Caldwell County MO Archives History .....CORN SONGS, SLAVE PATROLS, IN LIVINGSTON COUNTY  
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File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by:
Karen Walker khw4@yahoo.com September 4, 2008, 1:06 pm

CORN SONGS, SLAVE PATROLS, IN LIVINGSTON COUNTY 
                     AND SOME MEMORIES OF SLAVE DAYS
	Narrator:  Mrs. Helen Kirtley
 
     Mrs. Kirtley (nee Helen Leeper of Breckenridge) married into the Kirtley 
family of Livingston county which family had been slave owners.  This 
interview consists of facts told her by her mother-in-law, as to customs of 
slavery in that county.
     To watch slaves and prevent plotting to escape, they had a system of 
neighborhood patrols or pattarolls, as some of the ignorant called them, who 
under a leader, made the rounds of the plantations to watch the general 
conduct of the slaves.  No slave was allowed off his plantation after nine 
o'clock without a written pass from his owner.  This system began early in the 
40s, soon after the plantations began to grow up there.  Asa T. Kirtley was 
the first captain of the patrols, being the husband of the Mrs. Kirtley who 
was the original narrator.
     There was also more or less happiness among the slaves, and masters tried 
to make them contented by giving them merry making which suited their 
dispositions.  Old Mrs. Kirtley told of a pretty custom, existing among them, 
which sounds strangely like the folklore customs of Europe.  When the corn had 
been husked and was in an immense pile, the slaves picked up the master raised 
him to their shoulders and carried him around the corn, singing songs which 
were too old for them to know the origin of them.  Such songs were ordinarily 
called corn songs, and every darkey in that section knew them, hearing them 
from their babyhood.  They were what we today might call nonsense rhymes, but 
they helped the work.
     Interview  1932.


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