THE PLANTATION NEGROS--NOT STUPID TO BE LOYAL--THEIR DITHYRAMBIC MUSIC
--COPPERHEAD OPINION OF LONGFELLOW.
The stockade was not quite finished at the time of our arrival--a gap
of several hundred feet appearing at the southwest corner. A gang of
about two hundred negros were at work felling trees, hewing legs, and
placing them upright in the trenches. We had an opportunity--soon
to disappear forever--of studying the workings of the “peculiar
institution” in its very home. The negros were of the lowest field-hand
class, strong, dull, ox-like, but each having in our eyes an admixture
of cunning and secretiveness that their masters pretended was not in
them. Their demeanor toward us illustrated this. We were the objects
of the most supreme interest to them, but when near us and in the
presence of a white Rebel, this interest took the shape of stupid,
open-eyed, open-mouthed wonder, something akin to the look on the face
of the rustic lout, gazing for the first time upon a locomotive or a
steam threshing machine. But if chance threw one of them near us when
he thought himself unobserved by the Rebels, the blank, vacant face
lighted up with an entirely different expression. He was no longer the
credulous yokel who believed the Yankees were only slightly modified
devils, ready at any instant to return to their original horn-and-tail
condition and snatch him away to the bluest kind of perdition; he knew,
apparently quite as well as his master, that they were in some way his
friends and allies, and he lost no opportunity in communicating his
appreciation of that fact, and of offering his services in any possible
way. And these offers were sincere. It is the testimony of every Union
prisoner in the South that he was never betrayed by or disappointed in
a field-negro, but could always approach any one of them with perfect
confidence in his extending all the aid in his power, whether as a
guide to escape, as sentinel to signal danger, or a purveyor of food.
These services were frequently attended with the greatest personal
risk, but they were none the less readily undertaken. This applies only
to the field-hands; the house servants were treacherous and wholly
unreliable. Very many of our men who managed to get away from the
prisons were recaptured through their betrayal by house servants, but
none were retaken where a field hand could prevent it.
We were much interested in watching the negro work. They wove in a
great deal of their peculiar, wild, mournful music, whenever the
character of the labor permitted. They seemed to sing the music for
the music’s sake alone, and were as heedless of the fitness of the
accompanying words, as the composer of a modern opera is of his
libretto. One middle aged man, with a powerful, mellow baritone, like
the round, full notes of a French horn, played by a virtuoso, was the
musical leader of the party. He never seemed to bother himself about
air, notes or words, but improvised all as he went along, and he sang
as the spirit moved him. He would suddenly break out with--
“Oh, he’s gone up dah, nevah to come back agin,”
At this every darkey within hearing would roll out, in admirable
consonance with the pitch, air and time started by the leader--
“O-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!”
Then would ring out from the leader as from the throbbing lips of a
silver trumpet,
“Lord bress him soul; I done hope he is happy now!”
And the antiphonal two hundred would chant back
“O-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!”
And so on for hours. They never seemed to weary of singing, and we
certainly did not of listening to them. The absolute independence
of the conventionalities of tune and sentiment, gave them freedom
to wander through a kaleideoscopic variety of harmonic effects, as
spontaneous and changeful as the song of a bird.
I sat one evening, long after the shadows of night had fallen upon the
hillside, with one of my chums--a Frank Berkstresser, of the Ninth
Maryland Infantry, who before enlisting was a mathematical tutor in
college at Hancock, Maryland. As we listened to the unwearying flow of
melody from the camp of the laborers, I thought of and repeated to him
Longfellow’s fine lines:
THE SLAVE SINGING AT MIDNIGHT.
And the voice of his devotion
Filled my soul with strong emotion;
For its tones by turns were glad
Sweetly solemn, wildly sad.
Paul and Silas, in their prison,
Sang of Christ, the Lord arisen,
And an earthquake’s arm of might
Broke their dungeon gates at night.
But, alas, what holy angel
Brings the slave this glad evangel
And what earthquake’s arm of might.
Breaks his prison gags at night.
Said I: “Now, isn’t that fine, Berkstresser?”
He was a Democrat, of fearfully pro-slavery ideas, and he replied,
sententiously:
“O, the poetry’s tolerable, but the sentiment’s damnable.”