Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

I

On New Year’s Day in 1863, Thomas Wentworth Higginson was stationed in the Sea Islands of South Carolina, presiding over a large group of Unionist whites and formerly enslaved black workers who had gathered to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation. A prominent prewar abolitionist, Higginson had recently become commander of one of the first black regiments in the Civil War, the First South Carolina Volunteers. At the emancipation ceremony that Higginson had arranged, a local planter who had converted to abolitionism read the great document. There was a presentation of colors. Then, unexpectedly, as Higginson started to wave the flag, an elderly black man near the platform broke into song: “My country, ’tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty.” Two women joined, followed by others in the crowd. Higginson could hardly contain his emotion; everyone started to cry. “I never saw anything so electric,” he wrote in his diary; “it made all other words cheap, it seemed the choked voice of a race, at last unloosed; . . . art could not have dreamed of a tribute to the day of jubilee that should be so affecting; history will not believe it.”

Higginson had arrived in the Sea Islands five weeks earlier. He was part of a wave of northern whites who, during the turmoil of the war, experienced their first sustained encounters with southern slaves. As Higginson later recalled, one thing that this group mostly shared was their view of black people as “intensely human.” This differentiated them sharply, in Higginson’s mind, from southern slave owners, who had long claimed to understand their slaves better than northerners but tended in practice to see them (according to Higginson) as “merely a check for a thousand dollars, or less, from a slave auctioneer.”

Still, even though abolitionists tended to be relatively free from prejudices that were strictly racial in nature, they often harbored their own prejudices of culture and class. So while they never equated blackness with a permanent condition of barbarism, they did sometimes see black people as ignorant or backward, in need of education and guidance as they made their first steps in freedom. The result was a variety of responses, sometimes sensitive and sympathetic, sometimes condescending or patronizing, often a complex combination. 

With all its complications, this sudden mass encounter between newly freed slaves and white people who saw them as “intensely human” opened a fresh possibility in the study of slavery: the formal study of slave culture.

At the time such a thing did not exist. This neglect obviously owed a good deal to slavery and bigotry. The largely illiterate society of black slaves was not seen at the time as contributing anything to American culture as it was usually understood. Slaves seemed to have no role in driving the progress of civilization toward its pinnacle in white European and American society — aside from, in the minds of southerners, performing the important role of propping it up. Writings on slavery up to that point had focused more on its political, economic, and social effects, especially its effects on whites, and abolitionists had catalogued slavery’s physical cruelty and deprivation on blacks. 

The neglect of slave culture also reflected a broader lack of attention given to oral “folk” cultures, which tended to be either taken for granted or considered unimportant at a time when certain conceptions of cultural hierarchy and social evolution still held sway. White southerners did not become interested in black music or culture until after the Civil War, when they felt a strong wave of nostalgia for old plantation life. Some black music was known in the North before the war, but it was mostly minstrelsy. 

White southerners and northern travelers surely would have seen and heard the cultural practices of enslaved blacks in the South, but such observations usually did not make it into print. “I believe they have no history or a very short one,” one sympathetic southern white woman wrote, in connection with the slave songs, just after the Civil War; her mother had made a small collection around 1840, but it was never published. To the extent that antebellum Americans discussed slave songs, and slave culture more generally, it was primarily to argue about whether they provided evidence of contentment or sorrow.

That changed when northern abolitionists, missionaries, soldiers, and teachers encountered newly freed slaves during the war. Almost from first contact, slave music received significant attention. When Reverend Lewis Lockwood arrived as a missionary to the Union post at Fort Monroe, Virginia, in early September 1861, he took down notes about the music that he heard from southern slaves who had fled there. His initial report, written the day after he arrived, included the first written record of the song “Go Down, Moses.” By December, Lockwood had the full text of the song, which was published in the New York Tribune and the National Anti-Slavery Standard: 

The Lord by Moses to Pharaoh said: 

 “O let my people go!

If not, I’ll smite your first-born dead, 

 Then let my people go!”

O! go down, Moses

Away down to Egypt’s land,

And tell King Pharaoh,

To let my people go!

The song caught on with the abolitionist crowd. Henry Ward Beecher’s Brooklyn congregation started to sing it, and sheet music went on sale at the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society office in Philadelphia.

By that time, reports were also starting to come in from the Sea Islands, which became by far the most important site for sustained encounters between northern whites and newly freed blacks during the war. The Navy had secured a beachhead there very early, in November 1861, as part of the larger effort to blockade the Confederacy. White planters fled the islands. They tried to convince their slaves to go with them, but the slaves — thousands of them — thought better of it and stayed put. These people technically became contraband of war — and, soon, part of a vast experiment in education and free labor centered on the islands around Port Royal, including Hilton Head and St. Helena. Abolitionist groups in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia raised money and recruited volunteers to serve as teachers, missionaries, and plantation superintendents.

In Philadelphia, the city’s Port Royal Relief Committee was headed by James Miller McKim, who also helped run the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society office where “Go Down, Moses” was for sale. McKim was an abolitionist of some distinction. Back in 1849, he had been the one to open the box containing Henry “Box” Brown, the enterprising slave who shipped himself from Richmond to Philadelphia, and a decade later McKim and his wife had helped John Brown’s wife bring Brown’s body back north from Harpers Ferry. In early 1862, McKim quickly raised more than five thousand dollars to send to Port Royal. A few months later, the committee decided to dispatch McKim himself to provide a report on conditions there. McKim brought along his eighteen-year-old daughter, Lucy, as his assistant. The McKims had raised their children as staunch abolitionists. Lucy’s younger brother Charles Follen McKim — later the architect of New York’s Pennsylvania Station and other masterpieces of neoclassical modernism — was named for a German-born abolitionist who had died in a shipwreck off the Atlantic coast in 1840. In the 1850s, Lucy briefly attended and then taught at Eagleswood, an experimental school in New Jersey run by the abolitionist couple Theodore Dwight Weld and Angelina Grimké. 

James and Lucy McKim arrived at St. Helena Island on June 8, 1862 and stayed for three weeks. Within a day, Lucy felt that she was seeing slavery with fresh eyes. “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,” she wrote to her mother. “Mine have been most profoundly.” Even Garrisonian extremism seemed like a mild response now that she had seen the conditions of slavery for herself. “How lukewarm we have been!” she exclaimed. “How little we knew!” 

She began to jot down notes about everything she saw. She and others in the Sea Islands seem to have been motivated by a desire to record what they could before the evidence of slavery was swept away by change. In one letter, Lucy described the typical layout of a plantation’s “Quarters — or ‘Nigger-houses’” for a friend. “These were built in two long rows, facing each other, with a row of beautiful trees . . . down the center,” she explained. Every cabin had a small vegetable garden and fig tree out back. Inside, the cabins were “inconceivably small & filthy. With but few exceptions, the occupants lie on the floor, in bundles of rags, that have been reduced to one common dirt color.”

