ANTISLAVERY FICTION
_Growth of the Attitude._ The opposition to slavery, which began
almost as soon as the first slaves were brought here, found literary
expression in colonial times and especially in the eighteenth century,
when honorable voices denounced slavery as “the most unremitting
despotism on the one hand, and degrading submissiveness on the other.”
It was not until the eighteen thirties, however, that the antislavery
crusade took on full force, moving “from resistance to the slave power
... to death to slavery.” In 1831, the year of Nat Turner’s famous
revolt, the Antislavery Society was established, and William Lloyd
Garrison published the first number of his _Liberator_.
In addition to the pamphlets strewn on “the wayside, the parlor,
the stage coach, the rail car and the boat deck,” slave narratives
became a literary weapon. The experiences of fugitive slaves intrigued
abolitionists who took down their stories, sometimes for newspaper
sketches such as Isaac Hopper’s _Tales of Oppression_, and sometimes
for fictionalized biographies such as _A Narrative of the Life and
Adventures of Charles Ball, A Black Man_ (1838), _Recollections of
Slavery_ (attributed to a runaway slave, 1838) and _The Narrative of
James Williams_ (1838). In 1839 Theodore Weld, as important in the
antislavery crusade as Garrison, produced _Slavery As It Is_, a book of
facts “authenticated by the slave-holders themselves [yet containing]
but a tiny fraction of the nameless atrocities gathered from the papers
examined.” Written to combat “the old falsehood that the slave is
kindly treated that has lullabied to sleep four-fifths of the free
North and West,” this was the most popular antislavery publication
before _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_.
When antislavery fiction appeared, therefore, it found an audience
prepared, and the arguments, the characters and a literary form set up.
_Before Uncle Tom’s Cabin._ The first antislavery novel was published
anonymously in 1836 as _The Slave_, or _Memoirs of Archy Moore_.
Enlarged in 1852, it was renamed _The White Slave_, and claimed by
Richard Hildreth, the historian. Archy Moore, son of his master,
Colonel Moore, marries an octoroon, Cassy. Forced to run away, since
the colonel desires Cassy for himself, they are captured and sold to
different masters. Archy is sold and resold, until in South Carolina
he and Tom, an embittered rebel, take to the swamps, finding a colony
of outlawed slaves. Ferreted out of there, Archy, because of his light
color, manages to escape to the North; Tom becomes the wild scourge
of the region. Archy goes to Europe, attains some education and
wealth, and redeems his wife from slavery. Though written in highflown
language, and not so dramatic as _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, _The White
Slave_ is still vigorous. Certain characters--the white slave, the
octoroon girl, the insurrectionist, the unfeeling Yankee overseer, and
the lustful planter--are to reappear in later novels. The arguments,
though slowing up the action, are cogent and informed. Hildreth
obviously studied the slaves in his sojourn: his delineation includes
hypocritical humility, sullenness, vindictiveness, intractability,
cunning, courage, the contempt of house-servants for field hands, and
of mulattoes for darker Negroes. The loyalty of some slaves to their
masters, and their treachery to their fellows, are explained largely
as policy for gain. Although occasionally heightened and unfair, _The
White Slave_ is one of the most important novels of this controversial
period.
Herman Melville’s allegory _Mardi_ (1849) has bitter antislavery
protest and wise prophecy in the sections that describe Vivenza (the
United States). A slave with red marks of stripes upon his back is
observed hoisting a standard, correspondingly striped, over the
Capitol, the temple dedicated to Liberty. Hieroglyphics read “All men
are born free and equal;” minute hieroglyphics add “Except the tribe of
Hamo.” In the south of Vivenza, the strangers see
Under a burning sun, hundreds of collared men ... toiling in
trenches.... Standing grimly over these, were men unlike them; armed
with long thongs, which descended upon the toilers.
After close scrutiny the strangers, in amazement, swear that the
slaves are men. For this they are branded as “firebrands, come to
light the flame of revolt.” The southern spokesman exclaims: “The
first blow struck for them dissolves the Union of Vivenza’s vales.
