senting to us the character of the hero, as a most artistic whole. The most searching test of popularity can be applied to "Ole Dan Tucker" with perfect confidence. It has been sung, perhaps, oftener than any melody ever written. I have said that this was in some aspects the best of these songs. It was the last. With that ballad African minstrelsy may be said to have culininated. From that period its decline and fall was rapid and saddening. Hardly a song has been produced since that time which does not present the most giaring marks of barefaced and impudent imposition. The zealous student of this species of literature, as he wanders amongst the decaying ruins of its former grandeur, may well sigh at the rank and mildewed vegetation which is fast overspreading those noble relics of antiquity. If a buttress or a cornice of beauty meets his eye, he finds it but a portion of the old edifice degraded to a new position. If a gleam of the former light occasionally sparkles in his path, it is but the phosphoric glimmer which beans from loathsome and decaying putrescence. Vile parodies, sentimental love songs, dirges for dead wenches who are generally sleeping under the willow, on the bank of some stream, and melancholy reminiscences of negroic childhood fill the places once allotted to the grand old ballads of former days. From the volume before mentioned, I have not been able, after a most critical examination, to select more than ten which bear any trace of the cotton-field afflatas, and these ten, with only one exception, have been so patched and dressed up for drawing-room inspection, that they look like a bumpkin who has suddenly come into possession of a fortune. They have lost their country grace without acquiring a city polish. This inundation of trash has swept away in its might all the ancient landmarks of song. It is mortifying to be obliged to confess that I have searched unsuccessfully from Appleton's to the book stand in the rear of the post-office, for a copy of the original Jim Crow. The names, even, have lost their marked significance. The questionable taste which has given birth to appellations like Fanny Fern, Lotty Lee, Minnie Myrtle, and their long retinue of vegetable alliterations, has crept into this department of poetry and exhibits itself in such Africo-romantic fancies as Rosa Lee, Lily Dale, Flora May, Nelly Bell or Etty Way.* Poetasters who never saw an alligator, or smelt the magnolia blossom in their lives, sit coolly down to write an African ditty as a pleasant after-dinner pastine, or a daily task; and, as a natural consequence of this reprehensible assumption, we find the banana growing wild in Tennesse, South Carolina slaves gorging themselves with pumpkin pie, a deceased negress buried upon the Lawrence river in in the midst of a furious snow, and a Kentucky sugar mill in full blast in the month of June. But ludicrous anachronisms, and unpardonable ignorance of topography, are not the worst evils of which we have to complain. Instead of the lyrics which once stirred the heart of the nation, our wives and children are daily and nightly compelled to listen to some such horrible parody as this "In a lone cypress swamp, where the wild-roaring bullfrog, The echoes awake with his deep thrilling tonesOld Pompey lies there, and the plantation watchdog A requiem howls o'er his deep sunken bones." or sentimental trash like this "Etty was so gentle, kind, and good to all, She played the old banjo which hung upon a wall; Etty's voice was low and sweet, like de little bird; Them soft and gentle tones dat I've so often heard." or this "Oh! I ne'er can lubanudder They are fortunate if they get to bed without being wearied and disgusted with some crude burlesque on a popular opera, served up with vulgar caricatures of the style and manner of well-known Rosa Lee, if such a personage had ever existed, would have been known as "Massa Lee's Rosa." The prevailing ignorance at the North on the subject of negro names is remarkable and amusing. They seldom have pretty or common appellations, as they impose on their owners the office-on some plantations no $inecare-of dispensing the nomenclature; and as the gentlemen are naturally unwilling to confer upon a stave a name borne by some member of the family or some friend. The fruitfulness of the women on the "Please Massa," place of a planter whom I once visited, had on one occasion exhausted his vocabulary. si a hand to him one morning before he was out of bed, "Clementine sent me to ask you for a name. he had a little boy, last night." "Call him Last Night," said my friend, lazily catching at the last words; and Last Night" he is, and will remain until the shadows of the last night of all shall gather round him. He blacked my boots, and it struck me as a curious anomaly to rise in the morning, and call for Last Night. It seemed as if, like the last poet out, I was "summoning before me the dark past.' artists; and commended to popular favor by the vilest puns, of which "Lend her de Sham-money," or "Lucy did lam a Moor," are not exaggerated specimens. Now, all this may serve to make the unskilful laugh, but it cannot fail to make the judicious grieve. It is from the purpose of negroic minstrelsy, whose end at the first was, and now ought to be, to present to the lovers of original poetry and music, a class of songs, peculiar, genuine, and unadulterated. A thoughtful, reflective man, can hardly leave one of the temples devoted to such barbaric sacrifices, without reasonable and just despondency and alarm. The decay of Athens