Philadelphia: J. W. Lewis & Company, 1888), 130-131. My best efforts to trace the family lineage suggest that Nathaniel was a great-great-great uncle of Thomas Wentworth, and the great grandson of the Reverend Francis Higginson, who was the original Puritan Higginson to settle in Salem in 1629. The Writing School, as it was first named, was originally a Latin grammar school for boys, but as the institution expanded, its affiliates eventually included the Higginson Grammar School for girls, named after Nathaniel, which opened in 1827. http://books.google.comlbooks?id= 1506AOAAIAA1&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs ge summary r &c ad=O#v=onepage&g&f-=false (accessed September 8, 2012). 46 Charlotte Forten, "Interesting Letter from Miss Charlotte L. Forten," The Liberator 32 (Dec. 19, 1862), 51. 47 Forten, "Life on the Sea Islands, Part I," Atlantic Monthly 13 (May 1864),589. 133

that box. With such a receptacle all ready, even to the cover, it would have seemed like flying in the face of Providence not to put the piano in it. I ordered it removed, therefore, and afterwards presented it to the school for colored children at Fernandina.

Driven by moral reform activism, seduced by a packing box, and inspired by his discovery of the importance of music in the lives of the freedmen, Higginson equated his rescue ofthe piano with divine providence. This moral action demonstrated his transcendentalist connection of personal spiritual striving with moral public action. In

Higginson's remembrance, this violation of strict orders on behalf of the cultural future of his charges was a sign of his own self-culture and commitment to a higher morallaw.48

He continued seeking examples of this same moral commitment in local music.

Along with their paternalism, Higginson and the Port Royal educators not surprisingly shared an appreciation ofpatriotic musical expressions. The collective display of civic moral agency that Higginson craved was evidenced most dramatically at the Port Royal celebrations ofJanuary 1st, 1863, for the Emancipation Proclamation. Recalling the ceremony in Army Life in a Black Regiment, Higginson painted a picture that conjoined creative spontaneity, patriotic activism, poetic symbolism, and greater spiritual and social purpose. When Higginson was solemnly presented with an American flag, the African-

Americans in attendance began to slowly and spontaneously sing "My Country 'Tis of

Thee." Higginson recalled his own purposeful role in allowing the galvanizing declaration of freedom to continue:

48 Higginson, Army Li/e in a Black Regiment, 59-60. Pianos and organs are among the more frequently mentioned items in reports ofpost-occupation destruction to the Port Royal plantations and towns, and Higginson must have felt this incident reflected a unique opportunity. See Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal/or Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), as well as the Forten, Towne, and Ware sources quoted in Chapter Three. 134

It gave the key-note of the whole day. The very moment the speaker had ceased, and just as I took and waved the flag, which now for the first time meant anything to these poor people, there suddenly arose, close beside the platform, a strong male voice (but rather cracked and elderly), into which two women's voices instantly blended, singing, as ifby an impulse that could no more be repressed than the morning note ofthe song sparrow, "My Country, 'tis of thee/Sweet land of liberty, Of thee I sing!" People looked at each other, and then at us on the platform, to see whence came this interruption, not set down in the bills. Firmly and irrepressibly the quavering voices sang on, verse after verse; others ofthe colored people joined in; some whites on the platform began, but I motioned them to silence. I never saw anything so electric; it made all other words cheap; it seemed the choked voice of a race at last unloosed. Nothing could be more wonderfully unconscious; art could not have dreamed ofa tribute to the day ofjubilee that should be so affecting; history will not believe it ...the first day they had ever had a country, the first flag they had ever seen which promised anything to their people, and here, while mere spectators stood in silence, waiting for my stupid words, these simple souls burst out in their lay, as ifthey were by their own hearths at home! When they stopped, there was nothing to do for it but to speak, and I went on; but the life of the whole day was in those 49 unknown people's song.

The unplanned patriotic performance was "the life ofthe whole day," Higginson recalled, and the natural "art" of the song was both "electric" and like "the morning note of the song sparrow." He proudly reported that the freedmen sang "firmly and irrepressibly." In this public experience of "wonderfully unconscious" participation in moral and social duty, Higginson could finally hear the freedmen's musical initiative as a form of spiritual culture that linked nature and poeticism with collective moral activism.

Just as importantly for Higginson, he could locate his own actions within the moral landscape the patriotic ceremony, pointing out that he reverentially silenced the

Northerners who tried to join the singing, and that he forwarded the ceremony himself by finally delivering a speech. Forten recalled that the spontaneous African-American anthem "sent a thrill through all our hearts" and that Higginson in particular had been

49 Higginson, Army Life In a Black Regiment, 30-31. 135

"deeply moved by it."sO Laura Towne wrote that Higginson "made happy use ofthis incident" in his vigorous speech that followed. 51 Moved by the imminent realization of abolitionist goals, Higginson experienced the Emancipation Proclamation ceremony as a moment when his moral agency - and the moral agency ofthe freedmen - had progressed from individual consciousness to active moral purpose. African-American music, at this historic Emancipation Day celebration, provided Higginson with the evidence he had been seeking ofthe freedmen's capacity for self-culture.

Higginson later had a more private encounter with local music that, like the

January 1st, 1863 event, similarly provided him with a philosophically satisfying demonstration ofthe freedmen's agency and self-culture within a larger creative process.

In his "Negro Spirituals" essay, he recalled a discussion with a local oarsman on the topic of the "mysterious" origins of spirituals. The discussion seemed to reveal the very immanence and accessibility of the creative spirit:

I always wondered ...whether [spirituals] had always a conscious and definite origin in some leading mind, or whether they grew by gradual accretion in an almost unconscious way. On this point I could get no information, though I asked many questions, until at last, one day when I was being rowed across from Beaufort to Ladies' Island, I found myself, with delight, on the trail of a song. One of the oarsmen, a brisk young fellow, not a soldier, on being asked for his theory of the matter, dropped out a coy confession. 'Some good sperituals,' he said, 'are start jess out 0' curiosity. I been a-raise a sing, myself, once.' My dream was fulfilled, and I had traced out, not the poem alone, but the poet. I implored him to proceed ...Then he began singing, and the men, after listening a moment, joined in the chorus, as if it were an old acquaintance, though they evidently had never heard it before.52

50 Forten, "Life on the Sea Islands, Part Il," Atlantic Monthly 13 (June 1864),669. 51 Laura Towne, Letters and Diary o.lLaura M Towne, Written From the Sea Island, ofSouth Carolina 1862-1884 (1912; reprint, Negro Universities Press, 1969),98. 52 Higginson, "Negro Spirituals," 692. 136

By locating unconscious creation in the curious and active individual, Higginson heard his own transcendentalist activism. He observed that both the individual poet and the public participants took agency, adding to the creative process with intuitive familiarity.