The northern tribes well know it.” Melville warns northerners not to
feel self-righteous, and does not malign southerners, since “the soil
decides the man,” and they have grown up with slavery. Some slaves even
seem happy, but Melville adds significantly “not as men.” Melville is
perplexed about the solution, and fatalistically concludes that “Time
must befriend these thralls,” but he is certain that slavery is “a
blot, foul as the crater-pool of hell.”
The first woman to turn the novel to antislavery uses was Emily
Catherine Pierson, who felt that too few readers knew of the thousands
of runaways who had gained freedom. _Jamie, The Fugitive_ (1851)
introduces the hero in a newspaper advertisement of a runaway, and
takes leave of him in an invoice as one of “Ten Bales of Humanity,
in a thriving condition, late from three plantations in Virginia.”
In between we get descriptions of life in the cabins and fields, of
“nigger-buyers,” slave sales, slave-pens and caravans, and of the
hazards of the fugitive stealthily pursuing his way under the “eaves
of the Alleghanies,” befriended only by the North Star. Mrs. Pierson’s
book is pious and sentimental, but her characters, though slightly
sketched, are believable human beings.
The same author writes in _Cousin Franck’s Household_ (1852):
Were we content to be an humble imitator, we know of no one whom we
should be prouder to follow than the noble author of that wonderful
work “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” But we owe it to ourselves to say that our
little book was projected before the publication of the latter; and
our Jamie Parker, we think, had only one predecessor--and that we had
not seen--in this species of literature.
Written as the letters of a northern woman visiting Virginia, _Cousin
Franck’s Household_, or _Scenes In The Old Dominion_ is _Swallow
Barn_ in reverse. Slave-traders and fugitives are again described.
In addition we have close observations of domestic life. Some of the
slaves, with good right, resemble the master too much for his wife’s
comfort and she begs him to sell them or send them off to his Alabama
plantation. A slave drover remarks:
Fact is, I’ve got a specimen lot ... of Anglo-Saxon blood, I reckon
they calls it; at any rate, I’m takin’ ter market some of the best
blood in the “Old Dominion”.... Ingenus, ain’t it now, for a body to
tarn a body’s own blood to sich account.
A Yankee overseer, who “calculates what a nigger is wuth, and how
long he’ll last on the hard drive plan;” a beautiful octoroon and her
mother, crazy Millie, deranged by the tragedy of slavery, are types
that will frequently be met with in later fiction. Although apologetic
to “fastidious readers” who might object to her recording “dialectal
peculiarities,” Mrs. Pierson kept voluminous notebooks “to secure
accuracy in the nondescript vernacular of the cabin and the hut.” She
sees the social setting, likewise, with accuracy; she records what
southern novelists preferred not to show: the poor whites, not an
accident but a logical result of slavery; and the worn-out, profitless
land, which brought it about that Virginia’s best crop was the crop of
slave children in the quarters.
_Harriet Beecher Stowe._ In 1851, a little woman in Cincinnati sent the
first chapter of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin or The Man that Was a Thing_ to the
_National Era_. The daughter of a famed preacher, and the sister of
another more famous for his antislavery sermons, Harriet Beecher Stowe
had grown up in religious, humanitarian surroundings. Cincinnati, a
border city, was a battleground for antislavery and proslavery forces;
Dr. Bailey, abolitionist editor of the _National Era_ was mobbed there,
and Quakers spread the antislavery gospel in “sewing societies.” Mrs.
Stowe, whose home was at times a shelter for fugitives, had listened
to pathetic or hair-raising stories of the South, and had written two
antislavery sketches, “Immediate Emancipator” (1848) and “The Freeman’s
Dream” (1850). Her anger at the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law made
her dissatisfied with such weak parables, and she set out to write a
passionate protest. In preparation she read books like Weld’s _Slavery
As It Is_, and the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, of Lewis
Clark, who suggested George Harris, and of Josiah Henson, who suggested
Uncle Tom.
In 1852 when the completed serial was published in book form as _Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among The Lowly_, its success was instantaneous.
