I think that the following note, prefixed by the authors to their poem,
sufficiently explains what is to me one of their best humorous pieces:
"Not long ago a certain Georgia cotton-planter, driven to desperation
by awaking each morning to find that the grass had quite outgrown
the cotton overnight, and was likely to choke it, in defiance of
his lazy freedmen's hoes and ploughs, set the whole State in a laugh
by exclaiming to a group of fellow-sufferers: `It's all stuff
about Cincinnatus leaving the plough to go into politics "for patriotism";
he was just a-runnin' from grass!'
"This state of things -- when the delicate young rootlets of the cotton
are struggling against the hardier multitudes of the grass-suckers --
is universally described in plantation parlance by the phrase `in the grass';
and Uncle Jim appears to have found in it so much similarity
to the condition of his own (`Baptis'') church, overrun, as it was,
by the cares of this world, that he has embodied it in the refrain
of a revival hymn such as the colored improvisator of the South
not infrequently constructs from his daily surroundings.
He has drawn all the ideas of his stanzas from the early morning phenomena
of those critical weeks when the loud plantation-horn is blown
before daylight, in order to rouse all hands for a long day's fight
against the common enemy of cotton-planting mankind.
"In addition to these exegetical commentaries the Northern reader
probably needs to be informed that the phrase `peerten up' means substantially
`to spur up', and is an active form of the adjective `peert'
(probably a corruption of `pert'), which is so common in the South,
and which has much the signification of `smart' in New England, as e.g.,
a `peert' horse, in antithesis to a `sorry' -- i.e., poor, mean, lazy one."