Go Down, Moses

“Go Down, Moses” features an urgent message constructed by enslaved people determined to affirm hope by using the religious writings of the very people who had enslaved them. Originating in the 1830s, “Go Down, Moses” fused Christian theology and current events to produce a spiritual that links the suffering of the biblical Israelites to that of enslaved people in the 19th-century US. The song reassures its hearers that God, who has allowed slavery to persist, is a present and powerful agency, and his intervention will be felt soon.

While the lyric closes celebrating the “beautiful morning” (Line 25) when the enslaved will break free of the chains, this message of hope and expectation is unusual. Spirituals often feature comforting visions of joy in the glorious afterlife, when listeners will finally escape slavery, lay their burdens down, and dance joyously into heaven. However, “Go Down, Moses” is far more practical. Its closing two stanzas reflect the reality of their own time, when a war between pro- and anti-slavery states seemed inevitable. The vision that closes the poem offers the radical (and dangerous) certainty that liberty is within reach—that enslaved people need not wait until death nor must they find virtue in enduring the conditions of enslavement. Instead, the lyric reassures, deliverance is near in this world. 

To make such an audacious offer, the lyric relies on a tripartite structure that invokes the wrath and the will of an outraged God—an agency certainly powerful enough to end the abomination of slavery. In this, the lyric follows the structure of the Book of Exodus itself: God speaks to begin the process of liberation (Stanzas 1 and 2); God reveals his righteous power (Stanzas 3 through 5); and God promises a complete moral victory (Stanza 6 and the two-line peroration). By celebrating the omnipotence of a God who will not abandon his people, “Go Down, Moses” unites a community of the oppressed through the expectation of their deliverance. They are not as alone as they feel; they are not as vulnerable as they think. 

The song opens with a dramatic theophany, or a visible manifestation of the divine. In Stanzas 1 and 2, the God who has been willing to allow the enslaved to suffer for centuries, appears and present a new paradigm. The condition of the enslaved people is only hinted at—“oppressed so hard they could not stand” (Line 2)—because their enslavement, as symbolized by the character of the stubborn and arrogant Pharaoh, is not the premise of the lyric. Rather, the focus is on their fast-approaching liberation. Now is not the time to look back, to fester in history: The past is about to be cast off.

In Stanzas 3 through 5, God backs up his words with actions. In recounting the story of the Israelites’ flight from Egypt to the promised land through the desert, the lyric enforces the power of God, who is more powerful than the Pharaoh and his armies, and who can perform miraculous rescues like parting the Red Sea: “At the command of God, [the sea] did divide” (Line 16). If the Pharaoh represents the sociopolitical structure of the American South that created and sustained the enslavement of a kidnapped people, these stanzas assure those living in a nation on the brink of a civil war that God will prevail: Soon, the lyric promises, the enslaved people will sing “a song of triumph” (Line 18).

In the closing stanzas, God does what He is shown to do throughout the Old Testament of the Bible: God promises and is implicitly believed. “We need not always weep and moan” (Line 23), the speaker intones, including himself in the community of enslaved people via the first-person plural pronoun “we.” The song’s closing two-lines make immediate God’s promise: As soon as morning itself, God will shatter the darkness of history and introduce the glory of eternity.