Over three hundred thousand copies were sold in America in the first
year; in a very short time there were forty editions in England, and
over a million and a half copies sold in the Empire. It was translated
in many foreign languages, including Bohemian, Welsh and Siamese. It
was acclaimed by George Sand, Dickens and Kingsley, who naturally
were not annoyed by the sentimentality and melodrama; it set Heinrich
Heine to reading the Bible; to Macaulay it was the greatest American
literary achievement. Whittier rejoiced in the Fugitive Slave Law,
since it gave occasion for the book. Lincoln later said to Mrs. Stowe,
“So you are the little woman who brought on the great war.” If this
is overstatement, it is true that many of the voters who elected
Lincoln in 1860 were greatly influenced by the household favorite.
Tolstoy grouped it with the few masterpieces of the world, and Howells
considered it the only great American novel produced before the Civil
War. Detractors have for a long time been undermining its prestige,
but it has probably been more widely read than any other novel in the
world, and it is still popular.
In characterizing the Negroes in _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, Mrs. Stowe faced
the dilemma of the propagandist. If she showed them as brutalized by
slavery, she would have alienated her readers, whose preferences were
for idealized heroes. If on the other hand, she made her characters too
noble, her case against slavery would be weakened. She did this with
Uncle Tom, and critics have stated: If slavery produced a Christian
hero so far superior to free whites, then slavery is excellent. This
dilemma was hardly recognized by Mrs. Stowe, however, as all of her
training and inclinations were toward sentimental idealism. Eliza and
George, if not models of Christian forgivingness, are still virtue
in distress, to be saved by poetic justice. Eva’s ethereal goodness,
and Legree’s cruelty are examples among the white characters of the
same idealization. But Topsy must not be overlooked; although minstrel
shows have made her into a Puck in blackface, Mrs. Stowe intended
to show her as a pathetic victim of slave-trading as well. Sambo
and Quimbo, the slave-drivers, had been dehumanized by the system;
Cassy is the octoroon whose beauty has crushed her; and Chloe, while
traditional, is made realistic by the little touches of a woman well
acquainted with kitchen-lore. Mrs. Stowe has a wide range of Negro
characters, and one southern critic finds in _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ just
about all of the traits he is willing to grant the Negro. High spirits
are shown on Shelby’s Kentucky plantation, but tragedy lurks in the
background. Mrs. Stowe handles the tragedy with the bold melodramatic
strokes of Dickens; but she artfully blends the shocking with humor
and pathos, with mystery and suspense; familiar domestic scenes with
cotton-planting, steamboating on the river and gambling in New Orleans;
pious moralizing with fascinating wickedness--all in all a successful
recipe.
When Mrs. Stowe rattled the bones of the skeletons in southern closets,
howls arose from the manors. A South Carolinian recorded the rumor:
That the whole “nigger kingdom” of the South had been killed,
smothered, torn to pieces by bloodhounds, ground up for bone manure;
children dragged from mothers’ breasts, and the whole plantations
turned into slaughter-houses, we fully expected; and yet nobody had
read it.
It is needless to say that no such pictures occurred in _Uncle Tom’s
Cabin_, yet Mrs. Stowe was called a defamer, a hypocrite, “snuffling
for pollution with a pious air,” a plain liar.
A moralist and debater, Mrs. Stowe returned the lie. She published _A
Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, a book as long as the novel, giving sources
for all of her charges. The _Key_, largely unread by the critics,
remains unanswerable. Granting that such feats as Eliza’s crossing
the ice are sensational, although vouched for, in what did the lying
in _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ consist? Joel Chandler Harris goes too far in
calling it a defense of American slavery as Mrs. Stowe found it in
Kentucky, but his comment has point. Shelby and St. Clair are kindly
owners, in the plantation tradition, whose humanity was overpowered
by the system. The two Yankees,--the vicious Legree and the priggish,
unsympathetic Miss Ophelia are certainly in line with southern gospel.
