Topic: Kumbaya 1955-1961
Tony Saletan introduced “Kumbaya” to the nascent folk revival movement in the spring of 1957 when he sang it at the Swarthmore College Folk Festival. [1]
As mentioned in the post for 11 August 2019, the movement had begun to emerge in the 1930s and become more recognizable with benefit concerts in 1940 for refugees from the Spanish Civil War and drought in Oklahoma that brought together artists like Burl Ives, Josh White, and Woody Guthrie.
Anthony David Saletan was born to Russian immigrants in New York City in 1931. [2] He grew up surrounded by the kind of people who contributed to those causes. [3] Barbara Witemeyer remembers her father was friends with Saletan’s dad and that “as children we would go into New York City to have our teeth cared for. Lenonard Bernstein (‘Lenny’) was a good friend as he also went to Dr. Saletan who often charged his artist patients very little for his work. Lenny taught David’s son Tony to play jazz on the piano; and we three girls, a few years younger than Tony, always made him play for us.” [4]
Saletan was a freshman at Harvard in 1950 when the recording of “Goodnight Irene” by the Weavers [5] became the most popular song in the country. [6] By his junior year, he was the music director for Dunster House and arranging music for the dormitory. [7] His senior yearbooks listed his interests as: “Vocal, Jazz, Classical” and “Folk Dancing.” [8]
The summer he graduated, 1953, Saletan worked as a counselor at Buck’s Rock Work Camp outside New Milford, Connecticut. [9] It had been founded in 1942 by Ernst and Ilse Bulova, who had been trained by Maria Montresori in London. After they arrived in this country, Bulova worked at the Walden School in New York [10] where both Tony and his sister became students. [11]
The next summer Saletan worked at the Shaker Village Work Camp, [12] where Margot Mayo was responsible for folk music. [13] This may have fit his interests better than Buck’s Rock since she was a founding member of the American Square Dance Group, and taught in New York City. [14]
During this period, Harvey Matusow denounced Peter Seeger as a communist, and the Weavers lost their recording contract in 1953. The group stopped touring in the spring, [15] and Seeger began performing in New England summer camps. It’s not known when he first appeared at Buck’s Rock, [16] but he definitely appeared at Shaker Village when Saletan was there. [17]
Seeger became a role model for many aspiring folk singers, especially after he refused to cooperate with House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955. Apart from politics, he pioneered supporting a professional career by performing for children. [18]
Saletan began working on a Masters in Education from Harvard after he graduated. [19] In 1955, he appeared on a children’s show produced by the Tufts University Nursery Training School. Come and See was the very first program broadcast by Boston’s public television station, WGBH. [20] Saletan accompanied himself with a small guitar. [21]
From there, he became the music consultant for the Newton, Massachusetts, public schools. [22] This was less a full-time job than it was an opportunity to perform in schools when invited. For instance, he appeared for second graders in Plainville, Massachusetts, in 1958 [23] Three years later he gave a concert in Newton. [24]
The programs and the television show not only gave him opportunities to perfect his performing techniques, but probably brought him into contact with Augustus D. Zanzig. Zanzig retired from the Brookline, Massachusetts, schools in 1956, and began working for Lynn Rohrbough’s Cooperative Recreation Service. [25] Saletan had to have learned “Kum Ba Yah” from him, either directly or through someone like Marion Roberts who was working with Zanzig in Boston on the songbook for the Girl Guides mentioned in the post for 27 November 2022.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Tony Saletan
Instrumental Accompaniment: he probably used a guitar
Notes on Lyrics
I have no idea how Saletan sang “Kumbaya”; he may have added his own verses or instrumental flourishes.
This surmise is based on the changes he made to “Michael Row the Boat Ashore.” In the winter before he worked at Shaker Village, he was looking through folksong collections in the Harvard library and found Slave Songs of the United States. [26] Number 31 is the version of “Michael” collected by Charles Pickard Ware from boatmen working in the Port Royal Islands near Beaufort, South Carolina. [27]
Saletan recalls: “I judged that the tune was very singable, added some harmony (a guitar accompaniment) and thought the one-word chorus would be an easy hit with the teens (it was). But a typical original verse consisted of one line repeated once, and I thought a rhyme would be more interesting to the teenagers at Shaker Village Work Camp, where I introduced it. So I adapted traditional African-American couplets in place of the original verses.” [28]
The changes were slight. “Michael” is one of the few songs in the original collection to have two part harmony on the second line. The original had 16 verses. Many dealt with dying in Biblical imagery which would not have interested adolescents. Verses 10 through 12 became popular: “Brudder, lend a helpin’ hand,” “Sister, help to trim dat boat,” and “Jordan stream is wide and deep.”
Notes on Performance
Occasion: Swarthmore Folk Festival, Sunday, 14 April 1957
Location: Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, about 30 miles from Philadelphia and reachable by rail
The Swarthmore Folk Festival began in 1945 with a strong emphasis on folk ballads of Appalachia. Richard Dyer-Bennett was the first guest artist. Pete Seeger appeared in 1953. The festival became so popular by 1955, that the administration cancelled the festival because it attracted too many outsiders. Students claimed the president was offended by the fact many wore jeans. [29]
The administration allowed the festival to resume in 1957 on two conditions: fewer artists and no outside visitors. [30] John Jacob Niles [31] appeared all three days, with Mike and Peggy Seeger joining him on Saturday and Sunday. [32] The Sunday concert added Tom Paley [33] and Saletan. [34]
Notes on Performers
In 1958, Saletan worked on a record of Japanese folk songs for Rohrbough. [35] It supported a collection by Albert Ichiro Suzuki that was edited by Zanzig. [36] Suzuki earned a masters from Boston University in 1952, [37] and the other singers were BU students. [38] Zanzig played piano. Saletan spent the next year on an Asian tour sponsored by the International Recreation Association, and later worked on other CRS records. [39]
Throughout the florescence of the commercial folk-music revival, Saletan remained an active performer. He also continued to work on projects for second graders. At the time, the performances were probably the most satisfying. In retrospect, his work with elementary school music had the more lasting impact. Kathryn Bornhauser recalled:
“You taught me that I can make up new verses and new songs myself, and that my made-up songs count as REAL songs, too! I passed that awareness on to my children. We loved our time with you. One son took up guitar and still plays for personal enjoyment. You, your voice and your songs are still in our hearts and on our lips. Thank you, for your gift to the world. You did and are making a huge difference.” [40]
Saletan now lives in University Place, Washington, and still performs.
End Notes
1. Joseph C. Hickerson. Letter, 8 November 1977.
2. “Rose Saletan in the 1940 Census.” Ancestry website; his mother.
“David Saletan.” Geni website; last updated 2 November 2014. His father.
“Saul Saletan.” Geni website; last updated 2 November 2014. His grandfather, who was born in what is now Latvia.
3. In 2004, Saletan provided the music for George and Ruth, a play about the Spanish Civil War based on letters written by the parents of one of the authors, Dan Lynn Watt. [41] A blurb for the book version began: “Recently, Tony Saletan learned that his father, David Saletan, who had a dental practice in New York, provided pro bono dental work for ...” [42]
4. Barbara Witemeyer. “Dentist to the Stars.” Leonard Bernstein website, page 5 of “Memories.
5. Gordon Jenkins And His Orchestra And The Weavers. “Goodnight Irene.” Decca 27077. Released 1950. [Discogs entry.]
6. “Goodnight, Irene.” Wikipedia website; accessed 19 March 2023.
7. Milton S. Gwirtzman. “Dunster Dunces---Charms to Soothe the Savage.” The Crimson, Harvard University, 9 May 1952.
8. Red Book, Harvard University yearbook, 1953. 79.
9. “Tony Saletan.” Wikipedia website; accessed 17 March 2023.
10. Douglas Martin. “Ernst Bulova, 98, Founder Of Camp With a Free Spirit.” The New York Times, 28 January 2001.
11. Wikipedia, Saletan.
“Rhoda (Saletan) Goldberger.” 2022 obituary on North Jersey website.
12. Wikipedia, Saletan.
13. “Shaker Village Work Camp Is Novel Camping Experience.” The Berkshire Eagle, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 13 August 1947.
14. “Margot Mayo.” Wikipedia website; accessed 19 March 2023.
15. Pete Seeger and The Weavers are discussed in the post for 6 October 2019.
16. In 1957, campers attended a Weaver’s concert at the Berkshire Music Barn. [43]
17. Saletan recalled he taught “Michael Row the Boat Shore” to Pete Seeger during the summer of 1954. [44]
18. The influence of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s American Folk Songs for Children is discussed in the post for 18 August 2019. She was Pete’s stepmother. The book was published in 1948 by Doubleday.
19. “Dirty Old Boston.” Facebook website, 2 May 2021.
20. “WGBH-TV.” Wikipedia website; accessed 18 March 2023.
21. The photograph for the “Dirty Old Boston” entry shows Saletan and his co-host, Mary Lou Adams. He is sitting behind her with his guitar. Later photographs show him with a banjo.
22. Telecourse Catalog 1967. Bloomington, Indiana: National Center for School and College Television, 1967.
23. Harriet F. Washburn. “Music.” Forty-fourth Annual Report of the Town Officers of Plainville, Mass Year Ending 31 Dec 1958. 131.
