A skin stretched over the section of a hollow tree, and usually so constructed as to have two tones, made an instrument of extraordinary use in communication as well as in music.  By a system long anticipating the Morse code the Africans employed this “telegraph drum” in sending messages from village to village for long distances and with great speed.  Differences of speech were no bar, for the tom tom code was interlingual.  The official drummer could explain by the high and low alternations of his taps that a deed of violence just done was not a crime but a pourparler for the forming of a league.  Every week for three months in 1800 the tom toms doubtless carried the news throughout Ashantee land that King Quamina’s funeral had just been repeated and two hundred more slaves slain to do him honor.  In 1806 they perhaps reported the ending of Mungo Park’s travels by his death on the Niger at the hands of the Boussa people.  Again and again drummers hired as trading auxiliaries would send word along the coast and into the country that white men’s vessels lying at Lagos, Bonny, Loango or Benguela as the case might be were paying the best rates in calico, rum or Yankee notions for all slaves that might be brought.

In music the monotony of the tom tom’s tone spurred the drummers to elaborate variations in rhythm.  The stroke of the skilled performer could make it mourn a funeral dirge, voice the nuptial joy, throb the pageant’s march, and roar the ambush alarm.  Vocal music might be punctuated by tom toms and primitive wind or stringed instruments, or might swell in solo or chorus without accompaniment.  Singing, however, appears not so characteristic of Africans at home as of the negroes in America.  On the other hand garrulous conversation, interspersed with boisterous laughter, lasted well-nigh the livelong day.  Daily life, indeed, was far from dull, for small things were esteemed great, and every episode was entertaining.  It can hardly be maintained that savage life is idyllic.  Yet the question remains, and may long remain, whether the manner in which the negroes were brought into touch with civilization resulted in the greater blessing or the greater curse.  That manner was determined in part at least by the nature of the typical negroes themselves.  Impulsive and inconstant, sociable and amorous, voluble, dilatory, and negligent, but robust, amiable, obedient and contented, they have been the world’s premium slaves.  Prehistoric Pharaohs, mediaeval Pashas and the grandees of Elizabethan England esteemed them as such; and so great a connoisseur in household service as the Czar Alexander added to his palace corps in 1810 two free negroes, one a steward on an American merchant ship and the other a body-servant whom John Quincy Adams, the American minister, had brought from Massachusetts to St. Petersburg.[4]

[Footnote 4:  Writings of John Quincy Adams, Ford ed., III, 471, 472 (New York, 1914).]