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Nineteenth century US religious crisis and the sociology of music
Poetics 30 (2002) 5–18 www.elsevier.com/locate/poetic
Nineteenth century US religious crisis and the sociology of music Jon Cruz Department of Sociology, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9430, USA
Abstract This study argues that, in the US, key forms of studying music as a social and cultural phenomenon emerged during the nineteenth century—particularly salient were the social dimensions that surrounded the music making of slaves in the decades that encompassed the Civil War. Critical reflection on slave music was rooted in the religious debates that coincided with the abolitionist movement. This critical reflection yielded, first, a hermeneutical approach to the music making of slaves and, later, a formalistic approach to slave songs (i.e., spirituals). From religious crisis and critical reflection, then, came the first fully modern sociology of music in the US. # 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.
1. Introduction Music is fundamental to all cultures, peoples, and societies. It has long played a major role in brokering everyday life. It enables people to embrace the sublime as well as the mundane; it transects the religious and the secular; it serves modes of celebration as well as organized warfare; it grounds both cultural leisure and forced labor; it informs mass politics and also individual privacy. It also slides across history as deeply embraced tradition, and yet it serves new modalities for expressing cultural rupture. It is accessible to the solitary singer as well as to multinational corporations that continually annex and manufacture it in the form of mass commodities. It functions in one setting as a source for social cohesion and in another as a tool for social contestation. It does all of these things and much more. As can be said of many forms of popular culture, music allows people to chart histories, to cast and recast recollections, to remember (as well as dismember from consciousness parts of) the past. It helps anchor daily emotions from the simple to
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the most anguished and complex. It helps broker fears, anxieties, and notions of loss and threat, just as it facilitates aspirations, hopes, dreams, and fantasies. Music helps us mourn worlds gone by, probe worlds that trap, anticipate worlds promised but not yet born. And if, in all of this, music happens to delight and enlighten some, it can just as well be an obnoxious and even a frightening din for others. Music, however, also has some aspects that make it distinct from many of the more organized and institutionally coordinated forms of mass culture and communication. It has the dual dimensions of immediacy and pervasiveness (one can say this about television and radio). But more importantly, anyone can turn to music and produce it (one cannot say this about television or radio)—even when production takes the form of a conscious anti-musical minimalism, as in the case of some practitioners on the fringes of the punk music movement during the late 1980s who detested the compulsive values of ‘‘musiciany’’ skill and competence and saw the latter as barriers to expressivity. Try, however, to make your own film, launch a radio program or a newspaper, organize a sports team or event, etc. Nothing is easier than making music, even if one claims—like Max Weber, who wrote a book on music (see Weber, 1958)—to have a ‘‘tin ear’’. Today there are many approaches to the sociology of music. It is fair to say that most work within the sociology of music has a concern with the production of culture (a term that is not limited to a paradigmatic mapping of organizational and institutional sociology onto cultural phenomena). Thus inquiry into music can run the gamut—from a focus upon the ideological and meaning-laden dimensions of music to its most formalized properties, from the mundane and idiosyncratic aspects that pertain to only a small group to the socially systemic, deeply institutionalized and transhistorical features that cut across a number of societies. While all approaches have their importance, I wish to pose a more historical question: in the American context, when, where, and how did the sociology of music first emerge? As I shall argue, it was during the nineteenth century that the key forms of studying music as a social and cultural phenomenon took hold. There were many musical sites of importance in the US during the nineteenth century (see Levine, 1988). But the social dimensions that surrounded the music making of slaves in the decades that encompass the Civil War provide important keys to understanding the modern intellectual study of music as cultural expressivity. Furthermore, it was specifically the religious dimension of slave song making that proved to be so salient in the earliest formalized attention to slave music making. The religious song making of slaves proved to be important in solidifying two major shanks of modern cultural analysis: hermeneuticism and scientific objectification. Hermeneutic considerations centered on the discovery of the inner life and meanings of music-producing subjects, whereas formalistic approaches leveraged the modern scientific views toward the study of music’s properties, patterns and categories. While these two orientations frequently converge in contemporary studies (as when social scientists attempt to formalize the properties and structure of meaning), they emerged differently. The notion of music as a window into the lives of subjects can be seen fully in the 1845 publication of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Only after the Civil War did anything
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approaching rational objectivism take hold with regard to the study music. As the appreciation and increasingly refined study of slave music developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, it hosted both the older and earlier politics of hermeneutics with its emphasis on the problem of meaning and scientific objectivism with its emphasis on objectification. Because the religious dimensions of slave music were so central, it raises the question of the role of religion. During the middle decades of the nineteenth century there were a number of crisis-ridden flashpoints within Protestantism and these came to a head with the antislavery movement. The critical reflection on slave music — the first fully modern sociology of music in the US—is rooted in the religious debates that coincide with the abolitionist movement, the most significant social movement in the nineteenth century. How and why these interpretive developments took hold around slave music, and the importance they have in the rise of the sociology of music, is largely unappreciated. My questions are thus provisional (certainly no more so than any of the approaches that would be recognized today), yet they allow us to see how the cultural forms and the judgments that empower them actually take shape, become viable, and thus socially, historically, and epistemologically constitutive. The field of religion in nineteenth century American society is complex. However, if we take as our vantage point the black spiritual as it emerged as a site and an object of inquiry, three major fronts of religious tension prove to be determinant: (1) the expansion of religion to slaves in the South, (2) the revivalist movement associated with the second Great Awakening, and (3) the Unitarian and Transcendentalist movements in the North that joined the critical wings of Protestantism to the antislavery movement. Each of these developments fed into the discovery of black song making and, in the process, helped to elevate the black spiritual to its early modern position as a cultural good fit to be taken seriously and analyzed. When these three fronts are considered conjuncturally, they can be appreciated for creating something of a cultural watershed in how they put a fledgling sociology of music on the American intellectual map.
2. Extending the religious franchise in antebellum society Prior to the nineteenth century, instructing the slaves in matters of religion was not a high priority. But by the 1830s, proselytization had developed as part of cultural management. It developed in an important conjuncture that included a recent history of significant slave revolts, new expansionist drives to extend slavery into the newly acquired Western states, and the growing fervor of abolitionists. But in the early eighteenth century, proselytization was only in its beginning stages. When it did emerge, it did so as a rather feeble dispensation from abroad (see Johnston, 1970: 135–136; Genovese, 1974: 86; Epstein, 1977: 229). As dehumanized objects and chattel property, slaves could have traits, quirks, distinguishing features, and other distinctive markings, as could any distinct object. But as long as their status as human beings was a contested issue, they were not eligible to have bestowed upon
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them the attributes of what could be considered emblematic of modern selfhood, even as such cultural developments were taking place within the West in general and American society in particular (see Foucault, 1972, 1982; Taylor 1989). Selfhood, after all, as a modern notion was still emerging in the late eighteenth century, but primarily within the higher domains of intellectual reflection in philosophy and hermeneutics, both of which had deep roots in religious discourses. Once slaves could be considered to have souls, and hence eligible for redemptive salvation, the field in which their repertoire of cultural expressions took shape was greatly altered. Among the range of cultural expressions, those that gained new importance displayed an assimilated religion. For slaveholders, religious practices, especially singing, signified elements of the preferred dominant culture and the efficacy of social control. For slaves, song making helped anchor the new spiritualized subjectivity that the religious franchise helped produce. Among guardians of the antebellum South, the extension of religion to slaves was fraught with conflict. While some insisted that proselytization was an undeniable duty, others resisted the project and argued persuasively that it undermined planter domination. This argument could not be denied. The failed conspiracy led by Denmark Vesey and the bloody insurrection carried out by Nat Turner rocked the antebellum South. Imagined or real, the specter of revolts forced intense debate over the relationship between religion and social control. Rescinding the religious franchise however was not an option. Proselytization intensified. As Eugene Genovese (1974: 186) notes, slaveholders long distrusted slaves with religion, but after the Turner event ‘‘they feared slaves without religion even more’’ and Christianity was seen no longer as an impediment to social control but now ‘‘primarily as a means of social control.’’1 If extending the religious franchise to slaves was viewed as problematic, it was also urgent and necessary. Religion, after all, was the foundation of virtually all social orthodoxy, but it was emerging as the penultimate cultural contradiction of slavery. After the Vesey revolt South Carolinians may have initially withdrawn their support for religion and repressed its practices, it was because they ‘‘preferred to risk their salvation rather than their necks’’ (Freehling, 1965: 73). But religion was too important and too fundamental to the shifting social imaginary; it had to be made safe for the planter aristocracy. The Vesey and Turner affairs signaled the tip of an iceberg; beneath was a growing legitimation crisis that was being brokered into critical consciousness within, not outside, the framework of religion. Vesey was a member of the African Methodist Church; Turner was a self-appointed Baptist preacher. Sheer repression could cut out individual renegades once they were detected; individuals could be punished or purged by whatever means. But the soulgranting, subject-granting power of being given the religious franchise, which was
1 Genovese (1974: 236) argues that in spite of the laws passed to suppress black religious practices, they were strictly enforced ‘‘only during insurrection scares or tense moments occasioned by political turmoil’’. ‘‘Too many planters’’, he suggests, ‘‘did not want them enforced. They regarded their slaves as peaceful, respected their religious sensibilities, and considered such interference dangerous to plantation morale and productivity.’’