24. Item. The Newton Graphic, Newton, Massachusetts, 9 November 1961.
25. L. R. “Dedication.” 65 Friendly Songs. Delaware, Ohio: CRS, Inc, 1963. Edition for Ohio Music Education Convention, 12 January 1963. L. R. is Lynn Rohrbough. For more on Zanzig, see the column at the right of the screen.
26. Wikipedia, Saletan.
27. “Michael Row the Boat Ashore.” 31 in The Slave Songs of the United States. Edited by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison. New York: A. Simpson and Company, 1867.
28. Wikipedia, Saletan. It gives no source; by now Saletan probably has told the story so often he has an internal script he uses.
29. Will Treece. “The Swarthmore Folk Festival.” The Phoenix, Swarthmore College, 31 March 2011.
30. Treece.
31. Niles is mentioned in note 24 of the post for 28 April 2019.
32. Mike and Peggy are children of Pete’s father by his second wife, Ruth Crawford.
33. Paley was interested in the string-band music recorded in the 1920s and 1930s by Southern white artists. He, Mike Seeger, and John Cohen formed the New Lost City Ramblers in 1958 to perform that music. [45]
34. “Swarthmore College Folk Festival 1957 Setlists.” Setlist website.
35. A Sampler of Japanese Folk Songs. Delaware, Ohio: Cooperative Recreation Service, 1959. 10" LP.
36. Albert Ichiro Suzuki. A Sampler of Japanese Songs for Group Singing, edited by Augustus D. Zanzig. Delaware, Ohio: Informal Music Service, 1958.
37. Boston University website.
38. Taeko and Masako Fijii were Fulbright Scholars at BU; San'ichi Kesen was a graduate student in psychology. [46]
39. Larry Nial Holcomb. A History of the Cooperative Recreation Service. PhD dissertation. University of Michigan, 1972. 145-146.
40. Kathryn Bornhauser. “38 thoughts on ‘Tony Saletan’.” WGBH Alumni website. Comment added 20 January 2019.
41. Molly Lynn Watt and Dan Lynn Watt. George and Ruth: Songs and Letters of the Spanish Civil War. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Educational Alternatives, 2004. CD.
42. “George & Ruth-Songs & Letters of the Spanish Civil.” Deep Discount website, 27 April 2004. The website no longer is available.
43. Buck’s Rock Work Camp Yearbook. New Milford, Connecticut: Buck’s Rock Work Camp, 1957. 44, 61, 65.
44. Wikipedia, Saletan.
45. “Tom Paley.” Wikipedia website; accessed 20 March 2023.
46. Holcomb. 145.
Sunday, March 26, 2023
Tony Saletan - Kumbaya
Sunday, March 19, 2023
LaVilla Landowners - Francis L’Engle
Topic: Origins - Early Versions
In 1865, Francis L’Engle purchased the land west of Jacksonville, Florida, that had been owned by Baptist preachers. [1] After the Civil War, he platted the LaVilla subdivision [2] where James Weldon Johnson was raised.
L’Engle was the son of Susan Philipa Fatio and John Nicole Claudius L’Engle. Her family was from Switzerland and had owned land in Florida under the Spanish. His was from France and had lived in Haiti.
Francis Philip Fatio was a Protestant [3] who had fought with the Swiss Guard against France in the War of Austrian Succession. After he married Marie Madeleine Crispell, he developed land near Nice, France. [4] In 1761, he moved to London [5] where his brothers were merchants. [6] His son, Francis Phillipe, Jr., was born that year. [7]
Britain took control of Florida in 1763 as part of the settlement of the Seven Year’s War. [8] Fatio and two partners invested in an indigo plantation in 1769. Two years later he moved to the Saint John’s river to manage New Castle plantation. [9]
Fatio and his partners were granted 10,000 acres for a new plantation in 1774 called New Switzerland. [10] He remained when the Spanish regained control of Florida in 1783. [11] The next year he bought out his partners. [12] By 1800, Fatio was growing cotton. [13]
His son, Francis, Jr., married in Greensboro, Georgia, in 1802, [14] and Susan was born in 1806 in Saint Augustine. [15]
The elder Fatio died in 1811. During the War of 1812, Americans attempted to take Florida. While there, they burned the Fatio plantation. [16] The family fled over the international boundary to Saint Mary’s, Georgia. By 1816, they had returned to Fernandina. They moved back to the Saint Johns in 1822, and had returned to New Switzerland by 1824. [17]
L’Engle’s grandmother, Suzanne Guilman, was born in Haiti in 1775. [18] She had married Jean L’Engle by 1796, when their daughter Marie Madeline was born. [19] Neither were part of the planter class. Suzanne’s father may have been an officer in the Free Masons, and Jean may have been a ship’s captain and Mason. [20]
The Haitian Revolution broke out in 1791 and the United Kingdom invaded in 1796. After losing to yellow fever, the British troops retreated in 1798. [21] L’Engle’s father, John, was born in South Carolina in 1801. [22]
John graduated from West Point in 1819, and immediately was sent to Fernandina’s Amelia Island. [23] He married Susan Fatio in Saint Johns County, Florida, in 1830. [24] Francis was born later that year. [25] John remained in the army until 1838, when he resigned and settled in Florida. [26]
Their son Francis married Charlotte Johnston Porcher in 1853. [27] A letter at the time said she was the daughter of Dr. Peter Porcher and that Francis worked on the Broad River and “mostly lives in Goldsboro, North Carolina.” [28] While the immigrant Porcher is well known, her tie to the family has not been documented further. [29]
Francis was twenty-three years old when he married. He entered business with his father, who traded in real estate, bonds, and notes. He also rented slaves. On the eve of the Civil War, he owned fifteen or sixteen. [30]
In 1855, Seymour Baldwin became president of a railroad, which had been chartered in 1851. He convinced Jacksonville it should issue bonds to pay for construction. [31] One can only guess John L’Engle subscribed. The next year, Francis had the contract to survey the route from Jacksonville to Alligator Town, as Lake City then was called. [32] That was the same year he bought land in LaVilla, which would have benefited from his proposed route.
John Pease Sanderson took over management of the railroad in 1857, [33] and the road commenced operations in March 1860. Florida seceded from the Union in January 1861. [34] Francis’ younger brothers joined the army, [35] while John oversaw the construction of fortifications. [36] John died in 1864. [37]
At the end of the war, Francis faced reduced wealth. His wife complained she had problems managing with just one servant. [38] He and his brother Edward became involved with a society promoting immigration to Brazil. He hoped “to buy just “two or three slaves in Brazil and hold them as long as the damnable abolition spirit of the age will permit me.” [39]
The L’Engles had not been planters before the war; much of their real estate was in or near Jacksonville. Laura Jarnagin thought the brothers were less interested in leaving the country, than in establishing a business to handle the trade of those who did emigrate. [40]
Railroads were the only assets remaining in the state, and they were in poor condition. Before the first Union invasion of Jacksonville in 1861, [41] Confederate leaders ordered men to remove iron spikes, bolts, and rails, and then burn the crossties. [42] When Lake City became the transshipment point for food going north, parts of the original road were rebuilt. [43] They were the object of the fourth invasion of Jacksonville in 1864. [44]
Getting railroads operational after the war was a high priority for everyone. During the period when the Union was running the Pensacola and Georgia railroad that ran west from Lake City, Francis had a contract to produce crossties. [45] One suspects the family may have done similar business before the war. Later, his brother, Edward, and Sanderson tried to subvert attempts by outsiders to strip the railroad of its assets. [46]
Francis’ land in LaVilla was in equally poor condition. In 1862, Confederate troops used the Baptist church as a training camp, that led to a skirmish with Union troops in March. [47]
The next year Thomas Wentworth Higginson arrived with Black troops to build defenses for Jacksonville. To get materials and clear an area from invasion, they cut down “a large forest of pine and oak trees” and “destroyed about fifty dwellings, mostly of an inferior class.” [48]
In 1866, before the Freedmen’s Bureau was operational, Francis platted the land and gave 99-year leases to forty-one Freedmen. The next year, his wife signed similar leases. [49] Patricia Drozd Kenney says his motives are hard to discern. She thought perhaps he was trying to make money on land whose value “was not expected to increase over time.” [50]
Francis remained a businessman. When sixteen Blacks didn’t pay, he voided their contracts in 1869. [51] That was the year Johnson’s father contracted for a lot with a “four- or five-room dwelling, old, rough, and unpainted, a typical ‘poor white’ house.” [52] It may have been one of the repossessed lots.
Johnson was born in 1871 and believed his father bought his land for cash in 1869. [53] In 1871, he built a new house in the center of the lot. [54]
The next year, 1872, Kenney says “L’Engle entered into a new leasing agreement with twenty-one blacks, five of whom were among the original lessees, stipulating an option to purchase the property in fee simple.” [55]
Francis, no doubt, sold land to Johnson’s father when he saw the money. However, it would be interesting to know when, or if, he ever learned Johnson’s grandmother had left Haiti in 1802, [56] one year after Francis’ was born to Haitian refugees.
