Cheryl C. Boots. Singing for Equality: Hymns in the American Antislavery and Indian Rights Movements, 1640–1855.

Abstract

Seldom utilized effectively by today's interpreters, hymns and metrical psalms are fundamental sources for the history of American religious culture. These ritual texts and their paired tunes were ubiquitous in colonial and antebellum America, legitimating cultural institutions and practices while also holding the potential to inspire change. In this ambitious study, Cheryl C. Boots explores hymns as agents of change before the Civil War and their role in the struggle to achieve racial equality for African Americans and Native Americans. Boots begins her survey with John Eliot's efforts to share Puritan psalmody with his indigenous “praying towns” in seventeenth-century Massachusetts and ends with hymn texts in the abolition fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Wells Brown. Along the way she offers short treatments of hymns in the work of Samson Occom, Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker, Richard Allen, Jarena Lee, William Apess and Mary Apess, Lydia Sigourney, Lydia Maria Child, John Ridge, Elias Boudinot and Harriet Gold Boudinot, Catherine Beecher, David Walker, Maria W. Stewart, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Maria Weston Chapman, and William Lloyd Garrison. She contrasts hymn use by these egalitarian writers with references to singing in white establishmentarian works like Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), and James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826). She also examines four important egalitarian hymnals, Occom's A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs: Intended for the Edification of Sincere Christians of All Denominations (1774), Allen's The African Methodist Pocket Hymn Book (1816), the American Anti-Slavery Society's Freedom's Lyre (1840), and Brown's The Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings (1848).