In amusements and in religion the activities of the whites and blacks were both mingled and separate.  Fox hunts when occurring by day were as a rule diversions only for the planters and their sons and guests, but when they occurred by moonlight the chase was joined by the negroes on foot with halloos which rivalled the music of the hounds.  By night also the blacks, with the whites occasionally joining in, sought the canny ’possum and the embattled ’coon; in spare times by day they hied their curs after the fleeing Brer Rabbit, or built and baited seductive traps for turkeys and quail; and fishing was available both by day and by night.  At the horse races of the whites the jockeys and many of the spectators were negroes; while from the cock fights and even the “crap” games of the blacks, white men and boys were not always absent.

Festivities were somewhat more separate than sports, though by no means wholly so.  In the gayeties of Christmas the members of each race were spectators of the dances and diversions of the other.  Likewise marriage merriment in the great house would have its echo in the quarters; and sometimes marriages among the slaves were grouped so as to give occasion for a general frolic.  Thus Daniel R. Tucker in 1858 sent a general invitation over the countryside in central Georgia to a sextuple wedding among his slaves, with dinner and dancing to follow.[2] On the whole, the fiddle, the banjo and the bones were not seldom in requisition.

[Footnote 2:  Federal Union (Milledgeville, Ga.), April 20, 1858.]

It was a matter of discomfort that in the evangelical churches dancing and religion were held to be incompatible.  At one time on Thomas Dabney’s plantation in Mississippi, for instance, the whole negro force fell captive in a Baptist “revival” and forswore the double shuffle.  “I done buss’ my fiddle an’ my banjo, and done fling ’em away,” the most music-loving fellow on the place said to the preacher when asked for his religious experiences.[3] Such a condition might be tolerable so long as it was voluntary; but the planters were likely to take precautions against its becoming coercive.  James H. Hammond, for instance, penciled a memorandum in his plantation manual:  “Church members are privileged to dance on all holyday occasions; and the class-leader or deacon who may report them shall be reprimanded or punished at the discretion of the master."[4] The logic with which sin and sanctity were often reconciled is illustrated in Irwin Russell’s remarkably faithful “Christmas in the Quarters.”  “Brudder Brown” has advanced upon the crowded floor to “beg a blessin’ on dis dance:” 

[Footnote 3:  S.D.  Smedes. Memorials of a Southern Planter, pp. 161, 162.]

[Footnote 4:  MS. among the Hammond papers in the Library of Congress.]

  O Mashr! let dis gath’rin’ fin’ a blessin’ in yo’ sight! 
  Don’t jedge us hard fur what we does—­you knows it’s Chrismus night;
  An’ all de balunce ob de yeah we does as right’s we kin. 
  Ef dancin’s wrong, O Mashr! let de time excuse de sin!