End Notes
1. Patricia Drozd Kenney. “LaVilla, Florida, 1866-1887: Reconstruction Dreams and the Formation of a Black Community.” Masters thesis. The University of Florida, 1990. 13. This land is mentioned in the post for 12 March 2023.
2. Kenney. 12.
3. William Scott Willis. “A Swiss Settler in East Florida: A Letter of Francis Philip Fatio.” Florida Historical Quarterly 64(2):174-188:1985. 187.
4. Willis. 174.
5. Willis. 175.
6. “Francis Philip Fatio.” Wikipedia website, accessed 11 February 2023.
7. Tommaso Valarani. “Francis Phillipe Fatio, Jr.” Geni website; last updated 20 September 2022.
8. “East Florida.” Wikipedia website, accessed 10 March 2023.
9. “Francis Philip Fatio.”
10. “Francis Philip Fatio.”
11. “East Florida.”
12. “Francis Philip Fatio.”
13. Willis. 183, 184.
14. Louise Ingersoll Lanier. A Genealogy of the Family Who Came to Virginia and Their French Ancestors in London. Washington, DC: Goetz Printing Company, 1965; reprinted 1970. 262.
15. “Susan Philippa L'Engle (Fatio).” Geni website; last updated 20 September 2022.
16. Willis. 187.
17. Samantha Williams. “Spotlight on Louisa Fatio.” St Augustine website, 8 January 2012.
18. “Marie Madeleine L'Engle.” Ancestry website.
19. Johnny. “Marie Madeleine “Aunt Leonis” L'Engle.” Find a Grave website, 13 January 2017.
20. Oliver Gliech. “Settlers from St.-Domingue without Landed Property. Domingino website, 2021.
21. “Haitian Revolution.” Wikipedia website, accessed 10 March 2023.
22. “John Claudius L’Engle.” Ancestry website.
23. Bill Thayer. “Class of 1819.” University of Chicago website.
24. “John Claudius L’Engle (1800 - 1864).” Wiki Tree website; last updated 24 July 2014.
25. “Francis Fatio “Frank” L’Engle.” Geni website; last updated 12 June 2018.
26. Thayer.
27. Lanier. 262.
28. Quoted by Towles, p183 - Louise Palmer Towles. A World Turned Upside Down: The Palmers of South Santee, 1818–1881. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.
29. Isaac Porcher immigrated to the French Santee in 1695. [57]
30. “John Claudius L'Engle account book (1858-1864).” University of Michigan, Clement Library website.
31. Edward A. Mueller. “The Florida Atlantic and Gulf Central Railroad.” Railway and Locomotive Historical Society, Southeast Chapter, Newsletter, February 2012. Additional material from Don Hensley. 1.
32. Mueller. 2
33. Mueller. 2.
34. Mueller. 3.
35. William Johnson L’Engle was born in 1833. [58] He died “suddenly” in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1861 while awaiting his commission as a surgeon. [59] Edward McCrady L’Engle was born in 1834, [60] and served was a quartermaster. He was wounded in 1862. [61] John Claudius L’Engle was born in 1840, [62] and rose to be a surgeon. [63]
36. Thomas Frederick Davis. History of Early Jacksonville. Jacksonville, Florida: The H. and W. B. Drew Company, 1911. 156.
37. “John Claudius L’Engle (1800 - 1864).”
38. Jerrell H. Shofner. Nor Is It Over Yet. Gainesville: The University Presses of Florida, 1974. 21-22.
39. Laura Jarnagin. “The Edgefield Southern Immigration Society.” 37-45 in A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008.
40. Jarnagin.
41. The post for 19 February 2023 discusses Jacksonville in the Civil War.
42. Samuel Proctor. “Jacksonville During the Civil War.” The Florida Historical Quarterly 41(4):343–355:1962. 459. Proctor thought: “it is questionable that this order was fully carried out.”
43. Mueller. 4.
44. “Florida Central and Western Railroad.” Wikipedia website; accessed 11 March 2023.
45. Shofner. 30.
46. Paul E. Fenlon. “The Notorious Swepson-Littlefield Fraud: Railroad Financing in Florida (1868-1871).” The Florida Historical Quarterly 32(4):231-261:April 1954.
47. “Skirmish of the Brick Church.” Wikipedia website, accessed 11 February 2023.
48. Davis. 180.
49. Kenney. 12.
50. Kenney. 49.
51. Kenney. 49.
52. James Weldon Johnson. Along This Way. New York: The Viking Press, 1933. 129–604 in James Weldon Johnson, edited by William L. Andrews. New York: Library Classics of the United States, 2004. 139.
53. Johnson. 139.
54. Johnson. 140-141.
55. Kenney. 50.
56. Johnson. 135.
57. “Porcher Family Papers, 1740–1967.” South Carolina Historical Society website.
58. Cousins by the Dozens. “William Johnson L'Engle.” Find a Grave website, 14 August 2010.
59. “William Johnson L’Engle Book, 1843-1863.” University of North Carolina, Wilson Special Collections Library website.
60. Kristy Thomas. “Edward McCrady L’Engle.” Find a Grave website. 23 July 2002.
61. Genealogy Trails Team. “Civil War Infantry Rosters.” Genealogy Trails website. Its source is: Fred L. Robertson. Soldiers of Florida in the Seminole Indian--Civil and Spanish-American Wars. Tallahassee, Florida: Board of State Institutions, 1903.
62. “John Claudius L’Engle.” Ancestry website.
63. Genealogy Trails.
Sunday, March 12, 2023
LaVilla Landowners - Joseph Stevens Baker
Topic: Origins - Early Versions
James McDonald’s contract with the Georgia Baptist Association in 1832 required him to keep a daily journal and report quarterly. [1] He often sent reports to The Christian Index, [2] which was published by the association. By the time McDonald was in Jacksonville, the editor was Joseph Stevens Baker. [3]
Baker’s family had moved to Dorchester, South Carolina, from Massachusetts in 1695. [4] The Congregational church removed to Liberty County, Georgia, in 1752. [5] His grandfather was the first deacon. [6] After the American Revolution, it affiliated with the Presbyterians. [7]
Joseph was raised to be a Presbyterian minster like his four step-brothers. For that purpose he was sent to Hampden-Sidney College. [8] While the school supported religious freedom, [9] it also housed the Presbyterian’s Union Theological Seminary. [10]
When he returned to Liberty County, the local church asked him to prepare an answer to the question: was John’s baptism a Christian baptism? Two years later, Baker sold his property in Georgia and entered Columbian College to study medicine. [11] It had been founded in 1821 by Baptists. [12]
Baker practiced medicine for a few years, then became a Baptist missionary. It was after he moved to Georgia around 1840 that he took over the editorship of The Christian Index. It suffered the same financial problems that McDonald did when the Southern Baptist Convention replaced the Northern Baptist sponsors. [13] He resigned in 1848, and moved to Jacksonville, Florida. [14]
By then, Baker was fifty years old. His son, McRobert Baker, was a lawyer who also moved to Jacksonville. In 1850, he was the town’s mayor. [15] Joseph must have acted as a preacher at McDonald’s church when the evangelist was out proselytizing. [16] In 1851, McDonald sold his land to the Bakers [17] and moved to Atlanta. McRobert turned part of the acreage into a plantation, which he called LaVilla. [18]
The same year, 1850, McDonald’s deacon, Elias Jaudon bought a 550 acre plantation on the Saint John’s River. The previous owner, William McKay, had used 50 slaves to grow sea island cotton. By 1855, Jaudon had expanded Magnolia Plantation to 1,000 acres and added livestock and over crops. [19]
In 1853, McRobert Baker was a circuit court judge for Sumter County in the central part of the state, but still lived in Jacksonville. [20] The next year, Joseph returned to Georgia. [21] McRobert’s interests in central Florida increased, and, in 1856, he sold LaVilla to Francis L’Engle. [22]
Jaudon remained the deacon for Bethel Baptist church, and supported the minister who arrived in 1859, E. M. Dennison. [23] The church had grown to 290 members, of whom 250 were Black. [24] By 1861, Jaudon provided land for a new building closer to town. [25] The cemetery remained where it was.
In the meantime, in 1860, Jaudon, McRobert, and others incorporated La Villa Institute as a school to train teachers. [26]
During the Civil War, the new church building was used as a hospital for Union troops. [27] After the war, the white and Black members fought over its ownership. In 1868, a court gave whites the property, and ordered them to pay compensation to the newly freed Blacks. They used the funds to erect a wooden building at a new location, which they called Bethel Baptist. In response, the whites changed their name to Tabernacle Baptist. [28]
Jaudon’s role in this fight is unknown. By 1868, he was 62 years old. [29] His oldest son had died in Richmond in 1862, [30] and he apparently had left the area during the war. [31] Jaudon returned a less wealthy man; he had lost capital when slaves were emancipated. His land had not been tended during the war and probably had been used by Union troops in 1865.
During Reconstruction, Jacksonville attracted northerners, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, [32] who came for the winters or to make investments. [33] Capital moved more freely after Federal troops were withdraw in April of 1869. [34] In 1869, Jaudon sold 100 acres to Elwell Jamison, who in turn sold 35 acres to William James. They hoped to build a residential suburb. [35]
Jaudon died in 1872. [36]. McRobert had died in Richmond in 1864. [37] His father, Joseph, moved to Quitman, Georgia, after the war where he died in 1877. [38]
End Notes
1. James C. Bryant. “James McDonald: Missionary to East Florida.” Florida Baptist Historical Society meeting, Deland, Florida, 5 May 1984. Republished on the society’s website. 17, footnote 27. James McDonald is introduced in the post for 5 March 2023.
