Sentimental Borders: Genre and Geography in the Literature of Civil War and Reconstruction
The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters
Citation Silk, Emily Marie. 2020. Sentimental Borders: Genre and Geography in the Literature of Civil War and Reconstruction. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.
Citable link https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37365920
Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA
Sentimental Borders: Genre and Geography in the Literature of Civil War and Reconstruction
A dissertation presented
by
Emily Marie Silk
to
The Department of English
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the subject of
English
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
May 2020
© 2020 Emily Marie Silk
All rights reserved.
Dissertation Advisors: Amanda Claybaugh, Deidre Lynch Emily Marie Silk
Sentimental Borders: Genre and Geography in the Literature of Civil War and Reconstruction
Abstract
This dissertation resituates four popular antebellum sentimental novelists—Maria
Cummins, Mary Jane Holmes, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Susan Warner—as novelists of Civil
War and Reconstruction. Turning from their well-known novels of the 1850s to their less-studied works of the 1860s and 1870s, I argue that these novelists experimented with genre and geography to address—and sometimes, to avoid—the moral, political, and ideological underpinnings of the
Civil War. While their popular first books were foundational to the evolution of the sentimental novel during the 1850s, their later novels enable a more precise account of how popular mid- century sentimentalists grappled with the enormous historical and cultural shifts of this period.
On one level, the dissertation argues that these novelists experimented with the generic boundaries of the sentimental novel to produce narrative accounts of the Civil War and
Reconstruction that do not fit neatly into the categories of their earlier works. In Chapter 1, I illustrate how Cummins manipulated the conventions of the murder mystery and the historical romance to enter an ongoing national debate about the legality of secession; in Chapter 2, how
Holmes manipulated the conventions of the realist novel to depict the brutality of Civil War combat; and in Chapter 3, how Stowe and Warner adopted the conventions of the travel narrative to imagine fantasies of laborless agricultural production in postbellum Florida. In Chapter 4, meanwhile, I examine the migration Bleeding Kansas—a pre-Civil War conflict over the possible expansion of slavery into Kansas territory—from anti-slavery sentimental discourse in the 1850s to historical romance in the 1880s and 1890s.
iii
On another level, I argue that these authors also responded to the challenges of representing
Civil War and Reconstruction by displacing them to unexpected geographic and chronological borderlands—including rural New Jersey during the War of 1812, Florida orange groves in the
1870s, a deserted Caribbean island, and Kansas territory in the 1850s. Chapters 3 and 4, in particular, filter the story of Civil War and Reconstruction through two states on the “borders” of the major conflict: Florida and Kansas. At these geographic edges, I uncover regionalized alternatives to familiar reconciliation narratives in the war’s aftermath.
iv
Sentimental Borders: Genre and Geography in the Literature of Civil War and Reconstruction
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER 1 Courtroom Civil War: Piracy and Treason in Maria Cummins’s Haunted Hearts 22
Cold Sympathy: Haunted Hearts as Sentimental Murder Mystery 25 Confederacy on Trial: Haunted Hearts as History 36 Coda: Taming the Pirate in E. D. E. N. Southworth’s Britomarte, the Man-Hater 55
CHAPTER 2 Sentimental Gore: The Serialized Civil War Fiction of Mary Jane Holmes 66
The Making of Mary Jane Holmes 69 Sentimentalism and the Civil War 74 Getting Real: The “Inexorable Veracity” of John William De Forest 79 First Shots: Rose Mather and Annie Graham 87 Genre and the New York Weekly 98 Domestic Turns: Bad Hugh and Family Pride 106 Politics of Reconciliation: From Annie Graham’s First Love to Post-Reconstruction 112
CHAPTER 3 Florida Fantasies of Reconstruction: Leisure and Labor in the Orange Groves of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Susan Warner 120
Finding Florida in Postbellum Travel Literature 122 King Cotton and the Florida Orange 127 Stowe’s Palmetto Leaves: From Labor to Leisure 132 Warner’s Bread and Oranges: Visions of a Laborless South 152 Stowe and Warner in Context: Orange Cultivation in Other Popular Florida Travel Literature 172 Coda: Playful Labor and Laborious Play in Sarah Stuart Robbins’s One Happy Winter 180
v
CHAPTER 4 Border Ruffians and Free Staters: Mythologies of Bleeding Kansas in the Post-Reconstruction Historical Romance 188
Early 1880s: Two Visions in the Wake of the Exoduster Migration 196 Albion Tourgée’s Kansas: Hopeful Rehabilitation 199 Two Kansas Romances: Narratives of Pre-Conciliation 209 The Bleeding Kansas Historical Romance, 1890–1905 226 The Failed Promise of Free Kansas 236 Abandoning Kansas: Border Crossings in Pauline Hopkins’s Winona 242
CONCLUSION 256
BIBLIOGRAPHY 258
vi
List of Figures
Figure 1. Publication History: Mary Jane Holmes’s Civil War Novels, 1862–1868.
Figure 2. “The Confederate Officer Wounded at the Battle of Bull Run,” New York Weekly, 17 (15), March 6, 1862: 1.
Figure 3. “Farewell to the Husband and Hero,” New York Weekly, 17 (20), April 10, 1862: 1.
Figure 4. “Just across the river from Palatka lies the beautiful orange grove owned by Colonel Hart,” James Wells Champney, The Great South (1875), p. 402.
Figure 5. “Orange-Trees,” George Barbour, Florida for Tourists, Invalids, and Settlers (1882), p. 240.
vii
Acknowledgements
I am incredibly grateful to my dissertation advisors—Amanda Claybaugh, Deidre Lynch, and Leah Price—for their guidance in developing this project from start to finish. Their endlessly generative insights and profoundly generous mentorship have made it possible for me to reach this point.
I am also especially grateful to Philip Fisher, Ju Yon Kim, Lisa New, and Elaine Scarry, all of whom have deeply influenced my graduate studies through their teaching and mentorship; to Jeff Dolven, Diana Fuss, and Will Howarth, who inspired and advised me during my years as an undergraduate English major at Princeton University; and to Nina Berler, Joshua Gebhardt, Nicole Knapp, and David Yastremski, whose teaching laid the earliest foundations for this work.
For their kindness in assisting me with research on Mary Jane Holmes and the New York Weekly, I would like to thank Grace Wagner and Natasha Bishop at the Syracuse University Special Collections Research Center.
For generous support that allowed me to complete research for this project, my thanks to the GSAS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, the GSAS Merit Term-Time Research Fellowship, and the Harvard English Department’s Dexter Summer Research Travel Fellowship.
I am grateful to the undergraduates whom I have had the privilege to teach and advise over the last several years. Their boundless enthusiasm for the study of literature has made teaching in the Harvard English Department a source of great joy.
I would also like to thank my colleagues and friends, who provided support in many different forms as I completed this project. Special thanks to Amanda Auerbach, Marina Di Bartolo, Thomas Dolinger, Eliza Holmes, Kelly Lack, Mary Beth Lee, Jessi Lopes, Heather Lowe, Mariah Min, Miles Osgood, Will Porter, Hannah Rosefield, Anne Silk, Christopher Spaide, Michelle Taylor, and Janet Zong York. Very special thanks to Adrienne Raphel for her endless support and insight, which sharpened my thinking in every chapter.
This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Catherine Costa and Donald Silk, who have encouraged and cheered me through every step of the writing process. The project itself has benefited enormously from their insights, as well as from my mother’s eagle-eyed proofreading. I am incredibly grateful to them both, for their support in this and all things.
viii
Introduction
In the summer of 1873, Susan Warner entered a brief journal reflection on her latest novel. “Make myself melancholy over ‘Daisy,’” she noted. “Don’t see how I came to write such a sad book.”1
Warner herself was well known at this time as the author of The Wide, Wide World (1850), an enormously popular sentimental novel about the education of its orphaned young heroine Ellen
Montgomery. After suffering numerous injustices and learning to persevere with Christian sympathy and forgiveness, Ellen marries her tutor and ascends into an upper-middle class way of life. The “sad book” that Warner mentioned in her journal two decades later, Daisy in the Field, is in many ways a melancholic reversal of The Wide, Wide World. Published in 1869, it concludes a trilogy of novels tracing the development of heroine Daisy Randolph in the turbulent years just before and during the Civil War. Like her predecessor Ellen, young Daisy grows into a model of
Christian sympathy. However, Daisy also clashes with her family over secession and slavery after experiencing life on a Southern cotton plantation; must bid farewell to her fiancé when he enlists to fight in the Union Army; and volunteers as a nurse at a hospital, where she is reunited with her love only to watch him die in her care. The novel’s abortive ending returns its heroine from “the field” back to her secluded childhood home, where her hard-hearted mother mourns the death of the Confederacy. While Daisy evolves into a paragon of Christian sympathy and perseverance,
Warner’s conclusion does not allow her to progress from the divided house in which she began.
Although Warner claims not to know how she wrote “such a sad book,” her melancholia registers the palpable effect of the Civil War on Daisy’s foray into the wide, wide world—and on her own approach to writing the sentimental novel of female development. Although Daisy is suffused with the Christian sympathy characteristic of Warner’s previous heroines, the war itself
1 Anna B. Warner, Susan Warner, 471. Introduction circumscribes her journey to her childhood home, where fractious political and moral divides continue to reverberate through her family. The novel adopts all the outward signifiers of the sentimental bildungsroman, without actually becoming a coherent narrative of development. In referring to Daisy in the Field as a “sad book,” Warner conveyed an imprecise affective indication of this generic shift. The next time that she wrote about a young girl coming of age in the American
South, it would be in a radically different form. In the midst of Reconstruction, Warner published a didactic children’s novel set in 1870s Florida, where young Maggie Candlish—nicknamed
Daisy—learns religious lessons on an orange plantation evacuated of Civil War history. No scholarly account of Warner has successfully elucidated her attempts to embody the Civil War and
Reconstruction in fiction—or articulated what these attempts signify about her evolution as a sentimental novelist and about the sentimental novel’s place in American culture after 1865.
Early accounts of sentimental fiction suggested that the Civil War presented an insurmountable challenge to the genre: with its ideologies rooted in Christian faith and the family, it simply could not respond to the tragedy and atrocity that the war precipitated on a national scale.2
In the last two decades, scholarship on the literature of Civil War and Reconstruction has proven this assumption to be fundamentally untrue—and significantly expanded the canon to include works by many women writers who were overlooked and undervalued in previous criticism. In
Disarming the Nation (1999), Elizabeth Young replaced the long-held assumption that Civil War literature was the property of predominantly white male writers by charting a new course through a rich archive of women’s texts published during and after the war. Lyde Cullen Sizer’s The
Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War (2000), Sarah E. Gardner’s Blood
2 See, for example, Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction (1978), which suggests that the Civil War eroded antebellum “domestic ideology” (50); and Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents (1987), which dates “the end of the sentimental hegemony” to the early 1870s and attributes this shift in part to the destructive impact of the Civil War (188, 187).
2 Introduction and Irony (2006), and Sharon Talley’s Southern Women Novelists and the Civil War (2014) continued to expand this archive of female authors. Meanwhile, Kathleen Diffley’s Where My
Heart is Turning Ever (1992) offered the first substantive account of Civil War short fiction published in popular magazines between 1861 and 1876; likewise, Alice Fahs’ The Imagined Civil
War (2003) recovered hundreds of popular wartime poems, song books, novels, and stories— including a significant outpouring of periodical literature—published in both the North and the
South. This scholarship has not only restored women’s experiences to Civil War history, but also resituated genres traditionally dominated by women writers—in particular, sentimental and domestic fiction—firmly within the canon of Civil War literature.
As these scholars have shown, the sentimental mode was foundational to literary accounts of the Civil War in the nineteenth century. Both during and after the war, sentimentality offered a set of coherent frameworks for absorbing the impact of death on a massive scale. Particularly well- suited to organizing and sanitizing the horrors of war, sentimentalism reframed soldiers’ deaths for mid-century readers in comforting and usually Christian terms.3 Sentimentalism also undergirded numerous Civil War fictions focused on women’s experiences of the war at home. As
Fahs points out, such works often emphasized women’s “domestic contributions” to the war effort and their patriotic sacrifice of sons, husbands, and brothers (121). They also prioritized the expression of women’s emotions, deploying sentimental language to vocalize female suffering and make sense of the sacrifices that war demanded of women (129). Itself a domestic conflict, the war inspired stories of women’s home struggles as well as their struggles to make public spaces of war—the hospital, for instance—as home-like as possible for the wounded and dying.
3 See Drew Faust, This Republic of Suffering (2008); Fahs, The Imagined Civil War (2001); and Sizer, The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850–1872 (2000).
3 Introduction
In the aftermath of the Civil War, sentimental fiction also became integral to promoting a culture of reconciliation between the North and the South. Antebellum abolitionist sentimentalism had helped to stoke the flames of war, in a movement embodied by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s exhortation to “feel right” about slavery in her influential novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Yet as Nina Silber has shown in The Romance of Reunion (1993), Northern culture embraced sentimentalism as a mode of national unification during the Reconstruction era. After the Civil
War, “a romantic and sentimental culture of conciliation” steadily came to promote sectional reunion through idyllic visions of the Old South (2). Narratives of reconciliation repeatedly drew on idealized “regional iconography” of the antebellum South to create a “mawkish and sentimental view of reunion,” at once venerating the Southern planter class and backing away from political advocacy for black Americans (5, 6). Northern reconciliation fiction, moreover, often culminated in a symbolic marriage that reinforced the outcome of the war, wherein “the young and energetic northern hero always won the heart of the compliant southern belle” (123). In Race and Reunion
(2001), David W. Blight further clarified the effect of such romantic ideologies in American memory. Blight shows that Americans collectively chose a “reconciliationist vision” of the Civil
War: in the name of reunion, postbellum culture ensconced the war in a “shell of sentimentalism,” thereby ensuring that “romance triumphed over reality, [and] sentimental remembrance won over ideological memory” of the war and its causes (4). Idealizing the antebellum South and the “lost cause” of the Confederacy in romantic rhetoric, many Americans promoted "sectional healing" at the expense of “racial justice” in the decades following the Civil War (2, 3).4
4 In Remembering the Civil War (2013), however, Caroline Janney complicates this narrative of postbellum reconciliation, arguing that “reconciliation was never the predominant memory of the war” for veterans and their children (6).
4 Introduction
Yet while scholarship has clearly established sentimentalism’s centrality to the literature of Civil War and Reconstruction, Susan Warner—one of the most prominent sentimental novelists in America during the 1850s—remains noticeably absent from all accounts of this literature.
During Reconstruction, Warner published all three of her Daisy novels—roughly a thousand pages of prose—as well as her children’s book set in postbellum Florida, Bread and Oranges. Yet the scholarly narrative about her writing remains largely focused on The Wide, Wide World and—to a lesser extent—her second novel, Queechy (1852).5 Most of Warner’s subsequent books have received little to no scholarly attention, reflecting a widespread assumption that she essentially wrote lesser versions of The Wide, Wide World until she died.6 Rejecting that premise, this dissertation resituates Warner as a novelist of Civil War and Reconstruction—along with three fellow authors who also achieved great popularity as sentimental writers in the antebellum period:
Maria Cummins, Mary Jane Holmes, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
In the early 1850s, each of these authors published a highly successful debut novel in the genre of sentimental fiction: Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) was soon followed by
Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854), and Holmes’s Tempest and Sunshine (1854). While Stowe’s postbellum writing has generated scholarly interest in recent
5 Jane Tompkins made the first sustained case for Warner’s importance to literary history in Sensational Designs (1985), arguing that the sheer popularity of The Wide, Wide World with female readers in the nineteenth century justified it as an object of serious study (see ch. 6). Subsequent scholarship on Warner also focused on The Wide, Wide World, articulating various facets of its historical, cultural, and aesthetic complexity; debating the relative power of its heroine Ellen; and weighing the virtues of her mentor and future husband. See, for example, Joanne Dobson, “The Hidden Hand” (1986); G. M. Goshgarian, To Kiss the Chastening Rod (1992), ch. 3; Veronica Stewart, “The Wild Side of The Wide, Wide World” (1994); and Catharine O’Connell, “We Must Sorrow” (1997).
6 It is a widely held, but not an uncontested assumption. Cynthia Williams argues that Warner conceived a radically different version of the female bildungsroman in her second novel Queechy (1852), where the heroine enters the professional world in ways more associated with a male coming-of-age narrative. And in a recent doctoral dissertation, Rereading, Rewriting, and Recovering the Literary Legacy of Susan Warner (2015), Amanda Benigni argues that many of Warner’s later postbellum novels reflect her evolving ideas about gender, religion, charity, and labor reform.
5 Introduction years, the later works of both Cummins and Holmes—like Warner—have suffered from a lack of attention. Scholarship has predominantly focused on their antebellum publications, with particular attention to those first novels. Foundationally, this dissertation argues that Holmes, Cummins, and
Warner made significant contributions to the literature of Civil War and Reconstruction. Turning from their well-known novels of the 1850s to their less-studied works of the 1860s and 1870s, I argue that these novelists actually experimented with both genre conventions and geographic displacements in telling ways. While their first books were foundational to the evolution of the sentimental novel in the 1850s, their works of the 1860s and 1870s reveal how the nation’s most
prominent sentimentalists responded to the enormous historical and cultural shifts of this period.
The Rise of Sentimentalism in Antebellum America
Cummins, Holmes, Stowe, and Warner all rose to fame during a golden age of American women’s writing. In the 1850s, their publications in the genre of the sentimental novel set these four women among the nation’s most popular and widely read authors. Since feminist criticism first revived academic interest in the sentimental novel during the 1970s and 1980s, a wealth of scholarship has explored the aesthetic, political, and moral stakes of its most defining feature: sympathy.7 Indeed, the sentimental novel is perhaps best identified in terms of its affective orientation. As Philip Fisher notes in Hard Facts (1985), sentimental fiction makes human sympathy or compassion its “central moral category” (95). Since the “primary emotional goal” of sentimental narration is to produce compassion in the reader, its “primary subject matter” therefore becomes the suffering that should inspire a compassionate response (105). Cindy Weinstein also locates the work of the sentimental
7 In Woman’s Fiction (1978), Nina Baym led the effort to recover many of these women writers. Surveying hundreds of mid-century female bildungsromane by American women, Baym rejected the term “sentimental novel” to describe this body of work and settled on “woman’s fiction” instead. In a 1998 essay, she attributed this decision to “the longstanding invidious association of sentimentalism with foolish femininity” and the fact that the coming-of-age overplot “is not obviously sentimental” (335, 337fn4).
6 Introduction novel in the creation of sympathetic bonds, emphasizing the family’s centrality to the development of those bonds: “Sentimental fictions are about finding the right place where sympathy flourishes and understanding that place and those people as one’s home and ‘family’” (9).8 Rehearsing forms of sympathy, usually with the explicit goal of reproducing sympathy in its readers, the sentimental novel often denotes these sympathetic responses by representing outward displays of emotion: most famously, or notoriously, an abundance of tears.9
Sentimentality is closely associated with domesticity—so much so that the terms
“sentimental novel” and “domestic novel” at times are used in confusingly interchangeable ways.10
If sentimentality signals a novel’s affective orientation around sympathy, domesticity generally signals a novel’s central focus on home and family—often with particular attention to women’s experiences. The sentimental novel’s exploration of sympathy does traditionally take place within domestic space and through family relations. As a term of art, therefore, “sentimental fiction” often signals the parallel presence of domestic concerns.11 Forms of suffering and loss in the sentimental
8 Weinstein argues that such bonds are strongest between members of adoptive—not biological—families in these novels. On sympathy as the heart of nineteenth-century American sentimental literature and culture, see also: Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs (1985); Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments (2001); Kristin Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature (2002); Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy (1997); Joanne Dobson, “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature” (1997); and June Howard, “What is Sentimentality?” (1997).
9 The notoriety dates back to Fred Pattee’s The Feminine Fifties (1940) which famously enumerated and ridiculed the number of times that Ellen Montgomery cries in The Wide, Wide World. Tompkins led the reclamation of women’s tears in the sentimental novel, arguing that Ellen’s emotional outpourings are a “catharsis of rage and grief,” a coping mechanism in the face of her own powerlessness (173).
10 Howard’s “What is Sentimentality?” urged scholars to “make a systematic distinction between sentiment and nineteenth-century domestic ideology,” given the often “confusing elision between sentimentality and domesticity” (63, 73). Weinstein aptly captures the entanglement of these terms as well: “If literary critics can agree on anything…surely it would be that the everyday experiences of the domestic drive the plots, the characters, the scenes, and the meanings of sentimental literature, domestic literature, women’s literature, whatever one wishes to call that body of fiction whose primary subjects, one can only conclude, are feelings and families” (8).
11 Likewise, “domestic fiction” usually signals the parallel presence of sentimentality. I use “sentimental novel” as the term of art in this dissertation, given my focus on affective preoccupations.
7 Introduction novel have traditionally been anchored in the disintegration of the family, as Weinstein has shown in analyzing the genre’s penchant for orphan stories that launch young heroines into the world through the loss of their parents. Slave narratives and other abolitionist writing also deployed images of family suffering and separation in service of anti-slavery activism. According to Fisher, the affective power of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin resides in its many scenes depicting the separation of slave families (101–102). Valerie Smith likewise has shown how Harriet Jacobs’s
1861 slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, strategically deployed sentimental tropes to point out the destruction that slavery wreaked on the families of both slaves and masters.12
Since academic interest in the sentimental novel first revived, scholars have debated the quality of this literature. Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture (1977) and Jane
Tompkins’s Sensational Designs (1985) have framed the terms of this debate since their publication. Douglas famously brought sentimental fiction to the foreground of literary study, but also derided sentimentalism for its mawkish displays of emotion and overwrought language.
Tompkins’ Sensational Designs (1985), meanwhile, persuasively argued that sentimental fictions merited study on the basis of their historical significance and popularity. Sensational Designs also foregrounded historicist methodologies, suggesting that these novels were most productively read
“in relation to the religious beliefs, social practices, and economic and political circumstances that produced them” (xiii). While this orientation towards historical and cultural context profoundly shaped subsequent scholarship on the sentimental novel, others have since argued convincingly for the value of reintroducing close reading to the study of the genre.13
12 See Valerie Smith, “‘Loopholes of Retreat,’” in Reading Black, Reading Feminist (1990), ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
13 See, for example, Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature; and Dobson, “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature.”
8 Introduction
Scholars also continue to debate the political and moral stakes associated with the sentimental novel’s ideology of sympathy. The sentimental novel came of age in the eighteenth century, and its prioritization of sympathy is intimately tied to its celebration of sensibility, a concept drawn from moral philosophy and widely popularized in eighteenth-century English literature. Sympathy signals the virtue of those characters who display it, and the virtue of readers who mirror them by extending their own sympathies. The ability to feel sympathy is a marker of human moral goodness; and the cultivation of sympathy makes the sentimental novel, in a sense, an inherently moral project. As Stowe famously states at the end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the “one thing that every individual can do” in the face of slavery is “see to it that they feel right” (632).
Optimistic readers of the sentimental hold that sympathy serves as a vehicle to close the gap between the self and others. Fisher, for example, argues that sentimentality is inherently democratic because it deploys sympathy to make an “experimental extension of humanity” to marginalized figures in social life: “the prisoner, the madman, the child, the very old, the animal, and the slave” (99). Suffering is the vehicle through which these groups attain humanity, in the eyes of fellow characters as well as in the eyes of the sentimental novel’s implicitly white middle- class readers. For this reason, many nineteenth-century sentimental novelists deployed sympathy to advance social and legal reforms: support for temperance and poverty relief, protest against the forced removal of Native Americans, and advocacy both for and against the abolition of slavery.14
More recently, however, scholars have productively interrogated the political and ethical stakes of sympathy in the sentimental novel. While Fisher calls the sentimental novel “the most radical
14 On sentimentalism and social reform in the nineteenth century, see for example, Mary Lenard, Preaching Pity (1999); Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (1999); Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments (2001); and Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility (2004). In Apocalyptic Sentiments (2000), however, Kevin Pelletier argues that sympathy is not the only affect undergirding sentimentality: nineteenth-century abolitionists, he shows, wielded a form of sentimentality that depended as much on fear to encourage reform.
9 Introduction popular form available to middle-class culture” (91), scholars including Elizabeth Barnes, Saidiya
Hartman, Alice Kaplan, and Laura Wexler have instead cast the sentimental novel as an inherently conservative form that protects dominant ideologies.15
The novels of Cummins, Holmes, Stowe, and Warner are instructive both for how they address and how they avoid the moral, political, and ideological underpinnings of the Civil War and its aftermath. Their writings about Civil War and Reconstruction are often both aesthetically uneven and ideologically problematic, especially in their unwillingness or inability to address the foundational moral fissure undergirding the Civil War: the contest over slavery. Yet I believe that these imperfect experiments, propelled by the radical transformation in American life between
1861 and 1865, also enable a more precise scholarly account of the narrative strategies through which the most popular sentimental novelists of the 1850s grappled with the outcomes of the war.
For example, consider the fact that Maria Cummins—in her last novel, Haunted Hearts—chose to transform the Civil War into a strange sentimental murder mystery set during the War of 1812. As
I suggest in the first chapter, this shift both reflects the evolution of her approach to sentimental sympathy in wartime and also reveals the fault lines in her own ideological priorities: by rewriting the Civil War through the War of 1812, Cummins could forward a bold legal argument about
Confederate treason while also tepidly skirting around the moral underpinnings of a war fought over American slavery. As I argue there, the narrative strategies whereby Cummins enacts her imperfect experiment—for example, historical displacement—introduce new layers to the story of her career, and to the story of sentimentalism’s engagement with Civil War.
15 In States of Sympathy, Barnes argues that sentimentality is not truly democratic, but promotes a “way of reading both texts and people that relies on likeness and thereby reinforces homogeneity” (4). See also Alice Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity” (1998); Laura Wexler, Tender Violence (2000); and Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (1997).
10 Introduction
Recent scholarship has clearly shown that sentimentalism continued to flourish long after the Civil War, even continuing to inform twentieth- and twenty-first century literature in myriad ways.16 This dissertation proposes that the later novels of the most popular antebellum sentimentalists also evolved in meaningful ways after 1860. In this, I echo previous scholars who have rejected the claim that a predominantly antebellum era of sentimental fiction closed shortly after the Civil War had ended.17 Celebrated 1850s sentimentalists like Warner, Holmes, and Stowe continued writing long after the Civil War, producing dozens of novels between the late 1860s and
1900. The chapters that follow begin to illuminate the evolution of four authors foundational to the genre, through their engagement with Civil War and its aftermath in prose, addressing the unsung stories and unusual geographies of their fiction from this period.
Border Genres: On the Edges of Sentimentalism
On one level, this dissertation examines how popular antebellum sentimentalists experimented with the boundaries of the genre during the Civil War and Reconstruction. As previous scholars have shown, the representational strategies characteristic of sentimental fiction did indeed make it uniquely adapted to comfort, console, and reconcile. Yet I argue that the call to represent the Civil
War and Reconstruction in prose also encouraged generic experimentation among women authors who made their names in the genre of the sentimental novel during the antebellum period. This experimentation not only highlighted the challenges of describing the war and its aftermath in the sentimental mode, but also resulted in generically blended—and at times politically problematic—
16 On the evolution of sentimentalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, see Jennifer A. Williamson, Twentieth-Century Sentimentalism (2013); Aaron Ritzenberg, The Sentimental Touch (2013); Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint (2008); and Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism (1991).
17 In Reclaiming Authorship (2013), for example, Susan Williams rejects “the gap between antebellum sentimentalism and postbellum regionalist writing by giving attention to authors who wrote throughout the period 1850–1900” (2).
11 Introduction representational strategies. Through a close analysis of these representational strategies, I reevaluate the boundaries of what nineteenth-century sentimental discourse encompassed. I argue that Cummins, Holmes, Warner, and Stowe combined sentimental discourse with the conventions of other genres to produce accounts of Civil War and Reconstruction that do not fit neatly into the categories of their earlier works.
The chapters of this dissertation all therefore take up the question of genre—specifically the remaking of genre conventions in the confrontation with Civil War and Reconstruction. The authors in this dissertation were all familiar and comfortable with the generic conventions of the sentimental novel, and most of them wrote with facility in this genre during the 1850s. The period of Civil War and Reconstruction inspired generically creative experiments from a group of authors who began their careers in the genre of the sentimental novel, writing female coming-of-age narratives during the 1850s. This dissertation thus progresses chronologically from the wartime novels of Maria Cummins and Mary Jane Holmes; to Reconstruction-era texts by Susan Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In the chapters that follow, I show that Cummins manipulated the conventions of the murder mystery and the historical romance to enter an ongoing national debate about the legality of secession; Mary Jane Holmes manipulated the conventions of the realist novel to depict the brutality of Civil War combat; and Stowe and Warner adopted the conventions of the travel narrative to imagine fantasies of laborless agricultural production in postbellum Florida. The final chapter addresses not a single author, but a single topic: Bleeding Kansas, a major antebellum conflict over the possible expansion of slavery into Kansas territory, which migrated from anti- slavery sentimental discourse in the 1850s to historical romance novels in the 1880s and 1890s.
Chapters 1 and 2 examine wartime novels by Cummins and Holmes, respectively. I show that both novelists tested the generic boundaries of sentimentalism during wartime, suggesting that
12 Introduction the chaos of Civil War inspired not only formulaic responses but also generic experimentation. I focus on Cummins and Holmes because they were among the most popular and successful of the antebellum sentimentalists, whose early works fundamentally shaped the contours of the genre.
Both became war writers between 1861 and 1865, when they published Civil War novels that exhibited generic departures from their previous work in the genre of sentimental fiction. Cummins and Holmes also make a fascinating pair because they represent two extremes of productivity: although both published debut novels in 1854, Cummins died in 1866 while Holmes went on to write for four more decades. While the prolific Holmes published dozens of novels in her lifetime,
Cummins only published four novels before her death.
Foundationally, these chapters restore the Civil War to the scholarly narratives about
Cummins and Holmes—and at the same time, restore Cummins and Holmes to the literary history of the Civil War. Chapter 1 focuses on Cummins’s last published novel: Haunted Hearts (1864), a historical murder mystery that remains virtually undiscussed in scholarship. Cummins’s most popular work, both in the nineteenth century and in scholarship, is her sentimental bildungsroman
The Lamplighter. This chapter decenters The Lamplighter, showing how Cummins evolved her approach to sentimental sympathy for wartime readers in Haunted Hearts and manipulated the conventions of historical romance to enter into legal debates over the legitimacy of secession.
Chapter 2, meanwhile, redefines Mary Jane Holmes as a Civil War novelist through her serialized wartime fiction. Because she rose to prominence in the 1850s for her female coming-of-age novels,
Holmes is usually characterized as an antebellum sentimentalist.18 Yet Holmes actually published
18 Most scholarship on Holmes’s work is limited to examinations of domesticity and sentimentalism in a handful of her antebellum novels. See, for example, Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction (1978), 175–197; Barbara McGuire, “The Orphan’s Grief” (1998); and Amy Cummins, “An Honor to be a Teacher (1999), all of which focus on novels that Holmes published between 1854 and 1860.
13 Introduction the majority of her works after 1860, including three war novels serialized in Street and Smith’s
New York Weekly between 1862 and 1865. In fact, Holmes wrote more novels about the Civil War and Reconstruction than any other sentimental novelist of her generation.
Chapter 1 argues that Cummins manipulated sentimental sympathy in order to grapple with the implications of Southern secession in Haunted Hearts. On one level, the novel is a sentimental murder mystery that attempts to attune readers to subtle manifestations of grief.
Cummins demands that readers rely not only on the physical tears characteristic of sentimentalism, but also on subtler emotional displays that require more than superficial reading. I argue that
Cummins found this form of sentimental reading prescient during wartime, and adjusted her approach to representing grief accordingly. On another level, Cummins manipulates the novel’s global-historical context in order to wade into legal questions at the heart of the Civil War. Set during the War of 1812, Haunted Hearts actually indicts an archetypal Civil War figure: the
Confederate privateer, who is encoded in the novel’s villain. This chapter traces a legal argument about the illegitimacy of secession in Cummins’s approach to global-historical conflicts fifty years prior. I argue that Haunted Hearts turns sentimentalism into the vehicle for a damning critique of the Confederacy, and injects Cummins’s voice into one of the war’s most critical legal debates. I end this chapter by contrasting Haunted Hearts with the far more sympathetic portrayal of
Confederate privateering in E. D. E. N. Southworth’s more sensational novel Britomarte, the Man-
Hater (1865–66). Unlike Cummins, Southworth stages the ideological “rehabilitation” of her
Confederate privateer, sentimentalizing him in a sectional conversion narrative that symbolizes the reincorporation of the Confederacy into the nation. Southworth’s more conventional approach ultimately highlights the radicality of Haunted Hearts: instead of drawing on sentimental
14 Introduction sympathy to promote mercy and reconciliation, Cummins deployed sympathy in the name of swift and vengeful justice against the Confederacy.
Chapter 2 shows that Mary Jane Holmes tested the boundaries of sentimentalism and realism in her Civil War writing. I argue that Holmes’s restoration to the canon of Civil War writers is generically important because she was the rare sentimental novelist who experimented with writing unsanitized depictions of Civil War death and dying. Her first serialized war novel, Rose
Mather and Annie Graham (1862), revises one of the most important genre conventions of sentimental Civil War fiction: aestheticized depictions of dead and dying soldiers. The novel deploys forms of sympathy and moral logic not to sanitize depictions of death, but rather to enable the graphic portrayal of mutilated bodies in battle—a characteristic usually associated with realist accounts of war such as John William De Forest’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to
Loyalty (1867). This chapter thus interrogates the traditionally hard lines established between sentimental and realist depictions of Civil War death. I also contend that Holmes’s novels offer a rare window into the making of reconciliation fiction over time. Holmes serialized three Civil War novels during the war years, then republished them all during Reconstruction with modifications that reflect her transition from a wartime to a postwar author. Her novels of the 1880s and 1890s only further solidify this transformation. These revisions offer a rare window into the evolution of a Civil War novelist: from her most generically radical and politically partisan work in 1862,
Holmes grew into a writer of increasingly formulaic and predictable reconciliation novels.
My third and fourth chapters, meanwhile, move beyond the war years. They also approach the question of generic boundaries differently from the first two chapters, examining genre shifts not within but across texts. Chapter 3 situates Stowe and Warner as authors of Reconstruction, charting their progression from writing sentimental abolitionist appeals to writing travel narratives
15 Introduction set in Reconstruction-era Florida. Chapter 4 turns to the post-Reconstruction period, examining how the events of the antebellum Bleeding Kansas conflict migrated from the discourse of sentimentalism in the 1850s to the discourse of historical romance in the 1880s and 1890s.
In Chapter 3, I argue that Stowe and Warner constructed fantasies of laborless agricultural production to avoid confronting the challenges faced by black sharecroppers, wage laborers, and independent farmers in Reconstruction-era Florida. In 1873, Stowe published Palmetto Leaves, a collection of travel sketches about her life on a Florida orange plantation. In 1875, Warner published Bread and Oranges, a didactic children’s novel with the same setting. Examining the formal strategies whereby both texts obscured black labor in Reconstruction-era Florida, this chapter approaches sentimentalism in terms of its absence. I argue that these texts enact mutually reinforcing generic and geographic shifts: from sentimentalism to descriptive travelogue, from cotton fields to orange groves, from strongholds of the “Cotton South” to Florida. Both authors appropriate Florida orange groves as the site for a fantasy of labor-as-leisure, in which black farm workers disappear into the background. The redirection of sentimental sympathy away from black laborers is central to the project of both books, as is the geographic redirection from the Cotton
South to the Florida orange grove. Setting Palmetto Leaves in dialogue with Bread and Oranges for the first time, I also argue that Warner’s novel both was inspired by Stowe’s account and amplifies its implicit claims. I contrast both texts with a children’s travel narrative, Sarah Stuart
Robbins’s One Happy Winter; Or, A Visit to Florida (1878), which directly rebukes Stowe’s apolitical treatment of black labor.
In Chapter 4, I trace the migration of a major historical event—Bleeding Kansas—from abolitionist sentimental discourse in the 1850s to historical romance in the 1880s and 1890s. In the
1850s, sentimental anti-slavery discourse on Bleeding Kansas—an antebellum border conflict over
16 Introduction the expansion of slavery into Kansas territory—had flooded the nation. Rather than considering the evolution of individual authors, this chapter shows how generic turns in historical Bleeding
Kansas narratives reflected ideological visions for the state’s future. I argue that 1880s and 1890s historical romances about Bleeding Kansas were engaged in a contest to define the state’s identity after the failure of Reconstruction and a widely publicized migration of black Southerners to the state. Through this panoply of Bleeding Kansas historical romances, a contest over the future of
Kansas in the 1880s and 1890s unfolded: would the state become a haven for black Americans fleeing the South, or a haven for white Americans in which black freedpeople did not figure at all?
While novelist Albion Tourgée projected a hopeful vision of Kansas as a paradise for black
Americans in the early 1880s, white local Kansas writers largely resisted this vision while nevertheless celebrating the state’s anti-slavery history. In framing Kansas as a space for white settlers, Kansas novelists also developed a regionally specific version of the romance of reunion, in which Northerners and Southerners reconcile long before the outbreak of the Civil War. The chapter culminates with a reading of Pauline Hopkins’s Winona: A Story of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (1902), a turn-of-the-century Bleeding Kansas novel that reflects the faded dream of Kansas as a black homeland and restores sentimental activism to the long-romanticized history of Bleeding Kansas. Hopkins’s subversive account of Bleeding Kansas ultimately rejects Kansas altogether in a rebuke of the state’s romanticized history. I argue that post-Reconstruction Bleeding
Kansas novels represent not only a significant subgenre of Civil War fiction, but also a virtually unexamined resurgence of an antebellum sentimental tradition in a very different postbellum form.
Border Geographies: Florida and Kansas
On another level, this dissertation also confronts a number of unusual geographic borders in the literature of Civil War and Reconstruction. In addition to experimenting on the edges of genre, the
17 Introduction authors addressed in these chapters also responded to the challenges of representing Civil War and
Reconstruction by displacing them to unexpected geographic and chronological borderlands.
These texts make their generic experiments from the periphery, which may be one reason why so many of them have been overlooked in scholarship. They frequently address Civil War and
Reconstruction from unexpected places and times, including rural New Jersey during the War of
1812, the orange groves of Florida in the 1870s, a deserted island in the Caribbean, and the Kansas-
Missouri border in the 1850s. While such displacements are present in the first two chapters— where I consider, for example, Cummins’s displacement of the Civil War back to the War of
1812—it is in the last two chapters that I embark on a geographic experiment of my own. These chapters filter the story of Civil War and Reconstruction through two states on the “borders” of the major conflict: Florida and Kansas.
In making this experiment, I follow a recent turn in historical scholarship to illuminating the periods of Civil War and Reconstruction from their “forgotten” geographic edges—especially the West, and areas of the South—such as Florida—usually viewed as minor theaters of the war.19
Literary scholarship has also turned in this direction to a degree: Sharon D. Kennedy-Nolle’s
Writing Reconstruction (2015) approaches the literature of Reconstruction state by state; while
Matthew Christopher Hulbert’s The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory (2016) and Eric Gardner’s
Unexpected Places (2009) both situate insightful literary studies at the Kansas-Missouri border. I am also following theorizations of literature about the regional imagination and Civil War: as
19 A wealth of recent historical scholarship has focused on the Civil War in its Western theaters. See, for example, Christopher Phillips, The Rivers Ran Backward (2016); Virginia Scharff, ed., Empire and Liberty (2015); C. L. Higham, The Civil War and the West (2013); Earl J. Hess, The Civil War in the West (2012); and Donald L. Glimore, Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border (2006). On Reconstruction and the West, see Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox (2007). On the Civil War in Florida, see Seth A. Weitz, ed., A Forgotten Front (2018); Tracy J. Revels, Florida’s Civil War (2016); and Daniel L. Schafer, Thunder on the River (2014).
18 Introduction
Blight and Silber have shown, regional romances of the Old South were a cornerstone of the cultural movement for reconciliation in the postbellum period. I argue that narratives of reconciliation were themselves regionalized during this period, with narrative contours particular to their local contexts. Accounts of Civil War and Reconstruction fiction have not yet fully considered the role of such marginal geographies in the literature of reconciliation.
Jennifer Rae Greeson’s work on literary imaginings of the American South has informed my formulation. According to Greeson’s Our South (2010), American literature has historically defined the South through “geographic fantasies” reflective of larger nationalist and imperialist aims (11). The imagined South “both exceeds and flattens place; it is a term of the imagination, a site of national fantasy” (1). Greeson approaches the South as “an ideological concept rather than a place,” showing how American literature since the eighteenth century has imagined the formation of the nation in relation to the ‘othered’ South within its borders (10). In particular, she argues that the “Reconstruction South” was framed as an internal Africa on which the nation reflected and honed its imperial ambitions (14). I follow Greeson in my approach to Florida and
Kansas as ideological sites, onto which Northern authors after 1865 projected highly particular visions of reconciliation. Yet unlike Greeson, I am preoccupied with “geographic fantasies” that attached not to sections—the South, the North, the West—but rather to particular states after the
Civil War. By moving the narrative of reconciliation from the level of section to the level of state,
I uncover more particular regionalized variants of the reconciliation narratives familiar from existing scholarship. As it turns out, nineteenth-century Americans attached ideological stakes to the narratives of particular states within this sectional conflict.
My choices of Florida and Kansas are rooted in their status as geographic “borderlands” both during the Civil War and in its aftermath. In the antebellum period, both territories were
19 Introduction considered “frontiers” of sorts. Florida was a Southern frontier into which planters of the Old South pushed in search of new opportunities, and it joined the Union as a slave state in 1845.20 Kansas, meanwhile, was a strategic territory on the Western frontier. Its admission to the Union as a free state in 1861 was preceded by a major contest over the possible expansion of slavery into the territory. Bleeding Kansas also both predated and presaged the Civil War, positioned on the war’s temporal border in the late 1850s. During the Civil War itself, the peripheral geographies of both
Florida and Kansas limited their centrality to the conflict. While Florida seceded from the Union, it was geographically farther afield from the main theaters of war. Kansas sent regiments to the
Union Army, but much of the fighting at home was the guerrilla-style warfare that had characterized Bleeding Kansas in the 1850s. The geographically peripheral status of both states meant that they were not merely representative of their sections—the South, the West—but also defined by more particular regionalized narratives. Chapter 3 examines the ways in which postbellum travel narratives treated Florida specifically, as opposed to the South more broadly.
Chapter 4, meanwhile, examines the ways in which Bleeding Kansas historical romances addressed a conflict both temporally and geographically adjacent to the Civil War. While scholarship has posited that the West played a redemptive role in reconciliation fiction, I argue that Kansas narratives—because of the state’s contested history—wrestled with reconciliation in ways deeply informed by issues of race, politics, and class particular to Kansas after 1880.21
These chapters ultimately frame both Florida and Kansas as contested sites, on which postbellum authors projected dueling visions of the land and who owned it. After the Civil War, both Kansas and Florida were refigured as paradises in the American imagination—albeit, with
20 See Edward E. Baptist, Creating an Old South (2002), 4.
21 On the role of the West in reconciliation fiction, see Silber 187–192.
20 Introduction highly racialized inflections. Florida became a flourishing tourist destination for white Northerners during Reconstruction, framed in countless guidebooks as an Eden of leisure and health. Kansas, meanwhile, was reimagined as an Eden for black Southerners in the late 1870s and early 1880s. In the wake of Reconstruction’s failures, thousands of black Americans left the South for Kansas in a movement known as the “Exoduster Migration.”22 For a brief period, Kansas appeared in national news as a haven for black migrants. In writing about these states, however, white Northerners both erased slavery from their histories and imagined a racially homogenous future that also erased black freedpeople from the land. The particular conditions of both states, I argue, made them especially attractive sites for these white Northerners to imagine an agricultural future decoupled entirely from black labor. Florida and Kansas proved such fruitful and fraught sites precisely because both had reputations as states full of empty space. In the postbellum period, white
Northern “geographic fantasies” of each state depended on this illusion of emptiness, which effectively made Florida and Kansas into blank canvases. After the Civil War, their literary imaginings of both Florida and Kansas reflected a vision of the nation that erased black communities. In my last two chapters, I articulate the strategies through which white Northerners projected this narrative in their writings about Kansas and Florida—strategies that were, I argue, particular to the states towards which they gravitated. The contours of this reconciliation fiction suggest that much can be learned about the cultural memory of Civil War and Reconstruction from such unexpected, peripheral geographies.
22 On the history of the Exoduster migration, see Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters (1976).
21
CHAPTER 1 Courtroom Civil War: Piracy and Treason in Maria Cummins’s Haunted Hearts (1864)
In 1854, twenty-seven-year-old Maria Cummins published her first novel and became an overnight sensation. Instantly popular, The Lamplighter sold 40,000 copies in its first month, 70,000 by the end of its first year in print. It told the tale of orphaned Gertrude Flint—an essentially good child, if impoverished and uneducated—who finds a family in her friends and neighbors, learns through them the values of domestic Christian womanhood, and eventually completes her ascension to an upper-middle class way of life through a companionate marriage. Like Susan Warner’s The Wide,
Wide World, which preceded it by four years, The Lamplighter provoked outpourings of affection and vitriol alike. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s response, recorded in an 1855 letter to his editor William
Ticknor, remains perhaps the most famous: “What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of
The Lamplighter, and other books neither better nor worse? Worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by the 100,000.”1 In a judgement that seems partly undergirded by his envy of its popularity, Hawthorne captures the cultural presence of Cummins’s novel at what appeared to be the start of a bright—or at least a lucrative, in his account—literary career.
But as it turned out, The Lamplighter was both the start and the peak of Cummins’s career.
She published three more novels: Mabel Vaughn (1857), the story of a downwardly mobile heroine who rebuilds her life on an Illinois homestead; the “oriental” romance El Furiedis (1860); and the historical novel Haunted Hearts (1864). Apart from two travel guides and scattered periodical writing, these novels represent the entirety of her literary output. None of these later efforts garnered the acclaim or the financial returns of her first novel. And then in October 1866, just
1 Nathaniel Hawthorne, “779. To William D. Ticknor, Boston,” in The Letters, 1835–1856 (1987), ed. Thomas Woodson et al., 304. 1: Courtroom Civil War twelve years after publication of The Lamplighter, Cummins died at the age of 39. The Civil War had ended eighteen months earlier, in April 1865.2
Cummins’s last fictional writings were, perhaps unsurprisingly, preoccupied with the war itself. Less than a month after her death, the children’s magazine Our Young Folks published a short celebratory article that Cummins had written about “Old Abe,” a bald eagle who had regularly followed a company of the Eighth Wisconsin Volunteers into combat.3 But where “The
Veteran Eagle” offered a patriotic postwar celebration of Union soldiers, her strange last novel strikes a more somber note. Published as the Civil War dragged into its third year, Haunted Hearts combines a wartime love story with a murder mystery. Set during the War of 1812, it tracks the fallout from a misguided flirtation. After young Angevine Cousins shows interest in another man at a party, her jealous and heartbroken sweetheart George Rawle disappears. On the same night, robbers brutally murder George’s wealthy uncle under circumstances that suggest the young man himself is guilty. Angie and George’s mother endure five years of lonely suffering, until the novel’s denouement restores his honor: reappearing as a witness in a seemingly unrelated piracy trial that also proves his innocence, George reunites with his mother and marries his sweetheart.
Despite this reunion, Haunted Hearts is as icy as the wintertime in which it takes place. In striking contrast with The Lamplighter, familial sympathies are less instinctive and more difficult to rouse; silence characterizes the relationships between frustratingly uncommunicative friends, lovers, parents, and children; and the judicial system ultimately wrests the power of adjudication from families, dragging a largely domestic novel onto the courtroom floor. A career that began with one
2 Relatively little is known about the life of Maria Cummins. For a brief biography, see Nina Baym’s introduction to The Lamplighter (Rutgers University Press, 1988).
3 Maria S. Cummins, “The Veteran Eagle,” Our Young Folks, October 1866: 616–622.
23 1: Courtroom Civil War of the most popular female bildungsromane of the century—one that, as Cindy Weinstein has shown, built adoptive families from unrelated neighbors—ended with a strange and depressing meditation on wartime and the disquieting dysfunctionality of the family.4
As Steven Hamelman has pointed out, scholarship on sympathy in Cummins’s fiction focuses almost exclusively on The Lamplighter.5 Although her last novel relies just as fully on the currency of sympathy as her first, Haunted Hearts remains virtually undiscussed by scholars of her work. In an introduction to The Lamplighter, Nina Baym calls Haunted Hearts Cummins’s
“gloomiest” novel—one that bleakly reflects on “domestic ideology” and women’s powers of influence over “the body politic” (xxx). Baym proposes the Civil War as a catalyst for this shift, suggesting that the novel embodies a wartime crisis of faith in the stability of both the nuclear family and the “national family” (xxx). Rebecca Saulsbury reaffirms this interpretation, arguing in an unpublished dissertation that Haunted Hearts is both a “slightly disguised Civil War narrative and a gloomy outlook on the future of American womanhood.”6 Saulsbury reads the novel’s small- town setting, for example, as a “metaphor for the embattled nation, a place of anger, fratricidal violence and fragmentation where once had been a buoyant and hopeful community” (264).
Likewise, its largely passive and ineffectual heroine Angie reflects the destructive impact of the
Civil War on “Cummins’ hope that enlightened, evangelical women could renew America” (246).
It is a coincidence that Cummins died shortly after the end of the war, making Haunted
Hearts her last major work. Yet this coincidence encourages a tidy story about her trajectory as a
4 Cindy Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2004), ch. 2.
5 Steven Hamelman, “Orientalism and Sympathy in Maria Susanna Cummins’s El Fureidis” (2008). While Hamelman focuses on El Furiedis, he acknowledges that all three post-Lamplighter novels have a “rich sympathetic texture” (62).
6 Rebecca R. Saulsbury, ‘Strong and Brave’: The Culture of Womanhood in the Novels of Maria Susanna Cummins (1999), 260. To date, there is no other literary scholarship on Haunted Hearts.
24 1: Courtroom Civil War sentimental novelist: perhaps the time for sentimentalism was over, at least in Cummins’s eyes.
Haunted Hearts does indeed espouse a bleak vision of domestic ideology, and its female characters are indeed hopelessly curtailed by the plot. Yet I argue that this interpretation of Haunted Hearts, as a narrative sign that Cummins had given up on the power of domestic ideology, does not tell a complete story about her ambitious last novel. While the close coupling of Haunted Hearts with the Civil War has encouraged the impression that it is merely a bleak story about the impotence of wartime sentimentalism, I suggest that the novel’s generic ambiguities reflect not an abandonment but an evolution of Cummins’s sentimental ideology. Haunted Hearts is both a murder mystery and a historical novel, and reading it within the context of these two genres—with particular emphasis on mystery and history—is necessary to understanding its project. In this way, Haunted
Hearts epitomizes one argument of this dissertation: instead of killing the sentimental novel, the
Civil War inspired experiments within the genre from authors who had made their names writing sentimental female coming-of-age narratives during the 1850s.
