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