2. Bryant. 3.
3. “The Christian Index.” Georgia Historic Newspapers website.
4. Dorchester Antiquarian and Historical Society. History of the Town of Dorchester, Massachusetts. Boston, Massachusetts: Ebenezer Clapp, Jr., 1859. 261-262.
5. James Stacy. History of the Midway Congregational Church, Liberty County, Georgia. Newman, Georgia: S. W. Murray, 1899. 16-18.
6. Stacy. 33.
7. Stacy. 12.
8. William Cathcart. Baptist Encyclopedia. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Louis H. Everts, 1881. Biography of Joseph S. Baker reprinted by Greg Willis. “Joseph S. Baker, Queries Considered
Church Discipline, 1847.” 247-249 in Polity, edited by Mark Dever. Center for Church Reform, 2001. 248.
9. “Hampden–Sydney College.” Wikipedia website, accessed 4 March 2023.
10. “Union Presbyterian Seminary.” Wikipedia website, accessed 4 March 2023.
11. Cathcart. 248.
12. “Columbian College of Arts and Sciences.” Wikipedia website, accessed 4 March 2023.
13. The post for 5 March 2023 discusses the impact of the division of the Baptist church over slavery on the income of McDonald.
14. Cathcart. 248.
15. Richard Lee Cronin. “Cowboys & Lawyers: Part 2 - Joseph McRobert Baker.” Citrus Land Fl website, 9 January 2020.
16. Thomas Frederick Davis. History of Early Jacksonville. Jacksonville, Florida: The H. and W. B. Drew Company, 1911. 88.
17. T. Frederick Davis. History of Jacksonville, Florida and Vicinity, 1513 to 1924. Saint Augustine, Florida: The Record Company for The Florida Historical Society, 1925. 43-44.
18. Davis, 1925. 44.
19. Wayne W. Wood. The Living Heritage of Riverside & Avondale. Jacksonville, Florida: Riverside Avondale Preservation, Inc., 1994. 9.
20. Cronin.
21. Davis, 1911. 88.
22. Patricia Drozd Kenney. “LaVilla, Florida, 1866-1887: Reconstruction Dreams and the Formation of a Black Community.” Masters thesis. The University of Florida, 1990. 13.
23. Item on E. M. Dennison in “Biographies D.” Florida Baptist Historical Society website, 23 November 2020.
24. Davis, 1911. 88.
25. Davis, 1911. 87.
26. Chapter 1,166—[No. 73]. An act to incorporate La Villa Institute, near Jacksonville, Florida, 1860. 157-1958 in The Acts and Resolutions Adopted by the General Assembly of Florida at Its Tenth Session. Tallahassee, Florida: Dyke and Carlisle for Office of the Floridian and Journal, 1861.
27. Davis, 1911. 87.
28. “Our History.” The Bethel Experience website.
29. “Elias Gabriel Jaudon, Jr.” Geni website, last updated 8 February 2023.
30. Isaiah W. “Elias Gabriel Jaudon III (1836 - 1862).” Wiki Tree website, 10 November 2013; last updated 20 April 2018.
31. Steve W. has been researching the history of the 169th Civil War regiment from Troy, New York. The men were camped north of Jaudon’s plantation in 1865. On 9 February 2014, he reprinted reports by men in the regiment on the Metro Jacksonville website who described vacant houses in the area. In another post on 9 February 2014, Steve concluded: “I think a possible reason why the mansion, plantation, and nearby village were not identified by the men is because the place was deserted, per orders of the Confederate authorities. Nobody was left behind to say who owned the property.” [39]
32. Stowe paid her first visit to Jacksonville in 1867. For the next 17 years she and her husband spent their winters on 90 acres of land they purchased. She became a bit of a tourist attraction herself when steamboats went buy their property. [40] Her observations on a ring shout are quoted in the post for September 2018.
33. Davis, 1925. 149, 152.
34. Davis, 1911. 197.
35. Wood. 10.
36. “Elias Gabriel Jaudon, Jr.”
37. Cronin.
38. Stacy. 138. Quitman is located near the Florida boundary; the rivers flow into the Suwannee in central Florida. The surrounding Brooks County was a center of vigilante activity during reconstruction. [41]
39. Steve W. “Topic: Jacksonville Plantation Mystery (Civil War) -- SOLVED.” Metro Jacksonville website, 9 February 2014.
40. Jeff Klinkenberg. “Mrs. Stowe’s Florida.” Tampa Bay website, 19 November 2006; last updated 20 November 2006.
41. “Brooks County, Georgia.” Wikipedia website, accessed 8 March 2023.
Sunday, March 5, 2023
LaVilla Landowners - James McDonald
Topic: Origins - Early Versions
James Weldon Johnson grew up in LaVilla, a small community west of Jacksonville after the Civil War. [1] The area originally was an island, but the surrounding creeks later were filled. [2]
Like most land in the area, it began as a Spanish grant, and changed hands several times. In 1836, Adin Waterman acquired 250 acres on behalf of Lydia Pinkston, apparently as an investment. [3] It was described as pine and oak woods in 1863. [4] Waterman had a large timber grant from the Spanish with a sawmill near modern Chester. [5] He had been named as her trustee when she married Milo K. Pinkston. [6]
In that year, 1836, James McDonald was a Baptist evangelist in Darien, Georgia. [7] He had been born in Limerick, Ireland, where his father was hung as a rebel in 1805. The seventeen-year-old fled the country after “exacting revenge upon a fellow countryman for his false testimony against his relatives.” He had been raised as a Roman Catholic, and so headed for Cuba, where he was arrested by the Spanish as a spy for England. A friend from Norfolk saved him from execution. [8]
That was around 1815. Sometime after he moved to Georgia, where he became a Baptist. During his voyage to Cuba, the ship’s captain had tried to convince him “it was not a mortal sin to read the Scriptures.” [9]
McDonald was living near Macon in central Georgia when he was licensed to preach in 1830. Two years later, the Georgia Baptist Association made him a missionary to Burke County near Augusta on the South Carolina border. [10] By 1837, he was working for the Sunbury Baptist Association and living in Darien. [11] Most of his converts there were Black. [12]
He made an exploratory trip down the coast into north Florida in the spring of 1837 where he held a three-day protracted meeting. In the summer, he returned to the area where he held a five-day meeting in Jacksonville. After people asked him to return, [13] he moved to Fernandina’s Nassau County in 1838. At the time the county seat was at the Court House Ditch on Waterman’s Grant. [14]
McDonald’s primary purpose was holding meetings where he converted attendees. If enough affiliated, he found some local person to run the congregation, while he went elsewhere. He did return on a circuit a preach at each group. [15] By 1839, he had organized 17 congregations, and was ministering to seven. [16]
In 1840, Jacksonville built a small church, [17] and, in June, McDonald moved from Nassau County to the town. The building was dedicated in September, with a gallery for slaves. [18]
His life became for secure in 1941, when he was hired by the American Baptist Home Missionary Society. [19] That year, he notified The Christian Index:
“In this beautiful river [St. Johns] opposite our town, I have never baptized but one white person, whilst thirty blacks have gone down into the water, and been buried with Christ by baptism into death.” [20]
In January 1842, Waterman transferred 250 acres to McDonald. In March, a neighbor deeded the adjoining 250 acres to him. [21] In May, the 44-year-old man married. [22] In August, the Seminole War, which had been raging since 1835, formally ended. [23]
McDonald’s wife, Theresa Amanda Pendarvis, was the descendant of the Joseph Pendarvis, who had gone to South Carolina from Barbados in 1672. [24] His son, John, recognized and freed the children of his slave mistress, Parthena. [25] Theresa’s father George was born in Dorchester, South Carolina, and was in Jacksonville by 1830. [26] One of her sisters was named Lavilla. [27]
Nothing is known about the wives of George’s father, William, or his grandfather, also William, the son of John. [28] PBS thought some of John’s descendants could have married white women, and within a few generations been considered white. [29] One assumes Theresa was deemed white.