and Rome was as marked and as melancholy in their literature as in their government. The poet, the orator, and the statesman, went down hand in hand into the shadowy valley, and disappeared together in the clouds of ignorance and superstition that veil for ever the Dark Ages. Is it treasonable to hint, for the warning of American minstrels and politicians, that there is something more than a striking coincidence in this simultaneous decline; and that the present diseased taste in popular poetry, may be but the first faint symptoms of another dark period, in which America shall be hidden from the gaze of the world; never, perhaps, to emerge to her pristine dignity and splendor? I am no alarmist, and yet it seems to me that, in these views, the patriot may find matter for deep and serious consideration. A proper diagnosis of the disease, however, is of no effect, unless a remedy is applied. Fortunately, in this case, we are not left without hope. The mine from which Jim Crow and Ole Dan Tucker were dug, is not yet exhausted, and a resort to it will be alike easy and successful. Why need we groan and grumble under the inflictions of ignorant and self-conceited song-writers, when every cotton-field teems with melody, and every slave hut, throughout the Southern country, has its little list of genuine ballads, which only need to be known, in order to be received to the heart of a nation. We talk with vague regrets and sentimental longings, of the forgotten strains of Tasso, once chanted so commonly by the shrill-voiced gondoliers of Venice. Poets have mused dejectedly over the songless boatmen, travellers have feelingly bewailed the silence and desolation of those once gay canals; romancists and serenaders are gradually ceasing to adjure us to "list to the voice of the gay gondolier." That malice which delights to slander the unresisting dead, has begun to deny both the gaiety of the gondolier, and the purity of his voice. He shares the fate of Memnon. Ever since the hush of those mysterious sounds which were wont to greet the dawn, there have not been wanting travelled Gradgrinds to assure us that the song from his lips was a humbug and a sham; and to degrade that majestic statue into a vulgar shoemaker with a musical lapstone, upon which the morning hymn was hammered by his knavish priests. So we are asked to believe that the voice of the gondolier was harsh and unmusical, and that "Tasso's echoes," chanted alternately, were but such polite and complimentary remarks as may be heard to this day among the drivers on the Erie Canal. But as I seat myself in imagination, on this calm and moonlight night, by a certain wayside in the South, I leave these discussions to the prosy antiquary, and care not for the songs of Venice, or the music of Memnon. Up from the Sound comes a gentle south wind, rippling the water, and fanning my whiskers; the shore surge whispers low at my feet; afar in the distance I hear the hum of the plantation. The tumultuous harmony of the stock, mingled and blending with the faint shouts and cries of the "people," and the nameless and varied sounds of insect life lull my senses like the gentle susurrus of Tityrus. And now, faintly heard far over the water, I distinguish the soft thump of oars in the rowlock of an approaching boat. I listen with attentive ears-for I know by experience the gratification in store for me-and soon catch the distant tones of the human voicenow more faintly heard, and now entirely lost. A few minutes pass, and the breeze once more wafts to me the swelling notes of the chorus half buried in the measured cadence of the oars. wind dies away, and my straining ears again hear nothing but the measured beat of the rowers, and the plashing of the restless sea. But now, anew, I hear the sound of those manly negro voices swelling up upon the evening gale. Nearer and nearer comes the boat, higher and higher rises the melody, till it overpowers and subdues the noise of the oars, which in their turn become subscr Hallam's Middle Ages, Chapter ix., Part 1. The vient to the song, and mark its time with harmonious beating. And now the boat is so near, that every word and every tone comes to my ear, over the water, with perfect distinctness, and I recognize the grand old triumphal chorus of the stirring patriotic melody of "Gen'el Jackson": Gen'el Jackson, mighty man Whaw, my kingdom, fire away; He fight on sea, and he fight on land, "Gen'el Jackson gain de day Whaw, my kingdom, fire away, -Gen'el Jackson fine de trail, Whaw, my kingdom, fire away, Whaw, my kingdom, fire away." But the boat touches the beach; the negres with a wild cry quit their singing, tumble out into the shallow water, drag their dug-out up high and dry Ep the sand, and I am left once more with the evening breeze and the quieter harmony of nature. The song, a part of which I have just qotel, is fresh from the sable mint in which it was coined. Its originality and genuineness every one familiar with plantation life will at once perceive; while some Georgians may even be able to point to the very river on which the disky troubadours still chant it. I am Well aware that in depriving the words of their appropriate music, I rob it of much of its attractiveness, and still it is no bad sample of what may be called the Historic Plantation Ballad. The particular naval battle in which Old History was engaged, I have not been able to discover; but the allusion to the bales of cotton in the third stanza may not be without its effect in settling one of the vexed questions relating to the defence