But what captured Lucy’s attention most were the songs. Like many people who came to Port Royal, she started copying down the tunes and the words just days after her arrival. Unlike many others, she remained entranced by the songs even after her return to Philadelphia in July. A trained musician who had already spent a few years teaching piano, she was better prepared than most people to respond sensitively to them. She asked her friends in Port Royal to keep sending her examples, and she began to prepare a few piano arrangements for publication. “Poor Rosy, Poor Gal,” the first in her series of “Songs of the Freedmen of Port Royal” — and the second published slave song arrangement in the United States — came out in October: 

Before I spend one day in hell,

  Heab’n shalla be my home.

I sing and pray my soul away.

  Heab’n shalla be my home.

  Poor Rosy, poor gal!

  Poor Rosy, poor gal!

  Poor Rosy, poor gal!

  Heab’n shalla be my home.

She sent a copy to Dwight’s Journal of Music along with an introductory letter — which, when it was published in the journal in November, became the first article ever to describe the musical style and technique of the songs. 

Beyond their purely musical interest, she noted, the songs were also “valuable as an expression of the character and life of the race which is playing such a conspicuous part in our history.” She went on to provide a perceptive reading of what the songs revealed: “The wild, sad strains tell, as the sufferers themselves never could, of crushed hopes, keen sorrow, and a dull daily misery which covered them as hopelessly as the fog from the rice-swamps,” she wrote. “On the other hand, the words breathe a trusting faith in rest in the future.” 

Lucy’s second arrangement, “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” appeared in January, just after Emancipation Day:

March, angels, march!

March, angels, march!

My soul am rise to heav’n Lord,

Where de heav’n’e Jording roll.

Little chillen sittin’ on de Tree ob Life,

Where de heav’n’e Jording roll,

Oh! Roll, Jording, roll, Jording, Roll, Jording, roll!

She seems to have had a plan to publish four more, but life intervened. Young men to whom she had romantic attachments died in the war, and she soon entered into a courtship with Wendell Phillips Garrison, the son whom William Lloyd Garrison had named for his longtime abolitionist ally. She spent her time teaching piano and waiting for Wendell to find a steady job so they could get married.

Meanwhile Thomas Wentworth Higginson had arrived in Port Royal, called there in November 1862 to take command of the First South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment raised from the freedpeople on the Sea Islands. He got the position because he was one of the most fiery abolitionists in America. As a young man in Massachusetts, he spurned the law because he saw it as nothing but a system for the protection of property. Eventually trained as a minister — he dropped out of Harvard Divinity School because he was dissatisfied with the professors, then returned a year later — he took a position in Newburyport, where he advocated abolitionism and temperance. Neither stance went over well in a town with a rum factory, and he was asked to resign. 

After 1850, Higginson upped the ante. He became involved in the Underground Railroad and also helped to form Boston’s Vigilance Committee, which tried to protect alleged fugitive slaves from being recaptured. In 1854, he bought the axes for an ill-fated attempt to free the alleged fugitive Anthony Burns from Boston’s Federal Courthouse. In the scrum, he got hit on the chin and acquired a scar that he carried for the rest of his life; but a federal marshal was killed, an event that Higginson later recalled with perhaps a hint of pride (and certainly little sadness) as the first casualty of the Civil War. His next act was to take rifles and ammunition to Kansas, where he learned about the violent exploits of John Brown in the battles going on there between slaveholders and free-soilers. A few years later, when Brown needed help planning and funding his raid on Harpers Ferry, the radical Higginson was one of the so-called Secret Six who provided assistance. After the raid went awry, he was the only one of the six courageous or foolhardy enough to spill his secret; he also raised money for Brown’s defense and even planned an armed raid to rescue Brown before Brown learned of the scheme and called it off.

Higginson redirected his energy into an oblique defense of Brown mounted in a series of deeply researched articles on slave insurrections — Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, maroons in Jamaica and Surinam — which appeared from 1860 to 1862 in a new magazine called the Atlantic Monthly. He also prepared for war. He did not volunteer initially because his wife was ill, but by 1862 he could no longer resist — particularly when he got the invitation to serve with black soldiers in South Carolina, a position he saw as the fulfillment of Brown’s legacy. “As many persons have said,” he wrote on board the ship taking him south, “the first man who organizes & commands a successful black regiment will perform the most important service in the history of the War.”

Higginson thought he already knew all about slavery, but several months in the Sea Islands with his men showed him that he still had plenty to learn from the slaves themselves. At one point his black corporal, Robert Sutton, led the regiment up the St. Mary’s River to the plantation from which he had escaped, where the woman of the house remarked with some disdain that she had once known Sutton as “Bob.” Sutton took Higginson to the plantation’s slave jail for a look at the chains and stocks; in their presence Higginson felt himself choking, as if he couldn’t swallow or breathe. He realized that Sutton had a “more thorough and far-reaching” understanding of the slavery problem than “any Abolitionist.” That sense continued to grow as Higginson got to know his men better and talked to them about their experiences. “It was not the individuals, but the ownership, of which they complained,” he later recalled. “That they saw to be a wrong which no special kindnesses could right. On this, as on all points connected with slavery, they understood the matter as clearly as Garrison or Phillips.”

Higginson trained his men and led them on sorties during the day, and at night he listened to them as they gathered around their campfires to sing “these incomprehensible Negro Methodist, meaningless, monotonous, endless chants,” as he wrote in his journal after about ten days, “with obscure syllables recurring constantly & slight variations interwoven, all accompanied with a regular drumming of the feet & clapping of the hands, like castanets.” There was more than a little primitivism in this initial response, a sense that the songs were barbaric relics beneath the attention of cultured people. But soon Higginson learned to love the music, looking forward to it every night, running out of his tent when he heard a new song, writing down all the lyrics he could decipher (sometimes with pencil and notebook hidden in his pocket) and calling on Sutton to help fill in the gaps. “When I am tired & jaded in the evening nothing refreshes me more immediately than to go & hear the men singing in the Company streets,” he wrote after about ten months in South Carolina. He was particularly moved by the “graceful and beautiful” song “I Know Moon-Rise”:

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 walk in de graveyard, I’ll walk through de graveyard,

  To lay dis body down.

I’ll lie in de grave and stretch out my arms;

  Lay dis body down.

I go to de judgment in de evenin’ of de day,

  When I lay dis body down;

And my soul and your soul will meet in de day

  When I lay dis body down.

“What ages of exhaustion these four words contain,” Higginson marveled at the repetition of “lay dis body down.” “Rivers of tears might be shed over them.”

This was not idle talk; Higginson knew real artistry when he saw it. In addition to his abolitionist exploits, he was one of the most prominent literary men in America. He had studied French with Longfellow at Harvard and would later serve as poetry editor of The Nation for twenty-five years. Earlier in 1862, not long before he took command in the Sea Islands, a young woman from Amherst named Emily Dickinson had sent him, unsolicited, a few of her poems; recognizing their merit, he wrote back and kept up a correspondence with her for the next two decades. After her death, her family gave her poems to Higginson, who arranged for their first publication — today probably his chief claim to fame.

