Freedom Song

Prior to reading this book, why did I know nothing, basically, about the Hutchinson family? And, dear reader, why (in all likelihood) don’t you? I’m a historian of social movements, including the anti-slavery movement; I study and love American musical history; and just about anything that involves the history of religion, race, and reform or civil rights will draw my attention. The Hutchinsons provide the perfect vehicle to weave together all those stories. Somehow, though, their history had escaped my attention.

Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reform

Scott Gac (Author)

Yale University Press

328 pages

$55.30

Let us be thankful, then, that it caught Scott Gac’s eye. A double bassist as well as a historian (so the book jacket tells us), Gac sheds fresh light on the well-worn topics of the culture and politics of the anti-slavery movement—and utopian reform sentiment more generally—in antebellum America. He details the history of an antebellum northern Baptist family who “sang for freedom” in the anti-slavery movement of the 1840s, gaining some wealth and fame in the process. Like all good modern musical groups, they stirred listeners, counted their box-office take, slept around, quarreled, broke up, ventured on some ill-advised solo engagements (at one of which Lincoln slumbered), and then staged too many nostalgic reunion tours. Whatever their foibles and internal conflicts—of which there were certainly many—they played their modest part in emotionally invigorating the most important social reform movement of American history; and beyond that, they were about as close to being true racial egalitarians as it was possible to be in the antebellum era. They refused to play segregated halls, and their message was radical enough that they were never able to sing south of Baltimore. (Even Philadelphia proved dicey.)

I learned something on nearly every page of this book, no small praise given the familiarity of the larger topics Gac explores as he follows the saga of the large and extended Hutchinson family. The older brothers stayed at home on the New Hampshire farm, but they envied the success of Asa, John, and little sister Abby (known as “Angel”), the musical stars who got to tour northern cities and hang with the celebrities of abolitionism. The Hutchinson singers played on their image as wholesome farmers to further their professional opportunities and hype their singing engagements. Gac also tells us about the market revolution in antebellum New Hampshire, whose motto—”The Old Granite State”—provided inspiration for one of the Hutchinsons’ signature tunes. We learn much, moreover, about what it was like to be a professional musician in antebellum America. And we see how the Hutchinsons both coopted and resisted the rising racist culture of minstrelsy—to the extent that one minstrel group worked up a Hutchinson family parody in their act. Minstrelsy and anti-slavery (and anti-racist) musical acts battled in antebellum culture. I would have assumed minstrelsy won hands down, but the contest seems to have been closer than that, thanks in large part to the Hutchinsons. (That being said, I think Gac ultimately understates the vast and insidious influence of minstrelsy in antebellum northern cities. On the minstrel stage, even Uncle Tom, symbol of Christ-like suffering in the best-selling novel, was transformed into a happy darky).

The Hutchinsons took tunes from many traditions, religious and secular. Even the most seemingly apolitical of antebellum religious movements—the Millerites, soon to be gathering to await the return of Jesus—inadvertently contributed a tune (“The Old Church Yard”) that the Hutchinsons converted to antislavery purposes, to enormously popular effect. Whatever their Baptist theology, the Hutchinsons were not much interested in faith without works. They were obsessed with cleansing the body, personal and political: “Enslavement by calomel, rum, southerners, and every other abusive element demanded an immediate purge.” The Hutchinsons sang of resistance to all forms of slavery: “‘Let us, the Hutchinsons family, tune our voices for the cause of freedom, for the overthrow of slavery, for the promotion of Teetotalism and every moral and Christian act,'” Asa Hutchinson said. The last remaining singing Hutchinson even contributed an anti-cigarette tune in the early 20th century, decrying the “little white slaver.” Purification was a constant struggle.

What, ultimately, was the effect of the Hutchinsons? Gac expresses his argument with admirable clarity:

The magnitude of the Hutchinson Family Singers’ success during the 1840s suggests three generalizations: 1) that antislavery, though always a highly contentious issue, was nonetheless growing more popular in the North; 2) that the Hutchinsons’ medium, the parlor song, and the aesthetic of their music broke through ideology and political barriers; but at the same time, 3) that their performance (and its reception) revealed the limits of reform in song.

Those limitations already were becoming evident in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with its genuine (albeit highly sentimentalized) anti-slavery message being watered down by a colonizationist ending, leading Asa Hutchinson to surmise that “the famous antislavery statement ‘Am I not a man and brother?’ had changed—’Am I not a man and Uncle?'” Nonetheless, Asa celebrated the book in his melody “Little Topsy’s Song,” which even Frederick Douglass commended. On occasion the Hutchinsons failed to heed the distinction between “pure” and “political” anti-slavery, at one point even singing at a meeting to drum up support for Kentucky compromiser Henry Clay (drawing a harsh rebuke from Garrison and Douglass), but they soon repented from this particular instance of backsliding.