Cold Sympathy: Haunted Hearts as Sentimental Murder Mystery
Haunted Hearts effectively upends the sentimental paradigms that Cummins first established in
The Lamplighter. Her debut novel flourished the forms of “sympathetic identification” that
Elizabeth Barnes, in States of Sympathy (1997), has called the hallmark feature of sentimental fiction. Barnes defines sympathetic identification as “the act of imagining oneself in another’s position,” and suggests that its presence in the nineteenth-century novel “signified a narrative model whereby readers could ostensibly be taught an understanding of the interdependence between their own and others’ identities” (ix). As Barnes shows, the development of The
Lamplighter’s heroine Gerty depends on her education in sympathetic identification: she must learn to identify with both her oppressors and with the mercy of God, in order to embody the
25 1: Courtroom Civil War
Christian forgiveness that Cummins frames as a pillar of mature womanhood (86–87). In The
Lamplighter, moreover, tears serve as the primary physical sign of sympathetic identification.
While young Gerty’s tears at first reflect only her own sorrows, angers, and frustrations, they also evolve into signifiers of her ability to sympathize with the sorrows of others.7 The first time that
Gerty sheds tears for another’s misfortunes is a key step in her sympathetic education: when Gerty hears learns the history of her beloved blind mentor Emily, the story brings them together in an identificatory moment marked by tears (87). Barnes observes that moments of storytelling like this one help to teach sympathy: “Through narratives, characters learn to sympathize with one another and to unite in emotional kinship” (87). In The Lamplighter, tears come to reliably signify the heroine’s own emotional state as well as her sympathetic identification with the emotions of others.
Unlike the world of The Lamplighter, the world of Haunted Hearts is defined by emotional restraint. A brief summary of the novel will help to situate this affective departure. Haunted Hearts opens in rural Stein’s Plains, New Jersey, just before the Christmas of 1812. At a local ball,
Angevine Cousins upsets her sweetheart—the good but unrefined George Rawle—by accepting the attentions of Captain Josselyn, a lieutenant in the British Royal Navy. Rumored to be a prisoner of war, recently released in exchange for an American prisoner, Josselyn is warmly accepted in town for his apparent wealth and fine manners. George, meanwhile, has acquired a reputation as a gambler and a layabout, despite his wealthy uncle Baultie’s attempts to establish him in a career.
Unlike his neighbors, George is not impressed with Josselyn: “Unless he’s got better business to do in the world than what he’s been turning his hand to here,” he declares, “I wish our commodore had swung him up at the yard arm, instead of bringing him into port” (39). While Cummins does
7 As Jane Tompkins argues in Sensational Designs, female tears in the sentimental novel often embody anger as well as sorrow, serving as a “catharsis of rage and grief” in the face of women’s powerlessness against oppression (173).
26 1: Courtroom Civil War not validate George’s desire to execute Josselyn without a trial, his evaluation of the lieutenant will prove prescient. George and Josselyn quarrel over Angie’s attentions at the ball, an altercation that causes George’s uncle to disown him. Feeling rejected by his family and his sweetheart,
George skips town. The same night, robbers murder Baultie in his home. Both Angie and George’s mother Margery suspect him, but hide their suspicions in silent suffering. They soon learn that
George has died in New York City, an apparent suicide. Spurned by the community, Angie endures seemingly endless penance for driving George to this end through her flirtation with Josselyn.
Five years later, a seemingly unrelated piracy case heads to trial in New York City: the notorious pirate Bullet and his gang have been captured by an American ship captain, and stand accused of numerous crimes. A witness for the prosecution, local Stein’s Plains man Nick Bly, claims to have been an accomplice in Baultie’s murder as well. Angie privately confronts Bly at the courthouse: believing that he will incriminate the deceased George, she convinces him not to speak. Since Bly will not deliver his crucial testimony, the trial at first appears to favor the pirates.
At this point, however, George miraculously reappears. Very much alive, he is in fact the captain who captured the gang. His testimony explains his extended absence from home: after setting sail on a merchant vessel, he was captured by Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean. Forced to work as a galley slave in Algiers, he was eventually rescued by “Decatur and the rest,” a reference to a successful 1815 campaign led by US naval officer Stephen Decatur (416). Effectively ending the
Second Barbary War, this campaign did indeed secure the release of a group of American captives in Algiers. Returning to the sea as captain of a merchant ship, George captured Bullet in his self- proclaimed Christian duty to bring pirates to justice. One final twist completes the story: the pirate
Bullet is actually Captain Josselyn. Nick Bly ultimately provides the evidence that condemns
Bullet, who is pronounced guilty of myriad crimes against the nation and sentenced to death.
27 1: Courtroom Civil War
Returning home with George, Margery and Angie undergo an “exorcism” of their hearts, admitting that they believed him guilty of murder and receiving his forgiveness. George marries Angie and becomes a prosperous landowner in Stein’s Plains, which is renamed Rawley in his honor.
In Haunted Hearts, family itself is marred by the absence of sympathetic identification.
Even among family members who love and care for one another, the deepest feelings remain hidden under the surface—accessible only to those who possess sympathy. Cummins illustrates this principle of restraint in George’s relationship with his mother Margery. Although they love one another, there is “very little demonstration of affection between them” (135). Instead, each one expresses care through the performance of household tasks that ensure the other’s physical comfort: “as to any more sentimental indication of their relationship, it was unthought of, and unmissed on either side” (136). Margery worries about George’s professional shortcomings, but refuses to confront him; George accepts her “chronic depression of spirits” as a fact of life, and never considers “expostulating against it, or inquiring into its cause” (136). Unwilling or unable to look into one another’s hearts, they operate exclusively on a principle of emotional restraint:
“So, deep and sincere as was their love for each other, there was a certain want of sympathy and confidence between them which gave an air of restraint to their most familiar intercourse” (136).
Margery and George essentially rewrite the central mother-son relationship of The
Lamplighter. In that novel, the bond between Mrs. Sullivan and her son Willie is both sympathetic and confiding. On her deathbed, Mrs. Sullivan has a vivid dream in which she provides spiritual guidance to her son, who is overseas in India. Seeing him tempted by gambling, drinking, and women, she gently guides him away from each one. Cummins encourages the reader to believe in the strength of Mrs. Sullivan’s spiritual guidance, accepting that she has insight into and power over her son’s life despite the distance between them. George and Margery, however, cannot reach
28 1: Courtroom Civil War one another emotionally from within the same room. Neither one is a sympathetic reader, not having the ability or the desire to identify with the other’s feelings—the only way to access them, given the hesitation of both to verbalize the contents of their hearts. Unwilling to engage in the forms of storytelling that initiate emotional connection, per Barnes’s account of The Lamplighter, they remain mute and unknowable. In this relationship, Cummins articulates a model of familial love without sympathy. While they have an affective bond, unlike many of the biological parents and children in Weinstein’s study of sentimental novels, they do not truly know one another.
This emotional restraint is replicated in Angie, who is perhaps the most instinctively sympathetic character in the novel. Yet prior to the murder, Angie regularly restrains and disguises her emotions in public. She expresses “utter indifference” to cover up “how glad” she is to see
George (60); she forces out a “hollow, unnatural laugh” instead of succumbing to “the relief of tears,” when Josselyn mocks George at the ball (103–104); and she hides the entire incident from her oblivious father, “wiping away the few tears she had shed, and smothering the many that were unwept” (114). When George later confronts her about the incident, she feels “grieved by his appeal to her sympathies” and is “ready to burst into tears, comfort him, and entreat his forgiveness” (131). Yet her tears never come: George discovers that Angie has been entertaining
Josselyn at her home, leaving her with only “a shamefaced countenance” (131).
The fundamental problem of this world, in which emotions are constantly restrained, is this absence of sympathetic identification. Sympathy is simply difficult to rouse in Haunted Hearts, a condition allegorized in the deep winter weather that literally chills and numbs the limbs of its protagonists. Angie’s neighbor and foil, Polly Stein, is the most extreme example of absent sympathy. A girl who does not see the use of “making yourself miserable about other folks’ misfortunes,” she is ultimately punished in a seduction plot that ends with her death (201). Yet
29 1: Courtroom Civil War most of the community members are likewise unable or unwilling to identify with the feelings of their neighbors, preferring to read superficially for only the most obvious and exaggerated physical signs of emotion: specifically, tears. The absence of tears, especially female tears, is regularly misread as a lack of feeling. Indeed, Angie and Margery are repeatedly assumed to be cold and unfeeling because they do not vent their grief in displays of tears. When they hear about George’s suicide, for example, a relative mistakenly reads their outward “torpor” as a sign of their “unnatural want of feeling” (240). Yet to the contrary, there is actually a “winter of grief” behind “those glazed, tearless eyes, those mute, uncomplaining lips, that rigid patient posture” (240). Here,
Cummins guides readers to a set of subtler physical signs denoting grief: glazed eyes, total silence, rigid posture. Only the sympathetic reader can accurately interpret these signs: “no eye but that of sympathy can detect that mute holding on to each other on the part of despairing hands,” Cummins explains in reference to Margery. “It is the silent griefs that hide thus between the palms; and
Margery’s grief, from first to last, was dumb” (243–244). The relative who criticizes this “torpor” does not have the “spiritual talisman” of sympathy required to recognize it as a sign of grief (244).
Unsurprisingly, this relative manifests grief in a more standard physical form: a single tear, which
“testifie[s] to the sincerity” of her feeling (246). The tear is hypocritically entered as legal evidence of feeling, while less legible signs of grief go unregistered. Soon after, the death of Angie’s father gives the community another chance to judge her for lack of emotion: other funeral mourners assume that she is unfeeling because she has “no tears to weep” (268). Meanwhile, these mourners
“court emotions of sensibility” and take credit for “feeling it…more than the family” (267). Both episodes frame the interpretive limitations of characters who rely on tears as the primary physical manifestation of emotion. Characters who can only interpret grief in the form of tears are unsympathetic readers, while characters who only display grief through tears are shallow feelers.
30 1: Courtroom Civil War
The novel’s central affective claim is that the deepest feelings remain buried below the surface, inaccessible to shallow readers who rely purely on physical signs of emotion. Cummins
uses George’s inscrutability to illustrate this claim, in the aftermath of the disastrous ball:
That there is a correspondence between the head and the heart, there can be no doubt. But is it the deepest feelings, the tenderest hearts, the master powers that vent themselves in extravagant demonstrations, either of love, of threatening, or of wrath? Fickle preferences, short-lived hate, feeble purposes, explode like gunpowder, but great hearts nourish secret fires, and only those who explore deep feel the heat. Thus genius smoulders for years while the kindling process goes on, and resolutions ripen by imperceptible shades of growth, and unexpressed love is constant as the sun, and hate becomes a tyrant.
Then when some great deed is done, the household, the community, the nation, wonder: they had not traced the process; how could they anticipate the result? …because George had borne much, was it certain that he would bear every thing? (118)
The human fault that anchors this novel is a failure to “explore deep” in the hearts of others, a failure that ultimately prevents individuals from knowing what their friends and neighbors are capable of feeling—and therefore, how they are capable of acting. George’s expressed emotions of love and hate are simply not good enough indicators for those around him, or for the reader, to evaluate what he might do next. Who knows what George is capable of, without an ability to see into his heart? Restrained emotion, while far deeper than demonstrated emotion, is exceedingly difficult to read without sympathetic identification. The community of Stein’s Plains has grown complacent in their approach to such reading, as if keyed to the conventions of the sentimental novel. Having been trained to look for tears as an important signifier, much like early readers of
The Lamplighter, these individuals falter in a world characterized by the absence of physical signs of emotion. This absence is the core challenge to sympathetic reading in Haunted Hearts.8
8 In its reference to “nation,” the passage also seems to extend this critique to Civil War America—specifically, those who wonder at the onset of Civil War after having ignored the “kindling process” that fanned its flames.
31 1: Courtroom Civil War
In its approach to sentimentalism, Haunted Hearts thus prioritizes educating readers in a more invisible language of grief. Cummins seeks to retrain readers of the sentimental novel who have come to recognize “tears” as the genre’s only shorthand for human suffering, sympathy, and moral goodness. The novel’s preface, in fact, establishes its project as an exercise in sympathetic education—as opposed to an exploration of the murder in Stein’s Plains. Claiming that other authors have already published fiction based on the same crime, Cummins implies that her story will reverse the focus of such “popular feast[s]” for the public.9 “I did not write my story for the sake of the crime, but have tolerated the crime for the sake of my story,” she explains, “—as details of material horrors have been subordinate in my mind, and will be, I trust, in my reader’s, to the widespread and lasting influence which they exercised on innocent hearts and lives” (4). On one level, Cummins is offering a genteel disclaimer regarding her choice of material: this will be no sensational tale of murder, but a novel in which murder merely initiates—as the title suggests—an exploration of haunted hearts. This education in sympathy does actually turn out to be the novel’s primary goal, reflecting Cummins’s desire to “…awaken a respect and sympathy for truths buried in life’s unfathomed wells, and…thus strike the secret spring of all charity, by suggesting the debt of love, compassion, forgiveness, sympathy which each owes to all, and all to each” (5).
On another level, however, the crime that Cummins proclaims merely to “tolerate” is in fact central to this sympathetic education. Indeed, the ramifications of absent sympathy reverberate throughout the novel’s generic experiment with murder mystery. In many ways, Haunted Hearts is driven by the question of who killed Baultie Rawle while attempting to rob his home in the middle of the night. This mystery is fundamentally characterized by limited and unreliable physical evidence. In an initial coroner’s inquest, a handful of witnesses claim to have encountered an
9 If such fictions actually exist, I have been unable to locate them.
32 1: Courtroom Civil War unidentified man traveling to and from Baultie’s home. However, their testimonies on his appearance are inconclusive: “the more the witnesses strove to be graphic, the more blurred and confused was the sketch they mutually drew” (189). Cummins thus establishes both the evidence and the witnesses’ interpretation of it as unreliable: their collective inability to coherently describe the murderer’s appearance mirrors their collective inability to interpret evidence of the heart.
Multiple witnesses do recall a man with a stiff finger, which alerts the observant Angie to the involvement of Nick Bly, who had previously jammed his finger in a barn door (40). Yet Angie keeps quiet for George’s sake, believing that he is guilty of the crime. Her initial inability to interpret George thus further obscures the truth in the confused judicial proceedings (192).
Moreover, the most incriminating piece of evidence—George’s mitten, discovered at the crime scene—is entirely blocked from the jury’s consideration. A neighbor registers the potential power of the mitten, whose owner has not been identified: “Smaller things than that ha’ hung a man” (160). Recognizing the home-stitched mitten and interpreting it as a sign of George’s guilt,
Angie and Margery desperately destroy the clues that connect it with him: Angie unstitches his name from the inside, while Margery burns the excess wool in the house. Complicit in obscuring evidence, they too become covert criminals; Margery even wears “the frightened look of one detected in a crime” when Angie finds her burning the excess yarn (171). Misinterpretations of physical clues continue to multiply: when George’s watch is discovered on the body of a dead man, the inscription again wrongly identifies him—this time, as a suicide victim (221).
Defined by limited and unreliable physical evidence, this murder mystery instead demands nuanced emotional insight from the emotionally dysfunctional community in which it unfolds. The novel makes sympathy necessary to the process of detection—because only sympathy can access evidence of the heart. The absence of sympathy in Stein’s Plains consistently obstructs the ability
33 1: Courtroom Civil War of this community to interpret the available evidence. Fundamentally, a mutual inability to interpret George’s emotions leads both Margery and Angie—the two women who most love him— to accept the circumstantial evidence of his guilt. George engages in a restrained final conversation with each woman before his sudden disappearance, which both interpret suspiciously—especially after his mitten is found at the crime scene. Moreover, Margery and Angie themselves are able to successfully manipulate evidence of the crime because their emotions are also generally undecipherable. When Angie’s suspicions of George overcome her as she speaks with a neighbor about the case, he completely misses the muted signs of her distress: as she stands “stunned and torpid, like a mouse just released from a lion’s grip,” he leaves her abruptly and obliviously (162).
Unable to read her stunned silence and torpor as signs of emotional turmoil, he cannot see the clues in her reaction. Only Angie and Margery, who share the fear that George’s guilt will be uncovered, can read one another: when George is pronounced dead, for example, Margery’s silent look is that
“which none but she [Angie] could understand” (238). The murder of Baultie Rawle thus throws the community’s emotional dysfunction into high relief, highlighting the urgency of sympathetic reading that can access the clues in hidden feelings.
Haunted Hearts coincides with the rise of what Catherine Ross Nickerson calls the
“domestic detective novel,” a late nineteenth-century subgenre that joins “the moral worldview of the domestic novel” with “the structures of encroaching crime and energetic investigation from the foundational works of detective fiction” (2, 20). Although it shares certain characteristics with this genre, it is not truly a detective novel. Haunted Hearts not only lacks a detective who “examines and regulates the behavior of a family in turmoil” (26), but also refuses to be guided by detection at all. The plot is guided entirely by false assumptions, and the crime itself is only resolved because the murderer’s accomplice—Nick Bly—eventually confesses. In framing the investigation,
34 1: Courtroom Civil War
Cummins instead obsesses over the necessity of sympathy to the interpretation of evidence. She repeatedly suggests that her protagonists are not equipped to solve the mystery because they lack sympathy. Since they are unable to enter into the feelings of even close family and friends, they constantly misread the circumstantial evidence before them.
In what might even be called an anti-detective novel, Cummins imagines the failure of detection to be rooted in the absence of sympathy. Through the confounded murder investigation, however, she actually seeks to train her readers in the very art of detection that her protagonists fail to master. Indeed, one might say that Cummins requires the failure of detection to accomplish her primary project: the establishment of sympathetic identification. Her genres—the sentimental novel, the murder mystery—are interdependent: sentimental sympathy is necessary to unravel the murder mystery, while the delayed resolution of this mystery necessarily trains the protagonists in the exercise of sympathy. The process of detection is not objective and dispassionate, but fundamentally tied to acts of sympathetic identification. Read as an exercise in the detection and interpretation of evidence, Haunted Hearts can be understood as an affective and generic experiment that imagines the failure of detection to be rooted in the absence of sympathy. Instead of renouncing sentimental sympathy, the novel warns about the dangers of making and prosecuting accusations without it—itself a prescient statement during wartime. The novel’s first half is a wartime training course in the language and signs of morning—and specifically in noticing that the tearless also may suffer deeply. Using the conventions of the murder mystery novel, Cummins highlights the necessity of sympathetic reading that sees beyond obvious emotional signs.
Indeed, the fallout from the unsolved murder case reorients Angie entirely around the practice of sympathetic identification with the sorrows and troubles of other people. “Not for self, henceforth, was her life to be,” Cummins explains. “In action and in sympathy she must, for the
35 1: Courtroom Civil War future, find her mission and her solace (211). Educated by her trials, Angie devotes herself to sympathizing with and alleviating the sufferings of others in her community: “the spirit of her life was…one of sympathy,” Cummins explains, “and unconsciously made itself felt” (304). Because
Angie has experienced deep suffering, having "probed life deeply at one point,” she now knows
“better what lies beneath the surface everywhere” (304). Returning to the metaphor of emotional surface and depth, Cummins signals the completion of Angie’s emotional training in her ability to feel deeply for and with the sorrows of her neighbors: “experience now had let her down into the heart of things, and what others only knew of, she could feel” (304–305). While the resolution of the murder mystery is initially delayed by a lack of sympathetic identification, this delay itself enables the cultivation of Angie’s sympathies through suffering. This training gradually prepares
Angie to meet George again, and to unburden her heart to him for the first time.
Given its emphasis on the necessity of sympathetic detection, one might expect Cummins’s anti-detective novel to end with a newly sympathetic Angie revising her mistaken assumptions about George’s guilt and solving the case through her power of affective identification with others’ deepest feelings. At the end of the novel, Angie and Margery do undergo a final “exorcism” of their haunted hearts before George. Admitting that they believed him guilty of the murder, they receive his forgiveness and unite with him in sympathetic understanding. Yet between Angie’s sympathetic education and this conclusion, the novel makes a sharp pivot to the piracy trial of
Captain Bullet. It is the trial, not Angie, that ultimately resolves the murder—and reorients the novel around the legal stakes of the Civil War.
Confederacy on Trial: Haunted Hearts as History
In certain ways, the detour into the courtroom trial of the pirate Bullet—which occupies a full hundred pages, roughly a quarter of the novel—feels highly disconnected from the domestic drama
36 1: Courtroom Civil War that surrounds it. Suddenly shifting the scene from Stein’s Plains to the bustling world of New
York City, it also shifts the novel’s focus from a murder in this local community to treasonous crimes against the nation itself. Indeed, the trial sequence foregrounds a world-historical context for the local tribulations of the novel’s protagonists. As Baym and Saulsbury have established,
Haunted Hearts clearly reflects on the Civil War; indeed, it often alludes directly to the war in narrative asides. Yet Haunted Hearts is also contextualized by early nineteenth-century global warfare: specifically, the War of 1812 (1812–1815) and the Second Barbary War (1815). The War of 1812 reengaged the new nation in warfare with Great Britain, motivated in part by the British
Royal Navy’s repeated attempts to capture and impress US merchant sailors. The Second Barbary
War, meanwhile, settled longstanding tensions in the Mediterranean—where the ongoing capture of US merchant ships by Algerian pirates had periodically escalated into warfare since the 1780s.
Together, these two wars helped to engender the American Navy and establish its international prowess. Naval officer Stephen Decatur’s 1815 rescue of US citizens from Algerian captivity, referenced in Haunted Hearts, became a particularly resonant source of national pride.10
Cummins’s decision to allegorize the Civil War through these earlier global conflicts, which came to define American naval strength on an international stage, critically informs the argument of this historical novel: Haunted Hearts wields its global-historical context to symbolically situate the
Confederacy within a longer history of global piracy antagonistic to the American nation.
In his dual roles, Josselyn/Bullet is the linchpin of the novel: his villainy initiates the murder mystery, while his demise restores the familial bonds damaged in the novel’s first chapters.
10 For historical context on the War of 1812, see Donald Hickey, The War of 1812 (1989) and Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812 (2010). On the Barbary Wars, see Frank Lambert, The Barbary Wars (2005); on the Algerian captivity crisis specifically, see Lawrence Peskin, Captives and Countrymen (2009). In the nineteenth century, “Barbary States” referred collectively to the North African states of Algiers, Morocco, Tripoli, and Tunis. The First Barbary War was fought between 1801 and 1805; related conflicts over North African piracy had also erupted in the 1780s and 1790s.
37 1: Courtroom Civil War
In his two guises, he is also explicitly linked to both of the novel’s global conflicts. As an officer in the British Royal Navy, he opposes American forces in the War of 1812. As a pirate king, he antagonizes American ships in connection with the Second Barbary War. On one level, his dual identity speaks to the entwined nature of these two conflicts: Britain’s impressment of US sailors resulted in accusations of piracy during the turmoil that led to the War of 1812, while American conspiracy theories about the Barbary Wars often suggested that Britain was secretly supporting the pirates in their harassment of US sailors.11 On another level, this dual identity embodies a critique of Josselyn’s claims to legitimacy early in the novel. In his guise as a British naval officer,
Josselyn maintains a charming and aristocratic veneer; while these pretensions associate him with falsified royalty, they are not strongly vilified upfront. The trial sequence, however, reveals the aristocratic Captain Josselyn to be none other than a marauding pirate entangled with Barbary corsairs. In the guise of Bullet, also called “the Black Bull of the Indies,” he proves himself to be a villainous tyrant. He has a “reputation as the king of pirates,” a moniker that emphasizes the sinister undercurrents of his aristocratic pretensions as Josselyn (417). He is also a metaphorical slave-driver, a “tyrannic” master who rules over his crew as if they were “slaves” (401). Indeed, the novel consistently associates piracy with slavery: Bullet is said to have “learned his trade” from
Barbary pirates, whose attacks on American sailors in the Mediterranean fueled the Barbary Wars
(417). It is no accident that Bullet is brought to justice by Captain Rawle, an upright Northern man whose experience of enslavement in Algiers has taught him “what it is to be my own master, and what it is to be a slave” (415).
11 Peskin, Captives and Countrymen, 187–192. As Peskin shows, similar conspiracy theories also manifested during earlier Barbary captivity crises in the 1780s and 1790s (101–104). However, British impressment of American sailors intensified such suspicions in the lead-up to the War of 1812 (189).
38 1: Courtroom Civil War
The pirate Bullet also loosely figures another man who earned a “reputation as the king of pirates” during the Civil War: Jefferson Davis. In April 1861, Davis announced a plan to issue letters of marque to engage privately owned ships on behalf of the under-resourced Confederacy.
These privateers would fulfill the role of a navy, which the Confederacy desperately needed in order to face the more robust and well-equipped US Navy. His decision to engage privateers provoked outrage and derision in the North for two reasons. First, the practice of privateering had by this time largely fallen out of public favor. It had certainly played a significant role in the War of 1812, when the United States relied heavily on privateers to support its limited naval forces against the British Royal Navy.12 Yet by the 1850s, the United States and most European powers no longer accepted privateering as a legitimate practice.13 Second, and more importantly, Davis’s announcement presumed that the Confederacy was an independent nation with the power to issue letters of marque—a presumption vociferously denounced in the North.14
Northern newspapers and magazines responded to the idea of Confederate privateering with a mix of outrage and derision, decrying both Davis and his privateers as marauding pirates.
The New York Times reported that Davis’s announcement had “hung out the true flag of the
Confederates,” which was none other than “The Pirate Flag,” and denounced Davis himself as an illegitimate pirate king: “Even if JEFF. DAVIS’ kingdom were a legitimate nation, duly recognized by the world as an established and independent power, the treaties to which we have
12 On the pivotal role that American privateering played in the War of 1812, see Faye M. Kert, Privateering: Patriots and Profits in the War of 1812 (2015).
13 In 1856, fifty-five nations agreed to ban privateering in the Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law. Although the United States did not sign the Declaration, by this time the federal government had ceased to rely on privateers; indeed, its reliance on privateering declined sharply after the War of 1812 (Kert 56).
14 Privateering specifically refers to the engagement of private ships in warfare between nations; letters of marque, issued by a government after a declaration of war, distinguished legitimate privateers from pirates (Kert 5). On the initiation of Confederate privateering, see Mark Weitz, Confederacy on Trial (2005), 18–20.
39 1: Courtroom Civil War already alluded would shut him out from all the ports of the civilized nations of Europe. There is not one in which he would not instantly be condemned as a pirate.”15 During the war, satirical cartoons regularly portrayed Davis as a pirate king and depicted the Confederate flag as a pirate flag. In March 1862, for example, a Harper’s Weekly cartoon imagined Davis as a skeleton king: sitting over a shackled slave, he holds a pirate flag in one hand and a torch labeled “DESOLATION” in the other.16 A wartime fad for “patriotic envelopes” reinforced this association, as Northern printers manufactured and sold envelopes bearing a wide array of pirate imagery.17 Some images reimagined the Confederate flag as a pirate flag, complete with skull and crossbones.18 Others depicted Davis himself in a variety of piratical roles: sailing in a pirate ship under the skull and crossbones, doling out “blood money” to pirates in his employ for capturing Northerners, and hanging at the gallows with the caption “Jeff. Davis, ‘President’ of Traitors, Robbers, and Pirates; the Nero of the 19th century.”19
For Northern readers in 1864, Cummins’s portrait of a tyrannical pirate king masquerading as a legitimate naval captain would most readily have recalled the numerous wartime newspaper headlines, satirical cartoons, and patriotic images that satirized Davis himself as a pirate and would-be king. Bullet’s chameleon-like adaptation of different guises, moreover, mimics the
15 “The Pirate Flag,” The New York Times, April 20, 1861: 4.
16 “The Inauguration at Richmond,” Harper’s Weekly 6 (272), March 15, 1862: 176.
17 Steven R. Boyd, Patriotic Envelopes of the Civil War (2010). According to Boyd, patriotic envelopes began circulating in the spring of 1861 and quickly became popular in both the Confederacy and the Union (5).
18 See Boyd 47–48, and the accompanying images 2.31–2.32. One depicts the Confederate flag, labeled “The Pirate Flag” instead; the other depicts a pirate flag imprinted with the skull and crossbones, labeled “J.D. His Marque.”
19 These envelopes are not included in Boyd’s study, but are part of the American Antiquarian Society’s American Broadsides and Ephemera collection: “Jeff’s knave-y” (series 1, no. 25413); “Blood money; or how southern rebels encourage piracy” (series 1, no. 25471); and “Jeff. Davis, ‘president’ of traitors, robbers, and pirates; the Nero of the 19th century” (series 1, no. 25402).
40 1: Courtroom Civil War strategy of many Confederate privateers, who frequently disguised their ships with other nations’ flags before striking. Even Bullet’s connections with Britain would have coded him as a
Confederate analogue: although Britain declared neutrality during the Civil War, Davis made overtures to the British government that worried Northerners early in the war. One 1863 political cartoon, for instance, showed Davis wielding piracy against Northern ships with the support of
“John Bull” (Britain) and Napoleon III (France).20
If the marauding Bullet in Haunted Hearts is a coded figuration for Jefferson Davis, then
Bullet’s trial both condemns Davis as a pirate and the Confederacy as a traitorous enterprise. For this trial, Cummins also drew on historical precedent. The matter of the Confederacy’s legitimacy actually did come to a head in two Civil War piracy trials. In the summer of 1861, US naval forces captured the Confederate privateers Savannah and Jefferson Davis. At the end of October, the crews of both ships underwent highly public federal court trials: a week-long trial of the Savannah officers and crew took place in New York, while Jefferson Davis crew members were tried in
Philadelphia. The outcomes of both trials hinged on how the courts defined the defendants: were they privateers, or were they pirates? The defense for William Smith of the Jefferson Davis framed the stakes of this question succinctly: “Is he a pirate, and thus shut out from all law, and entitled to no mercy either at your hands, or at the hands of anyone else…or is he simply a privateer, and, thus, according to the law of nations and to the usages of all civilized warfare, entitled to be dealt with as a prisoner of war merely?”21 Both crews insisted that they were privateers engaged on behalf of the independent Confederate States. As “belligerent” members of a foreign nation, they wished to be tried as prisoners of war under the international “laws of war.” Yet the legal
20 Oliver Evan Woods, “The Pending Conflict” (1863).
21 D. F. Murphy, The Jeff Davis Piracy Cases (1861), 57.
41 1: Courtroom Civil War distinction between privateering and piracy was also intimately connected to the question of secession’s legality. Trying the men as privateers would effectively acknowledge the Confederacy as a legitimate nation, legally recognizing its independence. If considered pirates, the crews could be tried as criminals and possibly sentenced to death in civilian court—thus denying the
Confederacy formal recognition.22
Ultimately, the Savannah trial stumbled over these difficulties. Hung up on the question of the Confederacy’s legal status, the jury could not arrive at a verdict and the case was initially slated for retrial. In Philadelphia, the jury did find William Smith and his fellow crew members guilty of piracy and treason—by extension, refusing to acknowledge both the legality of secession and the
Confederacy as a nation. However, the defendants in this trial were never officially sentenced.
Instead, the crews of both ships were traded to the Confederacy as prisoners of war after Davis threatened to execute Union prisoners. Because the Jefferson Davis ruling did not establish precedent for future cases, it also left open the larger legal debate over secession.23 This debate was later renewed in the Prize Cases of 1863, a Supreme Court case that refused to define the
Confederacy as a nation but did acknowledge it as a belligerent entitled to rights of war— effectively affirming that Confederate privateers could not be tried as pirates.24 The debate over
22 Weitz’s The Confederacy on Trial is the most comprehensive account of the 1861 piracy trials to date; on the proceedings of these cases, see ch. 7–8. Several legal histories of the Civil War also address the piracy trials more briefly: see Stephen C. Neff, Justice in Blue and Gray (2010), ch. 1; William A. Blair, With Malice Toward Some (2014), 68–80; and Peter Charles Hoffer, Uncivil Warriors (2018), ch. 4.
23 On the outcome of the Savannah trial, see Weitz 189–190; 195–196. On the outcome of the Jefferson Davis trials, see Weitz 160–162; 195–196. As Hoffer explains, the ruling did not establish precedent because it took place in trial court rather than in a court of appeal (90).
24 Weitz 197–200; see also Neff 24–28. After President Lincoln issued a blockade of Southern ports in 1861, the US Navy seized several Southern ships for violating the order. In weighing the legality of these seizures, the Prize Cases also confronted secession’s legality: because governments are forbidden from blockading their own ports under the laws of war, the blockade and the seizures could only be legal if the Southern ports were considered part of a foreign nation. The court upheld the legality of the blockade, while allowing the Confederacy belligerent status.
42 1: Courtroom Civil War secession’s legality continued into the war’s aftermath, when a trial of Jefferson Davis was widely anticipated to determine the answer once and for all. Yet the trial never took place, endlessly deferred as both sides struggled with the potential consequences of losing the case. Secession was finally declared unconstitutional in Texas v. White (1869), a much lower-profile case.25
In the extended courtroom drama of Haunted Hearts, Cummins analogously put Jefferson
Davis and the Confederacy itself on trial for treason. Although Cummins did not live to see Texas v. White finally proclaim secession illegal, she certainly would have been exposed to the initial
1861 piracy trials and the Prize Cases in 1863. Coverage of these trials was extensive: large sections of the Savannah proceedings, for instance, were published daily in The New York Times.26
Moreover, Cummins—the daughter of a Massachusetts judge—had an established interest in legal questions, as Weinstein has shown in her analysis of The Lamplighter’s engagement with adoption law.27 In the trial sequence, Cummins explicitly connects the crimes of Bullet’s pirate crew with those of the Confederacy during the Civil War. She frames the contemporary relevance of her courtroom drama as the trial begins, prompting readers to read the entire episode as a revisionist judicial fantasy about punishing the Confederacy. With the “buccaneers” assembled in the dock, she pauses for an authorial aside: “It was the old story of deception, robbery, and cruelty, all summed up in the dark word, Piracy, -- a story so old, a deed so dark, as almost to be forgotten
25 See Cynthia Nicoletti, Secession on Trial (2017), on the legal history of the aborted Jefferson Davis treason trial and its implications for the constitutionality of secession.
26 See “The Savannah Privateer: Trial for Piracy—Great Throng in Court,” The New York Times, October 24, 1861: 8; “The Privateer Savannah: Documents and Authorities in the Case—Progress of the Trial,” The New York Times, October 26, 1861: 5; “The Privateer Savannah: Arguments on Both Sides,” New York Times, October 28, 1861: 3; “Case of the Privateer Savannah: Closing Arguments,” The New York Times, October 29, 1861: 2. Full trial transcripts were published shortly thereafter: see D. F. Murphy, The Jeff Davis Piracy Cases (1861); and A. F. Warburton, Trial of the Officers and Crew of the Privateer Savannah on the Charge of Piracy (1862).
27 Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, ch. 2.
43 1: Courtroom Civil War and lost in oblivion, but for the recent revival of the crime which makes it now a familiar outrage”
(400, my emphasis). In 1864, readers would have understood this complaint about the “recent revival” of piracy as a clear allusion to Confederate privateering. Before the trial even commences,
Cummins assumes the role of judge to define the defendants—and, metafictionally, Confederate privateers—as pirates. In denouncing Confederate privateers as pirates, Cummins thus rejected the outcomes of both the Savannah trial in 1861 and the Prize Cases trial in 1863; instead, she upholds the Jefferson Davis trial’s verdict of piracy and treason.
It is not particularly surprising that Cummins denounces the “recent revival” of piracy, given that Confederate privateers were widely condemned as pirates in Northern public opinion.
However, as far as I have found, Cummins is alone in fictionalizing a trial that authorizes—albeit by historical analogy, of course—their condemnation as pirates in a court of law. Contextualized by other Civil War fiction that addressed Confederate privateering, Haunted Hearts is unusual in confining its pirates largely to the space of the courtroom. In the North, Confederate privateers generally appeared as the antagonists in sensational adventure tales. Replete with abductions, escapes, and sea battles, these narratives also repeatedly show characters loyal to the Union denouncing the self-proclaimed privateers as pirates and traitors. In 1862, the New York Weekly ran just such a Civil War novella: Harry Hazel’s The Yankee Governess: Or, The Rival Brothers, in which a villainous Confederate privateer abducts the titular heroine and is repeatedly denounced by loyal Northerners as a traitorous pirate. In Ned Buntline’s The Rattlesnake; or, the Rebel
Privateer. A Tale of the Present Time (1862), a Confederate privateer also abducts a Yankee heroine, his former fiancé, who has broken the engagement over his allegiance to the Confederacy.
In both of these tales, the Confederate privateers are roundly denounced—but never actually tried as pirates in a court of law. Hazel simply kills off his villain in battle at the end of
44 1: Courtroom Civil War the novella. Buntline’s novel is clearly aware of the real—and unresolved—legal questions swirling around Confederate privateers. Multiple characters, including a US Marshal, state that the captain of the titular “rebel privateer” will be tried and hung as a pirate (16). At the end, however, the captured and defeated privateer simply drowns after falling overboard. The novella never actually confronts the legality of Confederate privateering in a court of law—perhaps because actual courts of law struggled to do so. Indeed, the action seems to take place after the capture but before the trial of “the far-famed and early-doomed brig ‘Jeff Davis’” in October 1861 (22). In one scene, Jefferson Davis himself tells the privateer that he is holding a group of Union prisoners and waiting “to see what the Yankees intend to do with those of our men whom they have taken. They have threatened hanging. If they commence, we will follow suit!” (24). Buntline appears to allude to the 1861 piracy cases, when Davis threatened to execute Union prisoners if the North executed the privateers on trial. Yet in this novel, such legal questions remain in the background:
Confederate privateers are present primarily to instigate the battles and chases that constitute its most thrilling sequences.
Contextualized by these more standard sensational tales of Confederate privateering,
Haunted Hearts raises two generative questions about genre. Why did Cummins write a historical novel, displacing her piracy plotline temporally from the Civil War to the War of 1812? And why did she write a sentimental novel, displacing the piracy plotline spatially from the high seas of sensational romance to a courtroom where sentimentalism reigns? The next two sections take each of these questions in turn.
Historical Displacements: Genre as Argument
Cummins’s decision to temporally displace the Civil War to the War of 1812, I argue, is intimately connected to the place of privateering in antebellum literature. Pirates and privateers were also
45 1: Courtroom Civil War established stock figures in antebellum sensational fiction, the typical fare of publications like the
New York Weekly and the New York Ledger. While the less sensational Cummins did not write pirate fiction in the 1850s, even she could not resist the excitement of shipboard melodrama: in
The Lamplighter, Gerty famously rescues a fellow passenger aboard a cruise ship that has caught fire. Antebellum historical romances, meanwhile, repeatedly rehearsed the heroics of American privateers during the War of 1812. While Harry Hazel vilified Confederate privateers during the
Civil War, his 1852 novel Yankee Jack; or, The Perils of a Privateersman: A Romance of the War of 1812 lauds the nation’s “swiftly sailing Privateers” as valiant “pioneers in our second war with
Great Britain” (6). Haunted Hearts is set at a time when American privateers were celebrated for their support of the fledgling US Navy—a pointed contrast with the moment of its publication.
The novel’s conclusion, in 1817, also takes place in the face of privateering’s impending obsolescence: with the rise of the American Navy, the privateers who had supported it during the
War of 1812 were rapidly relegated to the pages of romance. Reflecting on the power of the
American Navy, Cummins frames this postwar moment as one of national unity and pride: she describes December 1817 as a peaceful time, when “national prosperity” has been set “on a surer foundation than ever before” (307). In another allusion to the Civil War, she points out that Decatur and Somers gave the “infant navy its earliest title to a nation’s praise—a foretaste of the future triumphs which now fill her sails as she sweeps on in the march of freedom” (375). Establishing a fifty-year history of US naval prowess, Cummins connects the fledgling navy's rescue of the prisoners in Algiers with Union naval “triumphs” in the Civil War.
Viewed through this historical lens, Cummins’s decision to set Haunted Hearts during the
War of 1812 is actually argumentative in its own right. The novel delegitimates Confederate privateering by historicizing it: for Cummins, the Confederate privateers are no different from the
46 1: Courtroom Civil War pirates that she prosecutes in Haunted Hearts. As her commentary on the trial makes clear, such piratical attacks are out of place in the 1860s. Indeed, piracy would be “forgotten and lost in oblivion” if not for the Confederacy. In 1864, Cummins argued that history is the only place for piracy—and adopted the genre of the historical novel as the vehicle for this claim. Writing
Confederate privateering into a historical novel about piracy, she manipulated genre to stake her claim about the ludicrousness of reviving “the crime” of piracy during the Civil War. Moreover, although the novel is set at a time when American privateering was widely celebrated, Cummins expressly refuses to affiliate the Confederacy with the heroic privateers of 1812. Instead, she affiliates Confederate privateering with British impressment and Barbary piracy—both of which were widely viewed in early America as piratical attacks on the fledgling nation. Her generic argument resonates with the New York Times's account of Confederate privateering, which expressed its contempt that they “cannot even make war in the spirit of a civilized nation, but go back to the habits and practices of the barbarism of a hundred years ago” (4).
The novel’s dramatic temporal displacement of the Civil War also critically informs its treatment of American slavery. Although Bullet is tied inextricably to the practice of slavery, the novel focuses exclusively on the unjust enslavement of white American men by North African pirates during the Second Barbary War. While Cummins condemns these acts of slavery abroad, she also virtually ignores the crisis over American slavery at home. A generous interpretation might see the tale of George Rawle’s enslavement as a coded statement about the injustices of the slave system in the American South. As Jacob Berman and Lawrence Peskin have shown, Barbary captivity narratives frequently made implicit abolitionist arguments during the early nineteenth century. According to Berman, “Barbary acted as a contact zone that pushed white American captives, and those who read about them, toward identification with the plight of African slaves in
47 1: Courtroom Civil War
America.”28 Possibly, Haunted Hearts attempted to imitate such early nineteenth-century abolitionist accounts in its use of Barbary piracy. Yet given the evolution of the abolitionist movement since the Barbary captivity crises, such a coded analogue for American slavery seems at best a meek and belated political statement in 1864—a full year after emancipation had been declared. Barbary piracy appeared much less frequently in mid-century abolitionist rhetoric than it had in the early 1800s, and those abolitionist leaders who made the analogy also evolved it. In an 1860 speech entitled “Barbarism of Slavery,” Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts directly linked the American South and North Africa by their parallel latitudes as well as by their parallel practice of slavery—but reminded listeners that the North African states had largely “renounced” slavery, while “our Barbary” retained it. He urged the South to follow North Africa’s example, becoming “the complement in Freedom to the African Barbary, as it has already been its
29 complement in Slavery, and is unquestionably its complement in geographical character.”
I would argue instead that Haunted Hearts effectively signals its own lack of interest in the contest over American slavery. There is little indication that the enslavement of George Rawle is supposed to reflect on the “peculiar institution” at home. Even if it had, the choice of a white man as the victim of slavery makes for a problematic analogue at best. Instead, Cummins’s use of the
Algerian captivity crisis effectively situates Confederate aggression in a history of piracy and
“savage” attacks against the United States—from both Britain and the Barbary States. Her
Algerian slavery plotline relies on the “barbarism” of North African pirates, which even blackens the name of “Black Bullet” by association. Cummins manipulates blackness simply to delegitimize the pirate king—Bullet, and analogously Jefferson Davis—as a dark and foreign other. The novel
28 Jacob Berman, American Arabesque (2012), 45. See also Lawrence Peskin, Captives and Countrymen, ch. 1–4.
29 Charles Sumner, “The Barbarism of Slavery” (1860), 12.
48 1: Courtroom Civil War both displaces slavery abroad to Algiers and defines it as the crime of foreign—specifically,
African—pirates. In delegitimizing Confederate privateers through an affiliation with Barbary pirates, Cummins also obfuscates the crisis of American slavery in the middle of a war fought over its legitimacy. Ultimately, Cummins uses Confederate privateering to delegitimize the
Confederacy through racialized associations with piracy and empire.
Meanwhile, the most remarkable witness in William Smith’s piracy case was in fact a free black cook, Jacob Garrick, who was on board one of the Northern ships captured by the Jefferson
Davis. Garrick, whom Smith intended to sell into slavery in Charleston, played a pivotal role in rescuing his fellow captives: when a federal gun-boat passed by, he leapt from the side of the captured ship and shouted a warning to the US officers, which led to the capture of the privateers.
Garrick later testified at Smith’s trial, where the prosecution repeatedly valorized Garrick’s
“bravery and self-possession,” calling him the one “to whom is due the credit of the rescue of this vessel.”30 The narrative of Smith’s piracy is intimately tied to his identity as a slave trader, and both narratives are reflected powerfully in Garrick’s testimony. Cummins’s historical narrative of
Barbary piracy and white slavery, meanwhile, is at best an imperfect analogy for the Civil War.
Cummins takes advantage of Bullet’s mobility—his ability to sail far and wide—to associate him with racial “others” abroad. This move vilifies him—and analogously, Confederate privateers— as a “savage” engaged in unlawful warfare, delegitimizing him through racial blackness while ignoring the struggle over American slavery.
Sentimental Reckoning: The Affective Case Against Piracy
Cummins’s decision to displace the piracy subplot of Haunted Hearts from the high seas to the courtroom is also an argumentative one. Generically, this displacement shifted the contest over
30 Murphy, “The Jeff Davis Piracy Cases,” 13. On Garrick’s testimony, see also Weitz 138–139.
49 1: Courtroom Civil War
Confederate privateering from the seascapes of sensational romance to a location more intimately connected with the conventions of sentimentalism. As Laura Hanft Korobkin has shown in her analysis of “courtroom storytelling,” sentimental sympathy frequently extended its influence in the context of nineteenth-century court cases.31 Focusing on marriage law, Korobkin argues that lawyers regularly deployed sentimental rhetoric to argue cases in the courtroom—while judges at times relied on marriage narratives set forth in works of fiction “to instantiate the legal parameters of spousal rights and obligations” (18). Cummins deploys her own form of sentimental “courtroom storytelling” in Haunted Hearts: deliberately recalling antebellum romances, she confines such stories to testimony in the courtroom—where she can most effectively deploy sentimental strategies against the defendants.
I have argued that the murder mystery occupying the novel’s first half is focused on teaching readers how to sympathize without the physical sign of the tear; moreover, that the community’s inability to solve the mystery is contingent on their inability to sensitively read hidden feelings. In the trial scenes, however, Cummins appears to lose sight of these educational prerogatives. Suddenly, the novel abandons its interest in the cultivation of Angie’s sympathies through suffering; as well as in the cultivation of readers’ sympathies through teachable moments when emotions lie hidden below the surface. Instead, the courtroom scenes channel highly unsubtle performances of sympathy in order to indict Bullet for his crimes. The murder mystery is not resolved by the sympathetic reading of hearts, but rather by a public show of sentiment in the courtroom. If the rest of the novel explores deeply interior thoughts and feelings, the courtroom scenes are all surface. Instead of chastising superficial forms of reading, Cummins relies on these
31 Laura Hanft Korobkin, Criminal Conversations (1998), 11. See also Elizabeth Stockton, “E. D. E. N. Southworth’s Reimagining of the Married Women’s Property Reforms,” which frames Southworth’s Ishmael (1863–64) as a case for the importance of women having “sympathetic (male) legal mediators to safeguard them from male abusers” (245).
50 1: Courtroom Civil War superficialities to build the case against the pirate Bullet. While Cummins claims the necessity of deep sympathetic reading in Stein’s Plains, she engages in sentimental showmanship to convict
Bullet. In so doing, she deploys the sentimental novel’s great power—sympathetic identification— to analogously deny legitimacy to the Confederacy. Indeed, the trial sequence can be read as
Cummins’s revision of the 1861 piracy trials—as well as an effort to set a literary precedent for the trial and conviction of the “pirate king” Jefferson Davis. In these scenes, Haunted Hearts attempts to exert the power of the sentimental mode on the national political stage. Instead of deploying sentimental sympathy to urge mercy for the defendants, Cummins uses sympathy to model a harsh and unforgiving form of justice: this trial results in Bullet’s swift sentencing and execution, the punishment that the Confederate privateers escaped in both 1861 trials. By activating sympathy in the case, Cummins also makes determining the legal status of the
Confederacy the property of the sentimental novel.
Before the trial even begins, Cummins rejects the possibility that the pirates at the dock— and Confederate privateers—might be deserving of sympathy. In its entirety, her allusive aside at the start of the trial rejects all possible arguments for mercy towards pirates:
It was the old story of deception, robbery, and cruelty, all summed up in the dark word, Piracy, -- a story so old, a deed so dark, as almost to be forgotten and lost in oblivion, but for the recent revival of the crime which makes it now a familiar outrage. But lawless freebooters may yet claim legal sanction for their deeds, and indifference to others’ rights may be fostered by sophistry or imaginary wrongs. In some instances, too, life may be held sacred while property is sacrificed, and the eyes of neutrals may be blinded to the outrage by a certain pretence of justice and discrimination. No such affectation of mercy, no such partial distinctions softened the crimes of these men, or qualified their deeds. (400)
Her frustration that modern-day pirates “may yet claim legal sanction for their deeds” alludes to the ostensible legitimacy that letters of marque bestowed on Confederate privateers. Her scorn for
“affectations of mercy,” meanwhile, alludes specifically to another tactic mobilized by the defense in the Savannah case: emphasizing the crew’s attempts to preserve life as well as to discriminate
51 1: Courtroom Civil War amongst enemy and neutral ships. In a sentimental appeal fitting Korobkin’s description of
“courtroom storytelling,” the defense argued that the crew mercifully took the captured ship’s passengers as prisoners of war:
“I beg to call your attention to the facts that have been brought out on the testimony for the prosecution itself—that, in regard to this vessel, instead of her crew having been murdered—instead of helpless women and children having been sent to a watery grave, after having suffered, perhaps, still greater indignities—that not a hair of the head of any one was touched—that not a man suffered a wound or an indignity of any kind—that they were sent, as prisoners of war, into the neighboring port of Georgetown, where, in due time, by decree of a court, the vessel was condemned and sold— and the prisoners, having been kept in confinement some time as prisoners of war, were released, and have been enabled to come into Court and testify before you.” (72)
Haunted Hearts directly rejects sentimental appeals to images of “helpless women and children” excused from suffering. As the narrator-turned-judge, Cummins proclaims that such “pretence of justice and discrimination” only blinds neutral parties “to the outrage” of piracy. Her commentary inextricably links Confederate privateers who make “affectations of mercy” with the ruthless
Bullet and his crew, indicating that this revisionist courtroom fantasy will be unmoved by the kind of legal sophistry mobilized to defend the Savannah crew.