McDonald’s security ended in 1845, when the Baptists split over slavery. He lost his position with the northern society, and returned to itinerant evangelism for the Southern Baptist Convention. [30]
Meantime, the congregation in Jacksonville sold its church building and erected a brick building on McDonald’s land in 1846. His deacon, Elias Gabriel Jaudon, purchased some adjacent land for a cemetery. [31]
The Southern Baptist Convention finances deteriorated and, in 1849, the 51-year-old began planning a move to Atlanta. [32] After weathering the war there, McDonald moved to Rome, Georgia, in 1869, where he died in April. [33]
Jaudon must have maintained the church during the periods McDonald was working as an evangelist. His immigrant ancestor, Daniel Jaudon, moved from the Bay of Biscay to the French Santee. [34] Sometime his grandson, Samuel Elias Jaudon, moved to the Black Swamp area near Beaufort. [35] There the family affiliated with the local Baptist church. [36]
Our Jaudon managed a plantation on Hilton Head for Mary Sarah Stoney Barksdale. This was probably after her husband died in 1832 and before she remarried in 1836. [37] Her grandfather, John Stoney, had migrated from Tipperary, Ireland, in 1774. [38] His son, her father James, married the daughter of a Baptist convert who lived in the Black Swamp area. [39]
Jaudon was able to marry in 1835, and, by 1840, was a planter in Beaufort. [40] He was in Jacksonville by the time McDonald held his first meeting. He and his wife were charter members, and must have been two of the few whites in the congregation. When he died in 1872, [41] he owned the Magnolia Plantation. [42]
End Notes
1. Johnson is discussed in the post for 12 February 2023.
2. T. Frederick Davis. History of Jacksonville, Florida and Vicinity, 1513 to 1924. Saint Augustine, Florida: The Record Company for The Florida Historical Society, 1925. 151.
3. Davis, 1925. 43.
4. Thomas Frederick Davis. History of Early Jacksonville. Jacksonville, Florida: The H. and W. B. Drew Company, 1911. 180.
5. John Hendricks. “Pioneers Who Lived in the Yulee Area Two Hundred Years Ago.” The Yulee News, 16 June 2022. 2. Not much more is known about them except Waterman named one of his sons Lewis Pinkston. [43]
6. Davis, 1925. 43.
7. Darien, Georgia, is mentioned in the posts for 2 October 2018 on Lydia Parrish and for 3 February 2019 on Robert Winslow Gordon. Gordon collected four versions of “Come by Here” near Darien in 1926.
8. “James McDonald.” Florida Baptist History website.
9. James C. Bryant. “James McDonald: Missionary to East Florida.” Florida Baptist Historical Society meeting, Deland, Florida, 5 May 1984. Republished on the society’s website. 9.
10. Bryant. 9.
11. “James McDonald.”
12. Bryant. 3.
13. Bryant. 4.
14. Bryant. 5. “So stagnant did business become between 1835 and 1840 that the county seat was removed from Fernandina to a community known as Court House Ditch at Waterman’s Grant, between King’s Ferry and Fernandina.” [44]
15. Bryant. 6.
16. “James McDonald.”
17. Davis, 1911. 86.
18. Bryant. 11.
19. “James McDonald.”
20. The Christian Index, 24 September 1841. 618. Quoted by Bryant. 12.
21. Davis, 1925. 43. Davis used the word “deeded.” This suggests McDonald may not have bought the land, as it seems hard to believe he would have accumulated any capital.
22. Bryant 17, note 18.
23. “Seminole Wars.” Wikipedia website, accessed 26 February 2023.
24. Agnes Leland Baldwin. First Settlers of South Carolina, 1670–1700. Easley, South Carolina: Southern Historical Press, 1985. 182.
25. Jim Latrip. “Pendarvis.” Gen website. The connection was made by Theresa’s daughter who knew the names of George, William, and William. Randy Floyd found the reference in a letter of James Barnwell Hayward. Hayward then tied the elder William to Joseph. [45] Hayward elided John’s children in his published genealogy of the family. [46]
26. Fred. “wilfredleblanc -- Cavaliers and Pioneers.” Roots Web website, last updated 9 May 2019. Page for “George Pendarvis.” Dorchester is discussed in the post for 12 March 2023.
27. George Pendarvis. Will, 28 October 1870. Transcribed by Jane Gibbs and posted on US Gen Web website. He called Theresa Tracy.
28. Latrip.
29. “Pendarvis.” Public Broadcasting System website.
30. Bryant. 13.
31. Davis, 1911. 87.
32. Bryant. 14-15.
33. Bryant. 15.
34. Robert E. H. Peeples and Sarah Nichols Pickney. “Jaudon of Carolina.” Huguenot Society of South Carolina, Transactions (89):123-139:1984. 123. Daniel probably immigrated after 1700, because he is not in Agnes Leland Baldwin’s list of seventeenth century settlers. [47] His son was born in 1715 in the French Santee. [48] The French Santee is mentioned in the post for 20 November 2022 on Hezekiah Maham.
35. “Samuel Elias Jaudon.” Gini website, 5 September 2017.
36. Peeples and Pickney.
37. “Calibogia (Lawton) Plantation.” The Heritage Library Foundation, Hilton Head, South Carolina, website.
38. Mags Gaulden. “John Stoney (abt. 1748 - 1821.” Wiki Tree website, 18 March 2014; last updated 20 February 2023.
39. Robert E. H. Peeples. Tales of Ante Bellum Island Families. Hilton Head, South Carolina: 1970. Part reprinted in “Gaillard Genealogy,” Square Space website.
40. Peeples and Pickney.
41. “Elias Gabriel Jaudon, Jr.” Gini website, 8 February 2023.
42. Peeples and Pickney.
43. Sally Spencer (Watkins) Lanoza. “Adin Eleazer Waterman.” Geni website, 8 November 2022. She does not have surnames for Waterman’s wife or mother.
44. “American Proprietors, 1818-1860.” Amelia Island Genealogical Society website.
45. Cited by Fred. Page for “Sarah Rebecca McDonald.”
46. James Barnwell Hayward. Pendarvis-Bedon Family. Atlanta, Georgia: Foote and Davies, 1905. 45.
47. Baldwin.
48. Edward Leo Neary. “Elias Timothy Jaudon.” Geni website, 14 July 2021.
Sunday, February 19, 2023
Jacksonville in the Civil War
Topic: Origins - Early Versions
James Weldon Johnson described ring shouts he saw in Florida, in the 1880s. As mentioned in the post for 12 February 2022, he generalized his experience to fit everything he read later. That was necessary when he was discussing ring shouts in the introduction to his collection of spirituals.
However, it makes it difficult to know what existed in Fernandina and Jacksonville where he spent time as a boy. As should be clear to anyone who has read many of these posts, Black experiences differed by location. This would especially be true of Florida where Spain controlled territory until 1821. [1] Spain imported its slaves from central Africa, rather than west Africa, and many were baptized in the Roman Catholic church. [2]
Ring shouts may not have existed in northeastern Florida under the Spanish, but they were there, in a modified form, in 1871. When Harriet Beecher Stowe visited Jacksonville that year, she asked to “visit the meetings of the coloured people.” She found it “quite easy to do” because “there were two very large, active prayer meetings, the one Baptist and the other Methodist.” The Presbyterian [3] did not say which she visited. [4]
Whatever slave communities existed after the United States took control were disrupted by the Civil War. When hostilities broke out, local white men were sent to fight in Tennessee and Virginia. Union forces from Port Royal, South Carolina, [5] took advantage of the vacuum on 4 March 1862 and seized control of Fernandina’s Amelia Island. [6] The ocean port on the Saint Mary’s River, which flows south from Georgia, was used a “base of operations” until the end of war. [7]
Jacksonville was an inland port on the Saint John’s River, which flows north, parallel to the coast, for more than 300 miles. When Confederate sympathizers heard news of Fernandina, they fled west. [10]
The United States Navy made its first foray into Jacksonville on 11 March 1861. Confederate troops responded by burning all but one lumber mill. Then, a mob of “refugees from Fernandina and Jacksonville” set fire to more buildings. [11] The navy stayed until 1 April. [12] The loyal citizens, who had stayed in March, moved to Fernandina with the troops. [13]
The next expedition to Jacksonville occurred after Confederates built fortifications south of the city. The northern troops from Hilton Head found the town to be “nearly deserted” in October 1862. [14] One soldier noted “Grass and weeds grow rank and tall in the principal streets,” while “about the streets you see darkies, a few women, and a very few men.” [15] They took the slaves back with them. [16]
The Army hierarchy was hesitant to enlist Black soldiers. The first tentative experiments were at Port Royal, where Thomas Wentworth Higginson was named commander of the First South Carolina Infantry regiment in November 1862. [17] He noted that plantation owners had taken their house slaves with them when they fled Saint Helena Island. The field hands were “very black.” [18]
He also observed that the slaves who had come back from the October expedition to Jacksonville were “much lighter in complexion & decidedly more intelligent.” [19] When they proved they could master the drills, he sent recruiters to Fernandina and Saint Augustine in December 1862. They filled the regiment. [20]
The First South Carolina saw its first action in January 1863 when it sailed to Fernandina, then went up the Saint Mary’s river into Georgia. [21] Their success prompted James Montgomery to organize the Second South Carolina Infantry in Beaufort. [22]
Higginson’s troops were part of the longest occupation of Jacksonville, which began in March 1863. [23] The general overseeing operations from Hilton Head said “the negroes are collecting at Jacksonville from all quarters.” [24]
The troops spent time building forts. Their camp was in pine woods on an island west of Jacksonville near a brick church [25] that was built before the war by Baptists. [26] One imagines the men recreated the camp life they had had in South Carolina, which included frequent ring shouts. Although a contingent was left with the fortifications, most returned to South Carolina at the end of March to support “operations against Charleston and Savannah.” [27]
Once the First South Carolina Infantry had proven the value of Black troops, the Army organized more companies with recruits from the north. [28] When Union troops returned to Jacksonville in January 1864, seven of the fifteen infantry regiments were Black. They came from Massachusetts (2), North Carolina (1), and South Carolina (4). Higginson’s First South Carolina was not included, but Montgomery’s Second was. [29]
The main purpose was to support the siege of Charleston by stopping the flow of food from central Florida. [30] The army was routed when it moved inland. [31] They began leaving in April, and by May most of the “2,500 or 3,000 men” left were Blacks. [32] They left in July. [33] While Confederates rightly boasted of their victory, [34] commanders in Washington were moving troops away from peripheral areas to mount the attack in Virginia [35] that resulted in Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on 9 April 1865.