It is no lie that there were slave auctions, slave cellars such as the
ones where the flies “got to old Prue,” public whipping posts, mothers
separated from their children, and slaves like Cassy whose beauty was
their doom. With allowances for sentimentality and melodrama, essential
truth is in _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_. To argue against its artistic faults
and to consider it incomplete representation are possible. The charge
of lying, however, is confusing. Mrs. Stowe showed that slavery was
a great wrong, and that Negroes are human. Is it here that critics
believe that she lies?
Mrs. Stowe’s second antislavery novel, _Dred, A Tale of the Dismal
Swamp_ (1856) later published as _Nina Gordon_, was obscured by the
lasting fame of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, although many critics have
preferred it. It lacks the pathos and sweep of the earlier work, but it
adds pictures of the “poor whites” and of Negro outlaws in the Dismal
Swamp. Harry Gordon is a fuller portrait of George Harris; another
“white slave,” he is the successful manager of a plantation while
his white half-brother is a wastrel and carouser. His character is
analyzed in conventional terms: “the rules about Ham do not pertain” to
him, and at times he plaintively wishes to be “a good, honest, black
nigger, like Uncle Pomp.” Lizette, his quadroon wife, is similar to
Eliza. Traditional Negroes are Old Hundred, the coachman, and Tiff,
who in his love for his little white charges is like Uncle Tom. Dred,
a fanatical fugitive, the son of Denmark Vesey, is created somewhat
after the model of Nat Turner. A new figure for Mrs. Stowe, she does
not portray him very successfully. Devoted to the creed of “turning
the other cheek,” she shows Dred doing little other than rescuing the
virtuous, or urging slaves to escape. He is less an insurrectionist
than a Negro Robin Hood. His supernatural appearances recall Scott’s
novels, and his longwinded chants are more those of a Hebrew prophet.
Other fugitives are more real: Hark, sullen and inflexible, and Jim,
the clownish house-servant, pampered but wanting to be free, especially
so that he can have a wife all his own. There is local color in scenes
like the camp-meeting, but the book is written with a reformer’s zeal,
more concerned with urging emancipation and denouncing “the great
Christianizing institution” than with re-creating social reality.
Antislavery feeling is likewise in _The Minister’s Wooing_ (1859),
a tale of New England. Candace, “a powerfully built, majestic black
woman, corpulent, heavy,” is traditional in her loyalty to her family,
but she is proudly and volubly free: “I ain’t a critter. I’s neider
huff nor horns. I’s a reasonable being....”
_Negro Novelists._ Very shortly after _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ the first
novel by an American Negro appeared. This was _Clotel, or The
President’s Daughter_ (1853) by William Wells Brown, an antislavery
agent. The book was popular enough for three editions; in the second
and third, the heroine is changed to the daughter of “a great
statesman.” _Clotel_ is not well written or well constructed, but these
failings are common to its type. Scattered throughout the book are
intimate glimpses that only one who had been a slave could get: a few
dialect rhymes, certainly among the first in American literature, a few
comic interludes, and some Negro jokes on the master. But such things
are all too scarce. The story is melodrama, and the chief characters,
though vouched for by the author, are hardly distinguishable in
gentility from the heroines of “blood and tears” romances. Clotel’s
mother jumps into the Potomac, committing suicide to elude the slave
hunters. Her aunt, after marriage with a white Vermont doctor, who
neglects to file papers of manumission, is sold with her beautiful
daughters on the block, and dies of the shame. The surpassingly
beautiful Clotel is luckier. Sold from one place to another, she
finally becomes maidservant for an angelic girl, and falls in love with
a handsome black slave. Helping him to escape execution for resisting
a white man, she disguises him in her clothes, and remains undetected
in the cell. (She is nearly white, and he is black.) She is flogged for
this and sold to New Orleans, where an enraptured Frenchman steals her
away. After his death, providential for the plot, she meets her former
lover in Europe. Back in America, he dies leading a charge in the Civil
War, and she becomes an Angel of Mercy to the Federal troops. The
novel wanders far afield, and incidents that might have been impelling
arguments are told too casually.
