THE PLANTATION TRADITION: PRO-SLAVERY FICTION
_The Plantation Tradition._ The growth and accuracy of the plantation
tradition have been excellently studied in _The Southern Plantation_
(1925) by Francis Pendleton Gaines. Gaines attributes the tradition’s
hold on America to a love of feudalism,(in spite of our profession of
democracy), the charm of the Negro characters as “native” literary
material, and a romantic wish for an Arcadian past. He proves that
“the tradition omits much plantation truth and exaggerates freely
certain attractive features of the old life.” But the tradition goes on
unabashed; over a century old, it still guarantees best selling fame.
The setting is familiar:
The old plantation; a great mansion; exquisitely gowned ladies and
courtly gentlemen moving with easy grace upon the broad veranda behind
stalwart columns; surrounding the yard an almost illimitable stretch
of white cotton; darkies singingly at work in the fields, Negro
quarters, off on one side, around which little pickaninnies tumbled in
gay frolic.
It is used in advertisements for coffee, pancake flour, phonograph
records, and whiskey. It is a favorite American dream. The characters
are as constant as the cotton bolls: the courtly planter, the one
hundred per-cent southern belle, the duelling cavalier, the mammy or
cook, “broadbosomed ... with vari-colored turban, spotless apron, and
beaming face,” the plantation uncle, black counterpart “of the master
so loyally served and imitated,” and the banjo-plunking minstrel of the
quarters.
Since the plantation tradition tells of a glory that must have no
blemish, slavery is explained away as a benevolent guardianship,
necessary for a childish people’s transition from heathendom
to Christianity. By stressing festivities such as harvesting,
corn-shucking, hunting, fishing, balls, weddings and holiday seasons,
slavery was presented as “an unbroken Mardi Gras.” Since southerners,
merely because they are born in the South, are a kindlier, gentler
breed than other mortals, the possible abuses of slavery existed only
in the minds of fanatical Yankees.
Plantation tradition fiction, reenforcing proslavery thought, was
in turn reenforced by it. Occasionally southern economists admitted
that slavery was the basis of southern commerce and civilization.
But these dismal scientists were too outspoken for the sentimental
romancers. Southern physiologists who proved that “by an unknown law
of nature none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical
sun,” justified the sippers of juleps on shaded verandahs. Theologians
defended slavery as having Biblical support since Ham was cursed
by God. In the main, however, the plantation tradition advanced
less unfeeling arguments: the grown-up slaves were contented, the
pickaninnies were frolicking, the steamboat was hooting around the
bend, God was in his heaven, and all was right with the world.
_The Tradition Begins._ _Swallow Barn_, the first example of the
plantation tradition, appeared in 1832. J. P. Kennedy, the author, was
skillful, but his picture relies upon Addison, Goldsmith, Walter Scott,
and proslavery thought more than upon observation and understanding.
His mouthpiece in these sketches is Littleton, a northerner (Kennedy
himself was a Marylander, southern in upbringing), who comes South with
an “inky intent” to see the worst of slavery, but remains to worship
it. The southern aristocrats are not in love with the institution of
slavery, but realize that it is necessary for the Negro who is
essentially parasitical, dependent upon guidance for his most
indispensable necessaries, without foresight or thrift of any kind....
I am quite sure they never could become a happier people than I find
them here.... No tribe of people have ever passed from barbarism to
civilization whose progress has been more secure from harm, more
genial to their character, or better supplied with mild and beneficent
guardianship adapted to the actual state of their intellectual
feebleness, than the negroes of Swallow Barn.
In accordance with this ideal coloring, Negro children are shown
“basking on the sunny sides of cabins [like] terrapins luxuriating on
the logs of a mill-pond.” Slaves seem to be kept busiest tending their
own garden patches, of which they sell the produce. “I never meet a
Negro man--unless he is quite old--that he is not whistling; and the
women sing from morning to night.” Negroes are shown as ludicrous:
And when to these are added a few, reverend, wrinkled decrepit old
men, with faces shortened as if with drawing strings, noses that
seemed to have run all to nostril, and with feet of the configuration
of a mattock, my readers will have a tolerably correct idea of the
negro-quarter.
Hardships come chiefly from meddling abolitionists: “We alone are
able to deal properly with the subject.” Kennedy shows how he can add
sweetening to the bitter by explaining the breaking up of families
(Tidewater fortunes were frequently based upon domestic slave-trading)
as follows:
All before Abe had been successively _dismissed_ from Lucy’s cabin,
as they reached the age fit to render them serviceable, with that
satisfied concern that belongs to a negro mother who trusts to the
kindness of her master. [Italics mine.]