What did the Hutchinsons’ music sound like? Even after reading this book, I’m not entirely sure. That could be a failing of the book; or it could be simply the difficulty of writing about music history in an era before recording. Gac writes that the family “created a new kind of ‘sacred music,'” an “antiminstrelsy that hushed critics who feared the immorality of entertainment, challenged the European bias of their listeners, and attracted throngs of fans with uplifting reform messages built around familiar tunes.” They took the “well-liked melodies of blackface minstrelsy and of church hymns,” added their own lyrics, and “harmonized chorus refrains, the standard in today’s popular music but quite new to antebellum America.” One longs for a bit more of the context of the music, especially church music, from the era, and more descriptive terms for the sound that emerged from all this. That’s a tall order for an author who already has accomplished much, but it’s frustrating that at the end of the work, I can’t hear in my mind the music of the family. Perhaps too that is because the music of the Hutchinsons gradually gave way to the sentimentalism of Stephen Foster, making it easier to imagine the sound of a kinder and gentler minstrelsy and harder to hear lyrics such as these, from the Hutchinson classic “Get Off the Track”:

Let the Ministers and Churches Leave Behind sectarian lurches; Jump on board the Car of Freedom Ere it be too late to need them. Sound the Alarm! Sound the Alarm! >Sound the Alarm! Pulpit’s thunder! Ere too late, you see your blunder.

Or the following verse from “The Old Granite State,” which contemporaries of the Hutchinsons loved but which comes across to us like agitprop:

Yes we’re friends of emancipation And we’ll sing the proclamation, ‘Til it echoes through our nation from the Old Granite State That the Tribe of Jesse That the Tribe of Jesse That the Tribe of Jesse are the friends of Equal Rights.

It’s not hard to imagine the music’s power, though. As a religious newspaper noted of their early singing at antislavery conventions in 1843, “The music of the Hutchinsons carries all before it … . Speechifying, even of the better sort, did less to interest, purify and subdue minds, than this irresistible anti-slavery music,” garnering interest in the movement as well as followers for the Liberty and, later, Free Soil political parties. Here, one immediately leaps to the freedom songs of the civil rights era, with the SNCC Freedom Singers serving as the analogue to the Hutchinsons. The way powerful music can embolden a social movement comes across clearly, from the 1840s to the 1960s.

But even the most sublime music harnessed to the most righteous purposes cannot bring about the millennium. The Hutchinsons learned the lesson of another musical sensation from a much later era: you can’t always get what you want. Like many other utopian reformers, the Hutchinsons had condemned slavery as the root of all evils, and considered its extirpation a means to the millennium. Eventually, and to their sorrow, Gac writes, they saw that the end of slavery had “removed a foundational evil from American society without bringing about the apocalyptic change that the Hutchinsons and many of their antislavery friends had once predicted.” The end of slavery did not bring justice for African Americans, and the antislavery cohort “downsized their vision of emancipation,” still recognizing it as “part of a national story of progress, but no longer a story of eternal salvation.”

By the 1890s, when “talk of the millennium had suddenly become quaint,” the dreams that inspired antebellum utopian reform had run out of steam, Gac argues. In their place came latter-day forms of utopianism (left unmentioned by Gac) with more of an eye toward political economy (as seen in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward as well as in the emerging social gospel of Washington Gladden). In their place, too, and more emphasized in this book, arose the kind of skeptical pragmatism outlined in George Frederickson’s Inner Civil War and, more recently, memorably described in Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club. As Gac sees it, the distance from William Lloyd Garrison to Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ambrose Bierce was more than the few decades that separated their major works. Like many of their abolitionist generation, the Hutchinsons lived from the first era to the second, moving from the vanguard in the 1840s to the nostalgically quaint (at least in the eyes of some northeastern intellectuals) by the time of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. But the music of idealism, including social gospel hymns, carried forward some of the tradition of harmonizing utopia. And the tradition of singers and groups mixing social reform with professional opportunity survived the Hutchinsons. Listen to the Staples Singers, or to Mavis Staples’ recent CD My Own Eyes, and you’ll hear their echoes.

Paul Harvey is professor of history at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. He is the author most recently of Freedom’s Coming: How Religious Culture Shaped the South from the Civil War Through the Civil Rights Era (Univ. of North Carolina Press). He runs the blog Religion in American History at http://usreligion.blogspot.com.