of New Orleans; and it adds auther to the many examples of the superiority of oral tradition over contemporaneous written history. It is not alone, however, on the water that these quaint songs are produced. The annual corn-shucking season has its own peculiar class of songs, never Bear but on thatfestival; their rhythmical structure or cæsural pauses not being adapted to the measured cadence of the oars. Standing at a little distance from the corn heap, on some dark and quiet night, watching the sable forts of the gang, illuminated at in tervals by the flashes of the lightwood knot, and listening to the wild high notes of their harvest songs, it is easy to imagine ourselves unseen spectators of some secret aboriginal rite or savage festival. Snatches of one or two songs which on such occasions I have heard, recur to me. Could I in the following specimen give you any idea of the wild grandeur and stirring music of the refrain, I should need no apology for presenting it to my readers. "De ladies in de parlor, Hey, come a rollin' down- "De gemmen in de kitchen, Hey come a rollin' down- I place the above in a class to which I have given the name of descriptive songs. By this I do not mean to be understood as hinting that it is an accurate description of a "whitefolks," party. On the contrary, it probably originated in the tipsy brain of its dusky author; or, perhaps, in a moment of discontent may have been composed as an exaggerated satire. The allusion to the kitchen, as the place where the gentlemen are engaged in their pleasing and congenial occupation, goes to show that the minstrel had in his view a colored party, which I am inclined to think was in fact the case. But at this stage of our critical knowledge on the subject of negro literature, such speculations are alike tedious and unprofitable. The comic ballads of the South, form a large and highly interesting class of songs, more especially as they are of a sort most readily transplanted, and most grateful to the public taste. Apart from their fun, however, they lack the merit which distinguishes many other kinds of African composition. The negro is humorous rather than witty, and his comic songs consist of ludicrous images, instead of witty conceits. I do not remember, in the whole course of my investigations, to have met with anything like a pun in a genuine plantation melody. The following shucking song has nothing to recommend it to public attention, save the questionable rhyme to "supper." The lovers of "Öle Dan Tucker" will be pleased and interested with a coincidence in which there cannot be the slightest ground for a suspicion of plagiarism. Cow bog on middle e' island Ho! meleety, ho! Cow boy on middle e' islandHo! meleety, ho! "Missis eat de green persimmon, Ho! meleety, ho! [Repeat.] "Mouf all drawd up in a pucker, Ho! meleety, ho! [Repeat.] "Staid so till she went to supper, Ho! meleety, ho!" [Repeat.] The main obstacle which the enthusiastic collector of these songs will have to contend against, will be the difficulty of thoroughly comprehending the negro dialect. So peculiar is it, that those even who have been familiar with it from their infancy, are often times at a loss to interpret such passages as the chorus in the last specimen. No assistance can be expected in such matters from the negroes, who, when called upon to repeat slowly and distinctly a line which they have just sung, will declare with the utmost gravity and solemnity that they have utterly forgotten it. I used to think that they were unwilling to show to the world the richest treasures of their literature; but subsequent investigations induced me to believe their assertion, and to conclude that their intellects could only retain the words when assisted by the music. An intelligent friend to whom I applied, suggested, though not without doubt, that the line in question was "Oh! my lady, oh!" And the fact that the ballad is principally devoted to the misfortune of the "mistress," gives some countenance to this interpretation. With the line "He full um fote wid cotton bale," in the ballad of Gene'l Taylor, I had an amount of trouble which will hardly be appreciated by those who see the line in print. I suppose it is hardly necessary to observe that "full um fote means "filled" i. e., constructed "his fort." Autobiographic ballads hold a prominent position among Southern melodies; but as they are usually sung exclusively by their authors, and are regarded in a measure as private property, I do not feel at liberty to transfer any specimens to these pages; more especially as at this moment I find it impossible to bring any to my recollection. One melancholy chorus, "The long summer's day," I still remember. Its perpetually recurring sound never failed to have a singularly saddening and depressing effect upon me, whenever I heard it. In speaking of this kind of literature the improvisations of the negroes must not be forgotten, but as they are usually but a running commentary on matters passing under the immediate notice of the minstrel, they possess but a local and transitory interest, and a single stanza taken at random will suffice. The reader will notice the chorus, which was a favorite one with the improvisator, and has served to string many thousand lines together. "Ole Maus William, he gone to legislatur; Ah! chogaloga, chogaloga, chogalog. Young Maus John, he done come home from college, Ah! chogaloga, chogaloga, chagolog." Those who are familiar with Southern life, and especially those who have participated in its hunting delights, will