CHAPTER 4 | REGIONAL DIFFERENCES IN ANTEBELLUM BLACK MUSIC MAKING 97
The spread of the Christian faith seems to have done little, however, to restrain
the black population’s holiday celebrations. In 1774 a College of New Jersey grad-
uate working as a tutor on a rural estate in northeastern Virginia contrasted the
way Sundays were observed in New Jersey and Virginia. A Sabbath in Virginia
did not seem to him to “wear the same Dress as our Sundays to the Northward,”
which were days of religious solemnity. “Generally here by fi ve o-Clock on Sat-
urday every Face (especially the Negroes) looks festive & cheerful—All the lower
class of People, & the Servants, & the Slaves, consider it as a Day of Pleasure &
amusement & spend it in such Diversions as they severally choose.” The slaves
might embrace those diversions wholeheartedly on any day of the week. A visi-
tor to Virginia in 1784 expressed amazement that after a full day of work, a slave
might walk several miles to take part in a dance where “he performs with aston-
ishing ability, and the most vigorous exertions, keeping time and cadence, most
exactly, with the music... until he exhausts himself, and scarcely has time, or
streng th, to return home before the hour he is called forth to toil the next morn-
ing.” Perhaps slaves were willing to walk miles to attend dances because dancing
for them was both recreational and spiritual—a chance to perform their sense of
relatedness to community, gods, and ancestors.SOUTH CAROLINA
Blacks heavily outnumbered whites in South Carolina, which more than any
other colony resembled the plantation culture of the West Indies. Outside the
capital, Charleston, blacks lived and worked in large, isolated groups, many of
them on rice plantations. Black-white interaction in South Carolina was lim-
ited, but the lack of close oversight did not bring slaves any great amount of
autonomy—especially after the Stono Rebellion of 1739, in which a black revolt
left more than twenty whites and even more slaves dead. A report tells how
the rebels emboldened themselves with music and dancing, using the drum to
recruit other slaves to their cause. They came close to overthrowing their mas-
ters, who responded with greater repression. In earlier days, a few slaves had
enjoyed the freedom to move from place to place, to earn money, raise food, and
learn to read. But now controls were tightened. In hopes of reducing the dispro-
portion of blacks over whites in South Carolina, the importing of new slaves was
drastically cut.
Colonial efforts to Christianize South Carolina’s slaves reached very few. In
1779 an observer called Negro slaves in South Carolina and Georgia “great strang-
ers to Christianity, and as much under the infl uence of Pagan darkness, idola-
try, and superstition, as they were at their fi rst arrival from Africa.” An account
written in 1805 by John Pierpont, grandfather of the eminent New York banker
J. P. Morgan, reports that on one local plantation different groups of slaves made
different kinds of music, depending on the closeness of their ties to Africa.LOUISIANA
Louisiana never belonged to the British Empire. Settled fi rst by the French, the
territory was controlled by Spain from 1762 to 1800, when it was returned to
France, then sold to the United States in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase.
With its location and varied political history, Louisiana and its chief city, New172028_04_086-105_r2_vs.indd 97 23/01/13 10:07 AM