Pgs. 60-63 in Anti-Slavery Melodies
Tune: “When I Can Read My Title Clear”

This was an early anthem of the Garrisonian abolitionist movement and an American adaptation of a British song.  When celebrating the end of slavery at a Boston meeting, Garrison cited another version of this song as a memory of the early struggle against slavery (The Liberator, February 10, 1865).  Israel Campbell’s slave narrative, An Autobiography.  Bond and Free (1861) quotes a version of this song that includes the line “God forever save the Queen.” (288) 

The traditional folk tune was published widely in nineteenth-century England as “The Seven Joys of Mary,” among other Oxford carols, and in the United States accompanying Isaac Watts’s (1674-1748) beloved hymn, “When I can read my title clear to mansions in the skies, I bid farewell to every fear and wipe my weeping eyes”.  Secular versions include the nursery ditty “Three Little Kittens”, together with parodies such as “The man who has plenty of good peanuts and giveth his neighbor none, shan’t have any of my peanuts when his peanuts are gone.”

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