CHAPTER III

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 hisLiberator.

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’sTales of Oppression, and sometimes for fictionalized biographies such asA Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, A Black Man(1838),Recollections of Slavery(attributed to a runaway slave, 1838) andThe Narrative of James Williams(1838). In 1839 Theodore Weld, as important in the antislavery crusade as Garrison, producedSlavery 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 iskindly treated that has lullabied to sleep four-fifths of the free North and West,” this was the most popular antislavery publication beforeUncle 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 asThe Slave, orMemoirs of Archy Moore. Enlarged in 1852, it was renamedThe 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 asUncle Tom’s Cabin,The White Slaveis 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 Slaveis oneof the most important novels of this controversial period.

Herman Melville’s allegoryMardi(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 betweenwe 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 inCousin 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, orScenes In The Old DominionisSwallow Barnin 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.” Shesees 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 ofUncle Tom’s Cabin or The Man that Was a Thingto theNational 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 theNational Erawas 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’sSlavery 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 asUncle 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. Itwas 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 inUncle 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 ofslave-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 inUncle Tom’s Cabinjust 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 inUncle 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 publishedA Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book as long as the novel, giving sources for all of her charges. TheKey, 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 inUncle Tom’s Cabinconsist? Joel Chandler Harris goes too far in calling it a defenseof 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 inUncle 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 asNina Gordon, was obscured by the lasting fame ofUncle 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 createdsomewhat 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 inThe 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 afterUncle Tom’s Cabinthe first novel by an American Negro appeared. This wasClotel, 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.”Clotelis 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 chiefcharacters, 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’sThe 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 novelBlake, or the Huts of Americain theAnglo-African, but the work was not completed. With a hero and heroine modelled upon George Harris and Eliza, and a number of horrors,Blakeis an imitation ofUncle Tom’sCabin, 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 theYankee 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 ofAdela, 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 picturedonly 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 Octoroonis confused, incredible, and tedious, with only occasional originality.

More popular among the Union soldiers, according to report, than evenUncle 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 husbandhad 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’sNeighbor Jackwood(1856) is far more convincing in its pictures of Vermont than of the deep South. Camille, the daughter of a Frenchman and an octoroonplacée, 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’sCudjo’s Cave(1863), a stirring boys’ book, tells of the conflicts between Unionists andConfederates 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’sPeculiar(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. Heand 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 inSlave 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 ofGone 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 ofMemoirs of Archy Mooreand its later reissue and enlargement?

3. What might explain the fact that the first publisher approached turned downUncle 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?

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