by Simon Schama
Perhaps it was the sense that some outlet must be found for the fighting minister before some serious harm befell him that moved General Rufus Saxton—who was himself a transcendentalist-feminist-abolitionist West Point graduate—to offer Higginson a military posting. And the post was not as chaplain but regimental colonel! The notion was less outlandish than it seemed for after the execution of John Brown, Higginson had removed his cloth and put himself through a second ordination as soldier, teaching himself from manuals of arms, drill, firing, maneuvers. Word had got around, for the circles of the righteous were in communication with each other, and the perfect opportunity seemed to arise in 1861, when a Union expedition to the sea islands off the South Carolina and Georgia coast had liberated tens of thousands of slaves on rice and cotton plantations. Land had been distributed to the ex-slaves in what thus became the first “experiment’ in free black farming. Those who wished were offered service in the Union army. With such a force of devoted soldiers, fighting, as Higginson would write, “with a rope about their necks,” those islands, Port Royal in particular, could be held as strategic posts between the Carolinas and the Georgia–Florida coast. Saxton was set in command of almost a thousand blacks, transformed from slavery to soldiering almost overnight: the first ex-slave regiment.
So there was Higginson, now thirty-seven years old, still wearing his hair long in the manner of a Boston poet, approaching a cabin roofed with palm and palmetto fronds: the tabernacle of worship, around which a line of men was circling, chanting their songs, clapping their hands, bodies swaying, as they moved. Somewhere a drum was beating, and it wasn’t to marching time. Listening to this, Higginson felt lifted into a state of grace. He was beholding the perfect innocence of the church primitive in all its ancient purity.
On the morning of New Year’s Day 1863, the soldiers of the 1st South Carolina and the men, women, and children of the islands were assembled by General Saxton to hear President Lincoln’s proclamation of their freedom. Saxton had sent steamers to the neighboring islands to fetch the people, and most of them were women, fine-looking, with brilliant African kerchiefs on their head, many carrying children in their arms or holding hands as a crocodile line made its way to an improvised parade ground, beneath overarching live oaks. A little platform had been erected for the speakers and officers, and to Higginson’s surprise, some white visitors had arrived in gigs and carriages, parked under the trees in which they sat listening attentively to the proceedings.
After prayers, colors were presented to the black regiments and a South Carolinian doctor who had long since freed his own slaves read “Pres Linkum’s” words. “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, a strong male voice (but rather cracked and elderly) into which two women’s voices blended, singing as if by an impulse that could no more be repressed than the morning note of the 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 when this interruption came not set down in the bills. Firmly and irrepressibly the quavering voices sang verse after verse; others of the 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.”
Colonel Higginson had found his moment. A good officer to his men, he led them on gunboat raids up the Southern rivers, liberating slaves as they went, getting the proclamation read and understood. On the Edisto in South Carolina, his soldiers saw a water meadow all at once “come alive with human heads…a straggling file of men and women, all on a run for the riverside…old women trotting on the narrow paths, would kneel to pray a little prayer, still balancing the bundle, and then would suddenly spring up, urged by the accumulating procession behind.” “De brack sojer so presumptuous,” said one of the freed slaves, “dey come right ashore, hold up dere head. Fus’ ting I know dere was a barn, 10,000 bushel rough rice, all in a blaze, den mas’rs great house all cracklin up de roof. Didn’t I keer for see em blaze. Lor mas’r, didn’t care nothin at all. I was gwine to de boat.”
Every moment when he wasn’t commanding the liberator boats, or seeing to the orderly welfare of the camp, Higginson devoted to the African American music, already known as “Spirituals”; the “Sorrow Songs” that DuBois described, rightly, as “the most original and beautiful expression of human life and longing yet born on American soil.”
He understood just what the songs had meant in slavery; knew that some of them had been jailed in Georgetown, South Carolina, at the start of the war, just for singing:
We’ll soon be free
We’ll soon be free
We’ll soon be free
When de Lord will call us home
“Dey tink de Lord mean for say de Yankees,” a drummer boy told him, smiling, though they did mean the Lord. But when they sang “Many Thousand Go,” there was no ambiguity:
No more driver’s lash for me
No more, no more
No more driver’s lash for me
Many thousand go.
Whenever, wherever they could, they sang. One morning it was raining, the last drenching after a night’s evil storm. Higginson was concerned for the pickets out in exposed country and walked to the edge of the camp looking for their return like a fretful mother. Then he heard the sound of voices:
O dey call me Hangman Johnny
O ho o ho
And there were the soldiers, water streaming from their black rubber blanket-coats, marching into camp, broad smiles and big baritones.