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greatly aided by Evangelical populism, had taken hold. A new subjectivity had been beckoned, slaves had been hailed as souls, and there was no reversing the process. In this redemptive matrix, appropriate culture was religious culture. Slaves shared religion. Thus they had a newly recognizable religious culture. Having religious agency, even if surrounded by slave-based institutions, greatly augmented slave cultural practices. By having souls and being eligible for salvation, the entire cultural field upon which their practices unfolded was significantly altered. As candidates for ministerial attention, blacks could be more readily conceptualized as human subjects, as individuals with souls, and as persons who possessed the self-interior structures of meaning that came with the modern notion of selfhood. Religion, in spite of—or perhaps through—its highly contentious relationship to slavery, fostered practices conducive to the formation of new cultural structures of interiority and subjectivity. This new subjectivity engendered, in turn, a resonating black voice among ex-slaves in the form of the ‘‘slave narratives’’ and the ‘‘Negro spiritual’’. These two cultural modes of expression were, in turn, seized upon by radical abolitionists during the last few decades of the antislavery movement. Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, written in 1845, represents the penultimate expression of the intimate and logical linkage between the religion franchise, slave culture, and music. It is in Douglass’s autobiography that we glimpse the first modern formalization of social and ethnographic reflection on the discrete musical practices of slaves and their social identity in relationship to social and institutional circumstances. The extension of the religious franchise thus helped to inaugurate a cultural sphere with distinct practices that could also serve as windows into a new cultural interior. This interior could now be noted, observed, and marked for increasingly analytical attention.
3. Religious revivalism The expansion of religious teachings among slaves, especially in the early decades of the nineteenth century, was actually part of a larger cultural shift that involved powerful revivalist currents. Known as the Second Great Awakening, the revivalist movement among evangelical Methodist and Baptist sects swept across the Upper South and Western states. Another revivalist wave took place around 1857–1858 with a more distinctively progressive theology that fueled the modern humanitarian reformist movement (see Miller, 1965: 3–35; Smith, 1965: 45–62; May, 1967). Of the religious movements, the second Great Awakening was the most significant demographically.2 Unlike the neo-Calvinist Anglican and Congregational denominations,
2 As neo-Calvinist orthodoxy and Congregationalism waned, Protestant denominations, particularly Methodist and Baptist, flourished. By 1855, Methodists and Baptists dwarfed all other Protestant denominations with memberships of 1,577,014 and 1,105,546 respectively. Presbyterians, the third largest denomination, trailed with 495,715. Congregationalists and Evangelical Lutherans each had approximately 200,000 (see Smith, 1965: 20–21).
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which were largely the cultural property of cultural and economic elites, the new evangelical populism spoke to the more sprawling white lower and middle class. Revivalism took the form of a highly emotional search for religious renewal, and in the process, it opened widely to poor whites, new immigrants and, in some cases, even to blacks. Evangelicalism moved into the South through large camp meetings and through the even greater concerted effort to bring denominational church structure to the plantations (see Sernett, 1975: 36–81).3 Indeed, Methodist and Baptists sects grew significantly through the evangelical movements and augmented the piecemeal efforts of soul tending made by Southern overseers, thus deepening the process of extending the religious franchise to slaves.4 For the first time, large numbers of blacks were brought into Protestant religious sects. Through the revivalist movements, Protestantism took on new class, ethnic, and racial profiles.5 While the South’s cultural overseers vacillated between religious repression and reformism, Evangelicalism—with its mass revival sessions, spectacular camp meetings, and brazen disregard for most established (‘‘worldly’’) institutions—worked entirely against the grain of many Southern elites. Southerners continued to press their local ministers to tighten strict supervision over black religious gatherings, and to install in their slaves a more solemn and passive approach to religious conduct. Evangelicalism with its huge gatherings, however, defied repressive scrutiny. It fostered, instead, a cultural populism that valued intense, soul-searching emotional expressivity. Evangelical revivalists were boisterous precisely because they trusted human emotion; emotion was the language of the soul. Establishment religion— rigid and lacking emotional freedom and spontaneity—reflected a disconnection from God. Expressive and spontaneous emotionalism, or unsanctioned autonomous ‘‘exhortation’’, was what the South’s planter-minister power structure attempted to purge from black religious practices. Ironically, many white leaders in the South, and in the North as well, had long viewed unbridled emotionality as a Negro (as well as female) trait; but the emotionally insurgent religious revisionism that was taking place was largely a white phenomenon, though marginally open to blacks (Washington, 1964: 37–38).6 3 For general studies on historical aspects of the Negro church, see Du Bois (1903), Frazier (1956), Weatherford (1957), and Woodson (1964 [1921]). 4 As Raboteau (1978: 207) notes, ‘‘among other denominations in the antebellum South—Presbyterian, Lutheran, Disciples, Episcopalian, Moravian—black ministers were extremely rare or nonexistent.’’ See also Washington (1964) and Sobel (1988). 5 This ideological and demographic conjuncture in the South did not spawn radical abolitionism, nor was this social sector full of people who took quickly to the book counters to buy the latest slave narrative. That kind of cultural purchase took place in cities like Boston and New York. The expanding Methodist and Baptist denominations fostered a middle class ideology that was distinctly anti-intellectual as well as anti-institutional and easily aligned with Jacksonian democratic populism. On the important ties to racial politics, see Saxon (1990) and Roediger (1991). On Jacksonian politics, see Schlesinger (1953). 6 E. Franklin Frazier suggests that the uninhibited emotionalism encouraged by Baptists and Methodists offered blacks a more accessible form of Christianity. Important is the fact that these two sects had rejected slavery as early as the second half of the eighteenth century. See Jackson (1931); see also Genovese’s (1974: 232–233) important discussion of the appeal of Baptist and Methodist denominations, as well as the modifications slaves made of these orientations.
