Seven of the seventeen songs collected by Julian Boyd from Minnie Lee in Pamlico County, North Carolina, in 1926 had religious content. Four of those were described by Henry Belden and Arthur Palmer Hudson as "Negro fragments." [1]
The question is how did an African-American song like "Come by Here" cross the color line, when slaves fled from area plantations to New Bern when Union forces took control in 1862. [2]
The African-American population in New Bern has been estimated at around 3,100 in 1860. [3] Joe Mobley said 8,591 freedmen were in the New Bern area in January 1864. A year later there were 10,782. Thousands followed Sherman as his army moved through Georgia toward Richmond in 1865. Five thousand came to New Bern as a consequence. [4] The refugee camp on James Island in the Trent River "swelled to about 3,000 blacks." [5] Another along the Trent River housed individuals from Goldsboro. [6]
After the Civil War, the Freedman’s Bureau encouraged individuals to return to plantations as sharecroppers. The African-American population dropped, but James City persisted until the 1890s when a new land owner [7] evicted everyone. [8] The president of the Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad [9] wanted the island for commercial use. [10]
African Americans who stayed in New Bern and those who moved back to rural areas carried with them a regional culture [11] that developed when slaves, who had been isolated on plantations, mingled with one another. Like Thomas Wentworth Higginson in Beaufort, South Carolina, [12] a soldier stationed in New Bern in 1863 kept notes. He wrote:
"Our nights are rendered musical by the plaintive choral hymnings of devotional negroes in every direction, alone and in groups. From their open cabins comes the mingled voices of men wrestling painfully and agonizingly with the spirit, and those uttering the ecstatic notes of the redeemed." [13]
Zenas Haines also recorded his impression of their funereal customs. He wrote:
"The negroes here honor the Hibernian custom of ‘waking’ their dead. On occasions of this sort, they sometimes render night so hideous by their songs and shoutings that the guard is attracted to the scene of their spiritual orgies, to enforce order. At midnight, the revellers solemnly refresh themselves with coffee, and then resume their howling, reciting and chanting simple hymns, line by line." [14]
When freedmen established churches, they were not the ones of their former owners. Instead, they reopened a Baptist church closed by whites. The A.M.E Zion church was introduced in 1863, and in 1864 the older AME church was absorbed by it. [15] Haines visited one church in 1863 where "the singing was congregational, and line by line, as it was read by the preacher." [16]
After Reconstruction, camp meetings began to be reported in local newspapers, [17] but usually in association with violence. The Newbernian reported a "colored man was seriously stabbed in the side by a white man" at a "Colored camp meeting" in Broad Creek on 4 October 1879. [18] In 1888, the stereotype was so familiar, a New Bern journalist could say checks were "flying through the air like razors at a colored camp meeting" and be sure his simile would be understood. [19]
Sponsors for mass meetings rarely were mentioned, so there is no way to know if they were influenced by the camp meeting movement inspired by Phoebe Palmer or if they were an indigenous form derived from memories of pre-Civil War meetings. They already were so well known in 1880 a minstrel troop staged one as part of its program in Boston. [20]
In 1881, a railroad may have been experimenting with promoting events as a way to generate revenue. In mid October, trains arrived in New Bern from Morehead City, Beaufort, Kinston, and Goldsboro. From there, they went to Jumping Run in Onslow County. [21] Local papers reported "every passenger car on the Midland Road is engaged, and number of boxes and flats have been improvised as temporary passenger trains." [22]
Camp meetings were held in Kinston in 1883, [23] 1884, [24] 1885, [25] and 1887. [26] Two to three thousand people were present on a Sunday evening in 1884. The "Wise Fork colored camp-meeting" was "held in the open air, under the shade of heavy oaks and pines." A reporter noted "many white people were present and seemed greatly to enjoy the proceedings." He added "the singing was grand, enchanting, making such music as might have been heard at Bayreuth when Richard Wagner ‘stirred the concord of sweet sounds’." [27]
By 1886, steamers were beginning to be used. A camp meeting at Barrington Wood’s was fifteen minutes away. A visitor reported the pavilion could seat 3,000 and that on a Tuesday night there was a "fair sprinkling of white people, although the majority of the crowd were colored." [28]
In addition to steamers, groups could rent excursion boats from private individuals. These wouldn’t have been announced in the newspaper, so there’s no easy way of knowing how common they were. In 1882, the New Bern A.M.E Zion church hired one for a camp meeting on Goose Creek to celebrate the completion of its new building. [29]
No more African-American camp meeting notices appeared in New Bern newspapers until 1895, when an additional train was scheduled to take individuals to "a (colored) Union camp meeting" at Scott’s Hill in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1895. [30] This was repeated in 1896. [31]
Jim Crow laws were being adopted elsewhere in the South, especially after the Supreme Court issued its Plessy v Ferguson decision in 1896. [32] North Carolina was one of the last states to decree segregated passenger cars on railroads in 1899, [33] and the first to isolate African Americans on steamboats. [34] Since other states already had discriminatory laws, interstate railroads, which had absorbed local ones by this time, probably already were applying restrictions uniformly.
After 1899, the appearance of news items on camp meetings in New Bern newspapers no longer could be used as an indicator of African-American religious activity. What ones do exist suggest the character of mass meetings changed as a new generation came of age, which hadn’t spent time in refugee centers at the end of the Civil War.
Segregation limited potential camp-meeting locations to ones near New Bern. No more reports were published of whites attending them, even in small numbers. Although some may have done so, the wall between cultural groups was less permeable. Songs would have needed a different route to cross the barrier.
The language used to report African-American events changed as well. In 1906, a New Bern paper reported "the colored race are having a series of camp meetings at a place on Duck Creek about three miles from New Bern." [35] The creek emptied into the Neuse across the river from James City and was accessible by small boats.