Instead, Cummins flourishes displays of sentimental sympathy to move the jury and the audience against the pirate defendants. First, a tearful show of sympathy crucially verifies
George’s identity when he is called as a witness. Believing George to be dead, the defense lawyer accuses him of being an imposter and attempts to prevent his testimony. However, a deluge of affective proof ultimately verifies George’s identity. A relative in the courtroom rushes forward with tears in his eyes, clasping George’s hand in recognition. The audience is swept up in the “all engrossing emotion which this meeting awakened,” as both men look out to the crowd “for sympathy” that is readily given (406). Next, Margery comes forward embraces her son in a heartfelt reunion: “his heart aglow with a warm, instinctive throb, the earliest, purest throb a human heart can ever know, he received his poor old mother, and folded her to his breast” (408). Uniting
52 1: Courtroom Civil War mother and son, Cummins again reminds readers of the present war: “God grant that there may be many such gleams of rapture breaking through the clouds heavy with a nation’s pain” (410). Their affective display is so powerful that it momentarily disables the court proceedings, and again sweeps up the onlookers: “the lawyers involuntarily paused in the labor of weighing any other evidence than that of their senses; the jury, forgetting to be arbiters, were conscious only that they were men, and the audience, taking advantage of the distraction on the part of the authorities, carried away by an enthusiasm of sympathy which would not be repressed, sent up a simultaneous cheer” followed by a silence “more impressive and sympathetic” (408). In these episodes,
Cummins frames the show of familial sympathy as a form of evidence. Only the defense lawyer refuses to admit sentimental recognition as proof, and his “doubt and suspicion thus suggested grated against the universal sympathy in a scene whose genuineness nobody could justly question”
(413). The judge agrees to hear George’s testimony, deeming his identity sufficiently validated by his sympathetic affective bonds with family members.
The tearful reunion of the long-suffering Rawle family transforms Bullet’s trial for crimes against the nation into a vehicle for domestic reparation. Fundamentally, the case against Bullet is an affective one. Although he is actually on trial for piracy against the United States, the novel is emotionally anchored in the effects of his domestic crimes in Stein’s Plains. In murdering Baultie
Rawle, Bullet launches the women at the novel’s center—Margery and Angie—into a five-year spiral of anguish. As they mourn at home, the sensational plot of a very different novel—Bullet’s piracy, George’s capture and escape—unfolds behind the scenes. Yet Haunted Hearts contains these events to brief courtroom narration, and seems uninterested in the details of the piratical crimes for which Bullet is prosecuted. It instead registers his criminality through his destructive impact on families, and the emotional devastation that he wreaks specifically on Northern women.
53 1: Courtroom Civil War
Although he is an enemy of the nation, Cummins implicitly prosecutes him for destroying families and causing female suffering. Bullet’s conduct in the trial scenes only solidifies his domestic villainy: in contrast with the sympathetic displays of familial emotion, he gives Angie an ugly sneer and blows a mocking kiss from the dock. After the trial, he is also revealed to have seduced and abandoned Angie’s neighbor Polly Stein: when she approaches him with their child outside the courtroom, he cruelly rebuffs her with a kick. These courtroom episodes confirm Bullet’s irredeemable villainy. The novel repeatedly insists that he deserves no sympathy, validating and vindicating his execution on the basis of his destructive impact on the family. Analogously, of course, Haunted Hearts also lays these judgements on “pirate king” Jefferson Davis.
Through the jury’s verdict against Bullet, Cummins makes a bid for harsh justice in the analogous trials: she both revises the outcomes of the 1861 piracy trials, and projects the outcome in an imagined future trial of Jefferson Davis. Deploying sentimental evidence and female suffering in the name of justice, Cummins gives Bullet no opportunity to engage the audience’s sympathy. The jury delivers a guilty verdict “without leaving their seats,” sentencing is carried out the next morning, and he is executed soon after (435). Cummins does not depict the execution, and his final days are described only in the reports of the prison chaplain who visits him: Bullet displays
“an abject, craven fear of the gallows,” begging for “the mercy of government” and obsessing over
“the chance of a reprieve” (529, 530). However, Cummins does not swerve from her commitment to his execution: despite his pleas, there is “no shadow of a chance for him” (530). Bullet’s cowardice before the gallows further affirms that he has not a single “virtue,” even in the eyes of the chaplain (530). This is a stunning reversal from the novel’s early chapters, when the community largely embraced him as Captain Josselyn. In that guise, he had engaged sympathy and admiration:
“there was the pathos connected with his having been a prisoner, which appealed to the women’s
54 1: Courtroom Civil War sympathies; [and] the bravery indicated by the late sabre cut on his arm, which both sexes could appreciate” (71). Stripped of this legitimacy and revealed as a pirate, he engages no such sympathy in court. If the revelation of Josselyn’s true identity as Bullet is a reminder that pirates pretending to legitimacy are still pirates at heart, then the trial’s rapid denouement is a reminder that such pirates can—and should—be dealt unremitting justice.
Understanding Cummins’s pirate villain as the catalyst for the destruction and heartache at the book’s center, we can read Haunted Hearts not just as an atmospheric wartime lament—but rather as an angry indictment of the Confederacy through the trial of “pirate king” Jefferson Davis.
In another way, however, the trial surprisingly registers a gap between personal and national loss, and reflects on the hollowness of punishment in response to such personal loss. It is important that
Bullet has committed both a local murder in the community of Stein’s Plains, and war crimes against the state with larger national implications. Responsible for the destruction of individual lives as well as for treason against the nation, he is tried solely for the latter. The murder of Baultie
Rawle does not actually come up in the trial proceedings, and Bullet is condemned to “die in expiation of other crimes committed against high heaven” (446). Cummins acknowledges the emotional hollowness of condemning Bullet for piracy, suggesting that no large-scale prosecution of crimes against the state can give satisfaction to those who have experienced such intimate losses.
Coda: Taming the Pirate in E. D. E. N. Southworth’s Britomarte, the Man-Hater
Maria Cummins’s denial of sympathy to Bullet—and her refusal to offer him mercy in the outcome of his piracy trial—strongly departs from the treatment of Confederate privateering in the only other sentimental novel to address the subject during this period. Fellow mid-century novelist E.
D. E. N. Southworth (1819–1899) also included a Confederate privateering subplot in her Civil
War novel, Britomarte, the Man-Hater. Serialized in the popular New York Ledger from October
55 1: Courtroom Civil War
1865 to September 1866, the novel was later republished in two large volumes: Fair Play (1868) and How He Won Her (1869). Unlike Cummins, the prolific Southworth admittedly had a fondness for blending sentimental and sensational fare. Her antebellum novels are peopled with pirates, bandits, abductions, escapes, and battles; while the heroine of her most famous novel, The Hidden
Hand (1859), famously rejects sentimental conventions to fight duels and engage in daring rescues.32 Southworth’s sensational streak made Confederate privateering a logical choice for inclusion in her Civil War novel, but her treatment of the privateer himself is highly sentimental.
Although Southworth revels in the sensational high seas battles that Cummins relegated to mere courtroom testimony, her lenient approach to Confederate privateering makes Britomarte, the
Man-Hater a gentler postwar coda to Cummins’s wartime demands for justice.
Britomarte, the Man-Hater follows the adventures of four young women—Erminie,
Alberta, Elfrida, and the titular Britomarte—from graduation at their Virginia college in 1860 to the end of the Civil War. It has attracted renewed interest in recent years, and scholars have focused understandably on comparing Southworth’s four models of womanhood during wartime.33 As
Karen Tracey and Annie Merrill Ingram show, each woman represents a different set of responses to the Civil War: the Southern belle Alberta allies herself unflinchingly to the Confederacy; the
Southern Unionist Elfrida bravely defends her home from secessionists and supplies vital intelligence to the federal government; the gentle Erminie, a model of domestic womanhood,
32 On the blending of sentimental and sensational tropes in Southworth’s serial fiction, see Kathryn Connor Bennett, “Illustrating Southworth,” in E. D. E. N. Southworth: Recovering a Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist (2012), ed. Melissa J. Homestead and Pamela T. Washington, 77–106. On the rejection of sentimental tropes in The Hidden Hand, see Joanne Dobson’s “Introduction” to The Hidden Hand (Rutgers University Press, 1988), xxvii–xxix.
33 See Sandra Wilson Smith, “Not a True Woman but a Bold One: The Story-Paper Female Heroes of E. D. E. N. Southworth,” in The Action-Adventure Heroine (2018); Annie Merrill Ingram, “Change of a Dress: Britomarte, the Man-Hater and other Transvestite Narratives of the Civil War,” in E. D. E. N Southworth: Recovering a Nineteenth- Century Popular Novelist (2012); and Karen Tracey, “Britomarte, The Man-Hater: Courtship During the Civil War,” in Plots and Proposals (2000).
56 1: Courtroom Civil War shows great strength in breaking her engagement to a secessionist; and Britomarte disguises herself as a man, proving her mettle as a Union spy and soldier alongside the man whom she loves. Yet in a little-mentioned subplot of the novel, Britomarte encounters a Confederate privateer at sea before she ever sets foot on a Civil War battlefield. In a Crusoe-inspired subplot, Britomarte, her love interest Justin, and their Irish servant Judith are shipwrecked on a deserted island in the Indian
Ocean while traveling as missionaries to Cambodia. Tracey has framed this island detour as the precursor to Britomarte’s Civil War adventures, noting that Southworth had to invent a “fantastic” shipwreck scenario to allow Britomarte to flourish in the antebellum period while the Civil War gave her heroine more “historically situated” opportunities (143). Little else has been written about
Britomarte’s island adventure, where she meets a Confederate privateer who happens to be cruising the seas thousands of miles from home.
Serialized just one year after Haunted Hearts was published, Britomarte, the Man-Hater makes a very different gambit. In this novel, Southworth staged the ideological rehabilitation of a
Confederate privateer, privileging Christian mercy over legal justice and activating sentimental sympathy in the name of sectional reconciliation. Southworth’s treatment of her privateer contrasts strikingly with Cummins’s approach in the Haunted Hearts piracy subplot, which deploys sentimental sympathy to ensure that Bullet faces legal justice at the end of a rope. Published in the war’s immediate aftermath, Southworth’s sensational novel helps to illuminate Cummins’s more radical—and radically unforgiving—vision of legal prosecution in the midst of Civil War. Where
Southworth reveled in piracy on the high seas before neutralizing her pirate in a sentimental conversion narrative, Cummins’s unsympathetic and unforgiving approach reflects her implicit
interest in prosecuting both the Confederacy and Jefferson Davis for treason.
57 1: Courtroom Civil War
Southworth’s privateering plotline introduces the Civil War as a conflict with global reach, one that extends all the way to a deserted island in the Indian Ocean. In the summer of 1862, after nearly two years on this island, her trio of shipwrecked castaways see “a strange sail” approaching
(478).34 Initially mistaking it for both the American flag and the Union Jack, they soon suspect that it must belong to “a pirate or a fraybooter” as Judith puts it (481). Fittingly, Southworth uses her castaways’ ignorance of the Civil War to introduce Confederate privateering as piracy: the unidentifiable flag is in fact the Confederate Stars and Bars, flying atop the privateer Sea Scourge.
Helmed by the “rebel” Captain Spear, this ship brings the domestic conflict far abroad and proves that even the most remotely situated Americans cannot escape its grasp (495).
Having introduced Spear to the stage, Southworth now plays out a bloodless version of the
Civil War in miniature amongst the castaways. A garrulous drunkard defined by his flourish for theatrical storytelling, Spear updates Britomarte and Justin on the war at home as though it were a stage drama: “Behold, the curtain rises on the grand drama. Act 1st, Scene 1st.—The Election of
Abraham Lincoln!” (492). Exalting Southern victory at the Battle of Manassas, he explains that he
“received letters of marque from the Confederate Government, authorizing me to cruize in quest of Federal prizes” (496). When he claims to have sunk several Federal merchant ships and murdered their crews, an enraged Justin nearly chokes him to death, exclaiming that his “instant execution is a moral necessity” (497). Yet Southworth carefully tempers Justin’s righteous
Northern outrage with the Christian sympathy of Britomarte, who convinces him merely to take the inebriated Spear as a prisoner instead. Justin eventually agree that, in the absence of law, they cannot be responsible for determining his fate: “The man has forfeited his life by every law of every civilized land; but we are not warranted to become his executioners,” states Justin. “We have
34 All quotations are from Fair Play, the volume edition containing the first half of Britomarte, the Man-Hater.
58 1: Courtroom Civil War only to deprive him of the power of committing more crime, and then to treat him with Christian charity” (520). Ironically, Spear’s shipmates have meanwhile mutinied against their captain and
“elected” a new captain to replace him—a miniature repetition of the South’s secession, leaving
Justin and Britomarte with the “robber and murderer” as their prisoner.
Christian sympathy ultimately transforms Captain Spear from a cutthroat pirate to a rehabilitated Union naval fighter. While Justin refuses to see him as anything other than “a freebooter, throat-cutter, ship-burner,” Britomarte suspects that his crimes are less severe than he has boasted, and believes in any case that “the only way to reclaim a monster is to be kind to him”
(531). Ultimately, Justin himself also comes to exhibit sympathy towards Spear. During a violent storm, he hurries the sick and disoriented captain into the castaways’ house, offers his own bed, and helps to nurse him back to health. Pulled into the isolated domestic lives of these kind Northern castaways, Spear recovers from both his illness and his secessionist principles at the same time.
When a Union warship fortuitously arrives after the storm, Spear reveals that he lied about his supposed crimes because he takes “mad delight in inspiring fear, horror, and detestation” (563).
“Rebel I am, since you dub as such the commanders of all Confederate privateers,” Spear proclaims. “But I never cut a throat or burned a ship in my life! I never harmed a woman or child in my life, or man either for that matter, except in fair fight” (565). Exchanging his island tall tales for sober truth, Captain Spear reveals that he is not the cutthroat pirate of his own stories but rather an ordinary man—one who exhibits what Cummins would certainly call “affections of mercy” in his privateering. Spear adds that Justin’s sympathy during the storm, when Justin cared for him
“like a brother,” is what has prompted him to reveal the truth.
Crucially, the revelation of the ostensible “pirate! throat-cutter! ship-burner!” as none of these things coincides with the war’s turn in favor of the Union. As an officer on the warship
59 1: Courtroom Civil War informs the castaways, at this point—the summer of 1863—it is clear that the Union “shall overwhelm them [the South] by numbers at length, if in no other way” (551). Until this point, the castaways have only referred to Spear as a pirate, not a privateer, emphasizing his illegitimacy and his lawlessness. Justin, for instance, at first cannot believe that the South would “tolerate piracy,” and reasons that Spear must have “taken advantage of civil war to become a pirate” (499).
Meanwhile, the captain of the Union warship compares Spear to Jefferson Davis himself: “Have
Spear personally present on this remote Indian Isle! You might as well boast that you have Davis here!” (568). Like Bullet in Haunted Hearts, Captain Spear initially functions as a stand-in for the piratical Jefferson Davis. After Spear’s sickbed conversion, however, Southworth begins to detach the “rebel” captain from accusations of piracy—beginning with Justin’s request that the Union officers to treat Spear “as a prisoner of war.” As reinforced in the 1863 Prize Cases trial, “prisoner of war” status denoted that the Confederacy—if not legally a nation—at least had the rights of a belligerent at war; its privateers could not be tried for treason as pirates. Spear himself also claims
“the usage of a prisoner of war,” prompting a debate with the Union captain that emphasizes
Spear’s reasonableness and his mercy towards captured merchant ships (569):
“But whether I shall be able to treat you as a prisoner of war, depends very much upon the account you are able to give of yourself. What have you been doing with the Sea Scourge?” demanded Captain Yetsom. “Capturing your ships wherever I could find them,” boldly answered Spear. “Our merchant ships?” “Well, I never happened to overhaul one of your men-of-war.” “I suppose not. But do you not consider it the act of pirates to attack and capture unarmed merchantmen, as your privateers are doing?” “Do you not consider it the act of bandits to march into defenceless villages and sack them as your Federal armies are doing? I did but on the sea what you did upon the land.” “But after taking these merchantmen, you have massacred the crews and burnt the ships?” “Never.” “What have you done with them, then?” “Bonded them and sent them home. If I have ever done otherwise, convict me of the crime of piracy, and sentence me to suffer its penalty. But until you can do that, treat me as a prisoner of war.”
60 1: Courtroom Civil War
“I shall treat you as a prisoner of war until we reach one of our own ports. There I shall deliver you over to the authorities, to be dealt with according to law. For your own sake, I hope it will appear that you have done no worse than you say.” (569–570)
In the spring of 1863, Southworth’s villain reveals himself to be not quite so villainous after all— misguided, certainly, but no heartless murderer. The island, far from US courtrooms, enables all involved to blur and confuse the boundaries between piracy and privateering. On his claimed moral merits, and at a crucial turning point in the fighting, Spear receives the treatment of a prisoner of war—modeling leniency in the treatment of the Confederacy after the war. Justin even convinces the crew to allow Spear to dine with them, since he’s a prisoner of war!
Southworth effectively tames her Confederate privateer by sentimentalizing him in a sectional conversion narrative. By the time Spear and the castaways leave the island, this
Confederate privateer—a declared emissary for Jefferson Davis—has lost his secessionist zeal and instead is eager to chase down the Sea Scourge. Announcing that his rebellious crew has “turned pirate unquestionably,” he proclaims his desire “to see all those mutinous rascals hung in a row from the yard arms” (565). Southworth thus completely redefines the terms of piracy: Spear’s crew become pirates only after they turn rogue and abandon the Confederacy, while Spear himself is exonerated from accusations of piracy. She cements Spear’s sentimental transformation through his death, narrated in a chapter called “Expiation.” This chapter fully reestablishes Spear’s loyalty to the Union, foreshadowing the reincorporation of the Confederacy into the nation. When the
Union warship catches up with the Sea Scourge, Southworth reveals that Spear’s great sin is actually “the vice of inebriation,” which turned him away from a bright future in the navy (620).
His dying father, who had proudly sailed in the navy, exhorted him to “be true to the flag” in the coming war: “Unprincipled men on both sides, from selfish ambition…have stirred up animosities, both North and South, but most especially in the South, so that the Southerners are resolved upon
61 1: Courtroom Civil War separation” (621). Nevertheless, Spear is “seduced by evil counsellors, misled by specious arguments, tempted by ambition, and weakened by that growing vice” (621–622). Rebellion itself comes to be framed as the result of drunken stupor and poor decisions. Crying and begging God’s mercy, Spear launches himself into the fray and impresses the crew with his zealous sacrifice.
With his “promise to his dying father grandly redeemed” by his own death in battle, both Spear and the novel are saved from the complicated business of a piracy trial (623). The castaways arrive in New York Harbor with the Sea Scourge in July 1863, as news of victory at Gettysburg signals that “[t]he tide of war has turned” (651). Southworth skirts around ever legally determining whether Spear is a “privateer” or a “pirate,” a distinction that was—at the time of her novel’s serialization—indeed fairly moot.
Two contexts explain the narrative arc of Captain Spear. In Against the Gallows (2011),
Paul Christian Jones situates Southworth in relation to the anti-gallows movement of the 1840s and 1850s. Arguing that anti-gallows sentimentalism undergirds much of her fiction from this period, he shows that Southworth advocated against the death penalty and urged the passage of laws focused on rehabilitating criminals instead. Jones also argues that the reformation of Black
Donald, the roguish villain in Southworth’s The Hidden Hand (1859), reflects these beliefs: rescued from execution by the heroine Capitola Black, he declares himself a “Reformed Robber” at the novel’s end. Capitola’s decision to free him enacts “Southworth’s imagining of a [justice] system that could incorporate the ‘tender emotions,’ including concern for the welfare of souls”
(155). Given Southworth’s opposition to the death penalty, Spear can be read as a wartime echo of Black Donald—although Spear’s rehabilitation is imagined in far more sentimental and melodramatic terms. Shown sympathy and mercy, he becomes the Union naval fighter that he
62 1: Courtroom Civil War always should have been. Making legal judgement superfluous, he fights and dies honorably for the Union before he can even reach an American courtroom.
Captain Spear’s rehabilitation also reflects the novel’s orientation towards reconciliation in the aftermath of the war. Spear’s conversion ultimately makes the question of his piracy irrelevant. The Union naval crew reabsorbs him into their ranks, first giving him courtesy as a prisoner-of-war and later acknowledging his heroism on behalf of their cause. Like other
Confederate soldiers in the novel, Spear is embraced by his Northern counterparts after acknowledging the waywardness of his secessionist principles. Clearly hopeful about reconciliation in 1865, Southworth chose to skirt around the legal questions about Confederate privateering that Haunted Hearts had interrogated just one year earlier. In its approach to piracy,
Britomarte, the Man-Hater thus opposes Haunted Hearts in nearly every way. Instead of the guilty and irredeemable Black Bullet, Southworth offers up the converted and relatively benign Captain
Spear. Where Cummins frames Bullet’s execution as the just outcome of his trial in federal court,
Southworth allows Spear to escape trial by honorably volunteering his life in battle. Where
Cummins mobilizes courtroom sentimentalism in order to seal Bullet’s fate at the gallows,
Southworth mobilizes sentimentalism at sea in the name of mercy for Spear. Cummins’s demand for harsh prosecution of piracy reflects her wartime investment in imagining the trial of Davis, while Southworth’s leniency reflects her postwar investment in laying a pathway to reconciliation.
Like Haunted Hearts, the island subplot in Britomarte, the Man-Hater also avoids directly confronting American slavery. The novel is generally far less interested in slavery than in women’s rights, repeatedly describing the plight of white women as a form of slavery.35 Britomarte’s titular
35 On the novel’s ambivalence regarding questions of race, see also Tracey, Plots and Proposals, 134–135. As Tracey points out, Southworth implicitly frames the war around “the disunion and reunion of a white America” (134).
63 1: Courtroom Civil War epithet, “The Man-Hater,” signals her primary reform agenda: it alludes to her stated refusal to wed under laws that deny rights to married women. And just as Cummins associates Bullet with
Barbary pirates, Southworth initially links the Confederate privateer Spear with a dark foreign
“other.” Afraid of what Spear’s pirate crew might do to Britomarte, Justin invokes the Indian
Rebellion of 1857: “In that horrible Sepoy insurrection in India a few years ago, when the banded fiends invested the Tower of Djel and carried it by storm, the young English officer commanding the place shot his young bride through the brain, to save her from falling into the hands of those demons,” he explains. “Britomarte, if you do not follow my counsel and conceal yourself in the cavern, that may be the only means left me to save you from a fate worse than death!” (500).
Suggesting that the pirates might attack as the “banded fiends” attacked English officers, he aligns the Confederate privateer with colonial subjects—here, framed as dangerous and demonic— rebelling against the British empire. Spear’s boasts seem to validate Justin’s fears: the pirate indeed claims to have murdered “East Indiamen” merchants (558). References to Spear’s animal ferocity further alienate him from the novel’s white Northern heroes: in a chapter titled “The Caged Tiger,” he is described as a “savage” who has turned his makeshift prison into “a pig-sty” (519). This initial association of the Confederate privateer with colonial insurrection dislodges the conflict from both American soil and the context of American slavery. Like Cummins, Southworth take advantage of the privateer’s mobility on the high seas to associate him with racial “others” abroad.
Largely ignoring American slavery, she instead deploys racial darkness to vilify the “savage”
Confederacy and associate secession with colonial uprisings abroad. As part of Spear’s reconciliation to the Union, Southworth restores him from the darkness of the colonial other to
Southern whiteness: his claims to murdering “East Indiamen” are merely boasts, thereby dissolving his symbolic association with the “banded fiends” of the Indian Rebellion.
64 1: Courtroom Civil War
One scene, in particular, stands out for its strange refusal to address the legacy of slavery after the Civil War. Before their rescue from the island, Southworth’s three castaways learn to grow their own crops—including cotton, which they harvest and make into clothing all by themselves. “Judith and Britomarte picked the cotton, separating the seed from the wool with their fingers,” Southworth explains (521). The working-class Judith then cards and spins the wool, while
Britomarte performs the more genteel labor of knitting it to create “hose” (522). On this deserted island, in other words, the castaways demonstrate a subsistence model of cotton-growing—one that is dependent not on slave labor, but on the labor of a single white “family.” In fact, their tropical experiment looks less like a Southern plantation than it does a small New England farm.
Southworth suggests, moreover, that the castaways’ cotton is far superior to Southern cotton: Justin has “travelled all over the cotton growing States of his native country, but never had he seen such great white pods of such rich, fine fibre anywhere” (521.) Southworth’s island fantasy seems both to advocate for a subsistence model of cotton-growing on small farms by free white laborers, and to avoid reckoning with the divisions over slave labor that undergirded the war itself. Her castaways’ cotton-growing experiment highlights the novel’s own limited ability to represent a
Southern cotton economy that operates without slave labor. Two of her peers, Harriet Beecher
Stowe and Susan Warner, would also struggle to envision models of Southern agricultural production after the war. In the interim, however, Mary Jane Holmes marched the sentimental novel into the midst of the battlefield—where she grappled with the narrative challenge of embodying soldiers’ deaths in combat.
65
CHAPTER 2 Sentimental Gore: The Serialized Civil War Fiction of Mary Jane Holmes
In the spring of 1862, Street and Smith’s New York Weekly serialized a brand new Civil War novel entitled Rose Mather and Annie Graham; Or, What Women Can Do For the War. The author was
36-year-old Mary Jane Holmes, an established novelist celebrated for her works of domestic and sentimental fiction. Rose Mather and Annie Graham was her ninth novel since Tempest and
Sunshine debuted in 1854, and the first of three Civil War novels that she published serially with
Street and Smith between 1862 and 1865. Explicitly marketed to a female readership during wartime, the novel tracks the fortunes of several families in Rockland, Massachusetts, who rally together to support the Union after the fall of Fort Sumter. In an advertisement that announced the novel’s upcoming serialization, the New York Weekly framed it both as a guide to “what women can do for the war” and also as consolation for women with enlisted family members. “All who are interested in the present unfortunate war—and who is not?—will find themselves carried away in the contemplation of the graphic and touching scenes depicted in ‘Rose Mather and Annie
Graham,’ and to the sorrowing mother, who has a son in the army—the anxious wife, the doting sister, and the affianced bride—its perusal will convey consolation, and stimulate hope, as well as deeply interest,” the Weekly proclaimed. “‘Rose Mather and Annie Graham’ will be acknowledged by all to be one of the greatest romances of modern times.”1
The advertisement suggested that Rose Mather and Annie Graham would feature many of the ingredients customary to sentimental treatments of the Civil War: a focus on the sympathies and the sorrows of women, romantic attachments between soldiers and their sweethearts at home,
“touching scenes” to comfort mothers, sisters, and wives. The novel does, indeed, contain all of
1 “Mrs. Holmes’ New Story,” Street and Smith’s New York Weekly 17 (10), January 30, 1862: 4. 2: Sentimental Gore these elements.2 Yet surprisingly, this “consolation” novel also offers one of the most visceral descriptions of battlefield violence available in sentimental fiction of this period. Its fifth and sixth installments, which appeared in March 1862, featured scenes of horrific violence at the Battle of
Bull Run—a battle that would have been fresh in readers’ memories, as it had been fought just months prior in July 1861. Bull Run was both the first major military conflict of the Civil War and a colossal failure for the Union army, which retreated after a poorly planned attack on Confederate forces. Given its genre and its intended audience, Rose Mather is remarkable for its explicit descriptions of violence during this battle—and especially for its attention to the human body, mutilated beyond recognition.3
In the Bull Run episode of Rose Mather and Annie Graham, Mary Jane Holmes began to push the boundaries of the sentimental novel—a genre with which she had become familiar, comfortable, and successful during the 1850s. While she was far from the only sentimental writer to address the Civil War, her presentation of violence to the human body on the battlefield is unlike anything written by the cluster of white women authors with whom she is typically grouped— including Susan Warner, Maria Cummins, Louisa May Alcott, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and Marion
Harland. Holmes’s willingness not only to follow soldiers into battle—but also to linger on the horrors of the battlefield in “graphic” terms—distinguish her novel from treatments of wartime death and dying in fiction by these contemporaries.4
2 On the tropes of sentimental Civil War literature, see Fahs, The Imagined Civil War, ch. 3–4; Faust, This Republic of Suffering, ch. 6; and Sizer, The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850-1872.
3 In this sense, the advertisement’s reference to the novel’s “graphic and touching scenes” is a doubly fitting description. While readers of the New York Weekly were surely meant to take the word “graphic” in the sense of “vividly descriptive,” the more modern sense of the word—referring to “explicit” representations of violence—might be aptly applied to Holmes’s Bull Run episode (OED).
4 This fiction includes Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (1863) and Work (1873); Cummins’s Haunted Hearts (1864), a Civil War novel displaced back to the War of 1812; Warner’s Daisy in the Field (1869); Harland’s Sunnybank (1866); and
67 2: Sentimental Gore
In this chapter, I argue that Rose Mather and Annie Graham revises the boundaries between sentimentalism and realism in its vivid depictions of Civil War violence, exposing Holmes’s female readership to the horrors of the battlefield. Holmes’s battle scene introduces what I call
“sentimental gore,” a formal strategy in which she deploys sympathy and moral logic in order to linger on unexpectedly graphic descriptions of battlefield violence more typically associated with a realist portrait of war. While the sentimental novel is no stranger to violence, it is the descriptive intensity of Holmes’s sentimental gore that differentiates her novel from other sentimental portraits of the Civil War.5 As Philip Fisher observes in Hard Facts (1985), sentimental fiction is generally averse to “phenomenal descriptions” of violence, which, rather than encouraging the reader’s identification with the victim, offer “a pornography of the events of violence in which the reader is invited into the pleasures of pure phenomenal action—the point of view of the oppressor” (116,
118). Holmes’s sentimental gore distinguishes her novel from other sentimental portraits of the
Civil War—as well as from those fictions dubbed more “realistic” in nature, including the stories of Ambrose Bierce and, later, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Ultimately,
Rose Mather and Annie Graham is most productively read alongside another novel that blends
Southworth’s Britomarte, the Man-Hater (1865–66). With the exception of Southworth’s novel, where the heroine disguises herself as a man to accompany her beloved into battle, all of these texts focus on the home front or the hospital. As this chapter will address, Southworth also included brief instances of “graphic” violence that are out of keeping with the rest of the novel.
5 Recent scholarship has illuminated the many ways in which sentimentalism masks, contains, enables, or encourages violent behavior in nineteenth-century fiction. In Love’s Whipping Boy (2011), Elizabeth Barnes tracks how white male aggressors in literature of this period achieve sympathetic identification through violent acts; Marianne Noble’s The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (2000) charts the intersections of masochism and sentimentality in nineteenth-century women’s writing; Laura Wexler’s Tender Violence (2000) argues that sentimental culture masks its own “terrorism against nonreaders and outsiders” through such institutions as the racist and assimilationist Indian boarding school (125); and Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection (1997) shows how certain “forms of violence and domination” against slaves were in fact “enabled by the recognition of [their] humanity” (6). Kevin Pelletier’s recent Apocalyptic Sentimentalism (2013) also connects sentiment and violence, arguing that antebellum abolitionist sentimentalism invoked an apocalyptic fear of divine vengeance to encourage anti-slavery sympathies.
68 2: Sentimental Gore sentimental and realist modes: John William De Forest’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from
Secession to Loyalty (1867), famously praised by The Atlantic Monthly editor William Dean
6 Howells as “the first to treat the war really and artistically.” But where De Forest’s novel alternates between a reconciliationist sentimental romance and jarring accounts of battle, Holmes deploys the sentimental mode to enable gutting descriptions of bodies that rival De Forest’s accounts. Serialized two years before De Forest began writing Miss Ravenel’s Conversion,
Holmes’s novel surprisingly offers “realistic” depictions of battlefield violence contextualized within—indeed, empowered by—conventions of the sentimental novel.
The Making of Mary Jane Holmes
Mary Jane Holmes does not at first look like an obvious choice for consideration alongside John
William De Forest. Certainly, she was not the sort of writer whom Howells would have praised for treating “the war really and artistically.” Born in Brookfield, Massachusetts in 1825, Holmes became a schoolteacher when she was just thirteen years old.7 She married in 1849 and soon moved to Kentucky with her husband, where both worked as teachers. This experience would later inform several of her novels, which she set in rural Kentucky. In 1852, Holmes and her husband moved to Brockport, New York, where he practiced law and she began writing novels. At the age of 29, she published Tempest and Sunshine (1854), a tale of two Kentucky sisters—one a ray of sunshine, the other a tempest of mischief—and their romantic entanglements. Although Tempest and
Sunshine did not experience the instant success of Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) or
Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854), Holmes had staying power and gained popularity with time.
6 Howells, “Reviews and Literary Notices,” 121.
7 On Holmes’s life and works, see Earl Yarington, “Legacy Profile: Mary Jane Holmes (1825-1907)” (2008); and Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction (1978), 175–197.
69 2: Sentimental Gore
She published novels steadily for over 50 years, with at least 39 titles to her name by the time of her death in 1907.8 In 1899, her publisher claimed that total sales of Holmes’s novels numbered over two million copies.9
Mary Jane Holmes’s novels exhibit the conventions of sentimentality and domesticity that characterized much popular women’s writing in the 1850s.10 Much like her fellow sentimentalists,
Holmes—although popular in her lifetime—disappeared from literary history in the twentieth century. She first resurfaced in Nina Baym’s Woman’s Fiction (1978), which focuses primarily on the first decade of Holmes’s career. Baym describes Holmes as more humorous and irreverent than many of her peers: as a “comic writer” unafraid to mock the conventions of her own genre, she favored entertainment over education, laughter over moralizing, and secular over religious life
(175). Holmes’s 1850s novels are certainly characterized by this signature comic streak, as well as by their sentimentality, their focus on the domestic sphere, and their participation in the female
“trials and triumphs” narrative that Baym calls the “overplot” of woman’s fiction (22). But Holmes also continued to evolve as a writer after 1860, an evolution that Woman’s Fiction does not capture because it does not consider her later works: its treatment of Holmes concludes with her eighth novel, Marian Grey, which was serialized in 1860 and published as a volume in 1863. Since the
1970s, a small but significant body of new scholarship on Holmes has both solidified her status as
8 On Holmes’s publication history, see Grace Carson, “The Work of Mary Jane Holmes” (1988). The actual number of her novels is contested, in part because many appeared under multiple titles and from multiple publishers. According to Carson, however, 39 seems like “a reliable figure” (35).
9 Carson, 6. Carson cites Jacob Blanck’s Bibliography of American Literature, Vol. 4 (Yale University Press, 1963); Blanck found the claim in the preface to the 1899 revised edition of Holmes’s novel Marian Grey.
10 On the conventions of the sentimental novel in nineteenth-century America, see Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs (1985); Philip Fisher, Hard Facts (1985); Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy (1997); June Howard, “What is Sentimentality?” (1997); Joanne Dobson, “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature” (1997); Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism (2000); Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments (2001); Kristin Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature (2002); and Cindy Weinstein, Family, Kinship and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2004).
70 2: Sentimental Gore a popular mid-century sentimentalist and continued to develop the story of her authorial range.11
In fact, the early 1860s were an important time of transition for Holmes as a novelist in two ways.
During this period, Holmes developed fruitful long-term partnerships with her two most important publishers. At the same time, the country was thrown into the midst of the Civil War, which
Holmes would endeavor to capture in prose through numerous wartime and post-war novels.
First, as Lee Anne Elliott Westman has chronicled, Marian Grey inaugurated Holmes’s relationships with her most consistent and profitable long-term publishing partners: Street and
Smith’s New York Weekly magazine; and G.W. Carleton (later, G.W. Carleton and Company), a
New York-based publishing house founded in 1857.12 Having rotated among various publishers early in her career, Holmes settled into a reliable and profitable pattern during the 1860s: Street and Smith serialized her novels in the Weekly, after which G.W. Carleton sold them in volume form. Westman shows that Holmes’s serial novels played a major role in reviving the New York
Weekly: the magazine was verging on bankruptcy in 1858, when Street and Smith assumed control.
Serialization of Marian Grey in 1860 doubled its circulation, from 50,000 to 100,000 copies, thereby rescuing it from financial ruin (306–308). Street and Smith went on to serialize numerous
Holmes novels in the Weekly, including all of her novels written during the war. Marian Grey also
11 Lee Ann Elliott Westman and Earl F. Yarington have led this revival of scholarly interest in Holmes, beginning with dissertations devoted to her work: Westman’s The Novels of Mary Jane Hawes Holmes and the Nineteenth- Century American Literary Tradition (1997) and Yarington’s Relational Capacity Theory in the ‘Sentimental’ Works of Mary Jane Holmes (2004). Yarington’s The Portrayal of Woman’s Sentimental Power in American Domestic Fiction (2007) is the first published book devoted entirely to Holmes; it focuses on her participation in the sentimental tradition and the reasons for her popularity. Holmes also appears briefly in Mary Kelley’s Private Woman, Public Stage (1984) and in Cindy Weinstein’s Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2004), which cites several Holmes novels in arguing that nineteenth-century sentimental fiction affirmed a construction of the family based on affective rather than biological ties.
12 Westman, “How (And Why) Mary Jane Holmes Saved the New York Weekly, And Other True Stories,” in Popular Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Literary Marketplace (2007), ed. Earl Yarington and Mary De Jong (2007), 297–317.
71 2: Sentimental Gore marked the start of Holmes’s collaboration with G.W. Carleton, who published the volume editions of all her novels between 1863 and 1886—some twenty in total. Between 1887 and 1904,
Carleton’s partner G.W. Dillingham published some ten more of her novels (306–308).
The first two novels that Holmes published in the Weekly reflected her ongoing experimentation with genre. Both certainly had a comic streak, but they were also full of Gothic twists—a development likely encouraged by her new partnership with Street and Smith. Marian
Grey is a semi-Gothic novel of mistaken identities and missing wives. Darkness and Daylight, serialized in 1861, is also replete with defanged Gothic tropes: hidden identities, long-lost sisters, and wives with hereditary insanity. The heroine’s love interest, the wealthy Arthur St. Claire, is clearly modeled on Bronte’s Rochester: he keeps his first wife in a secret room with a bare-walled inner cell, where she is locked during her fits of lunacy. He is also a modern Bluebeard, giving the heroine a key to the secret room to test her curiosity. However, his Bertha Mason has no bite: the hidden wife is a child-bride, who conveniently fades away after an illness so that the heroine can take her place. The slave-owning Arthur St. Claire is also surely inspired by Augustine St. Claire in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, although this novel shows no interest in Stowe’s moral imperatives.
Darkness and Daylight takes place in a seemingly timeless Kentucky countryside where slavery is an accepted and unquestioned norm, and where enslaved characters come to the foreground only as comedic relief. Street and Smith was midway through serialization of Darkness and Daylight when Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861.
The outbreak of the Civil War, which coincided with the consolidation of Holmes’s publication strategy, profoundly influenced her subsequent work. Rose Mather and Annie Graham was the first of three Civil War novels that she published in the Weekly between 1862 and 1865. It was followed by Bad Hugh (1862–63) and Family Pride (1864–65), published by G.W. Carleton
72 2: Sentimental Gore as Hugh Worthington (1865) and The Cameron Pride (1867). Although Holmes wrote prolifically about the war, she is rarely recognized in scholarship as a Civil War novelist. Moreover, the volume editions—all published after the war ended—obscure the fact that these novels were originally serialized wartime fictions, in which she responded to the war as it unfolded around her.
Figure 1. Publication History: Mary Jane Holmes’s Civil War Novels, 1862–1868
1862 Street and Smith Rose Mather and Annie Graham; Or, What Women Can Do For the War 1867 Street and Smith Annie Graham’s First Love 1868 G.W. Carleton Rose Mather, A Tale of the War
1862–63 Street and Smith Bad Hugh 1865 G.W. Carleton Hugh Worthington
1864–65 Street and Smith Family Pride 1867 G.W. Carleton The Cameron Pride
Publication history is especially pertinent to Rose Mather and Annie Graham, the only
Civil War novel for which Holmes wrote a sequel. In the last installment of Rose Mather and Annie
Graham, issued June 5, 1862, Holmes insisted that she could not finish the story just yet:
And now, having brought our characters thus far, we find ourselves in a maze of perplexity to know just how to end our story. In fact, there can be no proper ending until the war is over…Then, if life and health are spared, we hope to resume the thread of our unfinished narrative, and tell what casualties befel [sic] our young heroes, and how many of them came back again to the loved ones watching, and waiting, and praying at home.13
Serialized in the summer of 1867, the sequel Annie Graham’s First Love fulfills this promise.
Beginning where Holmes paused the story in 1862, it reveals the fates of all the major characters by the war’s end. As the Weekly explained in introducing the new story, “It will be recollected that
13 “Rose Mather and Annie Graham,” Street and Smith’s New York Weekly 17 (28), June 5, 1862: 3. However, the Weekly also included careful assurances that readers need not have read the previous novel in order to enjoy this one.
73 2: Sentimental Gore
Mrs. Holmes promised to write this sequel as soon as possible after the conclusion of the war.”14
In 1868, G.W. Carleton published the two novels together as a single volume entitled Rose Mather,
A Tale of the War. The 1862 novel became the first half (chapters 1–19) of this volume, and the
1867 novel became the second half (chapters 20–39). The volume edition gives no indication that its two halves were originally written and published at two very different moments in time.
Due to this unrecognized quirk of its publication history, scholarship has incorrectly described the 1868 volume as “postwar” fiction.15 More accurately, it is both a wartime and a postwar novel. The 1868 volume combines two novels originally published five years apart, resulting in a disjointed reading experience that captures Holmes’s changing prerogatives in her
Civil War writing from 1862 to 1867. The differences between these novels reflect the consolidation of Holmes’s own identity as a postbellum novelist of reconciliation, an identity that her later novels of the 1880s and 1890s would only solidify. Although rarely recognized as a Civil
War writer, Holmes revisited the Civil War and its aftermath in novels spanning the thirty-three- year period from 1862 to 1895. The long career of Mary Jane Holmes shows a sentimental novelist in motion from radical to reconciliation.
Sentimentalism and the Civil War
As Drew Faust chronicles in This Republic of Suffering (2008), the Civil War rendered death on an unprecedented mass scale. “Bodies became highly visible in Civil War America,” Faust notes
14 “Mrs. Holmes’ New Story,” Street and Smith’s New York Weekly 22 (19), March 28, 1867: 4.
15 The few scholars who have addressed this novel refer to the 1868 volume, seeming not to know that it combines two previously serialized texts. Joyce Appleby describes Rose Mather, Hugh Worthington, and The Cameron Pride as Holmes’s “first three postwar novels” (128). Lyde Cullen Sizer also characterizes Rose Mather as a postwar novel, including it in a chapter on “Writing the War, 1865–1868” (216–221); J. Matthew Gallman states that it was “published shortly after the war” (33). Only Mary Noel’s Villains Galore (1954) notes that the Weekly serialized Rose Mather and Annie Graham, in a brief discussion of Holmes’s affiliation with Street and Smith (177).
74 2: Sentimental Gore in the book’s preface (xvi). “This new prominence of bodies overwhelmingly depicted their destruction and deformation, inevitably raising the question of how they related to the persons who had once inhabited them” (xvii). During the war, families at home received more and clearer pictures of life—and death—at the front than ever before. Most directly, advances in photography meant that the Civil War was the first war to be captured through such images. Photographer
Matthew Brady and his collaborators famously produced thousands of images showing camp life as well as the battlefield during and after combat. In October 1862, visitors to Brady’s exhibit The
Dead of Antietam would see the first photographs of battlefield carnage to be displayed on the homefront. The exhibit opened at Brady’s studio in New York City, less than a month after the
Battle of Antietam, and featured roughly ninety photographs of Confederate and Union dead on the field of battle. A New York Times reviewer described the impact of the exhibit: “Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.”16
The reviewer also describes the experience of looking at visitors looking at images of the dead:
You will see hushed, reverend groups standing around these weird copies of carnage, bending down to look in the pale faces of the dead, chained by the strange spell that dwells in dead men’s eyes. It seems somewhat singular that the same sun that looked down on the faces of the slain, blistering them, blotting out from the bodies all semblance to humanity, and hastening corruption, should have thus caught their features upon canvas, and given them perpetuity, for ever. But so it is.
The photographs had “caught” and preserved the dead in the hours before they became unrecognizable—not only as individuals, but also as humans at all. Here, the distinction between a recognizable and an unrecognizable human form is fraught with anxiety and urgency: the reviewer imagines a female visitor “bending over” the photographs in an attempt to recognize “a
16 “BRADY’S PHOTOGRAPHS.; Pictures of the Dead at Antietam,” The New York Times, 20 October 1862: 5. As Faust notes, referring to this article, “This new prominence of bodies overwhelmingly depicted their destruction and deformation, inevitably raising the question of how they related to the persons who had once inhabited them” (xvii).
75 2: Sentimental Gore husband, a son, or a brother in the still, lifeless lines of bodies.” Although the stereo photographs could not be printed, newspapers reproduced the images as woodcuts for an even wider audience.
Faust shows that nineteenth-century Americans, faced with the reality of death on such a massive scale, struggled to adapt the widespread Christian idea of the “Good Death” to the context of the Civil War. A form of the ars moriendi, or the art of dying, the Good Death was a pervasive ideal in mid-century Victorian culture. Dying well involved a series of deathbed rituals: surrounded by friends and family, the dying person ideally would accept death in a display of
Christian faith, which in turn reassured survivors that the dying person would experience salvation
(10). As Faust points out, the Civil War presented an unprecedented challenge to the narrative of the Good Death: soldiers often died suddenly and far from home, their bodies at times disfigured beyond recognition. Given these circumstances, soldiers and their families often attempted to recreate aspects of the “Good Death” on the battlefield and in the hospital (9). To avoid becoming unrecognizable and unclaimed corpses, soldiers took steps to ensure that their bodies would be identified and their families notified in the event of death. Likewise, condolence letters—often written by fellow soldiers or nurses—and obituaries tried to give family members accounts of soldiers’ last moments (15, 29–30). These letters ritually referenced the soldiers’ Christian faith and acceptance of death (17). The narrative of the “Good Death” helped to make battle and hospital scenes coherent, articulating the experience of death and dying in terms as comforting as possible.
Sentimental fictions of Civil War death and dying also sought to make soldiers’ deaths coherent. As Faust, Alice Fahs, and Lyde Cullen Sizer have shown, the sentimental mode was particularly well-suited to organizing and sanitizing the horrors of war for Civil War-era readers.17
17 See Faust, This Republic of Suffering (2008); Fahs, The Imagined Civil War (2001); and Sizer, The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850-1872 (2000). On nineteenth-century sentimentalism, death, and mourning more broadly, see Mary Louise Kete, Sentimental Collaborations (2000).
76 2: Sentimental Gore
Its narrative strategies offered a coherent framework for understanding and absorbing the impact of death on such a massive scale. According to Faust, the overwhelming response in Civil War literature of the period was “resolute sentimentality that verged at times on pathos” (194). In her study of popular Civil War literature published between 1861 and 1865, Fahs also found that
“sentimental insistence on the importance of sympathy and individual suffering increasingly became the most potent mode of discussing and coping with the wounding and killing of soldiers during the war” (94). Wartime sentimental literature “grappled with the fact of mass, anonymous death by creating idealized deaths for soldiers,” including aestheticized deathbed scenes and comforting narrations of their last thoughts (100–101). These scenes often focused on a character type that Fahs calls the “sentimental soldier,” an emotionally expressive and “feminized” figure defined “by tenderness of feeling and yearnings for home” (106, 109).18 In response to the problem of how to represent death and dying—especially given the ravages of war on the soldier’s body— the sentimental mode strategically reframed battlefield and hospital death, depicting it in sanitized, comforting, and usually Christian terms.
A related body of Civil War literature narrated the trials of women at home, focusing predominantly or entirely on domestic experiences—and thereby altogether avoiding direct engagement with the carnage of battle. According to Fahs, such works both highlighted women’s
“domestic contributions” to the war effort and prioritized women’s emotions, deploying sentimental language to articulate female suffering (121, 129). Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s popular
18 Fahs’ treatment of the “sentimental soldier” focuses on Civil War poems and songs, but also includes prose fiction such as Alcott’s Hospital Sketches. She notes that Civil War “conceptions of manliness” often incorporated “feminized components,” such as weeping over a fallen comrade, which were excluded from “new concepts of masculinity” at the end of the century (106). See also Young’s Disarming the Nation, ch. 2, on the type of the “feminized soldier” in Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (87). As Young shows, Alcott both “valorizes the injured soldier for his feminine characteristics” and “relocates the traits of masculinity within the figure of the female nurse” (71).
77 2: Sentimental Gore spiritualist novel The Gates Ajar exemplifies the “enthusiastic earnestness” of such Civil War fiction (Faust 194). Published in 1868, the novel became a commercial success for its comforting visions of Heaven as a domestic space in which families would eventually be reunited.19
Serialized in the spring of 1862, Holmes’s Rose Mather and Annie Graham wields these recognizable tropes of wartime sentimentalism—including a boyish paragon of Fahs’ “sentimental soldier,” a heroine who learns the meaning of sacrifice when her husband enlists, and tearful cross- class sympathy among women at home. While only a few scholarly accounts of Civil War writing give the 1868 volume even passing mention, those that do attend exclusively to its depiction of women on the homefront.20 For instance, Sizer reads the novel as part of Holmes’s larger project to “reinforce a mainstream middle-class understanding of moral value,” focusing on Holmes’s depiction of the Rockland women (218). Transformed by the war “into a supportive sisterhood” full of cross-class sympathies, this community of women ultimately settles into recognizably
“middle-class patience and virtue” (218). Tellingly, Sizer groups Rose Mather with another novel
19 On Phelps’s The Gates Ajar, see Nina Baym’s introduction to Three Spiritualist Novels (2000). Faust briefly contextualizes the novel within sentimental culture (185–187); for a more extended treatment of its sentimentalism, see Kete’s Sentimental Collaborations (94–102). Michael Denning goes so far as to suggest that The Gates Ajar was not only a sentimental attempt to bind up the nation’s wounds, but the last throe of sentimentalism in the wake of Civil War—as if sentimental novel could not, in fact, incorporate this violence (186–187).
