The Anti-slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Anti-slavery MeetingsBrown, William Wells
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The Anti-slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Anti-slavery Meetings
Brown, William Wells
Antislavery movements -- Songs and music; Slavery -- United States -- Poetry; Songs, English -- United States -- Texts
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THE
ANTI-SLAVERY HARP:
COLLECTION OF SONGS
FOR
ANTI-SLAVERY MEETINGS.
COMPILED BY
WILLIAM W. BROWN.
THIRD EDITION.
BOSTON:
PUBLISHED BY BELA MARSH,
No. 25 Cornhill.
1851.
Press of Bazin & Chandler,
No. 37 Cornhill.
SONGS.
[Illustration]
FREEDOM’S BANNER.
AIR--Freedom’s Banner.
My country, shall thy honored name,
Be as a by-word through the world?
Rouse! for as if to blast thy fame,
This keen reproach is at thee hurled;
The banner that above the waves,
Is floating over three millions slaves.
That flag, my country, I had thought,
From noble sires was given to thee;
By the best blood of patriots bought,
To wave alone above the Free!
Yet now, while to the breeze it waves,
It floats above three millions slaves.
The mighty dead that flag unrolled,
They bathed it in the heaven’s own blue;
They sprinkled stars upon each fold,
And gave it as a trust to you;
And now that glorious banner waves
In shame above three millions slaves.
O, by the virtues of our sires,
And by the soil on which they trod,
And by the trust their name inspires,
And by the hope we have in God,
Arouse, my country, and agree
To set thy captive children free.
Arouse! and let each hill and glen
With prayer to the high heavens ring out,
Till all our land with freeborn men,
May join in one triumphant shout,
That freedom’s banner does not wave
Its folds above a single slave.
O, PITY THE SLAVE MOTHER!
AIR--Araby’s Daughter.
I pity the slave mother, careworn and weary,
Who sighs as she presses her babe to her breast;
I lament her sad fate, all so hopeless and dreary,
I lament for her woes, and her wrongs unredressed.
O who can imagine her heart’s deep emotion,
As she thinks of her children about to be sold;
You may picture the bounds of the rock-girdled ocean,
But the grief of that mother can never be known.
The mildew of slavery has blighted each blossom,
That ever has bloomed in her pathway below;
It has froze every fountain that gushed in her bosom,
And chilled her heart’s verdure with pitiless woe;
Her parents, her kindred, all crushed by oppression;
Her husband still doomed in its desert to stay;
No arm to protect from the tyrant’s aggression--
She must weep as she treads on her desolate way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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