^UTHOI^S E^EPAGE.
IF you would knoAV the colored people, learn their
songs. The best history of a nation is often
found in its poetry, when that is fairly and fully
interpreted. I propose to preserve the history, but the
interpretation I leave to another time and possibly to
other and more skillful hands. Every line contained
in these melodies breathes a prayer for liberty, physical
and spiritual. They reveal in every sentence either
the pathetic moan of a slave in almost utter despair,
yet panting, groaning, bitterly wailing and still hoping
for freedom; or of a freedman Avith his heart lifted
up to God, melting in the purest fires of devotional
thanksgiving for deliverance from cruel bonds, the
auction-block, and years of unrequited, grinding toil
given for those AA'ho had no right to his labor.
In the desperate extreme of separation from all they
loved and reArered — husbands, M'ives, fathers, mothers,
children and friends being parted oftentimes forever
for speculation — the A'ictims of avarice, they have been
sustained by the instrumentality of these songs, under
God. Indeed, these songs Avere accepted of God, and
he seemed to use these simple ditties, as some of our
modern ministers and people have chosen to call them,
as his means of communication with a people from
whom the oppressor had denied and taken his Holy
Book away. "What God has cleansed, call thou not
common or unclean." The Book has come back to us,
and every man may worship now under his own vine
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