In 1908, reporters used a camp meeting as an occasion for ridicule. The streetcar carrying "darkies on the way back from the negro camp meeting at Centre Grove" caught fire. The paper said passengers "went headlong over the dashboard, while other crawled out beneath the restraining bars. None took thought as to the manner and method of their departure but fled as though pursued by a thousand devils." [36]
Map
PhilFree. Selection from "North Carolina Counties." Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons on 11 July 2006. Updated by DieBuche on 15 May 2010. Vance is short for Vanceboro.
End Notes
1. Belden and Hudson edited the text volumes of The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. [37] They classified three songs as religious, based on genre. I identified them solely by lyric content. One example of the difference was "Old Dan Tucker." They labeled it a play party, which it was. However, Lee ended every line with a reference to the Lord:
"Old Dan Tucker clam a tree
His Lord and Saviour for to see.
The limb did break and he did fall;
He never saw his Lord at all!" [38]
The other versions simply ended with references to Tucker:
"There was a man in Chapel Hill town
Who carried a load of molasses down;
The ’lasses worked, and the hoops did bust
And sent him home in thundergust." [39]
2. Joe A. Mobley. James City. Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, Division of Archives and History, 1981. 1.
3. Alan D. Watson. A History of New Bern and Craven County. New Bern: Tyron Palace Commission, 1987. 307. The New Bern population in 1860 was 5,432 of which 44% was slave and 13% was freed bondsmen.
4. Mobley. 25. Jacob Cox moved from New Bern toward Goldsboro on 14 March 1863. Sherman moved from Kinston to Raleigh on 13 April 1863. [40]
5. Mobley. 25.
6. Mobley. 43.
7. Mobley. 76. In 1880, the heirs of the original plantation sold 618 acres with James City to Mary S. Bryan.
8. Mobley. 81.
9. Mobley. 76. James Augustus Bryan was president of the Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad and the National Bank of New Bern.
10. Mobley. 89.
11. Judging from the participants in camp meetings shown on the map, New Bern’s supra-plantation culture reached west along the railroad and south along the coast. It did not look north toward Virginia and Maryland.
12. Higginson was discussed in the post for 20 September 2018.
13. Zenas T. Haines. Letter, 12 May 1863. 106–107 in Corporal. Letters from the Forty-fourth Regiment M.V.M. Boston: Herald Job Office, 1863. Mobley brought this to my attention. [41]
14. Haines. Letter, 1 June 1863. 114. Watson brought this to my attention. [42] Nothing in Haines’ letter suggested he did anything more than hear sounds; he probably did not see the people, and so could not comment on physical movements and rituals.
15. Wiley J. Williams. "St. Peter AME Zion Church." NC Pedia website. 2006.
16. Haines. Letter, 22 March 1863. 89.
17. On 16 August 2019, I asked Google for all entries with the keywords "camp meeting" and "New Bern" for every year from 1870 to 1926. Most of the responses were OCR transcriptions of newspaper pages. The quality of the translations depended on the cleanliness of the originals. I’ve found, in other research, if a copied page had been much handled it would have illegible sections, perhaps from oil deposits from the skin. Dirt and creases also could made it difficult for the computer program. When things were miscopied, they then couldn’t be found by search tools.
18. Item. The [New Bern] Newbernian. 4 October 1879. 3. Broad Creek appeared on the map for 19 January 2020.
19. Item. The [New Bern] Daily Journal. 12 December 1888. 2.
20. Sandra Jean Graham. Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry. Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 2018. No page numbers in online edition. The troop was J. H. Haverly’s Gigantic Colored Minstrels.
21. Item. [New Bern] Daily Commercial News. 18 October 1881. Cited by Mobley. 75.
Item. [New Bern] Daily Commercial News. 19 October 1881. 1.
Item. [New Bern] Daily Commercial News. 23 October 1881. 1.
22. Item. [New Bern] Daily Commercial News. 16 October 1881. 1.
23. Item. The [New Bern] Daily Journal. 20 September 1883. 1. The OCR transcription was poor; all that was clear in the garbage was "The colored camp meeting." A few lines later "Sunday near Kinston" was legible.
24. Item. The [New Bern] Daily Journal. 24 September 1884. 1.
25. Item. The [New Bern] Daily Journal. 26 August 1885. 1. The location was "a pine grove, one mile east of Kinston."
26. Item. The [New Bern] Daily Journal. 4 September 1887. 1. "The annual camp meeting of our colored churches."
27. Daily Journal, 26 August 1885.
28. Item. The [New Bern] Daily Journal. 16 September 1886. 1. I couldn’t confirm a location for Barrington or Barrington’s Woods. It was a surname in New Bern and Craven County.
29. Item. New Berne Weekly Journal. 19 October 1882. 3.
30. Item. New Berne Weekly Journal. 22 August 1895. 3.
31. Item. The [New Bern] Daily Journal. August 15, 1896. 4.
32. Gilbert Thomas Stephenson. "The Separation of The Races in Public Conveyances." The American Political Science Review 3:180–204:1909. 191.
33. Stephenson. 191.
34. Stephenson. 189.
35. Item. The [New Bern] Daily Journal. 24 May 1906. 1.
36. "Street Car Catches Fire." The New Bern Sun. 11 August 1908. 7.
37. Publication details were provided in the post for 8 December 2019.
38. Minnie Lee. "Old Dan Tucker." Brown 3:116.
39. Dr. Kemp P. Battle. "Ole Dan Tucker." Brown 3:116.
40. Wikipedia. "Campaign of the Carolinas."
41. Mobley. 10.
42. Watson. 399.
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