By observing how that individual flash of self-culture "took roof' in a collective and public expression, he could extend his romantic poet's fascination with mystical origins into a more radical political sense that the freed slaves "had now asserted their humanity" in a shared culture of spiritual participation. 53

The music Higginson heard in his regimental camps, on the march, at the 1863

Emancipation Proclamation celebration, and in his inquiry with "the poet," gave him connections for understanding the spiritual and public self-culture of African-Americans, and for demonstrating the moral worthiness ofthat culture to his post-war audience. By hearing this music as an element of the natural landscape, a form ofnatural religion, and a product of self-willed civic participation, Higginson could respond to the local music in terms of his transcendentalist and activist ideals. During the war, Higginson looked for agency in his soldiers' music; after the war, he made that music part ofhis moral argument. The spirituals, shouts, and spontaneous songs ofthe freedmen - and their tenacity in performing this music - became for Higginson evidence oforiginality, individual duty to society, and a higher moral purpose. When Higginson continued to champion the moral reform agenda of freedmen's rights during the early tenuous phases ofpost-war Reconstruction, he found it comforting to recall that the "essentially poetic" music ofthe First South Carolina Volunteers had been a moral and active music - the music ofa "Gospel army."

53 Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment, 73. 137

"Civilized in its Character": William Francis Allen and Racial Thinking

As surely as grounding in spiritual, musical, and civic imperatives drove the reactions ofabolitionists to slave music, so too did the conditioning ofracial thinking.

Moral actions towards slave music allowed abolitionists to work through inherited contemporary notions ofracial essence, racial origin, racial worth, and racial order.

Reformers who wrote about slave music were certainly morally and politically antislavery, and were also possessed ofgenuine humanitarian instincts. However, they were nonetheless influenced by Northern biases regarding ethnic hierarchy, paternalistic duty, and the innate "natural" traits that were presumed to be separate and distinct in

African-Americans and Anglo-Americans. Their interest in the moral value ofthe freedmen's musical culture became for these reformers an indicator of the moral superiority of their own Northern and particularly Anglo-American culture.

In this hearing space, racial thinking united with spiritual, musical, and civic concerns. Frances Kemble and the Port Royal educators were interested in stewarding a repressed race away from its "savage" ethnic past and current race-based social caste towards the superior self-culture of American republicanism. Lucy McKim, in the midst ofher aesthetic open-mindedness and enthusiasm, still deemed slave music a "valuable expression" in part because it embodied the "character and life of the race which is playing such a conspicuous part" in what she proudly distinguished as "our history."l

Thomas Wentworth Higginson studied slave music because he wanted to hear his

"mysterious race of grown-up children" assert themselves in the debate over the innate

1 Lucy McKim. "Songs ofthe Port Royal 'Contrabands'," Dwight's Journal ofMusic 21, (November 8, 1862),254-255. 138 value ofAfrican-American soldiers.2 By including the cultural expressions of a

"mysterious race" in the moral space of"our history," the Anglo-American abolitionists at Port Royal had begun to broach the racial issues ofthe post-war era of emancipation.

In 1867, while Higginson was writing wartime memoirs in which he applied liberal religion to local music in an argument favoring African-America potential,

McKim's dream ofpromoting the value of the freedmen's musical culture was also becoming a reality. That year, along with two prominent Port Royal Gideonites, William

Francis Allen and Harriet Ware's brother Charles Pickard Ware, McKim had been working on the ambitious Slave Songs ofthe United States music collection.3 This groundbreaking document in the history ofAmerican music publishing and ethno­ musicology brought an unprecedented l36 native plantation melodies from across the

South to the attention ofthe Northern public. McKim's earlier publishing efforts had encouraged Northerners such as Laura Towne to collect slave songs at Port Royal. In the fall of 1867, a full collection was made possible through Allen's scholarly renown and the publishing connections of Lucy's new husband, Wendell Phillips Garrison, the literary editor at the recently launched cultural periodical the Nation. 4

Though the Slave Songs ofthe United States project spoke for Lucy's dedication to promoting slave music as well as her success at enrolling others in her vision, the text

2 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 13. 3 William Francis Allen and Charles Pickard Ware were cousins, and both were grandsons of the pioneering Unitarian divine Henry Ware. Charles and Harriet were children of Ware's son, the influential Unitarian clergyman and hymn writer Henry Ware lr. 4 Dena J. Epstein first argued that McKim was the "intellectual catalyst" behind the book's publication, "who helped bring together a diverse group of collaborators," in her article, "Lucy McKim Garrison, American Musician," Bulletin ofthe New York Public Library, Vol. 67, No.8 (1963), 543-545. She offers additional evidence that McKim was "the first person with both the necessary ability and the sustained enthusiasm to bring the project to fruition" in Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University of lllinois Press, 1977), 318-320, 322, 327-330. 139 ofthe document spoke primarily for the racial and social views of William Francis Allen.

As the collection's principal editor, Allen wrote the introduction and the annotation for individual songs, corresponded with contributors, and worked directly with Wendell

Garrison to assemble proofs and complete logistics ofproduction. Charles Pickard Ware was much less involved, but was listed as an editor due to his contribution ofthe largest single collection ofsongs. Allen's text quoted heavily from McKim's 1862 letter to

Dwight's Journal ofMusic and from Higginson's recent Atlantic Monthly article, as well as from the letters of other contributors, but the race-conscious editorial perspective of the collection was his.

Allen approached slave music with a clear sense of Anglo-American superiority and a compulsion for race-based classification. His introduction to Slave Songs ofthe

United States consistently discussed the freedmen's music in terms ofnatural ethnic capabilities, cultural origins, and moral and civic worth. However, as studiously as he tried, Allen could not clearly delineate a hierarchy separating "civilized" influence from

"barbaric" originality:

The chiefpart of the negro music is civilized in its character - partly composed under the influence of the whites, partly actually imitated from their music. In the main it appears to be original in the best sense of the word, and the more we examine the subject, the more genuine it appears to be. In a very few songs... strains of familiar tunes are readily traced; and it may easily be that others contain strains of less familiar music, which the slaves heard their masters sing or play. On the other hand there are very few which are of an intrinsically barbaric character, and where this character does appear, it is chiefly in short passages, intermingled with others of a different character. Such passages may be found ...[which] may very well be purely African in origin. Indeed, it is very likely that if we had found it possible to get at more oftheir secular music, we should have come to another conclusion as to the proportion of the barbaric element.5

5 William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, Slave Songs of'the United States (New York: A. Simpson and Co., 1867), vi-vii. 140

Did Allen considered African-American music civilized, barbaric, or both? Confused

about character and origin, Allen turned to the popular nineteenth century romanticization

of African-Americans as "a race of remarkable musical capacity." But he qualified his

praise for this perceived natural talent, explaining that African-Americans were "very teachable" if their musical efforts were "associated with the more cultivated race" of

Anglo-Americans.6 Slave music and the freedmen were worthy, that is, as long as they had been, or could be, Anglicized.