Kennedy admits that the recording of dialect was beyond him. A great
deal more was beyond him, but that does not keep _Swallow Barn_ from
being influential upon literature about Negro life and character.
In his plays, especially _The Gladiator_ (1831), Robert Montgomery
Bird took an antislavery stand, but his satirical novel _Sheppard
Lee_ (1836) was proslavery. Part of the book deals with a Quaker
philanthropist, confused and futile, who goes to the South to work
for abolition. The slaves on the plantation are shown living happily
under an indulgent master until an antislavery tract changes them into
burners, ravagers and murderers.
_Proslavery Humorists._ Although, for the sake of the record, Sam
Slick, the comic character of T. H. Haliburton’s _Yankee Stories_
(1836) announces that he dislikes slavery, most of his comments
justify it. He objects to enslaving white men for debt, but “those
thick-skulled, crooked-shanked, flat-footed, long heeled, woolly headed
gentlemen don’t seem fit for much else but slavery ... they ain’t fit
to contrive for themselves.” He ridicules the talk of
broken hearted slaves killin’ themselves in despair--task-master’s
whip acuttin’ into their flesh--burnin’ suns,--day o’ toil--nights
o’ grief--pestilential rice grounds--chains--starvation--misery and
death,--grand figurs them for oratory.
He is unwilling that abolitionists should be lynched, but they should
learn how the cowskin feels. To prove slavery no hardship, he reasons
that a married woman is a slave, and if she happens to get the upper
hand, the husband is a slave, and leads a worse life than any Negro.
Sam’s brother, a lawyer in Charleston, S. C., forces an old white
swindler to buy a Negro back into slavery, for the good of the Negro.
These stories do not belong to the plantation tradition, for some
mention “nigger-jockies,” i.e., “gentlemen who trade in nigger flesh,”
and a planter who has “one white wife and fourteen black concubines.”
But they are proslavery in sympathy. Sam Slick is significant in that
he represents a large number of northerners who were never too fond of
Negroes and strongly opposed abolition. Some of these became catchers
of runaway slaves, and many expressed their hatred of the Civil War in
the Draft Riots.
When William H. Thompson, Georgia humorist, sent Major Jones on his
travels in the forties, he was able to get in many proslavery thrusts.
Mary Jones wants to take along her slave Prissy, since she is unwilling
to have white servants:
I could never bear to see a white gall toatin’ my child about, waiting
on me like a nigger. It would hurt my conscience to keep anybody
’bout me in that condition, who was as white and as good as me.... A
servant, to be any account as a servant, is got to have a different
kind of spirit from other people; and anybody that would make a
nigger of a white child, because it was pore, hain’t got no Christian
principle in ’em.
Uncle Ned believes that abolitionists have horns like billy-goats, eyes
like balls of fire, and great forked tails like sea serpents. “Ugh,
chile, dey wusser’n collery-morbus.” When these fierce creatures get
hold of Negroes, ruin is come; here is Major Jones describing the free
Negroes of the North:
Pore, miserable, sickly-lookin’ creaters! it was enuff to make a
abolitionist’s hart ake to see ’em crawlin’ out of the damp straw
of the cellars, to sun themselves on the cellar-dores till they got
able to start out to by or to steal sumthing to eat ... many of ’em
was diseased and bloated up like frogs, and lay sprawlin’ about like
so many cooters in a mud-hole ... like lizards in a pile of rotten
logs.... This, thinks I, is nigger freedom: this is the condition to
which the philanthropists of the North wants to bring the happy black
people of the South!
_First Answers to Mrs. Stowe._ In the three years following the
appearance of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ (1852), there were at least fourteen
proslavery novels published, besides numerous pamphlets, articles, and
a long poem. W. L. G. Smith’s _Life At The South_, or _Uncle Tom’s
Cabin As It Is_ (1852) was struck off while the iron was hot, borrowing
illustrations from _Swallow Barn_ and passages from _The Yemassee_.
Uncle Tom, irked at being outdone in the fields by the younger,
stronger Hector, and jealous of his master’s favoritism, moodily
listens to an abolitionist, and runs away. In Canada he finds real
slavery; in Buffalo he sees the freedmen in wretchedness, discovering
one frozen to death in a snow storm. Finally he begs his master to
return him to the South, which that gentleman does out of Christian
consideration and forgivingness. The following passage shows Dinah
refusing to join Tom in seeking freedom:
Dinah: “... An’ den wha’ would be de feelin’s of your own Dinah. She
would curse de hour when she was born. No, no! I cannot consent to be
a party to sich an arrangement.”