Sentimentalism did not always succeed in its attempt to sanitize the horrors of war. Jane E. Schultz, for instance, traces the emergence of “graphic realism” in the diary of Confederate hospital nurse Kate Cumming (203). Schultz argues that Cumming’s “growing awareness of and ability to articulate the normalization of death’s horrors facilitates the turn from sentiment to realism” (194); as the war progressed, Cumming eventually turned away from “narrative” to “a practice more closely resembling medical charting” (201). Such exceptions, however, were not conducive to the demands of the marketplace: accounting for poor sales of Cumming’s diary, Schultz suggests that it was both too partisan and too graphic for readers, who simply “were not ready for medical realism in 1866” (203). Cumming’s transition from sentimental narrative to “medical realism” differs from Holmes’s “sentimental gore,” which—I will endeavor to show—instead blends the genre conventions of sentimentalism and realism.
20 Gallman’s Defining Duty in the Civil War (2015) briefly addresses the novel’s opening scene (33–34); Frances B. Cogan’s All-American Girl (1989) explores the home front experiences of Rose and Annie with comparable brevity (84, 142). Rose Mather is equally absent from scholarship on Holmes herself: it is not mentioned at all in Yarington’s book-length study of her novels, the most comprehensive treatment of her work to date.
78 2: Sentimental Gore focused on Northern women’s wartime experiences at home: Isabel McLeod’s Westfield: A View of Home Life in the American War (1866), which also features a “community of women transformed by selfless and collective work, inspired by the example of the middle class” (217).
For its portrait of the Rockland community in wartime, Rose Mather does indeed deserve to be grouped with such novels of “home life.” Yet Holmes also boldly took her female readership to the battlefield to show them what most sentimental treatments of the war refused to describe: the graphic mutilation of the human body in battle, not the “Good Death” but a very bad death indeed.
Holmes’s first battle scene deploys sentimental sympathy and moral logic in order to enable a gory depiction of death and dying that is fundamentally out of keeping with the novel’s genre. Her jarring description of Bull Run suggests that Holmes also belongs in dialogue with writers who sought to offer realistic descriptions of war that rejected the sentimental, the romantic, and the domestic. The most prominent realist writer of the Civil War, John William De Forest, provides
instructive context for reading Rose Mather and Annie Graham.
Getting Real: The “Inexorable Veracity” of John William De Forest
Broadly speaking, scholarship on Civil War literature tends to differentiate between sentimental treatments of the war—popular, mainstream, widespread—and the gritty realism offered up by a smaller handful of authors. These more “realistic” texts are usually framed as anomalies awash in a tide of sentiment, at odds with the mainstream desire to comfort, to heal, and—especially in the war’s aftermath—to forget.21 Scholars including Diffley, Fahs, Faust, Silber, and Young have eloquently argued against the omission of such popular and sentimental literature—and the women
21 David Blight, for example, laments realism’s struggle “to get traction” in this culture of sentiment (237). Even among non-fiction eyewitness accounts, the presence of realistic detail is often framed as an exception to the rule of sentiment. See Schultz’s account of “medical realism” in the diary of Confederate nurse Kate Cumming (203), and Blight’s account of the horrors to be found in Union prison narratives (242–243).
79 2: Sentimental Gore writers most associated with it—from previous accounts of Civil War literature. As Young states,
“the critical account according to which De Forest or Crane ‘fathers’ the war novel is a defensive one” (10). Yet this work has not erased the genre distinctions regularly made between the sentimentalists and the realist writers—a much shorter list that always includes De Forest, often alongside fellow Union Army veteran Ambrose Bierce and later Stephen Crane.
Since its publication in 1867, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty has been consistently praised for its realistic descriptions of the experiences of Civil War soldiers.
William Dean Howells, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, was one of the novel’s first and best champions. In his 1867 review, he set the novel above an apparent glut of postbellum fiction thematizing the war:
Every author who deals in fiction feels it to be his duty to contribute towards the payment of the accumulated interest in the events of the war, by relating his work to them; and the heroes of young- lady writers in the magazines have been everywhere fighting the late campaigns over again, as young ladies would have fought them. We do not say that this is not well, but we suspect that Mr. De Forrest [sic] is the first to treat the war really and artistically (121).
The pointed contrast between De Forest and “young lady” writers suggests a certain disdain for women’s accounts of war—the implication being that these unreal accounts are too sentimental, too romanticized, and too sensationalized. Howells would continue to praise the realism of Miss
Ravenel’s Conversion across his life, calling De Forest “a realist before realism was named” in an
1887 “Editor’s Study” column (484). Yet despite Howells’s praise, the novel was not a commercial success and Harper’s struggled for decades to sell its initial run of 5000 copies. Meanwhile, the volume edition of Rose Mather appears to have found a popular foothold when it was published one year after De Forest’s novel.22
22 Appleby claims that Rose Mather “almost made the nation’s all-time best seller list,” although it is unclear to what list—if any—she refers (128). In his introduction to Miss Ravenel’s Conversion, Gary Scharnhorst notes that 1,608 of De Forest’s first edition copies were still unsold by 1884 (xx, citing James F. Light, John William De Forest [Twayne,
80 2: Sentimental Gore
Literary scholars have traditionally followed Howells’s lead, continuing to single out Miss
Ravenel’s Conversion for its realistic battle scenes. The nature of this realism, however, is often articulated in vague terms. Daniel Aaron’s The Unwritten War (1973) labeled De Forest and Bierce two of the Civil War’s “most evocative witnesses,” whose fiction “cut through the fog of idealism that obscured the hard and nasty particulars of war” (xiv).23 In Patriotic Gore (1994), Edmund
Wilson praised De Forest as “the first of our fiction writers to deal seriously with the events of the
Civil War” (670). In Wilson’s opinion, “it would be more than a decade…before any other writer of talent who had taken an active part in the war would describe it with equal realism” (685).
Michael W. Schaefer’s Just What War Is (1997) is entirely devoted to proving that De Forest and
Bierce were the Civil War veterans “most successful” in writing the “real” war, arguing that they prioritized the development of “a more accurately descriptive, more realistic form of combat discourse” (x, xiv). In Romance of Reunion (2001), David Blight proclaims that “no other
American writer wrote of war quite as realistically” as De Forest and Bierce did “until after World
War I” (151). Most recently, Benjamin Cooper’s Veteran Americans (2018) lauds De Forest’s battle and hospital scenes for their “realist aesthetic” and continues the long tradition of attributing this quality to his experience as a soldier (149). This litany of praise has established De Forest as
1956], 88). Although De Forest would go on to write a dozen more novels, by 1895 Howells was resigned to the unpopularity of his works. “If I have never been able to make the public care for them as much as I did it has not been for want of trying,” Howells wrote in My Literary Passions (223). “I do not know that I shall ever persuade either critics or readers to think with me” (224). Howells partially attributed De Forest’s commercial failure to the “scornful bluntness” in his depictions of women, suggesting that this was “the root of that dislike which most women have felt for his fiction, and which in a nation of women readers has prevented it from ever winning a merited popularity” (Heroines 153).
23 However, Aaron also calls Bierce’s war stories “not in the least realistic” (184). He seems here to refer specifically to the nature of Bierce’s plots, which he finds “as contemptuous of the ‘probable’ as any of Poe’s most bizarre experiments” (184). Aaron instead sees the “hard and nasty particulars” of war in the psychology of Bierce’s stories, praising the “fidelity” with which Bierce depicted “the shock of war’s terrors” (192). Blight, in similar fashion, calls Bierce’s short fiction “more surrealistic than realistic” (246).
81 2: Sentimental Gore the first true chronicler of the harsh realities of Civil War combat, and makes his novel an obvious baseline against which to compare the battle scenes in Rose Mather and Annie Graham.
It is not especially surprising that De Forest, a soldier who experienced both camp life and battle first-hand, wrote what so many have considered to be highly realistic battle scenes. De Forest began writing Miss Ravenel’s Conversion in 1864, during the war, and completed it the following year. The novel itself draws heavily on De Forest’s own experiences in the Union Army, which he also chronicled in articles and in his posthumously published manuscript collection A Volunteer’s
Adventures (1946). A captain in the Twelfth Connecticut Volunteers, he started recruiting his company after the disastrous First Battle of Bull Run. When Street and Smith began serializing
Rose Mather and Annie Graham in February 1862, De Forest was sailing with his regiment to Ship
Island in the Gulf of Mexico. He would not see combat, however, until the Battle of Georgia
Landing outside Labadieville, Louisiana in October 1862. De Forest chronicled this experience in an 1864 Harper’s Monthly article, entitled “The First Time Under Fire,” and more briefly in Miss
Ravenel’s Conversion, where it is reported in letters. His regiment fought again in the Siege of
Port Hudson (May 22–July 9, 1863). He wrote about this experience in an 1867 issue of Harper’s
Monthly and in a widely praised section of Miss Ravenel’s Conversion (ch. 21–22), which relates the Union’s initial failed attempt on Port Hudson through the eyes of his hero Edward Colburne.
Accounts of what makes De Forest’s battle scenes so real—so full of “inexorable veracity,” as Howells once remarked—are often relatively vague (Heroines 162). But in the context of comparison with Rose Mather and Annie Graham, I believe that his combat realism has two especially relevant dimensions. First, his descriptions of battle force readers to confront soldiers’ mutilated bodies in graphic and gory detail. Miss Ravenel’s Conversion unflinchingly depicts the mutilation of the human body in battle. After falling wounded in the Battle of Port Hudson,
82 2: Sentimental Gore
Colburne wakes on the battlefield surrounded by dead and injured soldiers. Among them are two artillerists, “rapidly blackening in the scorching sun and sweltering air...stark dead, one with his brains bulging from a bullet-hole in his forehead, while a dark claret-colored streak crossed his face, the other’s light-blue trousers soaked with a dirty carnation stain of life-blood drawn from the femoral artery” (258). Recalling the shrieks and cries at the moment each was hit, De Forest reflects on the eerie quiet of aftermath: “all, sooner or later, had settled into the calm, sublime patience of the wounded of the battle-field” (258). When Colburne arrives at a field-hospital, he discovers a terrible display of severed limbs: under each operating table “were great pools of clotted blood, amidst which lay amputated fingers, hands, arms, feet and legs, only a little more ghastly in color than the faces of those who waited their turn on the table” (260). De Forest refuses to omit graphic narration of gruesome deaths and piles of amputated limbs. Most accounts of his battle scenes, and of battlefield realism more broadly, frame this feature of unsentimental gore as an anchor of his realistic descriptions.24
24 Blight closely associates De Forest’s “war realism” with the “horror” and “savagery” in these descriptions of the dead and dying at Port Hudson (152). Moreover, he repeatedly uses “realistic” and “realism” as shorthand for other Civil War writers’ graphic depictions of violence to the human body: for example, he notes the “prurient realism” in an anonymous author’s graphic description of severed limbs (241). While “realistic” is a capacious term for Blight— it also seems to be shorthand for accurate description of common soldiers’ perspectives (239), and for an atmosphere of disillusionment (240)—it most often connotes a graphic and unsentimental depiction of dead and dying soldiers. Cooper also defines De Forest’s “realism” largely through his use of graphic violence. He suggests that De Forest’s battle scenes achieve “empirical realism” because they 1) replace sympathy among men with a more “emotionally detached” perspective, and 2) present an honest description of “gore and destruction” (157, 158). Contrasting the “gruesome and chaotic reality of De Forest’s dying soldiers” with the neatness of Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, Cooper clearly reserves his admiration for the former (151). He even suggests that “De Forest’s emotionally detached gaze at battlefield gore” has been undervalued for its role in the “rise of American realism” more broadly (19). Unabashed depictions of gore are also characteristic of Ambrose Bierce. Although less often categorized as a “realist” (see note 23), his prose is regularly invoked as an example of the anti-sentimental strain of war writing. Faust reflects on his bitter irony and obsession “with the gruesome and the macabre,” describing his resistance to the sentimental mode and the Good Death (197). She credits “What I Saw of Shiloh,” an 1881 essay, with “one of the most graphic depictions of war death ever written” (197). In the passage to which Faust refers, Bierce encounters a dying Union sergeant with his brain “dropping off in flakes and strings” from an open head wound (qtd. 198). Blight quotes the same passage to illustrate Bierce’s “sense of the grotesque,” cultivated in opposition to “Civil War sentiment and romance” (247).
83 2: Sentimental Gore
Second, De Forest’s battle scenes emphasize the chaos and randomness of combat, giving up—as much as possible, in a work of fiction—any moral logic as to who lives and dies in battle.
These battle scenes abandon the neat logic of the marriage plot that weaves around them, emphasizing instead the randomness of war through episodes of unexpected death and survival. In
Miss Ravenel’s Conversion, one soldier who looks as if he has received a death-shot emerges unscathed because the shot goes through his cap in “one of the wonderful escapes of battle” (251).
In camp, another man who appears to be reading his paper is actually dead for several minutes before his fellow soldiers realize that he has been shot. Again, this phenomenon is well- documented in De Forest scholarship: De Forest pulled both of these anecdotes from his own experience, and Schaefer notes that these kinds of escapes and fatalities appeared repeatedly in soldiers’ accounts of battle.25 Reinforcing this sense of chaos and randomness is De Forest’s narrative perspective, which is limited in scope. Rather than surveying the battlefield, the novel depicts battle through Colburne’s perspective on the ground. When unknown soldiers stagger up to him, the reader experiences them as anonymous flashes just as he does. The anonymity of the battlefield is heightened by the horrific images of the dead blackening in the sun and piles of amputated limbs at the field hospital—and by the narrator’s observation that “nearly all the leg amputations at Port Hudson proved fatal” (261).
Miss Ravenel’s Conversion is a doubly appropriate counterpart for Holmes’s novel because it is also generically bifurcated, moving between those universally lauded combat scenes and an often-maligned sentimental romance. As Nina Silber has shown, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion is
25 While Schaefer also alludes to De Forest’s “unflinching” depictions of the dead and dying in his war writing, he is more focused on questions of perspective and psychology (29). He argues that De Forest’s writing is “real” because it truthfully reflects “what the Civil War soldier did and felt,” a claim that he supports by comparing De Forest’s fiction with nonfiction accounts by fellow war veterans (15). As Schaefer notes, the romanticized “battle-pieces” that De Forest scorned did not reflect the perspective of soldiers on the ground: their limited sightlines, their limited knowledge of battle strategy, and their thoughts during combat (4–5). On the Battle of Port Hudson, see Schaefer 68.
84 2: Sentimental Gore ultimately a “romance of reunion,” with a marriage plot that promoted sectional reconciliation in the aftermath of the war (110–111). The novel follows the development of naive Lillie Ravenel from secessionist sympathies to Union loyalty, an evolution mirrored in her romantic relationships: after an ill-advised marriage to the reckless John Carter—a brash Virginian colonel in the Union
Army—ends with his infidelity and subsequent death in battle, Lillie marries the upstanding New
England lawyer and Union lieutenant Edward Colburne. While reviewers and scholars agree on the realism of De Forest’s combat chapters, his sentimental romance has attracted more varied opinions. Although Howells praised this aspect of the novel, it later earned Wilson’s condescension in Patriotic Gore, where he claimed that De Forest’s romance plot showed “the compulsion that he seems to have felt, in spite of his realist principles, to conform on occasion to the popular formula” (707). Thomas Fick alternatively reads the novel’s “war of genres” as a critique of the romance plots cherished in the Old South, arguing that De Forest deployed realism in order to counteract the “idealization of combat in Southern historical romances” (475). Yet although they may debate the reason, scholars generally agree that De Forest’s novel set two genres at odds. The semi-autobiographical realist battle scenes emphasize the chaos, randomness, indifference, boredom, fear, and adrenaline of camp life and combat. The sentimental romance, meanwhile, revolves around characters who are by turns flat, wooden, melodramatic, and silly.
Although the two plots track and reinforce one another, with Lillie’s romantic evolution mirroring her political and sectional education, they are rarely integrated. The plots are either explicitly at
“war,” or simply in an awkward relation taken to indicate De Forest’s weaknesses as a novelist.
In just one scene, De Forest brings the Ravenels—who otherwise only appear off the battlefield—to the front lines. Lillie and her father Doctor Ravenel are present for the battle at Fort
Winthrop, based on the actual Battle of Fort Butler (June 28, 1863). While the novel reflects the
85 2: Sentimental Gore disorientation and confusion of a nighttime battle, it also takes the opportunity to poke fun at
Doctor Ravenel as he attempts to take up arms, becoming a semi-comic danger to himself and those around him. Ultimately, the episode is a step in Lillie’s education: she arrives at Fort
Winthrop marveling about how delightful it will be to sleep outside under the stars, but ends up helping her father treat the wounded, “pale at the sight of blood and suffering, but resolute to do what she could” (303). Yet the semi-comic intrusion of Lillie and Doctor Ravenel, characters who have no place in combat, makes this battle scene feel qualitatively different from the other combat scenes. Lillie and Doctor Ravenel belong on the homefront, and to the sentimental romance plot anchored there. At Fort Winthrop, the conflation of the sentimental romance plot with combat realism produces an oddly humorous episode inconsistent with De Forest’s other battle scenes.
Unlike De Forest, Mary Jane Holmes did not have substantial first-hand experience on battlefields or in field hospitals.26 And yet in 1862, she produced an account of the first Battle of
Bull Run arguably as visceral as anything De Forest published in Miss Ravenel’s Conversion five years later. Like De Forest’s novel, Rose Mather and Annie Graham also combines the genres of combat realism and sentimental romance. Yet rather than oscillating between realism on the battlefield and sentimental romance off the field, Holmes brings the logic of the sentimental novel into battle—a choice that actually enabled her to evoke the grim realities of combat. In the Bull
Run episode of “Rose Mather and Annie Graham,” Holmes anticipates the two key characteristics associated with the realistic account of warfare that De Forest gave in Miss Ravenel’s Conversion: a willingness to directly confront the mutilated bodies of soldiers; and an honesty about the chaos and randomness of battle, in which moral logic does not guide who lives and who dies. Yet while
26 She did help to lead relief efforts in Brockport as the secretary and treasurer of the Ladies Union Aid Society (LUAS), an organization that collected donations for wounded soldiers; her reports show that she visited at least one military hospital. See William G. Andrews, Civil War Brockport: A Canal Town and the Union Army (2013), 61–63.
86 2: Sentimental Gore
De Forest depicted death as both gory and random, Holmes skillfully deployed forms of sympathy and moral logic to give death a semblance of non-randomness—thereby allowing herself to depict gore as unflinchingly as did her male peer. Rather than alternating between realist and sentimental modes, she applied sentimental narrative strategies on the battlefield in order to show her female readers the kinds of gruesome details characteristic of Miss Ravenel’s Conversion.
First Shots: Rose Mather and Annie Graham
Rose Mather and Annie Graham opens at a town hall meeting just after the firing on Fort Sumter, as Rockland’s young men are enlisting to fight for the Union Army. Holmes introduces most of the major characters, who represent a cross-section of Rockland life, in this scene. Her cast includes two poor widows, whose children have all enlisted: the helpless Mrs. Baker, with her uncouth sons Harry and Bill; and the scrupulous Widow Simms, with her upstanding sons Eli,
John, and Isaac. Also introduced are George and Annie Graham, a young married couple who live modestly but happily. George, a mechanic’s son, worries that the high-born Annie has married beneath her rank and sees his enlistment as an opportunity to advance their fortunes. Finally,
Holmes introduces Rockland’s wealthiest couple: William and Rose Mather. Rose comes from a fashionable Boston family, the Carletons; her older brother Tom has honorably enlisted in the
Union Army, while her younger brother Jimmie has waywardly enlisted with the Confederacy as a lark. Holmes tracks the alternating fortunes of these five families, shifting between the women’s experiences at home and the men’s experiences in battle. The serial novel ends in uncertainty: after months at the front, a subset of Rockland’s male heroes enjoy a brief reprieve at home before returning to war.
This uncertainty is especially poignant in light of the novel’s publication history. The timeline within the 1862 novel corresponds to the roughly ten months preceding its publication.
87 2: Sentimental Gore
The plot of Rose Mather and Annie Graham begins in April 1861 and ends in late January 1862, the same month that publication of the novel began in the New York Weekly. Holmes’s novel is not news, but it chronicles events of the very recent past: her chapters on the First Battle of Bull
Run appeared in March 1862, just months after the battle occurred. Holmes’s decision to end the novel in January 1862, with the Rockland men returning to the front in the story at the same time that the story was published, reflected the uncertainty of the war itself: how could she write a conclusion, when the progress of the war was anything but clear? Because the companion novel was not published until 1867, readers did not know what happened to the remaining characters until after the war had ended. In this way, the novel’s publication history mirrored the uncertainty that so many families experienced during wartime.
The full title of the 1862 serial, Rose Mather and Annie Graham; Or, What Women Can
Do for the War, suggests both the presentness of the war as well as Holmes’s ambition to engage women in the war effort. In the preceding issue, Street and Smith marketed the novel as a “New and Original Story of the Present Rebellion, written expressly for the NEW YORK WEEKLY.” It also sought to link Holmes’s fame with the magazine: “We need only mention the fact that ROSE
MATHER is by Mrs. HOLMES, to insure it a wide circulation, and…we would have all who admire Mrs. HOLMES as an authoress, and who believe in the superiority of the NEW YORK
WEEKLY, over all other papers of its class, endeavor to help us by getting some friend to whom our paper is unknown, to take it.” Below the advertisement appeared a brief invocation to support
“Union soldiers and Union prisoners” on the home front, a subject that Holmes’s novel addresses.27
27 “Next Week We Will Commence Mrs. Mary J. Holmes’ New and Original Story of the Present Rebellion, written expressly for the New York Weekly, entitled Rose Mather: or, What Women Can do for the War,” Street and Smith’s New York Weekly 17 (10), January 23, 1862: 4.
88 2: Sentimental Gore
On one level, Rose Mather and Annie Graham is the story of Rose Mather’s education. A silly young bride, Rose thinks that fighting in the war is a job for the lower classes and assumes wrongly that her husband will not enlist. After offending her neighbors with ignorant comments about the war effort and the Rockland regiment, she bonds with the Widow Simms and Annie over their distress about the fates of their loved ones. She also learns how to support the Union troops from home, as the Rockland women model Holmes’s ideas about “what women can do for the war.” These ideas are generally characteristic of sentimental and domestic Civil War fiction, reflecting themes that Faust and Fahs identify in their treatments of such literature. As Rose learns, women can give up their husbands, sons, and brothers, selflessly encouraging them to join the
Union Army. Women can contribute materially to the war effort, by sewing clothes, winding bandages, and sending packages to the front. Women can pray for the soldiers, and encourage unconverted soldiers to embrace Christian faith; they can also become hospital nurses, a path that
Annie adopts after George’s death (204). Most simply, they can take care of one another while waiting for the men to return. “She could be kind to the soldiers, if there were any in Rockland,”
Rose realizes. “She could visit their families, speak to them words of comfort, and supply, if needful, their necessities” (74). Women can also memorialize the dead, as George says on his deathbed: “Honor our memory—forget our faults—speak kindly of us when we are gone” (132).28
On another level, this novel is a harrowing account of the Rockland soldiers’ experiences at the First Battle of Bull Run—an account far less typical of sentimental Civil War fiction. Bull
28 While many issues of the 1862 serialization are publicly available online through American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals, the issues containing the Bull Run episode have not been digitized. A substantial number of original New York Weekly issues are housed in the archives at Syracuse University’s Special Collections Research Center, where Grace Wagner and Natasha Bishop kindly provided me with photographs of the relevant issues. All quotations from the novel cite the page number of the 1868 volume edition in parentheses. Notable variants between the volume edition and the 1862 serial are provided in footnotes. In many cases, Holmes’s revisions are minor and do not impact the meaning of the text: they include grammatical and syntactical alterations, small clarifications, and cuts for concision. More substantial revisions, where relevant, are discussed.
89 2: Sentimental Gore
Run spans the novel’s seventh and eighth chapters, which were originally spread across two issues of the New York Weekly: “The Battle” appeared on March 6, 1862, and “The Retreat” appeared the following week on March 13. “The Battle” begins by panning across the Union troops as they prepare for combat, providing a series of intimate glimpses into the thoughts of the Rockland soldiers. Holmes turns first to George Graham, who reflects on the possibility of his death and tucks his wife’s Bible into his breast pocket with the hope that it will soften the blow of any bullet.
Moving to Isaac Simms, she reveals that the young boy has been watching George and guessing at his thoughts. As Isaac turns to gaze at his own brothers, Holmes reveals their thoughts too: one is thinking of his mother, the other of his fiancé. Holmes accounts for the other Rockland men in turn: Bill and Harry Baker walk nearby; William Mather has stayed behind due to an indisposition;
Tom Carleton marches at the front of the line, where he wrestles internally with the fact that the war has divided him from Southern family and friends; and Jimmie Carleton is nearby with his
Confederate regiment, unbeknownst to his brother. In the moments before battle, Holmes thus takes systematic stock of her characters, family by family; incidentally, the two lovers of Annie
Graham—George and Jimmie—appear first and last, foreshadowing the fact that Jimmie will eventually replace George as Annie’s husband. Holmes makes sure that her readers know where every major character is located, and provides a comforting glimpse into each one’s mind.
Having dispatched this comfort, Holmes begins the battle with the sudden obliteration of human forms. After a misfired shell bursts “harmlessly at last just beyond its destined mark,” a second shell wreaks destruction: “a deep silence ensued, broken ere long by another heavy gun, which did its work more thoroughly than its predecessor had done, for where several breathing souls had been there was nought left save the bleeding mutilated trunks of what were once human
90 2: Sentimental Gore forms. The battle had commenced” (80).29 The chaos builds in a few sentences, with shouting and shots. And yet almost immediately thereafter, Holmes again locates the primary characters as if taking roll call. She notes the “[s]teady” presence of “George Graham’s giant form,” points out where Eli and John stand “firm as granite rocks,” and accounts for Isaac’s “boyish face” in “the excited throng” (81). Having provided this reassurance that Rockland’s heroes still stand, Holmes uses it as license to transition immediately into another scene of mutilation. A shot fatally hits
Harry Baker, who becomes “so blackened and disfigured, with the thick brains slowly oozing from his mangled head, and the purple gore pouring from his lips, that only those who saw him fall, could guess that it was Harry” (81).
This description is remarkably graphic for Holmes, or for any novel ostensibly prioritizing
“consolation.” But the depiction of Harry’s mutilation is also couched in the novel’s logic: Harry is accorded the most brutal and gory death of the novel’s main characters, because he is also the least “good.” Harry exhibits disregard for family and faith, as evidenced by his treatment of a care package prepared by the Rockland women: he mocks the hand-sewn clothes, comb, thimble, and other ‘feminine’ items that he receives (“Plaguey pretty implements of war, these!”), before finding a Bible in the bundle and jeeringly throwing it on the ground (36). Moreover, when his mother begs for a kiss before his departure from home, Harry “savagely” refuses (37). In return,
Harry receives the opposite of the “Good Death.” Disfigured beyond recognition, he is left unburied on the battlefield. Ironically, the moral logic of the scene allows Holmes to move very close to his “mangled head,” softening the grotesque blow with the knowledge that he was the least morally good of the Rockland soldiers.
29 Holmes only made two small revisions to the Weekly’s version of this scene for the volume edition: “The battle had commenced at last” became “The battle had commenced,” and “so blackened, so disfigured” became “so blackened and disfigured.” See New York Weekly 17 (15), March 6, 1862: 2.
91 2: Sentimental Gore
Moreover, in accord with the novel’s logic of goodness, Harry’s death spares the life of the gentle Isaac Simms. The bullet that strikes Harry first narrowly misses Isaac, passing through his cap on the way to its mark. Isaac is a classic example of what Fahs calls the “sentimental soldier”
(94). Unlike Harry, Isaac is a devoted son and brother; brave, selfless, and faithful to God, he desires only to die a “Good Death” at home in his bed. This is the consolation and the hope that
Holmes’s rendition of Bull Run affords: Harry’s horrific death accords with his moral depravity, while Isaac’s survival is dictated by his moral goodness. Governed by moral logic instead of random chance, the salvation of the angelic Isaac is even predicated on the death of Harry in his place. Holmes signals long before Harry’s death that this character does not deserve the reader’s sympathy, thereby laying the groundwork for a graphic description of his mutilated face. She even prepares the reader for this eventuality with heavy-handed foreshadowing: it is strongly presaged before the battle, when Holmes reveals that Harry “went thoughtlessly boasting on to death!” (79).
Isaac’s escape is also preordained and presaged well before the battle. As the soldiers march out of Rockland, Holmes notes that Isaac’s mother will come to “thank the over-ruling hand which kept her boy from growing just two inches taller,” a condition that allows the bullet to pass through his cap without harming him (40).
Moral logic is also at work in the case of George Graham, the other character for whom this battle proves fatal: wounded by a gunshot, he eventually dies in a hospital after an amputation.
Once again, Holmes presages this event earlier in the battle, noting that “the ball for which he was the mark had not been fired yet, but it was coming” (82). George, however, is moved out of the way from a class perspective: the death of this “poor mechanic” creates an opportunity for Annie to remarry in a class-corrective romance with Jimmie Carleton (128). As a fundamentally good man, George dies a classic “Good Death.” Full of Christian faith, he dictates a goodbye letter to
92 2: Sentimental Gore his wife before dying in the care of a friend. The two corpses are also treated according to Holmes’s moral logic: honorable George is the first soldier brought home for a proper burial, while Harry— the first Rockland soldier to die—is left disfigured on the battlefield (138).
Remarkably, the first major character death in an otherwise sentimental novel is a “bad” death enabled by a form of moral logic. Even more strangely, Harry’s bad death is also highly sentimentalized. Despite the obliteration of his human form, Harry is ultimately afforded the presence of a family member to say goodbye. His brother Bill sees him fall, and marks the spot where his body lies so that he can return. When he does, he finds Harry “trampled and crushed by the flying troops, and wholly unrecognizable by any save a brother’s eye” (84). But Bill does recognize him. While he cannot give Harry a proper farewell, he takes a lock of his “matted, bloodwet hair” and his personal effects, expresses his sorrow, and kisses him goodbye (84).
Holmes allots Harry some elements of the “Good Death,” but combines them with horrific descriptions of his mutilated body: she describes the corpse first as “the gory mass he [Bill] knew had been his brother,” and then again as a “lifeless gore” (82, 85). No longer a brother, or even a body, Harry has become mere anonymous “mass” and “gore.” Yet this description is tempered by
Bill’s touching recognition, and his pitiful expression of sympathy for both his brother and his mother, who also will bear the sorrow of his loss. Most striking is Bill’s desire to give this “gore” a farewell kiss, which is at first hindered by the complete obliteration of Harry’s face. “If there was a spot on your face as big as a sixpence that wasn’t smashed into a jelly,” Bill reflects, “I’d kiss you just for the old woman’s sake, but I swan if I can stomach it!” He settles for a kiss on the hand, touching his lips to “the clammy fingers of the dead” (85). Bill’s inability to kiss Harry’s face because it has been “smashed into a jelly” embodies Holmes’s unsettling application of sentimentality to “lifeless gore.” Holmes drapes the conventions of a sentimental deathbed farewell
93 2: Sentimental Gore around a graphic description of death, sentimentalizing gore as Bill’s compassionate kiss draws the reader uncomfortably close to the jellied corpse.
The Weekly’s illustrations further reinforce Holmes’s strategic deployment of sentimental gore. Most installments of Rose Mather and Annie Graham appeared on the front page of the
Weekly, with a large illustration depicting a relevant scene. Yet in the March 6 issue, “The Battle” was accompanied by a sentimental depiction of a scene from “The Retreat” instead—although that chapter would not run until the next week. In “The Retreat,” Isaac and Tom find a Union drummer boy whose hands have been “shot entirely off” (88). A fatherly Confederate soldier watches over him, although he too is fatally wounded (88). Attempting to generate Christian sympathy for the common soldier, irrespective of section, Holmes emphasizes that the two share the same faith; the boy even has the same name as the Confederate soldier’s son. The soldier blames “our leaders” and the “lying press” for the war: “Oh, had we, as a people, known each other; could we have guessed what brave, kind hearts there were both North and South, we should never have come to this” (91–92). The illustration of “The Battle” showed this pair lying side by side, reinforcing the centrality of the sentimental narrative with an image characteristic of the genre’s approach to death
(Figure 2). Meanwhile, Harry’s horrific death takes place—unillustrated—on the next page.30 With this sentimental tableaux, where even the young boy’s missing hands are delicately obscured in shadow, the Weekly invited readers into a narrative that contained far bloodier depictions of battle.
Ultimately, “The Battle” closes not by providing sentimental comforts but rather by moving outward from Harry’s death to the level of mass destruction and mutilation:
Cannon after cannon belched forth its terrific thunder, ball after ball sped on its deadly track, battery after battery opened its blazing fire, shell after shell cut the summer air, and burst with murderous hiss; shout after shout rent the smoky sky, shriek after shriek went down with the rushing wind, officer after officer bit the dust, rank after rank was broken up, soul after soul went to the bar of God, and then there
30 “Rose Mather and Annie Graham,” New York Weekly 17 (15), March 6, 1862: 1.
94 2: Sentimental Gore
came a pause. The firing ceased, the stifling smoke rolled gradually away, and showed a dreadful sight—men mutilated and torn, till not a vestige of their former looks was left to tell who they had been. Mingled together, in one frightful mass, the dead and the dying lay, smiles wreathing the livid lips of some, and frowns disfiguring others. Arms, hands, and feet, heads, fingers, toes, and clots of human hair, dripping red with blood, were scattered over the field—parts of the living mass we saw but a few hours agone [sic] moving on so hopefully beneath the morning moonlight. ‘Like leaves of the forest when autumn hath blown,’ they lay there now, their mangled remains crying loudly to Heaven for vengeance on the heads of those who brought this curse upon us. (83)
Holmes returns to mass death in this final paragraph, with the anonymous shrieks and fallen officers, followed by the undifferentiated “frightful mass” of human limbs. All “parts of the living mass” at the start of the chapter, they now raise a single voice against “those who brought this curse upon us.” While this passage ends the chapter in the 1868 volume, the 1862 serial actually softened the conclusion with two additional paragraphs. Holmes returns to the living, describing the sweaty and dusty survivors’ thirst for water before pausing the narrative with an authorial aside: “And now, tired of the sickening details, we leave them thus awhile and seek in the bracing winter air a panacea for the nervous gloom a description of that battle has hung upon our spirits.”31
Figure 2. “The Confederate Officer Wounded at the Battle of Bull Run,” New York Weekly, 17 (15), March 6, 1862: 1.
31 “Rose Mather and Annie Graham,” New York Weekly 17 (15), March 6, 1862: 2.
95 2: Sentimental Gore
Jarringly, the next story on the page is a sentimental little tale called “Our Home,” in which a young girl loses her grandmother and almost loses her childhood home, before marrying a kindly physician. The serial novel’s most horrific descriptions are thus surrounded by sentimentality and domestic images: both within the narrative, as Holmes steps outside for some air; and around it, through sentimental home stories with happy endings. In revising the novel for volume publication,
Holmes kept the final description of the dead but cut the description of the living and the authorial aside, actually heightening the horror of the chapter’s ending.
Holmes’s descriptions of the carnage at Bull Run are strikingly akin to De Forest’s account—right down to the language of blackened corpses smashed to jelly, and piles of severed human limbs. By allotting the fates of her central characters through a protective moral logic,
Holmes gave herself license to depict the fate of the masses without moral order: all is chaos, randomness, and the mass destruction of human identity. Ultimately, these two trends in the chapter are at odds: Harry’s gruesome death is allegorically appropriate, but the deaths of thousands of “men mutilated and torn” cannot be explained in this way. Of course, one might say that this ironic mismatch reflects the inappropriateness of Holmes’s genre for war—or her inability to accurately depict the chaos of war. Yet I argue that her deployment of moral logic actually allowed her to move closer to the war within a genre, the sentimental novel, that did not typically encompass vivid description of “men mutilated and torn” on the battlefield. In Holmes’s version of Bull Run, death initially appears to seek its marks according to moral status: bad Harry dies, allowing good Isaac to survive. George’s death introduces a parallel moral logic: good men may die in war, but they will be afforded Good Deaths according to their moral status. Yet the chapter’s conclusion shifts away from this reassuring formula to the horrors of anonymous mass death—a
choice that intentionally undercuts the very logic this chapter has worked so hard to establish.
96 2: Sentimental Gore
Ultimately, the moral logic of Rose Mather and Annie Graham enabled Holmes to produce a generically radical battle scene. The “sentimental gore” of this novel should be considered alongside the battle scenes of Miss Ravenel’s Conversion in any study of Civil War literature. De
Forest, of course, wrestled quite differently with the “moral logic” of novelistic death. Ultimately, his primary antagonist—the faithless Carter—meets his untimely end on the battlefield. Indeed,
Carter is conveniently shot in battle right after his wife Lillie has discovered his adulterous affair.
Attended by a surgeon and a chaplain, he refuses the latter’s exhortations to think “of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ” before his death (411). Within the novel, other characters make sense of Carter’s death in terms of moral logic. The surgeon sees Carter’s death as coherent with his character, remarking in French: “He maintained his character to the very end...His death is everything logical” (411, 494n11). In his 1867 review, Howells echoed this perspective: “When he [Carter] comes to be shot, fighting bravely at the head of his column, after having swindled his government, and half unwillingly done his worst to break his wife’s heart, we feel that our side has lost a good soldier, but that the world is on the whole something better for our loss” (121). Yet De Forest himself resisted any moral interpretation of Carter’s death, rejecting the surgeon’s claim about its logic: “So he thought, and very naturally. He had only known him in his evil hours; he judged him as all superficial acquaintances would have judged; he was not aware of the tenderness which existed at the bottom of that passionate nature” (411). In this moment, De Forest asks readers to resist the impulse to apply moral reasoning to make sense of Carter’s demise, insisting that his death is not ordained based on his character, his moral code, or how he lived his life.
Yet the fact remains that Carter’s death does ultimately accord with the novel’s moral and narrative logic. It conveniently releases Lillie from their marriage, allowing her to wed the more suitable Captain Colburne. De Forest disposes of Carter much as Holmes disposes of George
97 2: Sentimental Gore
Graham, making way for a more appropriate suitor through death on the battlefield. Carter’s death embodies the tension between De Forest’s chaotic battle scenes and his neat sentimental romance: while the moral logic of the romance plot demands the replacement of Carter with Colburne, De
Forest simultaneously wished to keep that moral logic from infecting his portrait of chaos and randomness on the battlefield. Hence his insistence, somewhat contradictory to narrative evidence, that Carter’s death cannot be explained away as “everything logical.” Miss Ravenel’s Conversion, precisely because it is a novel, cannot entirely resist moral and narrative logic. It seems appropriate that Carter’s death takes place in the novel’s very last battle scene. As De Forest’s narrative machinery works towards its conclusion, he both embraces and rejects the moral logic that he has otherwise confined to the sentimental romance: Carter must die to initiate the final act of the romance plot, but De Forest resists the implication that his battlefield death is logical. This ambivalence around Carter’s death is a symptom of Miss Ravenel’s status as a sentimental
“romance of reunion,” in which narrative ends are ultimately at odds with the realistic portrayal of battlefield chaos. Yet if moral logic crept into the last battle scene of Miss Ravenel’s Conversion,
Holmes manipulated the sentimental mode to enable her very first battle scene to depict human bodies mutilated beyond recognition. For Holmes, the moral logic of sentimentalism was a means to portray material that she otherwise could not present. It allowed her to move closer to the horrors
of battle than many of her contemporaries, and closer than she herself would go in any later text.
Genre and The New York Weekly
Holmes’s descriptive experimentation was likely encouraged by the novel’s original publisher,
Street and Smith’s New York Weekly. The Weekly regularly combined sentimental fare with more sensational offerings—a strategy that it also applied, with jarring effect, to its Civil War fiction.
Indeed, the Weekly is perhaps best described as “sentimental-sensational,” a term that Kathryn
98 2: Sentimental Gore
Conner Bennett has applied to its competitor The New York Ledger (82).32 One of the first authors secured to write exclusively for the Weekly, along with Holmes, was “Harry Hazel” (Justin Jones), who had made his name writing sensational stories of swashbuckling on the high seas.33 Street and
Smith serialized his novella The Yankee Governess: Or, The Rival Brothers (Apr–May 1862), in which the titular governess is abducted by a villainous Confederate privateer, alongside Rose
Mather and Annie Graham. As Fahs has shown, sensational Civil War stories like The Yankee
Governess were plentiful in the war years. Emphasizing “the romance, excitement, and adventure of war,” they often featured heroines on the battlefield as soldiers and spies in disguise (226, 230).
The other Civil War serial that ran alongside Rose Mather and Annie Graham was just such a tale:
William H. Bushnell’s Estelle, the Vivandiere; or, Dark Days and Daring Deeds (Feb–Mar,
1862).34 Described as “a story of the present war between the North and South, founded upon facts,” the novella is a sensational romp through Civil War camps and battlefields.35 After joining her beloved’s regiment as a vivandiere, the fearless Estelle rescues him in battle, is abducted and threatened with rape by a Confederate captain, and, once rescued from captivity, shoots that captain at Bull Run while again saving her beloved. In the end, Estelle and her love become engaged and jointly reenlist in the army.
Contextualized by the Weekly’s other offerings, Holmes’s novel turns out to have been just one of several guides to “what women can do for the war,” a fact obscured by the volume edition.
32 Bennet, “Illustrating Southworth,” 82. On the rise of sensational literature in nineteenth-century America, see Shelley Streeby, American Sensations (2002); and Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents (1987).
33 Mary Noel’s Villains Galore (1954) offers a brief but informative account of Weekly authors, including Harry Hazel. Hazel was “exclusive” to Street and Smith from 1859 to 1864, when he left to run his own story paper (47).
34 The novella was initially advertised as Estelle, the Vivandiere; or, The Rebel’s Doom.
35 “Another Great Story,” The New York Weekly 17 (13), February 20, 1862: 4.
99 2: Sentimental Gore
In many ways, Holmes herself might be said to have provided the Weekly with a sentimental ballast for more sensational fare. Street and Smith first introduced Holmes as a “chaste, elegant, and vigorous writer,” nothing less than “QUEEN OF THE HUMAN HEART.”36 The Weekly even used
Rose Mather and Annie Graham in its own defense, with an editorial aside that claimed the moral worth of the “romance reading” published in its pages: “Let those pastors who may be prejudiced against our paper, without knowing what it contains, take this story and read it. They will find in it nothing that they themselves would not cheerfully utter. While it is absorbingly interesting, it is full of the charity, and meekness, and hope, and faith, which only the true Christian can feel.”37
The Weekly’s sensational Civil War stories, including Estelle, the Vivandiere, leaned into more graphic depictions of violence—instances of what Karen Halttunen calls “body-horror.”
Halttunen’s study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “murder literature” shows that grotesque descriptions of corpses regularly appeared in secular accounts of actual murders, which in their sensationalism focused “directly on the ‘mangled remains’ of the murder victims” (51). “The primary technique of sensationalism was body-horror,” Halttunen explains, “the effort to arouse the reader’s repugnance (and excitement) in the face of the physiological realities of violent death”
(73).38 In Estelle, the Vivandiere, Bushnell repeatedly describes soldiers’ mutilated bodies, echoing
Holmes’s descriptions of death at Bull Run. A rebel soldier cruelly bayonets a fallen Union soldier,
“crushing out the little remaining life with his iron guarded heel, bruising the already mangled features into a shapeless mass beneath his heavy boot, and thrusting the reeking bayonet again and
36 Noel, qtd. 111, While Noel correctly notes that Holmes’s stories were far less sensational than those of her peer E. D. E. N. Southworth, she also states that Holmes novels featured “no abductions, no violence, no villains at all,” a claim that her Civil War fiction proves to be untrue (112).
37 “Power of Romance,” The New York Weekly 17 (11), February 6, 1862: 4.
38 Shelley Streeby points out, more generally, that nineteenth-century “sensational popular culture” “aimed to provoke extreme embodied responses in readers; and often lingered on the grotesque and the horrible” (30).
100 2: Sentimental Gore again into the groaning, mercy-pleading breast!”39 Confederate forces surprised by a trip wire are
“hurled into a shapeless, crushed, dying mass upon the ground.”40 And the Confederate captain who attempts to rape Estelle meets a gruesome end, also crushed and disfigured: his head is
“completely mashed into a jelly by horses’ feet, and his whole body crushed beneath the heavy cannon wheels,” so that he is unrecognizable except “by a peculiar ring he wore.”41 Like the murder literature that Halttunen surveys, Bushnell’s serial offers sensational thrills balanced between horror and pleasure, almost reveling in their own grotesquerie.
These gory “bad deaths” are less surprising in sensational fictions like Estelle, the
Vivendiere than they are in sentimental fictions like Rose Mather and Annie Graham. Perhaps, then, the Weekly’s apparent appetite for gore encouraged Holmes to experiment with introducing this language in her otherwise highly sentimental novel. Yet where Bushnell refuses to drape his gruesome “bad” deaths in the trappings of sentiment, preferring sensationalism instead, Holmes softened her episode of “body-horror” with sentimental sympathy. Rose Mather and Annie
Graham generally eschews sensationalism, although Holmes experimented with the tropes of sensational romance in some of her more Gothic works. Reading the novel in its original context, however, sheds light on its willingness to experiment with sentimentalizing gore. The columns of the Weekly were an ideal place to push the boundaries of the sentimental novel, as the sentimental novel itself was literally bounded on the page by sensational fictions that did not shy away from such gore. The April 10, 1862 issue provides an especially striking example of this juxtaposition.
As usual, Rose Mather and Annie Graham appeared on the first page with an illustration. This
39 Bushnell, “Estelle, the Vivandiere,” The New York Weekly 17 (14), February 27, 1862: 6. Holmes’s Bull Run episode ran in issues 15 and 16, March 6 and March 13, 1862.
40 Bushnell, “Estelle, the Vivandiere,” The New York Weekly 17 (16), March 13, 1862: 6.
41 Bushnell, “Estelle the Vivandiere,” The New York Weekly 17 (18), March 27, 1862: 7.
101 2: Sentimental Gore installment narrates a tearful funeral procession in honor of George Graham, whose body has been returned to Rockland. Entitled “Farewell to the Husband and Hero.” the illustration depicts George in his coffin surrounded by mourning loved ones with the Union flag overhead (Figure 3).42
Figure 3. “Farewell to the Husband and Hero,” New York Weekly 17 (20), April 10, 1862: 1.
On last page of the issue, however, Street and Smith offered a highly unsentimental account of war death. Entitled “A Thrilling Account of the Fight between the Cumberland and Congress and the
Merrimac,” this anonymous first-person account is told from the perspective of a sailor on the USS
Congress during the Battle of Hampton Roads (March 8–9, 1862). It is essentially an extended description of the gruesome deaths precipitated by a shell explosion, with the narrator moving from one mangled corpse to another in excruciating detail:
One man was flung around the main-mast. He must have struck on the sides of his legs, below his knees, and like a whip-cord he encircled the mast so that his head rested just above his feet, on the same side of the mast, and there, for a moment, he stuck, his bones broken, yet retaining human shape, stripped of nearly all his clothes; bleeding in some parts of his body, blackened in others; his eyes and tongue hanging out. How can I go on? Yet I must—we ought to know what war is; and the poor fellow died painlessly. He suffered less than we who saw him.
42 “Rose Mather and Annie Graham,” New York Weekly 17 (20), April 10, 1862: 1.
102 2: Sentimental Gore
Another man, who had been flung up to the ceiling, dropped at my feet. His clothes, too, had been stripped—so had his skin; headless, and with open and gory bowels, he lay beside me. The work, too, had been quickly and painlessly done for him—the flesh did not quiver, the lately active nerves were still. Ten, five seconds before he had been a man. Now in his place was a sodden smudge of bruised and blackened flesh.
The author continues in this manner for several paragraphs, moving from descriptions of individual corpses to disincorporated body parts: “long festoons” of intestines, “jelly-like, black, shapeless gouts of liver” coating the deck, brains and eyes flung about in “a sickening white shower of slime,” severed hands and feet. The deck is coated in bodily fluids, as well as the vomit of those survivors met with the “horribly sickening” sight. Rejecting sentimental conventions, the author notes that none turn to the comforts of religion: no prayers are heard on board this ship.43
The issue opens with a comforting image of George Graham laid out in his coffin, setting to rest the hero’s body—recognizable, intact—with due respect and honor. It closes with an irreconcilable account of mangled bodies that reads more like a sensational revel in the horror of gore, what Halttunen calls “a pornography of violence” (62). Both accounts of death insist on their own truth: the Congress narrator notes that he must describe the scene because “we ought to know what war is,” while Holmes emphasizes the reality of George’s sentimentalized death. “Is some reader ready to cry out against poor George’s fate as far too sad and tragical?” she asks her Weekly readers. “None feels that more deeply than ourselves, or would have saved him more willingly if that could be. But sad as the story appears, it is terribly real in every particular, as many an aching heart and broken fireside circle will attest.”44 The Weekly itself deployed wartime sentimentalism
43 “A Thrilling Account of the fight between the Cumberland and Congress and the Merrimac, by one who was concerned in the action,” The New York Weekly 17 (20), April 10, 1862: 8.
44 “Rose Mather and Annie Graham,” The New York Weekly 17 (20), April 10, 1862: 2. This authorial aside was excised from the volume edition.
103 2: Sentimental Gore and sensationalism alongside one another—presenting both as forms of “reality.” And the reader consumed both of these versions at once—sentiment and gore, separated by a few pages.
Restoring Rose Mather and Annie Graham to its original context thus reframes the reading experience: George’s death is as much framed by the horrific deaths of the Congress sailors, as it is by the morally licensed death of Harry Baker. The novel filled a very different function in this context than it did on its own, as only one of several—at times competing—descriptions of battlefield death. On one level, then, Holmes utilizes the logic of “sentimental gore” to embed
Harry’s death within her otherwise conventionally sentimental novel. On another level, the story paper itself engaged the logic of “sentimental gore” through its manipulation of Holmes’s novel: with her comforting image of George’s funeral on the front page, the Weekly then hit readers with a different kind of reality—a gory mass slaughter—later in the same issue. Holmes’s sentimentalism, in other words, couched and softened the Weekly’s more sensational Civil War fare; while this sensational fare seems to have liberated Holmes to experiment with descriptions of gore and violence.45 Yet where the Congress narrative practically revels in its sensationalized description of mangled bodies, Holmes gentles her account by mixing in some conventions of sentimental death. By embedding these description in a safety net of moral logics and sympathies,
Holmes achieved the rarer feat of combining sentiment and gore in a single death. Of course, these sentimental conventions break down when she turns from individuals to the dead and dying masses in the background. The novel highlights its own problematic logic in the act of sentimentalizing gore, both providing comfort and exposing the comfort as a generic cover at the same time.
45 Streeby notes a similar effect in Beadle and Company’s choice of popular author Ann Stephens as its first dime novelist in 1860, which “courted a certain respectability, despite the sensational subject matter, style, and emotional pitch of many of their offerings” (227). As she points out, women’s sensational fictions “often combine sentimental and sensational modes…sensational aspects of the text, which focus on violence, shocking scenes, bodies, and the grotesque are often framed by sentimental devices that reassert genteel values and middle-class respectability” (36).