He lasted only a few months in South Carolina. He was wounded in an upriver raid in July 1863, spent a month recovering in Massachusetts, and then contracted malaria soon after his return. Back in New England, Higginson started writing articles about his experience for the Atlantic, which were eventually collected in 1870, along with some of his journals and letters, in his book, Army Life in a Black Regiment. One of the articles, which appeared in June 1867, discussed “Negro Spirituals.” Higginson included the lyrics to three dozen songs as well as an account of how the songs were composed, which he had learned on a boat ride from Beaufort to Lady’s Island. His oarsman recalled a time when he had started a new song while carrying loads of rice. “De nigger-driver, he keep a-callin’ on us,” the oarsman explained. “Den I made a sing, just puttin’ a word, and den anudder word.” His song was called “The Driver.” When he started singing it there on the boat, the other black men quickly caught the tune and joined in for the chorus even though they had never heard it before. The spontaneous composition showed how individual improvisation worked in concert with a vast reservoir of communal culture.

Like McKim, Higginson speculated about the role the songs — and religion more generally — played in slave culture. One thing that had surprised him a great deal in the Sea Islands was that while slavery struck him as even more brutal than he had imagined, the enslaved people themselves did not seem to be brutalized by it. He wondered for a while about this paradox, and eventually solved it with the songs he had heard. “They were a stimulus to courage and a tie to heaven,” he believed. “By these they could sing themselves, as had their fathers before them, out of the contemplation of their own low estate, into the sublime scenery of the Apocalypse. There is no parallel instance of an oppressed race thus sustained by the religious sentiment alone.” Now that slavery was gone, he wrote, “history cannot afford to lose this portion of its record.”

By chance, there had been a historian in the Sea Islands with Higginson, and he was also interested in the songs. His name was William Francis Allen, and he arrived in November 1863. A Massachusetts abolitionist, he was sent by the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society, tasked with teaching one hundred fifty freedpeople spread across three plantations on St. Helena Island. He had studied philology and classics at Harvard and ancient history at Göttingen; after the war, he ended up at the University of Wisconsin, where he became a mentor to the great American historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who always considered Allen the finest scholar he ever met. Like McKim, Allen was also an enthusiastic amateur musician who could sing by sight and play flute and piano. Walking through the woods one day in South Carolina, for example, he heard a bird singing a trill of notes that reminded him of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony.

Allen’s reactions to the slave south mirrored those of McKim and Higginson. He was struck above all by the humanity of the people he met. Abolitionist rhetoric often emphasized the degrading aspects of slavery, but Allen discovered that the freedpeople were “much, very much, less degraded than I expected.” For him, that threw the evil of slavery into even sharper relief. “They seem human beings, neither more nor less,” he wrote after a few days in the Sea Islands. “It seems trite and common-place to say so, but I must say that the wickedness of slavery never seemed so clear as when I saw these people (about 240 on this plantation), so entirely human as they appear, and considered how they have been treated, and how little reason there is that they should be selected from all mankind for this awful abuse.”

Throughout his eight-month stay, Allen remained impressed by the lack of degradation (a word he used often) among the former slaves he encountered, even as he learned more about the abuse they had endured. He was staying on what had previously been John Fripp’s thousand-acre plantation, where he taught school in the big house. Among the formerly enslaved people still living there, Fripp had a reputation as a “kind master.” “Still,” Allen wrote, “the whipping-post stands within twenty feet of the school-room window (which used to be the drawing room) — a sprawling Asia-berry tree, leafless now and completely covered with long gray moss. It looks weird enough. Mrs. F. used to stand at the window to see the flogging.” Among other masters, even less “kind,” there were tales of “putting a hot poker in a girl’s mouth, and sprinkling red pepper in her eyes.”

In addition to stories of brutal punishments, Allen recorded everything he saw and heard: the arrangement of the Quarters, the location of the slave cemetery, the provisions the slaves had received (a peck of corn a week; some meat and eight yards of cloth twice a year). Trained in philology, he also paid attention to the grammar and the vocabulary of the local dialect. “It is really worthwhile as a study in linguistics,” he wrote after a few weeks. He kept gathering examples during the rest of his stay, and at the end of the war he wrote an article “to put them on record” before they vanished in the changed conditions of freedom. 

Above all, Allen recorded the songs. He arrived in the Sea Islands late enough that he was already primed to appreciate slave music. A few months before his trip, he read an article called “Under the Palmetto,” by the Unitarian minister Henry George Spaulding, which included some song lyrics and melodies that Spaulding had encountered during his own trip to Port Royal. Allen had started to sing some of the songs at home on his own. He first heard the singing for himself on the Sunday after his arrival, standing outside a packed Praise House in the Quarters. All he heard at first was a standard hymn, “Old Hundred,” but it was the style of singing that truly fascinated him, with the song “maintained throughout by one voice or another, but curiously varied at every note, so as to form an intricate intertwining of harmonious sounds.” He added, “no description I have read conveys any notion of it.” He started to copy down all the lyrics and tunes he could.

Allen went back to Massachusetts in the summer of 1864, then returned to South Carolina at the end of the war to serve as assistant superintendent of schools in Charleston. That summer, he started to write dispatches on conditions in the South for a new magazine called The Nation, which Lucy McKim’s father, James, had just cofounded as a venue for antislavery writers to discuss the problems facing the country after the war. The McKims probably had a hand in ensuring that the magazine’s first literary editor would be Wendell Phillips Garrison, Lucy’s fiancé; once he had this steady job, he and Lucy were married on December 6, 1865, the same day the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified.

Lucy had been living in the North since 1862, but she remained marked by her brief stay in the Sea Islands. Sometime in the first year of her marriage, she seems to have suggested to Wendell the idea of publishing a book-length collection of slave songs. Serious planning was under way by December 1866, and they began to reach out to contributors in early 1867. They knew of Allen from his articles for The Nation and quickly got him on board; Allen then brought on his younger cousin Charles Ware, who had collected more than four dozen songs in the Sea Islands during his time there.

The core team for the collection was now in place: Lucy had come up with the idea, Ware was contributing many of the songs, and Allen took over much of the editing in the spring of 1867, when Lucy gave birth to her first child. Allen was teaching in New Jersey at the time, by chance at the same abolitionist academy that Lucy had attended a decade before, and he often traveled to New York to work on the book with Lucy and Wendell. He drafted the introduction in May, before he headed west to start work at the University of Wisconsin. The editors also got in touch with Higginson, who sent them his own collection of lyrics (which he was preparing for publication in the Atlantic) as well as a host of observations and insights. The book was ready by late summer. 

II

Published in November 1867, Slave Songs of the United States was the first book on slave music in America as well as the first book on African American culture and perhaps even the first book-length collection of American folksongs of any kind. Among its 136 songs were beloved tunes such as “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” and “The Good Old Way”:

As I went down in de valley to pray,

Studying about dat good old way,

When you shall wear de starry crown,

Good Lord, show me de way.

In his meticulous introduction, Allen laid out four reasons (besides sheer beauty) why such songs were worth saving and studying. The first was that they revealed something about slave life. The content of the spirituals illustrated “the feelings, opinions and habits of the slaves,” Allen wrote, as well as their customs and their attitudes toward religion — though Allen himself did not probe very far in that direction. The songs could even provide evidence about the patterns of slave labor, he noted, since the tempo of the songs always depended on the activity they accompanied: what kind of work, what pace of work, and so forth.

