Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania, 1877.




Uncle Jim's Baptist Revival Hymn.

By Sidney and Clifford Lanier.

[Not long ago a certain Georgia cotton-planter, driven to desperation
by awaking each morning to find that the grass had
quite outgrown the cotton overnight, and was likely to choke it,
in defiance of his lazy freedmen's hoes and ploughs,
set the whole State in a laugh by exclaiming to a group of fellow-sufferers:
"It's all stuff about Cincinnatus leaving the plough to go into politics
FOR PATRIOTISM; he was just a-runnin' from grass!"

This state of things -- when the delicate young rootlets of the cotton
are struggling against the hardier multitudes of the grass-suckers --
is universally described in plantation parlance by the phrase "in the grass";
and Uncle Jim appears to have found in it so much similarity
to the condition of his own ("Baptis'") church, overrun, as it was,
by the cares of this world, that he has embodied it in the refrain
of a revival hymn such as the colored improvisator of the South
not infrequently constructs from his daily surroundings.
He has drawn all the ideas of his stanzas from the early morning phenomena of
those critical weeks when the loud plantation-horn is blown before daylight,
in order to rouse all hands for a long day's fight against the common enemy
of cotton-planting mankind.