Songs of Slavery and Home
The Foster family’s relationship with enslavement was both direct and indirect. Stephen’s mother, Eliza Clayland Foster’s (born Tomlinson) had cousins in Maryland who owned slaves. These cousins ran a plantation next to the one where Frederick Douglass was enslaved. Frederick Douglass (1818 – 1895) was an African American author, statesmen, abolitionist, and social reformer who argued for emancipation prior to the Civil War, and continued to work for African American equality until his death.
As Stephen’s biographer John Tasker Howard notes, during Stephen’s childhood, the Foster family participated in enslavement by making use of black hereditary term slaves. The Gradual Abolition Act of Pennsylvania, passed in 1780, declared that any individual born into slavery before March 1 of that year would be enslaved for 28 years before being considered free. William Barclay Foster Sr. in a letter to William Jr. on July 14, 1834, wrote that “Mrs. Collins made your ma [Eliza Foster] a present of an excellent coloured girl a few days ago, who has upwards of three years to serve. So much save for girls hire.” The “coloured girl” referenced here is an African American woman named known as “Kitty,” about whom little is known.[i]
Several individuals worked for the Foster family at the White Cottage, the Allegheny house, and many of their other residences, performing outdoor chores, household tasks, and caring for the children, including young Stephen. Among the latter was a “mulatto bound-girl” named Oliva Pise (called “Lieve” by the family) who was, according to Morrison Foster (Fig. 1), “the illegitimate daughter of a West India Frenchman.” Among the white servants was a boy named Tom Hunter who was born at the White Cottage on the same day as Stephen’s sister Henrietta. He would be bound to the Fosters for many years. There were also two Irish women named Catherine P. Roussel and Margaret McGowan who labored for the family at $1.25 per week in the 1850s. There is also evidence of a person of color named John Duval who worked for the family for “10$ per month” in 1851. It is important to note that in the antebellum period when the word “mulatto” was used to describe an individual who was half black and half white, this almost always meant that the person was conceived when a white slave owner sexually assaulted an enslaved woman. [ii]
As family lore goes, Stephen and his music were both influenced by the black church. In his book Biography, Songs and Musical Compositions of Stephen C. Foster Morrison Foster writes that Lieve, a “devout Christian,” took Stephen to her “church of shouting colored people when he was a boy,” and that he was “fond of their singing and boisterous devotions.” Morrison also claimed that Stephen told him that several parts of his compositions, including “Hard Times Come No More” and “Oh, Boys, Carry Me ’Long” featured some “scraps” from what he had heard at the church during these years. In an interview from 1895 Morrison mentions that the music from the church “impressed [Stephen] very much, and during his whole life he felt warmly inclined toward the colored race.” [iii]
The Fosters were Democrats. What did it mean to be a Democrat in the antebellum age? Generally, to be aligned with pro-slavery policies and legislation such as the Compromise of 1850 (which included the Fugitive Slave Act), The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and to show support for the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling in the Dred Scott case. Morrison Foster in particular was staunchly anti-Abolitionist. During the Civil War he was what was known as a Copperhead Democrat. These were northerners, led by Ohio congressman Clement L. Vallandigham (Fig. 2), who were sympathetic to the South and detested Lincoln and his war policies. Stephen Foster was a Democrat as well, though not one as always outwardly blatant in his beliefs and views as the rest of his family. As mentioned in the introductory portion of this site, there is evidence on both sides for Stephen’s stance on slavery, none of which can be sorted conclusively in favor of one stance or the other. According to his niece Evelyn Foster Morneweck, Stephen was friends with Vallandigham, but also "almost caused a complete break between himself and his brother's [Morrison's] wife, Jessie . . . by a song he produced in 1862 entitled 'That's What's the Matter'," which is anti-Confederate and anti-Rebel (though not pro-abolition). If read as Foster's personal view on political parties, he seems here to be repudiating the Copperheads: [iv]
The rebels thought we would divide,
And Democrats would take their side;
They then would let the Union slide,
And that's what's the matter!
But, when the war had once begun,
All party feeling soon was gone;
We join'd as brothers, ev'ry one!
And that's what's the matter!