What threads ofcontemporary racial thinking did William Francis Allen manifest as editor ofSlave Songs ofthe United States? What moral agenda did Allen bring to the

project, and what part did race play in that agenda? How did Allen's scholarly treatment

of a marginalized ethnic musical culture forward his goals for the emerging racial order?

Contemporary concerns over the transition to a biracial society led Allen, through his music analysis, to situate African-American worth in the context ofAnglo-American

superiority. Allen's moral agenda brought him down both of the primary paths of reform

action towards music - that is, changing/improving and sharing/promoting - which we

have seen in this study. Like Kemble and the Port Royal educators, Allen believed that

African-American musical culture should be improved according to European standards.

At the same time, like McKim and Higginson, he wanted to promote slave music as an

important historical document, and he was compelled to praise its originality and intrinsic worth. He worked to categorize slave songs according to regional traits and ethnic origins, and his scholarly treatment allowed him to process the past and future of the

freedmen according to the worth of their musical culture. By anchoring his editorial

6 Allen, Ware, and Garrison, Slave Songs, viii. 141 concerns in complicated racial biases, Allen was able to highlight merit as well as recommend improvement.

Complex and contentious European and American perceptions ofAfricans and other "savages" had been forming over centuries of contact and relationship. In order to understand how racial thinking drove Allen and other abolitionists who wrote about slave music, it is important to understand how thoroughly certain race-based debates dominated nineteenth-century American discourse. Abolitionist critiques ofslave music echoed four related themes ofprevalent nineteenth-century racial thinking. First, these critiques wrestled with the ongoing quasi-scientific debate over essentialism versus environmentalism, that is, character predetermined by biologically immutable racial qualities versus character shaped by the experienced conditions of slavery or civilization.

By hearing both in slave music, Allen and others also entered a second contemporary debate, over the worth of African-Americans as citizens and brethren in a Euro-American society and culture. The paternalism ofantislavery reformers resulted in reliance on a third mode of racial thinking, a type of thought that George M. Frederickson refers to as

"romantic racialism."? This sentimental assignment ofinnate musicality and religiosity to

African-Americans drew on romantic idealizations of the "noble savage," and contrasted these stereotypes with images of Anglo-Saxon intellect and vigor. Finally, Allen and other abolitionists who heard slave music resolved musical and linguistic puzzles - and their own doubts about a fleeting past and uncertain future - with assertions of the superiority ofAnglo-Saxon character and culture.

7 George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image In The White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York, Harper & Row: 1971); 101-107, 126. 142

Scientific models of classification dominated racial thinking in Europe and

America in the eighteenth century, and their credibility as science forwarded the essentialist view of fixed racial traits. The skull measurement system of German academic Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, which he used for his 1775 publication On the

Natural Variety ofMankind, gave the weight ofscience to popular taxonomies that ranked human "types" according to physical beauty. Thomas Jefferson, the most prominent intellectual in the early Republic, added an essentialist argument for intellectual hierarchy to the discussion ofrace classification. According to Jefferson, differences between whites and blacks are "fixed in nature." He explained that "blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances," were in their present state "inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind .. .in reason much inferior. .. [and] in imagination they are dull."s In the antebellum period,

American anthropologists such as Samuel Morton, Josiah Nott, and Swiss-born naturalist

Louis Agassiz furthered the argument for fixed racial hierarchies with theories of polygenesis, or separate origins of separate human species. When Charles Darwin's 1859 publication On the Origin ofSpecies eventually dispelled notions of fixed racial traits with its theory of evolution and adaptation over time, essentialist thinking had already grounded many Americans in some sense ofracial differences.9

The essentialist view was perfect for proslavery apologists as well as those in the divided North who distrusted the effects of free blacks on orderly society. Inspired by the

8 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State o/Virginia, 1781,264-270, http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modengipublicl1eNirg.html (accessed November 12, 20 II). 9 For more on the interrelated development of scientific and social race theories in Europe and early America, see Nell Irvin Painter, The History oj'White People (New York, London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2010); Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History 0/an Idea in America (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963); and Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968). 143 exclusionary use ofthe term "free white person" in the 1790 Naturalization Act, many white Americans, as well as new immigrant groups struggling to gain inclusion in the new republic, saw blacks as naturally unfit to participate in free society. As Matthew

Jacob Frye notes in his study of immigrants, "citizenship was a racially inscribed concept at the outset ofthe new nation.,,10 David R. Roediger has shown how the antebellum free labor and free soil movements, which appealed to both Northern working class and capitalist interests, depended on views ofinnate African-American inferiority. "Chattel slavery stood as the ultimate expression of the denial of liberty," Roediger notes, but rather than faulting the institution, republican virtue instead "suggested that long acceptance ofslavery" on the part of the enslaved race "betokened weakness, degradation and an unfitness for freedom." For established old-stock Northerners as well as immigrants of the aspiring European working class, the "black population symbolized that degradation" ofnatural liberty, and according to the logic of essentialism, that defect was innate. II

In contrast, the environmentalist argument, seeking to find causes ofracial degradation in corrupt institutions, found its ideological support not in science or social theory, but in new movements in American Protestantism. With the waning of the

Calvinist doctrine ofpredestination and the rise of new post-Enlightenment religious doctrines of free will, many Americans increasingly understood degraded and unworthy slave traits to be unnatural and imposed. Popular middle-class evangelicalism, with its roots in mass public revivals and rural camp meetings, and rational New England

10 Matthew Jaeobson Frye, Whiteness ofa Different Color: European immigrants and the Alchemy olRace (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1999). II David R. Roediger. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making oflhe American Working Class (London, New York: Verso, 1991),66. 144

liberalism, with its roots in Harvard ethics and German philosophy, both took the biblical record ofman's single origin as evidence of the universal brotherhood of man.

Evangelicals and liberals alike believed that racial brotherhood was further supported by

Christ's message ofinclusivity. In the 1830s, revivalism and a subsequently elevated moral high ground fueled the rise ofabolitionism in America, particularly in New

England. Radical immediatists such as William Lloyd Garrison as well as moderate gradualists such as William Ellery Channing all derived from the Gospel an argument that the immoral conditions ofslavery, not immutable racial essences, were the cause of the unworthy traits society perceived in and assigned to African-Americans. 12

Though comfortable with spiritual egalitarianism, Northern abolitionists also preached benevolence of the strong towards the weak and adopted a paternalistic sense of their own powerful moral role in relation to slaves. Such paternalism, often evident in slave music critiques, continued to cast African-Americans as inferior in their present

state, but upheld the environmentalist's refutation of scientifically verifiable racial

permanence. Frederickson's notion of "romantic racialism" explains how intellectual and reform-minded Euro-Americans often "acknowledged permanent racial differences but rejected the notion ofa clearly defined racial hierarchy." By defining race not in cold

scientific terms but in Romantic terms ofuniquely powerful traits and ancient national origins, romantic racialism allowed antislavery reformers to celebrate "the moral and spiritual pre-eminence of the Negro." However, with that projection of simplistic piety