At war’s end, the Army’s primary purpose was protecting federal buildings and supplies. [36] The Seventh Infantry of the regular army was assigned to Florida in May. [37] Otherwise, the military began mustering out volunteer units. It began with the expensive calvary in May 1865. [38] The Black regiments from the North left Florida in December. [39]
Congress was slower to respond to post-War needs. It established the Freedmen’s Bureau on 3 March 1865, but no one was sent to Florida until 1 September. [40] By then the planters were reestablishing their power. The legislature they elected passed its first laws controlling African Americans in October. [41]
Former slaves flocked to cities where there still were soldiers. Thomas Osborn, head of the Bureau, discontinued their rations in Fernandina and Jacksonville in November. He wanted them working on plantations, not living off the government. [42] His requests for continued military support were ignored by the War Department. [43]
Finally, in February 1866, nearly a year after Appomattox, Osborn was able to open an office in Jacksonville. [44]
A year later, on 15 March 1867, Congress put the South under martial law. [45] There must have been some troops in Jacksonville, [46] because the Freedmen’s Bureau moved its headquarters there in May. [47]
By 1868, Southern states had Republican governments, and Congress was preparing to declare victory. Florida elected Harrison Reed in July, and on the Fourth John Sprague, head of the Bureau, surrendered his authority to Reed. Reed’s request to have troops remain was refused. [48]
In October 1868, the head of the Army’s Department of the East moved troops to protect rail centers. Jacksonville had two companies of the Seventh Infantry, with men going to Fernandina as needed. [49] This was the regular army, and they were mainly white men from outside the South.
In December, Congress reduced the Freedman’s Bureau’s functions to education, and eliminated most of its employees. In February, the Seventh Infantry was moved to Montana [50] to protect miners against attacks by Native Americans. [51] Before they left, the soldiers opened fire on rioting Blacks in Jacksonville. [52] Sprague complained anarchy had returned. [53]
Graphics
Karl Musser. “St. Marys River Watershed.” Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons on 15 March 2007.
End Notes
1. Bland and Associates, Inc. “Historic Context and References.” Appendix A to The Historic Properties Resurvey, City of Fernandina Beach, Nassau County, Florida. 2007. 12.
2. Hugh Thomas. The Slave Trade. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. 397-398.
Michael A. Gomez. Exchanging Our Country Marks. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 145-146.
3. John Gatta. “The Anglican Aspect of Harriet Beecher Stowe.” The New England Quarterly 73(3):412-433:September 2000. 312.
4. Stowe’s version is discussed in the post for 30 September 2018, and reprinted in “Ring Shouts: Historic Descriptions and Contemporary Examples.” The latter is available on the Academia.edu website.
5. Union activities in Port Royal Sound are discussed in the post for 20 September 2018.
6. Bland. 24.
7. Bland. 25.
8. United States Census. 1880. Population, By Race, Sex, and Nativity. Table V. “Population, by Race and by Counties: 1880, 1870, 1860.” 384.
9. Bland. 32.
10. Thomas Frederick Davis. History of Early Jacksonville. Jacksonville, Florida: The H. and W. B. Drew Company, 1911. 160.
11. Davis. 161.
12. Davis. 167.
13. Davis. 169.
14. Davis. 174.
15. Valentine Chamberlain. “A Letter of Captain V. Chamberlain, 7th Connecticut Volunteers.” Florida Historical Quarterly 15:93:October 1935. Quoted by Samuel Proctor. “Jacksonville During the Civil War.” Florida Historical Quarterly 41(4):343-355:1962. 351.
16. Davis. 174.
17. William A. Dobak. Freedom by the Sword: The U. S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867. Washington DC: United States Army, Center of Military History, 2011. 34-35.
18. Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Quoted by Dobak. 35. His source is: The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, edited by Christopher Looby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Higginson is discussed in the post for 20 September 2018, which is reprinted in “Ring Shouts: Historic Descriptions and Contemporary Examples.”
19. Higginson. Quoted by Dobak. 36. Dobak suggests Higginson’s views were typical of the time, when whites thought people who were more like them, i.e., with lighter skins, were better than those that differed. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy when lighter skinned slaves were given more access to whites, and thus were more socialized into western ways, than those who were left alone because they had darker skins.
20. Dobak. 36.
21. Dobak. 39.
22. Dobak. 40.
23. Davis. 175.
24. Davis. 176.
25. Proctor. 352.
26. “Bethel Church (Jacksonville, Florida).” Wikipedia website, accessed 11 February 2023.
27. Davis. 178.
28. Dobak. 55. Joshua Rieger noted that families from areas controlled by the Union continued to move into the center of the state, and that “ planters’ families from across the South migrated to Middle Florida and southwest Georgia to protect their property interests in slaves.” [54] This would have increased the productive capacity of the area.
29. Dobak. 64.
30. Dubak. 61.
31. Davis. 186.
32. Davis. 189.
33. Davis. 191.
34. During Reconstruction, Joe Richardson said: “Floridians boasted that theirs was the only capital east of the Mississippi not captured during the war. The only attempt to take Tallahassee had been defeated in large part by a group of young boys and old men in March 1865. Though the Confederacy had fallen, the people did not feel that Florida had been conquered and they were inclined to be defiant and belligerent.” [55]
35. Dubak. 70.
36. Dubak. 459.
37. Steve A. Hawks. “7th United States Infantry Regiment.” Civil War in the East website, 2023. He has one sentence on its role in Reconstruction.
38. Dubak. 471.
39. Dubak. 473.
40. Reginald Washington. “Introduction” to Records of the Assistant Commissioner and subordinate field offices for the state of Florida, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865–1872. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration, 2002. 1.
41. Joe M. Richardson. “Florida Black Codes.” Florida Historical Quarterly 47(4):365-379:1968.
42. Joshua Rieger. “Florida Freedmen’s Bureau during Reconstruction, 1865-1872.” University of Florida senior paper, 8 April 2015. 14.
43. Rieger. 9.
44. Rieger. 19.
45. Merlin G. Cox. “Military Reconstruction in Florida.” Florida Historical Quarterly 46(3):219-233:1967. 219.
46. Most of the published research on Reconstruction in Florida deals with politics and vigilante groups in the central part of state. Little exists on the military. Even descriptions of the Seventh Infantry are sparse for the period between Chancellorsville and Montana.
47. Washington. 1.
48. Ralph L. Peek. “Aftermath of Military Reconstruction, 1868-1869.” Florida Historical Quarterly 43(2):123-141:1964. 123.
49. Peek. 133. The commander was George Meade.
50. Peek. 138.
51. “Fort Shaw.” Wikipedia website, accessed 17 February 2023.
52. Peek. 138.
53. Peek. 140.
54. Rieger. His source was Jerrell H. Shofner. Nor Is It Over Yet. Gainesville, University Presses of Florida, 1974. 3.
55. Richardson. 371.
Sunday, February 12, 2023
James Weldon Johnson - Ring Shout
Topic: Origins - Ring Shout
I just came across another description of a ring shout. This one was written by James Weldon Johnson in 1925, and reprinted with slight changes in 1933.
The preface to his Book of Spirituals drew upon both his boyhood experiences in a suburb of Jacksonville, Florida, and later research. [1] The hard part is isolating those sections which represent his first-hand experience in the 1880s in LaVilla.
In his 1933 autobiography, [2] he mentioned three churches: one he attended that was a mile from his home, one a block away from his house, and the ones his father served as a minister.