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Slaves had long relied on cultural forms that were collective, interactive, and emotionally expressive. They retained such forms as black congregations, which emerged to become legitimate extensions of major Baptist and Methodist denominations. But most important, the Great Awakening allowed slaves to rationalize their collective desires, perpetually stymied under slavery, in the form of institutionalized religion. This greatly augmented the cultural velocity that was being unleashed in the new religiously sanctioned forms of subjectivity, as it further expanded and simultaneously legitimized the new cultural interior that was now being expressed in black religion and slave song making. The Great Awakening emphasized the individual necessity of taking the first steps to Christian salvation and perfection by immediate conversion. Immediatism — the doctrine of immediate transformation of the soul based on erasing through repentance one’s flawed spiritual history and starting anew—had its societal corollaries in utopian community formation and, of course, abolition (see Davis, 1962; Fredrickson, 1971: 29). By extending the religious franchise, slaves were simultaneously granted admission into the dominant culture’s teleological and philosophical framework of subjectivity. And it was not just black subjectivity that was on the rise; major transformations were taking place within the larger modern context. Romanticism was in the process of spawning an early modern form of pathos-oriented humanitarian reform, and abolitionism was at the forefront. According to Marion Wilson Starling (1981: 15, 19), there were at least one hundred abolition societies operating in the 1820s. It was in this context that slaves were beginning to stretch their own subjectivizing claims as self-presenting and socially representative subjects. The most eloquent crystallization of the unintended consequence was the slave narratives. This period was rapidly accommodating the humanitarian reformism, including abolitionism was in the forefront. In the new receptive context, black authors benefited from the growing receptivity of the antislavery movement. They were able to take advantage of the new ideological privileges of subjectivity and selfhood, to stake claims to an experientially based self-authenticity, and to testify from a personal experience and to a social movement. In essence, the extension of the religious franchise, as it culminated in the nineteenth century slave narratives, was transformed into a cultural license authorizing black authors to practice as modern selves and to draw truths from their situated urgency. Conversion, after all, was a requisite for admission into subjecthood (an unintended consequence). Conversion, however, was irrelevant to the legal force of slavery. Converted or not, slaves by civil law were property; they were objects, not subjects. As a new mode of cultural expression, the slave narratives provided the phenomenologically based thick description that confronted the contradiction between moral subjects and objects of chattel. But only at its most radical-humanist margins, where the slave narrative emerged, did the cultural energy take hold to champion the reconceptualization of chattel property as selves and persons. By being recognized as authentic sources of observation, it was possible for slaves to be reclassified—from objects of property to authenticating subjects. Radical abolitionists, black and white, thus helped bring
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about a significant alteration in cultural perceptions of black expressions by introjecting a new element of humanness—selfhood—into the white accounts of blacks. Slaves found the religious franchise a powerful cultural resource to augment their emergence as subjects. Quite often their cultural uses of religion involved struggles over the interpretation of religious precepts and worldly practices, and this resulted in ongoing conflict over the relationship between religion and social order. Nonetheless, the religious franchise engendered social and political—as well as religious—transformations. As slaves became proselytized, overseers culturally continued to debate how slaves were either capable of possessing or lacking the rudiments of civilization. This process legitimated the proselytization policies of the moral and religious guardians of antebellum culture, but it also exacerbated cultural struggles. When abolitionists recognized that slaves possessed salvageable souls, it opened an important door from which nascent (and certainly radical) black subjectivity could emerge. Religious practice was a measure abolitionists could understand—and religious practice that could be cultivated, monitored, and controlled was all the better. White abolitionists most easily understood slaves through a religious lens as producers of acceptable religious cultural forms. But it was religious singing that provided a key to interpret black culture; songs could be defined and understood relative to their proximity to, or distance from, dominant religious norms. In essence, religious norms governed how black music was heard—as an aberrant noise, or recognized as meaningful sound if such sonic production resembled established hymnology. Having emerged through the religious franchise, the new system of cultural recognition rested tendentiously on the relative success of general surveillance—of extending religious instructions while policing black expressivity through rewards, repression, punishment, and violence. By the mid-nineteenth century, black song making under slavery had come to incorporate a long history of struggles of representation and social control, a history of tensions, conflicts, negotiations, and accommodations that were barely submerged in the black institutionalized church structures (e.g., those affiliated with mainstream Baptist and Methodist denominations). These structures deepened and rationalized the ties to subject emergence through religion and, thus, through ‘‘religious singing’’ as slaves built their relatively autonomous systems of cultural strength out of the long struggle over the meaning of the religious franchise. While pro-slavery Southerners construed religious practices and norms from the vantage point of protecting slavery, radical black and white abolitionists viewed the religious expressivity of slaves as a symbol of slavery’s aberration from Christian principles. As a predominantly religious social movement, abolitionism centered upon religious antagonism. Indeed, abolitionism was an expression of it. What more powerful signifying system could radical abolitionists find to ground the notion of religiously sanctioned inner authenticity than the spiritual (at least for a short while)? Most of the committed abolitionists, whose new cultural perceptions turned appreciatively toward the spirituals, viewed them as the penultimate signifiers of black Christian subjectivity. In this regard, the white radical abolitionist’s penchant
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for the spiritual echoed the more elaborate kind of cultural work that had already been carried by slave narratives and their radical embrace of—or their embrace of radical—religious principles. In the long run, Christian teachings had a profoundly unsettling yet determinant impact. Slaves found their symbolic universe widened by the expansion of additional cultural practices whose very forms—praying, congregating, singing—could feed into ongoing struggles to carve out their own sphere of discourse and collective engagement. It would only be a matter of time and refinement in which the focus upon the self-reports of truth-through-experience tellers would shift to the focus of investigators who would seek to get at that experience with their own accounts themselves—through the work of an ethnosympathetic social science. Confronting this new cultural-interpretive complex engendered nothing less than a new mode of culturally invested and investigative work at the subcultural margins. This was the new work of an ethnosympathy that emanated from within the abolitionist movement, and one that heard black and white meanings in what was once only black noise. Music making—especially religious singing—thus became one of the arenas of black cultural practice that white overseers found least objectionable. Religious singing was safe and acceptable. It could be held to ridicule, or its content (in so far as it could be understood by overseers) could be measured against external standards of goodness. But when religious singing was heard as earnest and authentically attuned spiritual yearning, it was easily acceptable as good black culture. Southern overseers tolerated such song making. Northerners sympathetic to antislavery, however, would soon seize on such songs—the spirituals—as evidence of souls ruthlessly shackled by slavery. As the antislavery movement gained in momentum, black spirituals would quickly become one of the key aspects of slave culture that Northerners found so appealing. The attraction to black religious song making took its most serious turn as northerners entered the South during and shortly after the Civil War. Northerners seized upon the ‘‘spirituals’’—a cultural practice that had already been so eloquently highlighted in ex-slave Frederick Douglass’s autobiography of 1845—as a privileged window into slave culture, and in the process, elevated it as a unique cultural form worthy of increasingly refined reflection.
4. Religious disenchantment in the North Frederick Douglass’s writings could not have emerged had there not been a viable antislavery movement. The movement enabled Douglass and so many other black and white abolitionists to produce a flourishing public discourse against slavery. Though his writings were those of an ex-slave addressing the crisis of slavery in the south, they were very much a northern discourse. Douglass’s autobiography is the first piece of writing by a former slave to highlight the crucial function of song making by slaves. His writings thus play a pivotal role in the early sociology of music in the United States. But let us first note the context.
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Antislavery sentiments already had a significant history, but they took on greater urgency in the context of the slave revolts. Influential Unitarian ministers in the North left the pulpit to agitate against slavery. Theodore Parker, one of the most popular and certainly most radical among Unitarian ministers of the 1840s, championed many of the political causes of the day. Parker’s sermons, which he delivered with intensity and inspiration, were considered events; they frequently drew several thousand audience members during his peak popularity. Parker, along with other radical ministers, was ostracized by fellow Unitarian ministers for preaching against the evils of an industrial capitalism and a runaway market society that trapped the individual and jeopardized one’s inner goodness. Parker also supported the fledgling women’s movement and the labor movement as he sought his own front line position in the battle against slavery. Taking his sermons on the public lecture circuit, he plied his activist theology by attacking slavery and institutional servitude. Parker—along with Franklin Sanborn, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and several others—formed the ‘‘Secret Six’’ to provide financial and political support for the white abolitionist, John Brown. In 1859, Brown and fewer than 50 accomplices planned to incite a slave uprising. Their raid upon the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia failed, and Brown was hanged. Both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, two Divinity School dropouts who became key figures in the Transcendentalist movement, publicly supported Brown, who exemplified Transcendentalism’s belief that actions must be true to a person’s innermost political beliefs (see Thoreau, 1906: 420, 438–439; Fredrickson, 1965: 40). Sanborn would later become the first president of the American Social Science Association that formed in 1865. Higginson—who had been a Harvard Divinity School student, but who had left the ministry to ply his beliefs through joining workers and women’s rights agitation—was offered at the outbreak of the Civil War the chance to command one of the first all-black Union Army regiments. The opportunity put him on the coast of South Carolina. It was there, and during his command of black soldiers, that he began to collect and write about black religious songs. Also in Parker’s congregation were some two hundred paying members (see Hutchinson, 1959: 183 n. 113), who included William Lloyd Garrison, the leader of the most radical abolitionist group in the antebellum era. Like many of the most critical northern abolitionists, Garrison was immersed in the religious tensions that surrounded Protestantism’s growing crisis with capitalist modernity and the institution of slavery. Garrison and his fellow black and white abolitionist followers were able to emerge in the growing disenchantment with mainstream Protestantism’s acquiescence to both industrialization and slavery. It was through his antislavery work that Garrison befriended Frederick Douglass. Garrison had launched his important antislavery newspaper, The Liberator, in 1831, the year of the Turner revolt. Two years later the American Anti-Slavery Society was launched. Garrison’s publication was scathing and emotionally ardent in its attack on slavery. The Liberator played a major role in distributing black accounts of slavery (Litwack, 1961: 236; Franklin and Moss, 1988:
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165).7 Nearly three hundred of these accounts of varying lengths appeared in the paper, and these were written by former slaves themselves. Garrison was crucial in the promotion of Douglass’s autobiography and wrote a powerful introduction for the first edition. In his introduction, Garrison implored readers to heed the crisis that Douglass’s narrative signaled. Garrison wrote: ‘‘He who can peruse it without a tearful eye, a heaving breast, an afflicted spirit—without being filled with an unutterable abhorrence of slavery and all its abettors, and animated with a determination to seek the immediate overthrow of that execrable system—without trembling for the fate of his country in the hands of a righteous God, who is ever on the side of the oppressed, and whose arm is not shortened that it cannot save—must have a flinty heart, and be qualified to act the part of a trafficker ‘in slaves and the souls of men’’’ (quoted from Douglass, 1986 [1845]: 38). By 1834, The Liberator had over 2300 subscribers. By 1836, there were at least eleven journals devoted to the abolition of slavery, and these had a combined subscribership of 1,095,000 (Starling, 1981: 19). The antislavery movement thus greatly augmented the capacity for black subjectivity to emerge in the form of writers, speakers, and movement activists. And it was this larger context that gave Douglass’s autobiography such cultural capital. And in the pages of his narrative, the sociology of music began to take distinct form. There were others who wrote sympathetically about black song making before and shortly after Douglass’s autobiography was published, but they wrote as outsiders (see Bremer, 1853; Kemble, 1863; Olmsted, 1904). Douglass provided the first insider’s view of what he called the ‘‘sorrow songs’’. He launched the sociology of music by charting a song’s lyrics and its meanings in relationship to slave communication; he showed how slaves used lyrics that ostensibly met the religious approval of overseers yet enabled double-coded messages meant only for the appreciation of slaves themselves. He probed the dual dimensions of overseer and clandestine culture. And he did so by also situating song making in the larger social context of slavery and everyday life. In this regard, Douglass’s classic text prefigured an ethnographically nuanced sociology of music that could be grasped as cultural expressions embedded in institutions, society and history.