Some of his closest friends, such as Charles Shiras—writer and publisher of the Abolitionist newspaper The Albatross—were Abolitionists. Stephen wrote songs, such as “Nelly Was a Lady” (Fig. 3) and “Old Black Joe” which portrayed African Americans as individuals with feelings rather than mere chattel property. Interpretation at the Stephen Foster Memorial Museum in Pittsburgh mentions how some of Stephen’s songs were sung or cited by Abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass. [v]
But that did not mean Stephen himself necessarily espoused Abolitionist beliefs. Stephen’s niece Evelyn Foster Morneweck wrote that Stephen was “fatalistic” about the subject of slavery, that he saw it as an “intolerable burden under which the black race stumbled helplessly and hopelessly, but with a kind master [Stephen] pictured them carefree and happy enough.” George Cooper, a friend and co-writer of some of Stephen's songs during the 1860s, stated in 1917 that “Foster disliked the disruption of the ties that held the negroes to their masters.” Some Stephen Foster historians have argued that Stephen had no “use” for the Abolitionists or Abolitionism as a cause, citing the campaign songs he wrote for Pennsylvania politicians, as well as Democrat presidential hopeful James Buchanan in the mid-1850s, whom he also campaigned for publicly. One of these Buchanan songs was called “The Abolition Show” (Fig. 4 - with verses co-written by Morrison) in which Abolitionists are referred to as “babies” and “clowns”. Another campaign song Stephen wrote during this time was “The White House Chair” (Fig. 5). [vi]
The issue of ambiguity arises again, however, when considering the extent of Stephen's political musical contributions. Beyond the sphere of local politics and familiar political connections (Buchanan was the brother of Stephen's brother-in-law) Stephen did not produce political songs for the Democratic Party at any level or at any other time beyond the election of 1856. In fact, during the war years, he wrote songs that supported the Union cause. If Stephen truly was personally and ideologically a Democrat, the question must be asked: Where are the campaign songs for fellow Democrats James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce, or a number of other local, regional, or national Democratic candidates? And why did he not participate in the campaigns that he was involved with beyond a musical capacity?
Abolitionism was considered a radical political position in the mid-nineteenth century. Though some in the North were anti-slavery, most whites held white supremacist beliefs. A common view both North and South during the time was that African Americans were child-like and did not have the capacity to take care of themselves. From this sprung the notion of “paternalism," in which plantation owners saw themselves as dubious “fathers” and caregivers of their human property. Many of these enslavers viewed blacks as lacking “moral self-discipline," and they could not see an America where slavery did not exist. This concept of paternalism is glimpsed in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, when slave owner Augustine St. Clare gifts to his cousin, Miss Ophelia from Vermont, “a fresh-caught specimen . . . a little negro girl, about eight or nine years of age” named Topsy to “bring her up” and educate her. Frederick Douglass describes a crueler example of paternalism in a narrative of his early life as an enslaved person, recalling how his former master turned out an injured child “to starve and die” while continuing to “care” for the girl’s mother. As Douglass contemptuously wrote, such was the benevolence of “many pious slaveholders who [held] slaves for the very charitable purpose of taking care of them.” [vii]
Perhaps prompted in part by his publishers to write “white man’s music," Stephen Foster abandoned the cruder minstrelsy of the “Oh! Susanna” and “Camptown Races” variety in 1852 (he would return to minstrelsy briefly in the 1860s) and began writing “Plantation Melodies,” which were a combination of minstrel songs and white parlor music. Some of his most famous and enduring compositions were penned in this style, including “Old Folks at Home,” “My Old Kentucky Home, Goodnight,” and “Massa’s in de Cold cold Ground” (Fig. 6). These songs, as Stephen wrote to E.P. Christy in the famous May 1852 letter, eschewed the “trashy and really offensive words which belong to some songs of that [the minstrel] order.” Stephen afterwards began focusing on creating music "better suited” to the pianos and parlors of the burgeoning white middle class. Similar to portrayals of plantations in the lithographic prints of the firm Currier & Ives during Reconstruction, Stephen’s Plantation Melodies generally depict African Americans who are "content" with their place as slaves (or in the Currier & Ives prints, sharecroppers - Figs. 7 and 8). There are also echoes of paternalism in such songs as “Massa’s in de Cold cold Ground.” [viii]
“My Old Kentucky Home, Goodnight” (Fig. 10) illustrates a similar state of “happiness” among enslaved people:
The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home,
'Tis summer, the darkies are gay,
The corn top's ripe and the meadow's in the bloom
While the birds make music all the day.
The young folks roll on the little cabin floor,
All merry, all happy and bright:
By'n by Hard Times comes a knocking at the door,
Then my old Kentucky Home, good night!
However in the last lines of this song, one of the ultimate horrors of slavery is suggested: the forced parting of families due to one or more of them being sold by one enslaver to another. The song in its early drafts was entitled “Poor Uncle Tom, Goodnight,” (Fig. 9) revealing that Stephen was influenced by Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, though whether he was motivated primarily by artistic or commercial interests is difficult to determine. [ix]
The reality for enslaved Africans during the mid-nineteenth century was of course grim and horrific. The grueling toil. The separation of families. Slaves endured beatings, whippings, and mutilations at the hands of their white owners, and were in some instances the victims of murder. One passage from a former slave, William Coleman, encapsulates the extreme violence an unnamed individual suffered after accidentally bumping into the wife of a plantation Master:
—he [the Master] called that poor Negro to him and took
him out in the pasture, tied his hands together, throwed the
other end of [a] rope over a limb on a tree, and pulled that
Negro’s hands up in the air to where that Negro had to stand
on his tiptoes. And Master, he took all that Negro’s clothes
off and whipped him with [a] rawhide whip until that Negro
was plumb bloody all over. Then he left that poor Negro tied
there all the rest of the day and night.