Two other Negro novelists took up the novel as their weapon. Frank
J. Webb’s _The Garies and Their Friends_ (1857) takes place chiefly
in Philadelphia. It has a new setting and problem, but is badly
overwritten. Mr. Garie, a white man, has married a wife only partly
white, and race prejudice makes the whole family suffer for it. In
contrast, a Negro family lives a happier life in spite of hardships.
Martin Delany, a versatile free Negro, began in 1859 a novel _Blake,
or the Huts of America_ in the _Anglo-African_, but the work was not
completed. With a hero and heroine modelled upon George Harris and
Eliza, and a number of horrors, _Blake_ is an imitation of _Uncle
Tom’s Cabin_, best in the pictures of the Southwest which Delany had
visited. In 1859 Frances Harper’s “The Two Offers” appeared, telling of
a white heroine who devotes her life to the antislavery cause. This is
the first short story by a Negro author, but otherwise unimportant.
_Other Successors._ _The Planter’s Victim_ (1855) by W. W. Smith,
republished five years later as the _Yankee Slave Driver_, is the
most gruesome antislavery novel. Richard Dudley, wishing his octoroon
half sister for mistress, is infuriated when she marries a nearly
white slave, George. He has Caroline flogged with one hundred and
fifty lashes and George with four hundred. On such a scale are all the
barbarities inflicted. Dudley smashes the skull of Caroline’s baby
and, when Caroline dies heartbroken, he insults her corpse. For many
years he torments George, and finally after starving him in a New
Orleans dungeon, stabs him. The slaves are extreme specimens, George
being a “youthful and majestic Apollo in the full glow of masculine
beauty and splendor,” and Caroline being magnificently beautiful. Both
speak highflown drivel. With all of his supposed manliness, George
equals Uncle Tom in saintliness. The book hardly serves its purpose:
the villains are too monstrous for belief, the hero too submissive for
respect, and the incidents too uniformly gruesome for anything except a
collection of horrors.
Among the antislavery authors who, like Mrs. Stowe, advocated
colonization is H. L. Hosmer, author of _Adela, The Octoroon_ (1860).
Adela, a slave-mistress, though disliking abolitionist books which
“merely ransack lawsbooks and newspapers for narratives of torture,”
condemns slavery as a fraud and curse. The misery of slaves on
Mississippi plantations is pictured only a shade darker than the
squalor of fugitives in the North. The happy opportunities of life
in Liberia are set in contrast, but without conviction. One of the
full length characters is Tidbald, distinguished champion of southern
rights, but seducer of his own slave daughter. A mysterious worker of
the underground, “broadbrim” Quakers, and an octoroon who preferred to
be a kept woman in New Orleans instead of a plantation drudge, could
well have been further developed at the expense of the argumentation.
Mention is made of the melodies of the slaves and the rhythm of their
dancing, but other local color is missing and the dialect is false.
Many of the Negroes are true steel, game to the core. At the end Adela
is proved to be herself an octoroon. To save her, a loyal body-servant,
Captain Jack, heads an insurrection and kills her would-be ravisher.
Although disgruntled at slavery, courageous, and intelligent, Jack
rebels only when his mistress is in danger. _Adela, The Octoroon_ is
confused, incredible, and tedious, with only occasional originality.
More popular among the Union soldiers, according to report, than even
_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, was a novel published in the Beadle Dime Novel
Series, _Maum Guineas’ Children_, by Mrs. M. V. Victor (1861). The
author disclaims any political purpose, but her stress is antislavery.
While planters and their families are shown in a sympathetic light,
the abuses of slavery are told of in fuller measure. Maum Guinea,
mysterious and embittered, has been deprived of her children and
husband. She contrives the escape of Hyperion and Rose, a beautiful
slave who has been sold by the “kindly” master to a libertine. The
novel deals with the Christmas week in the lives of the slaves.
