Mrs. Stowe’s second antislavery novel, Dred, A Tale of the Dismal Swamp (1856) later published as Nina Gordon, was obscured by the lasting fame of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, although many critics have preferred it. It lacks the pathos and sweep of the earlier work, but it adds pictures of the “poor whites” and of Negro outlaws in the Dismal Swamp. Harry Gordon is a fuller portrait of George Harris; another “white slave,” he is the successful manager of a plantation while his white half-brother is a wastrel and carouser. His character is analyzed in conventional terms: “the rules about Ham do not pertain” to him, and at times he plaintively wishes to be “a good, honest, black nigger, like Uncle Pomp.” Lizette, his quadroon wife, is similar to Eliza. Traditional Negroes are Old Hundred, the coachman, and Tiff, who in his love for his little white charges is like Uncle Tom. Dred, a fanatical fugitive, the son of Denmark Vesey, is created somewhat after the model of Nat Turner. A new figure for Mrs. Stowe, she does not portray him very successfully. Devoted to the creed of “turning the other cheek,” she shows Dred doing little other than rescuing the virtuous, or urging slaves to escape. He is less an insurrectionist than a Negro Robin Hood. His supernatural appearances recall Scott’s novels, and his longwinded chants are more those of a Hebrew prophet. Other fugitives are more real: Hark, sullen and inflexible, and Jim, the clownish house-servant, pampered but wanting to be free, especially so that he can have a wife all his own. There is local color in scenes like the camp-meeting, but the book is written with a reformer’s zeal, more concerned with urging emancipation and denouncing “the great Christianizing institution” than with re-creating social reality. Antislavery feeling is likewise in The Minister’s Wooing (1859), a tale of New England. Candace, “a powerfully built, majestic black woman, corpulent, heavy,” is traditional in her loyalty to her family, but she is proudly and volubly free: “I ain’t a critter. I’s neider huff nor horns. I’s a reasonable being....”
Negro Novelists. Very shortly after Uncle Tom’s Cabin the first novel by an American Negro appeared. This was Clotel, or The President’s Daughter (1853) by William Wells Brown, an antislavery agent. The book was popular enough for three editions; in the second and third, the heroine is changed to the daughter of “a great statesman.” Clotel is not well written or well constructed, but these failings are common to its type. Scattered throughout the book are intimate glimpses that only one who had been a slave could get: a few dialect rhymes, certainly among the first in American literature, a few comic interludes, and some Negro jokes on the master. But such things are all too scarce. The story is melodrama, and the chief characters, though vouched for by the author, are hardly distinguishable in gentility from the heroines of “blood and tears” romances. Clotel’s mother jumps into the Potomac, committing suicide to elude the slave hunters. Her aunt, after marriage with a white Vermont doctor, who neglects to file papers of manumission, is sold with her beautiful daughters on the block, and dies of the shame. The surpassingly beautiful Clotel is luckier. Sold from one place to another, she finally becomes maidservant for an angelic girl, and falls in love with a handsome black slave. Helping him to escape execution for resisting a white man, she disguises him in her clothes, and remains undetected in the cell. (She is nearly white, and he is black.) She is flogged for this and sold to New Orleans, where an enraptured Frenchman steals her away. After his death, providential for the plot, she meets her former lover in Europe. Back in America, he dies leading a charge in the Civil War, and she becomes an Angel of Mercy to the Federal troops. The novel wanders far afield, and incidents that might have been impelling arguments are told too casually.
Two other Negro novelists took up the novel as their weapon. Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857) takes place chiefly in Philadelphia. It has a new setting and problem, but is badly overwritten. Mr. Garie, a white man, has married a wife only partly white, and race prejudice makes the whole family suffer for it. In contrast, a Negro family lives a happier life in spite of hardships. Martin Delany, a versatile free Negro, began in 1859 a novel Blake, or the Huts of America in the Anglo-African, but the work was not completed. With a hero and heroine modelled upon George Harris and Eliza, and a number of horrors, Blake is an imitation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, best in the pictures of the Southwest which Delany had visited. In 1859 Frances Harper’s “The Two Offers” appeared, telling of a white heroine who devotes her life to the antislavery cause. This is the first short story by a Negro author, but otherwise unimportant.