104 2: Sentimental Gore
In the Weekly, both battlefields and wounded bodies became sites of genre liminality, places where the sentimental, the real, and the sensational blended together. Annie Merrill Ingram has suggested that sensational fiction is highly appropriate for the battlefield because, as a genre, it embraces the graphic description that truthful accounts of battle necessitate: “Because the realities of war are inherently grotesque and horrible, any accurate description of them will seem sensationalized” (146). Ingram is referring specifically to Holmes’s peer E. D. E. N. Southworth, whose Civil War novel Britomarte, the Man-Hater (1865–66) was serialized in the New York
Ledger after the war.46 Ingram finds “convincing evidence of reality of war” in this novel, as it features two rare moments of “graphic gore” (146). First, a sailor is beheaded in a maritime battle, his body “quivering down” to the deck as his head spins “round and round.”47 Later, two soldiers see a “young officer” meet a similar end in battle: “his whole face was blown off, and nothing but a gory, crimson, quivering mass of flesh remained where it had been.”48 Yet this kind of description is rare even in the less generically constricted space of the “sentimental-sensational,” enough for
Ingraham to note these episodes as unusual. Most of the novel rejects such grotesquery, while embracing other tropes of sensational fiction. With the exception of these two anonymous deaths,
Southworth’s few battle scenes are highly stylized and sanitized. She often simply skirts around the battles, and certainly none of her named characters are subjected to “bad deaths” of this kind.
Like Southworth, the New York Weekly also dealt sparingly in graphic Civil War gore. In the nineteen issues across which Holmes’s novel was serialized, I only identified three other accounts of the war that included such description: Estelle, the Vivandiere, the Congress account,
46 The novel was later published in two volumes, Fair Play; Or the Test of the Lone Island (1868) and How He Won Her (1869). A rival to the Weekly, the New York Ledger had been publishing Southworth’s work since 1856.
47 Southworth, Fair Play, 598–599.
48 Southworth, How He Won Her, 466.
105 2: Sentimental Gore and a short “Extract from a Letter of a Returned Union Prisoner” relating the scene after the battle at Fort Donelson.49 Gory bad deaths are a rarity even in the pages of the Weekly, whether called
“realistic” or “sensational” or something in between. Yet the presence of such episodes suggests that scholarly accounts of battlefield realism would benefit from considering the contents of generically fluid serials like the New York Weekly, where the sentimental and the sensational also worked—sometimes together, sometimes at odds—to approach the realities of war.
Domestic Turns: Bad Hugh and Family Pride
The sudden disappearance of graphic violence from Holmes’s literary oeuvre is just as strange as its appearance in Rose Mather and Annie Graham. The New York Weekly serialized two more wartime novels by Holmes: Bad Hugh appeared from July 1862 to April 1863, and Family Pride from November 1864 to July 1865. Republished as Hugh Worthington (1865) and The Cameron
Pride (1867), respectively, both novels included Civil War plotlines that fictionalized the events of the war often just months after they had occurred. At the same time, neither one depicts the kind of sentimental gore that characterizes Harry Baker’s death. In fact, both novels largely talk around the war: combat itself is constantly pushed to the background, as if Holmes wished to deflect the reader’s gaze from the battlefield. The longer the war dragged on, the less time Holmes appeared to want to spend on it in her fiction.
Hugh Worthington is primarily embroiled in domestic conflict, moving between the titular
Hugh’s Kentucky plantation and a Massachusetts village; the war breaks out in the novel’s final third. The Cameron Pride foregrounds the romantic trials of two sisters from rural Massachusetts; the Civil War begins a little over halfway through the novel, and takes place almost entirely in the background. Both novels continue to keep pace with the progress of the war. The action of Hugh
49 “Extract from a Letter of a Returned Union Prisoner,” New York Weekly 17 (19), April 3, 1862: 7.
106 2: Sentimental Gore
Worthington takes place between December 1859 and April 1863, although Holmes purposely skips over the first year of the war. Having arrived at the winter of 1862 in Rose Mather and Annie
Graham, she jumps ahead a few months in this next novel: “our story has little to do with that first year of carnage…Over all that we pass, and open again in the summer of ’62, when people were gradually waking to the fact that Richmond was not so easily taken, or the South so easily conquered” (324–325). The novel concludes in April 1863, at the same time that the Weekly issued its last installment. The Cameron Pride is even more ambitious in its scope: serialized in the war’s final months, it covers all four years of the conflict in its second half. The action concludes in May
1865, two months before the Weekly issued the novel’s final installment in July 1865.
In both novels, the war predominantly serves to resolve romantic difficulties among loyal
Unionists. In Hugh Worthington, the war releases Hugh’s sister Adah from a loveless marriage to her unfeeling and manipulative husband. With little regard for domestic or national responsibility, this husband deserts her early in the novel; he later attempts to desert the Union Army for the
Confederacy, returning to fight for his regiment only because Adah promises to remain with him in exchange. His death in battle both absolves his name and releases Adah to marry the honorable captain of his regiment. In The Cameron Pride, country girl Katy Lennox makes an unhappy marriage to a proud and wealthy New York lawyer. His death in the war, however, releases her to marry a worthy army surgeon instead. In both cases, the dying husband recognizes his faults and explicitly gives his consent to the second marriage. These novels are no longer preoccupied with
“what women can do for the war,” but rather what the war can do for women: release them from unhappy marriages. The war intervenes to resolve romantic entanglements, deploying moral logic in service of the marriage plot. The only war widows in these novels are women whose unworthy husbands stand in the way of happy second marriages.
107 2: Sentimental Gore
Why did Holmes portray the Battle of Bull Run so viscerally in 1862, only to give up on depictions of battle in her other wartime novels? In the winter of 1862, Holmes clearly wanted to stir women to join the war effort—and sentimental gore was one of her strategies for doing so.
Rose Mather and Annie Graham generates much of its emotional impact through the devastating
Union defeat at Bull Run. The novel was serialized towards the end of the war’s first year, when— as Holmes notes in Hugh Worthington—the nation was “waking” to the fact that this war would prove much longer than initially expected. Ultimately, her three wartime novels seem to reflect a gradual war weariness. Holmes’s grotesquery in 1862 is mirrored by the descriptions of Civil War bodies in other Weekly narratives issued at the same time, such as Estelle, the Vivandiere and the account of the Congress sailor. Yet the issues of the Weekly containing Bad Hugh and The
Cameron Pride also seem to shy entirely away from such depictions of Civil War death. I have not found a single Civil War story or article in the available issues that includes these kinds of descriptions. It is as if both Holmes and the Weekly itself tired of rehearsing such scenes.
Increasing war weariness might also account for the way in which pro-Union fervor slowly dissipates across the three novels. Rose Mather and Annie Graham was already less partisan than the Weekly writ large. While Holmes offered the touching set-piece of a Confederate father caring for a Union drummer boy while blaming the war on leaders from both sections in “The Retreat,” the Weekly’s next issue featured a poem that framed the rebels as “howling traitors” wielding
“Treason’s power”; a short story in which a young woman is encouraged to “[h]ate” and “curse” her “traitor” fiancé for enlisting in the “rebellious hordes” of the Confederate Army; and an advertisement for battle ballads on “the patriotic actions of the grand army which rushed to the defence of the most benign government which ever existed when it was assailed by traitorous
108 2: Sentimental Gore foes.”50 Yet by 1864, Holmes seemed eager to narrate the war years as briefly as possible. The
Cameron Pride is almost entirely uninterested in the war—a perspective perhaps inspired and reinforced by the increasing likelihood of Union victory. Its war chapters were published between
March and July 1865, during which time the war itself ended. It is almost as if Holmes incorporated the war because it was rapidly ending, and then dispatched the war as quickly because it had ended.
While the villainy of Katy’s husband is reinforced by his apathy for the war—he enlists only to hurt his wife, and expresses so little interest in the conflict that his whole family is surprised by his enlistment—the novel itself actually seems to mirror his apathy. It takes place entirely among
Northerners whose lives are minimally interrupted by war, and who do not seem especially concerned about its outcomes. Katy’s sister and a friend wait for their sweethearts to return, but they are not left in suspense for long. It is only at the very end of the war, on a tour of Fort Monroe, that Katy’s sister feels “awe and even terror” as she begins to “realize the bloody strife we have been engaged in, and which, thank God, has now nearly ceased” (414). Her terror is oddly retrospective, felt in the relative safety of the war’s aftermath.
In Hugh Worthington, meanwhile, Holmes quieted sectional fervor through careful revisions to the prose of Bad Hugh. There are two significant differences between the Civil War chapters serialized in the spring of 1863, and the edited versions of those chapters in the 1865 volume. In both versions, Hugh enlists in the federal army shortly after the outbreak of the war.
Although he owns a Kentucky plantation, the Northern-born Hugh is sympathetic to his slaves and eager to see slavery abolished. However, his motivation for joining the army shifts substantially from the serial to the novel. In the serial, Hugh’s decision to enlist is the result of his zealous
50 A. J. H. Duganne, “Battle Ballads – No. 1. The March to the Capitol,” New York Weekly 17 (16), March 13, 1862, p. 5; L. Augustus Jones, “The Promised Bride,” New York Weekly 17 (16), March 13, 1862, p. 6; “Battle Ballads,” New York Weekly 17 (16), March 13, 1862, p. 4.
109 2: Sentimental Gore patriotism. Motivated by a “strong desire to punish the South,” he appears with “the glow of enthusiasm kindling in his cheek, and the fire of patriotism flushing from his dark, handsome eyes.” Initially kept from enlisting by a subplot involving his sister’s disappearance, he vows to volunteer as soon as he finds her and to fight “like a blood hound, until some ball strikes me down.”51 In the volume edition, Holmes dampens his zealousness considerably. Devastated by a perceived rejection from his love interest, Hugh feels that he must leave home. He decides to search for his missing sister, and “failing to find his sister, he might possibly join the Federal
Army” (318). Although Hugh is “[a] Unionist to the heart’s core” and feels “an intense desire to enroll himself with the patriotic men” of the federal army, he recognizes that his “first duty” is to his sister and speaks aloud only of “the probabilities of finding her” (318). These subtle shifts reorganize Hugh’s priorities around romance, which is at odds with his service in the army. Bad
Hugh likely encouraged men to enlist as soldiers, while the postwar revision likely sought to dampen sectional fervor. As a result, Holmes’s hero in 1865 is not quite so zealously patriotic as— and far more concerned with unrequited love than—his 1863 counterpart.
The second difference between serial and volume is the removal of a scene in which Hugh’s love interest, Alice, defends his plantation from guerilla raiders.52 In the serial, Alice trains Hugh’s slaves to use guns and leads them in defying a group of rebel guerillas who attempt to steal his horses. Ultimately, a slave woman named Muggins shoots and kills the guerilla leader as he threatens the household. The entire scene was removed for the volume edition: Alice declares that she will learn to shoot if it is necessary to defend herself, but retreats to the North instead. The removal of this battle—the only battle depicted in the novel, and one that includes the murder of a
51 Mary Jane Holmes, “Bad Hugh; Or The Diamond in the Rough and How It Was Polished,” New York Weekly 18 (16), March 12, 1863: 5.
52 The scene originally appeared across two issues, New York Weekly 18 (19–20), April 2–9, 1863.
110 2: Sentimental Gore white man by a black slave—suggests that by 1865 Holmes, or her editor G.W. Carleton, was more interested in using the war as a backdrop for romance than in stoking sectional flames. In her revisions to Hugh Worthington, Holmes began to prepare the way for reconciliation.
Of the three novels, Hugh Worthington does grapple most directly with the moral stakes of the war. Hugh acts on his stated anti-slavery principles at the end of the novel, freeing his slaves and moving to the North once emancipation is declared. Yet Holmes doesn’t seem to know how to imagine a model of labor other than plantation slavery. Hugh brings the former slaves with him, creating a second Spring Bank plantation—he even gives it the same name—in New England.
Holmes’s description of this new home could easily be a description of a slave plantation. And while the original Spring Brank burns to the ground during the guerilla battle in the serial, the volume leaves this plantation standing—deserted, but not completely destroyed. While Holmes was not yet writing reconciliation romance, both Hugh Worthington and The Cameron Pride move towards reconciliation in ways that Rose Mather and Annie Graham could not envision in 1862.
While The Cameron Pride is an insular Northern novel, hardly a “romance of reconciliation” uniting North and South, both the serial and the volume anticipate reconciliation by deferring and decentering the war. And while Bad Hugh reflects Hugh’s fiery patriotism and the villainy of
Southern guerillas, Hugh Worthington dampens these elements.
It seems no accident that Holmes’s very next Weekly novel turned away from the war altogether. Serialized in 1866, Ethelyn’s Mistake; or, The Home in the West is the story of an unhappy marriage between the cosmopolitan Bostonian Ethelyn and the serious but unrefined
Richard Markham of Western Iowa.53 Set in the antebellum period, Ethelyn’s Mistake is a story of
53 Ethelyn’s Mistake was serialized from May 3 to October 18, 1866. It followed the final installment of The Cameron Pride, and preceded the first installment of Annie Graham’s First Love. Carleton issued the volume edition in 1869.
111 2: Sentimental Gore regional and class difference—a reconciliation narrative that turns from divisions between North and South to divisions between city and country. Neither partner is comfortable in the other’s world: Markham despises the conventions of Boston social life, while Ethelyn is horrified by the lack of social graces in his rural western hometown. Their unhappiness builds until Markham mistakenly accuses Ethelyn of unfaithfulness, causing her to flee. Their eventual reconciliation is marked by a tempering of each one’s social preferences, reflected in their decision to move to a more cosmopolitan Iowa town. A story about an unhappy marriage reconciled after a separation,
Ethelyn’s Mistake is a fairly apolitical reflection on the state of the nation in 1866. Iowa, which is sketched in almost no detail, offered Holmes a geography in which to explore regional differences without attending to wartime sectionalism: admitted to the Union as a free state in 1846, Iowa became heavily Republican in the 1850s and staunchly supported the Union during the Civil War.
Even an election subplot, in which Markham runs for governor, heavily emphasizes bipartisan political support: community members “cast aside political differences” to vote “for the best man,—one whom they knew to be honest and upright, like Judge Markham” (292). He wins “by an overwhelming majority,” in an election that models collaboration across party lines (294).
Politics of Reconciliation: From Annie Graham’s First Love to Post-Reconstruction
Like its immediate predecessors, the sequel to Rose Mather and Annie Graham contains nothing even close to Holmes’s horrific descriptions of the First Battle of Bull Run. Serialized in 1867,
Annie Graham’s First Love does not actually portray any battle scenes at all, providing readers with only prologue and aftermath. The Battle of Fredericksburg (Dec 11–15, 1862), for instance, takes place in the space between chapters: one chapter closes with a single sentence describing the battle’s first shots, and the next chapter opens in Rockland as news of the battle is just breaking
112 2: Sentimental Gore
(241).54 Holmes covers the “terrible battle” at Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863) in less than a paragraph, briefly describing “the horror-stricken men” and the “wail after wail of human anguish, mingled with the awful shrieks of dying horses” (245). Speeding through the latter years of the war, the novel merely marks time by noting these events: the next battle to be mentioned, the Battle of the
Wilderness (May 6–7, 1864), is also reported only in aftermath (255).
Instead, this 1867 novel offers up a reconciliationist love story of the most conservative kind. It is a classic “romance of reunion,” of the kind described by Silber, Blight, and Diffley.
Holmes shifts the spotlight from Rose to Annie, whose first love turns out to have been a teenage flirtation with Rose’s wayward brother Jimmie Carleton. Although he enlisted as a Confederate soldier in the previous novel, Jimmie now reconciles with the North and romances his childhood sweetheart. For this rebel without a cause, growing up means shifting to the right side: his rejection of the Confederacy is evidence of his growing maturity and suitability as a husband. The novel also shifts its focus to the past: recovering a pre-war dream and making it possible in a postwar world, it rehabilitates Jimmie as a Union soldier before uniting him with Annie in the end.
Annie Graham’s First Love is also much more interested than Holmes’s previous novels in portraying the balance of loss on both sides, and on reconciling the two sides to one another. The novel’s other major plotline follows William Mather and Tom Carleton through the South as they heroically attempt to return home, drawing flattering portraits of the Southern Unionists who help them along the way. As the war draws to a close, all of the remaining characters return home: Tom marries a Kentucky Unionist who helped him in his escape; Jimmie marries Annie; Rose and
54 Bill Baker reports on the combat in a letter home, but his prose does not come close to the gory detail of Harry’s death at Bull Run. The closest Bill gets to describing such bodily mutilation is his report on the status of the Jimmie Carleton, whom he saw “with the blood a spirtin’” from an “awful cut on his neck” (243). All quotations from the novel cite the page number of the 1868 volume edition in parentheses.
113 2: Sentimental Gore
William are reunited. The eventual death of young Isaac is paired with the death of a young
Southern boy—who is, coincidentally, the son of the Confederate soldier from the Bull Run episode. A monument to both boys, “each holding entirely different political sentiments, but both holding the same living faith which made for them an entrance to the world where all is perfect peace,” places a sentimental seal on the reconciliation between North and South (337).
While Annie Graham’s First Love is an unsurprisingly reconciliationist novel, the volume edition of Rose Mather joins this text to its more radical predecessor. Holmes made minimal changes to the two serials when she combined them. The result is a novel with a mixed and disjointed message, reflecting both the horror of the battlefield in 1862 and the desire to move past scenes of war in 1867. The 1868 volume combines the wartime serial’s genre experimentation with the 1867 novel’s predictable reconciliation plot. Holmes waited to deliver the reconciliation plot, delaying narrative reunion in such a way that it is possible to imagine Rose Mather having had a very different ending—or no ending at all. When taken apart, the two novels show an author who was emboldened by the narrative demands of depicting war during wartime—and who closed down those possibilities in 1867. While the Bull Run scenes were preserved in the 1868 volume, they are a product of Holmes’s wartime experimentation with genre—part of the urgency around doing something for the war effort, lending emotional weight to that ask.
Holmes returned to the Civil War twice in her postbellum career, first in Queenie Hetherton
(1883) and then in Doctor Hathern’s Daughters (1895). Published almost twenty years after
Appomattox and set in the late 1870s, Queenie Hetherton attempts to generate reconciliation through amnesia about American history.55 Like Ethelyn’s Mistake, this novel is preoccupied with the clash between a cosmopolitan heroine and her countrified relatives. Born in Marseilles to an
55 The novel’s action begins sometime in 1876 or 1877, though the exact date is unclear.
114 2: Sentimental Gore
American father and a French mother, young Reinette “Queenie” Hetherton travels to the United
States for the first time to meet her relatives in rural Massachusetts. Although the imperious
Queenie continually rebels against her new circumstances, the word is decontextualized entirely from the Civil War. Queenie’s rebellion is against her bumbling Yankee family, as she resists their attempts to absorb her in to their rustic world.
Significantly, Queenie neither knows nor cares about the American Civil War. The first person to mention the war in this novel is her grandmother, whose two brothers, once “the prize- fighters of the town,” both “died in the war fightin’ for their country” (124). Two generations removed from the dead, Queenie can only focus on the fact that her great-uncles were prize- fighters, feeling “half crazed and stunned with all she had heard of the father and mother she had held so high” (124). Later, her cousin Phil comforts her by stating that “they were only great- uncles, and they had the good taste to get killed in the war” (128). Divorcing her family history from American national history, Queenie is unaffected by the death of her great-uncles in war and yet pained by their status as lowly prize-fighters. Her crisis is ultimately not one of sectional identity, but one of national and class identity: French or American, gentry or working class. As if to emphasize their lack of sectional identity, Queenie and her father both regularly speak of their home in national terms: America, rather than New England or the North.
The amnesia that Holmes generates around the Civil War, facilitated by Queenie’s
European upbringing, is advanced still further in the novel’s closing act—when Queenie travels to
Florida and Tennessee, in a cross-country journey that both completes her initiation into American life and models sectional reunion. When Queenie’s parentage is suddenly questioned, she flees to
Magnolia Park, the Florida plantation where her father grew up. Ravaged by both North and South during the war, Magnolia Park is now a dilapidated relic inhabited only by two loyal former slaves.
115 2: Sentimental Gore
Queenie does not understand the story behind the ruins, although Holmes narrates this background for the reader—who is presumed, unlike her heroine, to care about Civil War history. The ambiguously “dark-faced” heroine, however, does express sympathy for black Americans; her class prejudice does not extend to race prejudice, a fact that Holmes attributes to her European upbringing (199). “Reared as she had been in France,” Holmes explains, “she had none of the
American prejudice against the African race” (395).
The great national crisis of this novel is not the Civil War, but the 1878 yellow fever epidemic in Memphis, Tennessee. Holmes frames Memphis as a site ravaged by a new kind of death, one that claims all without regard to class or race. She explicitly recalls the terrors of war and occupation, only to replace them with the terrifying prospect of disease: “the death roll increased, and men who walked the streets to-day were dead to-morrow, a panic seized upon the terror-stricken inhabitants, who fled before the horror as those who live on a frontier in time of war flee the rapidly advancing enemy” (413). Instead of sectional antagonism, this threat of disease inspires national unity. In this way, Queenie Hetherton is consistent with other contemporaneous reflections on the epidemic, which highlighted nationally unifying efforts to support the victims.56
Ten years prior, Queenie might have found meaningful work nursing soldiers wounded in battle. In 1878, she finds this work in the Memphis yellow fever outbreak. Reunited with her mother, she is also joined by volunteers from all across the country: “But there were hundreds of brave men and women who, from the New England hills, and the prairies of the West, and the pine glades of the South, went to the rescue, and by their noble heroism proved themselves more Christ- like than human.” (413). The Memphis scenes show Queenie and her French mother caring for
56 See Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., Epidemics (2018), 392 –393. According to Cohen, the “outpouring of charity from northern cities” helped to alleviate “at least temporarily, the strained relations between North and South” (392).
116 2: Sentimental Gore black and white sufferers alike, alongside a racially and nationally diverse cast of helpers. In 1883,
Holmes turned away from the sectional crisis that generated the hospital scenes in Rose Mather and Hugh Worthington. Retaining the hospital as a locus, she resituated it within the context of a more nationally united effort against disease. This novel asserts that the war is in the past:
Americans now must band together to face a public health crisis that does not recognize sectional identities, in a Southern city that once belonged to the Confederacy. It is no accident that Queenie is reconciled with and reincorporated into her family while nursing in Memphis. Through this act of service, she reunites with her mother and is officially restored to legitimacy; she also reunites with Phil, to whom she becomes engaged. Her actions as a healer also heal her status, bringing her home and officially making her an American.
In the novel’s conclusion, Queenie marries Phil and the pair move to Magnolia Park, where they hire “plenty of negroes” to farm the land under his direction (451). Queenie and Phil are represented as the new benevolent plantation owners of the South. Well-bred and cosmopolitan white Americans, they now oversee wage-earning black laborers on a former slave plantation.
Importantly, the couple unites Southern, Northern, and European heritage: the Hethertons represent Florida and Massachusetts, while Queenie represents France. Most importantly, Holmes frames Florida as a place without much pre-war history—a wilderness in which to create a new postwar order, and a place of reconciliation. The Magnolia property is explicitly located in “middle
Florida,” which means that it was likely a cotton plantation before the war (392).57 Yet Holmes does not show black laborers in the cotton fields, past or present. In his new role as overseer, Phil instead plans to model the revived plantation after a French Chateau or the English Kew Gardens.
In other words, Magnolia—a Southern slave plantation—will be revived as an aristocratic
57 On middle Florida’s suitability for cotton cultivation, see Julia Floyd Smith, Slavery and Plantation Growth in Antebellum Florida, 1821–1860 (1973), 10.
117 2: Sentimental Gore
European pleasure garden. Presented as idle and effeminate throughout the novel, Phil has found work for which he is perfectly suited. In an idealized vision of the postbellum South, Holmes leaves this aristocratic Northerner and his queenly French-American bride to remake Florida, without prejudice, without memory of recent history, and seemingly without much labor at all.
Doctor Hathern’s Daughters (1895), meanwhile, is a highly formulaic reconciliation novel—what Silber would call a classic “romance of reunion.” The novel opens in Virginia, where the romances of Doctor Hathern’s three daughters—Fanny, Anne, and Katy—each model a different kind of reconciliation in the war’s aftermath. Fanny is a zealous Confederate rebel, so associated with secession that men from her hometown shout “For the South, and Fanny Hathern” in one breath (203). Ultimately, she finds herself interested in two men: Jack Fullerton, a poor but good Southerner; and Colonel Errington, a wealthy and haughty Union general who occupied her hometown. Errington is the erroneous choice, as his name suggests, but Fanny picks him and sails to Europe in a loveless marriage. When Errington dies, Fanny returns home hoping to reconcile with Jack. The rebellious champion of the Confederacy, Fan cannot be happy while married to the
Union—but she is also not a good choice for Holmes’s model Southern man. Widowed and childless, Fan is tamed but unfulfilled in the war’s aftermath. The novel’s most stridently sectional characters—Fan and Errington—are not the way of the future. Meanwhile, Jack matures out of his fiery Confederate rebellion and into a new love for Fan’s less partisan sister Anne, whom Holmes clearly believes is the right choice. Jack becomes a more moderate ideal for the future: his concerns grow less sectional as he considers a career in politics, and he becomes more cosmopolitan as he visits other parts of the nation. Jack and Anne thus represent Holmes’s vision for a temperate and cosmopolitan South. Their daughters, also named Fan and Anne, are still more temperate—new versions of the original sisters for the postbellum period. Meanwhile, the third pair—Katy and her
118 2: Sentimental Gore
Bostonian sweetheart Carlyle, who were children during the war—are preoccupied with gender roles instead of sectional allegiances. Katy is a singer with an opportunity to perform professionally, which Carl opposes; after each vows to sacrifice their view for the other, Katy forgoes her career to stay at home. Katy and Carlyle thus offer yet another vision for reconciliation, as members of a younger generation who seem utterly unconcerned with sectional allegiances.
Together, Queenie Hetherton and Doctor Hathern’s Daughters complete Holmes’s turn to reconciliation. Yet for all their predictability in this regard, both novels also take a remarkable geographic turn—featuring the state of Florida as an imaginative space for this reconciliation, a new kind of home in the aftermath of war. Queenie Hetherton concludes with the transformation of Magnolia Park from a slave plantation into a Europeanized pleasure-garden, while Doctor
Hathern’s Daughters imagines Florida as a restful and recuperative space for the Southern hero
Jack Fullerton. While Florida flits on the edges of these two novels, two of Holmes’s contemporaries—fellow sentimental novelists Harriet Beecher Stowe and Susan Warner—would make Florida, and specifically the Florida orange grove, the site for an imagined postbellum plantation economy that looked far more like leisure than labor.
119
CHAPTER 3 Florida Fantasies of Reconstruction: Leisure and Labor in the Orange Groves of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Susan Warner
In the aftermath of the Civil War, two of the most popular and influential American sentimental novelists turned to a new landscape for inspiration. Within three years of one another, Harriet
Beecher Stowe and Susan Warner each published a book set among the orange groves of
Reconstruction-era Florida. Stowe, whose antebellum abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(1852) stoked the flames of war with its sentimental appeal against slavery, published perhaps the most famous narrative of life in postbellum Florida: Palmetto Leaves (1873), a collection of sketches about her experiences on the orange plantation that she had purchased in 1868. Stowe depicts Florida as a lush pleasure-ground, urging fellow Northerners to visit and even to attempt orange cultivation. Susan Warner, best known then and now for her popular female bildungsroman
The Wide, Wide World (1850), published her own Florida book two years later. Her didactic children’s novel Bread and Oranges (1875), although more of a religious guide than a travel guide, likewise details the experiences of Northern vacationers on an orange plantation. Unlike Stowe, however, Warner had never visited or lived in Florida. And although Warner published dozens of novels in her lifetime, Bread and Oranges was one of only two that she chose to set in the
American South. Her 1868 novel Daisy charts the development of its heroine’s abolitionist principles on a Southern cotton plantation during the 1850s. Seven years later, Bread and Oranges ventured to the South again—but significantly, shifted her geographic focus from an 1850s cotton plantation to an 1870s orange plantation. Warner’s pair of novels trail after Stowe’s like belated step-siblings: while Daisy is a backwards-looking abolitionist novel in the tradition of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, Bread and Oranges is a fable of Reconstruction-era Florida that seems to have been directly inspired by Palmetto Leaves. 3: Florida Fantasies
It is no accident that Stowe and Warner, two of the most prominent 1850s sentimentalists, chose to imagine Southern Reconstruction in Florida—and specifically, on Florida orange plantations. Although agriculture in antebellum Florida was dominated by cotton and other cash crops grown on slave plantations, its citrus industry experienced a rapid boom only after the Civil
War and Emancipation. While cotton remained indelibly tied to slave labor in the national imagination after 1865, the citrus industry was far less culturally entwined with memories of the recent slave plantation past. Recent scholarship on Stowe has connected the prevalence of oranges in her postbellum writing with this history. Kathryn Cornell Dolan and Shana Klein, for example, have both argued that Florida’s Reconstruction-era citrus boom offered Stowe an opportunity to imagine the orange plantation as a progressive site of waged black labor disconnected from the history of slavery.1 While this progressive narrative is a persuasive one, I believe that Palmetto
Leaves in fact offers a more complicated narrative about the relationship between orange cultivation and black labor in postbellum Florida—one that Warner adapts and amplifies in Bread and Oranges, a novel that is almost amnesiac about both slavery and the Civil War.
In this chapter, I argue that the Florida orange grove provided both authors with an opportunity to reimagine agricultural labor as leisure in the postbellum American South. At the level of narration, both Stowe and Warner subtly frame the Florida orange grove as disconnected not just from slavery but from black labor altogether. Their Florida books initiate agricultural fantasies of self-growing and self-sustaining orange groves, which seemingly do not require cultivation by human laborers. Where their sentimental novels of the antebellum Old South highlight the injustices of slavery on cotton plantations, their 1870s books efface both sentimental
1 See Dolan’s Beyond the Fruited Plain (2014) and Klein’s “Those Golden Balls Down Yonder Tree” (2017), both of which I discuss later in this chapter. Warner’s Bread and Oranges has never been addressed in scholarship.
121 3: Florida Fantasies appeal and black laborers by turning to the orange groves of Reconstruction-era Florida. At the same time that postbellum injustices against black sharecroppers and wage workers often made large-scale plantation labor look uncannily similar to antebellum slave labor, Stowe and Warner indulged in visions of Florida orange farming that detached this particular fruit from the challenges of reorganizing agricultural labor relations in the post-slavery South.
Finding Florida in Postbellum Travel Literature
In a short 1888 poem, “Orange Buds by Mail from Florida,” Walt Whitman expresses wonder on the occasion of receiving fragrant Florida orange buds in the middle of a Northern winter:
A lesser proof than old Voltaire’s, yet greater, Proof of this present time, and thee, thy broad expanse, America, To my plain Northern hut, in outside clouds and snow, Brought safely for a thousand miles o’er land and tide, Some three days since on their own soil live-sprouting, Now here their sweetness through my room unfolding, A bunch of orange buds by mail from Florida.2
The orange buds prompt Whitman to marvel at both the “broad expanse” of the nation, from sunny
Florida to the snowy North, and the speed of modern transportation. Carrying fresh orange buds a thousand miles in three days, the mail effectively connects and compresses the expansive nation.
As the “sweetness” of those orange buds circulates the room, moreover, it creates a brief sensory overlap between North and South: for a moment, the essence of Florida enwraps the snow-bound hut. In this way, the poem also quietly celebrates a unified nation that had been contested and reconfirmed through the Civil War.
The Civil War itself marked a turning point for Florida’s visibility in American letters.
While Florida certainly received attention from antebellum American authors, including
2 Walt Whitman, “Orange Buds by Mail from Florida” (1888), in Florida in Poetry (1995), ed. Jane Anderson Jones and Maurice J. O’Sullivan, 2.
122 3: Florida Fantasies
Washington Irving and Ralph Waldo Emerson, it became a much more popular subject for literary treatment after 1865.3 Its popularity in prose directly correlated to its flourishing popularity as a postbellum tourist and vacation destination, especially for Northern invalids seeking rest and relaxation.4 One popular Florida travel guide, Ledyard Bill’s A Winter in Florida (1869), framed its mild weather as a primary attraction for Northern visitors: “The chief interest, perhaps, that the
State of Florida possesses for the people of the North, is its delightful climate, and the reputed beneficial effects thereof on the health of certain classes of invalids” (173). Palmetto Leaves belongs to this larger genre of postbellum Florida travel literature, which encouraged the thousands of tourists who flooded the state after the war. Indeed, historian Susan Eacker has uncovered hundreds of postbellum travel narratives dedicated specifically to Florida.5 Such texts consistently painted Florida as a land of health and rehabilitation, reflecting the motifs of “the Edenic, the exotic, and the exaggerated” (497).6 Eacker also identifies women’s narratives, including Palmetto
Leaves, as a small but distinct subcategory of the Florida travel narrative—one that tended to frame
Florida as “the antithesis of Northern bourgeois order and decorum,” inviting women “to reinvent
3 A number of recent literary anthologies and scholarly texts have recovered the rich history of literary writing about Florida since the early nineteenth century. See, for example, James C. Clark, ed., Pineapple Anthology of Florida Writers vols. 1–3 (2013); Jane Anderson Jones and Maurice J. O’Sullivan, Florida in Poetry (1995); Anne E. Rowe, The Idea of Florida in the American Literary Imagination (1986); and Susan A. Eacker, “Gender in Paradise” (1998). For Emerson and Irving’s treatments of Florida, see Rowe, The Idea of Florida, 11–20.
4 On Florida as a late nineteenth-century tourist destination, see Tracy J. Revels, Sunshine Paradise (2011), ch. 2–3; William B. Stronge, The Sunshine Economy (2008), ch. 5; and Reiko Hillyer, Designing Dixie (2014), ch. 2. Hillyer focuses specifically on the popular tourist destination of St. Augustine, Florida, arguing that postbellum southern boosterism for the city obscured its recent Confederate history by emphasizing its Spanish colonial origins instead.
5 In total, Eacker found “106 single-authored nonfiction works on Florida” published between 1865 and 1900; hundreds more were published by Florida towns and cities, as well as transportation and realty companies (497).
6 Anne Rowe finds similar patterns in fictional representations of Florida from Irving to Bishop, which collectively depict Florida as “a tropical, lush ‘Good Place’” (Idea of Florida 9).
123 3: Florida Fantasies traditional gender roles and relations” (503).7 Bread and Oranges also participates in such Florida myth-making: although it is not especially interested in reinventing gender roles, it does paint
Florida as an exotic paradise using tropes that Stowe helped to establish.
More broadly, Northern interest in touring and reading about Florida reflected a now well- documented public hunger for regional portraits of the American South after the Civil War. As
Rebecca Cawood McIntyre has shown, Northern readers’ imaginations were especially impacted by two popular serialized travel narratives: Edward King’s The Great South, which appeared in
Scribner’s Monthly Magazine (1873–1874); and Picturesque America, edited by William Cullen
Bryant for Appleton’s Journal (1870–1871). Republished in volume form shortly after their magazine runs, these lavishly illustrated series both encouraged Southern tourism and helped to inaugurate a new fashion for local color writing in American letters. In the pages of these volumes, readers encountered a variety of alluring regional mythologies: the South as grotesque and gothicized swamp, the South as leisurely vacationland, the South as plantation idyll.8
The plantation idyll was particularly embedded in both the literature and the experience of
Southern tourism. Beginning in the 1870s, as McIntyre explains, Northern travel writers drew regularly on slave stereotypes from the antebellum period to promote Southern tourism (100).
Their efforts to shape African Americans into “souvenirs of an Old South” appealed to white
7 Eacker found a total of thirteen women-authored Florida travel narratives, all of which were published after the Civil War. Her study addresses thematic patterns in six of these narratives, including Stowe’s Palmetto Leaves and Sarah Stuart Robbins’s One Happy Winter; or, A Visit to Florida (1878), which I also discuss later in this chapter.
8 See Rebecca Cawood McIntyre, Souvenirs of the Old South (2011), ch. 3–6. On Southern tourism after the Civil War, see also Karen L. Cox, Dreaming of Dixie (2011), ch. 5–6; Nina Silber, Romance of Reunion (1993), ch. 3; and Rembert W. Patrick, “The Mobile Frontier” (1963). As Jennifer Rae Greeson has shown, The Great South also projected a fantasy of the postbellum South as a colonial outpost, echoing imperial travel narratives of the African interior (see Our South, 227–251). On colonialist rhetoric in travel writing about the postbellum South, see also Jamie Winters, “Imperfectly Imperial” (2005). Meanwhile, Hillyer’s Designing Dixie has shown that some southern writers of promotional tourist literature actually emphasized the modern commercial promise of the South to encourage investment from Northern readers.
124 3: Florida Fantasies
Northern readers, who perceived such “picturesque” stereotypes as components of an authentic
Southern vacation experience (101, 103). James Wells Champney, the illustrator of The Great
South, regularly offered stereotypical images showing black Southerners engaged in agricultural and other menial labor, or alternatively, lounging and sleeping in characteristically Southern landscapes (106–111). Such material fed Northern nostalgia for an antebellum past, while also licensing racist stereotypes and hierarchies in the Reconstruction era: tourism promoters effectively “created a Dixie fantasyland for their northern readers to escape into, a world where blacks looked like slaves and acted like slaves but were not enslaved” (123).
Plantation pastoralism also characterized depictions of the South in regional fiction of this period. Nostalgically romanticizing the antebellum South, this fiction returned readers to a world of idyllic plantations, benevolent and aristocratic masters, and contentedly loyal slaves.9 Lewis P.
Simpson aptly refers to the slave plantations imagined in this fiction as the “pastoral garden of the chattel,” a literary space characterized by “the assimilation of slavery to the pastoral ideal” (22,
23). Looking back to the dream of the Old South, such fictions often also featured freedmen fondly recalling that past from the post-slavery present. As Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan has pointed out, plantation fiction typically dealt “with the question of the presence of slaves in Arcady…by having the black man plead the cause of his former master” (11).
Stowe and Warner certainly drew on elements of the pastoral in their depictions of Florida orange groves. Yet instead of idealizing the antebellum slave plantation, their Florida writings deploy narrative strategies that absent black wage laborers in the Reconstruction era. This narrative
9 On the pervasive role of plantation pastoralism in fiction after the Civil War, see Lewis P. Simpson, The Dispossessed Garden (1975); Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan, The Dream of Arcady (1980); and Peter Templeton, The Politics of Southern Pastoral Literature, 1785-1885 (2019). On the romance of reunion more broadly, see Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion (1993); and David W. Blight, Race and Reunion (2001).
125 3: Florida Fantasies absence is enabled by an agricultural fantasy that cultivation of their chosen crop, the orange, does not actually require labor. While much Northern tourist literature nostalgically rehearsed images of black laborers in cotton fields, Warner and Stowe curiously imagined pastoral idylls that detached oranges from agricultural labor. Their works mythologize the orange—a crop that represented the future of Florida agriculture—as a crop that effectively grows itself.10 In this way, their narratives enact what Jennifer Rae Greeson would call a “geographic fantasy” of
Reconstruction-era Florida. This is not plantation pastoral, a dream of an Old South, but rather a projection of a New South excused from the problems inherent to postbellum plantation labor.
The Florida orange grove provided Stowe and Warner with an ideal locus for imagining agricultural production in the postbellum South. Both authors fashioned the orange into a symbol of labor as leisure, encouraged by the place of Florida orange cultivation in the national imagination: the orange’s ties to slavery were less geographically widespread, less visible, and less culturally iconic than those of cotton. Ultimately, Florida provided Stowe and Warner with the opportunity to engage in “geographic fantasies” of Reconstruction that avoided confronting the realities of sharecropping vividly embodied in the cotton crop. Because the commercial orange boom took place after 1865, the orange grove offered a perfect opportunity to imagine an agricultural future freed not only from associations with slave labor but from black labor entirely.
Stowe and Warner frame the orange not only as a crop that does not require the kind of large-scale labor required to pick cotton, but also as a crop that requires almost no labor at all to produce.11
10 Bruce Robbins’s The Servant’s Hand (1986) is a helpful referent on the phenomenon of absent labor, as it tracks a consistent set of tropes that define “literary servants” across centuries. Stowe and Warner, however, imagine an absence of the laboring body altogether: their Florida fantasies do not even show “the servant’s hand” at work.
11 In Writing Reconstruction (2015), Sharon D. Kennedy-Nolle shows that Constance Fenimore Woolson—another Northern visitor to Florida after the Civil War—also interrogated the labor-leisure binary in her Florida travel writing and fiction. Kennedy-Nolle argues that Woolson’s descriptions of working people in Florida erased binary divisions between labor and leisure: instead of drawing typically hard lines between Northern industry and Southern laziness,
126 3: Florida Fantasies
King Cotton and the Florida Orange
During the antebellum period, cotton was far more indelibly tied to slave labor—both in actual scale and in the national imagination—than orange cultivation. In Cotton and Race in the Making of America, Gene Dattel traces the entwined story of cotton and black slavery in the United States from the late eighteenth century through the 1930s. As the nation’s most important export in the nineteenth century, cotton—which accounted for 60% of US exports just before the Civil War— had unparalleled economic status in antebellum America (x). As “the economic engine of the antebellum economy,” cotton had unmatched power in the international market (27). While
England could boycott West Indian sugar plantations by acquiring sugar elsewhere, for example, the same could not be said for quality cotton from the American South (82). Cotton played a major role in propelling the country towards civil war, as Dattel shows.
In antebellum Florida, cotton also reigned supreme among cash crops. According to Junius
Dovell, cotton was “the chief product of Florida agriculture before 1861,” dominating over other staple crops such as sugar and tobacco (365). Comparatively, Florida did lag behind the rest of the
Cotton South: in 1860, its cotton production ranked tenth among “the twelve cotton states” (362).
Yet cotton was an important and rapidly growing component of the state’s agricultural output:
her depictions of working Minorcans in Florida “blend labor and leisure” as these characters “work for and with pleasure to satisfy their basic needs” (66). Kennedy-Nolle also identifies Florida’s natural productivity as a running trope in Woolson’s work: “Woolson replaced an understanding of labor as work done upon the land with an understanding of the land as nearly self-producing….[and] refashioned a northern understanding of labor as sweated work into a meaning connotative of greater ease and leisurely pace” (62–63). This pattern certainly dovetails with the trope of the self-cultivating orange that I identify in the works of Stowe and Warner. Yet as Kennedy-Nolle shows, Woolson’s interest in leisurely labor ultimately fueled a progressive “free-labor vision” that embraced “the right of the ex-slaves to choose the terms of their labor, arguing for their independence, dignity, and freedom in making work arrangements” (27). The trope of a productive Florida fed into this argument: “If Florida were naturally productive, the issue of how to compel freedpeople to labor (through enforced contracts, apprenticeship laws, or vagrancy statutes) was tacitly resolved” (63). Stowe and Warner, while also invested in narratives of Florida’s productivity, ultimately disconnect this productivity from black labor altogether. On Woolson and Reconstruction, see also the essay collection Witness to Reconstruction (2011), edited by Kathleen Diffley.
127 3: Florida Fantasies production of ginned cotton more than doubled between 1840 and 1860, from 30,276 bales
(approx. 12 million pounds) to 65,153 bales (approx. 26 million pounds) (362).12 Cotton plantations were primarily concentrated in a small handful of Middle Florida counties, which planters favored for their especially good growing conditions.13 In 1860, the seven “cotton counties” generated 72% of Florida’s cotton crop (Dovell 325). That year, the estimated cash value of farmland in these counties (approximately $11.7M) constituted 71% of the estimated cash value of all farms in Florida (333).
As it did elsewhere in the Cotton South, the cotton industry in Florida depended on slave labor. Although Florida’s long history of slavery began with Spanish colonization in the sixteenth century, the territory became a particular destination for Southern planters after Florida was ceded to the United States in 1821.14 In search of better agricultural conditions and higher profits, planters from other Southern states brought slaves to this new territory, part of what Edward Baptist calls
“the plantation frontier,” where they began raising cotton, sugar, tobacco, and other crops.15 Florida eventually entered the Union in 1845 as a slave state, and experienced tremendous population
12 In 1860, meanwhile, Mississippi and Alabama—the two biggest cotton producers—generated 1.2 million bales (approx. 481 million pounds) and 980,955 bales (approx. 392 million pounds), respectively (US Department of Agriculture, “Agriculture of the United States in 1860; Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census”). Ginned cotton is reported in “bales of 400 lbs. each.”
13 Julia Floyd Smith, Slavery and Plantation Growth in Antebellum Florida, 1821-1860 (1973). This “cotton belt,” according to Smith, “compared favorably in output with that of the Georgia Piedmont or the Black Belt of Alabama and Mississippi” (10).
14 On black life in Spanish Florida, see Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (1999); on slavery and the slave trade, see ch. 7. Slave plantations continued to flourish when Florida came under British rule in the late eighteenth century. On British slave plantations in East Florida at this time, see Daniel L. Schafer’s William Bartram and the Ghost Plantations of British East Florida (2010). The essays in Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida (2000), edited by Landers, offer case studies of slave plantations established under both Spanish and British rule.
15 Edward E. Baptist, Creating an Old South (2002), 4. On plantation culture and slavery in antebellum Florida, see also Smith, Slavery and Plantation Growth in Antebellum Florida, 1821–1860.
128 3: Florida Fantasies growth in the decades before the Civil War. In 1845, Florida had a free white population of 35,500 and a black slave population of 33,950. By 1860, these figures had roughly doubled to a free white population of 77,746 and a black slave population of 61,745 (Dovell 334). Almost 50% of its slave population lived in the seven cotton counties (325).
The antebellum commercial orange industry, meanwhile, was limited in scale, slow to expand, and localized primarily in Florida. Orange trees arrived in North America during the sixteenth century, with the agents of Spanish exploration. Ponce De Leon is generally credited with bringing orange trees to Florida in his 1513 expedition, followed by Hernando de Soto in
1539. Wild oranges soon spread across the territory, but commercial orange farming did not take hold until the late eighteenth century—after Spain, which had its own robust orange industry and little reason to cultivate a colonial one, traded Florida to England in 1763. A New York-born merchant by the name of Jesse Fish established the first Florida orange plantation in the 1760s, becoming—as John McPhee calls him in Oranges, his book devoted to the fruit—the territory’s
“first orange baron” (88). Fish installed himself on Anastasia Island, a small island off the Florida coast near St. Augustine. His oranges quickly became popular in England and sold in the tens of thousands in London by 1776. Florida returned to Spanish rule after the American Revolution, under the terms of the Treaty of Paris. After Spain ceded Florida to the United States in 1821, orange cultivation become increasingly prevalent. Although a freeze in 1835 destroyed nearly all of the territory’s orange trees, the citrus industry recovered and continued to grow.16 According to
Dovell, it “was on the threshold of boom-proportion expansion” by the time of the Civil War (370).
But Florida was not the orange blossom state yet. While the commercial orange industry grew in the antebellum period, Florida’s iconic association with oranges developed only after the
16 McPhee, Oranges 88–91. On Jesse Fish, see also Robert L. Gold, “That Infamous Floridian, Jesse Fish” (1973).
129 3: Florida Fantasies
Civil War and the dismantling of American slavery. From the beginning, to be sure, Florida’s relatively few commercial orange groves were cultivated by slave labor. Fish was a slave trader and slave owner. Douglas Dummett, whose Merritt Island grove was one of the few to survive the
1835 frost, also relied on slave labor to cultivate his 1,300 orange trees. After the Civil War, his grove was lauded as the oldest and largest in Florida, and its oranges were priced accordingly.17
Yet because the commercial orange boom took place during Reconstruction, oranges were far less tied to slavery in the national imagination than cotton. The exponential growth of Florida’s commercial orange industry was coterminous with the beginning of waged black labor in the
South, and with the influx of novice Northern orange cultivators like Stowe.
After the Civil War, cotton remained a major cash crop and continued to demand an extensive labor force across the South. The competing interests of white planters and freedpeople informed the labor arrangements that replaced slavery in the war’s aftermath. As white planters adamantly pursued systems of waged gang labor that strongly echoed slave labor, freedmen attempted to pursue independent land ownership as represented in the ideal of “forty acres and a mule.” Meanwhile, sharecropping arrangements carved large plantations into small family-sized plots, which freedmen cultivated in return for a share of the crop.18 Yet while new labor arrangements replaced slavery, the reality remained that a huge force of black laborers continued to hand-pick cotton—many on the plantations where they had formerly been slaves. As Dattel points out, cotton growing retained “a striking resemblance to the methods of the antebellum era”
17 On the history of Douglas Dummett’s orange grove, see McPhee 90–91 and 94–95.
18 On competing labor systems and the rise of sharecropping in the postbellum South, see Edward Royce, The Origins of Southern Sharecropping (1993); see also Jay R. Mandel, Not Slave, Not Free (1992), ch. 1–3. On wage labor and sharecropping in Florida specifically, see Jerrell H. Shofner, Nor Is It Over Yet (1974), ch. 8.
130 3: Florida Fantasies until the 1930s, when mechanized cotton machines replaced black laborers in the fields (xii). Even today, Dattel observes, images of cotton picking remain entangled with the legacy of slavery:
Among American agricultural and industrial pursuits, only cotton still evokes a sad association. Despite harsh conditions, raising cattle, growing wheat or corn, mining coal, silver, or gold, or building railroads suggests energy, perseverance, and independence. The image of a black worker dragging a cotton sack through rows of cotton conjures up images of slavery and sharecropping. (28)
After the Civil War, as McIntyre and Cox have shown, Northern tourists embraced such imagery of the Cotton South and eagerly visited cotton plantations on their Southern tours. Moreover, thousands of Northerners purchased or leased Southern cotton plantations in the war’s immediate aftermath. While many certainly envisioned themselves as progressive heralds of free labor, they also generally preferred gang-labor arrangements that mirrored the antebellum past.19
Florida, however, enabled a different kind of white Northern fantasy: orange cultivation both untainted by a history of slavery, and untroubled by new postwar struggles to define labor arrangements, payment structures, and land ownership in accordance with the competing interests of freedpeople and white planters. The Florida cotton crop certainly continued to grow in the postbellum period, although Florida planters struggled with widespread cotton crop failures in the war’s aftermath.20 But it was during this time that oranges became Florida’s most iconic crop. In a popular 1882 book, Florida for Tourists, Invalids, and Settlers, George Barbour reflected on the
19 On the movement of Northern planters to pursue cotton speculation in the South after the Civil War, see Lawrence N. Powell, New Masters (1998); on similarities between slavery and postwar gang labor, see Powell 73–96. On Northern tourism of cotton plantations, see McIntyre 110 and Cox 122–123.