Tom: “How silly you talk. You will do noffin yourself, an’ you will
let no one help. I begin to think, you hab revoked your decision....
Dere you hab it; you now know’d my feelin’s.”
Dinah did not know what to say in reply ... “there is something in
this idea of being free that I cannot comprehend,” she thought to
herself.
This passed for Negro speech and psychology in proslavery novels.
Hector likewise refuses to be free in a speech stolen from the Hector
of Simms’ _Yemassee_. Allgood, a hypocritical philanthropist, and
Bates, an abolitionist busybody, are types that later novels were to
repeat.
In the same year, Caroline E. Rush sent forth her little book, _North
and South_, or _Slavery and Its Contrasts_, to teach the Northern
reader “boundless, illimitable love,” that would make him “regret the
necessary evils of the Slavery of the South, without bitter feelings
towards those who are born amid the peculiar rights and duties of the
slaveholders.” The thousands of free Negroes in Philadelphia pain Mrs.
Rush because of their lack of an “elegant degree of refinement and
cultivation”; their poverty is racial debauchery, while the poverty of
the whites is victimization. What are the abuses suffered by slaves
to the real, bitter, oppression that in our own midst sweeps its
thousands out of a life of penury into premature graves?
Tears should not be shed for Uncle Tom--“a hardy, strong and
powerful Negro”--but should be reserved for helpless, defenseless,
children--“of the same color as yourself.” Writing of plantation
Negroes she wishes that she too had “taken lessons of a colored
professor, and was conversant enough with Negro dialect, to launch
out boldly into their sea of beauties,” but she is forced to leave
the speech to her readers’ imagination. Little is left to their
imagination, however, when she describes the cabins of the field-hands,
embowered in Cherokee roses. At this point, the book’s illustration
resembles a suburban paradise adjoining the White House. When the
slave-mistress gently patted a quadroon’s head, she “intimated a
freedom which is not often shown to the servants in the North.” Mrs.
Rush is correct here; there was a great deal of such freedom.
Mrs. Eastman’s _Aunt Phyllis’ Cabin_ likewise appeared in 1852.
This popular novel glorified slavery and denounced abolitionists,
particularly Mrs. Stowe, but it did attempt to describe slave life.
Bacchus prays hard and drinks harder; many of his antics--his love
for cast-off finery, the banjo, and big words--could grace a minstrel
show. Aunt Phyllis is one of the first to appear of the mighty race of
“mammies.” The title character of John W. Page’s _Uncle Robin in His
Cabin_ (1853) puts the author’s beliefs into dialect: he does not want
freedom for himself, and the Negro who is dissatisfied should go back
where he came from:
“Dis, sir, is no country for free black men: Africa de only place
[for] he, sir....”
_Sentimentality of The Old South._ Mrs. Caroline Lee Hentz, a
northerner married to a southern gentleman, turned out a number of
blood-and-tears romances. In _Marcus Warland_ (1852) and in _Linda_
(1857) she celebrates the mammy:
Aunt Judy’s African blood had not been corrupted by the base mingling
of a paler strain. Black as ebony was her smooth and shining skin, on
which the dazzling ivory of her teeth threw gleams bright as the moon
at midnight. Judy had loved--adored, reverenced her, as being of a
superior, holier race than her own.
_The Planter’s Northern Bride_ (1854) by Mrs. Hentz shows the typically
converted northern girl. After her appearance on the plantation has
elicited rapturous cries of adoration from the slaves, she is won
over to the peculiar institution. “Oh! my husband! I never dreamed
that slavery could present an aspect so tender and affectionate!” The
husband, though a perfect master, modestly says that he is “not as
good as the majority of masters.” His slaves are fat, sleek and good
natured; on Sunday, at church, they are “fashionably attired” and there
is “the rustle of tissues, the fluttering of muslin and laces, the
waving of feathery fans, the glitter of jewelry.” The planter proves
that the Negro was divinely ordained for slavery since
his skull has a hardness and thickness greater than our own, which
defy the arrowy sunbeams ... and his skin secretes a far greater
quantity of moisture and throws back the heat absorbed by us.
Crissy, misled by an abolitionist, crosses the Ohio and finds freedom
too much for her--“the only slavery she had ever known.” An incipient
revolt is nipped by Moreland, who, appalled by “the intolerable burden
of the slaves’ treachery and ingratitude” says:
I would rather, ten thousand times, cultivate these broad fields
myself, than be served by faithless hand and false, hollow hearts.
