Today I crossed the Suwannee River on my ride across Florida. Yes it is the Su - WA - nee River, not the Swanee River as Stephen Foster called it. Riding along you have plenty of time to think about stuff and so I spent a lot of time thinking about "The old folks at home". It's a song we all learned as kids, well before we learned about slavery. The lyrics had even been doctored to meet modern sensibility. But the song is indeed about how good life was "on the old plantation".
My first thought was just the depravity of someone writing a song that romanticizes slavery. It seems evil knowing what we now know about the brutality of life on the old plantation. But Stephen Foster was a northerner who had only visited the south one time. It is very possible that he was totally ignorant of the cruelties of slavery and the suffering of the people. Indeed the slave owners, who of course controlled the press, probably liked to paint a picture of peace, harmony, and happy slaves living a good life. I don't know when the evils of slavery became common knowledge among northerners.
But let's take the song at face value. Imagine you grew up a slave. Let's assume you were lucky and your family didn't get separated and sold off. So you had some semblance of family life. You had people who loved you. Then one day you either escaped or were freed and made your way up north. Say Chicago. I imagine the city must have been absolutely terrifying for someone with no education coming from the old plantation. As a slave you knew the rules. You knew how to stay alive. Now you're alone on the streets in a cold, alien, and completely hostile environment.
But that's really as far as I can take the sentiment. Yes, your heart may be weary, but you know those old folks at home aren't sitting in a rocking chair sipping mint julep on the veranda. They're out in the cotton fields working until the day they die. Life may be hard on your own, but no one's going back.
Stephen Foster died in 1864, a year after the Emaciation Proclamation, and a year before the end of the Civil War. So I guess he was a man of his time. He wrote some beautiful songs, but what the world really needed was a Woody Guthrie singing about the evils and brutality of slavery, not romanticizing about some fantasy life on the old plantation.