Other Successors. The Planter’s Victim (1855) by W. W. Smith, republished five years later as the Yankee Slave Driver, is the most gruesome antislavery novel. Richard Dudley, wishing his octoroon half sister for mistress, is infuriated when she marries a nearly white slave, George. He has Caroline flogged with one hundred and fifty lashes and George with four hundred. On such a scale are all the barbarities inflicted. Dudley smashes the skull of Caroline’s baby and, when Caroline dies heartbroken, he insults her corpse. For many years he torments George, and finally after starving him in a New Orleans dungeon, stabs him. The slaves are extreme specimens, George being a “youthful and majestic Apollo in the full glow of masculine beauty and splendor,” and Caroline being magnificently beautiful. Both speak highflown drivel. With all of his supposed manliness, George equals Uncle Tom in saintliness. The book hardly serves its purpose: the villains are too monstrous for belief, the hero too submissive for respect, and the incidents too uniformly gruesome for anything except a collection of horrors.
Among the antislavery authors who, like Mrs. Stowe, advocated colonization is H. L. Hosmer, author of Adela, The Octoroon (1860). Adela, a slave-mistress, though disliking abolitionist books which “merely ransack lawsbooks and newspapers for narratives of torture,” condemns slavery as a fraud and curse. The misery of slaves on Mississippi plantations is pictured only a shade darker than the squalor of fugitives in the North. The happy opportunities of life in Liberia are set in contrast, but without conviction. One of the full length characters is Tidbald, distinguished champion of southern rights, but seducer of his own slave daughter. A mysterious worker of the underground, “broadbrim” Quakers, and an octoroon who preferred to be a kept woman in New Orleans instead of a plantation drudge, could well have been further developed at the expense of the argumentation. Mention is made of the melodies of the slaves and the rhythm of their dancing, but other local color is missing and the dialect is false. Many of the Negroes are true steel, game to the core. At the end Adela is proved to be herself an octoroon. To save her, a loyal body-servant, Captain Jack, heads an insurrection and kills her would-be ravisher. Although disgruntled at slavery, courageous, and intelligent, Jack rebels only when his mistress is in danger. Adela, The Octoroon is confused, incredible, and tedious, with only occasional originality.
More popular among the Union soldiers, according to report, than even Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was a novel published in the Beadle Dime Novel Series, Maum Guineas’ Children, by Mrs. M. V. Victor (1861). The author disclaims any political purpose, but her stress is antislavery. While planters and their families are shown in a sympathetic light, the abuses of slavery are told of in fuller measure. Maum Guinea, mysterious and embittered, has been deprived of her children and husband. She contrives the escape of Hyperion and Rose, a beautiful slave who has been sold by the “kindly” master to a libertine. The novel deals with the Christmas week in the lives of the slaves. Barbecuing, dancing, singing, and hunting are described to show the brighter side, but the stories told around the fire are grim and rebellious. One slave’s husband had been in the Nat Turner uprising; another had attempted to kill his mistress, because she had jealously hounded his mother to death. The novel is simply written and evidently based upon intimate knowledge. Mrs. Victor seems to look upon the pure African type as happy-go-lucky, and finds rebels only among the mixed bloods, and the happy ending is forced. Even with these failings, however, the novel belongs with the most readable and convincing of antislavery novels.