Barbecuing, dancing, singing, and hunting are described to show the
brighter side, but the stories told around the fire are grim and
rebellious. One slave’s husband had been in the Nat Turner uprising;
another had attempted to kill his mistress, because she had jealously
hounded his mother to death. The novel is simply written and evidently
based upon intimate knowledge. Mrs. Victor seems to look upon the pure
African type as happy-go-lucky, and finds rebels only among the mixed
bloods, and the happy ending is forced. Even with these failings,
however, the novel belongs with the most readable and convincing of
antislavery novels.
Written to enforce the antagonism of many northerners to the Fugitive
Slave Law, since “a human critter’s of more account than all the
laws in Christendom,” J. T. Trowbridge’s _Neighbor Jackwood_ (1856)
is far more convincing in its pictures of Vermont than of the deep
South. Camille, the daughter of a Frenchman and an octoroon _placée_,
is “jest dark enough to be ra’al purty.” Enslaved after her father’s
death, untimely as in so many abolitionist novels, she is sold and is
subjected to her master’s advances. Robert Greenwood, a northerner,
enamored of her, helps her escape to the North; but unwilling to become
his mistress, she runs away from him. In Vermont she finds honest love
in Hector, who marries her, and goes South to buy her freedom. Left
in Vermont, she is hidden away by Neighbor Jackwood, until Robert,
now a full-fledged scoundrel, tells the kidnappers where she is. She
is rescued in the nick of time by Hector, who brings her papers of
freedom. There is a great deal of mystery and suspense, Camille’s
hiding away in a haystack on a stormy night being vividly described.
But the book is more sensational than revelatory of Negro life; and the
southern scenes are hastily passed over and conventional.
The same author’s _Cudjo’s Cave_ (1863), a stirring boys’ book, tells
of the conflicts between Unionists and Confederates in Eastern
Tennessee in the first year of the war. Three Negro characters are
prominent: Toby, the faithful servant; Cudjo, ape-like in appearance,
but cunning, powerful, and vindictive, the unbroken African; and Pomp,
“magnificently proportioned, straight as a pillar, and black as ebony,
of noble features.” Pomp has been educated abroad by an indulgent
master. As usual in these novels, the benefactor dies, and the new
master is tyrannical. Pomp escapes to the ravines of the Cumberland
Mountains, and there meets Cudjo, whose scarred back was “the most
powerful of antislavery documents.” They eke out an existence in the
cave, with the connivance of slaves who keep them posted; in their
turn they help runaways, succor abolitionists is distress, and finally
aid in overthrowing the Confederate guerrillas. The Negroes and the
Unionists are too good, and the Rebels too villainous, but the novel
has the suspense of escape and capture, and throws light upon an
interesting chapter of history.
In spite of its unwieldy plot, Epes Sargent’s _Peculiar_ (1863) is
one of the most rewarding of antislavery novels. It is not a mere
recounting of horrors. “It ain’t de whippins ... dat make de wrong
of slavery. De mos’ kindest thing dey could do de slave would be ter
treat him so he wouldn’t stay a slave nohow,” says one character.
Another insists that if slaves were so brutalized as to be contented,
slavery would be doubly cursed, and rejoices that “there is manhood
in them to make them at least unhappy.” The slave Peek, named for the
“Peculiar Institution,” has full share of this manhood, and is defiant,
provident, intelligent, and, strangely for the antislavery gallery,
skeptical of religion. Vance, the white hero, disguises himself as
Gashface, a mulatto underground agent, out of hatred for the system
that had killed his octoroon wife. He and Peek, as climax to their
safeguarding the virtuous, and confounding wrong-doers, discover a
beautiful white girl who had been sold into slavery, and rescue her
from the lust of her master. The story is sensational, but Sargent
shows an understanding of such historic matters as the kidnapping
from northern States, the workings of the underground, and the easy
acceptance of concubinage by southern society. He shows the slaves
to be secretive, relying on their “grapevine telegraph” for mutual
protection; slyly humorous, waging their own guerrilla warfare against
a stronger enemy. Sargent goes below the surface and gets at social
causes, and because of this his book is frequently persuasive.