But I never hang nobody
Hang boys hang
Transcribing the songs, “the vocal expression of the simplicity of their faith and the sublimity of their long resignation,” now became Higginson’s obsession, his personal battle against the oblivion he thought could swallow up folk culture. The notebooks tucked inside his coats grew thicker like quilting. “Often,” wrote Higginson, “in the starlit evening, I have returned from some lonely ride by the swift river or on the plover-haunted barrens, and entering the camp, have silently approached some glimmering fire, round which the dusky figures moved in the rhythmical barbaric dance the Negroes call a ‘shout,’ chanting, often harshly, but always in the most perfect time. Writing down in the darkness as I best could with my hand in the safe covert of my pocket—the words of the song. I have afterwards carried it to my tent, like some captured bird or insect, and then, after examination, put it by.” The gap between listening and recording meant that, often enough, some words slipped away; others made no sense to Higginson. But he had help filling in those gaps from his black corporal Robert Sutton, “whose iron memory held all the details of a song as if it were a ford or a forest.” The melodies he could “only retain by ear” and few can have survived the way the black soldiers sang them. But his collection—some of it published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1869—is still a precious document; the first anthology of the Sorrow Songs.
My army cross over
My army cross over
O Pharaoh’s army drownded
My army cross over
Queen Victoria quite liked this, thought it charming; so did Mr. Gladstone, one of the few judgments they had in common. Having listened to the Fisk Singers in the spring of 1873, the queen noted in her diary, “they are real Negroes; they come from America and have been slaves.” And with some amazement, “they sing extremely well together.” Like most everybody else, the queen was more accustomed to hearing fake Negroes: the blackface whites doing doo-dah minstrelsy; the music that DuBois in particular singled out as a degradation of the true soul-liberty music. But everyone who heard Ella Sheppard, Fred Loudin, and the other five knew they were hearing something raw and unsettling in its passion. Only the irreproachable devotional intensity saved it from indecorousness. But th
e voices conquered just as surely as had the black soldiers. The year before their English tour, the Fisk Singers had performed in the White House at the invitation of President Grant before an audience of congressmen and senators, the diplomatic corps and cabinet members. But they had still been expelled from their Washington hotel for defying the conventions of segregation.
Their manager-mentor George White was pitched into a fury about this, but recognized there was little he could do about it, for all the fame of his ex-slave singers. They must needs take an event at a time, and he had pledged his life to the concerts, which raised funds for Fisk University in Nashville where all this had started. White was a blacksmith’s son from rural New York who had seen the worst at Gettysburg, Chancellorsville, and Chattanooga, where he had seen Montgomery Meigs bringing in wagons of provisions for the beleaguered Union soldiers. Like Higginson, White had listened to the sorrow songs he had heard at the campfire, had begun to take notes; and when, after the war, he had offered his services to the Fisk Free School for Negroes in Nashville, it was music (as well as penmanship) that he taught.
The school, hard up, even in the heyday of Reconstruction, recognized in White someone committed to build a new life of the ex-slaves; someone who understood that the Teacher alongside the Preacher was to be the way ahead. He was appointed school treasurer, which kept him awake at nights worrying about its future. When he heard one of the students, Ella Sheppard, who had spent most of her sixteen years as a slave, sing more sweetly than anything he had ever heard, White conceived of a choir that might give public performances of the spirituals to raise money for Fisk. This was mostly frowned on even by those sympathetic to the Negro colleges, like the American Missionary Association. Taking young blacks on the road with no support but what a collection plate might yield, and in an atmosphere of, at best, mixed sentiments, even in the North, was a provocation.
But White was resolved. He would have his young men and women “sing the money out of the hearts and pockets of the people.” The choir of seven, with no proper cold-weather coats or clothing, opened their tour at Oberlin in October 1871, where they were warmly applauded, but the clapping failed to translate into strong receipts. The same was true in Cincinnati: many huzzahs but just fifty dollars. In New York everything changed as, often, everything does. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher brought the Fisk Singers to the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, and overnight they became a sensation. Verbal brickbats were thrown at them but so were dollars, enough to pay their expenses and ensure the survival and even flourishing of Fisk. There was a price to be paid for the relentless touring: Mabel Lewis harmed her larynx; White himself, Maggie Porter, and Fred Loudin all became ill with bronchitis and pneumonia. White’s tubercular cough became chronic, incurable; stifled somehow during the recitals. They were playing now to audiences of 10,000 and more.