I have hands that can work. I would do it cheerfully; if labor was
the portion God had assigned to me in the world. Better, far better,
the toiling limbs than the aching heart! He paused a moment in
indescribable emotion.
The slaves, naturally, break down and weep. All are forgiven, except
Vulcan, who had lifted his “rebel arm” against Moreland: “You must
never more wield the hammer or strike the anvil for me.... Go--you are
free!” Poor Vulcan....
Mrs. M. J. McIntosh in _The Lofty and The Lowly, or Good in All and
None All-good_ (1854), hopes for the solution of the most difficult
problem: “how the slave may be elevated to the condition of an
intelligent, accountable being, without detriment to the master’s
interest.” Mrs. McIntosh is sure that the solution cannot come from
the fanatical North; she hopes that the South “with its greater
sympathy, love and understanding will awaken to its responsibilities.”
Daddy Cato, who has grown gray in faithful service at Montrose Hall,
Savannah, is set free and given a little homeplace. He is not proud of
his freedom; he will be proud only when he can read the Bible and is
free of sin. Following his beloved family to the North, he is highly
insulted when he is approached by Boston abolitionists.
Make me free! how can I free any more? Dem da nonsense people, and
what dem want take me from Miss Alice for?... I wonder if I been sick
and couldn’t do any ting, ef dem would nuss me and take care o’ me
liken Miss Alice.... I tink dem crazy ’bout free. Free bery good ting,
but free ent all; when you sick, free won’t make you well, free won’t
gib you clo’s, no hom’ny, let ’lone meat.
Needless to say, the other slaves at Montrose, away from these crazy
people talking about “free,” live their childish lives in happiness.
_The Lofty and The Lowly_ is full of piety toward southern divinity.
_The Defense Sums Up Its Case._ Mrs. Henry R. Schoolcraft’s _The Black
Gauntlet_ (1860) is likewise a compendium of proslavery arguments. The
comfortable, well-ventilated slave homes “with sitting and sleeping
room” and a loft for storing provisions are compared with the dens,
holes, cellars and tenements of poor whites in northern cities. Food is
good and abundant, with game and fish caught in the slave’s plentiful
off time. Slaves were given an acre of ground for their own use and
allowed to raise hogs and poultry, of which the produce was sold at
full market price. That slaves were ever knocked senseless is “purest
fiction,” since “their skulls are so thick that it is doubtful whether
any white man’s strength could consummate such a feat.”
I am so satisfied that slavery is the school God has established for
the conversion of barbarous nations, that were I an absolute Queen
of these United States, my first missionary enterprise would be to
send to Africa, to bring the heathen as slaves to this Christian
land, and keep them in bondage until compulsory labor had tamed their
beastliness....
Mrs. Schoolcraft was a bit late, however; for over two centuries
countless ships had been sent, and millions of Africans had been
brought “to school” in Christian lands.
Since “not a living man can swear that he has ever heard antislavery
sentiment from a slave in the South,” the suffering of the Negro, to
Mrs. Schoolcraft, is a lie whipped up by northern politicians. Runaway
slaves are always the good-for-nothing rowdies, who flee to escape
work and discipline. The separation of slave husbands and wives is no
tragedy, since all are polygamists as in Africa.
It is not believed by the author that such a monstrosity (babies sold
from mothers) has ever occurred in South Carolina, as a mistress there
usually takes more care of her little Negro property than a black
mother ever does of her children.
Poetic justice is in the book: the poor dupe of abolitionists is
betrayed into crimes that “destroyed and grieved her conscience,” but
the faithful mammy is well rewarded. _The Black Gauntlet_ is an extreme
case of special pleading, where vilification of the accursed Negro
alternates with praise of his blessedness in slavery. It is noteworthy,
however, that Mrs. Schoolcraft’s use of Negro dialect, in this case the
Gullah of the low country, is as good as that of any preceding writer.
Suggested by “a popular work of fiction, abusive of southern slavery,”
_The Yankee Slave Dealer_ by a Texan (1860) has for its subtitle _An
Abolitionist Down South_. The theme is hackneyed: a northerner attempts
in vain to aid slaves to freedom, is won over to the proslavery cause,
and winds up by becoming a confirmed slave dealer, inhumane because
he was born on the wrong side of the Ohio River. Justus, the Yankee,
tries to lure three Negroes to freedom. Moses, the first, is a walking
edition of _The Bible Defense of Slavery_:
Well, heah’s sump’n else, mastuh: we read in the book of Leviticus dat
de childin of Isr’l was told dey should buy slaves. I marked de place,
and I’ll jes read it to you; doe I s’pose you’s seed it many a time.