12 Though guilty of a tone of moral superiority, Garrison consistently referred to Africans as spiritual and social brethren, and was an ardent advocate not only of emancipation but also ofequal civil rights for blacks. See his selected writings in George M. Frederickson, ed., William Lloyd Garrison (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968). Channing preached that "he who cannot see a brother, a child ofGod, a man possessing all the rights ofhumanity, under a skin darker than his own, wants the vision ofa Christian." William Ellery Channing, Slavery (Boston, 1835), http://www. vcu.edulengweb/transcendentalismlauthors/wechanning/slaveryl.html (accessed March 5, 2012). 145

and natural creativity, romantic racialism also led reformers "to accept a stereotype of the

Negro which made him a kind of anti-Caucasian," that is, non-assertive, non-industrious,

and non-intellectual. Through the paternalistic ordering ofromantic racialism,

Northerners contrasted African femininity and submission with Anglo-Saxon authority and aggression in a way that ironically "tended to undermine the notion of white moral responsibility." By restating natural hierarchy, the very beneficence "upon which the

abolitionist movement had originally placed such heavy reliance" became the source of racial differentiation. 13

Even enlightened religious intellectuals couldn't escape the lure of hierarchical race ordering. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the former Unitarian preacher who became a

Transcendentalist maverick and the preeminent intellectual in mid-nineteenth century

America, was a staunch proponent ofAnglo-Saxon exceptionalism. Nell Irvin Painter has recently argued that Emerson defined the ideal, independent American according to "the

Anglo-Saxon myth of racial superiority" - which he inherited from the Scottish Romantic writer Thomas Carlyle - in order to set his old-stock class above incoming immigrant populations. "Emerson saw himself as a New Englander, virtually as an Englishman, and

therefore as a 'Saxon'," she explains, detailing how works such as his 1856 book, English

Traits, championed the purity ofNorthern European origins and contributed the understanding that "to be American was to be Saxon." Emerson, like Channing, was a moderate opponent ofslavery most interested in personal moral consciousness and self- determination. "Emerson's disapproval ofslavery in no way reflected racial

13 Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, 10 I-I 07, 126. Willie Lee Rose similarly noted this contradiction in antislavery paternalism: "Charity was not a popular word with abolitionists ..the implications ofpaternalism and condescending benevolence it conveyed were antithetical to that equality of man upon which their ultimate arguments were laid." Rose, Rehearsal For Reconstruction, 158. 146 egalitarianism," Painter notes of Emerson's gradual entry into the cause. Abolitionism eventually "connected to his sense of civilization" because he "considered slavery a relic ofbarbarism that was bad for civilization," that is, "bad for his kind of white people.,,14

Debates over fixed nature versus social conditioning, debates over the social worth ofAfrican-Americans, liberal religion, romantic racialism, and Emerson's popular advocacy ofAnglo-Saxon superiority were all currents of contemporary racial thinking that, in 1867, informed William Francis Allen's editorial perspective in Slave Songs of the United States. As part of the second wave ofGideonites who came to Port Royal during the war, the Harvard Divinity School graduate participated in the humanitarian and educational mission we saw in chapter three. His reform agenda in this context involved, as it had for other educators, stewarding the improvement of the freedmen. In contrast, during the 1870s and 1880s, when Allen held the post of Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, he wrote at length on themes ofAnglo-Saxon purity and the

Teutonic origins ofAmerican society.IS His introduction and annotation in the Slave

Songs compilation was an early exercise for his developing scholarly views of Anglo-

American superiority. 16

14 Nell Irvin Painter, The History ofWhite People (New York, London: W. W. Norton and Company, 20 I0), 162-168, 186. Painter also reports that English Traits was a hit with abolitionists, and that Charlotte Forten in particular was an enthusiastic admirer of the book. 15 Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History ofan Idea in America (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963),100-103. Allen, Gossett reports, was an ardent admirer of Tacitus, the Roman historian, and that he published an edition of Tacitus' Germania, a work that celebrated the Northern tribes. Allen wrote that through Teutonic influence, "the English ... preserved more completely their primitive free institutions and the democratic spirit. .. [and] are the foremost representatives and pioneers of this movement." 16 Allen was not alone among reformers in holding strict views of racial superiority. His cousin and eo­ editor Charles Pickard Ware expressed a much cruder sense of racial superiority in letters he wrote from Port Royal, with comments such as "I find myself often using nigger idioms, especially in conversation with them," and, on the topic of free labor, the assertion that "you at the North know nothing about niggers, nothing at all." Most abolitionists, however, did not use the word "nigger." Pearson, Letters From Port Royal,90. 147

Driven by his scholarly training, Allen consistently sought Euro-American origins of melodies and words and was left to concede local originality when his searches were indeterminate. He expressed concern that the songs, as historically and racially based cultural "specimens," were on the verge of disappearing in a post-emancipation society.

For Allen, this condition demanded the moral intervention of preservation. Finally, like

Higginson, he looked to local music for signs of African-American agency. He understood both the evolution of slave music towards European standards and the freedmen's own desire to move past slave music to be indications of African-American potential to conform to Anglo-American models of self-determination.

William Francis Allen was born on September 5, 1830, in Northborough,

Massachusetts, into the family of the Reverend Joseph Allen and Lucy Clarke Ware, the eldest daughter ofthe controversial Unitarian professor of divinity Henry Ware. Allen displayed an early inclination towards vocal music, and as a student and young teacher, he developed above-amateur skills on piano and flute as well as the typical New England intellectual's interest in German romantic composers and Scottish folk songs. He began divinity studies at Harvard in 1847, and after graduation, worked for three years as a private tutor for a wealthy family in New York. In 1854, he commenced a series of travels and studies in Germany, Italy, and Greece, where he studied classical philology and ancient history. Allen's cousins, Harriet and Charles Ware, had been among the first groups ofeducators to arrive at Port Royal in the spring of 1862, and November of 1863,

Allen joined them as an agent of the Educational Commission for Freedmen. He remained as a teacher on Northern land speculator S. Philbrick's plantations until July of 1864. Allen returned to the region as a superintendent of schools after the war. By the 148 time of the publication ofthe Slave Songs collection, he had begun teaching at Antioch

College in Ohio, and in August of 1868, he joined the history faculty at the University of

Wisconsin, where he remained until his death in 1889. 17

Allen opened the Slave Songs collection with a combined dose ofessentialism and romantic racialism. He continued the almost inescapable Euro-American assumption of innate African musicality, coupled with the dual equation of that trait to both genius and barbarism. He reminded his readers that the "musical capacity of the negro race has been recognized for so many years," and he praised the "musical genius" of the "half­ barbarous people" and the innate "creative power from which [that genius] sprang.,,18

Allen heard verification ofhis romantic essentialism in "the voices of the colored people," which he determined "have a peculiar quality that nothing can imitate." He believed this peculiar quality applied to all freedmen, as he perceived that "the intonations and delicate variations ofeven one singer cannot be reproduced on paper.,,19

When detailing lyrical variations in the hymn "Sabbath Has No End," Allen spoke of the

"odd transformations which words undergo in their mouths" with an assumption that such corruptions were endemic.2o The "peculiar quality" ofthe singing, for Allen and others, was an essential trait of the African race.

