6. List the books making use of the pure African type as hero.
7. What, according to Melville, would cause Civil War in Vivenza?
CHAPTER IV
RECONSTRUCTION: THE GLORIOUS SOUTH
The Triumph of The Tradition. If Uncle Tom’s Cabin triumphed in the antebellum “battle of the books,” being widely remembered while its opponents are forgotten, the plantation tradition was to score a signal victory in the Reconstruction. Although no longer needed to defend a tottering institution, it was now needed to prove that Negroes were happy as slaves and hopelessly unequipped for freedom, so that slavery could be resurrected in practise though not in name. Ancestor worshippers, the sons of a fighting generation, remembering bitterly the deaths of their fathers, uncles, or brothers, the sufferings of their families and themselves, brought the passion of the defeated to their descriptions. Many, politically astute, used the plantation tradition to further their ambitions.
The authors of the reconstruction were better writers than their antebellum predecessors. Moreover, they were farther from slavery, and since their memories were often those of childhood, they idealized to a much greater degree. Some proslavery authors, like William Thompson, had admitted, for instance, that many slaves had the harshest kind of masters; others unconsciously allowed facts to enter that their descendants considered too uncouth for mention. Nostalgic yearning brought it about that, according to Gaines:
Slavery was softened until whatever may have been evil was regarded as accidental.... The scale of life was steadily enlarged, the colors were made increasingly vivid. Estates swelled in size and mansions grew proportionately great. Gentlemen were perfected in courtly grace, gay girls in loveliness, slaves in immeasurable devotion.
With the seductiveness of any past seen through “the golden haze of retrospect,” with realism to the surface of Negro life, disarmingly affectionate references to Negroes of the old school, and a mastery of the tricks of fiction, the plantation tradition came into its own. The Negro was established as contented slave, entertaining child and docile ward, until misled by “radical” agitators, when he became a dangerous beast.
Local Color. Following Bret Harte’s discovery of the picturesque and quaint in California’s past, local colorists sprang up all over the nation. Many southern regions were staked out as claims worth mining. Charles Egbert Craddock in the Tennessee mountains, Mark Twain in the Mississippi valley, George Washington Cable in fabulous New Orleans brought the wealth of their discoveries to a literature that had fallen on lean years. Coincidentally with the rise of the local colorists, a new interest in the South, the scene of America’s greatest war, was awakening. Magazines, especially Scribner’s, attempted to slake this curiosity. A great outburst of dialect stories resulted. Among the first of the writers to realize the picturesque interest of the southern Negro was Sherwood Bonner (Mrs. Katherine McDowell), a pioneer in local color fiction as Russell was in poetry (she had even written dialect poetry of the Negro before Russell’s book appeared). Many of her Dialect Tales (1878) and Suwanee River Tales (1884) are about Negroes. They are interesting as first attempts, but they illustrate the chief weaknesses of local color: they reveal odd turns of speech and customs but the characterization is superficial and condescending. Southern local colorists were soon to sweep the North with a different formula; fidelity to speech and manners was to be combined with regret “for the dear dead days beyond recall.”
Thomas Nelson Page. Most elegiac of these authors, and probably most persuasive in casting a golden glow over the antebellum South is Thomas Nelson Page. With a mastery of pathos and stirring melodrama, his In Ole Virginia (1887) sets a pattern that time has not been able to wear out. The three best known stories of this volume are “Marse Chan,” “Meh Lady,” and “Unc’ Edinburg’s Drownin’.” They are told in the dialect of eastern Virginia, accurately recorded. The literary device used in all three stories is quite simple: an old Negro, garrulous in praise of the old days, tells a tale of handsome cavaliers and lovely ladies, with stress upon the love between master and slave. Marse Chan saves a slave’s life at the cost of his own sight; Uncle Edinburg is saved by his young master from a raging torrent; Uncle Billy defends his charges from marauding Yankee soldiers, and supports them after the war. The stories end in lovers’ meetings; as in Shakespeare, the courtship of lord and lady is balanced by the comical courtship of the servants. Page has his three ventriloquist’s dummies agreeing upon the blessedness of slavery. Sam says: