Executive Mansion
September 1st, 1864
“This is a beautiful country,” said John Brown, as the hangman hung him.
He was no black Christ: no gentle Uncle Tom; yet, he is becoming a black Christ as we continue this civil war, as we become more and more harassed by casualties. We will need black Christs if we are to free the negro. Uncle Tom’s Cabin must add space—room by room, year by year.
All the powers of earth seem to be combining against the chattel slave. Mammon is after him, ambition follows, philosophy follows, and the theology of the day is joining the cry. They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him; and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of every key—the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distance places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.
This evening I heard negroes singing, as I worked at my desk, the windows open. I heard that song in New Orleans on my first visit; I heard it later when on the Mississippi, when we were on our cargo-raft, when we tied up at a wharf. That was quite a scrap. The blacks almost threw us off our raft.
Oh, was you ev – er in Mo – bile Bay,
Low – lands, low – lands, A – way, –