“Like Stephen Foster, Benjamin R. Hanby was a white, northern composer who wrote ‘plantation songs’ that evoked feelings and sentiments that he imagined were experienced by enslaved people working in southern plantation labor camps. Born in 1833 in Rushville, Ohio, he graduated from Otterbein College in Westerville in 1858 and went on to work as a minister at the United Brethren Church in New Paris, Ohio (1861–63). Today Hanby is mostly remembered as the composer of the 1865 Christmas song ‘Santa Claus, or Up on the Housetop.’ He died in Chicago in 1867. 

‘Darling Nelly Gray’ was written in 1856 as a minstrel song to be performed in the theater by professionals wearing blackface and costumes that mock and demean African Americans. Like many minstrel songs, ‘Darling Nelly Gray’ was published in sheet-music form so that it could also be sung by amateurs in the parlor. Early minstrel songs (see ‘Jump Jim Crow’) were typically simplistic and mocked the speech of African Americans by featuring offensive dialect. But in the 1850s, as minstrel songs were increasingly designed for parlor performance, they took on a more refined character and expressed strong sentiments, more in line with the conventions of traditional parlor songs (see ‘The Blue Juniata‘ and ‘Hard Times Come Again No More‘).

Unlike Foster, whose family members were Democrats opposed to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, Hanby came from a family of ardent abolitionists. In addition, Hanby’s family and friends helped escaped slaves reach freedom along the Underground Railroad. Despite the minstrel characteristics of the song, it was almost certainly intended to encourage whites in the North to sympathize with the plight of enslaved African Americans and support abolitionism.” [Source: University of Pittsburgh]

The following song sheet is not dated nor are there any marking to indicate who hand-wrote it but it appears to be of Civil War era vintage.