Tamar's Prayer

This poem was written by Ellen Murray, a co-founder of the Penn School on Saint Helena Island in South Carolina. The poem was originally published in the National Anti-Slavery Standard on August 2, 1862.

Fitfully her cabin fire
Flickered up across the gloom,
On the little children sleeping
In the corners of the room,
On the forms that circled slowly,
Swaying to the favorite tune,
To the measured beat of rhythm,
That the older woman croon.

When one said, amid the chorus,
Speaking hurriedly and low-
“Of the strange words of our masters,
Have you heard and do you know?
Down along Virginia’s rivers,
Lincoln’s men march side by side,
Giving all the black men freedom,
While the masters fly or hide.”

She went out beneath the live oaks,
With their hanging veil of grey,
Knelt upon the passion flowers,
Reasoned all her fears away,
And she said, “In far Virginia,
With its stranger fruits and flowers,
One God rules alone the country,‘
Tis the self-same God rules ours.

“We have prayed in Carolina,
They upon Virginia’s sod,
One has heard, and One shall answer -
Have we not the self-same God?
God of Northmen, as of Moses,
Send them to our help, we pray;
God of slaves as well as freemen,
Give us freedom in this day.

”Bless the Lord! Their friends are coming,
Marching on like thunder-storms,
With their firm but kind eyes looking
Pity on their trembling forms,
Past their quarters, through their cornfields,
With a black man for their guide,
While they thought “our Father’s angels
Surely with the freeman ride.”

Far away in many a rice field
Where the blue mist creeps at night,
In the tangled marsh where hunted
Fugitives have stayed their flight,
Pine and moan their wives and children,
Sleep in fear and wake in prayer,
But the God who freed these islands -
Yes, the self-same God is there.

Soon across the Southern city,
Guarded fort and cotton row,
Shall the steps of the deliverers,
Shall the Northern armies go;
For the self-same God is reigning
In the South as in the North,
And at last to save his people
He has sent his armies forth.
Ellen