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From the 1830s on, as Michael Denning argues, the practice of serializing stories in general was part of the larger development of the dime novels that had its developmental precursor in the early penny press of the 1830s. The penny press helped to spin off serialized narratives in the form of ‘‘story papers’’, pamphlet novels of cheap and sensational fiction emerging as early as 1842, which were also the immediate forerunners to the successful series of ‘‘Beadle’s Dime Novels’’ that appeared in 1860 and culminated in the ‘‘cheap library’’ of nickel and dime pamphlets in the 1870s. These publications, the material read by working class readers, were culturally distinct from those of middle class Victorian readers who read periodicals like Century, Scribners, Harpers, and Atlantic. It is within the burgeoning development of various reading publics that Garrison’s The Liberator emerged as one of the most important antislavery publications of the 1830s and was involved as well in serializing slave narratives. On the rise of the working-class literary forms, especially the dime novels, see Denning (1987: 9–16). On the rise of the penny press, see Schudson (1978).
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5. Cultural convergence The paths to the study of music as fathomable inner culture, and as a window onto a social world of subjects hitherto misunderstood, were now charted—albeit in the form of passionately condensed descriptions of black musical culture within a personally political narrative that was fundamentally a contribution to the nineteenth century’s most important social movement. What Douglass intimated would soon be seized upon and expanded by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Allen, and others. Both Higginson and Allen took to a cultural field shaped by massive social crisis to become the first to systematically pursue and record black songs. Higginson’s allegiance to Transcendentalism fostered the hermeneutic impulse. His Army Life in a Black Regiment, which was published in 1870, was based on his observations of former slaves who served in the Union uniform under his command. Allen’s book, Slave Songs of the United States, published in 1867, involved the efforts of others (including Lucy McKim Garrison, who married one of William Lloyd Garrison’s sons) who primarily collected song specimens from the South. Higginson pushed the insights first penned by Frederick Douglass, and while he was a social and racial outsider, he nonetheless tried to immerse himself in the day to day lives of his black troops, and he attempted to grasp the relationship between song making and the singer’s cultural horizon. His activity would today be understood as a precursor to ethnographically attuned ‘‘participant observation’’. Allen and fellow compilers were much more like modern data collectors. They knew the objects they wished to capture, and they developed strategies (often relying on networks of acquaintances) to collect, log, and classify the songs they obtained. If Higginson was the hermeneuticist, Allen and associates were the formalists. Both laid the groundwork for the earliest most viable sociology of music. The work they carried out took place upon contentious and complex cultural terrain. They were keenly aware that modernity was in the process of banishing the songs (or so they believed at the time) that Frederick Douglass had brought to the modern analytical table. Their urgency would soon be adopted by the black schools and colleges that emerged during and after the Civil War; these schools would keep alive the collection and analysis of the songs of a slave culture on the verge of disappearing in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The work of cultural retention continued by the black schools, such as Fisk University, Hampton Institute, and Tuskegee Institute, would soon be annexed by the professional social scientific fields of ethnology, folklore, and early sociology. In retrospect, the religious crises bear a direct relationship to the modern emergence and cultivation of the social study of music. Proselytization in the South beckoned black subjectivity in general, and it served as the major impetus not to black song making per se but to the ethnosympathetically and ethnologically oriented interests in song making as a dimension of inquiry. Though with quite different sensibilities, the southern religious revivalism and northern disenchantment with market society, capitalism and slavery in the North were each fueled by antimodern and anti-institutional impulses. The quest for cultural renewal cut deeply across these distinct religious fronts. These fronts converged in the cultural production of
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the black spiritual as both expressive culture and a new knowledge frontier. This convergence is sharpened in the context of war as the spiritual is for the first time elevated to a new, culturally distinct practice. From this convergence arose the early modern framework for the sociology of music. The further rationalization of the hermeneutic and the formalistic approaches would unfold from this point.
References Bremer, F., 1853. Homes of the New World. Harper and Brothers, New York. Davis, D.B., 1962. The emergence of immediatism in British and American antislavery thought. Mississippi Valley Historical Review 49 (September), 209–230. Denning, M., 1982. Mechanical accents. Verso, London. Douglass, F., 1986 (1945). Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Pengiun Books, New York. Du Bois, W.E.B., 1903. The Negro Church. Atlanta Press, Atlanta, GA. Epstein, D.J., 1977. Sinful Tunes and Spirituals. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Foucault, M., 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Harper and Row, New York. Foucault, M., 1982. The subject and power. In: Dreyfus, H.L., Rabinow, P. (Eds.), Michel Foucault. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 208–226. Franklin, J.H., Moss Jr., A.A., 1988. From Slavery to Freedom. McGraw-Hill, New York. Frazier, E.F., 1956. The Negro Church in America. Schocken Books, New York. Fredrickson, G.M., 1965. The Inner Civil War. Harper and Row, New York. Fredrickson, G.M., 1971. The Black Image in the White Mind. Harper and Row, New York. Freehling, W., 1965. Prelude to Civil War. Harper and Row, New York. Genovese, E.D., 1974. Roll, Jordan, Roll. Pantheon, New York. Hutchinson, W.R., 1959. The Transcendentalist Ministers. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Jackson, L.P., 1931. Religious development of the Negro in Virginia from 1760 to 1860. Journal of Negro History 16, 168–239. Johnston, H.J., 1970. Race Relations in Virginia and Miscegenation in the South 1776–1860. University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, MA. Kemble, F.A., 1863. Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation, 1838–1839. Harper and Brothers, New York. Levine, L., 1988. Highbrow/Lowbrow. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Litwack, L., 1961. North of Slavery. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. May, H.F., 1967. Protestant Churches and Industrial America. Harper and Row, New York. Miller, P., 1964. The Life of the Mind in America from the Revolution to the Civil War. Harcourt, Brace and World, New York. Olmsted, F.L., 1904. A Journey into the Seaboard States in the Years 1853–1854 (reprint). G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York. Raboteau, A.J., 1978. Slave Religion. Oxford University Press, New York. Roediger, D., 1991. The Wages of Whiteness. Verso, London. Saxon, A., 1990. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic. Verso, London. Schlesinger Jr., A.M., 1953. The Age of Jackson. Little, Brown and Co, Boston. Schudson, M., 1978. Discovering the News. Basic Books, New York. Sernett, M.C., 1975. Black Religion and American Evangelicalism. The Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ. Smith, T., 1965. Revivalism and Social Reform. Harper Torchbooks, New York. Sobel, M., 1988. Trabelin’ On. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Starling, M.W., 1981. The Slave Narrative. G.K. Hall and Co., Boston. Taylor, C., 1989. Sources of the Self. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Thoreau, D.H., 1906. In: Bradford, T., Gleason H.W. (Eds.), The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Vol. xii. Houghton Mifflin, Boston.