As a child, he walked two blocks to his maternal grandmother’s house. In his autobiography he mentioned the perils a small boy faced who knew things more by hearsay, than experience. He said he did not cross the street until he passed the house of Mr. Cole who “everybody said was crazy.” [3]
Next he passed the houses of two older women. He remembered: “we were a little bit afraid of Aunt Venie, too; for she was said to have fits.” [4] He added she was “the champion of all ‘ring shouters’ at the “colored church on the corner.” [5]
He gives no evidence he ever went into the church. Saint Paul was an African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), founded in 1869. [6] The AME denomination was introduced into Jacksonville by Charles Pearce in 1866, with the permission of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. [7]
Johnson’s grandmother joined Mount Zion Methodist Church. [8] It was organized by the Northern Methodist Episcopal Church in 1864. The Methodists had split over slavery in 1844. [9] The Southern branch was the one that proselytized slaves in South Carolina and Georgia, then shucked them off into the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in 1870. [10]
The northern church sent its first missionary south to Beaufort. South Carolina, in 1862. [11] During the war, the hierarchy began recruiting “disabled clergy” to send to the “warmer climates” to serve soldiers. Sanford Swain went to Jacksonville in 1864 [12] where he began with Black soldiers. [13] He organized Mount Zion in May of 1866 with both Black and white members. [14]
The difference between Saint Paul’s and Mount Zion was more than the difference between the Northern and Southern branches of the Methodist Church. Neither of Johnson’s parents were ever slaves on plantations in this country. His mother was raised in the Bahamas after England abolished slavery in 1833. [15] Both her father and her grandfather were white. [16]
His father, James Johnson, was born free in Richmond, Virginia, and ran away to New York City when he was a teen. [17] Less information exists about him. Johnson admits he never heard his father “speak of his childhood and what lay back and beyond it.” [18] He learned about his father’s religious conversion from his maternal grandmother. [19]
The elder Johnson was in his fifties when he became a Baptist minister. His first assignment was in Fernandina, an old settlement thirty miles northeast of Jacksonville. [20] Johnson remembered he and his brother went to visit him for “a few days at a time” [21] and that the church was “large.” [22]
By 1886, his father had found a pulpit in Jacksonville, and returned home. Johnson described it as “little” [23]. In fact, it had some prestige in LaVilla. Shiloh Baptist was built in 1875 by several prominent Blacks. [24] When Johnson’s father was an alderman in 1872, the tax collector for the town was Samuel Spearing. [25] Spearing supervised the Sunday School. [26]
Later, Johnson’s brother, Rosamond, was the choir director and organist for Bethel Baptist church. [27]
I am not sure that Johnson saw a ring shout when he was young, despite asserting in Spirituals that he remembered “remember seeing this dance many times when I was a boy.” [28] His description matches that of many others, and include details someone who did not participate would not notice.
In his autobiography, he says something different. There he wrote:
“When there was a ‘ring shout’ the weird music and the sound of thudding feet set the silences of the night vibrating and throbbing with a vague terror. Many a time I woke suddenly and lay a long while strangely troubled by these sounds.” [29]
What is true in this statement is his reaction to the music. It may not have been a “ring shout” but an emotional religious service. He may not have known the difference as a child. The only experience he mentions is a revival he attended when he was nine years old. He contrasted the “decorum of the regular Sunday services” with “overlaid emotions” that came “to the surface.” [30]
I trust him on music because it was something he was attuned to as a child. His mother had a good voice, [31] and both he and Rosamund took piano lessons. [32] Drums were the one instrument he mentioned several times. They may be all he recalled about his visit to the Bahamas with his mother when he was four years old. [33]
Later, he said he wanted to be a drummer in a brass band, and recalled the skills of Martin who “could beat a continuous and unbroken roll on his muffled drum all the way from the church to the cemetery.” He added “I lost my ambition to be a drummer, but drums have never lost their tumultuous effect on me.” [34]
The question is why would Johnson write beyond his experience. By 1925, he had become politically active with the NAACP, while his brother wrote popular music. Rosamund created the piano arrangements for the Spirituals collection. No doubt the two compared notes when James was writing the “Preface” where he took on the persona of an expert. He broaches the ring shouts at the end of his discussion to distinguish them from spirituals.
“This term ‘shout songs’ has no reference to the loud, jubilant Spirituals, which are often so termed by writers on Negro music; it has reference to the songs or, better, the chants used to accompany the ‘ring shout’.” [35]
This led to a description of ring shouts. In his autobiography, he introduces part of his 1925 descriptions to explain the word “shout” after he said Aunt Vinnie was a “shouter.” Again, he may have felt a need to define a term for his less-informed readers.
If Johnson did see ring shouts when he was young, it was in one of the churches were his father was pastor. Rosamond was more likely to have seen them after James left for school in Atlanta in 1887.
End Notes
1. James Weldon Johnson. The Book of American Negro Spirituals. New York: The Viking Press, 1925.
2. James Weldon Johnson. Along This Way. New York: The Viking Press, 1933. 129–604 in James Weldon Johnson, edited by William L. Andrews. New York: Library Classics of the United States, 2004.
3. Johnson, autobiography. 157.
4. Johnson, autobiography. 157.
5. Johnson, autobiography. 158.
6. Teresa Stepzinski. “St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church celebrates 150 years of serving God and Jacksonville.” Jacksonville website, 15 September 2019.
7. John R. Scott. “Introduction of African Methodism into East Florida.” 168-174 in Proceedings of the Quatro-Centennial Conference of the African M. E. Church of South Carolina, edited by Benjamin W. Arnett. Xenia, Ohio: Aldine Printing. House, 1890. 173.
8. Johnson, autobiography. 143. Mount Zion is now Ebenezer United Methodist Church.
9. John T. Foster Jr. and Sarah Whitmer Foster. “The Last Shall Be First: Northern Methodists in Reconstruction Jacksonville.” The Florida Historical Quarterly 70(3):265–280:January 1992. 269.
10. The Colored Methodist Episcopal Church is discussed in the post for 15 November 2020.
11. Foster. 269.
12. Foster. 268.
13. Foster. 270-271.
14. Foster. 272.
15. Johnson, autobiography. 135.
16. Johnson, autobiography. 136.
17. Johnson, autobiography. 137.
18. Johnson, autobiography. 137.
19. Johnson, autobiography. 163.
20. Johnson, autobiography. 190.
21. Johnson, autobiography. 193.
22. Johnson, autobiography. 190.
23. Johnson, autobiography. 198-199.
24. Patricia Drozd Kenney. “LaVilla, Florida, 1866-1887: Reconstruction Dreams and the Formation of a Black Community.” MA thesis. University of Florida, 1990. 57.
25. Kenney. 34.
26. Kenney. 57.
27. Charlie Patton. Jacksonville Native Left a Huge Legacy, But Nothing Marks It.” The Florida Times-Union, Jacksonville, Florida, 15 June 2012. He said Johnson was the organist in the 1890s.
28. Johnson, Spirituals. 33.
29. Johnson, autobiography. 158.
30. Johnson, autobiography. 161.
31. Johnson, autobiography. 137.
32. Johnson, autobiography. 147.
33. Johnson, autobiography. 179.
34. Johnson, autobiography. 197.
35. Johnson, Spirituals. 33. Rosamond added to the confusion. His version of “Dry Bones” was advertised as a shout song in 1938. [36]
36. J. Rosamond Johnson. “Dry Bones: Descriptive, Characteristic Shout Song.” New York: Handy Brothers, 1938.
Sunday, February 5, 2023
Walter Anderson - Come By Here (Part 2)
Topic: Kumbaya 1955-1961
Continued from previous post dated 29 January 2023
Notes on Performance
Cover: “Nobody Knows.” Linoleum cut on tanwove paper [1] of Negro head by William Smith.
Color Scheme: The cover uses dark brown ink on beige stock. Inside, the pages employ brown ink on beige paper.
Reissue as 50 Negro Folk Songs: Same cover design, but with a light brown cover and cream pages. The version of “Come by Here” is the one used in Max Exner’s The Bridge of Song. It used the plate made by Jane Keen for Indianola Sings with a revised title and no reference to Angola.
Reissue as 56 Negro Folk Songs: Same cover design, but with a goldenrod cover and white pages. The plate for “Kum Ba Yah” is the one from that period.
Notes on Audience
The songbook Look Away seems to have had wide distribution: several libraries have recorded owning copies with WorldCat. The publication dates are contradictory because Lynn Rohrbough, the owner of the company that issued Look Away, was not consistent in how he labeled his songbooks.
As mentioned in the post for 18 July 2021, Rohrbough or Walter Anderson, the editor of Look Away, may have sent copies to civil rights groups in Alabama in 1963. Carlotta Scott King had been a student of Anderson’s at Antioch College, [2] and contributed a song to the 1963 revision. [3]
Anderson himself apparently carried copies to distribute. In 1980, he gave a copy to John Paul II when he was invited to meet him at a United Nations conference held at the pope’s summer palace. John Paul responded: “I love spirituals. I like to sing them.” [4]
The anthology seems to have encouraged others to submit collections of spirituals to Rohrbough. In 1961, CRS published Great Day. The editor, Joseph Jones, was the son of a Black Presbyterian pastor who organized Sunday Schools in the south for the denomination. He “frequently sang and led singing on his travels.” [5] The artwork for Great Day was done by B. D. Roberts, the principal of a Black elementary school in Charlotte, North Carolina. [6]
The 1963 revision of Look Away had Jones’ version of “Rock My Soul.” It was illustrated with Roberts’ illustration for “Great Day.” [7] Jones’ page for “Kum Ba Yah” had the drawing of a man sitting on the ground with a mule by Roberts. [8]
Notes on Performers
Walter Franklin Anderson was born in Zanesville, Ohio, in 1915 to children of slaves. His mother’s family had been owned by an Irishman near Asheville, North Carolina, who fathered Anderson’s grandmother. [10] His father was born in Spartanburg, South Carolina, to slaves who had been purchased by Swedes. [11]
James Rosemond Anderson could read music and play piano. [12] He sent all nine of his children to music classes. [13] Leila Henrietta Weaver had attended Berea College for one year before Kentucky passed a law that prevented African Americans from sharing classes with whites. [14] She made sure all the children could go to college. Most went to Hampton Institute in Virginia. One boy attended Wilberforce in Xenia, Ohio. [15]
Walter studied piano and organ at Oberlin College. He spent his summers working at a summer residential camp run [16] by Karamu House, a Cleveland community center modeled on settlement houses. [17]
His first teaching job, after graduation, was at Wilberforce where he led a chorus that emphasized “gospel music, spirituals, and related sorts of ethnic music.” [18] The Black college founded by Methodists was in the throes of reorganization, [19] and Anderson left after a year. [20]
In 1938, Anderson embarked on a career as a concert pianist. [21] After a year on the road, he accepted a position at Kentucky State College. [22] This time he had to direct the band [23] and a jazz orchestra. [24] During February, he was able to book concerts. [25] He also continued to work at the Karamu camp in summers. [26] It hired him full-time in 1942. [27]
While he was working in Cleveland, he took classes at the Cleveland Institute of Music. [28] A piece he wrote for his composition class, “Variations on the Negro Spiritual, Lord, Lord, Lord,” was played by the Cleveland Symphony in 1946. [29] The arrangement of “Lord, Lord, Lord” in Look Away must have been based on that work.