The houses of enslaved people were tiny cabins made of logs or clapboard, often only one room. In many cases two families or more shared a single twelve by fifteen foot structure. The floors were sometimes wood planked, but usually they were of hard-packed dirt. Most had no windows, and the only light within was that which shone through the gaps between the logs. Sometimes there were crude pieces of furniture—benches, bedsteads laid with straw, maybe a small table. Most enslaved people merely squatted “on their hams”—crouching in the corners of their hovels and around their outside fires. They had very little in the way of cooking utensils or storage pieces, and their bedding was often just a coarse blanket. [x]
[Two portrayals of enslaved people harvesting cotton. In the top image the enslaved are idealized, "happy" to perform their work. The image below depicts a closer proximity to the reality of slavery. Note the bullwhip in the white man's hand.]
Descriptions and images such as these sharply contrast the "happy slaves" and warm, rustic houses portrayed in both the prints of post-war Currier & Ives and the Plantation Melodies of Stephen Foster. In some ways Stephen is following the narrative of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in “My Old Kentucky Home, Goodnight.” The family he describes, though enslaved, are “gay” as Stowe describes them; the setting is Kentucky; the “young folks” (Tom’s children) are rolling “on the little cabin floor”; a figure which could be Tom is taken away (sold) from the family. However in the last verse of the song Stephen writes:
The head must bow and the back will have to bend,
Wherever the darkey may go:
A few more days, and the trouble all will end
In the field where the sugar canes grow.
This could be read as a nod to Tom’s struggles on Simon Legree’s Louisiana plantation. In the story, however, cotton was the central crop farmed there, not sugar cane, and none of the horrific conditions nor the brutal death Tom suffers in the book are suggested in the lyrics. Yet “My Old Kentucky Home, Goodnight” parallels Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the sense that death, as evidenced by Tom’s demise, is—besides the possible escape to Canada—the only way an enslaved person may escape bondage. [xi]
What is the legacy of Stephen’s songs about slavery and the enslaved? Did they show respect and sympathy for African Americans during the mid-nineteenth century? As with many of his songs, it can be hard to extract his true intentions from the lyrics of his “Plantation Melodies.” In “My Old Kentucky Home, Goodnight” Stephen could be writing specifically about the characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (as we’ve seen, the song at least in early drafts was based on the novel), but couldn’t the song also be about a parting in general, or more poignantly, about the parting we all experience from our loved ones at death? Morrison claimed that Stephen’s plantation songs “founded a new era in melody and ballad”:
The grotesque and clownish aspect of negro songs was
softened, and ridicule began to merge into sympathy.
Unknown to himself, he opened the way to the hearts of
his people, which led to actual interest in the black man.
Whatever his intentions, and though his political position as a Democrat did not change, Stephen’s portrayal of blacks bucked the trend of contemporary songwriting. His Plantations Melodies such as “Farewell, My Lilly Dear,” (Fig. 11) “Massa’s in the Cold cold Ground,” “Old Folks at Home,” “Uncle Ned,” “My Old Kentucky Home, Goodnight,” “Nelly Bly,” and “Nelly Was a Lady” all contain sympathetic portrayals of black Americans which helped to raise awareness for African American struggles and even emancipation in the mid-nineteenth century. By and large they moved away from black “slave” dialect (“My Old Kentucky Home, Goodnight” contains none of the latter) in a decade when portrayals of blacks on the minstrel stage were becoming cruder as the North and South moved closer to war. For “Oh! Boys Carry Me ’Long,” Stephen mentions in a letter to E.P. Christy in June of 1851 that the song should be performed in a “pathetic, not a comic style.” Perhaps the last word on the subject belongs to Frederick Douglass, who understood that minstrelsy and “Plantation Melodies” were about racial denigration, but could also be about racial uplift. Just as Abolitionists used Stephen’s songs to promote their cause in the antebellum period, the songwriter’s “Plantation Melodies” were also used by Southern proponents of Jim Crow in the 1890s who longed for the days of “loyal” antebellum African Americans who they derogatorily referred to as “Mammies” and “Uncle Neds.” But Douglass also understood that Stephen Foster had produced “heart songs” that promoted empathy for enslaved people: [xii]
It would seem almost absurd to say it, considering the use that
has been made of them, that we have allies in the Ethiopian songs;
those songs that constitute our national music, and without which
we have no national music. They are heart songs, and the finest
feelings of human nature are expressed in them. “Lucy Neal,” “Old
Kentucky Home,” and “Uncle Ned,” can make the heart sad as well
as merry, and can call forth a tear as well as a smile. They awaken
the sympathies for the slave, in which antislavery principles take root,
grow, and flourish.