Charlotte Forten, a free woman of color from the North who taught at the Penn School on St. Helena Island, SC. In 1864 Mrs. Forten, heard the newly freed Gullah Geechee people singing Spirituals.
By and by, when the morning comes
All the saints of God are gathered home
We will tell the story how we've overcome
And we'll understand it better by and by
Spirituals are a uniquely African-American art form with deep roots in the Gullah Geechee community.
They were songs of Black suffering married to expressions of Christian faith that reflected the desire for freedom and a return to home. The first substantial collection of Negro spirituals to
appear in the United States was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1867 by Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
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As the little steamer, Flora, approached landfall at Port Royal Island on Emancipation Day, Charlotte Forten and her fellow passengers celebrated this important day the first dawn of freedom.”
Black folks arrived by foot from nearby plantations and by steamer from the Sea Islands all around and as far as Hilton Head Island.
To meet the Flora at the steamboat landing, companies of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the freedmen’s regiment, stood waiting in their new uniforms of blue coats and scarlet pantaloons.
Charlotte Forten was delighted to find an old friend, Dr. Seth Rogers, as the regiment’s surgeon.
For Emancipation Day, the U.S. Army had brought in great stores of molasses, hard bread, tobacco, and sweetened water, plus a barbeque of a dozen oxen, each standing whole and roasting in its pit.
A speakers’ platform had been erected, and companies of the First South Carolina Volunteers stood or sat in a circle around it. The platform was reserved for distinguished speakers, officers and other soldiers, a military band, and the lady missionaries in attendance.
The celebration began with prayers, recited poetry, hymns, and speeches. The crowd of several thousand, sprinkled with whites but the majority black, waited for a moment they had so long dreamed of.
Finally, President Lincoln’s proclamation was read aloud and “enthusiastically cheered,” Forten recalled. The proclamation called for black volunteers to join the U.S. Army or Navy. About 200,000 black men would serve in the Union military by the end of the war.
Next, Col. Higginson was presented with a silk regimental flag sent from friends in New York. Embroidered on the flag was the name of the regiment and the words, “The Year of the Jubilee has come!”
He gazed out at the audience. “I took and waved the flag,” Higginson recalled in his diary, and “there suddenly arose, close beside the platform, a strong but rather cracked & elderly male voice, into which two women’s voices immediately blended.” They sang, “My country ‘tis of thee. Sweet land of Liberty.”
Colonel Higginson then introduced Dr. Brisbane, who read the President's Proclamation, which was enthusiastically cheered. Rev. Mr. French presented to the Colonel two very elegant flags, a gift to the regiment from the Church of the Puritans, accompanying them by an appropriate and enthusiastic speech. At its conclusion, before Colonel Higginson could reply, and while he still stood holding the flags in his hand, some of the colored people, of their own accord, commenced singing, "My Country, 'tis of thee."