In 1946, he found a home as chairman of the Antioch College music department. He was then thirty years old. [30] In addition to teaching, he continued to play concerts, and edited the songbooks issued by Lynn Rohrbough. His next projects are discussed in the post for 4 June 2023.
The names listed on the Advisory Editorial Committee [31] suggest he asked for help from people he already knew. Clarice Jones Michaels had been his department chairman at Kentucky State, [32] and Harry Baker later held that position. [33] Anderson’s brother continued to live near Wilberforce, [34] and that probably is how Anna Terry became involved.
Other members of the committee were on the faculties at Southern University, [35] University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, [36] the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, [37] and Clark, [38] Howard, [39] Spellman, [40] Morgan State, [41] and North Carolina colleges. [42] Anderson may have met people when he touring or at academic meetings.
Anderson was responsible for the aesthetic design of Look Away. Karamu House had become an arts center. The man whose artwork is on the cover, William Elijah Smith, moved from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Cleveland in 1927 where he was taken in by the center’s owners, Russell and Rowena Jelliffe. His training in the 1930s included classes at the John Huntington Polytechnic Institute. During the 1950s he ran a gallery in Los Angeles devoted to art by African Americans. He may have done the print used by Anderson for the WPA in the Depression. [43]
Rohrbough obviously had stayed in contact with Marion Downs and Olive Williams, and probably had met Welch at sometime when she was in Ohio. [44] He, or Anderson, may have known Thomas Harrison who ran a private music school in Tallahassee, Florida. [45]. I could not find any information on line about E. Anderson of Langston, Oklahoma, [46] or Fred Hall of Montgomery, Alabama.
One of the most famous members of the committee was Charles Harris. He had accompanied the concert tenor Roland Hayes. [47] The other noted contributor was Bayard Rustin. He then was with the Fellowship for Reconciliation, and later helped Martin Luther King organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. [48] FOR was the organization that sponsored the songbook for Conscientious Objectors edited by Olcutt Sanders.
Sanders’ role may have been a silent one. As mentioned in the post for 22 January 2023, the 1940s songbook was the first to include a number of spirituals. All ten he selected were in Look Away. In 1963, was hired to direct Karamu House. [49]
Availability
Songbook: Look Away: 50 Negro Folk Songs, edited by Walter F. Anderson. Delaware, Ohio: Cooperative Recreation Service, Cooperative Song Service. Undated, but before Olive Williams moved from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to Baltimore, Maryland in the mid-1950s. [50] Does not contain “Kumbaya.”
Songbook: “Come By Here (Kum Ba Yah).” 27 in Look Away: 50 Negro Folk Songs, edited by Walter F. Anderson. Delaware, Ohio: Cooperative Recreation Service, Cooperative Song Service. Undated revision; dated to late 1957 or early 1958 by the plate.
Songbook: “Kum Ba Yah.” 27 in in Look Away: 56 Negro Folk Songs, edited by Walter F. Anderson. Delaware, Ohio: Cooperative Recreation Service, Cooperative Song Service, 1963.
Songbook: “Kum Ba Yah.” 13 in J. T. Jones. Great Day: Negro Spirituals as Sung and Directed by J. T. Jones. Delaware, Ohio: Cooperative Recreation Service, Cooperative Song Service, 1961.
Songbook: Rosa Page Welch. Fifteen Negro Spirituals. Delaware, Ohio: Informal Music Service, 1960s. It came up in my search for “Come by Here,” but the WorldCat entry did not provide any details to support the selection. It probably was “Kum Ba Yah.”
Album: Rosa Page Welch. “Kum Bah Yah.” Sings Of God’s World And “His Wondrous Love. MRC LP 11-28. The liner notes mention a 1963 event. [Discogs entry.]
End Notes
1. “William E. Smith (1913 - 1997 ) Nobody Knows.” Item offered by Swann Auction Galleries, New York, 7 October 2008. Invaluable website.
2. Joan Horn. Playing on All the Keys: The Life of Walter F. Anderson. Yellow Springs, Ohio: Yellow Springs Historical Society, 2007. 178-180.
3. “Walk Together Children” as sung by Carlotta Scott King. 39 in Look Away, 1963.
4. Horn. 178.
5. LindaJo J. McKim. The Presbyterian Hymnal Companion. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993. 125.
6. Roberts was principal of the Myers Street School in Durham. [51] “It was the largest elementary school in North Carolina for black children” in the “late 1940s.” [52]
7. Jones. 1.
8. Jones. 13.
9. John Major ran MRC Records from the 1960s through the 1980s. [53]
10. Horn. 2.
11. Horn. 7.
12. Horn. 24.
13. Horn. 10.
14. Horn. 3.
15. Horn. 17.
16. Horn. 39.
17. “Karamu House.” Wikipedia website, accessed 4 January 2023.
18. Horn. 49.
19. Horn. 50-52.
20. Horn. 54.
21. Horn. 53.
22. Horn. 59.
23. Horn. 60.
24. Horn. 61.
25. Horn. 59.
26. Horn. 40.
27. Horn. 72.
28. Horn. 80.
29. Horn. 87.
30. Horn. 96.
31. Look Away, early 1950s. 2.
32. Horn. 60.
33. Thorobred, Kentucky State College yearbook, 1969, dedicated to Baker.
34. Horn. 17.
35. DeBose Tourgee should be Albion Tourgee DeBose. He taught at Howard, Talladega College, and Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, according to the Debose Foundation website.
36. Ariel M. Lovelace directed the Vesper Choir, according to the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff website.
37. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga awards the Edmonia J. Simmons Endowed Scholarship in Music according to its website.
38. J. DeKoven Killingsworth was chairman of the music department at Clark College in Atlanta, Georgia. [54]
39. Walter Lawson was dean of Howard’s College of Fine Arts. “He developed the art of choral singing among Negroes to perhaps its highest point. He is credited with demonstrating that the Negro choir, while retaining its folk music, also could interpret the choral literature of the world.” [55]
40. Kemper Harrold was a violinist [56] and head of the music department at Spellman in Atlanta. [57]
41. Orville Moseley was head of the music department at Southern University in the 1940s [58] and directed the choir at Morgan State in the 1950s. [59] Morgan State is in Baltimore where Williams later had close relations with it.
42. Thomas Dorsey was chairman of the music department at North Carolina College in Durham. [60]
43. “William E. Smith (Artist).” Wikipedia website, accessed 4 January 2023.
44. Welch was often in Ohio, usually as a soloist for a Disciples of Christ or Christian Church gathering. Irma Voight said she was at Ohio University for its 1943 Brotherhood Week, in part because she taught spirituals to youth groups. [61]
45. “Students holding recital at the St. Michael & All Angels Episcopal Church in Tallahassee.” Florida Memory website.
46. He probably was associated with Langston University, but could I not confirm this.
47. “Harris Family Papers.” Durham County Library website, Durham, North Carolina.
48. Bayard Rustin. Wikipedia website, accessed 10 January 2023.
49. Sanders is discussed in the post for 13 February 2022.
50. Williams is discussed in the post for 22 January 2023.
51. Jones. 32.
52. Charlotte Mecklenburg Story website.
53. “MRC (2).” Discogs website.
54. “The Renowned Dr. J. DeKoven Killingsworth, conducting the Clark College Philharmonic Society.” National Museum of African American History and Culture website.
55. Death Notice for Warner Lawson, Sr. The Pittsburgh Courier, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 19 June 1971. 6. Item posted by internet judith_lawson on 5 June 2015.
56. Associated Negro Press. “Musicians Open Meet At Hampton Institute.” Published by Indianapolis Recorder, Indianapolis, Indiana, 29 August 1931.
57. Item. Indianapolis Recorder, Indianapolis, Indiana, 7 August 1943.
58. Item. Indianapolis Recorder, Indianapolis, Indiana, 10 February 1940.
59. Item. Baltimore Afro American Newspaper Archives website, 4 December 1951.
60. Johnny B. Hodge, Jr. A Biography of Phillmore Mallard Hall with Particular Emphasis on His Contribution to the Development of Black School Bands in North Carolina. PhD dissertation. American University, 1997. 155.
61. Irma Voight. “The Religious Foundations of Ohio University.” Ohio University website.