Steal away
Steal away
Steal away to Jesus
White pleaded with the president of Fisk, Erastus Cravath, for a break, but the college needed funds and the choir went on a second European tour to England (again), Holland, and Germany in 1875. Many of the singers were now on the verge of collapse. White had left, feeling he had created a monster; a form of show-business slavery. After the choir disintegrated in sickness and argument, he re-formed them in 1878, as the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the Jubilee of course being the biblical moment when all bondsmen were liberated. When TB prevented White from being with them, Fred Loudin took charge for tours that took the singers through Asia to Australia and back to the West Coast of the United States. In 1895 White’s own lungs finally gave out. At his funeral the choir sang “Steal Away,” their voices lifting the Nashville chapel roof off.
The Fisk Jubilee Singers had become an institution, exactly at the moment of a racial counterrevolution that put into question the victory of the Civil War. Outside the United States (and frequently inside), it is often forgotten that during the Reconstruction decade from 1865 to 1875, an extraordinary flowering took place. Protected by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution conferring full citizenship and voting rights on the former slaves, and abolishing segregation in public places (other than schools and cemeteries!), African Americans flocked to the polls. Federal troops, still stationed in the South, were there to uphold their right to vote should that become necessary. The first African American governor was elected in Louisiana; congressmen and senators followed. Turnout was on the order of 70 percent; a level which Barack Obama would be happy to achieve almost a century and a half later. Among the defeated white population of the South, with some honorable exceptions, all of this was viewed as tragic farce; the enforcement of an occupation; the blacks as puppets of sinister northern carpetbaggers who had battened on their ruined country like ravening coyotes. The sentimental literature of defeat now actually hymned the virtues of the slaves: honest, toiling, decent in their simple way; while the monsters unloosed by the Freedmen’s Bureau were promiscuous, idle, and empty-headed. The only hope of overturning such an unnatural order of things and restoring God’s proper racial hierarchy lay with the Democratic Party. So when their candidate Samuel Tilden won a plurality of the popular vote in 1876, the bargain struck with the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, included the withdrawal of federal troops from the Southern states. And that was that: the Civil Rights Act set at naught; poll taxes and literacy tests put in the way of the vote; segregation everywhere triumphant; violence and intimidation unleashed against any blacks presuming differently. Thomas Wentworth Higginson resumed a literary life as Emily Dickinson’s mentor, protector, and posthumous editor while Jim Crow reigned in the South.
Except in two places: black colleges like Fisk, Howard, and Atlanta (later Morehouse, where Martin Luther King studied) and the black church. In both those institutions, a battle was fought, at the end of the nineteenth century, for the “souls of black folk,” between Booker T. Washington’s practical gradualism, bought at the expense of political self-determination, and DuBois’s call for church and school to produce a liberation vanguard. DuBois was a light-skinned son of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, which was about as far away from the sharecropper South as you could get (though he would write movingly and accurately of the impoverished rural counties of Georgia). Fisk had given him an undergraduate education, but he had been a graduate student at Harvard, studying with William James and George Santayana, as well as the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. Before he came to Atlanta University he taught at another black college, Wilberforce in Ohio, and the University of Pennsylvania. What DuBois came to want from black education is pretty much exactly what America has in the Democratic nominee in 2008: someone not only unapologetic about the empowerment of learning in an age of mass democracy, but who could also convincingly project knowledge as a tool of liberation. DuBois pinned his hopes for an educated black future on the “talented tenth” of black America—that would be embarrassingly elitist now—but when he turned away from an intellectual vanguard toward the mass of his people he looked in exactly the same direction as Obama: toward the church.
For although the Harvard-educated pragmatist himself became more skeptical as he aged, he always knew that the black church functioned as more than a house of worship. The 24,000 black churches were also “the social center of Negro life in the United States”; a communal government that, because it had roots deep in the antebellum world of the Richard Allens and Jarena Lees, functioned far more effectively as a government than anything the more thinly attached politics of Reconstruction had managed. After the liquidation of Reconstruction the church “reproduced in microcosm, all that great world from which the Negro is cut off by color-prejudice and social condition.” Allen’s own Mother Bethel Methodist church in Philadelphia, at the turn of the twentieth century, had more than 1,100 members, “an edifice seating 1,500 persons and valued at $100,000, an annual budget of $5,000, and a government consisting of a pastor with several assisting local preachers, an executive and legislative board
, financial boards and tax collectors, general church meetings for making law…a company of militia and twenty-four auxiliary societies.” DuBois could also have mentioned schools, sickness insurance, and burial societies. In its cradle-to-grave inclusiveness Mother Bethel was just one of the black megachurches, indistinguishable, except in pure numbers, from their black and white counterparts of today.