The songs also raised the question of what ingredients had gone into the making of slave culture in the South. This was Allen’s second reason for paying special attention to the tunes and the lyrics of freed slaves. The central question — which later recurred again and again in studies of slave culture — was how much consisted of so-called survivals from Africa, how much was adopted or adapted from white Americans, and how much was the spontaneous product of slave life itself. Culture is always the product of both inheritance and experience, but in this case the question was fraught with considerable ideological weight that often influenced people’s answers. Before the war, slavery’s defenders had argued that slavery operated as a means of education for a barbarous black race, gradually replacing African superstition with American civilization. In a more negative light, some antislavery authors saw the Middle Passage and the process of enslavement as splintering experiences that stripped Africans of their heritage, making them “a mass of broken fragments, thrown to and fro,” as one black writer put it before the war. 

Now there was new evidence — and a new perspective. To James Miller McKim, for example, some songs and dances that he saw in the Sea Islands seemed like “a remnant of African worship.” Higginson suggested, based on his conversations with some old Sea Islanders, that the phrase “mighty Myo” in the song “My Army Cross Over” might be an African term meaning “the river of death.” “In the Cameroon dialect,” he noted, “‘Mawa’ signifies ‘to die.’” For his part, Allen — making use of his classical training — speculated soon after his arrival in the Sea Islands that one song might be “of African origin, with Christianity engrafted upon it just as it was upon the ancient Roman ritual.” He stuck to a similar interpretation in his introduction to Slave Songs a few years later, though with a somewhat heavier emphasis on white American influences. “The chief part of the negro music is civilized in its character,” he decided — “partly composed under the influence of association with the whites, partly actually imitated from their music.” Yet he added that there always remained “a distinct tinge of their native Africa” somewhere in the mix.

There had clearly been some sort of cultural exchange between whites and blacks under the slave system. One interesting aspect of that exchange was that it had not operated evenly across the South. This was the third reason Allen gave for collecting slave songs: to see how and where slave culture shifted in form. Close attention to variations in different versions of the songs showed that slave culture actually consisted of several related regional cultures that shared broad characteristics but differed in the details — differences that the editors chose to highlight by grouping the songs they had collected by place of origin: southeastern seaboard, northern seaboard (North Carolina to Delaware), inland, and Gulf Coast. “The songs from Virginia are the most wild and strange,” Allen noted. He and the others even noticed variations from one plantation to the next, and specified the exact source whenever possible.

Finally, the fourth reason to collect and to study the songs was that they were rapidly disappearing under the new conditions of freedom. Already in 1867, Allen said, it was becoming hard to find unaltered slave songs. Some black Americans regarded emancipation as a new start to their story, with slavery as a shameful prehistory that they did not wish to revisit, and some freedpeople, especially upwardly mobile ones, associated the songs so strongly with enslavement that they had no desire to sing them anymore. The music of slavery seemed not in keeping with “the sense of dignity that has come with freedom,” as Allen put it. 

But much broader forces of cultural change, such as education, urbanization, and modernization, were also at work. Abolitionist teachers across the South were among the culprits in this cultural loss, since they sometimes considered the old songs barbarous and often introduced new songs in their classrooms as part of their effort to Christianize and civilize. “Even the ‘spirituals’ are going out of use on the plantations,” Allen lamented, “superseded by the new style of religious music” that conformed to white standards.

This suggests one reason why Slave Songs of the United States ended up as a false start in the formal study of slave culture: at the time, the prevailing view of culture was closer to a ladder than to a buffet. Slave culture, no matter how interesting or affecting, was still seen as something primitive to be overcome on the path to civilization. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, Slave Songs was a landmark book, the only attempt of its kind to preserve the songs with as few modifications as possible. Yet Allen, Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison’s careful work of collection and interpretation was not seen at the time as a contribution to American historical scholarship or the study of slavery — or to anything, really. Lucy and Wendell wrote an unsigned review in The Nation (one of the perks of being an editor) and arranged for several others, but more popular magazines such as Harper’s and the Atlantic ignored the book. After a reprint in 1871, it was promptly forgotten for more than fifty years. Even then it would take yet another fifty years for many academic scholars to begin to study the songs as Allen had studied them, as both a form of art and a part of American life. As it took shape across the twentieth century, the academic study of slave culture eventually broadened to examine an astonishingly wide range of practices and customs, but it is worth continuing to focus on the study of the songs, especially the spirituals, because they have usually been regarded as the emblematic case.

Lucy, the driving force behind Slave Songs, soon saw her health decline. After suffering two strokes, she fell into a coma and died in May 1877, at the age of thirty-four, leaving behind her husband and three young children. A few years later Wendell Garrison sent a packet with some of the publication correspondence for Slave Songs to the Cornell University library, thinking that the letters might be of interest to some future scholar. They were deposited in the archive, in a collection about freedmen. 

In the meantime, music programs at black colleges helped keep the slave songs alive, preserving them through practice and performance. Fisk University in Nashville led the way. Starting in 1871 at Henry Ward Beecher’s Brooklyn church, Fisk’s Jubilee Singers made a name for themselves and raised quite a bit of money for their school by performing shiny renditions of old spirituals in concert halls and cathedrals across the United States and Europe. Over the next generation, students and professors at Fisk, Hampton, and Tuskegee started some efforts to collect, sing, and study African American folk music.

But this activity lay outside the mainstream of American slavery scholarship, which took a different path as Reconstruction unfolded. At first veteran combatants continued to spar over slavery’s role in causing the war, with former Confederates such as Vice President Alexander Stephens writing tendentious Platonic dialogues saying that slavery was just a sideline in the South’s noble stand for constitutional liberty, while old abolitionists such as Henry Wilson, Grant’s vice president, spun out mammoth volumes showing the centrality of slavery to prewar American politics. Soon a new generation of “scientific” historians at a new breed of research universities attempted to demonstrate their objectivity by draining slavery of its political and moral baggage and tracing its evolution in the legal code. This paralleled developments in the Supreme Court, which narrowed what counted as slavery to a legal definition that did not include social discrimination or economic deprivation. 

In this environment, slave culture was relegated for a while to the realm of Uncle Remus — a book that William Francis Allen took the time to review upon its publication in 1881, calling it “a contribution from a new and almost unworked field.” Over the next decade, as the egalitarian advances of Reconstruction stalled and were rolled back, the new regime of segregation found its justification, in part, in the nostalgic rehabilitation of the old plantation as a place peopled by supposedly happy slaves and their benevolent masters. Even an old abolitionist such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson was reduced to tears by Thomas Nelson Page’s sentimental plantation story “Marse Chan.”

This spirit of nostalgia also informed new scholarship on slavery, particularly among progressive southerners who saw in the old plantation a model of both racial and industrial relations. In 1918, in American Negro Slavery, by far the most influential scholarly book on slavery written between Reconstruction and the civil rights movement, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips portrayed plantation life as essentially jolly. “On the whole,” he wrote, “the fiddle, the banjo and the bones were not seldom in requisition.” One of the few songs that he quoted, and one of the few examples of sadness that he cited, involved slaves weeping because their beloved master had died: “Down in de cawn fiel’ / Hear dat mo’nful soun’; / All de darkies am aweepin’, / Massa’s in de col’, col’ ground.” Phillips believed that the plantation had been a benevolent institution, similar to a school or a settlement house, serving to civilize a supposedly barbarous black race.