perhaps understand, without any explanation, that the foregoing refrain is intended to be an imitation of the gobble of the wild turkey. I have performed many orthographical experiments, in order to represent the sound more nearly On paper, but without success, and I am aware that no words can express the rich, unctuous, guttural flow of the line, when uttered in perfect time by a full gang at their corn-shucking task. An approximation to it, however, may be made by pronouncing the words rapidly in a deep tone, and at the same time violently agitating the body in a perpendicular direction. Having on one or two occasions essayed this mode with considerable satisfaction to myself, and no little commendation from a few privileged spectators, I am enabled to make this assertion with some confidence; but, as the movement is slightly fatiguing, and totally devoid of grace, I do not wish to be understood as recommending it either to invalids or ladies. It is, however, the only feasible method of "talking turkey," that I have yet been able to discover. I have thus attempted, as calmly and dispassionately as my own strong feelings of the importance of the subject will permit, to call the public attention to a serious and growing evil, and humbly, as becomes me, to point out some means for its removal. My task is finished, and my duty accomplished. Henceforth, the duty of guiding or correcting the public taste in these matters will devolve upon other pens than mine. I have endeavored to discharge my obligations to society fearlessly and sincere ly. For this courage and sincerity alone I desire credit. If the considerations which I have presented shall have the effect of awakening public attention to the subject, I shall be sufficiently rewarded; if not, the consciousness of duty performed will sustain me. It is earnestly to be desired that collections of genuine plantation songs may be made. The grateful incense of posterity would embalm the memory of him who should hand down to them authentic ballads, which another generation may sweep from the face of the earth forever. There are men whose birth or long residence in the South, whose knowledge of the negro dialect, and whose taste and accomplishments in polite literature, seem to have especially fitted them for this service. For the few and imperfect specimens which I have given above, I have been indebted to a treacherous memory of a few months' sojourn in Georgia some six or seven years ago, when I had no reason to suppose that I should ever feel called upon to pen this article. Could I have foreseen its necessity, the collection would have been greatly larger and more perfect. But ces. enough has been presented to show how much may be effected by a zealous scholar under more advantageous circumstanUpon a rough calculation, made with no statistics to refer to, I have concluded that there are, at least, thirty thousand slave plantations in the United States. Is it unreasonable to suppose that, on each of these plantations, one song may be found of undisputed genuineness and excellence? It will be a proud day for America when these thirty thousand songs are collected into several volumes, handsomely bound in Turkey morocco, and superbly embellished. Then negro minstrelsy will take its proper place in literature; then Ethiopian Serenaders, and Congo Minstrels will draw crowded houses at three dollars a seat, and one dollar for a promenade ticket; and then-but long ere that time the hand that writes these lines will have mouldered and become dustwill the eye of the student and antiquary linger reverently and delightedly over some time-worn manuscript as he deciphers the title "Jim Crow," or "Uncle Gabriel?" ARE ALL MEN DESCENDED FROM ADAM? то 10 the most cursory observer, the human race presents the utmost diversity in almost every aspect in which it can be viewed. Men exist of all colors, from the deepest black down to the purest white, of all forms of configuration, from the finely formed Circassian, to the stunted and deformed Bushman, and of all gradations_in beauty, from the Georgian to the Papuan. Besides, the intellectual capacities of the race appear to be as various; and there is every variety of mental endowment in the human species, from the far-reaching sagacity and inductive power of the philosopher who extends the boundaries of knowledge to the very confines of creation, to the narrow intellect of the savage who burrows in the earth, and is influenced only by the instinctive feelings which guide the brate creation. Is it possible, then, that a class of beings, so different in all their character istics have descended from a single pair? or does not the diversity of appearance prove also a difference in origin? Are all the modifications of form, color, &c., which distinguish the different families of mankind merely accidental, the result of climate, food, habits, &c., or do they indicate a specific difference which divides inseparably the human race? The latter supposition, viz., that all mankind do not belong to the same species is, we believe, entirely given up, at the present day, by every respectable ethnologist; though, by a very remarkable inconsistency, the accidental differ ences are adduced as a proof that the different families of mankind must have had a different origin. It is confessed that men possess the same general physical characteristics, are endowed with the same moral and intellectual powers, are influenced by the same hopes and the same fears, have the same sense of accountability, and the same conscience, |