Get on Board, Little Children

Lyrics

The lyrics below are preserved exactly as documented in nineteenth-century primary sources. Dialect, spelling, and phrasing reflect the living tradition of the communities who created and sang these songs. Standardizing the language would erase the historical record. See our editorial standards for more.

Historical Context

"Get on Board, Little Children" — sometimes titled "The Gospel Train" or "The Gospel Train's A-Comin'" — was first published in 1872 among the songs of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the pioneering ensemble of formerly enslaved and free Black students who introduced the spiritual tradition to concert audiences in the United States and Europe after the Civil War. J.B.T. Marsh included it in his 1880 volume The Story of the Jubilee Singers; With Their Songs, one of the earliest and most important documentary sources for the spiritual repertoire as it was actually performed by the singers who carried it out of slavery.

The song's authorship is genuinely contested in a way that complicates any simple narrative of its origin. Some historical accounts credit a white Baptist minister from New Hampshire, John Chamberlain, with singing a version of the song during Sunday services for the 12th New Hampshire Regiment on April 26, 1863, as recorded by the regiment's historian, Captain Asa W. Bartlett. Scholars of the broader "Gospel train" song family have also traced earlier, related railroad-and-salvation songs back to transatlantic revivalist and even Mormon emigration hymnody of the 1850s, including "Be in Time" (1853) and "The Warning" (1857), both associated with camp-meeting and revival traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. What reached Fisk and Hampton by the 1870s, and what generations of Black congregations sang before and after, was very likely a song shaped and reshaped through this tangled, cross-cultural revival tradition — consistent with how spirituals generally moved through call-and-response performance, camp meetings, and oral transmission long before anyone wrote them down.

Regardless of its precise point of origin, the song was thoroughly absorbed into the Black spiritual tradition well before Emancipation and became one of the most widely sung and widely recognized entries in that repertoire, appearing across Fisk, Hampton, and later folk-song collections. Its train imagery — arriving, rumbling, gathering all aboard regardless of class — proved durable enough to be reworked again nearly a century later, when Civil Rights Movement organizers in the 1950s and 1960s sang new verses to the same tune, casting the "gospel train" as the movement itself.

Cultural Significance

On its surface, "Get on Board, Little Children" is a straightforward song of invitation: the gospel train is coming, and everyone — rich or poor — has a seat. That plain religious meaning, salvation offered freely to all, was itself a radical claim for people denied full personhood under slave law, and it needs no hidden layer to carry weight.

But the song is also one of the most frequently cited examples in popular retellings of "coded" spirituals — songs said to have carried literal instructions for escape along the Underground Railroad, with the "gospel train" standing in for the escape network itself, "getting on board" for joining a party of fugitives, and the train's arrival signaling that an escape attempt was imminent. Popular historical accounts describe enslaved singers using this and related railroad imagery to communicate escape plans in front of slaveholders who heard only pious sentiment.

The train metaphor certainly resonated with the language of the real Underground Railroad, which by the 1840s and 1850s had adopted railroad terminology — "conductors," "stations," "passengers" — for its own network of safehouses and guides. It is entirely plausible, and consistent with what scholars like John Lovell Jr. have written about the spirituals' use of contemporary technology and imagery, that singers heard an unmistakable double meaning in a song about a train "comin' round the curve" to carry the faithful out of bondage toward a promised land.

Whether that double meaning ever functioned as an operational code — passing specific, actionable instructions about a real escape in progress — is a separate and much harder question, discussed below.

Scholarly Notes

The claim that "Get on Board, Little Children" and songs like it functioned as literal operational code for the Underground Railroad is widespread in popular history but treated with real caution by historians of slavery and the spiritual tradition. Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative, one of the most detailed firsthand accounts of enslaved life and song from the period, describes spirituals as outlets for sorrow and inarticulate longing for freedom — not as instruments carrying specific navigational instructions. Likewise, the surviving testimony of Underground Railroad conductors and organizers such as Levi Coffin and William Still, who left extensive records of the network's actual operation, does not describe songs being used to transmit escape directives. Because the coding thesis rests almost entirely on oral tradition and later retellings rather than contemporaneous documentation, scholars are divided on how literally to take it: the absence of proof is not proof of absence, but it does mean the strongest versions of the "map song" claim — that particular verses encoded specific routes or landmarks — remain unverified and, by many historians' assessment, more likely a later folkloric elaboration than a widely practiced wartime code.

What is far better documented is the song's function as a genuine expression of hope within the religious life of enslaved and freed communities, and its documented life in the written record beginning with the Fisk Jubilee Singers' 1872 repertoire and Marsh's 1880 collection. John Lovell Jr., in Black Song: The Forge and the Flame (1972), situated "Get on Board" and other train spirituals within a broader pattern: enslaved singers absorbing a genuinely new nineteenth-century technology — the railroad, which did not reach most of the plantation South until the 1830s and 1840s — into a theology of deliverance, so that the arriving gospel train became at once a figure for death, salvation, and the very real hope of a journey north. That layered meaning, plausible and even probable in individual moments of use, is a different claim than a fixed, transmissible code — and the site's approach here follows the more cautious scholarly reading: the song certainly could carry, and likely did carry, a double meaning of literal and spiritual escape for those who sang it, without asserting a specific, verifiable system of coded instruction behind every verse.