_Summary._ Antislavery fiction naturally concentrated upon the abuses
that proslavery fiction left unmentioned: slave-sales, the breaking
up of families, shameful practises at the slave-mart, slave jails and
coffles, whippings, overwork and concubinage. Slave discontent was
stressed. Negro insurrectionists, outlaws, fugitives and underground
agents are favorite characters, and since they existed in large
numbers, antislavery fiction makes a contribution here to realism.
Unfortunately the rebellious and militant are generally shown to be of
mixed blood, like George Harris, whereas the more African type is shown
as docile, like Uncle Tom. Some novelists depart from this pattern, but
the pattern persists and has remained wrongly influential. Moreover,
the heroine is frequently a quadroon or octoroon, a concession,
unconscious perhaps, to race snobbishness even among abolitionists. As
one critic says:
This was an indirect admission that a white man in chains was more
pitiful to behold than the African similarly placed. Their most
impassioned plea was in behalf of a person little resembling their
swarthy protégés....
The plots are strained and melodramatic. Too often the kindly disposed
master dies suddenly, without having chance to fulfill his promises of
freedom. Too often, on the other hand, the slave’s problems are solved
by breaks of good luck at the book’s end.
Antislavery fiction set up the stereotypes of “the victim”, “the noble
savage” sometimes “the perfect Christian,” and the “tragic octoroon.”
The items of its denunciation are true enough to history, but they
do not represent the real gamut of Negro life and character. The
large plantation, where the abuses incidental to absentee ownership
throve, is still the chief setting, and the smaller, more typical farm
is neglected. The workaday life of the average slave, who, through
fear, ignorance, loyalty or habit did not revolt or run away, and who
learned to accommodate himself so that the whippings and penalties
would be less, is missing. Often, too, antislavery fiction, by
stressing physical punishments, underemphasizes the greater wrongs,
the destruction of manhood, and the ugly code of morality that slavery
fostered. Certain articles of the southern creed were accepted too
easily, such as the belief that the slave-trader was a low boor,
unaccepted socially by the aristocrats. Modern scholars, such as
Frederic Bancroft in _Slave Trading in the Old South_, have shown how
some of the “finest” southern families built up their wealth from slave
dealing.
It might be expected in the “battle of the books” that proslavery
authors would have an advantage in being on the scene. But full or
even partial use was not made of this advantage, the dialect and
local color of the proslavery authors being very little better than
and frequently not so good as those of the abolitionists. Except for
Mrs. Schoolcraft, Harriet Beecher Stowe writes better dialect than
proslavery authors. Hildreth and Mrs. Victor obviously knew southern
life. In their total presentation of social setting, the abolitionists
have not been so one-sided as their detractors have made out. Many show
good masters as well as bad, attacking a system rather than the people.
For comic relief, or for honest realism, many present happier scenes,
but wisely present these as holidays, not as the reality of slavery.
Most important, however, is the difference in characterization. Lowell
said that Mrs. Stowe’s genius “instinctively goes right to the organic
elements of human nature, whether under a white skin or black;” and
at their best the other antislavery authors do like wise. When a
mother is separated from her child, they show the grief of a bereft
mother, not a mother of peculiar racial endowments who cannot love
her children because she and they happen to be black. If she is not
grief-stricken, they lay the blame upon the brutalizing of slavery, not
on a racial characteristic that it soothed slave-holders to believe
in. The antislavery authors may not ever have owned Negroes, but they
started from the premise that Negroes were human. Finally, it must be
said that although both sides went in for melodrama and idealizing, the
antislavery case was much more credible. Facts, even in spite of _Gone
With the Wind_, are abolitionist.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. What noted Americans outside of the novelists, were antislavery in
sympathy?
2. What are probable reasons for the private first printing of _Memoirs
of Archy Moore_ and its later reissue and enlargement?
3. What might explain the fact that the first publisher approached
turned down _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_?
4. List the books that make use of the hero and heroine of mixed blood.
5. How did the use of these characters strengthen the antislavery
argument? How did it weaken?
6. List the books making use of the pure African type as hero.
7. What, according to Melville, would cause Civil War in Vivenza?