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Washington Jr., J.R., 1964. Black Religion. Beacon Press, Boston. Weatherford, W.D., 1957. American Churches and the Negro. Christopher Publishing House, Boston. Weber, M., 1958. The Rational and Social Foundations of Music. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, IL. Woodson, C.G., 1964 (1921). The History of the Negro Church. Schocken Books, New York.
Jon Cruz is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His current research projects include the rise of critical subjectivity in late modernity, and digital music and the changing political economy of sound. His recent publications include Historicizing the American Cultural Turn: The Slave Narrative, European Journal of Cultural Studies 4(5) 2001; Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation (1999); Ethnosympathy: Reflections on an American Dilemma, in The Cultural Turn (forthcoming); Subject Crises and Subject Work, From Sociology to Cultural Studies: New Perspectives (1997), and is co-editor of Viewing, Reading, Listening: Audiences and Cultural Reception (1994).
Nineteenth century US religious crisis and the sociology of music Jon Cruz Department of Sociology, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9430, USA
Abstract This study argues that, in the US, key forms of studying music as a social and cultural phenomenon emerged during the nineteenth century—particularly salient were the social dimensions that surrounded the music making of slaves in the decades that encompassed the Civil War. Critical reflection on slave music was rooted in the religious debates that coincided with the abolitionist movement. This critical reflection yielded, first, a hermeneutical approach to the music making of slaves and, later, a formalistic approach to slave songs (i.e., spirituals). From religious crisis and critical reflection, then, came the first fully modern sociology of music in the US. # 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.
1. Introduction Music is fundamental to all cultures, peoples, and societies. It has long played a major role in brokering everyday life. It enables people to embrace the sublime as well as the mundane; it transects the religious and the secular; it serves modes of celebration as well as organized warfare; it grounds both cultural leisure and forced labor; it informs mass politics and also individual privacy. It also slides across history as deeply embraced tradition, and yet it serves new modalities for expressing cultural rupture. It is accessible to the solitary singer as well as to multinational corporations that continually annex and manufacture it in the form of mass commodities. It functions in one setting as a source for social cohesion and in another as a tool for social contestation. It does all of these things and much more. As can be said of many forms of popular culture, music allows people to chart histories, to cast and recast recollections, to remember (as well as dismember from consciousness parts of) the past. It helps anchor daily emotions from the simple to
E-mail address: [email protected] 0304-422X/02/$ - see front matter # 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. PII: S0304-422X(02)00006-2
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the most anguished and complex. It helps broker fears, anxieties, and notions of loss and threat, just as it facilitates aspirations, hopes, dreams, and fantasies. Music helps us mourn worlds gone by, probe worlds that trap, anticipate worlds promised but not yet born. And if, in all of this, music happens to delight and enlighten some, it can just as well be an obnoxious and even a frightening din for others. Music, however, also has some aspects that make it distinct from many of the more organized and institutionally coordinated forms of mass culture and communication. It has the dual dimensions of immediacy and pervasiveness (one can say this about television and radio). But more importantly, anyone can turn to music and produce it (one cannot say this about television or radio)—even when production takes the form of a conscious anti-musical minimalism, as in the case of some practitioners on the fringes of the punk music movement during the late 1980s who detested the compulsive values of ‘‘musiciany’’ skill and competence and saw the latter as barriers to expressivity. Try, however, to make your own film, launch a radio program or a newspaper, organize a sports team or event, etc. Nothing is easier than making music, even if one claims—like Max Weber, who wrote a book on music (see Weber, 1958)—to have a ‘‘tin ear’’. Today there are many approaches to the sociology of music. It is fair to say that most work within the sociology of music has a concern with the production of culture (a term that is not limited to a paradigmatic mapping of organizational and institutional sociology onto cultural phenomena). Thus inquiry into music can run the gamut—from a focus upon the ideological and meaning-laden dimensions of music to its most formalized properties, from the mundane and idiosyncratic aspects that pertain to only a small group to the socially systemic, deeply institutionalized and transhistorical features that cut across a number of societies. While all approaches have their importance, I wish to pose a more historical question: in the American context, when, where, and how did the sociology of music first emerge? As I shall argue, it was during the nineteenth century that the key forms of studying music as a social and cultural phenomenon took hold. There were many musical sites of importance in the US during the nineteenth century (see Levine, 1988). But the social dimensions that surrounded the music making of slaves in the decades that encompass the Civil War provide important keys to understanding the modern intellectual study of music as cultural expressivity. Furthermore, it was specifically the religious dimension of slave song making that proved to be so salient in the earliest formalized attention to slave music making. The religious song making of slaves proved to be important in solidifying two major shanks of modern cultural analysis: hermeneuticism and scientific objectification. Hermeneutic considerations centered on the discovery of the inner life and meanings of music-producing subjects, whereas formalistic approaches leveraged the modern scientific views toward the study of music’s properties, patterns and categories. While these two orientations frequently converge in contemporary studies (as when social scientists attempt to formalize the properties and structure of meaning), they emerged differently. The notion of music as a window into the lives of subjects can be seen fully in the 1845 publication of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Only after the Civil War did anything
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approaching rational objectivism take hold with regard to the study music. As the appreciation and increasingly refined study of slave music developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, it hosted both the older and earlier politics of hermeneutics with its emphasis on the problem of meaning and scientific objectivism with its emphasis on objectification. Because the religious dimensions of slave music were so central, it raises the question of the role of religion. During the middle decades of the nineteenth century there were a number of crisis-ridden flashpoints within Protestantism and these came to a head with the antislavery movement. The critical reflection on slave music — the first fully modern sociology of music in the US—is rooted in the religious debates that coincide with the abolitionist movement, the most significant social movement in the nineteenth century. How and why these interpretive developments took hold around slave music, and the importance they have in the rise of the sociology of music, is largely unappreciated. My questions are thus provisional (certainly no more so than any of the approaches that would be recognized today), yet they allow us to see how the cultural forms and the judgments that empower them actually take shape, become viable, and thus socially, historically, and epistemologically constitutive. The field of religion in nineteenth century American society is complex. However, if we take as our vantage point the black spiritual as it emerged as a site and an object of inquiry, three major fronts of religious tension prove to be determinant: (1) the expansion of religion to slaves in the South, (2) the revivalist movement associated with the second Great Awakening, and (3) the Unitarian and Transcendentalist movements in the North that joined the critical wings of Protestantism to the antislavery movement. Each of these developments fed into the discovery of black song making and, in the process, helped to elevate the black spiritual to its early modern position as a cultural good fit to be taken seriously and analyzed. When these three fronts are considered conjuncturally, they can be appreciated for creating something of a cultural watershed in how they put a fledgling sociology of music on the American intellectual map.
