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