In spite ofhis respect for "innate" African-American musicality, Allen was also careful to link Sea Island music to Northern romanticism and paternalism. Local music,

Allen reported, was sought out as an exotic curiosity by the Port Royal reformers. "When

17 My biographical data on Allen has been drawn from Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War, 304-310; Gossett, Race: The !listory ofan Idea in America, 100-103; and Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsalfor Reconstruction, 265-267, 282-286, 299. I~ Allen, Ware, and Garrison, Slave Songs, i-ii. 19 Ibid., iv-v. 10 Ibid., 69. 149 visitors from the North were on the islands," he noted of the wartime contact, "there was nothing that seemed better worth their while," that is, better suited to their racially romantic instincts, "than to see a 'shout' or hear the 'people' sing their 'sperichils.'" The native "people" were naturally and attractively musical, but Allen stressed that the Port

Royal missionaries and educators deserved praise for "discovering the rich vein ofmusic that existed in these half-barbarous people." As this study has shown, he was correct in crediting Northern reformers for publicizing the music ofthe Port Royal freedmen.

However, by linking his praise for African-American musicality to an emphasis on its discovery by Anglo-Americans, Allen portrayed that historical process as a victory of romantic and paternalistic agency.21

Assured of a connection between Northern morality and African-American potential, Allen further explained that the "creative power" inherent in slave music was sacred, not secular. This romantic assumption ofnatural and profuse black religiosity was common among abolitionists in part because it confirmed their own moral mission. Allen, like other reformers in this study, also heard hymns as "civilized" and folk songs as

"barbaric" because that distinction convinced him of the innate morality ofthe freedmen.22 Allen sought to convince his readers as well by insisting that he knew of

21 Allen, Ware, and Garrison, Slave Songs, i-ii. 22 Kemble, Forten, Towne, Ware, and Higginson all suggested or directly stated their sense that the majority of African-American music - certainly the most worthwhile African-American music was religious, while they considered secular songs marginal or altogether unworthy. McKim was alone among the reformers in this study in not putting this distinction into writing. She praised the song "Poor Rosy, Poor Gal" for its practical flexibility as both a folk song and a hymn. See Lucy McKim, "Songs of the Port Royal 'Contrabands' ," Dwight's Journal ofMusic 21, (November 8, 1862), 254-255. In contrast to the common white perception of the predominance ofreligious music among blacks, Lawrence Levine has argued in his study of black folk culture that "neither the slaves nor their African forebears ever drew modernity's clear line between the sacred and the secular." Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Alro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom, (Oxford, London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977),30. For more on the interconnectedness of sacred and secular black music, see also Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., The Power oj'Black Music: Interpreting Its History./f-om Alrica to the United States (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 15-26. 150

"very few [local songs] which are ofan intrinsically barbaric character," and by explaining that barbaric sounds only occurred "in short passages, intermingled with others of a different character.,,23 This "different character" was the higher character of natural African religiosity, and for Allen, its apparent dominance in the music suggested that it was also dominant in the race.

As a reformer, Allen was pleased to hear an abundance ofthe freedmen's

"intrinsically" religious character. As a scholar, however, he was less convinced of the universality of this character. Unable to completely categorize "negro character" by region or religion, Allen sought to justify his awareness of coexisting sacred and secular

African-American traits in favor oftheir religious side by quoting one ofhis contributors from Delaware, the Reverend John L. McKim - Lucy's uncle, who, as we saw in chapter two, had sent her a crude reproduction ofa slave song in 1862. John McKim had remarked in his letter to Allen that "we must look among their non-religious songs for the purest specimens ofnegro minstrelsy." The freedmen, his letter indicated, "have themselves transferred the best ofthese [secular songs] to the uses oftheir churches.,,24 If the freedmen were using secular songs in churches, Allen would have had trouble making distinctions, and might have been reminded of similar borderless conditions in Northern musical culture.

Allen addressed this confusion between sacred and secular tunes by situating barbaric secular music outside the environment of his study. He defended the character of his subjects by insisting that he "never fairly heard a secular song among the Port Royal

23 Allen, Ware, and Garrison, Slave Songs. vii. 24 Ibid., vii 151 freedmen, and never saw a musical instrument among them.,,25 Proud that religious music dominated at Port Royal, he reported that "in other parts of the South, 'fiddle-sings,'

'devil-songs,' 'com-songs,' 'jig-tunes'" and other debased styles were much more

"common.,,26 He described one southwestern folk song, "I'm Gwine to Alabamy," as an example of "the strange barbaric songs one hears upon the Western steamboats.,,27 Moral music was innate to the Port Royal freedmen, he argued, but savage music was innate elsewhere in the South.

Ultimately, Allen found this regional separation of fixed sacred and savage traits unsatisfying. "Ifwe had found it possible to get at more [local] secular music," he regretted of the Slave Songs collection's focus on sacred Sea Island music, "we should have come to another conclusion as to the proportion of the barbaric element" at Port

Roya1. 28 Allen didn't know what that proportion was, but sensed that it was just as innate as the religious element. He also felt compelled to admit the limitations of his study. The song collectors and the editors, he reported, related to the music makers "chiefly through the work of the Freedmen's Commission, which deals with the serious and earnest side of the negro character." By admitting that his study largely involved the positive "side" of primarily local "negro character," he implied that a more widespread negative side also existed.29

25 Allen, Ware, and Garrison, Slave Songs, x. 26 Throughout the Slave Songs collection, Allen compared versions of the same songs that varied across the South, accurately attributing the similarities to the "constant intercourse between neighboring plantations... [and] the sale of slaves from one to another." But he maintained that Port Royal songs had an indigenous and impenetrable piety, noting that "it is surprising how little [regional sharing] seems to have affected local songs." Allen, Ware, and Garrison, x-xi. 27 Ibid., 89. 28 Ibid., vii. 29 Ibid., x. Higginson similarly worked to reconcile the dichotomy of black morality and debasement by splitting the difference between essentialism and environmentalism, when he described African-Americans 152

If his attempts to assign essential "negro character" according to region were incomplete, his more compulsive efforts to identify ethnic musical sources proved even more inconclusive. He observed that songs from Tennessee and Florida "are most like the music of the whites," but he could not so easily make this distinction on the Sea Islands. 3o

Certain of the superiority of Euro-American culture, Allen consistently took pains - as

Higginson had - to search for the roots of Port Royal spirituals in Methodist hymns.

