... One flash from the heart-supplied intellect of Harriet Beecher Stowe could light a million camp fires in front of the embattled host of slavery, which not all the waters of the Mississippi, mingled as they are with blood, could extinguish. The present will be looked to by after coming generations, as the age of anti-slavery literature ... If the anti-slavery movement shall fail now, it will not be from outward opposition, but from inward decay. Its auxiliaries are everywhere. Scholars, authors, orators, poets, and statesmen give it their aid. The most brilliant of American poets volunteer in its service ... It would seem almost absurd to say it, considering the use that has been made of them, that we have allies in the Ethiopian songs; those songs that constitute our national music, and without which we have no national music. They are heart songs, and the finest feelings of human nature are expressed in them. "Lucy Neal," "Old Kentucky Home," and "Uncle Ned," can make the heart sad as well as merry, and can call forth a tear as well as a smile. They awaken the sympathies for the slave, in which antislavery principles take root, grow, and flourish ...
MY BONDAGE AND MY FREEDOM
FREDERICK DOUGLASS (1855)
pp 461-462
The Hidden Racial History of 'My Old Kentucky Home'
... the song comes across as a nostalgic ode to a more genteel time in the life of the South. But that's not the song that Foster wrote in 1854. Inspired by the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, he instead penned a lament by a slave in Kentucky who's been sold down the river to the Deep South by his master. The slave is both saying goodbye to his old Kentucky home and preparing to meet his imminent death from overwork and brutal mistreatment in the "land where the sugar canes grow" ... Foster told the story by using words that are offensive to modern ears. In 1986, The Kentucky General Assembly passed a law that removed the words "darky" and "darkies" from the song and replaced them with "people." The same law requires that the new lyrics be sung at official state functions. Ken Emerson, author of a biography on Foster, describes the effect on the scene at Churchill Downs: "I find it very ironic that all these men and women in their lovely hats and fancy gowns are singing a song with adulterated lyrics and they think they are singing a song that is a celebration of the Antebellum South, with ladies in crinoline and dashing cavaliers" ...
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