Note 2 — THE RELIGION OF THE AMERICAN NEGRO SLAVE: HIS ATTITUDE TOWARD LIFE AND DEATH

Working toward this end, I have examined a vast amount of material on slavery, much of which is controversial, having been written by men who favored slaves, or by abolitionists and slaves who were able to see only one side of the question discussed. Such literature, being biased, so distorts the truth that it is extremely difficult to discover what is social fact. As sources, however, I have used books and magazine-articles, written from a more scientific point of view. There are a few representative ones. Kingsley's West African Studies, which, although expressing the attitude of the author, gives us a comprehensive picture of what the life in Africa is. Washington, in the Story of the Negro, in a simple, sincere manner, sets forth the struggles of the Negro in his contact with a higher civilization. Woodson's Education of the Negro prior to 1861 shows to what extent effort was made by the whites to bring the slaves into contact with the white civilization. The Religious Development of the Negro in Virginia, by Earnest, shows how the church of the Negro slave, beginning in the church of the whites, grew to be an independent organization. Fragmentary evidence in the histories of the religious denominations shows the same progressive development. A few of the stories of fugitive slaves, though written for other purposes, still speak very clearly of how dependent the slave was upon his cultural surroundings for his religious ideas. The stories of the lives of Nat Turner, the Virginia slave insurrectionist, and of Harriet, the Moses of Her People, are filled with apocalyptic imagery. Concerning the phenomena of cultural contacts, the most scholarly piece of work yet produced is that by Prof. Park, which shows the tendency of one civilization to accommodate itself to another, by assimilation of concepts, expressed in language and custom. For a study of the religion of the slave, however, the best of all the sources is that spontaneous, naive body of literature consisting of the slave-songs, sometimes called "spirituals," which were sung by individuals upon various occasions, and by shouting groups of religious enthusiasts. Krehbiel, who set many of these primitive verses to printed scales, made of them a psychological interpretation that has given the slave-mood. Colonel T. W. Higginson, the commander of a "black regiment" in South Carolina, during the Civil War, an eyewitness of many of the slave religious meetings, gives the circumstances under which a number of the "spirituals" arose. But Odum, in Volume III of the Journal of Religious Psychology and Education, makes of all the classes of slave-songs a psychological interpretation that is unsurpassed. The value of these collections is the common longing found therein, a burning enthusiasm to live in heaven.