Religious revivals had in fact brought slaves into contact with Methodist hymns, and

Allen was on solid scholarly ground pursuing this connection. But his search was

3 continually frustrated by incomplete and contrary evidence. ) He determined that the lyrics of spirituals were "in a large measure taken from Scripture, and from hymns" which "we find abundantly in Methodist hymn-books." He confessed, however, that

"with much searching" in Methodist hymnals, "I have been able to find hardly a trace of the tunes.',32 The preeminence of European culture in African spirituals, he sensed, was not absolute.

When he couldn't prove conclusive Anglo-American origins, he finally -like

Higginson - credited originality to local music makers. Allen reported that in the hymn

"King Emanuel," the "words and melody [bear] all the marks of white origin," but he admitted that he had not "been able to find it in any hymn-book, and therefore retain it, as as "a simple and lovable people, whose graces seem to come by nature, and whose vices by training." Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment, 14. 30 Allen, Ware, and Garrison, Slave Songs, xx. 31 Allen apparently ignored one crucial piece of evidence in his search for white origins. "So far as I can learn," he reported, "the shouting is confined to the Baptists; and it is, no doubt, to the overwhelming preponderance of this denomination on the Sea Islands that we owe the peculiar richness and originality of the music there." Allen, Ware, and Garrison, Slave Songs, xv. The obvious question, therefore, is why Allen did not pursue the roots of spirituals in Baptist hymnals. His text offers no evidence to address this question, other than this vague association of the denomination with "originality." I suspect that his obsession with Methodist rather than Baptist hymns was a reflexive prejudice based on inherited stereotypes about white cultural origins. In other words, Allen must have believed that he was supposed to find proof of white origins in Methodist hymnals. 32 Ibid., ix. 153 being a favorite at Port RoyaL,,33 Noting that the second section ofone Port Royal spiritual, "Go in the Wilderness," was a familiar white Methodist hymn, Allen conceded that the black version "may be the original" simply because "the first part is very beautiful, and appears to be peculiar to the Sea Islands.,,34 The musical characteristics of the hymn "On To Glory" tempted Allen "to doubt its genuineness as a pure negro song," but he admitted that the hymn "was sung twenty-five years ago in negro camp meetings, and not in those of the whites.,,35 Could black hymns, Allen wondered, have been an influence on white hymns? The local hymn "Just Now," he observed, "is now, in a somewhat different form, a Methodist hymn." If this African-American tune was "now," in 1867, a Methodist hymn, that meant that it had not been part ofthe Anglo-American hymnals in the past.

After his inconclusive searches in Anglo-American hymnbooks, Allen knew that slave music had some ancient origins. His awareness ofAfrican-American originality drove him to romantically seek those ethnic national origins. He accurately deduced that the ring shout was a "relic ofsome native African dance, as the Romaika is ofthe classical Pyrrhic.,,36 He also relayed E.S. Philbrick's observation that local boat songs were related to "the boatmen's songs [Philbrick] had heard on the Nile.,,37 He accepted that the ring shout was an avenue in which the freedmen were "searching for religion" ­ rather than dismissing it as "dangerous" as Laura Towne had - and he also compared the

33 Allen, Ware, and Garrison, Slave Songs, 26. 34 Ibid., 14. 35 Ibid., 66. 36 Ibid., xiv. The Romaika is a modem Greek dance, and the Pyrrhic is a metrical foot in classical poetry consisting of two unaccented syllables. 37 Ibid.. viii. 154 participants to "ancient bacchantes," implying a connection to natural holiness and spiritual revelation.38

This romantic sense of African origins helped him - as it had helped Kemble,

McKim, and Higginson to understand the difference between native forms and

Northern minstrel songs. Calling minstrel songs "spurious imitations, manufactured to suit the somewhat sentimental taste ofour [white] community," Allen made the connection that "the fact that [minstrel songs] were called 'negro melodies' was itself a tribute to the musical genius of the race.,,39 As we saw in chapter two, minstrel songs,

Methodist hymns, and plantation melodies had in fact been interwoven over time.

However, Allen's distaste for minstrelsy and his failure to prove absolute Methodist sources led to a romantic isolation of the freedmen's original music according to racial authenticity and innate genius.

Awareness ofAfrican origins and originality may have complicated Allen's racial agenda of asserting Anglo-American preeminence and inherent local piety, but that awareness also suited his moral agenda of stewarding black potential in the dawning biracial society. First, Allen confirmed his moral agenda by identifying innate morality in the freedmen's musical culture. The two most popular local songs, "Roll, Jordan, Roll" and "Poor Rosy, Poor Gal," were examples of moral and civic worth that ranked with the

"noblest" music in terms of "dignity and favor.,,4o He quoted an anonymous letter to the

Nation, from May 30, 1867, in which the contributor credited the freedmen for their faith in the "Biblical warrant for shout" and its "well-defined intention of 'praise. ",41 Allen

38 Allen, Ware, and Garrison, Slave Songs., xii. 39 ibid., i. 40 ibid., 1,7. 41 ibid., xii-xiii. 155

was also proud that the freedmen had the common sense to regard some secular boat

songs "as mere nonsense.,,42 Military men and cotton agents looked for signs of innate

courage and initiative in the freedmen; Allen and other Gideonites looked for signs of

innate piety, and often found it in the freedmen's music.

Secondly, the freedmen's originality inspired Allen - as it had Higginson - to identify signs of agency in their music. Somewhat to his chagrin, this agency was most evident in the control the freedmen took over native music. African-American agency was ofcourse part of Allen's reform agenda, but his inability to pin down the "utterly un-

English sound" oflocal music caused him "despair.,,43 The Slave Songs collection featured a section ofAnglicized directions for singing, but Allen warned curious

Northern musicians that "however much latitude the reader may take in all such matters, he will hardly take more than the negroes themselves do.,,44 Musical initiative was, once

again, portrayed as a natural trait of the race:

Neither should anyone be repelled by any difficulty in adapting the words to the tunes. The negroes keep exquisite time in singing, and do not suffer themselves to be daunted by any obstacle in the words. The most obstinate Scripture phrases or snatches from hymns they will force to do duty with any tune they please, and will dash heroically through a trochaic tune at the head of a column of iambs with wonderful skill. We have in all cases arranged one set of words carefully to each melody; for the rest, one must make them fit the best he can, as the negroes themselves do.45

With this warning about "heroic" vocal unpredictability, Allen seemed to be both relishing and relinquishing the "un-English" character of African-American music. The

42 Allen, Ware, and Garrison, Slave Songs 22. 43 Ibid., v, xxiv. 44 Ibid., xlvii-xlviii. 45 Ibid. iv. 'Trochaic" refers to a trochee, or a metrical foot in classical poetry consisting of one accented syllable followed by one unaccented syllable. An iamb is the opposite, that is, one unaccented syllable followed by one accented syllable. 156 freedmen, he observed, would do as they pleased. Struggling with multiple irregular time signatures in the hymn "God Got Plenty 0' Room," Allen decided it was a "hopeless undertaking to attempt to restore the correct time" and instead transcribed the irregularities because they were "a characteristic specimen of negro singing.,,46 Allen's contrast ofan assumed "correct" time with "characteristic" irregularity indicated that the freedmen's musical agency defied both his scholarly control and his racial superiority.