20 In 1867, cotton crop failures in Florida induced the Freedman’s Bureau to distribute rations just to prevent starvation (Shofner 65). The cotton market also suffered widely across the South that year, as plummeting cotton prices meant that “selling one’s cotton did not even pay the expense of raising it” (Powell 146). Florida’s cotton production did continue to grow in the following decade, jumping from 40,000 bales in 1870 to 55,000 bales in 1880 (Dovell 626). Yet cotton was no longer Florida’s chief crop: according to Shofner, “cotton diminished in importance while citrus groves and winter vegetables increased as the population expanded into the peninsula” (259).
131 3: Florida Fantasies
“orange craze” in postbellum Florida: “It is only since the war that any special attention has been given to their production, or any effort made to cultivate them for profit,” he notes, remarking on the “very careless and desultory way” that Florida oranges were grown in the antebellum period
(239). “At present, the orange is undoubtedly the staple product of the State: it is to Florida what cattle are to Texas, corn and pork to Illinois, wheat to Iowa, and peaches to Delaware” (240).
Dovell confirms the orange’s preeminent status after 1865, noting that the citrus industry was “the greatest agricultural boom of post-bellum Florida” (629). Indeed, many Northerners—including
Stowe, who encouraged others to follow suit—traveled to Florida to grow oranges after the war.
By 1880, Florida was exporting over 400 thousand boxes of oranges annually; by 1885, 600 thousand boxes; by 1890, 2.15 million boxes; and by 1894, over 5 million boxes (630).21 By the time of Whitman’s poem, the orange was firmly associated with Florida. This association was only further institutionalized in 1909, when the orange blossom became Florida’s state flower.
Stowe’s Palmetto Leaves: From Labor to Leisure
A primary impetus for Stowe’s Florida venture was the health of her son Frederick, who had been wounded fighting in the Union Army and struggled to cope in the aftermath of the war. Worried by his increasing reliance on alcohol, Stowe rented, in 1866, a large cotton plantation for Frederick to run: Laurel Grove, a thousand-acre property near the St. John’s River that had belonged to the slave trader Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. in the early nineteenth century.22 The cotton venture was
21 In February 1895, however, another historic freeze destroyed both the orange crop and a large number of orange trees. Production dropped dramatically to 150,000 boxes, and the industry again had to rebuild (Dovell 630–632).
22 On the history of Laurel Grove under Kingsley, see Daniel L. Schafer, “Zephaniah Kingsley’s Laurel Grove Plantation” (2000) and Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. and the Atlantic World (2013), ch. 7; see also Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 167–171. Kingsley bought Laurel Grove in 1803. He primarily grew long-staple cotton, but also cultivated a 750-tree citrus grove on nine acres of land. In Liquid Landscapes (2017), Michele Currie Navakas carefully reconstructs the plantation’s post-Kingsley history (147–148). Falling into disuse after 1813, it was revived
132 3: Florida Fantasies disastrous, as Stowe discovered on a visit in the spring of 1867, but she found Florida attractive.
Abandoning Laurel Grove, she instead purchased a much smaller property in Mandarin, on the other side of the St. John’s River, and spent her winters there until 1884. The thirty-acre property included a house and an orange grove, which was soon under the management of her cousin
Spencer Foote and cultivated by black wage laborers. Stowe took great pride in her orange crop and capitalized on her fame to sell her produce, sending oranges to the North in boxes marked
“ORANGES FROM HARRIET BEECHER STOWE—MANDARIN, FLA.” (McPhee 96). Stowe herself even became a tourist attraction, and Florida guide books regularly made note of her presence.23 Her house was a point of interest for tour boats carting visitors up and down the St.
John’s River, and some daring tourists even crept onto her property in hopes of glimpsing her.
Stowe also involved herself in the community, helping to establish a schoolhouse and church to serve both white and black residents. Various family members joined her in Mandarin, including her husband Calvin Ellis Stowe. Frederick, however, disappeared mysteriously and permanently after leaving Florida for San Francisco in 1871.24
After Stowe purchased her Mandarin property in 1868, she began to publish reflections on
Florida life in articles for The Christian Union, edited by her brother Henry Ward Beecher, and
Hearth and Home, which she herself edited from 1868 to 1869. Published in 1873, Palmetto
Leaves collected these articles along with a number of new sketches. Her favorable depictions
in the 1850s by two consecutive owners: John H. McIntosh and Stephen Bryan, who later served as a colonel in the Confederate Army. Laurel Grove was raided by Union forces in 1863, and abandoned until Stowe leased the property.
23 See, for example: Ledyard Bill’s A Winter in Florida (1869), 91–92; Sidney Lanier’s Florida (1876), 122, 124; and George M. Barbour’s Florida for Tourists, Invalids, and Settlers (1882), 111–112. All three include a sketch of Stowe’s residence as well.
24 For accounts of Stowe’s years in Florida, see Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (1995), ch. 25; John T. Foster, Jr. and Sarah Whitmer Foster, Beechers, Stowes, and Yankee Strangers (1999); and Olav Thulesius, Harriet Beecher Stowe in Florida, 1867–1884 (2001). On tourists’ attempts to sneak onto her property, see Thulesius 95–96.
133 3: Florida Fantasies helped to encourage Northerners to visit Florida and even attempt orange cultivation. They also helped to make her welcome in Mandarin: although Stowe was largely surrounded by fellow
Northerners, she apparently won favor from even her Southern neighbors with her positive portrayals of Florida life (McPhee 95–96). Many of the sketches in Palmetto Leaves dwell considerably on leisure and tourist activity: sailing on a “pleasure-yacht” down the St. Johns River
(54), visiting a boarding-house full of “people enjoying themselves after the usual fashions of summer watering-places” (87), “flower-hunting” in the Mandarin forests (105). Others are devoted to practicalities, such as the suitability of Florida for invalids, or the opportunities and challenges of cultivating oranges. The final two chapters famously address the circumstances of black laborers in the South. “Old Cudjo and the Angel” describes Stowe’s encounter with a freedman who, after four years of cultivating his own property, both produces his first bale of cotton for sale and loses his land to a white man who overrides his claim. “The Laborers of the South,” meanwhile, reflects on the future of agricultural labor in Florida. “Who shall do the work for us?” Stowe asks (279).
Her conclusion: free black laborers, who she claims are more suited than white laborers to withstand the Florida heat. The chapter includes an anecdote about Stowe’s failed attempts to teach
Minnah, a formerly enslaved field hand, about domestic labor. It ends with a call for industrial education, urging common schools to educate black students on domestic arts and agriculture.
Given its focus on the pleasures of Southern living, Palmetto Leaves is generally seen as marking Stowe’s retreat on the related subjects of labor reform and freedmen’s rights in the South.
According to Rowe, the work lacks “the strong thesis of reform” visible in Uncle Tom’s Cabin:
Stowe’s “complacency” is apparent in her blithe descriptions of Florida’s scenic attractions, and in her limited attention to “the economics of black labor” in the South (Enchanted 18, 20). In this way, Palmetto Leaves also participates in the genre of reconciliation literature—rehabilitating and
134 3: Florida Fantasies romanticizing the South, and smoothing over sectional divides. Rowe’s evaluation is consistent with recent accounts of Stowe’s depoliticized attitude towards labor more generally after the war.
Rachel Naomi Klein, for example, has argued that Stowe’s postbellum writing reflects a vision of the marketplace governed by free labor but fundamentally disengaged from systemic reform:
“Having constructed slavery as the principal obstacle to the consummation of American freedom,
Stowe was relatively sanguine once the Civil War was won,” she points out (147–148).25
Stowe’s complacency on questions of labor in Palmetto Leaves, however, takes on new valences when contextualized by the book’s presentation of two iconic crops: cotton and oranges.
Palmetto Leaves consistently deploys oranges as a symbol of Stowe’s life in Florida—in stark opposition to cotton, which her son had tried and failed to raise at Laurel Grove. Stowe had even originally planned to title the book Orange Blossoms, before settling on Palmetto Leaves instead.
Her sketches not only define orange cultivation as the primary form of agriculture on her Mandarin plantation, but also redefine the labor of growing oranges as a form of leisure: Stowe’s narrative reflects the fantasy that little actual work is required to yield a successful crop. While Stowe hired black laborers to cultivate both of her plantations, Palmetto Leaves erases black labor specifically from orange cultivation in a way that was impossible to do with cotton picking. Meanwhile,
Palmetto Leaves inextricably ties cotton cultivation—which is relegated to its final two chapters— to black labor in the postbellum South. In these chapters, Stowe also heavily implies that cotton is a dying industry in Florida—an implication that continues to divorce Florida itself from the harsh and unfair conditions that black laborers faced during Reconstruction, and allows Palmetto Leaves to avoid grappling with the uncanny resemblance of 1870s labor arrangements to slave labor.
25 In arguing that Stowe’s works are engaged in free labor economics, Klein also resists the position—articulated by Gillian Brown in Domestic Individualism (1990), among others—that Stowe’s works are deeply anti-commercial.
135 3: Florida Fantasies
Shana Klein has called attention to the centrality of orange imagery to Stowe’s Florida project, framing her symbolic shift from cotton to oranges as an indication of progress. Analyzing
Stowe’s postwar paintings of oranges, Klein argues that these paintings lauded a new postbellum
Florida marked by new forms of agriculture and opportunities for black laborers. The citrus industry “signaled a departure from the Old South,” with its focus on cotton and sugar: “In the era of Reconstruction, orange cultivation promised to ‘awaken’ Floridians and bring social progress to the South” (35). Oranges even came to connote a more egalitarian approach to agriculture,
“unlike cotton, which was seen as benefiting a small group of elite planters,” and orange cultivation became attractive to freedmen “as a promising departure from more traditional crops” (35). Stowe herself employed black laborers to cultivate the orange grove at Mandarin, and Klein cites one of
Stowe’s personal letters to demonstrate her investment in supporting these waged laborers. In this letter, Stowe indeed boasts that the region around her “will soon be a continuous orange grove planted by northern settlers and employing colored laborers,” adding that her “best hands already are landholders of small farms planting orange trees and on the way to an old age of easy independence” (qtd. 35). Klein concludes that Stowe consistently deployed the orange “to promote a new industry and a new era of ‘easy independence’ for black Americans” (37).26
Kathryn Cornell Dolan also identifies the orange as an icon of progress for Stowe after the
Civil War, arguing that oranges in Palmetto Leaves are “a conscious symbol of the potential for
26 It is possible that the geographic limitations of Florida’s cotton industry—which was anchored in the Middle Florida counties—also enabled Stowe to more easily reinvent Florida as a place disconnected from cotton. In The Idea of Florida, Rowe suggests that Stowe may have praised Florida so freely in Palmetto Leaves because it never had “the highly developed plantation system of the tidewater and the Deep South” (28). Navakas likewise notes that Florida was the only area of the South “where plantation culture had never flourished on a large scale,” suggesting that this lack of “a traditional plantation past” made postbellum Florida more hospitable to “Americans both black and white who could not manage—or did not desire—to belong in traditional ways on other parts of the continent” (10). Nonetheless, the fact that antebellum Florida was economically a cotton state—dependent on the cotton cultivated by planters who had migrated from the Old South—grounds my claim that cotton was a significant icon of Florida agriculture before the war.
136 3: Florida Fantasies the hope of an emancipated ‘New South’” (119). Tracking the fruit’s symbolic evolution in
Stowe’s fiction, Dolan shows that Stowe first associated the orange with slavery in Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, before uncoupling it from slavery in her postbellum writings (109). She also identifies
Stowe’s own decision to raise oranges, rather than sugarcane or cotton, as a telling sign of her investment in a new Southern agriculture (120). Klein ultimately argues that oranges in Stowe’s postbellum fiction serve a project of reconciliation, whereby Stowe sought to articulate a “shared national taste uniting North and South” (105). Together, Dolan and Klein contextualize Stowe’s interest in oranges with her investments in promoting the image of the New South, creating new waged opportunities for African Americans, and encouraging national unity after the war.
Yet such claims about the orange as a hopeful representation of waged black labor in the
New South should be reevaluated in light of Florida’s postbellum identity as a land of leisure and tourism. If Palmetto Leaves develops the orange as an icon of progress, it also develops the orange as an icon of laborless leisure. While Stowe may have considered her orange grove a symbol of
Reconstruction-era progress, Palmetto Leaves curiously never shows the black orange cultivators whom she was so pleased to hire. Stowe’s pride in paying black laborers to cultivate her orange grove, reflected in her private letter, disappears altogether in Palmetto Leaves. Palmetto Leaves paints Stowe’s Florida as a site of leisure, and the orange’s association with leisure complicates its status as a symbol of Southern agricultural progress. If Palmetto Leaves indeed decouples oranges from slave labor, it arguably decouples them from waged black labor as well.
In Palmetto Leaves, oranges symbolize leisure in two ways. First, they are consumed under the conditions of leisure: on pleasure outings and picnics, or at home in scenes of repose. Second, they are seemingly untouched by human laborers. Indeed, Palmetto Leaves regularly presents the orange not as produce cultivated through the labor of farm workers but rather as produce that
137 3: Florida Fantasies fantastically self-cultivates in the background while white vacationers pursue leisure activities in the foreground. Stowe’s sketches deploy two narrative strategies that obscure the black laborers responsible for tending and picking her oranges. She regularly emphasizes the productivity, reliability, and wildness of Florida orange trees, thereby erasing the labor required to cultivate them. In addition, she portrays such self-sustaining orange groves—both wild and domestic—as having overtaken plantation land formerly devoted to sugarcane, cotton, and rice cultivated by slave labor.27 While the final two chapters of Palmetto Leaves bring black laborers to the foreground, these same chapters push oranges to the background—just as black laborers are largely absent from the previous chapters, to which the orange is central. This structure preserves the orange as an icon of leisure, divorcing it still further from the problems of labor articulated in the book’s final chapters, which are symbolically associated with the image of the cotton bale.
Self-Cultivating Oranges: Abundance, Reliability, and Absent Labor
The fantasy of the self-cultivating orange grove is woven throughout Palmetto Leaves. It is a fantasy contingent, first of all, on the idea that Florida orange groves are both incredibly reliable and incredibly productive in proportion to the labor of cultivating them. In the chapter “Swamps and Orange-Trees,” Stowe responds to the inquiry of a “gentleman” who wishes to know “the prospect of certainty in the orange-crop” (142). She downplays the risks of orange growing, reassuring readers that it is a reliable venture: “apart from the danger of frost,” she asserts, “the orange-crop is the most steady and certain of any known fruit” (142). Stowe uses her own
27 Daniel Schafer traces a similar pattern in the writings of William Bartram one hundred years earlier (see Ghost Plantations). He argues that Bartram’s popular Florida travel narrative depicted the St. Johns River area of East Florida as a romantic natural world, obscuring the fact that this area was full of British plantations cultivated by slave labor. Bartram turns them into “ghost plantations,” omitting them from his work—despite evidence that he traveled past, and even visited, some of these plantations—in order to create an image of wild romantic nature. One hundred years later, Stowe and Warner also obscure black labor—but for very different reasons, I argue here.
138 3: Florida Fantasies experience as evidence of this reliability, reporting that the 115 trees on her 1.5 acre grove have yielded an average “of sixty thousand [oranges] a year for each of the five years we have had it”
(142). Frost did present a real, if intermittent, threat to oranges: Stowe admits to having twice lost her crop “through sudden frost coming after it was fully perfected.” Nonetheless, she is quick to disclaim that “these two years are the only ones since 1835 when a crop has been lost or damaged through frost” (142). In another chapter, she also carefully notes that these frosts only ruined her crop without “materially injuring the trees” (31).28 Stowe’s dogged assurances against the threat of frost culminate with a visit to her neighbor Colonel Harte’s “fruit-house,” designed to protect his oranges from frost. Impressed, Stowe reassures readers that fruit-houses promise to remove “the only uncertainty relating to the orange-crop” and “will make this delicious crop certain as it is abundant” (263, 264). Stowe likewise downplays the risk of insects to the orange crop, carefully displacing this threat to the past: she notes that the last orange-insect “epidemic” was “some fifteen or twenty years ago,” and “growers now have no apprehensions from this source” (143).
Having dispatched the risks from frost and insects, Stowe dwells instead on the “wonderful vital and productive power of the orange-tree” (143). The visual proof is in their roots, which voraciously consume nutrients: Stowe observes that it is impossible to grow flowers nearby, because all the fertilizer “is immediately rushed after by these hungry yellow orange-roots” (144).
Proof of the trees’ vitality also resides in anecdotal evidence from her neighbors, one of whom apparently reaped 5000 oranges from each of his three orange trees in a single year. Again, Stowe emphasizes reliability and frames failure as an exception to the rule: “He says he has never failed of a steady crop from any cause, except in the first of the two years named; and, in that case, it is
28 Stowe did not know that in 1895, ten years after she abandoned Mandarin, another devastating frost would destroy both the orange crop and most of Florida’s orange trees.
139 3: Florida Fantasies to be remembered the fruit was perfected, and only lost by not being gathered” (145). Describing the crop loss almost as an afterthought, Stowe emphasizes that it is unrelated to the “perfected” yield of his productive trees. This neighbor, in turn, knows two other men “who had each gathered ten thousand from a single tree,” in what he considers “a creditable story, though a very remarkable yield” (145–146). In two short paragraphs, Stowe relays an anecdote within an anecdote that effectively doubles the imagined yield of a single tree from five to ten thousand. To be sure, Stowe does at times acknowledge the challenges of growing oranges in Florida, and does earnestly caution readers to be ready “to see a great deal that looks rough and desolate and coarse” in Florida more generally (36). Yet her reflections on the yield of her neighbors’ orange crops are highly encouraging, likely in part because she is advertising for Florida: emphasis on the ease and security of raising oranges was surely reassuring to Northern readers interested in such a project.
In Palmetto Leaves, the abundance and reliability of oranges fuels an overarching fantasy that orange cultivation requires little to no human intervention. This narrative of self-cultivation is first established in the many wild orange groves that grow freely across the verdant Florida landscape. Wild oranges are visible everywhere, a signature feature of the Florida wilderness. On a trip to St. Augustine, for example, Stowe glimpses “forests of wild orange-trees” as her train chugs “through the Florida woods” (209). They even grow adjacent to domestic spaces: the orange trees surrounding a Magnolia boarding-house “are entirely of the wild kind,” since the 1835 frost destroyed all domestic orange groves on that side of the river (93). Stowe’s descriptions of orange cultivation, moreover, often blur the lines between domesticated and wild orange trees. Although wild oranges are not particularly good for eating, she explains, orange farmers have found the wilderness useful in growing their domestic counterparts. One of her neighbors, for instance, actually grows his oranges in the forest:
140 3: Florida Fantasies
The place had many native wild orange-trees, which had been cut off and budded with the sweet orange, and were making vigorous growth. Under the shade of the high live-oaks, Mr. M— had set out young orange and lemon trees through quite an extent of the forest. He told us that he had two thousand plants thus growing. It is becoming a favorite idea with fruit-planters here, that the tropical fruits are less likely to be injured by frosts, and make a more rapid and sure growth, under the protecting shadow of live-oaks. The wild orange is found frequently growing in this way; and they take counsel of Nature in this respect. (169–170)
This neighbor not only grafts wild and domestic oranges, but also grows his crop among wild oak trees, adopting a strategy from “Nature” to protect it against frost. Purchased just after the war, his property is a cultivated wilderness: while he is indebted to the forest for protecting his crop, he is also battling to keep it from overtaking his plantation. “These places in Florida…are spots torn out of the very heart of the forest,” Stowe explains, “and where Nature is rebelling daily, and rushing with all her might back again into the wild freedom from which she has been a moment led captive.” (171). Another neighbor, Colonel Hardee, also grows his fruits under oak trees in “the wild forest,” where “peach, orange, and lemon trees...struggle for existence on the same footing, and with only the same advantages, as the wild denizens of the forest” (181). In both cases, wild nature seems as much responsible for growing the fruits as the planters: the forests protect and cultivate the orange crop, even as they threaten to overtake the land again.
Elsewhere, Stowe continues to suggest that nature—specifically, the trees themselves— will do most of the work required to grow oranges. For example, Stowe laments that the once
“extensive” domestic orange groves around the Magnolia boarding-house were not replaced after the 1835 frost destroyed them:
The frost of 1835 killed the trees, and they have never been reset. Oranges are not, therefore, either cheap or plenty at Magnolia or Green Cove. Nothing shows more strikingly the want of enterprise that has characterized this country than this. Seedling oranges planted the very next day after the great frost would have been in bearing ten years after; and would, ere now, have yielded barrels and barrels of fruit; and the trees would have grown and taken care of themselves. One would have thought so very simple and easy a measure would have been adopted. (93–94, my emphasis)
141 3: Florida Fantasies
On one level, Stowe laments a lack of foresight and “enterprise” in Floridian farmers. The small labor of planting seedlings after the frost would have resulted in fruit-bearing trees ten years later.
By 1872, these trees would have produced “barrels and barrels of fruit.” In this hypothetical reflection, Stowe displaces labor to the antebellum past: the work of planting orange trees during the 1830s would have paid off in abundant produce by the 1870s—a fantasy of postbellum produce contingent on antebellum work. She also engages in a fantasy of laborless ease: after the “simple and easy” step of planting, the orange trees “would have grown and taken care of themselves.”
Stowe’s insistence on the resilient self-cultivation of the orange trees has metaphorical stakes. In the book’s second chapter, she establishes the orange tree as a model for her parallel project of cultivating the community in Mandarin. Reflecting on an orange tree in her yard, Stowe again recounts the history of orange cultivation in her neighborhood:
In 1835, every one of them was killed even with the ground. Then they started up with the genuine pluck of a true-born orange-tree, which never says die, and began to grow again. Nobody pruned them, or helped them, or cared much about them any way … Then, when they had made some progress, came the orange-insect, and nearly killed them down again. The owners of the land, discouraged, broke down the fences, and moved off; and for a while the land was left an open common, where wild cattle browsed, and rubbed themselves on the trees. But still, in spite of all, they have held on their way rejoicing, till now they are the beautiful creatures they are. Truly we may call them trees of the Lord, full of sap and greenness; full of lessons of perseverance to us who get frosted down and cut off, time and time again, in our lives. Let us hope in the Lord, and be up and at it again.
It is certainly quite necessary to have some such example before our eyes in struggling to found a colony here. We had such a hard time getting our church and schoolhouse! (19–20)
As Shana Klein observes, Stowe often used oranges to represent the progress of Reconstruction.
Yet only in the context of this Reconstruction metaphor do the material challenges to the orange crop take on sizeable proportions: here, frost and insects reflect the difficulties of establishing both a church and a school in the community. The orange tree’s resilience and independence are also symbolically appropriate within this Reconstruction metaphor: the self-cultivating resilience of
142 3: Florida Fantasies these trees—grown by the grace of Nature and God—symbolizes the human resilience of Stowe and her neighbors, also guided by God. After the schoolhouse burns down, for example, Stowe and her neighbors “imitate the pluck of the orange-trees” in raising money to rebuild it (22). At the same time, this narrative absents human labor from the history of the trees in her neighborhood.
According to her story of self-reliance, the trees grew themselves on abandoned land roamed only by “wild cattle.” By making the tree in her yard a symbol of human progress, Stowe again obscures the black laborers who actually cultivated the oranges in her Mandarin grove.
Palmetto Leaves never overtly shows the labor of picking and gathering oranges. Instead,
Stowe usually dispatches this labor in no more than a passing phrase. A characteristic episode of orange-gathering takes place in the context of an “impromptu picnic” with friends on a neighboring plantation (165). Stowe describes the group preparing to embark on this pleasure outing:
“Everyone dropped the work in hand, and flew to spreading sandwiches. Oranges were gathered, luncheon-baskets packed; and the train filed out from the two houses” (165–66). Orange-gathering is compressed into a brief clause on the way to an afternoon of pleasure, mentioned between the spreading of sandwiches and the packing of lunch-baskets. This work of preparation is also subtly framed as not work at all, since the household has “dropped the work in hand” to attend to it. The brisk sequence suggests that all of this non-work is completed rapidly and easily, yet it also ambiguates roles and responsibilities. Who is everyone? Who gathered the oranges and packed the lunches? Stowe’s use of the passive voice obscures both the work and the laborer who presumably completes it.
Pushing episodes of orange picking to the background is not the only way that Palmetto
Leaves obscures this labor. In one especially remarkable case, a sudden spring storm actually makes the work of picking oranges entirely unnecessary:
143 3: Florida Fantasies
Up flies the wind; the waves are all white-caps; the blinds bang; the windows rattle; every one runs to shut every thing; and for a few moments it blows as if it would take house and all away. Down drop oranges in a golden shower; here, there, and everywhere the lightning flashes; thunder cracks and rattles and rolls; and the big torrents of rain come pouring down...Well, we wouldn’t have missed the sight if we had been asked; and we have picked up a bushel of oranges that otherwise somebody must have climbed the trees for. (96, emphasis added)
Here, Stowe’s allusion to orange-picking is couched in the absence of a need for such labor. The unexpected storm removes the oranges from the trees “in a golden shower,” resulting in a sellable economic unit (“a bushel”) on the ground. Once again, Palmetto Leaves presents wild nature acting in service of domestic agriculture: while the storm appears to threaten destruction of “house and all,” it actually performs the work of picking the oranges. In so doing, the storm effectively removes “somebody” from the field. That hypothetical orange-picker never materializes, existing only as part of the alternate scenario in which the absence of a storm equates the need for labor.
While that scenario must be the normal state of affairs—tropical storms do not pick oranges regularly—Stowe presents the exception instead. “Somebody” remains undefined and unrealized, the suggestion of a presumably black laborer made unnecessary by nature’s bounty.
Instead, Stowe consistently associates her orange trees with play. She expresses the wish that her girl readers could “come fluttering down together to play croquet with us under the orange- trees” and, while waiting their turns, “reach up and pull down a bough, and help yourselves to oranges…” (41). One afternoon, Stowe’s family does play croquet “under the orange-trees” until they can “see the wickets no longer” in the darkness (66). Elsewhere, she records “no end of amusement in watching” the mocking-birds who nest in her orange trees (199). Oranges are also often mentioned in relation to outings and adventures. A yachting trip does not get underway until
“[a] great basket of oranges is hoisted in,” while their lazy pace gives them “plenty of opportunity to discuss the basket of oranges” (54, 55). Similarly, “baskets of oranges” are among the treats procured for a picnic up Julington Creek (70).
144 3: Florida Fantasies
In one rare instance, Stowe does reference a “negro workman” while discussing an orange tree that has “become an invalid” (159). Her cousin Spencer Foote, “Mr. F” in the book, discovers the tree “dropping its leaves” and quickly proceeds to prune and examine it (159). Unable to cure the tree, Stowe turns to her readers:
Now, we ask any wise fruit-growers, What is this disease? and how is it to be treated? We have treated it by cutting off all the blossoms, cutting back the branches, watering with water in which guano and lime have been dissolved; and the patient looks a little better. A negro workman testified that a tree in a similar state had been brought back by these means. Can any fruit-grower give any light on this subject? (160)
This passage contains Stowe’s only mention of a black workman in relation to the orange crop.
Yet even here, the workman provides testimony rather than labor, which is instead conducted by the collective “we.” Stowe implicitly questions his knowledge, moreover, by asking instead for fruit-growers to respond from among her readers. From start to finish, Palmetto-Leaves evacuates human labor from the story of orange cultivation: Stowe’s orange trees appear to grow themselves, effectively separating the Mandarin plantation from the legacy of slave labor.
The Case of Cotton
In Palmetto Leaves, black labor is most strongly affiliated with cotton. The book’s few references both to cotton and to black farm workers are almost entirely contained within its final two chapters, and the illustrations accompanying each chapter visually herald this shift. “Old Cudjo and the
Angel” features a sketch of Cudjo with his single cotton bale, while “The Laborers of the South” features a sketch of nearly a dozen black cotton-pickers laboring in a cotton field. The two chapters are anchored in two different labor systems for postbellum cotton cultivation: Cudjo’s story reflects on challenges faced by free black landowners, while “Laborers” blithely depicts freedmen adhering to the gang-labor arrangements that structured the antebellum slave system (290).
145 3: Florida Fantasies
Cudjo is part of a black settlement that has taken some government land “up Julington”
(270). Former slaves from North Carolina and Georgia, the settlers labor extensively to develop the land: building, fencing, planting orange trees, clearing scrub-palmetto. After four years, Cudjo produces his first bale of cotton and also loses his land to a white man who has claimed it. His white neighbors, although formerly suspicious of the freedmen’s settlement, ultimately help to reinstate Cudjo “to his rights” (273). Cudjo’s story is meant to highlight racial injustice in the postbellum South, where a legal loophole allows this claimant to take his land. At the same time, it is meant to paint a favorable portrait of white Floridians: Stowe carefully identifies the man who steals his land as “a foreigner,” emphasizing that Cudjo’s white neighbors support him. To a degree, Cudjo’s bale of cotton is redemptive: it is the product of his own free labor, which he himself brings to market. Although Stowe portrays Cudjo in comic stereotypes, she is at least honest about the labor behind his bale of cotton and the unfair laws that enable his mistreatment.
Noticeably, “Cudjo and the Angel” does not take place in the spaces of leisure—homes, resorts, wildernesses—that Stowe describes so vividly in the rest of Palmetto Leaves. Cudjo and his cotton bale appear on a wharf, in the middle of the marketplace where goods are in transit to be sold. If the orange is affiliated with the leisure spaces of white vacationers, cotton is affiliated with both the marketplace and black labor. This depiction of Cudjo on the wharf also surely recalls and revises another of Stowe’s riverside scenes: the sale of Tom to Augustine St. Claire in Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, on board a Mississippi River steamship that is “[p]iled with cotton-bales, from many a plantation, up over deck and sides, till she seems in the distance a square, massive block of gray”
(205). The cotton at first even obscures Tom, who has created a temporary shelter “in a little nook among the everywhere predominant cotton-bales” (205). Here, Tom rests his Bible on a cotton bale as he weeps over the loss of his family (206). By the end of the chapter, however, the image
146 3: Florida Fantasies of books laid on the cotton bales has changed: St. Claire and the slave trader Haley now use the bales to prop up their pocket-books as they negotiate his sale. St. Claire leans “one elbow on a bale of cotton, while a large pocket-book lay open before him,” as Haley places “a greasy pocket-book on the cotton bales” (212–213, 215). Tom can reclaim cotton only for a brief redemptive moment, a pattern that repeats throughout the novel: Cassy fashions a pillow from “a roll of damaged cotton” to comfort Tom after he is whipped (511), while Sambo and Quimbo later provide him with “a rude bed, of refuse cotton” (588). In both cases, the cotton is damaged and unsellable, the only reason it can be repurposed to comfort Tom. Cudjo’s story, meanwhile, associates cotton with the challenges faced by free landowning black farmers during Reconstruction. In Palmetto Leaves, he is the sole example of a freedman who cultivates his own land instead of working for wages on a former slave plantation. Cotton is the crop of choice for this independent farmer, and it is no coincidence that Stowe chooses to highlight Cudjo with his single cotton bale. By framing Cudjo’s trials around cotton, Palmetto Leaves associates systemic injustice against black landowners with a crop historically tied to slave labor. This narrative choice thereby leaves the orange as a symbol of pleasure and leisure, divorced from these problems of labor.
Moreover, Stowe clearly frames cotton as a dying industry in Florida. Initially, she is arrested by the “unusual sight” of Cudjo’s single cotton bale: “It was the first time since we had been in Mandarin—a space of some four or five years—that we had ever seen a bale of cotton on that wharf” (268–269). Acknowledging that East Florida soil is highly adapted to raising cotton, especially the long staple variety that “commands the very highest market-price,” Stowe nonetheless offers a bleak reflection on the future of the cotton industry: “for two or three years past the annual ravages of the cotton-worm had been so discouraging,” she remarks, “that the culture of cotton had been abandoned in despair” (269). Cotton is the crop of least abundance in
147 3: Florida Fantasies
Palmetto Leaves, embodied by Cudjo’s single bale. The result of four years of labor, that single bale seems a meager offering compared to the thousands of oranges harvested across the same time period. By presenting cotton cultivation as untenable in postbellum Florida, Palmetto Leaves avoids ever fully addressing its uncanny resemblence to slave labor. Stowe reinvents the cotton bale as the symbol of a single black man’s herculean efforts to cultivate his purchased government property, in a scene that rewrites the sale of Uncle Tom amid the cotton bales. On one level, Stowe suggests that the future of Florida cotton is in the hands of free black landowners: if cotton is going to make a recovery in Florida, it will be through the efforts of black landowners like Cudjo. On the other hand, she simultaneously suggests that cotton has no future in Florida. Instead, Florida’s most promising crops—oranges chief among them—are abundant, easy, and self-cultivating.
Palmetto Leaves symbolically replaces the ravaged and unreliable cotton crop with one of abundant and reliable oranges. While Cudjo’s cotton endeavor seems uncertain at best, members of the white planter class have turned from cotton to more promising crops. Not one of the white planters featured in Palmetto Leaves grows cotton after 1865. Stowe’s descriptions of neighboring plantations instead imagine a Florida populated by white fruit farmers, both reinvented Southerners and newly arrived Northerners alike. The Reverend Mr. M– raises citrus, grapes, peaches, and roses on his plantation, purchased just after the war (165–171); another neighbor operates a dairy and breeds cattle, while also growing his own fruits and vegetables (229–246); and Colonel Harte has an orange grove (262–264). One chapter enumerates a dozen crops raised by three Vermont brothers who have moved to Florida; cotton is noticeably absent from the list (185–190). In
Palmetto Leaves, postbellum Florida is a land of fruits, vegetables, and even cattle—but not cotton.
In the book’s final chapter, “The Laborers of the South,” Stowe makes her most explicit statement about black agricultural labor in Florida. Again, cotton appears prominently: Stowe
148 3: Florida Fantasies exclaims over a “gang” of black workers carrying “great bags of cotton-seed” on yet another wharf, and visits a neighboring plantation where freedmen work as waged gang laborers in the cotton fields (282). While Stowe’s Mandarin home has been established as a site of leisure, labor is foregrounded on the Mackintosh Plantation—otherwise known as Laurel Grove, the site of
Stowe’s failed cotton experiment.29 Stowe funnels all her commentary on black labor through the work performed at the Mackintosh Plantation, leaving her Mandarin grove a site of leisure. The
Mackintosh Plantation at once evokes the antebellum past and hearkens to the future: “in old times, the model plantation of Florida, employing seven hundred negroes, raising sugar, rice, Sea-Island cotton,” it now employs “thirty laboring families” who came to Florida after Emancipation “to try the new luxury of being free to choose their own situation, and seek their own fortune” (287, 288–
289). Admitting that the labor structure recalls “the old ways of working” before the war, Stowe also notes pointedly that the employees were hired under a written contract (290).
Yet the fact that Stowe’s own cotton endeavor failed miserably here in 1867, and the fact that she abandoned cotton for oranges, also makes the Mackintosh Plantation representative of a dying past. Stowe made this symbolism explicit in “Our Florida Plantation,” a short personal narrative that she published in an 1879 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. “Our Florida Plantation” tells the story of the crop failure at Laurel Grove, and ends with Stowe’s decision to exchange her large cotton plantation for a much smaller orange grove.30 After making “in all, perhaps, two bales of cotton,” Stowe explains, “we and ours bought an orange grove on the other side of the St. John’s, and forever forswore the raising of cotton” (649). After again tying cotton inextricably to black
29 Navakas has shown that the Mackintosh Plantation is in fact Laurel Grove; while Stowe visits the property in Palmetto Leaves, she never calls it by its original name or mentions that she previously rented it (144–145).
30 “Our Florida Plantation” revises the story of the MacIntosh Plantation in Palmetto Leaves; see Navakas 142–153. As Greeson points out, Stowe’s blithe attitude about the labor system on her cotton plantation reflects how Reconstruction retained “the basic economic structure of the old Slave South” under new Northern masters (257).
149 3: Florida Fantasies gang labor, the story both removes cotton from Stowe’s field of concern and, implicitly, from the future of Florida. “Our Florida Plantation” makes the rise of the self-cultivating orange crop contingent on the failure of cotton cultivated by black laborers. In the same moment that Stowe gives up on Laurel Grove, black laborers disappear. While proud that she was able to pay her workers for their efforts on the cotton plantation, Stowe says nothing about who cultivates the oranges at Mandarin.
Elsewhere in Palmetto Leaves, cotton is quietly part of an antebellum past that hovers just under the surface. In a telling episode, Stowe describes a visit to the fruit nursery of her neighbor
Colonel Hardee. She presents Hardee as “an enthusiast in his business,” who was left “miserably poor” after the war but resiliently started over on a new plot of land with “his former slaves as free laborers” (178). Historical records provide more context. Before serving as a captain in the
Confederate Army, Lucius Augustus Tarquinses Hardee (1828–1885) owned a cotton plantation in Duval County called “Rural Home.” After the war, Hardee started growing citrus on a new property called “Honeymoon Home,” which was the site of Stowe’s visit. Stowe praises Hardee’s successful endeavors to grow oranges, along with various other fruits and plants, referring to his property as “the pioneer nursery of Florida” (183). In highlighting Hardee as an agricultural
“pioneer,” Stowe foregrounds his fruit and flower nursery worked by waged freedmen—and quietly obscures the fact that these former slaves once worked on his large cotton plantation. While
Stowe does acknowledge the freedmen on Hardee’s plantation, emphasizing their new status as waged laborers, she also refuses to show these workers engaged in the labor of orange cultivation.31
31 Like Colonel Hardee, the owners of the dairy farm also live with “those who formerly were their slaves settled peaceably around them as free laborers” (231). This family also grows their own fruits, but laborers never appear in the context of citrus cultivation; Stowe briefly features an “Ethiopian dairy-woman” instead (234).
150 3: Florida Fantasies
Stowe directly mentions cotton only once outside of the book’s final two chapters, in a brief reflection that symbolically replaces cotton with oranges. While orange groves thrive in
Mandarin, she notes that the landscape looks quite different on the other side of the St. Johns River:
“But opposite Mandarin, along the western shore, lie miles and miles of splendid land—which in the olden time produced cotton of the finest quality, sugar, rice, sweet-potatoes—now growing back into forest with a tropical rapidity” (243). Stowe presents Reconstruction as a period of revision to the very landscape: both the planters and the wilderness reject former staple crops and slave labor. Their work is mutually reinforcing: while planters like Hardee carve a place for fruit cultivation in the wilderness, and even rely on the wilderness to support their growing fruits, the wilderness itself re-consumes land on which slaves once labored to cultivate cotton, sugar, and rice. In Palmetto Leaves, nature collaborates with a reformed planter class to transform the landscape itself—erasing the history of these slave plantations from its contours.
Similarly, Stowe only mentions her own orange grove once in the book’s last two chapters.
At the end of the last chapter, she uses oranges to demonstrate the honesty of black laborers:
Now, no fruit is more beautiful, more tempting, than the orange. We live in an orange-grove surrounded by negroes, and yet never have any trouble of this kind. We have often seen bags of fine oranges laying all night under the trees; and yet never have we met with any perceptible loss.” (320)
Divorcing the orange from labor once again, Stowe instead frames the fruit as a temptation. The bags of oranges are not invoked to signify the labor of fruit-gathering, although these oranges presumably were collected by Stowe’s black employees. Rather, they are used to signal the honesty of her black neighbors to white Northern readers. This sole invocation of the orange is consistent with the labor narrative of the final two chapters, which diminish the orange’s presence when foregrounding true physical work—both agricultural and domestic—by black laborers.
151 3: Florida Fantasies
Warner’s Bread and Oranges: Visions of a Laborless South
Two years after the publication of Palmetto Leaves, popular sentimental novelist Susan Warner followed Stowe’s lead in her didactic children’s novel Bread and Oranges. Warner’s first two novels celebrate Northern and Western farm labor in loving detail. The Wide, Wide World (1850) represents life on a rural New York farm through the eyes of Ellen Montgomery, while the heroine of Queechy (1852), Fleda Ringan, capably manages a large farm and sawmill in rural Ohio.
Although published contemporaneously with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, these novels devote at most limited attention to the subject of slavery.32 During Reconstruction, however, Warner twice ventured to represent Southern plantation life through the eyes of her young heroines. In Daisy
(1868), her child heroine Daisy comes face-to-face with the slave system on an antebellum cotton plantation. In Bread and Oranges (1875), meanwhile, her child heroine Maggie visits an orange plantation in postbellum Florida where the ghosts of slavery are nearly invisible. This novel also manipulates the orange to obscure black labor, adapting and amplifying Stowe’s narrative strategies in a way that suggests Warner may have been familiar with Palmetto Leaves. Most of
Warner’s novels are set in Northern locations, based on places that she knew from her own life:
New York City, Constitution Island, New Canaan, and Old Saybrook. Daisy and Bread and
Oranges are the only novels in which Warner set a substantive portion of the action in the South, let alone on a working plantation.33 The exceptional geography of these novels, and their approaches to representing plantation labor, together shed light on the limitations of Warner’s vision for Reconstruction-era reform.
32 In Queechy, for example, Fleda briefly argues about slavery with an English author. Although she agrees with him that the “curse of slavery” is wrong, the passage is primarily focused on English hypocrisies: Fleda finds it hypocritical for an Englishman to shame Americans about slavery, given “the condition of their own factory slaves” (2.86).
33 Daisy Plains (1885) does feature a brief antebellum interlude in Mississippi, but soon relocates to rural New York.
152 3: Florida Fantasies
Slavery and Civil War in the Daisy Novels
The Daisy novels attempt to set the female bildungsroman, the genre in which Warner rose to fame during the 1850s, within the context of the Civil War. Warner began the series during the war, publishing ten chapters of the first novel in The Little American (1862–64), a monthly magazine that she edited with her sister Anna. She completed that novel, Melbourne House, for volume publication in 1864. It was followed by Daisy in 1868, and Daisy in the Field in 1869. Stylistically, the novels are also a departure for Warner: unlike Ellen or Fleda, Daisy tells her own story. While
Melbourne House is narrated in the third person, Daisy and Daisy in the Field offer the heroine’s first-person perspective. The child Daisy is narrated, while the young woman narrates; part of her maturation is the cultivation of her own narrative voice.
Together, the three novels trace the development of young Daisy Randolph from the late
1850s through 1865. Melbourne House opens on Daisy just before her ninth birthday. Although born in the South, she is growing up at Melbourne House, her parents’ estate in rural New York.
Daisy spends much of this novel unsuccessfully attempting to reconcile her Christian worldview with the views of her worldly and irreligious parents. Daisy sends her to live with relatives at
Magnolia, a southern plantation that she will eventually inherit. Now ten years old, Daisy is horrified to learn about slavery and eager to help the seven hundred slaves who labor to produce cotton and rice for her family’s profit. Guided by her Christian beliefs, she makes efforts to improve the slaves’ situation: she leads a weekly Bible study in the kitchens, and sacrifices her allowance to buy small gifts. After four years at Magnolia, Daisy returns North to attend a boarding school in New York City, where her Christian piety is further tested by vain and worldly peers.
During a visit to West Point in the summer of 1860, she witnesses growing tensions between North and South amongst the cadets. The moral lines are clear: the Northern cadets are stalwart and
153 3: Florida Fantasies honorable, while the Southerners are divisive troublemakers. Daisy even sees a young Jefferson
Davis and instinctively recognizes his “sinister” look (319). As her Southern cousin Preston spits vitriol about Yankees, Daisy grows closer to a cadet from Vermont named Christian Thorold. Their budding romance reinforces Daisy’s commitment to the Union and abolition: the novel ends after the fall of Fort Sumter, with their engagement and Thorold’s enlistment in the Union army.
Daisy in the Field takes place during the Civil War, although Daisy herself spends most of the novel traveling outside the country. Daisy first visits Thorold at a Union army camp in DC, where she affirms her love for him and her allegiance to the Union. Distressed that her sympathies place her at odds with her secessionist family, Daisy is next whisked to Europe—and later
Palestine—to reckon with her parents over her faith, love, and political views. Although she eventually wins her father’s support, his sudden death leaves her alone with a mother who remains adamantly opposed to her beliefs. Daisy and her mother return to America as the war is ending.
They learn that Daisy’s Confederate cousin Preston has been captured, and Daisy hastens to the
Union hospital where he lies wounded. Thorold arrives at the same hospital with an injury that, unlike Preston’s, will prove fatal. Daisy nurses Thorold in his final hours, which coincide with the end of the war, and then returns to Melbourne House with her mother. There, Daisy renews her pledge to live a Christian life and expresses her hope to one day teach in a freedman’s school.
The novels’ focus on the Civil War was atypical for Warner, who said little about the war elsewhere. In a recent dissertation, Amanda Benigni points out that Warner and her sister Anna rarely refer to the Civil War in their wartime children’s magazine, The Little American, and never mention slavery or secession—although other children’s publications regularly engaged young readers on these issues.34 Anna’s biography of her sister also refers only briefly to the war, and
34 Amanda Benigni, Rereading, Rewriting, and Recovering the Literary Legacy of Susan Warner (2015), 128.
154 3: Florida Fantasies
Susan’s extant letters do not suggest that they lost close family or friends in battle; moreover, the fighting never approached their home on Constitution Island (153, 154).35 Warner’s knowledge of plantation life also seems to be secondhand, drawn from slave narratives and other abolitionist texts.36 She clearly relied on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as Daisy compares a kindly slave named Uncle
Darry to Tom himself: “I have read that wonderful story of Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom; he reminded me of Darry then, and now I never think of the one without thinking of the other” (56).
As an abolitionist novel, Daisy attempts to represent the injustices of the slave system through the eyes of its sympathetic child heroine. Daisy feels intense sympathy for the 700 slaves who labor to produce cotton and rice on her family’s plantation, and tries to alleviate the suffering of as many people as she can with her limited capacities. Yet while Daisy is clearly an abolitionist novel in the tradition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the timing of its publication evacuates it of Stowe’s urgency. Recognizing the bizarre belatedness of copying Stowe in 1868, Edward Halsey Foster complains that Warner does “little more than list or state the usual materials of the Abolitionist movement” (94). Benigni more generously frames Daisy as an “attempt to rewrite Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin for the Reconstruction era,” one that ultimately “represents the beginning of
Warner’s support for evangelical Christian women’s activism” (18). Where Uncle Tom’s Cabin advocated “moral suasion” and “self-sacrifice” as strategies for reform, she argues, Daisy teaches
35 Yet given that Constitution Island was just across the Hudson River from West Point, it is possible that the West Point scenes in Daisy were at least partially drawn from Warner’s experiences. Mabel Baker speculates that Warner based Thorold on a real West Point cadet (85); F. G. Notehelfer argues that he was modeled after Warner’s distant cousin Leroy Lansing Janes, a West Point graduate and Union army captain. Daisy herself, Notehelfer argues, may be based on Janes’ first wife Helen (Nellie) Robinson. See Notehelfer, American Samurai (1985), 56-74. Susan later hosted a popular weekly Bible study for West Point cadets, from 1875 to 1882.
36 Edward Halsey Foster, Susan and Anna Warner (1978), 94. Benigni also speculates that Warner’s influences included Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation (1863), the abolitionist memoir of actress Fanny Kemble, whom the Warner sisters had befriended in 1859 (161). She may also have learned about plantation life anecdotally from Bertha and Willis Buckner, former slaves who joined the Warners as hired servants in the 1860s (181–183).
155 3: Florida Fantasies its heroine that Christian responsibility extends to engaging in “social activism” (155). Instead of becoming “a Christ-like martyr for the abolitionist cause” like Stowe’s Eva, Daisy tries to improve the lives of the slaves at Magnolia. According to Benigni, she is Warner’s attempt to create “a new role model” for evangelical women teaching freedmen in the South during Reconstruction (158).
It is certainly possible that Warner wrote Daisy as a handbook for Reconstruction-era
Christian evangelical activism. Yet if Warner truly did seek to model Reconstruction-era activism, one might wonder why she chose to set Daisy in the 1850s—or why, having done so, she did not at least begin to imagine Reconstruction-era activism at the end of the series. Ultimately, Warner seems only able to envision Magnolia as an antebellum space. This may be the reason that
Magnolia and its inhabitants fade further and further into the background as Daisy grows up.
Moving away from abolitionist sentimentalism, the novel instead spirals into a number of other genres: the boarding school story, the war story, the love story. The story of Reconstruction is not, however, one that this Daisy will tackle. Indeed, the conclusion to Daisy in the Field suggests that
Warner did not know how to move past 1865, and could not imagine how life in the South might look after the Civil War. At the end of the novel, Daisy reflects briefly on her future:
My only care is to do exactly the work He means I shall do. It is not so easy always to find out and make sure of that. I would like, if I followed my liking, I would like to go South and teach in the Freedmen’s schools somewhere. But that is not my work now, for mamma claims me here [at Melbourne]. (331)
While Daisy expresses a desire to teach in freedmen’s schools, the novel itself will not take her back South. Warner instead cloisters her at her childhood home in New York, where mother and daughter—one mourning the Confederacy, the other hoping to be part of a progressive New
South—remain unreconciled. Left to keep house together in the war’s aftermath, their domestic situation allegorizes that of the reunited yet still divided nation. Daisy in the Field essentially becomes Melbourne House all over again, as the Civil War and the aborted marriage plot put the
156 3: Florida Fantasies adult Daisy right back where she started at age ten. Unlike the child Daisy in the late 1850s, however, this adult Daisy is not permitted to attempt reforming the plantation system. In its reluctance or inability to imagine Reconstruction, the Daisy series is not necessarily unusual among Civil War novels of the late 1860s. Rebecca Harding Davis’s Waiting for the Verdict
(1868), for example, ends in April 1865 as the people of the American nation “stand waiting for its verdict” (361). And of course, it is also possible for a novel set during the antebellum period to model Reconstruction-era reform. Yet I do not believe that the Daisy novels are most convincingly read in these terms. I view these novels as essentially backward-looking, and thus believe that they are most interesting when read alongside the novel in which Warner did imagine plantation life after 1865. Bread and Oranges suggests that Warner required a very different set of conditions for writing the postbellum South than those that she established at Magnolia plantation in Daisy.
From Daisy Randolph’s Civil War to Maggie “Daisy” Candlish’s Reconstruction
While the Daisy novels and a series of Biblical histories occupied Warner between 1865 and 1869, her writing between 1870 and 1877 was dominated by Sunday school novels. During this period, the religious publisher Robert Carter & Brothers printed four novels in her A Story of Small
Beginnings series (1870–1872) and seven novels in her Tales Illustrating the Lord’s Prayer series, also called the Say and Do series (1873–1877).37 Bread and Oranges appeared in the latter series, which is organized around the lines of the Lord’s Prayer. The novels follow Maggie Candlish, nicknamed Daisy, as she learns to lead a Christian life through the friendly teachings of her uncle
Eden Murray. In the first book, The Little Camp on Eagle Hill (1873), Uncle Eden discovers that
Maggie and her siblings do not know the meaning of the Lord’s Prayer. The series unfolds from
37 For a bibliography of the Warners’ publications, see Dorothy Hurlbut Sanderson, They Wrote for a Living (1976). Edward Halsey Foster also provides a helpful narrative sketch of this period in Warner’s career (87–101).
