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 of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), there were at least fourteen proslavery novels published, besides numerous pamphlets, articles, and a long poem. W. L. G. Smith’s Life At The South, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin As It Is (1852) was struck off while the iron was hot, borrowing illustrations from Swallow Barn and passages from The 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 runs away. 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.