Almost all liberation movements have a song that inspires people and turns rooms where it is sung into spirit filled spaces. In 1830s Virginia, The African Hymn, created by a Philadelphia based AME preacher Shadrack Bassett was that song.
On August 21, 1831, Nat Turner, an enslaved preacher and visionary in Virginia led a group of 70 enslaved people to rise up and fight for their freedom.
We see Nat Turner’s uprising as an important galvanizing action. It made visible the strength of what was already an active transatlantic movement for emancipation led by Black people and including all oppressed people, ignited by the Haitian Revolution.
Leaders from Philadelphia were an important part of that movement.
This is a story that shows us one example of how.
From Bishop Allen to Rev. Shadrack Bassett to Nat Turner
Bishop Allen Sends Rev. Shadrack Bassett on a Mission
This story starts when Bishop Richard Allen traveled to Baltimore for the 1817 AME annual conference. Bishop Allen was building a core of itinerant preachers - men who would travel on foot to teach the gospel, build community and eventually build churches (Handy, 28). Note that this job later extended to women by the 1830s, thanks to Reverend Jerena Lee.
Bishop Allen ordained Shadrack Bassett at this conference and assigned him to Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Allen’s preacher corp did more than build churches. They organized communities. They bought free and enslaved peoples together. And because of their communication back to the mother church in Philadelphia, their presence extended a network of communication, both verbal and written. Written materials were especially important. Historian Nathan Jeremie-Brink argues that “the distribution of print materials…was essential in supporting African American resistance” (Jeremie-Brink, 4),
The transatlantic emancipation movement was greatly facilitated by these networks of both free and enslaved Black and Indigenous people, organized around benevolent and aligned leadership, and with privacy and stability of physical church buildings. And almost all AME churches became underground railroad stops - sort of like local offices of the movement.
Before Rev. Bassett had a church building, he was well known for standing on top of an ox-cart to preach on Sundays at the corner of Hanson and South in Easton, Md. But when it was time to move into a building, he had a vision that led to the correct site to build the church.
He was motivated by a verse in a hymn “To dwell I’m determined on that happy ground” and while singing, he pointed to a spot of land and the people felt that he was telling them to build the church on that spot, which they did.
That church still stands today - nearly 200 years old.
Morgan State Professor Dale Green has been instrumental in documenting the history of The Hill Community in Easton. Here he is describing the history of Bethel AME on a walking tour.
Mission Accomplished, Shadrack Bassett is Sent to Preach in Virginia
In the late 1820s, Rev. Bassett was sent to preach in Virginia.
White authorities quickly learned that Rev. Bassett was preaching a theology that focused on liberation. Rev. Bassett’s “emancipatory interpretation of the biblical narrative” got him barred from preaching by slavery supporting authorities (Callahan, 45).
In 1830, Rev. Bassett wrote The African Hymn.
We don’t have the original music for the The African Hymn, but we do know it had power.
The authors of Songs of Slavery and Emancipation envisioned what the song may have sounded like:
Here are the words:
We shall not always weep and groan
And wear these slavish chains of woe,
There’s a better day that’s coming
Come and go along with me.
Good Lord, O when shall slavery cease
And these poor souls enjoy their peace,
Good Lord, break the power.
Come and go along with me.
O! come, ye Africans, be wise
We’ll join the armies in the skies!
We’ll ruin Satan’s kingdom
Come and go along with me.
King Jesus now comes riding in,
He bids his army sound again.
They will ruin Satan’s kingdom
Come and go along with me.
I will pursue my journey’s end,
For Jesus Christ is still my friend,
O, may this friend go with me.
Come and go along with me—
Go sound the Jubilee.
Rev. Bassett's liberation theology, and The African Hymn, most likely inspired Nat Turner. (Callahan, 45)
Printed versions of The African Hymn were found in the confiscated papers owned by members of the Nat Turner uprising (Jeremie-Blink, 223).
The hymn itself was so powerful that it “struck terror in proslavery Virginians.” The song “advanced a theological argument for Black liberation and a rhetoric of apocalyptic violence that was common to [David Walkers] Appeal and the alleged preaching of Turner in advance of his uprising” (Jeremie-Blink, 224).