2. Extending the religious franchise in antebellum society Prior to the nineteenth century, instructing the slaves in matters of religion was not a high priority. But by the 1830s, proselytization had developed as part of cultural management. It developed in an important conjuncture that included a recent history of significant slave revolts, new expansionist drives to extend slavery into the newly acquired Western states, and the growing fervor of abolitionists. But in the early eighteenth century, proselytization was only in its beginning stages. When it did emerge, it did so as a rather feeble dispensation from abroad (see Johnston, 1970: 135–136; Genovese, 1974: 86; Epstein, 1977: 229). As dehumanized objects and chattel property, slaves could have traits, quirks, distinguishing features, and other distinctive markings, as could any distinct object. But as long as their status as human beings was a contested issue, they were not eligible to have bestowed upon
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them the attributes of what could be considered emblematic of modern selfhood, even as such cultural developments were taking place within the West in general and American society in particular (see Foucault, 1972, 1982; Taylor 1989). Selfhood, after all, as a modern notion was still emerging in the late eighteenth century, but primarily within the higher domains of intellectual reflection in philosophy and hermeneutics, both of which had deep roots in religious discourses. Once slaves could be considered to have souls, and hence eligible for redemptive salvation, the field in which their repertoire of cultural expressions took shape was greatly altered. Among the range of cultural expressions, those that gained new importance displayed an assimilated religion. For slaveholders, religious practices, especially singing, signified elements of the preferred dominant culture and the efficacy of social control. For slaves, song making helped anchor the new spiritualized subjectivity that the religious franchise helped produce. Among guardians of the antebellum South, the extension of religion to slaves was fraught with conflict. While some insisted that proselytization was an undeniable duty, others resisted the project and argued persuasively that it undermined planter domination. This argument could not be denied. The failed conspiracy led by Denmark Vesey and the bloody insurrection carried out by Nat Turner rocked the antebellum South. Imagined or real, the specter of revolts forced intense debate over the relationship between religion and social control. Rescinding the religious franchise however was not an option. Proselytization intensified. As Eugene Genovese (1974: 186) notes, slaveholders long distrusted slaves with religion, but after the Turner event ‘‘they feared slaves without religion even more’’ and Christianity was seen no longer as an impediment to social control but now ‘‘primarily as a means of social control.’’1 If extending the religious franchise to slaves was viewed as problematic, it was also urgent and necessary. Religion, after all, was the foundation of virtually all social orthodoxy, but it was emerging as the penultimate cultural contradiction of slavery. After the Vesey revolt South Carolinians may have initially withdrawn their support for religion and repressed its practices, it was because they ‘‘preferred to risk their salvation rather than their necks’’ (Freehling, 1965: 73). But religion was too important and too fundamental to the shifting social imaginary; it had to be made safe for the planter aristocracy. The Vesey and Turner affairs signaled the tip of an iceberg; beneath was a growing legitimation crisis that was being brokered into critical consciousness within, not outside, the framework of religion. Vesey was a member of the African Methodist Church; Turner was a self-appointed Baptist preacher. Sheer repression could cut out individual renegades once they were detected; individuals could be punished or purged by whatever means. But the soulgranting, subject-granting power of being given the religious franchise, which was
1 Genovese (1974: 236) argues that in spite of the laws passed to suppress black religious practices, they were strictly enforced ‘‘only during insurrection scares or tense moments occasioned by political turmoil’’. ‘‘Too many planters’’, he suggests, ‘‘did not want them enforced. They regarded their slaves as peaceful, respected their religious sensibilities, and considered such interference dangerous to plantation morale and productivity.’’
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greatly aided by Evangelical populism, had taken hold. A new subjectivity had been beckoned, slaves had been hailed as souls, and there was no reversing the process. In this redemptive matrix, appropriate culture was religious culture. Slaves shared religion. Thus they had a newly recognizable religious culture. Having religious agency, even if surrounded by slave-based institutions, greatly augmented slave cultural practices. By having souls and being eligible for salvation, the entire cultural field upon which their practices unfolded was significantly altered. As candidates for ministerial attention, blacks could be more readily conceptualized as human subjects, as individuals with souls, and as persons who possessed the self-interior structures of meaning that came with the modern notion of selfhood. Religion, in spite of—or perhaps through—its highly contentious relationship to slavery, fostered practices conducive to the formation of new cultural structures of interiority and subjectivity. This new subjectivity engendered, in turn, a resonating black voice among ex-slaves in the form of the ‘‘slave narratives’’ and the ‘‘Negro spiritual’’. These two cultural modes of expression were, in turn, seized upon by radical abolitionists during the last few decades of the antislavery movement. Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, written in 1845, represents the penultimate expression of the intimate and logical linkage between the religion franchise, slave culture, and music. It is in Douglass’s autobiography that we glimpse the first modern formalization of social and ethnographic reflection on the discrete musical practices of slaves and their social identity in relationship to social and institutional circumstances. The extension of the religious franchise thus helped to inaugurate a cultural sphere with distinct practices that could also serve as windows into a new cultural interior. This interior could now be noted, observed, and marked for increasingly analytical attention.
3. Religious revivalism The expansion of religious teachings among slaves, especially in the early decades of the nineteenth century, was actually part of a larger cultural shift that involved powerful revivalist currents. Known as the Second Great Awakening, the revivalist movement among evangelical Methodist and Baptist sects swept across the Upper South and Western states. Another revivalist wave took place around 1857–1858 with a more distinctively progressive theology that fueled the modern humanitarian reformist movement (see Miller, 1965: 3–35; Smith, 1965: 45–62; May, 1967). Of the religious movements, the second Great Awakening was the most significant demographically.2 Unlike the neo-Calvinist Anglican and Congregational denominations,
2 As neo-Calvinist orthodoxy and Congregationalism waned, Protestant denominations, particularly Methodist and Baptist, flourished. By 1855, Methodists and Baptists dwarfed all other Protestant denominations with memberships of 1,577,014 and 1,105,546 respectively. Presbyterians, the third largest denomination, trailed with 495,715. Congregationalists and Evangelical Lutherans each had approximately 200,000 (see Smith, 1965: 20–21).
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which were largely the cultural property of cultural and economic elites, the new evangelical populism spoke to the more sprawling white lower and middle class. Revivalism took the form of a highly emotional search for religious renewal, and in the process, it opened widely to poor whites, new immigrants and, in some cases, even to blacks. Evangelicalism moved into the South through large camp meetings and through the even greater concerted effort to bring denominational church structure to the plantations (see Sernett, 1975: 36–81).3 Indeed, Methodist and Baptists sects grew significantly through the evangelical movements and augmented the piecemeal efforts of soul tending made by Southern overseers, thus deepening the process of extending the religious franchise to slaves.4 For the first time, large numbers of blacks were brought into Protestant religious sects. Through the revivalist movements, Protestantism took on new class, ethnic, and racial profiles.5 While the South’s cultural overseers vacillated between religious repression and reformism, Evangelicalism—with its mass revival sessions, spectacular camp meetings, and brazen disregard for most established (‘‘worldly’’) institutions—worked entirely against the grain of many Southern elites. Southerners continued to press their local ministers to tighten strict supervision over black religious gatherings, and to install in their slaves a more solemn and passive approach to religious conduct. Evangelicalism with its huge gatherings, however, defied repressive scrutiny. It fostered, instead, a cultural populism that valued intense, soul-searching emotional expressivity. Evangelical revivalists were boisterous precisely because they trusted human emotion; emotion was the language of the soul. Establishment religion— rigid and lacking emotional freedom and spontaneity—reflected a disconnection from God. Expressive and spontaneous emotionalism, or unsanctioned autonomous ‘‘exhortation’’, was what the South’s planter-minister power structure attempted to purge from black religious practices. Ironically, many white leaders in the South, and in the North as well, had long viewed unbridled emotionality as a Negro (as well as female) trait; but the emotionally insurgent religious revisionism that was taking place was largely a white phenomenon, though marginally open to blacks (Washington, 1964: 37–38).6 3 For general studies on historical aspects of the Negro church, see Du Bois (1903), Frazier (1956), Weatherford (1957), and Woodson (1964 [1921]). 4 As Raboteau (1978: 207) notes, ‘‘among other denominations in the antebellum South—Presbyterian, Lutheran, Disciples, Episcopalian, Moravian—black ministers were extremely rare or nonexistent.’’ See also Washington (1964) and Sobel (1988). 5 This ideological and demographic conjuncture in the South did not spawn radical abolitionism, nor was this social sector full of people who took quickly to the book counters to buy the latest slave narrative. That kind of cultural purchase took place in cities like Boston and New York. The expanding Methodist and Baptist denominations fostered a middle class ideology that was distinctly anti-intellectual as well as anti-institutional and easily aligned with Jacksonian democratic populism. On the important ties to racial politics, see Saxon (1990) and Roediger (1991). On Jacksonian politics, see Schlesinger (1953). 6 E. Franklin Frazier suggests that the uninhibited emotionalism encouraged by Baptists and Methodists offered blacks a more accessible form of Christianity. Important is the fact that these two sects had rejected slavery as early as the second half of the eighteenth century. See Jackson (1931); see also Genovese’s (1974: 232–233) important discussion of the appeal of Baptist and Methodist denominations, as well as the modifications slaves made of these orientations.
