Scottish Slaves Sharing Music with African Slaves

The following is an excellent story from the book Fair Sunshine: Character Studies of the Scottish Coventanters by Jock Purves.
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White Scottish Slaves Share Gospel and Music to Slaves from Africa in America

John Pollock was most cruelly treated, but in the midst of it was steadfast and cheerful, and was banished as a slave to the American Plantations with the marks of his torture still upon him.

From whom did the early American slaves wrested from Africa hear the Gospel? No doubt from the Puritans and Quakers. But such were not fellow slaves. The former lived more in their own settlements, and the latter to their everlasting credit would not hold slaves. Whosoever got to a Quaker settlement was at once a free man. To the West Indies, Barbadoes, and South Carolina many Covenanters were sent as slaves. The accounts of their tragic hell-ships make painful reading. Hundreds of these godly men and women, shipped to be sold as slaves, perished in most terrible conditions through disease, and in fearful storms were drowned miserably battened under hatches. From those who reached the Plantations black slaves heard the Gospel, and thus white-skinned slave and black rejoiced in one common Lord.

In our young years we were rightly familiar with Longfellow’s poem, beginning: “Beside the ungathered rice he lay, His sickle in his hand,” but it is possible that it was not always an African who so lay. Now and again it may have been one who in his last visions saw not himself as if ‘once more a king he strode, ‘ but one who was back once again in fellowship among the hunted ‘of one heart and one soul.’

The Negro Spirituals always have a hearing. The words of worship there united with the moving melody are a living union. But such melodies, it seems, may be sought for in vain in the negroes’ own native land, Africa. Whence came they? Out of something wondrously new, the dark soul meeting with the Light of Life, Christ Jesus? Yes! And out of fellowship in His sufferings, and the fellowship of Christ Jesus in the slaves’ sufferings. Yes, no doubt of that. But there are seeming traces of time and melody in these lovely spirituals which are reminiscent of the music of the old metrical Psalm-sing. Who can say? At any rate, these banished men and women carried the message of redeeming love to their fellow-slaves of another race.

Fair Sunshine: Character studies of the Scottish Covenanters by Jock Purves, Banner of Truth Trust, 1968, p.48-49. (ISBN: 0851511368)