Go Down Moses

Before you listen: the song

From Egypt to the Americas, and today

An ancient institution. Slavery existed in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and India, among the Greeks and Romans, the Celts, Germans and Vikings, in the Islamic world, in Africa and in the Americas before Columbus. The Romans enslaved more people than probably any other ancient power: ancient writers claimed that Julius Caesar alone enslaved about a million people in Gaul, and in the Roman Empire of Philo’s time perhaps one person in ten was a slave, and many more in Italy itself; most were captured in war, kidnapped by pirates, or born to slave mothers. In Egypt the picture was different: there were slaves, mostly war captives and debtors, but the great building works were done mainly by paid and fed workers and by corvée, compulsory labour owed to the king. The royal tomb-builders of Deir el-Medina were paid in grain, and around 1157 BCE, when their rations were late, they went on strike. From the 7th century to the 19th, millions of Africans were taken across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean, and from the 16th to the 19th centuries North African corsairs enslaved hundreds of thousands of Europeans, raiding coasts as far away as Spain, Ireland and Iceland.

The Atlantic trade. From the 1500s to the 1800s, an estimated 12.5 million Africans were forced onto ships bound for the Americas, and roughly 1.8 million died during the crossing. Most were taken to Brazil and the Caribbean; about 400,000 were taken to North America. By 1860 there were nearly four million enslaved people in the United States. Abolition came slowly, driven by enslaved people’s own resistance and by campaigners such as Quakers, evangelical Christians like William Wilberforce, and former slaves like Frederick Douglass: Britain banned the trade in 1807 and slavery in its colonies in 1833; the United States ended slavery in 1865 with the Thirteenth Amendment; Spain abolished it in Puerto Rico in 1873 and in Cuba in 1886; Brazil was the last country in the Americas, in 1888. Mauritania became the last country to abolish it officially, in 1981. Yet the International Labour Organization estimates that around 50 million people today live in forced labour or forced marriage.

The song. “Go Down Moses” is an African American spiritual, created by enslaved people and first printed in 1861; it was made famous by the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the 1870s. It tells the story of Exodus: God tells Moses to go to Pharaoh and say, “Let my people go.” For the enslaved, Egypt was the American South, and freedom was the promised land. The escaped slave and liberator Harriet Tubman, who led dozens of people to freedom, was called “Moses”, and the song is said to have been used as a signal. Louis Armstrong (1901–1971), the grandson of enslaved people, recorded it in 1958 with a choir. The words, traditional and in the public domain, are printed below.

Story and history. The Exodus is a sacred story for Jews and Christians. Historians and archaeologists, however, have found no evidence of a large Hebrew slave population in Egypt or of a mass escape in the second millennium BCE: Egyptian records of the period, which are rich, do not mention it, and there is no sign of the economic upheaval that the loss of so many workers would have caused. Some scholars link the story to distant memories of the Hyksos, Semitic-speaking rulers who governed much of northern Egypt until they were expelled around 1550 BCE, or to a much smaller group; many think that early Israel emerged mainly within Canaan itself. Research on documents such as the Elephantine papyri, written by a Judean community in Egypt in the 5th century BCE, by scholars including Gad Barnea and Reinhard Kratz, suggests that the worship of Yahweh was still varied, and not yet strictly monotheistic, in the Persian period, when much of the Bible was being edited. Whatever happened, the story itself is historical in another way: it has given hope to enslaved and oppressed people for thousands of years.

Every human being is made to be free.

Words in the poem

Talk and write

Discussion and writing

Timeline. In groups, make a timeline of abolition around the world, from the Essenes to Mauritania. Use the passive and approximation.

Discuss. 1. Why do you think slavery existed in almost every ancient society, including in the laws of the Bible? 2. Should we judge people of the past by today’s standards? Give arguments on both sides. 3. Why did enslaved people in America find hope in the story of Moses? 4. What can be done about slavery today?

Write (180–220 words). “Let my people go.” Write about how the story of Exodus has inspired people who were not free, using let / make, the passive with estimates and careful approximation.