This was an indirect admission that a white man in chains was more pitiful to behold than the African similarly placed. Their most impassioned plea was in behalf of a person little resembling their swarthy protégés....
The plots are strained and melodramatic. Too often the kindly disposed master dies suddenly, without having chance to fulfill his promises of freedom. Too often, on the other hand, the slave’s problems are solved by breaks of good luck at the book’s end.
Antislavery fiction set up the stereotypes of “the victim”, “the noble savage” sometimes “the perfect Christian,” and the “tragic octoroon.” The items of its denunciation are true enough to history, but they do not represent the real gamut of Negro life and character. The large plantation, where the abuses incidental to absentee ownership throve, is still the chief setting, and the smaller, more typical farm is neglected. The workaday life of the average slave, who, through fear, ignorance, loyalty or habit did not revolt or run away, and who learned to accommodate himself so that the whippings and penalties would be less, is missing. Often, too, antislavery fiction, by stressing physical punishments, underemphasizes the greater wrongs, the destruction of manhood, and the ugly code of morality that slavery fostered. Certain articles of the southern creed were accepted too easily, such as the belief that the slave-trader was a low boor, unaccepted socially by the aristocrats. Modern scholars, such as Frederic Bancroft in Slave Trading in the Old South, have shown how some of the “finest” southern families built up their wealth from slave dealing.
It might be expected in the “battle of the books” that proslavery authors would have an advantage in being on the scene. But full or even partial use was not made of this advantage, the dialect and local color of the proslavery authors being very little better than and frequently not so good as those of the abolitionists. Except for Mrs. Schoolcraft, Harriet Beecher Stowe writes better dialect than proslavery authors. Hildreth and Mrs. Victor obviously knew southern life. In their total presentation of social setting, the abolitionists have not been so one-sided as their detractors have made out. Many show good masters as well as bad, attacking a system rather than the people. For comic relief, or for honest realism, many present happier scenes, but wisely present these as holidays, not as the reality of slavery. Most important, however, is the difference in characterization. Lowell said that Mrs. Stowe’s genius “instinctively goes right to the organic elements of human nature, whether under a white skin or black;” and at their best the other antislavery authors do like wise. When a mother is separated from her child, they show the grief of a bereft mother, not a mother of peculiar racial endowments who cannot love her children because she and they happen to be black. If she is not grief-stricken, they lay the blame upon the brutalizing of slavery, not on a racial characteristic that it soothed slave-holders to believe in. The antislavery authors may not ever have owned Negroes, but they started from the premise that Negroes were human. Finally, it must be said that although both sides went in for melodrama and idealizing, the antislavery case was much more credible. Facts, even in spite of Gone With the Wind, are abolitionist.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. What noted Americans outside of the novelists, were antislavery in sympathy?
2. What are probable reasons for the private first printing of Memoirs of Archy Moore and its later reissue and enlargement?
3. What might explain the fact that the first publisher approached turned down Uncle Tom’s Cabin?
4. List the books that make use of the hero and heroine of mixed blood.
5. How did the use of these characters strengthen the antislavery argument? How did it weaken?