Throughout this period, slave culture, and black culture more generally, was often regarded with condescension. The American exhibition at the World’s Fair of 1893 contained no contributions from black culture, and neither did the fair’s Concert of Folk Songs, put on by the International Folk-Lore Congress. “Excepting some selections representative of the music of our North American Indians,” declared one representative in his introductory address, “the utterances of the savage peoples were omitted, these being hardly developed to the point at which they might be called music.” Yet by the time Slave Songs of the United States was reprinted again in 1929, this was no longer the case, as the rise of a new generation of black scholars and artists collided with the new disciplines of cultural anthropology and folklore studies to make slave culture the subject of serious academic and artistic attention. 

The first and deepest student of the slave songs in this new era was W. E. B. Du Bois, who arrived at Fisk University as a seventeen-year-old sophomore in September 1885, walking in the shadow of the grand Jubilee Hall built with money earned by the school’s famous singers. Du Bois went on to get a second bachelor’s degree at Harvard, did graduate work in historical economics and sociology in Germany, and — when the white administrators of the agency funding his education made the petty decision not to renew his grant — returned to Harvard to become, in 1895, the first black American to receive a doctorate in history. A few years later, he sharply criticized the way American scholars had studied slavery to that point:

The slaves are generally treated as one inert changeless mass, and most studies of slavery apparently have no conception of a social evolution and development among them. The slave code of a state is given, the progress of anti-slavery sentiment, the economic results of the system and the general influence of man on master are studied, but of the slave himself, of his group life and social institutions, of remaining traces of his African tribal life, of his amusements, his conversion to Christianity, his acquiring of the English tongue—in fine of his whole reaction against his environment, of all this we hear little or nothing, and would apparently be expected to believe that the Negro arose from the dead in 1863.

By that time, Du Bois had been hired by Atlanta University to continue and expand the school’s annual series of studies on Negro problems, which had started in 1896. With Du Bois in charge, the studies quickly moved to the leading edge of empirical sociological research in the United States, with annual conferences attracting activists and scholars including Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and Harvard president Charles William Eliot. The topic changed each year, cycling through issues such as education, business, the church, and the family. 

Du Bois believed it was impossible to understand the present problems and the future prospects of the Negro “without knowing his history in slavery,” so his Atlanta University Studies included some of the only analyses of slave society and culture that existed at the time. His descriptions of slave culture could sometimes take a distinctly negative tone, both because he believed in relatively strict Victorian notions of morality and because he saw black social and economic inequality in his own time as rooted in the lingering effects of slavery (then just a generation past). He even stretched his historical studies back to Africa so that he could give a full account of how customs and institutions changed across the wrenching transitions of the middle passage and emancipation. “There is a distinct nexus between Africa and America which, though broken and perverted, is nevertheless not to be neglected by the careful student,” he explained. 

In 1903, in the midst of this scholarly activity, Du Bois published an odd but moving collection of essays, simultaneously lyrical and empirical, called The Souls of Black Folk. At the head of all but one of the essays, he paired a few lines of European poetry with a few bars from a Negro spiritual, placing the two forms on an equal cultural level. The one exception was the final essay, where the European poetry was replaced by lines from the spiritual “I Know Moon-Rise,” the same song that Higginson had praised so highly some forty years earlier. (Du Bois seems to have known of Higginson’s article and Lucy’s arrangements, but not of Slave Songs of the United States.)

Du Bois sketched an account of the songs’ historical evolution — one that doubled as an account of American culture itself. In the beginning, he wrote, was primitive African music, of the kind sung by his great-great-grandmother, seized by a Dutch trader some two hundred years before:

Do ba-na co-ba ge-ne me, ge-ne me!

Ben d’nu-li, nu-li, nu-li, nu-li, ben d’le.

Du Bois no longer knew what it meant, but it had been passed down through his family all the same. The next stage of development was one he called “Afro-American,” with songs “of undoubted Negro origin” and “peculiarly characteristic of the slave.” Among these he listed “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” The third stage started to show the influence of white American culture. The result remained “distinctively Negro,” Du Bois noted, as in the songs “Bright Sparkles” and “I Hope My Mother Will Be There,” but “the elements are both Negro and Caucasian.” Finally, he identified a fourth step of cultural evolution in the rise of white American songs that were influenced by black melodies, as in “Swanee River” and “Old Black Joe.”

“What are these songs, and what do they mean?” he asked. Against the popular plantation myth of the time, which deployed slave songs as evidence of happiness and contentment, he declared (as Higginson, Allen, Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison had decades earlier) that they were in fact “sorrow songs.” “They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment,” he wrote; “they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world.” At the same time, he saw in them a breath of hope, “a faith in the ultimate justice of things . . . that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.” Yet with black political rights being rolled back and a regime of racial segregation rising all around him, he could not help but wonder, “Is such a hope justified? Do the Sorrow Songs ring true?”

III

In 1910, Du Bois resigned from Atlanta University. He was frustrated by his inability to attract funding for his work, especially after his public break with Booker T. Washington earlier in the decade. He moved to New York and took a job as director of publicity and research for the newly established NAACP. As he shifted from scholarship to activism, the study of slave culture proceeded along two separate paths in his wake, one anthropological, the other sociological. Both disciplines were in the process of emerging into their modern forms — anthropology from an older racialist ethnology, sociology from a haze of social Darwinist theorizing — and they took on the study of slave culture in part to prove their value in analyzing contemporary social problems.

In anthropology, the central figure was Franz Boas, a Jew from Germany who had come to believe in the 1880s and 1890s that racial differences had environmental rather than genetic causes, and that the primary causes of racial inequality were prejudice and discrimination. He and Du Bois spoke the same language, and soon became allies. In 1906, Du Bois invited Boas, by that time on the faculty at Columbia, to come to the Atlanta University conference on “The Health and Physique of the Negro-American.” Boas discussed the cultural basis of racial behavior, and while there he also gave the school’s commencement address, in which he praised the genius of African cultures. “I was too astonished to speak,” Du Bois later recalled. He had never heard someone talk about Africa in that way.

Boas saw the study of folklore as a way to demonstrate racial equality, since a sympathetic understanding of a people’s folklore could go a long way toward explaining their thought and behavior as a result of culture and society rather than genetics. He helped to found the American Folk-Lore Society and had a hand in directing its journal until the 1930s. From the start, the Journal of American Folk-Lore planned to devote fully one-quarter of its space to black folklore. The trouble was that most anthropologists and scholarly collectors lived in the North, while most black Americans — some ninety percent at the time — lived in the South. Boas and his colleague William Wells Newell had some success with collectors based at southern black colleges, but that sputtered after a few years, in part because Boas had many demands on his attention and in part because he was simultaneously pushing for the professionalization of the field, a cause that cut against the use of amateur collectors.