The freedmen also made choices about what they sang. Allen often regretted the post-war difficulty collectors experienced in convincing freedmen to sing slave songs, which they were rapidly abandoning due to "the dignity that has come with freedom.,,47

African-American dignity was the goal of antislavery reform, but independent choice and a rejected past also signified a break from the abolitionist mission of paternalism. Allen responded to this musical independence with what he considered to be the moral intervention of preservation. Allen believed slave music "should not be forgotten and lost," that it should instead "be preserved while it is still possible" because the songs were valuable "relics ofa state ofsociety which has passed away.,,48 The urgency for musical preservation was not to steward independent choice or dignity for freedmen, but rather to simply illustrate the "feelings, opinions, and habits of the slaves.,,49 This perspective was strikingly close to the rationale of the Southern Lost Cause, as it allowed a dominant race to romanticize a past of racial subordination and dependence. If Allen understood that slave music symbolized pain and perseverance - as opposed to the contentment argued by the Lost Cause - he also understood that the "state of society which has passed away"

46 Allen, Ware. and Garrison, Slave Songs 106. 47 Ibid.. xiv. 48 Ibid., iii. 49 Ibid., xii. 157 was the past of abolitionist righteousness. Because slave songs were products of a repressed racial past, hearing that past allowed abolitionists like Allen to maintain their moral mission.

Allen was not alone in hearing the loss of slave songs as a break from a romanticized past ofabolitionist superiority. The Reverend John McKim, in his letter that

Allen quoted, also noted that because slavery'S "plan oflabor has now passed away," so had "the songs, I suppose, with it," and that "opportunities for respectable persons to hear them are rather few."so Another Gideonite, T. Edwin Ruggles, responded in 1866 to

Charles Pickard Ware's request for his song collection by reporting that the freedmen

"sing but very little nowadays to what they used to. Do you remember those good old days," Ruggles mused, "when the Methodists used to sing up in that cotton-house at

Fuller's? Wasn't it good?" Ruggles noted that the freedmen "never sing any of [the old songs] at the church, and very few in their praise-meetings." The abolitionist victory had unfortunately led to this loss of musical culture, Ruggles believed, because the freedmen at last were "all American citizens now."SI The urgency of preservation, then, was to ensure that "respectable persons" could continue listening to the past.

Slave music suited the pre-emancipation paternalism of Allen and other reformers, while musical agency and the freedmen's rejection of their musical past confounded his post-emancipation racial superiority. He resolved this conflict by asserting the authority ofwhite standards and continued paternalism in the new biracial society. Allen found evidence for the continuation of Anglo-American superiority in choices the freedmen made to copy European music. Describing the Louisiana folk song

so Allen, Ware, and Garrison, Slave Songs, xiii. 51 Quoted in Pearson, Lettersfrom Port Royal, 328. 158

"Musieu Bainjo" as "the attempt of some enterprising negro to write a French song," he reported with approval that the composer was "certainly to be congratulated on his success."S2 Even though the spirituals were "going out ofuse on the plantations," he observed that they had been "superseded by [a] new religious style of music," that is, the more staid "lining-out" ofhymns favored among Anglo-Americans. Allen quoted an article by Harriet Beecher Stowe, in which Stowe had described the freedmen's new hymns as "closely imitated from the white people." Stowe and Allen believed the freedmen considered Anglo-American hymns "the more dignified style ofthe two...being a closer imitation ofwhite, genteel worship."s3 The freedmen, in other words, were not only rejecting the sounds of slavery, but were more importantly for Allen conforming to the sounds ofAnglo-American society.

This perception that African-American agency could foster conformity to established Anglo-American society brought Allen comfort regarding the emerging social order. If the "musical genius ofthe race" could become "civilized in its character," then so could the freedmen. African-American music confirmed Allen's beliefthat essential racial traits existed, and yet it also confirmed his faith that the environmental effects of freedom in Anglo-American society would convert the freedmen into worthy citizens.

Anglicized music was a marker of that new social worth. Just as Kemble wanted to turn boat songs into an opera, Allen similarly heard slave music as an unrefined cultural form with the potential to progress towards a refined state under the example ofEuro-

American music:

52 Allen, Ware, and Garrison, Slave Songs, 113. 53 Stowe's article appeared in Watchman and Reflector in April of 1867. Quoted in Allen, Ware, and Garrison, Slave Songs, xx. 159

The greater number of the songs which have come into our possession seem to be the natural and original production of a race of remarkable musical capacity ... [a race which is] very teachable, which has been long enough associated with the more cultivated race to have become imbued with the mode and spirit of European music - often nevertheless, retaining a distinct tinge oftheir native Africa.54

The "distinct tinge" of racial originality, Allen insisted, would necessarily remain

subordinate to the aesthetics of the "more cultivated race," just as the freedmen would necessarily be expected to follow the lead of their Northern benefactors. The potential for

conformity led Allen - as it had led Forten, Towne, and Ware - to advocate the educational correction of a "savage" musical culture. Regarding the unrefined, hybrid dialect heard in spirituals, Allen believed "the establishment of schools will soon root up

all these original growths.,,55 Improving music according to Euro-American standards had become, once again, a way for abolitionist reformers to help African-Americans move forward.

Contemporary racial thinking had trained Allen to romantically appreciate the

worthiness of the "essential" musical and religious traits of the freedmen, and had also

taught him to emphasize those traits according to Anglo-American standards. Like other reformers in this study, Allen wanted the former slaves to evolve into their own state of moral and civic agency. What he did not want was to lose his own paternalistic racial

superiority in the process. The fact that the freedmen took agency over their own musical

culture satisfied his abolitionist moral agenda, but confounded his expectations of racial hierarchy. Their "wonderful skill" and "remarkable musical capacity" merited promotion

because, as examples of worthy and inherent African-American traits, they fit Allen's

54 Allen, Ware, and Garrison, Slave Songs, viii. 55 Ibid., xxxi. 160 romantic racialism. He cared most of all that the freedmen could become "civilized" because they were in essence "very teachable." The question that remained for Allen was what their musical agency, and their musical conformity, said about their place in the emerging biracial society. With this question unanswered, Allen took reform action to promote and preserve the freedmen's African-American past while imagining their

Anglicized future. 161

Conclusion

Abolitionists who heard slave music in the antebellum and Civil War periods heard moral reform arguments that encouraged them to take moral reform actions related to that music. Although they sometimes found this music to be "indescribable," they also found that it demanded their involvement. The abolitionists in this study "heard" moral reform in slave music when that music triggered "moral" responses based on their reform agendas. As they sought their own moral perfection and self-improvement, they became involved in the moral perfection and self-improvement of slaves and freedmen. Music that sounded "barbaric" might have suggested replacement of that music with pious New

England hymns; music of"striking originality" might have suggested publication and promotion of that music in the North. Earlier listeners had casually dismissed slave music as "noise," but abolitionists either acted to benevolently correct that noise or to direct attention to the moral value of beautiful and active music. Listening to African-American music offered these abolitionists more than a chance to experience the exotic culture of the suffering, foreign people for whom they had crusaded. The listening experience more importantly offered these abolitionists a chance to connect that musical culture to their own moral culture. They became morally involved with slave music because they

"heard" opportunities for enacting personal and social betterment.