157 3: Florida Fantasies this premise, with Uncle Eden educating the children on specific lines of the Lord’s Prayer in each novel. Bread and Oranges, the fifth book, focuses on the line “give us this day our daily bread.”
Warner’s postbellum novels are usually dismissed as part of an increasingly didactic, repetitive turn, which evacuated them of the rich characterization that made early works like The
Wide, Wide World and Queechy so beloved.38 The waning of her mainstream appeal is reflected in her publishing history: while she published her first two novels with Putnam, she published most of her later didactic books in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s with Carter’s religious press. Yet her
Sunday school series are not without complexity. Sondra Smith Gates, for example, has argued that Warner’s Sunday school novels forwarded progressive ideas about Christian charity.39 Gates shows that Warner’s contributions to the genre reflect the values and concerns of the social gospel movement: while Sunday school books generally focused “on the personal virtues of middle-class
Christian children,” excluding the working class, Warner focused on identifying “causes and solutions for poverty” in accordance with this evangelical Protestant movement (3, 12). Her child characters regularly “correct the injustices perpetrated by their elders,” motivated by their own
“emotional responses to scenes of suffering” (11–12). Gates ultimately argues that Warner’s
Sunday school books suggest “radical revisions of capitalist systems of exchange” in the process, though their “solutions to economic injustice” are often less than satisfactory (12, 16).
The omission of Bread and Oranges from Gates’ treatment of the Sunday school novels— and from Warner scholarship more broadly—is a significant one.40 Bread and Oranges is the only
Lord’s Prayer novel to transport Maggie to the South. Its first half chronicles Maggie’s visit to a
38 See, for example, Edward Halsey Foster, ch. 5–6.
39 Sondra Smith Gates, “The Edge of Possibility: Susan Warner and the World of Sunday School Fiction” (2004).
40 To my knowledge, there is no existing scholarship on Bread and Oranges.
158 3: Florida Fantasies
Florida orange plantation, where she joins family friends on a health-inspired vacation. The second half recounts a disastrous sea voyage, in which Maggie and company are shipwrecked on a deserted Caribbean island while traveling to Jamaica. Meanwhile, the first four Lord’s Prayer novels are all set in New York. Although Maggie and her family move between rural and urban locations, including the Catskills and New York City, they never stray beyond state lines. The sixth novel, The Rapids of Niagara, restores them to New York with a family vacation to Niagara
Falls. “I must premise,” Warner notes up front, “that the party had returned from Jamaica” (5).
In its attempt to represent life on a Southern plantation during Reconstruction, Bread and
Oranges necessarily complicates Gates’s narrative about labor in Warner’s other novels. Where the other books in the Lord’s Prayer series promote social activism guided by religious belief, as
Gates shows, the investment of Bread and Oranges in religious lessons about God’s provision of daily bread actually obscures human workers—enabling Warner to avoid confronting the injustices embedded in labor relations in the Reconstruction South. Bread and Oranges is also a necessary complement to Warner’s representation of the South in the Daisy series. While Daisy in the Field refuses to imagine the adult Daisy’s life after the Civil War, Bread and Oranges is set clearly—if quietly—during Reconstruction. Although the timeline of the Lord’s Prayer series is not stated, the seven novels appear to span the years 1870 to 1874.41 At the very least, Bread and Oranges is definitely set after the war: in a rare reference to historical time, one character dates a family anecdote back to the year 1866 (185).
41 I’ve done some sleuthing to come up with the timeline. The first two novels, The Little Camp on Eagle Hill (1873) and Willow Brook (1874), take place across a period of months in the same year. In Willow Brook, Uncle Eden mentions that October 9 of that year is on a Sunday (7). Assuming that Warner was true to her calendar, this novel must have taken place in 1859, 1864, or 1870. Given that it is clearly not a wartime novel, the likeliest possibility is 1870. References to seasonal changes suggest that the next novel, Sceptres and Crowns (1875), takes place in the winter of 1870–71; while The Flag of Truce (1875) takes place in the spring and fall of 1871. Since Warner notes that Bread and Oranges begins the following March, this novel is most likely set in the spring of 1872. Accordingly, The Rapids of Niagara (1876) likely begins in the summer of 1873, and Pine Needles (1877) in the fall of 1874.
159 3: Florida Fantasies
It seems no accident that Maggie’s nickname is “Daisy,” and that she is nine years old at the start of the series—the same age as Daisy Randolph at the start of Melbourne House. While
Daisy Randolph came of age during the Civil War, it is likely that Maggie “Daisy” Candlish was born sometime in 1861.42 This second Daisy is so young that she probably has no memory of the war at all. The Lord’s Prayer novels themselves, at least, are amnesiac about it. For example, these novels occasionally refer to West Point—the place where Daisy Randolph witnessed the growing pre-war rift between North and South in Daisy. The Lord’s Prayer series, however, frames West
Point only as a decontextualized point of interest: in Sceptres and Crowns (1875), for instance,
Maggie’s sister desires an opera glass in order to see various sights from their house, “people coming on the river…people at West Point: and ever so many things” (229).
In Bread and Oranges, Warner revises Daisy’s experience at the Magnolia cotton plantation with a new generation of heroine, Maggie “Daisy” Candlish; new landscapes in Florida and the Caribbean; a new crop, the orange; and a new genre, the Sunday school book. Giving up on the Daisy of the aborted Civil War bildungsroman, Warner rewrites her as a child of
Reconstruction: a Northern girl with an unconflicted relationship to the South, who is simply trying to regain her health in sunny climes. Her depiction of Maggie in 1870s Florida is oddly divorced from the questions of labor that occupied Daisy Randolph. Where the sympathetic Daisy attempted to address the injustices of the slave system in the antebellum South, Maggie is little concerned with the labor of freedpeople in postbellum Florida. Warner frames Florida as a blank canvas, an ahistorical place of rest and rehabilitation in which agricultural production—thanks to the role of
God and Nature—is entirely disconnected from human labor.
42 Assuming that the series opens in 1870, she must have been born around the start of the Civil War in 1861.
160 3: Florida Fantasies
Forgetting the Hand: Labor and Reconstruction in Bread and Oranges
As the title suggests, Bread and Oranges is a novel centrally concerned with food production and consumption. The novel takes “give us this day our daily bread” as its anchoring line from the
Lord’s Prayer, and Maggie’s early conversations with Uncle Eden focus on the sources of the food on her plate at mealtimes. More lessons emerge as the characters attempt to procure food in the aftermath of two disasters: a house fire at the Florida plantation, and a shipwreck in the Caribbean.
Each disaster forces Maggie and the Franklins to reflect on their food sources, always under the
Christian guidance of Uncle Eden. To be sure, the “daily bread” theme was standard in the Sunday school genre long before Warner published Bread and Oranges.43 Yet this novel is unique within the genre for its setting in Reconstruction-era Florida, which necessarily complicates the absence of laboring bodies.
Like Palmetto Leaves, Bread and Oranges characterizes Florida’s orange groves by their abundance, reliability, and wildness. The novel’s opening scene depicts Maggie seated on the veranda of a “large frame house” in Florida, her lap “full of orange blossoms” in the first of many gestures towards abundance (6). On their way to fetch Uncle Eden from the station, Maggie and her young friend Meredith Franklin drive through a “rather wild” scene full of “rank and rich and untrimmed” vegetation: “Sometimes orange plantations, which looked as if they took care of themselves; sometimes woodland, which certainly nobody gave himself any trouble about; other times wild land and wild low shrubbery; still not like the briars and thorns of the North, but luxuriant and of lovely growth, like all the treasure-sweet naturework of the South” (15, my emphasis). Appearing to care for themselves, the orange plantations are also inextricably entwined
43 The American Sunday School Union, for example, published a pamphlet entitled “Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread,” in which a kind Christian woman provides an impoverished widow and her children with food.
161 3: Florida Fantasies with the wilderness: the scene alternates rapidly between orange plantations, woodlands, and other
“wild” Southern vegetation. Maggie also contrasts this landscape with the New York wilderness, experienced on a camping trip in a previous novel. Where rural New York has huckleberries and blackberries only “for a little while in the summer,” Florida has “oranges and ever so many other things the whole year round” (16). This abundance means that the family can feed “on oranges as much as they liked” (8). As if to illustrate this point, in the very first scene Meredith emerges from the orange groves with an armful of “the ripe fruit” for Maggie and his mother (8). “There are always oranges,” Maggie points out matter-of-factly (10).
The fantasy of the laborless orange grove extends to the Franklins’ rented plantation, which is located in a “wilderness of orange blossoms” (5–6). This plantation is explicitly decoupled from agricultural labor, as a description of the barn on the property makes evident: this barn was “built rather for carriages and horses than for the storage of crops, which indeed did not grow and were not expected to grow on the place” (70–71). Warner also implies that the plantation house is recently constructed, “built by a business friend of Mr. Franklin” as part of his speculation in oranges (8). This friend is likely one of the many Northern speculators who began growing oranges in Florida after the war. It is explicitly a place of leisure: Mr. Franklin rents it as a vacation home, where his invalid wife and Maggie can recover from illnesses. While he also plans to send “the fruit to market,” the family seems to need to do nothing in the way of cultivation (8). The new house, the lack of crops, and the Northern vacationers all signal that this plantation has no legacy of slave labor and also no expectations of future agricultural work.
Nevertheless, the plantation house is noticeably surrounded by small cabins belonging to free black families. Given the shadowy history of the plantation, it is unclear whether or not these individuals are former slaves; whether they are longtime inhabitants of Florida or recent arrivals;
162 3: Florida Fantasies and whether they are landowners, or sharecroppers, or wage laborers. Warner shies entirely away from defining the labor system that governs the operation of this property. Maggie assumes that the “poor people in the cabins” must live on oranges, given their apparent poverty and the perennial abundance of the fruits (9). Although the Franklins dismiss the idea as naïve, Maggie’s vision of living on oranges in fact reflects the novel’s running refusal to connect the procurement of food with agricultural labor. Even when she learns that the cabin occupants survive “on pork and corn bread…with now and then a variety of game and coffee,” she stubbornly persists that “they could” live on oranges nonetheless (10). Warner’s wilderness of self-propagating oranges supports this idea, especially given the suggestion that this plantation does not actually produce crops.
Indeed, the novel persistently divorces the orange both from the history of slavery and from agricultural labor altogether. In a telling example, Uncle Eden explains how Maggie’s breakfast orange was prepared for her:
“Maggie wants an orange to finish her breakfast, and she has got it. It was full ripe, yellow and sweet, hanging on the tree, ready to be plucked. But that is not the whole. Months ago there was a white orange blossom just there on the branch. Nobody meddled with it; and in due course of time its white petals shrivelled up and a tiny little green seed-vessel began to shew itself. Daily and daily it grew, it swelled out to a little hard ball, and still waxed larger and larger, and by and by began to change its green and become faintly yellow; and all the while a wonderful manufactory of sugar and juices and perfume withinside was going on under the sun’s rays and by the ministry of the air. Sweeter and juicier and riper it grew every day, until its moment of perfection had come; and Maggie wanted it for her breakfast.” (24, my emphasis)
Here, Uncle Eden encourages the children to think about the growth of the orange as God’s work— a form of work that excludes human “meddling.” Urging the children to recognize “God’s hand” behind all works of nature, he points out that God carefully provides for the “daily bread” of all creatures. “We see the work and forget the hand,” he quips (27). Yet ironically, this revelation of
God’s labor also forgets the human hands required to grow, tend, and gather the oranges. Helped
163 3: Florida Fantasies by the language of wilderness, whereby sun and air become the ministers of God’s bounty, Uncle
Eden’s description divorces orange cultivation from human labor practices.
The climactic event in these Florida chapters is a fire that destroys the plantation house, in an episode that echoes and adapts the burning of the schoolhouse in Palmetto Leaves. Only when the house catches fire do the black families living in the nearby cabins become visible: “a motley crowd of men, women, and children, all the poor coloured people of the immediate neighborhood indeed, with the servants of the family,” come out to watch it burn (60–61). The responses of the
Franklins’ black neighbors range from ambivalence to exultation. Only a few people help to salvage the family’s belongings. One man, whom Warner describes as an “imp,” does “a most provoking dance of exultation” that mirrors the “exultingly rejoicing and triumphant” flames (62–
63, 67). Warner’s sympathies clearly lie with the white family, yet the dancing man’s exultation suggests that the burning of the plantation house should be read symbolically. While most Florida narratives—like Palmetto Leaves—luxuriated in such plantation houses, Warner’s burns entirely to the ground, leaving only the cabins and “the orange trees on the other side.” (69).
On the one hand, Warner burns the plantation house seemingly to establish a new economy of relation between the poor black families and wealthy white vacationers. Maggie and the
Franklins retreat to the barn with an assortment of salvaged possessions, and must procure food from their neighbors: passing by an unsavory family of “Georgia crackers,” they knock instead at the cabin of a black family (77). Uncle Eden pays them “liberally” for their generous offer of sweet potatoes, in an exchange that establishes neighborly friendliness and models fair compensation for the produce (79). Symbolically burning down the plantation house, Warner appears to validate these small farms—where black families grow their own sweet potatoes and corn—as an agricultural model, independent of the plantation house formerly at the center. Uncle Eden even
164 3: Florida Fantasies uses the remains of that house to prepare their food for consumption: stoking “a place of live fire,” he roasts the potatoes in its ruins (80). “I declare! you’re using the old house to cook our supper,”
Meredith exclaims (82). The produce of the black family’s small farm not only sustains the white
Northerners, but also is roasted in the ashes of the house that both symbolized their life of leisure and visibly echoed the ‘big house’ of a slave plantation. Warner seems to create a reciprocal relationship between the white family now living in the barn and the kindly black families in the cabins, establishing a new domestic order from the ashes of the plantation arrangement.
On the other hand, in the aftermath of the fire, Uncle Eden again takes several opportunities to develop a fantasy of food production without humans. This section of the novel is obsessed with crops that were, until recently, grown by slave labor: coffee, sugarcane, and tobacco. However,
Warner seems determined to avoid any mention of slavery. Consider Uncle Eden’s description of sugarcane production, which is displaced both to the recent past and to an ambiguous geography:
“Your imagination may now go back, months and months back, to a place and time where a great plantation of something looking a little like Indian corn filled many a wide acre. It might be in Jamaica, it might be in Louisiana; where the sun is hot and the summers are long. This plantation was not Indian corn, but sugar cane; taller-growing than ever you have seen the other...For a year or more the canes were growing and ripening, from which our bowl of sugar, and a great many other bowlfuls, were afterwards obtained. The canes are known to be ripe when the skin is dry and smooth, the cane heavy, and the pith is grey, with a thick sweet sap. Can you imagine the field of thick standing canes, a dozen feet high, with a tuft of leaves at the top of each; and your bowl of sugar there?” (142)
Uncle Eden’s description locates sugarcane cultivation outside of Florida, and specifically in two places historically associated with slave-produced sugar: Jamaica and Louisiana. Like Stowe,
Warner subtly displaces the cash crops most deeply entangled with slave labor to other geographies. Just as Stowe does with cotton, Warner detaches sugarcane from Florida’s future— despite the fact that Florida had a robust sugarcane industry both before and after the Civil War.
Even more bizarrely, Uncle Eden also displaces sugarcane cultivation to the past: emphasizing that
165 3: Florida Fantasies
Meredith’s bowl of sugar was harvested more than a year ago, he implicitly encourages the young boy to detach that bowl of sugar from the process of cultivation. Asking Meredith to imagine just a cane field and a sugar bowl, he elides the work required to transform one into the other. When
Meredith inevitably asks how “they” create sugar, Uncle Eden describes the process wholly in the passive voice: “The canes are cut in dry weather, tied in bundles, and carried to the crushing mill….The juice is immediately put into a great iron boiler...and from boiler to boiler it is passed…” (143). Although his description takes several pages, he narrates it entirely without explicit reference to human agents.
In fact, Warner’s only descriptions of human farmers are all displaced out of the American
South. Mr. Murray locates the origins of their bread in the American West, asking the children to imagine “a farmer somewhere in western prairie lands...ploughing a certain field” and “working to get your daily bread ready” (129). He locates the origins of their coffee in the West Indies, asking the children to imagine “a West Indian field” and “fancy the coloured people picking the berries from the trees” (139–149). And he locates the origins of their tea in China, asking them to
“think of the olive coloured Chinese, at the other side of the world, with their long queues of hair down their backs, who years ago roasted and rolled and dried the leaves of Mrs. Franklin’s tea”
(170). On one level, Maggie’s plate participates in a phenomenon that Dolan traces in Stowe’s
Florida writing: Warner encourages her young readers to conceive of a national economy that includes wheat fields of the West, orange groves of the South, and dairy farms of the North—the economy, in other words, of a reunited and reconciled nation.44 Warner adds world cuisine to this picture, presenting a global economy that also includes the coffee fields of India, Africa, and the
West Indies; the salt mines of England; and the tea manufactories of China. On another level,
44 See Dolan, Beyond the Fruited Plain, ch. 3.
166 3: Florida Fantasies however, Maggie’s plate specifically evacuates black laborers from US agricultural fields. Asking the children to imagine an implicitly white farmer in the American West, Uncle Eden’s only reference to laboring “coloured people” locates those workers in the West Indies. Meredith later replicates this pattern, marveling that “the plantation of sugar canes that grew long ago somewhere, was intended to furnish our sugar that we are drinking this morning; and the Chinese pig-tails that were flourishing over the hot pans of tea leaves nobody knows when, were about your business, mother…” (172). The sugar plantation that he imagines is depopulated, as well as displaced in time (“long ago”) and space (“somewhere”). While the “pig-tails” begin to suggest a human form working over the tea leaves, this work also occurs in ambiguous time (“nobody knows when”).
In this way, Bread and Oranges quietly erases black labor from food production throughout the American South. According to one of Uncle Eden’s lessons, humans are all cogs in “a complicated machine” of agricultural industry (155). He explains to the children that the world is
God’s “great factory,” where “the men and women are only his instruments and tools,” deploying a metaphor for food production that mechanizes all farm laborers as the tools of divine will (171).
“Chinese or American, it is all the same,” he adds (171). Yet it is not all the same: while the implicitly white Western farmer appears embodied in the labor of growing wheat, black Southern laborers are obscured in the process of growing sugarcane. The Franklins’ rented Florida plantation perfectly epitomizes this broader phenomenon: defined by leisure and an abundant “wilderness” of oranges, it has at best an obscure relationship to agricultural labor. Although Warner briefly alludes to the poor black families engaged in subsistence farming around the plantation, she quickly backs away from this image. Rather than explore the possibilities represented by this new economy, she doubles down on a narrative of God’s bounty that ultimately removes the novel’s
white vacationers from the Reconstruction South altogether.
167 3: Florida Fantasies
Warner’s Island Fantasy
While the first half of Bread and Oranges is anchored in and around the Florida orange plantation, the second half takes the Franklins, Uncle Eden, and Maggie still further south to the Caribbean.
In hopes of restoring Mrs. Franklin’s health, the travelers set off on an ill-fated voyage to
Jamaica—a British colony with its own brutal history of slave labor. The travelers are waylaid by a storm on a tiny, nameless, deserted island. Stranded for seven days, they must rely on their resourcefulness and on God’s providence to survive. While the island is uninhabited, it has not always been so: they stumble upon a “poor sort of house,” long deserted and in disarray, which they outfit with the furniture from the ship (247). Ultimately, this deserted island detour allows the family to continue playing out a fantasy of laborless food production: they discover that this land is wildly abundant, thanks to the efforts of past inhabitants who have mysteriously disappeared.
Rejecting both Florida and Jamaica, Warner instead takes her travelers to an imagined island without any recognizable history of colonization, slavery, or civil war.
This section of the novel once again adjusts the diet of the travelers. For their first few days on the island, the group survives on a trunkful of food from the ship: bread, salted beef, coffee, cheese, sugar, sea biscuit, sardines, bananas, and Florida oranges. As their supplies dwindle, they begin to explore the island in order to replenish their stores with local food sources. Maggie and
Meredith discover free-growing sweet potatoes, oranges, bananas, and coconuts, while an entire chapter is devoted to an episode of turtle hunting by moonlight in the “wilderness” (418). By day six, they are breakfasting largely on foods that they have scavenged and hunted on the island. “An odd breakfast you would have thought it,” Warner tells her American readers. “They had coffee, it is true, but no bread and butter. Instead, were boiled sweet potatoes, baked turtle’s eggs, ripe
168 3: Florida Fantasies bananas, cocoanut milk, and oranges” (425). The coffee is the only part of the meal that has come from Florida: all the rest has been collected on the island.
The deserted island invites the castaways to gather food that they have done no work to cultivate. Warner repeatedly affirms that there are no other humans on the island. “Jist a very fine country, with nobody to have no good of it, that we could see,” pronounces one sailor after surveying the land (273). Yet the traces of human inhabitants are everywhere, beginning with the house. “Somebody lived here once,” Meredith notes seriously (274). Uncle Eden echoes the observation, pointing out that these past inhabitants likely farmed the land: “Once this island was occupied, and not very long ago; and there ought to be traces of cultivation left, in both fruits and vegetables” (340). Meredith and Maggie go on a scavenging expedition to find these traces, speculating along the way about what they might find:
“What do you suppose they could have planted?” “Maggie, I am not certain; but fruits and vegetables, I should suppose; and possibly sugar canes, or tobacco. I have seen nothing yet but what was of wild growth.” “I wish we could find some sugar canes.” “Yes, but I do not expect that. There have never been many people here, and those that were here did not stay long. I suppose it was too lonely for them, and too far from all the rest of the world. You see, Maggie, it’s only a very little island.” (345–346)
Meredith is quite right: they find neither sugarcane nor tobacco, but an abundance of sweet potatoes, bananas, and coconuts instead. The scene echoes and amplifies several lessons about food production in the Florida section. First, it again divorces the crops from human labor. The act of planting and growing is displaced back in time, along with the humans who performed this labor. Since that time, the domesticated crops and the wilderness have blended together. The children’s scavenging journey emphasizes this entanglement of the domestic and the wild: they find the barest trace of a path midst the “wild plants” (343); Meredith spots bananas planted by human hands from a “wilderness hillside” that looks “as wild as wild could be” (348, 347); and he
169 3: Florida Fantasies recognizes a sweet potato vine while standing “among the vines and weeds and plants that grew wildly together” (353). Finely attuned to the variations in plant growth, Meredith is able to pick the domestic crops out of the wilderness with which they have become tangled.
Second, the crops that they find on the island mirror the crops found on the Florida plantation. It is significant that the island’s previous inhabitants never grew sugarcane or tobacco—two cash crops cultivated through slave labor in both the American South and the
Caribbean. This island is small, and has never had enough inhabitants for large-scale plantation farming. It is an island sized for a single family, living in a single house. Instead of cash crops, the children find sweet potatoes and tropical fruits. Instead of luxuries like sugar and tobacco, they find basic staples: “anybody can live on sweet potatoes,” notes Maggie in an echo of her earlier comment about oranges (356). These sweet potatoes recall their meal of sweet potatoes after the
Florida plantation fire, supplied by their black neighbors. Here, Warner reaffirms the small family farm but oddly displaces even that into the past—in place of the black farmers, she presents a wilderness full of crops left over from another time by farmers who are long gone.
Finally, Meredith observes that the island was likely “too far from all the rest of the world” for the former inhabitants (346). Warner explicitly compares their “colonial existence” to that of
Robinson Crusoe and the Swiss Family Robinson, although her castaways are more accurately re- colonizing an island whose previous inhabitants have left them with an agricultural foundation
(386). Stopped from going to Jamaica, an island with its own history of British imperialism and— until abolished in 1833—slave labor, the travelers instead land on a nameless fantasy island cut off from the rest of the world and from the world market. On this imagined playground, with no real history of its own, Warner seized an opportunity to envision produce without human providers,
170 3: Florida Fantasies imparting her religious lessons detached from the global-historical context of colonialism and slavery that undergirded neighboring agricultural economies.
The message of the book, of course, is ultimately a religious one: God is the provider, and through his will the travelers are able to acquire their “daily bread.” This lesson is repeated and developed on the island, where Maggie and company learn that sometimes “the want of bread for the body may be a sort of bread for the soul” (428). The absence of foods that they are used to having—bread, butter, milk—will help them to remember “that all their good things come from
God and are to be used for him” (428). It is through their Biblically significant week on the island that Meredith becomes a true Christian, committing himself to serving God. The island is thus a convenient place to drive home the novel’s spiritual lessons, and it is no accident that the castaways are rescued shortly after this last revelation about “bread for the soul.” Although Florida is the most conducive Southern state in which to teach these religious lessons about God’s provision of daily bread, they are ultimately best taught on a deserted fantasy island beyond US borders entirely.
While Stowe at least considers the economic situation of former slaves at the end of
Palmetto Leaves, Warner ultimately retreats to an imagined island where God’s grace has ensured the preparation of food for the stranded family. The island fantasy removes the black laboring families visible in Florida, and allows the Franklins to exist on semi-wild fruits cultivated in the past by unknown farmers. In both Florida and the Caribbean, the Franklins lose all their material goods; their experience of downward mobility, however, is only temporary in each case. Warner does restore them to the continental US—but significantly, she restores them to the North and keeps them there for the rest of the series. Much like E. D. E. N. Southworth in Britomarte, the
Man-Hater, Warner deploys an imaginary deserted island in order to model small-scale family farming. Like Southworth, she seems interested in revising the plantation model but unable to
171 3: Florida Fantasies articulate that revision fully on US soil. As the Daisy series does, Warner’s novel of Reconstruction ends up retreating from the South altogether. Ultimately, Warner’s religious teachings about daily bread suppress any possibilities for social activism around Southern plantation labor by moving free black workers entirely to the margins.
Stowe and Warner in Context: Orange Cultivation in Other Popular Florida Travel Literature
Palmetto Leaves and Bread and Oranges are not the only Florida narratives that almost or completely absent human labor from the story of orange cultivation. Indeed, three Florida travel narratives that rivaled Palmetto Leaves in popularity also reinforce the fantasy of the abundant, reliable, self-cultivating Florida orange grove: Ledyard Bill’s A Winter in Florida (1869), the
Florida sections of Edward King’s The Great South (1875), and George Barbour’s Florida for
Tourists, Settlers, and Invalids (1882). These texts make explicit the argument about orange cultivation that is embedded implicitly in Stowe’s text: framing the orange as a crop that will yield abundant returns with a very lean labor force, they encourage their Northern readers to imagine postbellum Florida as a land of small orange farms that—with only one or two laborers—will generate the commercial returns once associated with cash crops cultivated on large-scale slave plantations. Collectively, these guidebooks frame oranges as a distinctly Southern crop that can be cultivated on the model of the small-scale family farm.
In A Winter in Florida, a chapter devoted to orange cultivation predictably opines on
Florida’s abundant, reliable, self-sustaining trees. Like Stowe, Bill relates marvelous examples of productivity: a tree reported to have produced ten thousand oranges, while “far beyond the common experience,” nonetheless becomes the model for “what may be done” (201). Drawing on all the same tropes as Palmetto Leaves, Bill claims that the orange tree is a “very easy tree to manage,” suffers little threat from insects, and can be counted on as both a “prolific” and “steady”
172 3: Florida Fantasies fruit-bearer (202, 203). The chapter combines this promising depiction of abundance and reliability with one of self-sustainability. “No fruit-tree will sustain itself and produce fruit so well [as the orange tree] under neglect and rough treatment,” Bill proclaims confidently (200). He even includes the trope whereby stormy weather assists with orange picking, noting that sometimes “the winds and storms but gradually shake them off” the trees (202). But his most surprising claim is a statement about the number of laborers necessary to cultivate an orange grove: “The labor of one man is quite sufficient to tend the largest grove in Florida, except at the time of gathering, when two are required” (201). While Palmetto Leaves never states the size of the labor force required to cultivate oranges, it is implicitly guided by the same labor principle that Bill articulates here. A
Winter in Florida makes explicit what is just under the surface in Palmetto Leaves: orange cultivation is a form of agriculture in which one man’s labor will generate enormous returns.
“These advantages, in connection with its longevity,” Bill concludes, “make it the most profitable and least expensive fruit grown in America” (203).
King and his illustrator James Wells Champney replicate this phenomenon in The Great
South, a volume that generally embraced black labor as a tourist attraction. As Rebecca Cawood
McIntyre shows, the pair portrayed black laborers “in every conceivable type of agricultural landscape,” including fields of cotton and sugar cane (110). On one level, then, it is not surprising that King indicates the presence of black orange-pickers in his account of Florida. On another level, however, King’s description is much subdued when compared with parallel descriptions of black laborers cultivating other crops in other states throughout The Great South. Here is King’s account of his visit to the orange grove of Colonel Harte, one of Stowe’s neighbors:
Just across the river from Palatka lies the beautiful orange grove owned by Colonel Hart [sic], in which seven hundred trees, some forty years old, annually bear an enormous crop of the golden fruit, and yield their owner an income of $12,000 or $15,000. The trees bear from twelve to twenty- five hundred oranges each; some have been known to bear four or five thousand. The orchard
173 3: Florida Fantasies
requires the care of only three men, an overseer and two negroes. The myriads of fish to be caught at any time in the river furnish material for compost heaps, with which the land is annually enriched. At the gateway of this superb orchard stand several grand bananas; entering the cool shade—some resplendent December day—one finds the negroes gathering the fruit into bags strapped at their sides, and bearing it away to storehouses where it is carefully packed for the steamers which are to bear it North. (402, my emphasis)
It is telling that King mentions the two black laborers primarily to emphasize how few people are required to complete the work. King emphasizes both the abundance of the orange crop and the minimal labor required to cultivate this extraordinary yield: an overseer and two black workers are all it takes to tend the grove, gather the fruits, and pack them for shipment. Champney’s illustration of the scene, moreover, does not even show the briefly mentioned laborers (Figure 4). The image depicts an extensive orange grove, with dozens of trees stretching out in rows. A lone orange- picker stands at the top of a ladder in the foreground, his arm extended to pluck an orange from a tree. Almost two dozen oranges lie scattered at the ladder’s base, reflecting abundance and ease: while the orange-picker carries a sack for collecting the fruits, these oranges have apparently fallen of their own accord. The orange-picker is a white man, likely either the overseer or Harte himself.
Setting this single figure against a profusion of orange trees, the image erases the black orange- pickers mentioned in the prose and reproduces the fantasy of abundant yield with minimal effort.
At the same time, King’s brief mention of the black orange-pickers does help to shed light on a parallel episode in Palmetto Leaves. Stowe also visited the Harte grove, and reported briefly on that experience in one of her sketches. Her description of the grove is quite similar to King’s in most respects: she marvels at its hundreds of orange trees, remarks on Harte’s use of fish as compost, and meets the white “agent” who oversees the grove (263). Yet the two black laborers mentioned in King’s narrative are nowhere to be found in Palmetto Leaves (263). By merely acknowledging their presence in Harte’s grove, King makes visible what is completely invisible
174 3: Florida Fantasies in Stowe’s account. Like Champney’s illustration, Stowe’s description of the Harte plantation suggests that the white agent is the only employee on the premises.
Figure 4. “Just across the river from Palatka lies the beautiful orange grove owned by Colonel Hart,” James Wells Champney, The Great South (1875), p. 402.
For Champney and King, there is clearly something alluring about the minimal labor force requisite for orange cultivation. This allure is at once economic, and also romantic: Champney’s image idealizes the vision of a solitary white orange cultivator in an abundant grove, departing from his displays of black laborers crowded in the cotton fields elsewhere in The Great South.45
Perhaps The Great South is simply acknowledging that oranges require less manual labor than other crops. Yet this dual emphasis on abundant yield and minimal labor, I argue, clearly reconceptualizes one of Florida’s largest and most lauded orange groves as an idyllic pleasure garden with almost no workers attached. If images of cotton-picking fulfilled one white Northern tourist fantasy about the South, the orange grove surely fulfilled another: the Southern plantation
45 On Champney’s depictions of cotton-picking, see McIntyre 109–111.
175 3: Florida Fantasies without the uncanny echo of slave labor or the necessity of negotiating waged black labor, but rather manageable entirely through the labor of a single white farmer.
This ideal is most explicit in travel writer George Barbour’s Florida for Tourists, Settlers, and Invalids. Barbour published his guide roughly ten years after Palmetto Leaves, and perhaps for this reason it sings a more cautious tune about orange cultivation than the earlier accounts.
“Contrary to what used to be the prevalent idea,” he notes, “the orange requires careful cultivation, and will not flourish without it” (248). His chapter on “Orange-Culture” provides specific advice for would-be orange farmers, on everything from choosing a location, to evaluating soil quality, to purchasing land, to planting and fertilizing orange trees.46 Barbour seems eager to dispel 1870s fantasies of self-propagation, and warns his readers not to believe the exorbitant estimated profits so often noted in discussions of Florida orange groves. His evaluation of orange cultivation is more sobering than the one fielded by A Winter in Florida: “In conclusion, it must be said that orange- groves do not make themselves; their value, indeed, consists in the very fact that it takes years of hard labor and a very considerable expenditure of money in the mean while to raise them” (250).
Yet despite these more realistic reflections, Barbour also emphasizes the minimal labor force required for orange cultivation. For Barbour, oranges are perfectly suited to a model of small- scale yeoman farming. His examples of successful orange growers exemplify this ideal of the high- yield orange farm, cultivated on a few acres by one or two intrepid white farmers:
Among other places, we visited the Spratt orange-grove, one of the finest in Florida, with one thousand trees growing on ten acres. The founder, Mr. Spratt, came here about ten years ago, an old man, and with but little means or money. He commenced clearing the land all by himself, and now has a grove hard to surpass…That grove is sure to produce henceforth an income of several thousand dollars annually; and it is an evidence of what one poor old man can do by living a camping-out sort of life for a few years.” (38–39)
46 Moreover, he refers readers to two manuals containing even more detail on these topics: A. H. Manville’s Practical Orange Culture (1883) and T. W. Moore’s Treatise and Handbook of Orange-Culture in Florida (1881).
176 3: Florida Fantasies
At one of the few houses encountered on the route (a handsome new building, occupied by a family from Illinois), we stopped and were shown a splendid large orange-grove, yielding the owner an income of several thousand dollars annually. He had come here very poor, had lived cheaply and worked hard, and is now reaping his reward.” (49)
In both cases, Barbour emphasizes the initial poverty of the orange cultivator as well as his outsider status: one comes from Illinois, and the other—while his origins are not mentioned—clearly arrived from elsewhere during Reconstruction. In both cases, the labor of that single poor white farmer is rewarded with a successful grove and economic returns. Even the book’s frontispiece reinforces this message: it is Champney’s illustration of the single white orange cultivator at the
Harte grove, first published in The Great South.47 Barbour does include an image of black orange- pickers in his book, the only one that I have found in a Florida guidebook from this period (240).
Yet this image also reinforces the idea of a limited labor force: just two black orange-pickers labor in the foreground, while a woman with a parasol and a child wander in the background (Figure 5).
Barbour’s closing reflections most fully promote his ideal of the small family orange farm.
Here, he encourages Northern settlers to invest in small five-acre groves that can be easily self- managed without hired labor:
A fruitful cause of failure among new-comers to Florida is their greed for vast possessions; they want a hundred-acre grove at an outlay not sufficient for ten acres. Remember, it costs money, labor, and tedious time to produce an orange-grove; and a snug, well-cared-for, thrifty grove of five acres, with say three hundred trees, all brought to quick and prolific bearing, is a far surer and more desirable investment than one three or four times as large which can not be kept in an equally high state of cultivation. Observation has shown that a small grove can be brought to bearing from two to three years sooner, and at much less proportionate expense of money and labor, than a very large one. One reason of this is, that in a large grove the work must all be performed by hired laborers, while in a small one the owner is quite likely to do much of it himself. (300)
47 Unlike Stowe and King, however, Barbour has little to say about Harte’s grove; he simply calls it “one of the most famous in the State” (113).
177 3: Florida Fantasies
Figure 5. “Orange-Trees,” George Barbour, Florida for Tourists, Invalids, and Settlers (1882), p. 240.
Barbour extends this ideal to several other crops in his guidebook, which positions Florida as an exceedingly favorable state for a dizzying array of agricultural endeavors: “All the crops of all portions of America can be grown in Florida,” he confidently proclaims (264). Thirty to forty acres of corn can be cultivated by “[o]ne person with one mule” (268); and various crops and livestock can be easily raised in the Indian River Region, where “[t]he labor of one man, when once properly established, may make his thousands” (139). Amazingly, sugar cane—one of the crops most notoriously tied up with large-scale plantation labor—is also rehabilitated on the model of the small family farm:
It is known that one small planter near Picolata, during the past year, with no help except that of his own little boy, made from two acres of land forty barrels of sugar and five hundred gallons of sirup; and I have already told of the planter on Indian River who, with the assistance of one negro man, netted sixteen hundred dollars for five acres. (267)
Barbour makes explicit what is implicit in Stowe’s Palmetto Leaves: the fantasy of abundant produce given minimal human labor. His volume most explicitly envisions Florida’s agricultural
178 3: Florida Fantasies future as a series of small farms that can cultivate any crop—even sugar—with at most one or two black laborers to assist the white landowners. Any crop, that is, except cotton.
Cotton is the only crop that does not fit into Barbour’s fantasy of small-scale Florida farming. His few reflections on cotton are relatively tepid, deemphasizing its productivity: “Of all the various field-crops cotton has by custom ranked as the staple product in this State; however, it is one of the least productive, although it pays as well here as in any other State or country where it can be grown” (264). In one passing sentence, however, Barbour articulates the heart of his perspective on cotton: “Generally speaking, cotton is a safer crop in Florida than anywhere else; but it is subject to some risks from drought, rain, cold, and caterpillars, and other crops which require less attention and are less dependent upon negro labor are superseding it” (267, my emphasis). Barbour states the underlying principle in all of these works: cotton requires far more black labor than orange cultivation—or apparently, any other agricultural endeavor—and this is the reason that it is less attractive in Florida. Barbour explicitly envisions the future of Florida as one that does not depend on black labor—and it is cotton, so inextricably tied to the image of black laborers in the field, that cannot be fit into this vision. In a chapter entitled “Florida Folks and
Families,” he clearly articulates his ideal of a Florida built entirely on white Northern and Western industry: “The negro, I think, will not play a permanent or prominent part in Florida. In moderate numbers, no doubt, he will always be found there, but his shiftless, incompetent, and indolent ways will not long be endured by the class of vigorous and thoroughgoing Northern and Western men who constitute the bulk of the immigration to Florida at present” (238). Again, Barbour’s Florida for Tourists makes explicit what is implicit in Palmetto Leaves and the other travel narratives:
Florida’s agricultural future would be one of white farmers cultivating a variety of crops through their own labor, phasing out black wage laborers, sharecroppers, and independent farmers entirely.
179 3: Florida Fantasies
Coda: Playful Labor and Laborious Play in Sarah Stuart Robbins’s One Happy Winter
At least one contemporary of Stowe and Warner registered this literary pattern of laborless orange- growing, and resisted it in her own Florida writing. Sarah Stuart Robbins (1817–1910) was a prolific writer of children’s fiction and travel narratives, who published at least 46 books for young readers between 1863 and 1890. Her older sister was author Elizabeth Wooster Stuart Phelps
(1815–1852); and her niece was Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (1844–1911), the popular author of
The Gates Ajar (1868). Phelps Ward traveled to Florida in the 1870s, publishing sketches of St.
Augustine for the Atlantic Monthly as well as an illustrated gift book called A Lost Winter (1889).48
Her verses in this book present Florida as a serene paradise: “Deep hearted as an untried joy / The warm light blushes on the bay, / And placid as long happiness / The perfect sky of Florida” (34).
Like her more famous niece, Robbins took an interest in Reconstruction-era Florida. Her children’s travel narrative, One Happy Winter: Or, A Visit to Florida, was published in 1878. The genre was familiar to her: in 1869, she had published six books in a children’s travel series called
Butterfly’s Flights. While that series focused on Northern US and Canadian travel, One Happy
Winter takes its heroine—another Maggie—on a Southern tour that ends in St. Augustine, Florida.
In December 1875, fourteen-year-old Maggie Ware, a self-proclaimed “Massachusetts girl,” travels down the coast to Florida with her mother and older sister (41). Her sister’s doctor has prescribed the trip for her health, relying on familiar tropes as he urges her to leave “the shut-up, cold, dismal, northern winter” and recover “in the perpetual summer of the semi-tropics” (9). The book is presented as Maggie’s diary, in which she reflects on her experiences in her own voice.
48 See “Going South” (Atlantic Monthly, January 1876) and “Confession of St. Augustine” (Atlantic Monthly, February 1876). She also included a Florida interlude in her novel The Story of Avis (1877).
180 3: Florida Fantasies
When the Wares arrive in Florida, Robbins takes an unusual opportunity to critique the labor-as-leisure paradigm of orange growing. Indeed, this novel frames the orange grove as a
“playground” only in the eyes of naive Northern children who do not have any real experience with labor. Like Bread and Oranges, One Happy Winter seems to be a direct response to Palmetto
Leaves. Robbins was certainly aware of Stowe’s presence in Florida: in one scene, Maggie travels by steamer through “Mandarin, where Mrs. Stowe lives” (98). When the boat passes Stowe’s house with its “fine orange grove,” the children are disappointed that they cannot stop for “a better look”
(98). Yet unlike Bread and Oranges, Robbins’s novel explicitly rejects the trope of labor as leisure in the voice of a black worker intimately familiar with the hard work of orange cultivation.
As the Wares travel from Massachusetts to Florida, Robbins consciously tracks their progress south through the relative cost and abundance of oranges in various cities. In Philadelphia,
Maggie’s friend Herbert buys an orange from a fruit man’s stall. In Savannah, they see a moderately sized orange tree with at least twenty-five oranges. When an orange falls out, Maggie convinces Herbert to leave it behind: “Think of stealing the first orange we saw at the South, how would it sound!” (60). At last, in Florida, they purchase and consume oranges: Herbert buys six oranges for 25 cents, “almost as much as they cost at the North” (72). While oranges cost only slightly less in Florida than they do in the North, they are far more beautiful and delicious for the price. The young people later go on a pleasure outing to pick wild oranges, where they see trees with thousands of fruits. As they move farther and farther south, oranges become increasingly abundant and more freely available.
Yet the naivete of Robbins’s child narrator is also reflected through the orange, in an episode that plays on the Northern children’s lack of knowledge about Florida fruits. When Maggie visits the wild orange grove with Herbert and other young friends, they learn a telling lesson from
181 3: Florida Fantasies a black boatman named Ben Pride. After guiding their sailboat up the St. Johns River, Ben brings the young tourists to a public grove where oranges are free for the taking. Maggie marvels at the large trees, “covered, literally covered, with great, glorious ripe oranges!” (84). Ben informs the awe-struck children that “two or three thousand” oranges grow on each tree, in a now-familiar narrative of abundance. “Plenty grows here in Florida,” he adds (85). After picking “a heap of oranges,” Herbert asks permission to eat them. “As many as you wish; dem dare for the public,”
Ben replies (85). Yet as they bite into the oranges, the children are surprised by their bitter taste: these wild fruits are sour oranges, not good for eating. Herbert even tosses his oranges into the river, as the rest of the company laughs. Jokingly, Ben encourages Herbert to continue gathering the inedible fruit: “Why, sar, dem dare Florida oranges, for sure, sar, help yourself, dey public property, sar, no charge, plenty of them” (86). Ben knows what the children do not: oranges never come free for the eating, and cannot simply be plucked from the wilderness. The children’s Irish nurse, meanwhile, explains that wild sour oranges can be turned into orangeade, teaching Maggie how to properly use the fruits. Robbins contrasts the naivete of the white Northern children—who see the grove as a magical place of abundance—with the wisdom of the boatman and the nurse, who know that wild-growing oranges cannot be consumed or marketed like domestic oranges.
Domestic oranges, as this Maggie learns, only arrive on her plate as a result of hard labor.
Late in the novel, Maggie visits a neighbor’s abundant orange grove in St. Augustine. She reports that the grove holds “eighty thousand” orange trees, some of which have “two thousand five hundred oranges on them, and from one thousand three hundred up was very common” (190).
While Maggie’s leisurely tour of the grove does not include any displays of labor, she has a telling experience in the packing house where the oranges are processed after picking:
This was the sorting-room. After the oranges are gathered they are put on the floor here, and left for a few days to sweat before packing; then each one is wiped, and carefully rolled in a bit of clean
182 3: Florida Fantasies
paper. Herbert was rolling away as if that was his home, and he had been trained to it. At first I was shocked, but I never can tell how such things happen—they just are. I was sitting down beside him, rolling too, and when the mothers came there we were. There was the best-natured negro there, who seemed to have the care of things, and when my mother asked him if we troubled him, he said: ‘No, no; dat dare new work for ‘em; p’r’aps if day had more dey wouldn’t like it quite so well— my boys don’t.’”
I don’t see how any children could ever be tired of handling these beautiful things. I could have sat there and packed all the rest of the day, if Herbert would have stayed too, but mother bought a quantity of oranges here, and I think Herbert wanted to get home to eat them. He said he never knew how to feel for Eve before, about that apple, you know, in the Garden of Eden; that if it looked half as tempting as some of the fruit he had seen that morning, he thought she ought to have had me along, to be kept from tasting not, touching not, handling not. (192)
This episode directly counters Stowe’s vision of the laborless orange grove. Maggie frames the repetitive work of the sorting-room—wiping oranges and rolling them in paper—as a form of play, a continuation of their leisure tour in the grove. Escaping adult supervision, Maggie and Herbert freely choose to roll oranges for fun. Maggie never describes this as work, but rather as “handling these beautiful things,” framing it as an experience of tactile and aesthetic pleasure.
The only person to describe the packing-house in the terms of labor is the black worker
“who seemed to have the care of things” (191). He relates the pleasure that Maggie and Herbert take in the “work” to its novelty, noting that if they had more work they would dislike it as his own children do. The moment highlights Maggie’s naivete: she reads repetitive hard labor as pleasurable play, because she does not have to do it every day. In the voice of the caretaker, whose own children labor in the packing-house without pleasure, Robbins undercuts the myth of orange- growing as a leisure activity. The caretaker’s words make visible the hidden labor in this ostensible pleasure garden. While the white Northern children play at packing oranges as part of their Florida vacation, their black counterparts must do the work of packing oranges every day. The end of the episode highlights this distinction: while Maggie would like to keep packing all day, Herbert breaks off in search of another pleasure—eating the oranges that his mother has just purchased.
183 3: Florida Fantasies
Having made the storing-room a temporary “home,” he quickly abandons it for the opportunity to be a consumer rather than a producer. His familiar Garden of Eden analogy also resituates him within the world of pleasure-going vacationers who envision Florida as a tropical paradise.
This episode breaks down the ideal of orange farming as leisure, and the orange grove as a site of pleasure. There is hard, repetitive work taking place in the background, and there are black children laboring behind the doors of the packing-house. To think of this labor as play is to have the perspective of a naïve Northern child, one lacking in sympathy with the black children who labor in the packing-house. The child of Reconstruction, Maggie cannot enter into the experiences of her unseen counterparts; and in Maggie’s blithe conception of orange cultivation as play,
Robbins embeds a critique of her predecessors’ Floridian fantasies. One Happy Winter is clearly in dialogue with Palmetto Leaves—and possibly with Bread and Oranges, although it is unclear whether Robbins knew of Warner’s novel. Robbins both notices and critiques Stowe’s tendency to obscure the dependence of Florida orange groves on black labor. Presenting similar images of oranges by the thousands, Robbins contextualizes this abundance in the packing-house, where all of these oranges must be wiped down and hand-rolled in paper: pleasurable play to white Northern children, but repetitive and difficult for the black children who perform the work day-to-day.
Robbins’ reflections on labor and leisure in the packing-house are part of a broader commentary on the place of history in Florida tourism. This commentary becomes highly apparent in a short but fraught episode that Robbins imagines at Stowe’s Mandarin home. As their boat passes the house, the Ware’s servant Hannah expresses appreciation for Stowe and a desire to see her. Maggie’s mother assumes that she wants to see Stowe because it would be “a literary treat,” a response that irks Hannah considerably (99). She rebukes her employer, explaining that she does not care about the literary aspect: her admiration is rooted in the “flesh and blood part of it,” in
184 3: Florida Fantasies
Stowe’s willingness to call black Americans “brother” and “sister” (99). In this exchange, Robbins articulates a tension between the tourist impulse to enjoy a decontextualized “literary treat” and the historical imperative to remember the abolition movement. At Stowe’s Mandarin home, her abolitionist legacy and her present life of Florida leisure collide. Robbins emphasizes this point by having another tourist refer to Stowe’s house as “only Uncle Tom’s cabin,” seemingly disappointed in its size and scale. While Hannah recalls Stowe as the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, many visitors experience her home with historical amnesia as a tourist attraction—one that is regrettably unimpressive, an “Uncle Tom’s cabin.”
This tension between historical memory and present pleasure weaves throughout Maggie’s narrative of her “happy winter,” in which she often expresses paranoia and anxiety about traveling through the South. In a chapter entitled “Distressed by Politics,” Maggie worries that her family’s
Northern sentiments will lead to their imprisonment in Charleston. As they tour the ruins of houses destroyed by Union forces during the war, Herbert expresses satisfaction with the scene: “‘It’s an awful, old, tumbled-up place…and I, for one, am glad of it. If it hadn’t been for that famous shot from Fort Sumter’—” (44). He is interrupted mid-sentence by a street vendor, whom he initially mistakes as “a policeman going to nab me for treason” (44). Maggie shares this anxiety about
Southern surveillance: when a family member calls out to them from afar, she too initially assumes
“that some one had heard what Herbert said about that first gun from Sumter, and the Governor of
South Carolina had sent to arrest us” (47). Her paranoia continues throughout their visit, even leading her to censor herself in her journal. “I am afraid to write any more here, for fear some one will get a peep inside of my journal and betray me,” she notes, after expressing anxiety that her mother voiced opinions about the South in public. “I wish we were away from Charleston; I shall never have a moment’s comfort while we are here” (47–48). Yet when the family moves on to
185 3: Florida Fantasies
Savannah, Maggie continues to self-censor. She writes only briefly about the Union invasion of the city because she fears that if her diary is “taken possession of by some one, authorities, you know—the governor of Georgia, or some of his council—we might be arrested” (62). Maggie refuses to even write the word “confederacy” in her journal, adding that the Southerners seem generally polite and cordial, “not a bit stiff, or as if they lived in a con—I didn’t write the word— city” (63). One Happy Winter offers a cutting and paranoid vision of the postbellum South, one in which the child heroine envisions danger from state officials and worries that her diary may be confiscated as evidence of treason. In this novel, the child tourist’s experience of the South involves as much fear and anxiety as it does leisure and pleasure.
