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, or Slavery 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 reserved for 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’s Aunt Phyllis’ Cabin likewise 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’s Uncle 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. In Marcus Warland (1852) and in Linda (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 and shining 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.