The Song Beneath the Live Oaks

On New Year's Day, 1863, thousands of formerly enslaved men, women, and children gathered at Camp Saxton near Beaufort, South Carolina. Ancient live oaks trailed Spanish moss over the crowd like a cathedral ceiling. Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson mounted a rough platform and read the Emancipation Proclamation aloud — the decree that declared them free.

As the last words settled, an old man's voice rose from the crowd, trembling but clear: "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing." A second voice joined, then a third, then hundreds. Higginson later wrote that he had never heard anything so electrifying — that no white voice dared enter in, because this song belonged to those who had finally earned the right to claim it. Charlotte Forten, a young Black teacher from Philadelphia, recorded in her diary that the moment was "too beautiful, too wonderful" for words.

Isaiah saw something like this centuries earlier — a messenger's feet cresting the mountains, carrying news that the exile was over, that the Almighty had redeemed His people. And what did the watchmen do? They lifted their voices and sang. What did the waste places of Jerusalem do? They broke into joy. Because when true liberation arrives — not as a rumor but as a proclamation read aloud over your life — the only response is a song that rises from somewhere deeper than the throat. It rises from the place that has been waiting.