Black people were distributing the hymn clandestinely, singing the hymn and soaking in “God's promise of liberation” (Jeremie-Brink, 242). Even enslaved peoples miles away from the Nat Turner uprising were heard singing The African Hymn (Oates, 57).
Charity Bowery was an enslaved woman who lived through the Nat Turner uprising and described the post uprising environment in an 1839 interview with Lydia Maria Child. She told how Black people were not allowed to pray or sing hymns; that doing so would get them killed.
When asked by the interviewer to sing the songs that were prohibited, Bowery sang a song that had the line “There’s a better day a coming”, which is a key refrain from The African Hymn.
She said ,
“They wouldn’t let us sing that. They wouldn’t let us sing that.
They thought we was going to rise, because we sung, ‘better days are coming’” (Callahan, 60).
Finding Shadrack Bassett (or Maybe Shadrack Bassett Finds Us)
As part of our Bethel Burying Ground (BBG) work with Creative Philadelphia, we were researching people who may be buried at BBG. BTW - our display is up for just a few more days so go catch it at City Hall - 2nd Floor - outside the Mayor's office.
I was looking specifically for home owners so that we could visit their homes and Rev. Bassett came up as a homeowner in the 1838 Census.
He did own his home on South 4th Street, just south of Christian, which he purchased in 1825.
So it appears that his home base was in Philadelphia even during the time he was in Virginia.
He lived in the home from 1825 to 1861. I can’t find him in the city directory after 1862 and I haven’t been able to find a will or death certificate.
As I could not confirm that he was buried at BBG, I quietly tucked him away for further study at a later time.
But then…
1838 Board Member Michelle Flamer and I went out to see the Dorsey collection at Penn State last week. The Dorsey Collection is the sibling to the Leon Gardiner collection at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Both collections were originally part of the one collection of the American Negro Historical Society.
Dorsey had kept a file on Rev. Bassett and when I opened the folder, I gasped.
There he was.
I wasn’t expecting this beautiful of a portrait. It’s so rare for us to find really good pictures of our ancestors.
This was like Rev. Bassett just burst back into the present, with all the energy of Shadrach from the Bible (whom Rev. Bassett is named after) emerging from the fire.
In the Bible, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are three men who refuse to worship a false idol. This angers the King of Babylon who throws them in a fire. But they do not burn. God protected them in the fire. “They saw that the fire had not harmed their bodies, nor was a hair of their heads singed; their robes were not scorched, and there was no smell of fire on them” (Daniel 3).
Rev. Shadrack Bassett, a proud citizen of the 1838 Black Metropolis, has emerged from the fire and brings The African Hymn back to us. Maybe one of us can envision the lyrics mixed with a modern beat track, so that we can once again sing this song and feel its liberating power.
Sources:
Note: Bassett's first name is spelled in a myriad of ways in official records: Shedrick, Shadric, Shadrack etc. I've decided to use Shadrack as that is what is used in the Handy's AME history.
Callahan, Mathew, et al. Songs of Slavery and Emancipation. University Press of Mississippi, 2022.
Jérémie-Brink, Nathan. “Gratuitous Distribution”: Distributing African American Antislavery Texts, 1773-1850. 2018. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses. https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/luc_diss/article/3964/&path_info=JeremieBrink_luc_0112E_11978.pdf
Handy, James. Scraps of African Methodist Episcopal History. 1902.
https://docsouth.unc.edu/church/handy/handy.html
Oates, Stephen B. The Fires of Jubilee : Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion. 1st ed., Harper & Row, 1975.
Turner, Nathaniel. The Confessions of Nat Turner. 1831. https://archive.org/details/confessionsofnat00turn/page/10/mode/2up?view=theater
Wayman, Alexander Walker. “My Recollections of African M. E. Ministers.” African American Biographical Database, 1881. https://www.google.com/books/edition/My_Recollections_of_African_M_E_Minister/jVnQ2oDZVLIC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=bassett
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