CHAPTER II

THE PLANTATION TRADITION: PRO-SLAVERY FICTION

The Plantation Tradition.The growth and accuracy of the plantation tradition have been excellently studied inThe 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 abenevolent 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 aristocratsare 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 successivelydismissedfrom 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 keepSwallow Barnfrom being influential upon literature about Negro life and character.

In his plays, especiallyThe Gladiator(1831), Robert Montgomery Bird took an antislavery stand,but his satirical novelSheppard 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’sYankee 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 ofUncle Tom’s Cabin(1852), there were at least fourteen proslavery novels published, besides numerous pamphlets, articles, and a long poem. W. L. G. Smith’sLife At The South, orUncle Tom’s Cabin As It Is(1852) was struck off while the iron was hot, borrowing illustrations fromSwallow Barnand passages fromThe 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 runsaway. 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.

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, orSlavery 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 reservedfor 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’sAunt Phyllis’ Cabinlikewise 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’sUncle 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. InMarcus Warland(1852) and inLinda(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 andshining 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 inThe 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 Lowlyis full of piety toward southern divinity.

The Defense Sums Up Its Case.Mrs. Henry R. Schoolcraft’sThe 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 hogsand 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 Gauntletis 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 Dealerby a Texan (1860) has for its subtitleAn 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 ofThe 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 ofUncle 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 thePro-Slavery Argument, and of the Reverend Priest inThe 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, becomestheNegro slave; a poor unemployed wretch becomesthefreedman.

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 thatSwallow Barnwas 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?

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