Everything changed with World War I. The war accelerated the rise of a mass national culture, symbolized most prominently by radio and movies, which by its very nature threatened the survival of various ethnic and regional cultures — even as new technologies made it possible (though still difficult) to record the actual sounds and songs before they died out. Simultaneously, the war fostered a feeling of nationalism, including cultural nationalism, in whose warm glow America’s threatened ethnic and regional cultures were now seen as authentic and worthy of preservation. And the war undermined easy ideas about civilization and progress, opening even greater space for these non-dominant cultures to be seen in a positive light. (It is worth noting that none of this was unique to the United States, as, for example, the modernist primitivism of artists such as Gauguin and Picasso demonstrates.) 

Perhaps most important for the study of black folklore in particular, the war increased the demand for industrial labor at the same time as it cut off the supply of immigrant workers, thus inaugurating the decades-long Great Migration of millions of black Americans from the South to northern and western cities. This had a huge number of ramifications for American society, one of which was the rise of the “race problem” as a national (rather than primarily southern) issue for the first time since Reconstruction. A range of new social scientific funding organizations suddenly became interested in pouring money into research about black life. At the same time, conveniently, the migration also solved the old problem of the distance between northern anthropologists and southern blacks. Now all Boas and his students had to do was walk down the hill from Morningside Heights to Harlem. With the help of a wealthy white anthropologist named Elsie Clews Parsons, Boas made a renewed push to collect and publish black folklore. Starting in 1917, fourteen single-topic “Negro Numbers” of the Journal of American Folk-Lore appeared over the next twenty years. 

During these years, Boas’ ideas gained prominence among some academics as well as black intellectuals and activists, in part because Du Bois gave them space in The Crisis, the NAACP’s journal. The collection of black folklore was central to the Harlem Renaissance, serving as a symbol and source of cultural pride. In 1922, the black poet James Weldon Johnson edited an anthology of Negro poetry, which he hoped would raise the status of black Americans by demonstrating their artistry. He noted that the slave songs contained flashes of “real, primitive poetry” and could be counted among the American Negro’s handful of truly important artistic creations (along with the Uncle Remus stories, the cakewalk dance, and ragtime music). 

Three years later Johnson edited a full volume of Negro spirituals, which he soon followed with a second volume. He celebrated efforts by black Americans to preserve and promote the spirituals instead of neglecting them as unwanted reminders of slavery. “This reawakening of the Negro to the value and beauty of the Spirituals was the beginning of an entirely new phase of race consciousness,” he wrote. It was akin to the rediscovery of the classics in late medieval European culture, which also led to a cultural and intellectual renaissance. In 1925, Alain Locke’s influential anthology The New Negro included an entire section on folklore, called “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” as well as a separate essay by Locke focused specifically on the spirituals. By the time Allen, Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison’s Slave Songs collection was reprinted in 1929, studies of black folk music were tumbling out of American presses.

Still, Boas’ ideas about race and culture remained marginal in American society until Nazism discredited “scientific” racism starting in the late 1930s. With genetic explanations of racial difference collapsing, what could explain the apparent inferiority of black Americans? The most influential answer came from sociology, where the study of slave culture had proceeded for several decades along a somewhat separate track — one that descended from Booker T. Washington instead of W. E. B. Du Bois. 

In sociology, the central figure was Robert Park. A white man who grew up in Minnesota, Park took an extraordinarily circuitous route to becoming perhaps the most influential sociologist in America, a route that included studying philosophy with John Dewey as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in the 1880s, a decade-long career as a newspaper reporter (which he regarded as his true sociological training), stints in graduate school at Harvard and Germany (in philosophy and psychology), a few years as publicity agent for the Congo Reform Association, and finally a position doing similar work for Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee, where he started in 1905 (after Du Bois turned down the job). A firm believer in industrial education for black Americans, Washington sometimes seemed to join the chorus of plantation nostalgists in viewing slavery as a necessary precursor to his own work. In 1901, in his autobiography Up from Slavery, which became one of the central racial statements of the age, he observed that

when we rid ourselves of prejudice, or racial feeling, and look facts in the face, we must acknowledge that, notwithstanding the cruelty and moral wrong of slavery, the ten million Negroes inhabiting this country, who themselves or whose ancestors went through the school of American slavery, are in a stronger and more hopeful condition, materially, intellectually, morally, and religiously, than is true of an equal number of black people in any other portion of the globe.

Park absorbed much of Washington’s worldview as he worked for the next eight years as Washington’s ghostwriter, publicist, and bulldog, building up Tuskegee and tearing down its rivals, including Du Bois. 

By 1913, Park was ready for a change, and he seized an offer from the University of Chicago’s sociology department, then one of the top two departments in the country, to start teaching a course on “The Negro in America.” Soon he published his first major article, “Racial Assimilation in Secondary Groups with Particular Reference to the Negro,” which grew out of his time at Tuskegee. “Slavery has been, historically, the usual method by which peoples have been incorporated into alien groups,” he wrote. “When a member of an alien race is adopted into the family as a servant, or as a slave, and particularly when that status is made hereditary, as it was in the case of the Negro after his importation to America, assimilation followed rapidly and as a matter of course.” Park went on to have an extraordinarily influential career at Chicago over the next two decades, making the school practically synonymous with sociology in America. Among other things, he trained a generation of important black sociologists such as Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier, both of whom did vital work in the 1930s collecting the testimony of formerly enslaved black southerners (in Johnson’s case) and studying the structure and evolution of the black family in slavery and freedom (in Frazier’s).

While some anthropologists, particularly Boas’ student Melville Herskovits, saw evidence of cultural diffusion in the African diaspora, Park did not. He subscribed to the more common view at the time, which was that the middle passage had acted as a kind of cultural holocaust. In 1919, in an essay called “The Conflict and Fusion of Cultures with Special Reference to the Negro,” Park declared that “there is every reason to believe, it seems to me, that the Negro, when he landed in the United States, left behind him almost everything but his dark complexion and his tropical temperament.” In this view, with freshly imported slaves as blank slates, slave culture could not be either an original production or an adaptation of African traditions to American conditions, but only an imperfect copy of white American culture as filtered through “the racial temperament of the Negro” and the strain of slavery. This was, indeed, the prevailing interpretation of slave songs at the time, as scholars looked at the lyrics, saw similarities to some white hymns, and assumed the line of influence must have flowed in only one direction.

This view of slave culture may not have allowed much room for African influences or black cultural creativity, but with the collapse of scientific racism in the late 1930s and 1940s, it proved useful as a framework for combating segregation. Slavery had stripped black people of their African culture, the argument implicitly went, so now, with no cultural baggage to hold them back, the only things preventing their full assimilation into American society were prejudice and discrimination.

For roughly a full generation, liberal scholars pushed hard on the “damage” thesis to demonstrate all the ways that slavery and segregation had left black Americans as mere husks of humanity. It was apparent, for example, in the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal’s mammoth study of American race relations, An American Dilemma, which appeared in 1944, and for which several of Park’s former students, including Franklin Frazier, served as researchers. “In practically all its divergences,” Myrdal famously wrote, “American Negro culture is not something independent of general American culture. It is a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture.” Another member of Myrdal’s team, the psychologist Kenneth Clark, went on to do doll studies showing that segregation caused black children to associate white dolls with being pretty or nice and black dolls with being bad or ugly. 

