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‘Meet, O lord’: Hilton head in 1861—the time and place of this negro song's creation This photograph appears here by a curious coincidence. With the presentation of the ‘spiritual’ that commemorates an event of the war connected with the Confederate General Drayton, there has come to light a photograph of his home on Hilton Head in 1861. Through these gates, watched by loving eyes, he rode on the ‘milk-white horse,’ the morning of the engagement at Bay Point. Mr. W. F. Allen, who collected many slave-songs, was told that, ‘When de gun shoot at Bay Pint,’ General Drayton left a Negro boy holding his white war horse. He never returned to claim his steed and in some way the incident was commemorated in this ‘spiritual,’ which is still sung on the plantations of Hilton Head Island. Observe the Negro ‘mammies’ on the porch and at the gate, also the luxuriance of foliage framing the Southern house in a bower of greenery. Members of the Third New Hampshire regiment face the reader; for the house is now a rendezvous of Federal troops.

 

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