Christianized Ring Shouts

Topic: Origins - Ring Shout
The ability of Protestant evangelists to convert slaves in the antebellum South depended on the goodwill of plantation owners. Baptists, like those of Saint Helena, [1] were more likely to Christianize their chattel than others. Margaret Washington indicated most slave owners in lowland and insular South Carolina wouldn’t let Methodists near their lands because the church was associated with abolition. [2] The camp meetings that included slaves, like the one visited on the Georgia piedmont by Fredrika Bremer, [3] were held in the uplands.

When church services were introduced before the Civil War, slaves adjusted their activities to perpetuate ring shouts. In late January 1853, Frederick Law Olmsted visited Richard James Arnold near Savannah in Bryan County, Georgia. Arnold was a Quaker from Providence, Rhode Island, who had become a slave owner when he married. [4] Olmsted observed:

"On most of the large rice plantations which I have seen in this vicinity, there is a small chapel, which the Negroes use as their prayer-house. The owner of one of these told me that, having furnished the prayer-house with seats having a back rail, his negroes petitioned him to remove it because it did not leave them room enough to pray. It was explained to me that it is their custom, in social worship, to work themselves up to a great pitch of excitement, in which they yell and cry aloud, and, finally, shriek and leap up, clapping their hands and dancing, as it is done at heathen festivals. The back rail they found to seriously impede this exercise." [5]

Edward Pierce visited Saint Helena island in January 1862 to assess its cotton crop. He noted

"more than one-half of the adults being members of churches. -Their meetings are held twice or three times on Sundays, also on the evenings of Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. They are conducted with fervent devotion by themselves alone or in presence of a white clergyman, when the services of one are procurable. They close with what is called "a glory shout," one joining hands with another, together in couples singing a verse and beating time with the foot. A fastidious religionist might object to this exercise; but being in accordance with usage, and innocent enough in itself, it is not open to exception." [6]

On the same island in May 1862, Harriet Ware observed a shout at the end of a church service:

"They then shook hands all round, when one of the young girls struck up one of their wild songs, and we waited listening to them for twenty minutes more. It was not a regular ‘shout,’ but some of them clapped their hands, and they stamped in time. It was very difficult to understand the words, though there was so much repetition that I generally managed to make out a good deal, but could not remember it much, still less the music, which is indescribable, and no one person could imitate it at all." [7]

Later in the war, a contributor to the Continental Monthly described praise meetings held by freed Baptists and Methodists in South Carolina. He or she was the only person to actually try to describe the steps rather than the formation.

"there usually follows the very singular and impressive performance of the ‘Shout,’ or religious dance of the negroes. Three or four standing still, clapping their hands and beating time with their feet, commence singing in unison one of the peculiar shout melodies, while the others walk around in a ring, in single file, joining also in the song. Soon those in the ring leave off their singing, the others keeping it up while with increased vigor, and strike into the shout step, observing most accurate time with the music. The step is something halfway between a shuffle and a dance, as difficult for an uninitiated person to describe as to imitate. At the end of each stanza of the song the dancers stop short with a slight stamp on the last note, and then, putting the other foot forward, proceed through the next verse. They will often dance to the same song for twenty or thirty minutes, once or twice, perhaps, varying the monotony of their movement by walking for a little while their hands and drawling out in a monotonous sort of chant something about the ‘River Jawdam’." [8]

One other description of Civil War shouts on Saint Helena appeared in the 30 May 1867 issue of The Nation.

"But the benches are pushed back when the formal meeting is over [. . .] when the "spirichil" is struck up, begin first walking and by-and-by shuffling round, one after the other, in a ring. The foot is hardly taken from the floor, and the progression is mainly due to a jerking, hitching motion, which agitates the entire shouter, and soon brings out streams of perspiration. Sometimes they dance silently, sometimes as they shuffle they sing the chorus of the spiritual, and sometimes the song is also sung by the dancers. But more frequently a band, composed of some of the best singers and of tired shouters, stand at the side of the room to ‘base’ the others, singing the body of the song and clapping their hands together or on the knees." [9]

End Notes
I have not done research in this area and am grateful to the individuals mentioned below. I have read the original sources cited by them.

1. William Francis Allen and his wife were missionaries assigned to Seaside, the John Edwin Fripp Plantation on Saint Helena. He and Harriet Ware’s brother, Charles, collected the songs they heard. He wrote in the introduction to The Slave Songs of the United States: "so far as I can learn, the shouting is confined to the Baptists; and it is, no doubt, to the overwhelming preponderance of this denomination on the Sea Islands that we owe the peculiar richness and originality of the music there." (Slave Songs. Edited by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison. New York: A. Simpson and Company, 1867. xv.) Examples from Saint Helena were discussed in the post for 20 September 2018.

2. Margaret Washington Creel. "A Peculiar People." New York: New York University Press, 1988.

3. Fredrika Bremer was quoted in the post for 18 September 2018.

4. Olmsted identified the plantation owner as Mr. X. Charles Hoffmann and Tess Hoffmann identified him in North by South: The Two Lives of Richard James Arnold. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988 edition. 1.

5. Frederick Law Olmsted. A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States. New York: Dix and Edwards, 1856. 449. Emphasis in original. Katrina Hazzard-Donald brought this to my attention. "Hoodoo Religion and American Dance Traditions: Rethinking the Ring Shout." The Journal of Pan African Studies 4:194-212:September 2011. 197. Olmsted visited the South in 1853 for the New York Daily Times.

6. E. L. Pierce. "The Negroes at Port Royal." Report to Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, 3 February 1862. Boston: R. F. Wallcutt, 1862. 31. He was mentioned in the post for 20 September 2018.

7. Harriet Ware. Letter for 1 May 1862. In Letters from Port Royal Written at the Time of the Civil War. Edited by Elizabeth Ware Pearson. Boston: W. B. Clarke Company, 1906. No page numbers in on-line copy. She was mentioned in the post for 20 September 2018.

8. "Under the Palmetto." The Continental Monthly. 4:188-203:1863 (spring?). 196.

9. The Nation 4:432-433:1867. Reprinted in Slave Songs. xiii-xiv. Either Allen or Ware could have written the article to publicize the release of their book. The third editor, Lucy McKim, arrived in South Carolina in June 1862 with her father, mentioned in the post for 20 September 2018. He was gathering information for the Philadelphia Port Royal Relief Committee. In 1865 she married Wendell Phillips Garrison, who was the literary editor for the recently founded Nation. Her father was one of the men who financed it as a way to continue working for freedmen’s rights. (Margaret Hope Bacon. "Lucy Mckim Garrison: Pioneer in Folk Music." Pennsylvania History 54:1-16:1987.)