“April 26th.—Bade good-by to Charleston at 9:45 A.M. this day, and proceeded by railway, in company with Mr. Ward, to visit Mr. Trescot’s Sea Island Plantation*….

At length, towards sundown, having taken to a track by a forest, part of which was burning, we came to a broad muddy river, with steep clay banks. A canoe was lying in a little harbour formed by a slope in the bank, and four stout negroes, who were seated round a burning log, engaged in smoking and eating oysters, rose as we approached, and helped the party into the "dug-out," or canoe, a narrow, long, and heavy boat, with wall sides and a flat floor. A row of one hour, the latter part of it in darkness, took us to the verge of Mr. Trescot's estate, Barnwell Island*; and the oarsmen, as they bent to their task, beguiled the way by singing in unison a real negro melody, which was as unlike the works of the Ethiopian Serenaders as anything in song could be unlike another. It was a barbaric sort of madrigal, in which one singer beginning was followed by the others in unison, repeating the refrain in chorus, and full of quaint expression and melancholy :

"Oh, your soul! oh, my soul! I'm going to the churchyard to lay
        this body down;
Oh, my soul! oh, your soul ! we're going to the churchyard to lay
        this nigger down."

And then some appeal to the difficulty of passing "the Jawdam," constituted the whole of the song, which continued with unabated energy through the whole of the little voyage. To me it was a strange scene. The stream, dark as Lethe, flowing between the silent, houseless, rugged banks, lighted up near the landing by the fire in the woods, which reddened the sky-the wild strain, and the unearthly adjurations to the singers' souls, as though they were palpable, put me in mind of the fancied voyage across the Styx.”
[My Diary, North and South, Vol.1, Russell, W.H., 1863]
William Howard Russell (1827 – 1907)

*Near modern day Beaufort, SC. In January, 1865 made subject to Gen. Sherman's famous Special Field Orders, No. 15 (series 1865) (forty acres and a mule) and overturned by the courts in 1867.