Abolitionists became more involved with African-American music during the years leading into emancipation as imperatives for antislavery reform action increased.

As America moved closer to the new biracial, post-slavery society the abolitionists had fought to create, listening conditions increasingly made the experience of hearing slave music a summons to moral action. William Francis Allen answered his own question 162 when he wondered, in his introduction to the Slave Songs ofthe United States collection in 1867, "why no systematic effort [had] hitherto been made to collect and preserve

[African-American] melodies" before that time. I The answer was evident in the fact that

Allen was himself finally making that effort after the war. The publication of an entire collection of African-American melodies had been made possible by the sectional conflict and the humanitarian mission at Port Royal. Additionally, such a collection had been made possible because the moral rhetoric of abolitionism and the fluidity of

American musical culture had trained the reformers prior to their contact with slave music at Port Royal - to be interested, sympathetic, and active listeners.

By taking action towards slave music, abolitionists brought together antebellum traditions of spiritual reform and shared social music. Religious arguments and moral appeals against slavery - drawn from Evangelicalism as well as liberal religion - had convinced abolitionists that slavery was a national sin that demanded cleansing, that antislavery was a higher moral law, that African-Americans were spiritual brethren, and that benevolence was a sign of morally advanced self-culture. Just as reformers had been taught to take action to effect spiritual and social progress, they had also been taught that music served a moral and civic purpose. As moral imperatives against slavery increased during the antebellum years, Americans also experienced a growing national culture of shared music. Patriotic festivals, church music, minstrel theatre, opera, and sentimental popular songs connected diverse segments ofsociety and all served to remind abolitionists of a national striving for collective moral improvement. "Emerging as they did from the Protestant tradition," Vicki Eaklor notes of the abolitionists' connection of

J William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, Slave Songs oj'/he United Stales (New York: A. Simpson and Co., 1867), vi-vii. 163 their spiritual and musical cultures, "nothing was more obvious to them than music's potential to uplift (and possibly convert)." As they sought racial egalitarianism and the

"perfection of humanity," abolitionists came to believe that "nothing was more natural than to utilize music to aid that process.,,2 By connecting music with moral arguments and social duties, abolitionists were compelled to take active involvement with slave music when they finally heard it on the Sea Island plantations.

As we have seen, the actions taken by abolitionists to become "morally" involved with slave music followed two primary paths, namely, efforts to change or improve the music, or efforts to promote the value of the music. The abolitionist summons for benevolent paternalism led reformers to assume stewardship of moral development in slaves and freedmen, and changing or improving music - for the benefit of its makers was seen as part of that benevolent guardian's role. Frances Anne Kemble became involved with slave music because she strove to teach slaves self-culture during her three-month stay on her husband's Georgia plantations in 1838 and 1839. When she heard his slaves sing self-demeaning lyrics, "nonsense" songs, and melancholy songs, she discouraged them, and instead praised melodies she thought might be improved to the level of opera. Charlotte Forten, Laura Towne, and Harriet Ware similarly intervened in the freedmen's musical culture when it conflicted with their educational mission at Port

Royal. When these educators heard the "uncivi1ized" African ceremony known as the

"ring shout," they discouraged and belittled it, and instead taught their students patriotic

Northern anthems. Kemble and the educators thought that "nonsense" and "savage"

2 Vicki Eaklor, American AntislavelY Songs: A Collection and Al1a~vsis (New York, London, Westport, eN: Greenwood Press, 1988), xxiii. 164

music hindered progress towards civilized self-culture, and as responsible guardians, they sought to redirect their charges to music of a higher moral and cultural order.

On the other hand, some abolitionists heard moral reform possibilities in the sharing of slave music for its own cultural merit. Ifchanging slave music was an action

intended to improve the lives of African-Americans, than promoting and preserving the music was an action intended to improve Northern impressions of slaves and freedmen.

During the 1850s and 1860s, the powerful classical music critic John S. Dwight involved the cultured Northern readership of his publication, Dwight's Journal ofMusic, in discussions of African-American music. Lucy McKim, a young abolitionist and professional musician who spent only three weeks at Port Royal, transcribed and published melodies of slave songs, encouraged others to do the same, and eventually helped produce the full-length Slave Songs ofthe United States collection. After the war, activist Thomas Wentworth Higginson included an essay-length discussion of spirituals in wartime memoirs that advocated the moral worth of the freedmen. William Francis

Allen, editing the Slave Songs collection, suggested that African-American music, and its makers, were making progress towards a "civilized" cultural and social status.

My analysis of antebellum and wartime reports of slave music has focused on how the inherited moral culture of abolitionism combined with the musical culture of mid-nineteenth century America to encourage abolitionists to hear slave music as a call to social action. Moral involvement with slave music became a new way of "hearing"

African-American music and a new way of taking reform action. One must wonder, however, what affect this new method of"moral" listening had on later Anglo-American actions towards African-American music. Jon Cruz and Dena Epstein have suggested that 165

the efforts to document slave songs at Port Royal during and after the Civil War marked

the early origins of the academic disciplines of folklore and ethnomusicology, and that as

those disciplines developed, listening became more scientific and less sympathetic.3

Further research is needed to determine the extent to which traditional moral imperatives

continued to motivate folklorists and musicologists of the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries. Abolitionists had been driven by a national crisis to hear slave music

as part ofa moral reform argument, and they had treated that music as part of their reform

program. Later generations offolklorists and musicologists mayor may not have

approached their scholarly actions with the same urgency for moral reform.

Taking action to improve or promote slave music allowed abolitionists to express

the moral urgency of their generation. They "heard" moral reform when they connected

African-American musical culture to their own traditions of moral activism. When

abolitionists were compelled to take moral action in relation to African-American music,

that music became "meaningful" music for Anglo-American listeners. If these reformers

had only, as Cruz suggests, remotely engaged with slave music "to refresh their half-

critical, half-romantic sensibilities," only to wash their "disenchantment with modernity"

in a dose of"human authenticity," then they might not have found it so important to

become so involved with the music.4 With this study, I have attempted to suggest instead

that they did become involved as they moved from listening to action. The actions they

took after listening were meant to help African-Americans. Through this involved

listening, those actions helped abolitionists fulfill their own goals as moral crusaders.

3 Jon Cruz, Culture on the lHargins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise ofAmerican Cullllra/Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 164-188; Dena Epstein, Sin/iii TUlles and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977),303-341, 347. Cruz, Cllltlire 011 the Margins, 190. 166

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