This work was successful. In 1952, Chief Justice Earl Warren cited Clark, Frazier, and Myrdal to help justify ending school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. Over the next few years, the “damage” thesis made its way into two important new books on slavery as historians joined the crusade against segregation. Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution came first, in 1956. Determined to use slave testimony to overturn Ulrich Phillips’ plantation idyll, Stampp ended up portraying slave life in a pitiful light. His chapter on slave culture, tellingly titled “Between Two Cultures,” emphasized the slaves’ lack of “cultural autonomy.” Not only had slaves “lost the bulk of their African heritage,” Stampp argued, but they “were prevented from sharing in much of the best of southern white culture,” resulting in a “culturally rootless people.” “In slavery,” he went on, “the Negro existed in a kind of cultural void. He lived in a twilight zone between two ways of life and was unable to obtain from either many of the attributes which distinguish man from beast.” Stampp allowed that slave songs and folklore were important exceptions, but the overall picture was almost irredeemably bleak.

A few years later, Stanley Elkins took out the “almost.” Using insights about the supposedly “closed” nature of North American slavery along with psychological studies of “infantilization” among Nazi concentration camp inmates, he set out to show that “Sambo,” the lazy, childish slave of southern lore, was not a stereotype but rather a fact — the natural product of the American slave system. Elkins thought this was the only explanation for how the “native resourcefulness and vitality” of West African culture, as described by anthropologists such as Herskovits, somehow degenerated “to such a point of utter stultification in America.” Slave songs and folklore, which may have complicated that assessment, did not enter into his analysis. The fantasy lives of slaves, he noted in passing, were “limited to catfish and watermelons.” 

Arguments about the damage inflicted on slaves and its lingering effects on black Americans crested in 1965, at the same moment as the civil rights movement achieved its major legislative goals. That spring, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then the assistant secretary of labor, drew on Elkins’ work as he prepared a report for Lyndon Johnson’s administration about the problems facing black families and the need for a wide range of federal programs to support them. Moynihan also drafted a speech that Johnson delivered in June at Howard University, which was intended to outline the rationale for the policies that Moynihan’s report proposed. “Much of the Negro community is buried under a blanket of history and circumstance,” Johnson declared, urging federal action to undo the damage. But this did not work out as planned. Moynihan’s report was unfairly pilloried for a relentlessly negative view of black society and culture (probably a tactic to persuade politicians — Moynihan was motivated by a deep sympathy for his subjects), and instead of paving the way to new programs it ended up serving as a convenient marker for the death of a view of slave culture defined by “damage” and the rise of new studies interested in exploring the varieties of black resistance and cultural vitality under slavery. 

IV

By that time, two or three decades’ worth of scholarship had emphasized the damage wrought by slavery and segregation, portraying black culture as little more than an incomplete or pathological version of white American culture. A generation of black activists and intellectuals — Ralph Ellison was usually quoted as the emblematic example — was getting tired of this paternalistic attitude, of seeing mostly white scholars and politicians run their culture down and tell them what to do. Some of them began to assert (partly out of fear, partly out of faith) that there was, in fact, a distinctive black culture worth preserving and even celebrating — that, as the new civil rights legislation broke down the formal barriers of segregation that had kept black Americans apart, they could not and would not simply be assimilated as undifferentiated Americans. The experience of the civil rights movement itself bore this out, buoyed as it was by black leaders, black churches, and black songs, including spirituals.

Meanwhile, thanks to the GI Bill, the vast expansion of American higher education after World War II, and the simultaneous decline in racial and ethnic (and gender) barriers to access and employment, there were suddenly whole new groups of people writing and teaching and studying history, and they brought with them their own experiences, questions, and concerns. Not only black scholars but also the scholarly sons and daughters of Jewish and Italian immigrants might have some interest in, and insight into, processes of oppression and acculturation. And, finally, there arose at precisely that moment a “new sensibility” (as Susan Sontag put it) among educated Americans which collapsed old cultural distinctions between high and low. Pop cultural productions such as rock music and folk music and movies, previously disdained or dismissed, became worthy of serious analysis and explication. It became possible to study pop, folk, and other non-mandarin cultural expressions in a way that was critical and historical, not just anthropological or sociological.

The result of all this was an explosion of slave culture studies throughout the 1970s. The black scholar Sterling Stuckey forecast the shift in 1968 in an essay called “Through the Prism of Folklore”: “No study of the institutional aspects of American slavery can be complete, nor can the larger dimensions of slave personality and style be adequately explored, as long as historians continue to avoid that realm in which, as DuBois has said, ‘the soul of the black slave spoke to man.’” Over the next decade, this basic idea guided several different scholars who pursued it mostly independently and who sometimes felt as if they were discovering the source material for the first time: John Blassingame’s The Slave Community (1972), George Rawick’s From Sundown to Sunup (1972), Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974), Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (1977), Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1978). Though they varied quite a bit (especially Genovese), they were all intended to demonstrate the strength of the community and culture that enslaved people forged largely on their own. (At the same time, Dena Epstein’s Sinful Tunes and Spirituals became the first book to look closely at Allen, Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison’s collaboration on Slave Songs of the United States; among other sources, Epstein consulted the correspondence that Wendell Garrison deposited at Cornell after Lucy’s death.)

To understand this wave of slave culture studies, Levine’s case is instructive. Born to Orthodox Jewish immigrants in Washington Heights, he attended City College of New York in the 1950s. He later said his familiarity with the cultural inheritance of the shtetl and the ghetto helped him more easily grasp the nature of black folk beliefs, but he also thought that anyone who did the necessary work to enter deeply into that cultural world could have seen the same thing. After getting his PhD at Columbia and taking a job at Berkeley in 1962, he joined the local branch of CORE. He worked on fair housing and picketed stores that did not hire black employees. In the spring of 1965, he and Kenneth Stampp served as the department’s representatives to the Selma-to-Montgomery march; they happened to spend the night in Tuskegee, of all places, on the way from Atlanta to Selma. Back in Berkeley, Levine had a research sabbatical the next academic year and used it to start a project on Black Protest in Twentieth-Century America — essentially a long history of the civil rights movement. 

At first Levine was reading only about the leaders, not the masses of people who made protests and movements possible. Like many other historians working on similar topics at the time, he looked at the previous generation of scholarship, saw that black people had “been rendered historically inarticulate by scholars,” as he put it, and set out to fix that problem. Dipping into anthropology, he realized that folklore and folksongs might provide a point of entry. Soon they took over his whole project as he realized that black folk culture (like all culture) was essentially a form of philosophy. “In their varied forms of oral expression,” he wrote, “they thought about who they were, what their situation was, how it could be changed, and how best to teach their children how to survive without succumbing to the forces that had them in their grasp.” The way he interpreted black culture and slave culture would undermine the views of Park, Myrdal, and Elkins — and even of Kenneth Stampp, who “was not amused by it,” Levine recalled, when his young colleague showed him a draft.