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Slaves had long relied on cultural forms that were collective, interactive, and emotionally expressive. They retained such forms as black congregations, which emerged to become legitimate extensions of major Baptist and Methodist denominations. But most important, the Great Awakening allowed slaves to rationalize their collective desires, perpetually stymied under slavery, in the form of institutionalized religion. This greatly augmented the cultural velocity that was being unleashed in the new religiously sanctioned forms of subjectivity, as it further expanded and simultaneously legitimized the new cultural interior that was now being expressed in black religion and slave song making. The Great Awakening emphasized the individual necessity of taking the first steps to Christian salvation and perfection by immediate conversion. Immediatism — the doctrine of immediate transformation of the soul based on erasing through repentance one’s flawed spiritual history and starting anew—had its societal corollaries in utopian community formation and, of course, abolition (see Davis, 1962; Fredrickson, 1971: 29). By extending the religious franchise, slaves were simultaneously granted admission into the dominant culture’s teleological and philosophical framework of subjectivity. And it was not just black subjectivity that was on the rise; major transformations were taking place within the larger modern context. Romanticism was in the process of spawning an early modern form of pathos-oriented humanitarian reform, and abolitionism was at the forefront. According to Marion Wilson Starling (1981: 15, 19), there were at least one hundred abolition societies operating in the 1820s. It was in this context that slaves were beginning to stretch their own subjectivizing claims as self-presenting and socially representative subjects. The most eloquent crystallization of the unintended consequence was the slave narratives. This period was rapidly accommodating the humanitarian reformism, including abolitionism was in the forefront. In the new receptive context, black authors benefited from the growing receptivity of the antislavery movement. They were able to take advantage of the new ideological privileges of subjectivity and selfhood, to stake claims to an experientially based self-authenticity, and to testify from a personal experience and to a social movement. In essence, the extension of the religious franchise, as it culminated in the nineteenth century slave narratives, was transformed into a cultural license authorizing black authors to practice as modern selves and to draw truths from their situated urgency. Conversion, after all, was a requisite for admission into subjecthood (an unintended consequence). Conversion, however, was irrelevant to the legal force of slavery. Converted or not, slaves by civil law were property; they were objects, not subjects. As a new mode of cultural expression, the slave narratives provided the phenomenologically based thick description that confronted the contradiction between moral subjects and objects of chattel. But only at its most radical-humanist margins, where the slave narrative emerged, did the cultural energy take hold to champion the reconceptualization of chattel property as selves and persons. By being recognized as authentic sources of observation, it was possible for slaves to be reclassified—from objects of property to authenticating subjects. Radical abolitionists, black and white, thus helped bring
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about a significant alteration in cultural perceptions of black expressions by introjecting a new element of humanness—selfhood—into the white accounts of blacks. Slaves found the religious franchise a powerful cultural resource to augment their emergence as subjects. Quite often their cultural uses of religion involved struggles over the interpretation of religious precepts and worldly practices, and this resulted in ongoing conflict over the relationship between religion and social order. Nonetheless, the religious franchise engendered social and political—as well as religious—transformations. As slaves became proselytized, overseers culturally continued to debate how slaves were either capable of possessing or lacking the rudiments of civilization. This process legitimated the proselytization policies of the moral and religious guardians of antebellum culture, but it also exacerbated cultural struggles. When abolitionists recognized that slaves possessed salvageable souls, it opened an important door from which nascent (and certainly radical) black subjectivity could emerge. Religious practice was a measure abolitionists could understand—and religious practice that could be cultivated, monitored, and controlled was all the better. White abolitionists most easily understood slaves through a religious lens as producers of acceptable religious cultural forms. But it was religious singing that provided a key to interpret black culture; songs could be defined and understood relative to their proximity to, or distance from, dominant religious norms. In essence, religious norms governed how black music was heard—as an aberrant noise, or recognized as meaningful sound if such sonic production resembled established hymnology. Having emerged through the religious franchise, the new system of cultural recognition rested tendentiously on the relative success of general surveillance—of extending religious instructions while policing black expressivity through rewards, repression, punishment, and violence. By the mid-nineteenth century, black song making under slavery had come to incorporate a long history of struggles of representation and social control, a history of tensions, conflicts, negotiations, and accommodations that were barely submerged in the black institutionalized church structures (e.g., those affiliated with mainstream Baptist and Methodist denominations). These structures deepened and rationalized the ties to subject emergence through religion and, thus, through ‘‘religious singing’’ as slaves built their relatively autonomous systems of cultural strength out of the long struggle over the meaning of the religious franchise. While pro-slavery Southerners construed religious practices and norms from the vantage point of protecting slavery, radical black and white abolitionists viewed the religious expressivity of slaves as a symbol of slavery’s aberration from Christian principles. As a predominantly religious social movement, abolitionism centered upon religious antagonism. Indeed, abolitionism was an expression of it. What more powerful signifying system could radical abolitionists find to ground the notion of religiously sanctioned inner authenticity than the spiritual (at least for a short while)? Most of the committed abolitionists, whose new cultural perceptions turned appreciatively toward the spirituals, viewed them as the penultimate signifiers of black Christian subjectivity. In this regard, the white radical abolitionist’s penchant
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for the spiritual echoed the more elaborate kind of cultural work that had already been carried by slave narratives and their radical embrace of—or their embrace of radical—religious principles. In the long run, Christian teachings had a profoundly unsettling yet determinant impact. Slaves found their symbolic universe widened by the expansion of additional cultural practices whose very forms—praying, congregating, singing—could feed into ongoing struggles to carve out their own sphere of discourse and collective engagement. It would only be a matter of time and refinement in which the focus upon the self-reports of truth-through-experience tellers would shift to the focus of investigators who would seek to get at that experience with their own accounts themselves—through the work of an ethnosympathetic social science. Confronting this new cultural-interpretive complex engendered nothing less than a new mode of culturally invested and investigative work at the subcultural margins. This was the new work of an ethnosympathy that emanated from within the abolitionist movement, and one that heard black and white meanings in what was once only black noise. Music making—especially religious singing—thus became one of the arenas of black cultural practice that white overseers found least objectionable. Religious singing was safe and acceptable. It could be held to ridicule, or its content (in so far as it could be understood by overseers) could be measured against external standards of goodness. But when religious singing was heard as earnest and authentically attuned spiritual yearning, it was easily acceptable as good black culture. Southern overseers tolerated such song making. Northerners sympathetic to antislavery, however, would soon seize on such songs—the spirituals—as evidence of souls ruthlessly shackled by slavery. As the antislavery movement gained in momentum, black spirituals would quickly become one of the key aspects of slave culture that Northerners found so appealing. The attraction to black religious song making took its most serious turn as northerners entered the South during and shortly after the Civil War. Northerners seized upon the ‘‘spirituals’’—a cultural practice that had already been so eloquently highlighted in ex-slave Frederick Douglass’s autobiography of 1845—as a privileged window into slave culture, and in the process, elevated it as a unique cultural form worthy of increasingly refined reflection.
4. Religious disenchantment in the North Frederick Douglass’s writings could not have emerged had there not been a viable antislavery movement. The movement enabled Douglass and so many other black and white abolitionists to produce a flourishing public discourse against slavery. Though his writings were those of an ex-slave addressing the crisis of slavery in the south, they were very much a northern discourse. Douglass’s autobiography is the first piece of writing by a former slave to highlight the crucial function of song making by slaves. His writings thus play a pivotal role in the early sociology of music in the United States. But let us first note the context.
