THE LADY OF THE SLAVE STATES.
Mrs. George Haven Putnam, in a very charming essay in the Contemporary Review for December, discusses “The Lady of the Slave States.” She deals gently enough with her subject; she says that the slave-owner’s wife like everybody else with slavery was blighted by its curse, but she demolished very effectually the myth of the gracious fascinating woman of culture who ruled family and estate by the charm of her personality.
The ante-bellum Southern lady never had much to say for herself and was in short not “the Gothic saint in her niche” that tradition pictures, but a kindly little creature surrounded by “Orientalism” and little better off, so far as opportunities for development went, than any lady of the harem.
Mrs. Putnam quotes Miss Martineau, who traveled extensively through the slave States, to show how the system limited the white women and made them “the greatest slaves on the plantation.” Patience was the supreme virtue of the ante-bellum lady—they made the best of a bad state of affairs. Logic she had little or none, and her up-bringing tended to make her a delightful girl but a middle-aged woman of only moderate attractions. And while she was often very kind to her slaves her sensibilities seemed in some measure blunted by perpetual sight of suffering and injustice.
When the war ended the ex-mistresses of slaves showed how good was the material that had been buried under the “Orientalism” of the plantation.