I do sing a couple of Stephen Foster song.
But I opened the thread expecting a lyric more critical than praising. Foster wasn't particularly political; he was a commercial songwriter at a time when minstrel shows and blackface were popular , but Foster appears to me to have been an apologist for slavery, depicting the "darkies" as living in contentment.

I'm surprised to read that in his own time:
https://sites.pitt.edu/~amerimus/Fosterbiography.htm

Regardless of Foster’s personal opinions, many abolitionists favorably viewed his songs and performed them to help persuade more people to support the abolition of enslavement. Such plantation songs as “Old Folks at Home,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” and “Massa’s in de Cold Ground” were frequently included in theatrical productions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Moreover, the members of the Hutchinson family, renowned performers and abolitionists, included “Nelly Bly,” “Gentle Annie,” and “Old Folks at Home” in their activist concerts. Even Frederick Douglass celebrated plantation songs. In an 1855 address to the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, New York, he stated,

    It would seem almost absurd to say it, considering the use that has been made of them, that we have allies in the Ethiopian songs; those songs that constitute our national music, and without which we have no national music. They are heart songs, and the finest feelings of human nature are expressed in them. “Lucy Neal,” “Old Kentucky Home,” and “Uncle Ned,” can make the heart sad as well as merry, and can call forth a tear as well as a smile. They awaken the sympathies for the slave, in which anti-slavery principles take root, grow and flourish. (p. 329)
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sources:
The Life and Music of Stephen Collins Foster
By Christopher Lynch (online, https://sites.pitt.edu/~amerimus/Fosterbiography.htm)

Douglass, Frederick. “The Anti-Slavery Movement, Lecture Delivered before the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, March 19, 1855.” In Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings. Philip S. Foner, ed. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2000.