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Antislavery sentiments already had a significant history, but they took on greater urgency in the context of the slave revolts. Influential Unitarian ministers in the North left the pulpit to agitate against slavery. Theodore Parker, one of the most popular and certainly most radical among Unitarian ministers of the 1840s, championed many of the political causes of the day. Parker’s sermons, which he delivered with intensity and inspiration, were considered events; they frequently drew several thousand audience members during his peak popularity. Parker, along with other radical ministers, was ostracized by fellow Unitarian ministers for preaching against the evils of an industrial capitalism and a runaway market society that trapped the individual and jeopardized one’s inner goodness. Parker also supported the fledgling women’s movement and the labor movement as he sought his own front line position in the battle against slavery. Taking his sermons on the public lecture circuit, he plied his activist theology by attacking slavery and institutional servitude. Parker—along with Franklin Sanborn, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and several others—formed the ‘‘Secret Six’’ to provide financial and political support for the white abolitionist, John Brown. In 1859, Brown and fewer than 50 accomplices planned to incite a slave uprising. Their raid upon the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia failed, and Brown was hanged. Both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, two Divinity School dropouts who became key figures in the Transcendentalist movement, publicly supported Brown, who exemplified Transcendentalism’s belief that actions must be true to a person’s innermost political beliefs (see Thoreau, 1906: 420, 438–439; Fredrickson, 1965: 40). Sanborn would later become the first president of the American Social Science Association that formed in 1865. Higginson—who had been a Harvard Divinity School student, but who had left the ministry to ply his beliefs through joining workers and women’s rights agitation—was offered at the outbreak of the Civil War the chance to command one of the first all-black Union Army regiments. The opportunity put him on the coast of South Carolina. It was there, and during his command of black soldiers, that he began to collect and write about black religious songs. Also in Parker’s congregation were some two hundred paying members (see Hutchinson, 1959: 183 n. 113), who included William Lloyd Garrison, the leader of the most radical abolitionist group in the antebellum era. Like many of the most critical northern abolitionists, Garrison was immersed in the religious tensions that surrounded Protestantism’s growing crisis with capitalist modernity and the institution of slavery. Garrison and his fellow black and white abolitionist followers were able to emerge in the growing disenchantment with mainstream Protestantism’s acquiescence to both industrialization and slavery. It was through his antislavery work that Garrison befriended Frederick Douglass. Garrison had launched his important antislavery newspaper, The Liberator, in 1831, the year of the Turner revolt. Two years later the American Anti-Slavery Society was launched. Garrison’s publication was scathing and emotionally ardent in its attack on slavery. The Liberator played a major role in distributing black accounts of slavery (Litwack, 1961: 236; Franklin and Moss, 1988:
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165).7 Nearly three hundred of these accounts of varying lengths appeared in the paper, and these were written by former slaves themselves. Garrison was crucial in the promotion of Douglass’s autobiography and wrote a powerful introduction for the first edition. In his introduction, Garrison implored readers to heed the crisis that Douglass’s narrative signaled. Garrison wrote: ‘‘He who can peruse it without a tearful eye, a heaving breast, an afflicted spirit—without being filled with an unutterable abhorrence of slavery and all its abettors, and animated with a determination to seek the immediate overthrow of that execrable system—without trembling for the fate of his country in the hands of a righteous God, who is ever on the side of the oppressed, and whose arm is not shortened that it cannot save—must have a flinty heart, and be qualified to act the part of a trafficker ‘in slaves and the souls of men’’’ (quoted from Douglass, 1986 [1845]: 38). By 1834, The Liberator had over 2300 subscribers. By 1836, there were at least eleven journals devoted to the abolition of slavery, and these had a combined subscribership of 1,095,000 (Starling, 1981: 19). The antislavery movement thus greatly augmented the capacity for black subjectivity to emerge in the form of writers, speakers, and movement activists. And it was this larger context that gave Douglass’s autobiography such cultural capital. And in the pages of his narrative, the sociology of music began to take distinct form. There were others who wrote sympathetically about black song making before and shortly after Douglass’s autobiography was published, but they wrote as outsiders (see Bremer, 1853; Kemble, 1863; Olmsted, 1904). Douglass provided the first insider’s view of what he called the ‘‘sorrow songs’’. He launched the sociology of music by charting a song’s lyrics and its meanings in relationship to slave communication; he showed how slaves used lyrics that ostensibly met the religious approval of overseers yet enabled double-coded messages meant only for the appreciation of slaves themselves. He probed the dual dimensions of overseer and clandestine culture. And he did so by also situating song making in the larger social context of slavery and everyday life. In this regard, Douglass’s classic text prefigured an ethnographically nuanced sociology of music that could be grasped as cultural expressions embedded in institutions, society and history.
7
From the 1830s on, as Michael Denning argues, the practice of serializing stories in general was part of the larger development of the dime novels that had its developmental precursor in the early penny press of the 1830s. The penny press helped to spin off serialized narratives in the form of ‘‘story papers’’, pamphlet novels of cheap and sensational fiction emerging as early as 1842, which were also the immediate forerunners to the successful series of ‘‘Beadle’s Dime Novels’’ that appeared in 1860 and culminated in the ‘‘cheap library’’ of nickel and dime pamphlets in the 1870s. These publications, the material read by working class readers, were culturally distinct from those of middle class Victorian readers who read periodicals like Century, Scribners, Harpers, and Atlantic. It is within the burgeoning development of various reading publics that Garrison’s The Liberator emerged as one of the most important antislavery publications of the 1830s and was involved as well in serializing slave narratives. On the rise of the working-class literary forms, especially the dime novels, see Denning (1987: 9–16). On the rise of the penny press, see Schudson (1978).
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5. Cultural convergence The paths to the study of music as fathomable inner culture, and as a window onto a social world of subjects hitherto misunderstood, were now charted—albeit in the form of passionately condensed descriptions of black musical culture within a personally political narrative that was fundamentally a contribution to the nineteenth century’s most important social movement. What Douglass intimated would soon be seized upon and expanded by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Allen, and others. Both Higginson and Allen took to a cultural field shaped by massive social crisis to become the first to systematically pursue and record black songs. Higginson’s allegiance to Transcendentalism fostered the hermeneutic impulse. His Army Life in a Black Regiment, which was published in 1870, was based on his observations of former slaves who served in the Union uniform under his command. Allen’s book, Slave Songs of the United States, published in 1867, involved the efforts of others (including Lucy McKim Garrison, who married one of William Lloyd Garrison’s sons) who primarily collected song specimens from the South. Higginson pushed the insights first penned by Frederick Douglass, and while he was a social and racial outsider, he nonetheless tried to immerse himself in the day to day lives of his black troops, and he attempted to grasp the relationship between song making and the singer’s cultural horizon. His activity would today be understood as a precursor to ethnographically attuned ‘‘participant observation’’. Allen and fellow compilers were much more like modern data collectors. They knew the objects they wished to capture, and they developed strategies (often relying on networks of acquaintances) to collect, log, and classify the songs they obtained. If Higginson was the hermeneuticist, Allen and associates were the formalists. Both laid the groundwork for the earliest most viable sociology of music. The work they carried out took place upon contentious and complex cultural terrain. They were keenly aware that modernity was in the process of banishing the songs (or so they believed at the time) that Frederick Douglass had brought to the modern analytical table. Their urgency would soon be adopted by the black schools and colleges that emerged during and after the Civil War; these schools would keep alive the collection and analysis of the songs of a slave culture on the verge of disappearing in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The work of cultural retention continued by the black schools, such as Fisk University, Hampton Institute, and Tuskegee Institute, would soon be annexed by the professional social scientific fields of ethnology, folklore, and early sociology. In retrospect, the religious crises bear a direct relationship to the modern emergence and cultivation of the social study of music. Proselytization in the South beckoned black subjectivity in general, and it served as the major impetus not to black song making per se but to the ethnosympathetically and ethnologically oriented interests in song making as a dimension of inquiry. Though with quite different sensibilities, the southern religious revivalism and northern disenchantment with market society, capitalism and slavery in the North were each fueled by antimodern and anti-institutional impulses. The quest for cultural renewal cut deeply across these distinct religious fronts. These fronts converged in the cultural production of
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the black spiritual as both expressive culture and a new knowledge frontier. This convergence is sharpened in the context of war as the spiritual is for the first time elevated to a new, culturally distinct practice. From this convergence arose the early modern framework for the sociology of music. The further rationalization of the hermeneutic and the formalistic approaches would unfold from this point.
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Washington Jr., J.R., 1964. Black Religion. Beacon Press, Boston. Weatherford, W.D., 1957. American Churches and the Negro. Christopher Publishing House, Boston. Weber, M., 1958. The Rational and Social Foundations of Music. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, IL. Woodson, C.G., 1964 (1921). The History of the Negro Church. Schocken Books, New York.
Jon Cruz is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His current research projects include the rise of critical subjectivity in late modernity, and digital music and the changing political economy of sound. His recent publications include Historicizing the American Cultural Turn: The Slave Narrative, European Journal of Cultural Studies 4(5) 2001; Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation (1999); Ethnosympathy: Reflections on an American Dilemma, in The Cultural Turn (forthcoming); Subject Crises and Subject Work, From Sociology to Cultural Studies: New Perspectives (1997), and is co-editor of Viewing, Reading, Listening: Audiences and Cultural Reception (1994).