Written to enforce the antagonism of many northerners to the Fugitive Slave Law, since “a human critter’s of more account than all the laws in Christendom,” J. T. Trowbridge’s Neighbor Jackwood (1856) is far more convincing in its pictures of Vermont than of the deep South. Camille, the daughter of a Frenchman and an octoroon placée, is “jest dark enough to be ra’al purty.” Enslaved after her father’s death, untimely as in so many abolitionist novels, she is sold and is subjected to her master’s advances. Robert Greenwood, a northerner, enamored of her, helps her escape to the North; but unwilling to become his mistress, she runs away from him. In Vermont she finds honest love in Hector, who marries her, and goes South to buy her freedom. Left in Vermont, she is hidden away by Neighbor Jackwood, until Robert, now a full-fledged scoundrel, tells the kidnappers where she is. She is rescued in the nick of time by Hector, who brings her papers of freedom. There is a great deal of mystery and suspense, Camille’s hiding away in a haystack on a stormy night being vividly described. But the book is more sensational than revelatory of Negro life; and the southern scenes are hastily passed over and conventional.
The same author’s Cudjo’s Cave (1863), a stirring boys’ book, tells of the conflicts between Unionists and Confederates in Eastern Tennessee in the first year of the war. Three Negro characters are prominent: Toby, the faithful servant; Cudjo, ape-like in appearance, but cunning, powerful, and vindictive, the unbroken African; and Pomp, “magnificently proportioned, straight as a pillar, and black as ebony, of noble features.” Pomp has been educated abroad by an indulgent master. As usual in these novels, the benefactor dies, and the new master is tyrannical. Pomp escapes to the ravines of the Cumberland Mountains, and there meets Cudjo, whose scarred back was “the most powerful of antislavery documents.” They eke out an existence in the cave, with the connivance of slaves who keep them posted; in their turn they help runaways, succor abolitionists is distress, and finally aid in overthrowing the Confederate guerrillas. The Negroes and the Unionists are too good, and the Rebels too villainous, but the novel has the suspense of escape and capture, and throws light upon an interesting chapter of history.
In spite of its unwieldy plot, Epes Sargent’s Peculiar (1863) is one of the most rewarding of antislavery novels. It is not a mere recounting of horrors. “It ain’t de whippins ... dat make de wrong of slavery. De mos’ kindest thing dey could do de slave would be ter treat him so he wouldn’t stay a slave nohow,” says one character. Another insists that if slaves were so brutalized as to be contented, slavery would be doubly cursed, and rejoices that “there is manhood in them to make them at least unhappy.” The slave Peek, named for the “Peculiar Institution,” has full share of this manhood, and is defiant, provident, intelligent, and, strangely for the antislavery gallery, skeptical of religion. Vance, the white hero, disguises himself as Gashface, a mulatto underground agent, out of hatred for the system that had killed his octoroon wife. He and Peek, as climax to their safeguarding the virtuous, and confounding wrong-doers, discover a beautiful white girl who had been sold into slavery, and rescue her from the lust of her master. The story is sensational, but Sargent shows an understanding of such historic matters as the kidnapping from northern States, the workings of the underground, and the easy acceptance of concubinage by southern society. He shows the slaves to be secretive, relying on their “grapevine telegraph” for mutual protection; slyly humorous, waging their own guerrilla warfare against a stronger enemy. Sargent goes below the surface and gets at social causes, and because of this his book is frequently persuasive.
Summary. Antislavery fiction naturally concentrated upon the abuses that proslavery fiction left unmentioned: slave-sales, the breaking up of families, shameful practises at the slave-mart, slave jails and coffles, whippings, overwork and concubinage. Slave discontent was stressed. Negro insurrectionists, outlaws, fugitives and underground agents are favorite characters, and since they existed in large numbers, antislavery fiction makes a contribution here to realism. Unfortunately the rebellious and militant are generally shown to be of mixed blood, like George Harris, whereas the more African type is shown as docile, like Uncle Tom. Some novelists depart from this pattern, but the pattern persists and has remained wrongly influential. Moreover, the heroine is frequently a quadroon or octoroon, a concession, unconscious perhaps, to race snobbishness even among abolitionists. As one critic says: