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 his Liberator.
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’s Tales of Oppression, and sometimes for fictionalized biographies such as A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, A Black Man (1838), Recollections of Slavery (attributed to a runaway slave, 1838) and The Narrative of James Williams (1838). In 1839 Theodore Weld, as important in the antislavery crusade as Garrison, produced Slavery 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 is kindly treated that has lullabied to sleep four-fifths of the free North and West,” this was the most popular antislavery publication before Uncle 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 as The Slave, or Memoirs of Archy Moore. Enlarged in 1852, it was renamed The 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 as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The White Slave is 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 Slave is one of the most important novels of this controversial period.
Herman Melville’s allegory Mardi (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 between we 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 in Cousin 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.