Levine recognized that culture was not a fixed thing but a process, one in which it was possible to trace African folkways interacting with the Euro-American world to forge a new African American perspective. This was most clearly apparent in the songs, which Levine worked on first, presenting a paper about them at the American Historical Association conference in 1969 (he was given a whole session to himself) and publishing it in an edited collection two years later. “It is to the spirituals that historians must look to comprehend the antebellum slaves’ world view,” he wrote, “for it was in the spirituals that slaves found a medium which resembled in many crucial ways the cosmology they had brought with them from Africa and afforded them the possibility of both adapting to and transcending their situation.” 

Yet he threw the whole origins question overboard as ultimately irrelevant. Where the cultural forms came from was less important, he said, than what people did with them. He carefully worked out how songs were created and re-created through improvisational group sessions in which pre-existing lines were mixed together with new tunes and lyrics, and how that process balanced “individual release” with “communal solidarity,” and how slaves tweaked the Christian doctrines they had learned from their white masters and preachers to fit their own needs. Like Du Bois and Allen, Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison before him, he believed the songs expressed deep sorrow but were relieved by an abiding hope. He concluded:

Slave music, slave religion, slave folk beliefs — the entire sacred world of the black slaves — created the necessary space between the slaves and their owners and were the means of preventing legal slavery from becoming spiritual slavery. In addition to the world of the masters which slaves inhabited and accommodated to, as they had to, they created and maintained a world apart which they shared with each other and which remained their own domain, free of control of those who ruled the earth.

In many ways, the culture studies of the 1970s laid the foundation for the next few decades of research about slavery, at least in the sense that slave culture became indispensable to any attempt to analyze the institution. Instead of establishing only that slave culture existed, however, the main questions shifted to how that culture changed across time and space as well as how it developed in a complicated dance with the surrounding culture of slaveowners and other whites, with mutual influences in both directions. The essentialist assumptions that lurked in the background of some of the major studies of the 1970s, which occasionally implied that there was a distinctively “black” family or culture and treated origins in slavery as the measure of authenticity, faded in those years of relative optimism about race relations. More recently, as that optimism has waned in the face of ongoing discrimination and injustice, essentialism has seen a resurgence among authors who posit unique racial inheritances and forms of knowledge, eternally separate but equal. Meanwhile, slave culture, at least in the form of songs, has receded a bit into the background as scholars, black and white, concern themselves with issues that are either overwhelmingly macro in scale (imperialism, capitalism) or extremely micro (reconstructing the experiences of a single enslaved person from traces in the archive). 

One major exception is a big recent book by David Hackett Fischer called African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Freedom. Calling his study an “inquiry into what happened when Africans and Europeans came to North America, and the growth of race slavery collided with expansive ideas of freedom and liberty and rule of law,” Fischer goes region by region to trace how specific clusters of Africans (and their cultures) interacted with specific clusters of Europeans (and their cultures) to make something new. In New England, for example, Akan-speaking groups brought an ethical philosophy of doing good and doing well, which dovetailed with New England Puritanism to create what Fischer calls a “new syncretist ethic” focused on expanding rights through petitions for freedom, schooling, and the right to vote; in the Chesapeake, people such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman built on a regional tradition of leadership exemplified by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to push for freedom for all. 

Some of the conclusions can feel a bit pat, but on the whole Fischer’s book is effective, thanks to the wealth of detail that he includes along the way to show exactly how specific peoples and cultures mixed. At the very end he borrows from Du Bois, who, more than a century earlier, concluded his own essay on “The Sorrow Songs” with a list of “three gifts” that Africans brought to America “and mingled them with yours”: gifts of story and song, of sweat and brawn, and of the Spirit. Fischer adapts and expands the list for his purposes, but it includes a gift of language, a gift of music, and a gift of spirit and soul — gifts that culminate, for him, in the spirituals. He quotes several of them, including “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve had / Nobody knows but Jesus” and “I want to climb up Jacob’s ladder, / But I can’t climb it till I make my peace with the Lord.” He also cites William Francis Allen, Charles Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison’s Slave Songs of the United States. “In a large literature,” he writes, their book, now more than one hundred fifty years old, remains “the most important work” on the subject.

What lessons does the long history of the study of slave culture hold for us today, especially for those who are not professional historians of slavery? 

First, the history of the study of slavery in America is in many ways the intellectual history of America. It is not only recently that we have reckoned with slavery. Not at all. We have been reckoning with it from the beginning. Slavery first became a major problem in American life around the Revolution, and Americans have continued to wrestle with the nature of slavery and freedom ever since — not to mention all the other issues connected with slavery, such as race and labor, agriculture and industry, culture and conquest, opportunity and inequality. Not only has thought about slavery reflected the changing contours of American intellectual life, but in many cases it has shaped those contours, as founding figures in various scholarly disciplines — Boas in anthropology and Park in sociology, but also Herbert Baxter Adams in history, Francis Lieber in political science, and plenty of others — saw slavery and its legacies as central problems that their field would have to puzzle out in order to prove its worth.

The story of slave studies suggests also that older scholarship is valuable. Despite their avowed interest in the past, historians tend to dwell on recent work when it comes to our own field. This may be because we believe in history as a progressive science, or because we want to be a part of the conversation, or simply because we (like most humans) are attracted to things that are shiny and new. We often think of older scholarship as incomplete or incompetent or biased — all of which is true, to be sure, but no more true of scholars in 1822 or 1922 than in 2022. It is precisely because those older scholars had a different view of the world and of history that they can help cure us of our habit of following the herd in writing about all the faddish varieties of historical capitalism or whatever other topic is now academic catechism. Moreover, although historians often think of near-contemporary accounts as blind to their full situation, those accounts can be penetrating and revealing because their sense of the stakes, and of the constellation of relevant questions, is second nature, in the same way that near-contemporary translations often capture something about a book that later translators miss. 

We can also intuit from the study of slave culture something about the way culture works. All culture — slave culture, certainly, but also abolitionist culture, academic culture, American culture — is syncretic, variegated, improvisational, combining influences in ways both obvious and subtle as it wends its way through history. As many early writers recognized, slave songs were a complex combination of African inheritance and American experience, and slaves shaped their owners just as surely as owners shaped their slaves. Whether as an act of description or prescription, it is always false to say that any culture is closed or isolated or pure. (And it can lead to hideous politics.)

The most stirring lesson of slave studies, certainly, is that no group or individual lacks some kind of cultural autonomy. Victims are always more than their victimization; people are defined more by what they do than by what is done to them. Inner resistance is possible against even the most obscene oppression. Our contemporary obsession with trauma sometimes threatens to turn us into a catalogue of everything that has been done to us and to our ancestors, just as abolitionists sometimes made slaves into nothing more than a catalogue of the brutalities that they had suffered. But the skill for coping knows no racial or historical boundaries. The true subject of slave studies is human resilience. Slave songs were one of the ways of coping, as Higginson and his abolitionist friends learned in the Sea Islands, but they were also something more. They were evidence of undefeated spirits. That they continue to resonate with us today is a testament to the power of the people who first sang them in slavery — and, perhaps, to the universal need we all feel, at one time or another, for the good Lord to show us the way.