It’s in de twenty-fif’ chapter, de forty-fif’ and sixt’ verse.
Truly religious, Moses says that he submits because the Bible tells
him that such is his duty. Justus approaches the second Negro with
ludicrous pomp: “Let an ardent desire to alleviate the woes of the
suffering plead my excuse for the breach of decorum.” To this the Negro
responds: “What for massah make fun of puoh nigger dis way!” The third
specimen, farthest down in the physical and mental scale, runs away
with Justus, only to steal his horse and saddle-bags and return to his
master. Justus soon learns the proslavery creed that freeing the Negro
will merely “people the penitentiary or feed the gibbet.”
Nature, by their inferior capacity and cheerful submission to their
lot, has so well fitted them for this position.... The lot of the
serving classes in all countries imposes a burden.
Grief is expressed for the white working class of the North; the female
slave finds no parallel to the degradation of northern prostitutes.
Abounding in such arguments, _The Yankee Slave Dealer_, though poor in
characterization and plot, was the type of novel that the South wanted.
_Summary._ Less novels than fictional arguments, the first books of the
plantation tradition are strikingly similar. Frightened by the success
of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, southern authors rushed counter-propaganda
to the presses. To testify to their culture, they produced crude,
ungainly works. They called Mrs. Stowe “a moral scavenger” and worse
names; since she was a Yankee woman, the rules of chivalry could be
suspended. The pattern seldom varied: scenes of bliss on the plantation
alternated with scenes of squalor in the free North. The contented
slave, the clown and the wretched freedman are the Negro stereotypes,
who put into dialect the creeds of Chancellor Harper and Professor
Dew in the _Pro-Slavery Argument_, and of the Reverend Priest in _The
Bible Defense of Slavery_. A plantation with a kindly master was basis
for generalizing about all plantations, of whatever type, in whatever
sections. A pampered house-servant, who refuses uncertain freedom for a
comparatively easy place, becomes _the_ Negro slave; a poor unemployed
wretch becomes _the_ freedman.
The intractable, the ironic, the abused Negro is nowhere on these
plantations. Congressmen might deplore in legislative halls the
injuries done the South by the Underground Railroad, and southern
newspapers might be filled with descriptions of runaways, some second
offenders with branded scars on their faces. But runaways in these
books are generally flighty creatures and half-wits, and even they
finally steal back to the South. Judicial records might be full of
instances of brutality, but the occasional whippings are shown to be
for due cause such as stealing a ham from a poor woman who could not
spare it. Miscegenation is missing in spite of the proofs walking about
in the great houses or in the fields or the slave-pens. Slavery is
shown as a beneficent guardianship, never as a system of cheap and
abundant labor that furnished the basis of a few large fortunes (and
assured an impoverished, disfranchised class of poor whites).
In spite of the exaggerations and omissions, however, certain damning
evidence creeps in. Though too kind to maltreat Negroes, the cavaliers
are adept at tarring-and-feathering, riding on rails, and lynching
abolitionist villains, probably out of consideration for the Negro’s
welfare. Slavery is sometimes considered as not the Negro’s final
state; at some indefinite time (probably after the planters had all
become wealthy) he would be returned to Africa to bear witness to the
civilization and Christianity he had seen in America. And lastly, the
arguers are betrayed by their argumentative tactics: It isn’t true;
but since it is, you are worse. Thus: it isn’t true that slavery is a
bad system, it is really a fine thing--no worse than the northern and
English system of wage-slavery, which is terrible. Proslavery authors
were justified in protesting the exploitation of northern factory
workers, but to argue that therefore slavery was blessed, is to prove
that a man’s broken leg is not painful since another man has a broken
arm.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Describe examples of the plantation tradition found in modern
advertising.
2. List examples of the plantation tradition in popular songs.
3. Granting that _Swallow Barn_ was the truthful picture of a Virginia
plantation, why is its influence on literature dangerous?
4. What is damaging in Kennedy’s admission that he could not record
Negro speech?
5. List examples of what you consider the greatest exaggerations in the
pictures of slavery given by these books, and state your reasons for so
considering them.
6. List the similar situations and arguments of these books.
7. Which novelists defend slavery because of the physical traits of
Negroes?