In Designing Dixie (2014), Reiko Hillyer argues that promoters of Florida tourism after
1865 effectively “erased” the state’s involvement in the Civil War from its history (45). In the popular vacation city of St. Augustine, she shows how the tourist industry diverted attention to the state’s “Spanish colonial history” instead of its more recent “Confederate past” (45, 46). One
Happy Winter is an exception to this general rule, in the way that it frames the state’s violent history. If Maggie is naive about the orange-packing, she is highly aware of history and the potential for violence—both sectional and racial—and state surveillance. Before her trip to Florida,
Maggie learns a great deal about its history from readings provided by her father. These readings introduce Maggie both to Florida’s present tourist pleasures and to its bloody past: “I like to hear about the hunting and the birds, flowers and oranges; but for the history, it has been nothing but fights—fights—fights! white people fighting each other because they were not of the same religion, and the poor Indians killing both parties as fast as they could get a chance…” (25). Maggie positions the Civil War as merely the most recent of the many past “fights” in Florida:
Florida was, of course, a slave State until the Emancipation act. I heard mother ask father, to-day, if he supposed the Southerners bore the Northerners any ill-will for all that happened during the
186 3: Florida Fantasies
civil war, and father said probably they did, and he should prefer not to discuss these times with them; but he thought they were too poor, and too dependent upon the Northerners for the money they brought them, to do any harm.
I never dreamed before of being frightened, but suppose they should rise upon us, and cut all our throats,—boys and all! Only think what a horrid butchery it would be! St. Augustine seems to me to have been nothing but a vast slaughter-house from the first of its settlement. I mean to ask father to have my life insured before I go, so, if anything should happen, some one would be the better for it” (25).
Here, Maggie connects Florida’s involvement in the Civil War with a long history of violence dating back to the Spanish settlement of St. Augustine in the sixteenth century. Her assessment of
St. Augustine as “nothing but a vast slaughter-house from the first of its settlement” even includes the possibility of future violence in a vengeful uprising by its Southern inhabitants. Maggie’s obsession with Florida’s past briefly resists the tourist impulse chronicled by Hillyer: the young narrator of this novel learns about Florida’s history of slavery and its involvement in the
Confederacy, tying these forms of violence to earlier antebellum and colonial conflicts. Although
Maggie’s desire to have her life insured might strike older readers as comic, her fears are merely an exaggerated reflection of her parents’ stated concerns about Southern “ill-will.”
One Happy Winter refuses, in other words, to lose itself entirely in scenic reveries on
“birds, flowers and oranges.” In privileging the fears and anxieties of its child narrator, the novel actually resists the impulse to present her travels in the South—and especially, in Florida—as a leisurely stroll through an aestheticized landscape scrubbed of recent history. In One Happy
Winter, Robbins does what neither Stowe nor Warner wanted—or was able—to do: she presents
Florida as not just a tourist fantasy, but a place of historical strife. Her narrative is not focused exclusively on leisure, but reflects on the racial dynamics of the labor underpinning Florida’s postbellum orange economy.
187
CHAPTER 4 Border Ruffians and Free Staters: Mythologies of Bleeding Kansas in the Post-Reconstruction Historical Romance
In May of 1854, the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act pushed Kansas territory to the forefront of the already heated national conflict over slavery. In addition to establishing the territories of
Kansas and Nebraska, the act stipulated that slavery’s status in each would be determined by popular vote, thereby overriding the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Almost overnight, Kansas became a battleground for the status of slavery in the West, as both anti-slavery and pro-slavery advocates sought to flood the territory with sympathetic voters. In the North, the New England
Emigrant Aid Society encouraged anti-slavery settlers to move to Kansas in support of the “free state” mission of outlawing slavery. Meanwhile, pro-slavery forces from neighboring Missouri— a slave state—made their way across the border to intimidate anti-slavery voters and cast pro- slavery votes at the polls. Erupting into a series of violent outbreaks between 1854 and 1858, the conflict made national news under the epithet of “Bleeding Kansas.”1
By the spring of 1856, this conflict had reached fever pitch. The previous year, pro-slavery
Missourians had successfully elected a pro-slavery territorial legislature in Kansas by riding over the border to flood the polls with votes. Their intimidation tactics, meant to keep free-state settlers from voting, helped them to earn the nickname of “border ruffians.” Free-state Kansans rejected the legislature, establishing their own constitution and choosing their own territorial governor and legislature. In May of 1856, this political unrest culminated in a shocking series of events. On May
1 Bleeding Kansas is the subject of numerous scholarly books and essays. See, for example, Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel, Bleeding Borders (2009); Jeremy Neely, The Border Between Them (2007), especially ch. 2–3; Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas (2004); Michael Fellman, “Rehearsal for the Civil War” in Antislavery Reconsidered (1979), ed. Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman; and Jay Monaghan, Civil War on the Western Border, 1854–1865 (1955). On the history of slavery in Kansas and Missouri, see Kristen Epps, Slavery on the Periphery (2016); Harriet Frazier, Runaway and Freed Missouri Slaves and Those who Helped Them, 1763-1865 (2004); and Diane Mutti Burke, On Slavery’s Borders (2010). 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
19 and 20, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts decried the Kansas-Nebraska Act in a speech entitled “The Crime Against Kansas,” urging for Kansas’s admission to the Union as a free state.
On May 22, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina attacked Sumner while he was alone in the Senate chamber, violently beating him with a gutta-percha cane and immediately sparking a national outcry. On May 21, meanwhile, Missouri pro-slavery forces attacked the anti-slavery stronghold of Lawrence, Kansas, destroying its newspaper offices and hotel, and terrifying its citizens. The abolitionist leader John Brown, who had arrived in Kansas a few months prior, led a controversial retaliation that came to be known as the Pottawatomie massacre. Riding to
Pottawatomie, Kansas in the middle of the night, Brown and his followers pulled five pro-slavery men from their homes and murdered them. Guerrilla violence on the Kansas-Missouri border continued in the years leading up to the war.2
Historians now frame Bleeding Kansas as a precursor to the Civil War, a conflict that encapsulated the tensions of the much larger battle to come.3 Nineteenth-century Americans also thought about Bleeding Kansas in these terms, as Craig Miner has shown in his study of national press coverage on the conflict: widely considered “a ‘test’ or a battleground” for the very survival of the nation, Bleeding Kansas became the high-stakes subject of a national “media circus” (1, 5).
The events of May 1856 inspired a veritable deluge of press coverage across the nation, with newspapers frequently describing the conflict itself as a civil war (17). Bleeding Kansas also inspired passionate pleas from abolitionist writers, among them John Greenleaf Whittier, Lydia
Maria Child, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In their appeals, the Kansas-Missouri border came to
2 For a more extended account of these events, see Etcheson, ch. 7–8. On Brown’s abolitionist campaign in Kansas and its evolution in cultural memory, see R. Blakeslee Gilpin, John Brown Still Lives! (2011), ch. 2–3.
3 Michael Fellman, for example, defines Bleeding Kansas as a “rehearsal” for the Civil War (“Rehearsal for the Civil War,” 306). In Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory (2016), however, Matthew Christopher Hulbert points out that this perspective can obscure how different the “irregular” guerrilla warfare on the border was from Civil War combat (4).
189 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters clearly represent the border between two sections and two ideologies: the anti-slavery North and the pro-slavery South. Whittier wrote multiple poems about Bleeding Kansas, including “The
Kansas Emigrants,” which compared emigration to Kansas with the establishment of Puritan New
England in the name of freedom: “We cross the prairie as of old / The pilgrims crossed the sea, /
To make the West, as they the East, / The homestead of the free!”4 Stowe initially published a rousing call to American women in January 1854, urging action against the Kansas-Nebraska bill: women should not only feel right about the matter, but also “get up petitions in their particular districts to our National Legislature,” hire lecturers, and share Congressional speeches against the bill.5 She wrote her second novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), as the Kansas conflict unfolded. While set in North Carolina, it included recognizable allusions to Bleeding
Kansas, including two instances of beating with the exact type of cane that Brooks used to beat
Sumner on the Senate floor. Rifles sent to Kansas free-state settlers were casually called
“Beecher’s Bibles” for Stowe’s brother Henry Ward Beecher, who advocated providing arms to the abolitionist forces in the conflict. Calls to the nation came from within the territory as well:
Sarah Robinson, wife of the free-state governor Charles Robinson, published an 1856 memoir that fervently urged New Englanders to support the free-state cause.6
Novelist Lydia Maria Child also wrote in support of the free-state cause, and her strategically timed sentimental novella The Kansas Emigrants appeared at the height of the conflict. Deeply unsettled by the events of May 1856, Child wrote in a July letter that her “anxiety
4 John Greenleaf Whittier, Poems of John Greenleaf Whittier (1857), 200.
5 Harriet Beecher Stowe, “An Appeal to the Women of the Free States of America, on the Present Crisis in Our Country” (1854), 57.
6 Sarah Robinson, Kansas: Its Interior and Exterior Life (1856). For a survey of 1850s writing about Bleeding Kansas by Kansas women, see Nina Baym, Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927 (2011), 136–138.
190 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters about Charles Sumner and the sufferers in Kansas has thrown a pall over everything.” In another letter, she affirmed her belief that the “noble martyrs of liberty in Kansas will prove missionary ghosts, walking through the land, rousing the nation from its guilty slumbers.”7 The Kansas
Emigrants was serialized in Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune in October and November 1856, with the intention of securing the Republican presidential victory that Child hoped would cement the free-state cause in Kansas.8 The novella is a sentimental tale of two white couples who heed the abolitionist call to settle in Kansas, only to find themselves embroiled in the border conflict and witnesses to the sacking of Lawrence. In the end, Child castigates New Englanders for refusing to do more to help their brothers and sisters in Kansas. As Margaret Kellow has shown, Child not only leveraged sentimentalism in service of her political argument, but also framed the free-state struggle as part of a larger “American story” by comparing it to Puritan New England and the
American Revolution (41). Child’s sentimental appeal firmly situates this local conflict in relation to the larger sectional conflict, as her focus on emigrants makes clear: Child’s heroes are all from
Northern states, valiantly bringing their anti-slavery principles to Kansas soil.
Unlike Florida, Kansas territory thus swept to the foreground in the years immediately prior to the Civil War. Bleeding Kansas became a harbinger of the war to come, and sentimental abolitionist appeal concentrated on defending the territory against slavery. Both Stowe and Child recognized the crucial importance of the Kansas question, and their sentimental rallying cries encouraged Northerners not only to feel but to act in sympathy with the free-state cause. Yet although Kansas had become a veritable anti-slavery beacon by the spring of 1856, its time in the
7 Lydia Maria Child, Letters of Lydia Maria Child (1882), 80, 79.
8 See Margaret Kellow, “‘For the Sake of Suffering Kansas’” (1993), 38–39. While Republican John C. Fremont lost the presidential campaign to Democrat James Buchanan, the free-state cause still triumphed when Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state in 1861. On Child’s rhetorical strategies in The Kansas Emigrants, see also Carolyn L. Karcher, “From Pacifism to Armed Struggle (1988).
191 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters national spotlight was also relatively brief. According to Miner, Bleeding Kansas had largely faded from national news by the summer of 1858 (240). Sporadic guerrilla violence did continue in the territory, and John Brown—who had departed Kansas in 1857—returned late in 1858, when he successfully led the escape of eleven slaves from a Missouri plantation. Yet Brown himself would also soon turn from Kansas to prepare for his raid on Harper’s Ferry in October 1859. Kansas was eventually admitted to the Union as a free state in January 1861. Pro-slavery Missouri, moreover, stayed loyal to the Union.9 While guerrilla warfare continued to plague both states throughout the war—including another raid on Lawrence, Kansas in 1863, led by the notorious guerrilla fighter
Bill Quantrill—this fighting remained ancillary in the larger story of the war.10
Although the Kansas question had been settled by its admission to the Union, the story of
Bleeding Kansas in fact continued to unfold after the Civil War. While Reconstruction-era Florida became the stage for stories, novels, and travel narratives that muted its history of slavery in the name of tourism and leisure, Kansas became—after Reconstruction—a stage for historical romances rooted in this 1850s border conflict over the expansion of slavery. While Stowe and
Warner turned from sentimental appeals to pastoral idylls of Florida in the 1870s, an array of authors in the 1880s and 1890s moved Bleeding Kansas from the genre of the sentimental to the genre of historical romance. No longer the territory of sentimental reformers, this decades-old border conflict took on new historical valances that have yet to be fully articulated. This chapter recovers these narrative recursions to Bleeding Kansas, showing how post-Reconstruction novels
9 Although the slave population in Kansas Territory before 1861 was quite small, the claim that there had never been slavery on Kansas soil was part of the free state “myth.” On slavery in antebellum Kansas, see Epps.
10 As Hulbert shows, however, there is incredible value in bringing that ancillary fighting—what he calls the “irregular war,” to the foreground (4). Several histories of the Civil War now specifically address the fighting in Kansas and Missouri: see Michael Fellman, Inside War (1990); Donald Gilmore, Civil War on the Kansas-Missouri Border (2005); and Deborah Goodrich Bisel, The Civil War in Kansas (2012).
192 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters manipulated this border conflict variously in the name of reconciliation and revolution, region and section, mythology and reality. These narratives offer competing claims not only over the history of Bleeding Kansas, but also over the racial and political identity of Kansas after 1880. Recovering an underexplored post-Reconstruction coda to the story of Bleeding Kansas, I argue that this narrative afterlife—even among Northern and Kansan writers, who generally shared a desire to celebrate the state’s anti-slavery past—was far more convoluted and contested than sentimental abolitionist appeals of the 1850s would suggest.
Much like the narrative imaginings of Florida during the 1870s, depictions of Kansas— and specifically Bleeding Kansas—during the 1880s and 1890s also introduce new dimensions to the story of national reconciliation after the Civil War. As Nina Silber has shown, the “romance of reunion” had become deeply embedded in Northern culture by this time. Promoting sectional reunion through visions of the Old South that drew on its idealized “regional iconography,” the romance of reunion both venerated the southern planter class and backed away from political advocacy for black Americans (5). Northern reconciliation fiction often culminated in a marriage symbolic of the Union victory, with a Northern hero winning over a Southern belle (123). Yet while the “romance of reunion” defines a central narrative in postbellum reconciliation culture, the
Bleeding Kansas novel introduces a new Western version of this narrative in a territory that lacked the “regional iconography” of either section.
To be sure, recent scholarship has interrogated the role of the West in Civil War memory.
Silber herself argues that the West broadly functioned as an idealized site of sectional harmony in the Northern romance of reunion: “its newness, its openness, and, perhaps especially, its whiteness, could erase the vestiges of sectional distinctiveness” (190). She offers Owen Wister’s popular novel The Virginian (1902), in which the titular Virginian reinvents himself as a Wyoming cattle
193 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters farmer, as an archetypal case: the novel frames the West as a “locus of sectional unity,” suggesting that it is where the best qualities of the Southern gentleman will flourish (188). In The Ghosts of
Guerrilla Memory, meanwhile, Matthew Christopher Hulbert specifically probes the meaning of the Missouri-Kansas border in Civil War memory. Hulbert shows that many Civil War guerrilla fighters in Missouri, known casually as bushwhackers, were later depoliticized into “gunslingers” of the American West. Obscuring their Confederate political ties in what Hulbert calls a process of “Americanization through westernization,” retellings of their exploits gradually transformed them from Confederate agents to wild outlaws (12).
Following both Silber and Hulbert, I understand the West broadly—and the Missouri-
Kansas border specifically—as an integral site for the postbellum reconciliation narrative. At the same time, the Bleeding Kansas novels gathered in this chapter complicate the story of the West as a “locus of sectional unity.” They also constitute a peculiar exception to the “Americanization” of Missouri guerrilla fighters “through Westernization,” because they frequently implicate the figure of the Missouri border ruffian—predecessor to the Civil War bushwhacker—as the chaotic center of pro-slavery violence. As a pre-war conflict, Bleeding Kansas was not a distraction from the main theater of war but rather the war of the 1850s—a civil war in miniature. Funneled through this conflict, the “romance of reunion” fractures in unexpected ways. Decades after the events of
Bleeding Kansas, historical romances of the 1880s and 1890s began to generate new regionalized forms of reconciliation. The narratives that emerged from Bleeding Kansas duel over the project of reconciliation itself, deploying the regional figure of the border ruffian to alternately venerate and vilify the Old South. They also duel over whether the promise of postbellum Kansas belonged strictly to white American farmers, or extended to black Americans seeking new opportunities in the wake of Reconstruction. Embodied in Bleeding Kansas, the pre-war West resurged in a
194 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters surprising array of Northern and Kansan novels—some inventing new regional narratives of reconciliation, others engaging in strident sectionalism that defied the very idea of reconciliation.
Bleeding Kansas novels of the 1880s and 1890s, this chapter argues, constitute a surprising regional variant on a now-familiar story about the reconciliation romance.
Historical romances began to rehearse and revise the Bleeding Kansas conflict in the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction. Nina Baym first noticed a late surge of Bleeding Kansas fiction by Kansas women writers in Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1937 (2011).
According to Baym, Kansas women published books about the state in two historical clusters. The first cluster appeared in the 1850s and early 1860s, as the border conflict raged around them. In the early 1880s, however, Kansas women authored a new wave of novels, histories, and travel guides focused on Kansas life—including several Bleeding Kansas novels.11 Baym’s list of post-
1880 Bleeding Kansas novels can be expanded to include several other works by American men and women, Kansans and non-Kansans alike. In addition to numerous historical romancers whose names have long been forgotten, Bleeding Kansas drew the attention of two major post-
Reconstruction authors: the white lawyer and novelist Albion Tourgée in the early 1880s, and the
African-American novelist Pauline Hopkins in the early 1900s. Tourgée’s novels addressed the hopes and failings of Reconstruction, witnessed first-hand in his capacity as a North Carolina judge during the 1870s, while Hopkins decried racist violence at the turn of the twentieth century. I argue that the post-Reconstruction Bleeding Kansas historical romance is not only a coherent sub-genre, but also a sub-genre shaped by its emergence in the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction. Across the next twenty years, this panoply of authors waged a new contest over the symbolic meaning of
Kansas after 1880.
11 For Baym’s full list of Kansas women writers between 1880 and 1927, see American West 138–145.
195 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
Early 1880s: Two Visions in the Wake of the Exoduster Migration
It is no coincidence that Bleeding Kansas novels reappeared in the immediate aftermath of
Reconstruction, which had officially ended in 1877. In the wake of Reconstruction, as historian
Nell Irvin Painter has documented in Exodusters (1976), Kansas became a nationally symbolic refuge for black Americans seeking respite from the South.12 Between 1877 and 1879, migrants from Tennessee and Kentucky founded several black settlements in Kansas. Benjamin “Pap”
Singleton, a former slave from Tennessee and the self-proclaimed “Father of the Kansas emigration,” established the Singleton settlements in 1877 (117). Singleton believed that prosperity for black Americans required migration out of the former slave states (108–109).
Arguing that this migration would force white planters to reckon with labor shortages and rises in cotton prices, he hoped to that black migrants would one day be able to return to a chastened South
(116–117). Black Kentuckians, inspired by Singleton, soon founded Nicodemus colony, which boasted a population of approximately 700 people by 1880 (150). Kansas migration reached its height during the “Kansas Fever Exodus” in the spring of 1879, when approximately six thousand black Americans migrated to Kansas from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas (184). The
Exodusters sought to escape racist violence and intimidation, fearing especially that conditions for black Americans in the South would worsen with the end of Reconstruction (191, 193). Migration from these states continued through 1881, but more gradually and in smaller numbers (200).
During March and April 1879, extensive news coverage of the migration brought Kansas to the forefront of national consciousness once again.13 This news coverage continued to develop
12 On the Exoduster migration, see also Robert G. Athearn, In Search of Canaan (1978). On local black migration from Missouri to Kansas during the Civil War and late 1860s, see Neely 150–155. As Neely points out, this “cross- border resettlement” was generally more “spontaneous and independent” than the Exoduster migration (151).
13 Although as Painter notes, this coverage was “out of proportion to” the relatively small scale of the migration (147).
196 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters the mythology of Kansas as an Edenic refuge, a homeland for black Americans seeking to escape the violence and terror of life in the post-Reconstruction South. Many well-known abolitionists, including Sojourner Truth, Wendell Phillips, and William Lloyd Garrison, spoke in favor of the
Exodus (247).14 While homesteading and farming opportunities attracted both black and white settlers to Kansas during the 1870s, the state’s symbolic history carried special weight for black
Americans. For the Exodusters, explains Painter, “Kansas represented something that Nebraska and the Dakotas did not” (159). Kansas was the “quintessential Free State, the land of John
Brown,” and “blood [had] flowed freely during the 1850s” to protect that freedom (159). At a New
Orleans convention on migration in April 1879, black newspaper editor George T. Ruby noted that
“Kansas with her freedom and broad prairies, with the memories of John Brown and his heroic struggle, seems naturally the State to seek.” According to Ruby, the “very name” of Kansas gave black Americans “the same longing and all-pervading desire to leave here and go there as the magic name Canada gave in that time to the slave” (qtd. Painter 215). Brent M. S. Campney also credits this pervasive mythology, which he terms the “Free State narrative,” with encouraging black Americans to migrate to Kansas. Rooted in Bleeding Kansas history, the Free State narrative portrayed Kansas as an Eden unblighted by a history of slavery, and a refuge from racist violence.15
The Exoduster migration is an essential context for postbellum historical novels about
Bleeding Kansas, the first of which appeared in its immediate aftermath during the early 1880s.
Although set in the 1850s, Bleeding Kansas novels of the early 1880s were ultimately invested in the state’s postbellum identity in the wake of the Exoduster migration. Would Kansas be a homeland for black Americans fleeing the South, as this migration seemed to promise? Novelist
14 The exception was Frederick Douglass, who did not support the Exodus. See Painter 247–250.
15 Yet as Campney shows, the actual reception of the Exodusters was not so idyllic: many white Kansans resisted black migration to the state, and a white mob led a brutal lynching at the height of the Exodus (63–68).
197 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
Albion Tourgée certainly seemed to think so. In nearly back-to-back novels, Tourgée included
Kansas subplots that link the state’s anti-slavery history with its potential to become a model of postbellum racial harmony: the Reconstruction-era plot of Bricks Without Straw (1880) features a
Kansas emigration inspired by the Exodusters, while a subplot in Hot Plowshares (1882–83) revisits Bleeding Kansas. His vision contrasted sharply with the vision articulated in historical romances by white Kansas novelists. While Tourgée celebrated Kansas as a model of postbellum racial harmony, white Kansans began writing historical novels that both celebrated the state’s anti- slavery history and emptied Kansas of black communities at the same time. Set thirty years in the past, this fiction framed postbellum Kansas as a space for white settlers—a state where slavery was never legal, to be sure, but also a state emptied almost entirely of black Americans.
In framing Kansas as a space for white settlers, early 1880s Kansas novelists also began the work of regionalizing the antagonists in the Kansas-Missouri border conflict. Carefully exonerating the wealthy Southern planter class, the novels displace the burden of guilt onto a local regional figure: the Missouri border ruffian. In this way, they manage to offer a coherent narrative of what I call “pre-conciliation,” allowing North and South to reconcile in their joint enmity against the border ruffians. Embodying all of the lowest passions and instigating all of the violence in the novels, the border ruffians “regionalize” the national conflict, allowing the representatives of each legitimate section to be valorized. Ironically, the border ruffians end up promoting sectional reconciliation as Northerners and Southerners unite to combat this localized criminal figure. Set during Bleeding Kansas, these antebellum “pre-conciliation” narratives actually resolve sectional tensions between North and South in 1850s Kansas. They frame Kansas as a homeland specifically for moderate white settlers: Northerners who are anti-slavery, but not necessarily “radical” abolitionists; planters who are pro-slavery, but open to “reason.”
198 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
Albion Tourgée’s Kansas: Hopeful Rehabilitation
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Ohio-born lawyer Albion Tourgée (1838–1905) distinguished himself as one of the nation’s most vigorous and committed white advocates for the project of
Reconstruction.16 Tourgée’s dedication to achieving racial equality was deeply informed by his wartime experience as a lieutenant in the Union Army, when he became comrades with black volunteers, worked with his regiment to protect fugitive slaves, and personally witnessed the slave system in the South.17 In the fall of 1865, he moved to North Carolina hoping to contribute to
Reconstruction efforts and support the freedmen. Settling near Greensboro, Tourgée became deeply involved in both Republican politics and the legal system. He served as a highly influential delegate to the State Constitutional Convention in 1868, and was elected as a superior court judge in the same year. In his judicial capacity, Tourgée strove to ensure racial equality before the law: he insisted on racially mixed juries, overturned verdicts that he deemed to be motivated by racial discrimination, and adamantly adhered to a principle of “color-blind justice” for all.18 Tourgée also actively resisted racist violence against black citizens, at a time when the Ku Klux Klan raged throughout the state. In 1870, Klansmen brutally murdered two of Tourgée’s colleagues: the prominent black community leader Wyatt Outlaw, and the white state senator John Walter
Stephens. Tourgée himself received death threats, but continued to hold court and advocate vigorously against the Klan. When he lost reelection in 1874, Tourgée remained in North Carolina against the advice of friends and family. After a failed bid for Congress in 1878, he turned his
16 On the life and career of Albion Tourgée, see Carolyn L. Karcher, A Refugee from His Race (2016); and Mark Elliot, Color-Blind Justice (2006).
17 On Tourgée’s experiences in the Civil War, see Elliott 85–91.
18 As Elliot explains in his introduction, Tourgée coined the term “color-blind justice” and understood it to mean “that all Americans must enjoy equality in the law, regardless of race or color” (2).
199 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters focus to a literary career that he hoped would more effectively change public opinion and policies on questions of race.19 Between 1874 and 1890, Tourgée published seven novels that collectively grappled with the nation’s history of slavery as well as the progress and eventual collapse of
Reconstruction.20 He finished three of those novels in 1879 alone, in the aftermath of his unsuccessful Congressional run. As he wrote, the Exoduster migration to Kansas made headlines across the nation. Later that year, Tourgée himself finally also left the South for good.
Tourgée wrote a shadowy Kansas subplot into two of his post-Reconstruction novels, both of which were published on the heels of the Exoduster migration. Bricks Without Straw (1880), while set primarily in North Carolina during the 1870s, offers Kansas as a hopeful emblem of the free West for black Americans in the wake of Reconstruction’s failure. Hot Plowshares (1882–
83), which is set primarily in New York during the 1850s, keeps almost but never quite sending its heroes to Bleeding Kansas. Although Kansas is only tangential to Tourgée’s primary concern, the struggling project of Reconstruction in the South, his depictions of the historic “free state” are far more idealistically egalitarian—if less fully realized—than depictions by 1880s novelists who lived in Kansas. Ultimately, both novels position Kansas as a land of optimism and opportunity for black Americans after Reconstruction—but also, crucially, as a distraction from the ongoing crisis of racist discrimination and violence in the South.
Bricks Without Straw was one of Tourgée’s two most popular novels, outstripped in publicity and sales only by its predecessor A Fool’s Errand (1879). Published consecutively in the lead-up to Republican James A. Garfield’s successful 1880 presidential bid, the novels influenced
19 On Tourgée’s career in North Carolina, see Elliott, ch. 4–5; and Karcher, A Refugee from His Race, 1–13.
20 The novels are ’Toinette (1874), A Fool’s Errand (1879), Figs and Thistles (1879), Bricks Without Straw (1880), John Eax (1882), Hot Plowshares (serialized 1882–83), and Pactolus Prime (1890). ’Toinette was later abridged and republished as A Royal Gentleman (1881).
200 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters both the outcome of the election and public opinion more broadly.21 Bricks Without Straw takes place in the North Carolina community of Red Wing, where black and white citizens live in uneasy proximity after the Civil War. Initially, Tourgée tracks the progress of the black community: former slave and Union army veteran Nimbus Desmit becomes a successful tobacco farmer, having used his army pension to purchase land from his former master; the self-taught black preacher Eliab Smith becomes a leader in in the community; and the white Northern schoolteacher
Mollie Ainslee leads a thriving freedman’s school. Yet as Carolyn Karcher points out, the novel’s middle sections topple this fragile progress as the Ku Klux Klan begins to terrorize the black community.22 After the Klan tortures Nimbus’s family in his absence, his terrified wife Lugena approaches Mollie for help. “I will take you away to the North, where there are no Ku Klux!”
Mollie responds (311). But Mollie takes Lugena and the children north only briefly, before going west—to Kansas. There, Mollie buys a huge tract of land to settle with Lugena and the children; they are joined by several other black migrants from Red Wing, whom she employs. The thriving city of Eupolia soon grows up alongside her property, and more Red Wing citizens migrate to this bustling western metropolis: Jordan Jackson, a white politician who has been targeted by the Ku
Klux Klan for his pro-Northern sympathies and his support of the local black community;
Lugena’s cousin Berry Lawson, a sharecropper who arrives as part of the Exoduster migration; and Nimbus himself, who rejoins his family and decides to remain permanently in Kansas.
21 A Fool’s Errand sold 150,000 copies in its first year; dubbed “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of Reconstruction,” it was also featured prominently in speeches and campaign literature during Garfield’s presidential run (Karcher, A Refugee from His Race, 6). Published just before the election, Bricks Without Straw also sparked immediate interest and rapid sales; it would sell 50,000 copies by the end of its first year (6). Garfield himself actually believed that the novels helped him to win the election, and echoed several of Tourgée’s major points in his inaugural address (7). Yet Garfield’s assassination four months later ushered in a more conservative administration under Chester A. Arthur (8). See also Elliott 186–192.
22 Karcher, “Introduction,” Bricks Without Straw (2009), 40–42.
201 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
Clearly inspired by the Exoduster migration, Bricks Without Straw frames Kansas as an emblem of mitigated possibility in the wake of Reconstruction. Tourgée is fundamentally uninterested in Kansas as a real place. The novel never shows life in Eupolia, only allowing Mollie and Jordan to describe it in letters. Through those letters, however, Kansas becomes an emblem of thriving egalitarianism and opportunity. Jordan, for instance, marvels at the accepting nature of the Eupolia community: “Nobody stops to ask where you come from, what’s your politics, or whether you’ve got any religion...there are rich folks and poor folks, but the poor are just as respectable as the rich, feel just as big, and take up just as much of the road” (387). Moreover,
Tourgée makes Eupolia representative of the West more broadly: “The West takes right hold of every one that comes into it and makes him a part of itself, instead of keeping him outside in the cold to all eternity, as the South does the strangers who go there” (387). Significantly, the Kansas emigrants do not face the kinds of legal contests over property that plague black landowners in
Red Wing. In 1880, Tourgée idealized Kansas—a beacon of the free West— against the bleakness of the American South for black Americans.
Bricks Without Straw features only one scene actually set in this free West, when Tourgée vividly depicts the Exoduster migration at the train depot in St. Louis: “that wonderful young city of seventy-seven hills which faces toward free Kansas and reluctantly bears the ban which slavery put upon Missouri” (410). Tourgée’s description reclaims St. Louis, a notorious crossing point in the antebellum slave trade, as a place of reunion and rehabilitation: it is now where “the great ever- welcoming far West meets and first shakes hands with ever-swarming East” (410).23 As a major crossing point between Missouri and Kansas, antebellum St. Louis was also a contested site for
23 In Unexpected Places (2009), Eric Gardner argues that the famous description of this city “as a ‘gateway’ to the heart of slavery” in William Wells Brown’s Narrative (1847) was intended to refute white-authored travel guides and articles that framed it “as the gateway to the West (and thus to America’s future)” (25).
202 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters white settlers on either side of the border during Bleeding Kansas; this contentious history, too, gives way to an optimistic future. Tourgée’s depiction of the Exodusters, meanwhile, ironizes the
“delights of the South,” which the novel has shown to be far more horrific than any “life upon the plains of Kansas” might be:
Soon they came upon a dusky group whose bags and bundles, variegated attire, and unmistakable speech showed that they were a party of those misguided creatures who were abandoning the delights of the South for the untried horrors of a life upon the plains of Kansas. These were of all ages, from the infant in arms to the decrepit patriarch, and of every shade of color, from Saxon fairness with blue eyes and brown hair to ebon blackness. They were telling their stories to a circle of curious listeners. There was no lack of variety of incident, but a wonderful similarity of motive assigned for the exodus they had undertaken. (410)
While some have been motivated to escape the “injustice and privation” experienced in the South, most simply wish “to find a place where their children could grow up free, receive education, and have ‘a white man’s chance’ in the struggle of life” (410–11). They are, Tourgée explains, “the forerunners of a movement which promised to assume astounding proportions in the near future”
(411). More symbolic emblem than geographic place, the Kansas-Missouri border is free land, an apolitical and egalitarian space of refuge. No longer a notorious locus of the slave trade, no longer the “bleeding” crossroads of a border-state battle, St. Louis has become a site of hopeful passage in both directions: while Mollie prepares to board a train to Red Wing to continue her work in the community, the sharecropper Berry Lawson has just arrived with the Exodusters in hopes of finding new opportunities.
Yet Tourgée also frames Mollie’s Kansas plan as a last-resort attempt to save a select few, in contrast with the kind of systemic change he had hoped that Reconstruction would bring to the
South. He carefully qualifies her project, emphasizing its limitations: “She did not aspire to set on foot any great movement or do any great deed, but she felt that she was able to succor a few of the oppressed race. Those who most needed help and best deserved it, among the denizens of Red
203 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
Wing, she determined to aid in going to a region where thought at least was free” (340). Tourgée’s commitment to systemic change in the South undergirds his refusal to turn the novel’s focus entirely towards Kansas. Since black westward migration clearly will not resolve the divisions and terrors in Red Wing, Tourgée’s attitude towards this migration is at heart an ambivalent one. The novel ultimately splits up its two black leaders. Nimbus settles permanently in Kansas, where his military and agricultural skills are well suited to prairie life. Eliab pursues a college education, but returns to Red Wing as a teacher and a community leader—reflecting Tourgée’s own commitment to systemic change through education. Mollie splits her time between Kansas and North Carolina, furthering the interests of the black community in both. While Kansas migration is an avenue of opportunity, neither Mollie nor Eliab abandons the project of Southern education.
Tourgée’s depiction of 1880s Kansas in Bricks Without Straw is intimately tied to his depiction of 1850s Kansas in Hot Plowshares two years later. Unlike Tourgée’s previous novels,
Hot Plowshares was published serially: it appeared from July 1882 to May 1883 in Our Continent, a short-lived weekly literary magazine edited by Tourgée himself.24 Hot Plowshares was, as
Tourgée stated in a preface, “designed to give a review of the Anti-Slavery struggle” in the years before the Civil War (4). It received far less acclaim and interest than Bricks Without Straw, as unfavorable reviews mingled criticisms of its plot and style with frustrations over Tourgée’s stubborn insistence on his political views. Certainly, the political atmosphere had changed since
Bricks Without Straw appeared in 1880. In the wake of Garfield’s assassination, Chester A.
Arthur’s more conservative administration steadily continued to walk back the original promises of Radical Reconstruction, while public opinion increasingly favored reconciliation over the
24 The magazine was founded in 1882 and collapsed financially in 1884, leaving Tourgee himself deeply in debt. See Elliott 203–206.
204 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters project of racial equality. As fictional romances of the Old South became increasingly popular in the literary marketplace, Tourgée’s novels found a less willing audience and lost much of their influence on the national stage.25
Yet although it did not carry the same weight as Tourgée’s previous novels, Hot
Plowshares is one of the earliest postbellum novels to revisit the Bleeding Kansas conflict. Like the Exoduster subplot in Bricks Without Straw, this brief Bleeding Kansas subplot refuses to shift the scene to Kansas territory. While the novel embraces the abolitionist spirit of Bleeding Kansas, it frames the border conflict itself as little more than a noble distraction. Instead, Tourgée filters his history of the “Anti-Slavery struggle” through the entwined stories of two white patriarchs and their families in Skendoah, New York. Harrison Kortright is a noble farmer-turned-manufacturer, the owner of a successful mill who morally opposes slavery. Merwyn Hargrove is a South Carolina slaveowner who has retired to his New York estate; as a self-proclaimed “Southern Abolitionist,” he has no sympathy for enslaved people but “would destroy it [slavery] for the sake of the master”
(270). One of the novel’s many subplots involves a romance between Kortright’s son Martin and
Hargrove’s ward Hilda. Mistakenly believed to be the daughter of a slave, Hilda is nearly enslaved herself before her white parentage is revealed, allowing her to marry Martin at the novel’s end.
Kansas comes to the foreground in the novel’s middle sections. In a wave of abolitionist zeal, young Martin proclaims his desire to fight with John Brown and the Free State men in Kansas.
However, he is twice convinced to abandon his project. First, Hargrove convinces him that his work is better done at home than as a western outlaw-squatter. When Martin reveals his intentions,
Hargrove’s response is blunt:
“Which is worth the more to liberty and righteousness—Martin Kortright, single-handed, immature, one of a disorganized crowd of squatters, half scout and half freebooter; made an outlaw,
25 On the reception of Hot Plowshares and the declining popularity of Tourgee’s political views, see Elliott 216–218.
205 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
perhaps, by the imperious necessity of organized government—or Martin Kortright, matured, developed, clothed with intellectual mail and armed with the power to lead a thousand whithersoever he may choose?” (277)
Tourgée endorses this logic, consistently framing the fight at the Kansas-Missouri border as a disorganized and ineffective outlaw scuffle that will waste young Martin’s talents. Instead, the spirit of Bleeding Kansas should fire worthy men like Martin to become leaders in a more effective bid for liberty down the road. This is exactly what happens: saved from wasting himself at the border, a mature Martin leads a Union regiment out of Skendoah in the novel’s final paragraphs.
Hilda, who once laughed at his desire to fight in Kansas, stands now the model wife, giving up her husband to a worthy cause. Hargrove’s vision of Martin leading a thousand men is fulfilled: “He is not one man but a thousand,” Tourgée proclaims (610).
Before arriving at this conclusion, however, Martin is tempted to Kansas a second time. In the middle of the book, Skendoah is visited by the passionate abolitionist orator Dawson Fox, who seeks to recruit young men to defend Kansas territory against the border ruffians. Fox understands
Kansas’s “strategic importance in the great conflict” over slavery, and its status as an “outpost” of the East (342). He begins a rousing speech to the whole town on the subject of Bleeding Kansas— only to be cut off by a massive fire at the Kortright mill next door, which breaks up the meeting and kills him shortly thereafter. Initially, Dawson’s death catalyzes a zeal for Kansas. Convinced that pro-slavery forces intentionally set the fire, the Kortright men commit to going to the territory.
Hilda reminds Martin of her father’s words, attempting to hold him back in a letter: “Kansas was at best only an outpost, and if there was to be a great conflict between freedom and slavery, it would not be fought by little squads of partisan rangers fighting and plundering on the prairie”
(392). Tourgée again endorses this view: Kansas is effective as an abstract symbol, but the actual fighting on the ground is much grubbier and less morally clear.
206 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
Ultimately, the plot of Hot Plowshares prevents the Kortrights from ever going to Kansas.
Their emigration is endlessly deferred, stalled first by the sudden death of Hargrove and then by a convoluted subplot in which Hilda is mistaken as the daughter of a slave and pursued by slavecatchers. The death of Dawson Fox thus also signifies the death of a possible Bleeding Kansas plotline. Divisions and crises in Skendoah instead consume the rest of the novel, as the slave system wreaks havoc through the community. It is no accident that the arsonist—as Tourgée later reveals—is a former slave, a woman named Alida who has been separated from her children and fears being remanded into slavery. Once married to Hargrove’s late brother, Alida is also mistakenly believed to be Hilda’s mother; this suspicion initiates the storyline wherein Hilda herself is nearly sold into slavery. Hilda’s persecution further removes any possibility for a Kansas plot, diverting attention completely away from the Western fighting. The fire at the Kortright mill ultimately symbolizes the widespread devastation catalyzed by slavery—to Alida and her children, to the persecuted Hilda, and to the entire community. Consumed by the symbolic flames of slavery in their own hometown, the Kortrights and their neighbors can little afford to look to Kansas.
Hot Plowshares frames Kansas as more of a principle than an actual place. The Kansas plains are where “[t]he fury of the South for the first time met the sturdy resolution of the North,” and this “desultory warfare” makes Kansas “the watchword of a more important conflict in the national arena” (336). Kansas serves as an emblem of the fight to come, predating and predicting the Civil War. Accordingly, Tourgée frames the border ruffians themselves as a sectional threat.
They are clear representatives of Southern interests, pitted against the men of the North:
The South believed it had an abstract right to carry slavery into Kansas, and it was not slow to assert that right. It sent its voluntary representatives to take and hold. They came from far and near. Missouri overflowed with typical plantation-grown, slave-nursed, slave-holding and slave-raising Americans, who counted the right to enslave inalienable in the freeman and were willing to fight for it as an inestimable privilege. They were called, north of the mystic line that separated the realms so strangely bound together, ‘Border Ruffians.’
207 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
The East and North mustered their forces at once to hold the territory against all attempts to establish slavery in its borders. Money flowed like water. Tools, provisions, arms were furnished all who would go and settle there. The anti-slavery societies sent out armed colonies. In the section where slavery held sway they were called ‘Jay-Hawkers.’ (336)
Positioning Missouri as a miniature South, Tourgée defines the border ruffians as members of the
Southern planter class: the “typical plantation-grown” slaveholders who flood the state from the
South are called, in the North, “Border Ruffians.” Echoing the 1850s abolitionist discourse on
Kansas and Missouri, Tourgée frames each state as the emblem of an entire section—albeit with less urgency than his predecessors. As a local border struggle, Bleeding Kansas is nothing more than a distraction—and traveling to Kansas to fight is not a particularly useful move. As an emblem of the larger sectional struggle, however, Bleeding Kansas helps to stoke the fiery anti-slavery spirit that Martin Kortright will apply at home and later on Civil War battlefields. Tourgée utilizes the “spirit” of Bleeding Kansas to catalyze the Kortright men into action elsewhere.
Hot Plowshares initiated a long series of political frustrations for Tourgée, who continued to advocate for the rights of black Americans in a national climate increasingly hostile to his views.
Although Tourgée published the novel only three years after the Exoduster migration, the fervor over this movement had already dissipated. Perhaps this is why postbellum Kansas never recurred in his work again, after his relatively hopeful depiction in Bricks Without Straw. His depiction of
Bleeding Kansas in Hot Plowshares does not celebrate Kansas as a haven for black citizens, nor does it ritually historicize Kansas as a land that slavery never touched. While he touts the spirit of
Bleeding Kansas, the place itself remains far on the periphery of the novel. His insistence on framing Bleeding Kansas as an emblem of the larger sectional divisions between North and South, and his insistence that border ruffians and Southern planters are one and the same, both contrast sharply with the ideological underpinnings of Bleeding Kansas novels composed by local white
Kansans in the same moment.
208 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
Two Kansas Romances: Narratives of Pre-Conciliation
Tourgée’s depictions of Kansas contrast sharply with the images that appeared in early 1880s historical romances by white Kansan writers. In the immediate wake of the Exoduster migration, two such novelists published Bleeding Kansas novels with very different political stakes. Mary E.
Jackson’s The Spy of Osawatomie; or, the Mysterious Companions of Old John Brown appeared in 1881, while Mary A. Vance Humphrey’s The Squatter Sovereign: Or, Kansas in the ‘50’s followed in 1883. Both authors indicate upfront their strong personal interest in the history of
Bleeding Kansas. In a preface, Jackson (1852–1893) claims authenticity as a first-hand witness to
John Brown’s clash with pro-slavery forces at Osawatomie. “The writer, then a little child, living near, heard the fearful sounds of that memorable battle,” she states. “Thus growing up amid these scenes, a true narrative of those early days has been penned” (6). Born in Indiana, Jackson had indeed moved to Osawatomie, Kansas as a small child in 1855. She would remain in Kansas for the rest of her life, eventually resettling in Topeka. Working as both a teacher and a writer, she published a second novel in 1886 and a Topeka guidebook in 1890.26 Humphrey (1838–1916) had also called Kansas home for more than twenty years when she penned her Bleeding Kansas novel.
Although born and raised in Ohio, she moved to Kansas as a young woman in 1861 and lived there for the rest of her life, first in Manhattan and later in Junction City. Involved in women’s clubs, the Kansas Historical Society, and the school board, she also advocated for women’s voting rights and wrote short stories supporting women’s property rights.27 The Squatter Sovereign was her only
26 Baym, American West, 286.
27 Baym, American West, 285; Kansas State Historical Society, “Twentieth Biennial Report of the Board of Directors of the Kansas State Historical Society,” 65–66; Nettie Garmer Barker, “Mary Vance Humphrey” in Kansas Women in Literature, 11–12.
209 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters novel, effusively dedicated to “THE PIONEERS OF KANSAS” whose sacrifices protected “the principles of liberty and justice” and “turned back the advancing tide of slavery” in the state (5).
Writing from their Kansas homes, neither Jackson nor Humphrey had anything like the national platform that Tourgée did at the height of his literary career. While it is unclear how widely these novels circulated, neither was reissued after its initial publication. Their publishers were also firmly situated in the Midwest. Jackson’s publisher W. S. Bryan was based in St. Louis, where he ran the short-lived Historical Publishing Company from 1880 to the mid-1890s.
Humphrey’s novel was printed by the Chicago-based Coburn & Newman. Both women were interested primarily in fictionalizing the history of their adoptive state. Humphrey’s preface, for instance, expresses her desire to “disinter some of the leading events” in Kansas history “from beneath the weight of later memories of the civil war and its great achievements, and to embody them, while sources of information are still accessible, in a more enduring form” (5). Similarly,
Jackson closes her novel by urging the nation to remember “Kansas’ own brave,” those heroes of
Bleeding Kansas who fought against slavery but “wore neither ‘The Blue nor the Grey’” (439).
Both authors were explicitly focused on recovering local antebellum history, since obscured by the more prominent events of the Civil War.
The depictions of Kansas territory in both novels diverge in telling ways from Tourgée’s utopian vision of the state in Bricks Without Straw. These novels articulate revisionist histories of
Bleeding Kansas, specifically from the perspective of white women living in Kansas after the Civil
War, the failure of Reconstruction, and—most immediately—the Exoduster migration. In revisiting the Bleeding Kansas conflict, both of these historical romances clearly frame Kansas as a white homeland. Moreover, they consistently distinguish evil Missouri border ruffians from good
Southerners—thereby also making this white homeland a site of sectional reconciliation between
210 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
North and South. These Bleeding Kansas novels, I argue, are direct responses to Kansas’s emerging identity as a possible refuge for black Southerners after Reconstruction’s collapse.
The emphasis that Jackson and Humphrey place on sectional reconciliation is not itself surprising. However, Jackson and Humphrey articulate a new Western version of reconciliation through their manipulation of a character type particular to Bleeding Kansas: the Missouri border ruffian. As Baym notes, the border ruffian is a recognizable figure in Bleeding Kansas fiction.
“After the Civil War, Kansas celebrants usually claimed that all emigrants from the Northeast had been abolitionist patriots,” she observes, “while all Missourians arriving over the border were pro- slavery ruffians driven by greed” (American West 136). The border ruffian in Bleeding Kansas fiction does indeed always support slavery, a feature that he shares with the Southern planter class.
Unlike the Southern planter class, however, he is generally associated with roughness, criminality, and vicious passions. He is also typically irrational, uneducated, and susceptible to mob mentality.
While his background is often (but not always) Southern, his identity is Missourian and—as his moniker suggests—he haunts the Missouri-Kansas border, hunting for anti-slavery Kansans or roughing it in a makeshift camp. He usually does not own land or slaves, nor is he interested in acquiring either. Instead, his role is merely to claim Kansas territory in the name of slavery.
Both Humphrey and Jackson manipulate the border ruffian in order to stage narratives of sectional reconciliation particular to the Kansas-Missouri border. I argue that these early 1880s novels present a coherent narrative of “pre-conciliation,” turning the Kansas-Missouri border into the stage for sectional reconciliation before April 1861. They frame Kansas as an ideal space for reconstructing the relationship between white anti-slavery Northerners and the pro-slavery planter class of the Old South, displacing the story of sectional reconciliation west to the Kansas-Missouri border and back to the antebellum period. Moreover, they achieve reconciliation through narrative
211 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters strategies that are specific to their geographic and historical context—strategies that differ from the sentimental strategies of reconciliation culture as it developed in the North. These novels ritually review the events of Bleeding Kansas, often becoming mired in historical details and relying little on the strategies of sentimentality that Silber attributes to the classic romance of reunion. They do not so much venerate a romantic Old South as they do envision a politically temperate new West anchored in free white labor.
Mary A. Humphrey’s The Squatter Sovereign (1883)
Although set in Kansas territory during the 1850s, The Squatter Sovereign presents a clear vision for the state that became Humphrey’s permanent home after 1861. While the novel certainly celebrates Kansas’s anti-slavery history, it also frames Kansas as a perfect location for the reconciliation of Northern and Southern “values” through a farming economy based entirely on free white labor. The Squatter Sovereign takes place largely between 1854 and 1856, at the height of the Bleeding Kansas conflict. It focuses on two families, the Aldens and the Langtrys, who have settled in Kansas territory. Edward and Agnes Langtry are staunch abolitionists from Vermont, who have come to Kansas expressly to defend it from the spread of slavery. Meanwhile, Ohioans
John and Amy Alden arrive by chance: after John’s failure to strike rich in the California Gold
Rush, he decides on a whim to homestead in Kansas while traveling through the territory. Alden learns about the local conflict over slavery only after his arrival, when he encounters a group of border ruffians and later befriends Edward Langtry. Together, the Langtrys and Aldens lead a group of Northern transplants in establishing a frontier settlement founded on anti-slavery principles. This group eventually includes Alden’s wife and their daughter Grace, as well as
Grace’s hometown sweetheart Arthur Fairchild. While the entire community is opposed to slavery,
Langtry and Fairchild are specifically marked as “radical” abolitionists—a distinction that will
212 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters prove significant. The novel follows the trials and tribulations of this colony, as it is continually harassed by pro-slavery border ruffians.
Humphrey’s representative of the wealthy Southern planter class is Roderick Delaney, a young South Carolinian who leads a competing effort to send pro-slavery emigrants to Kansas.
Delaney visits the territory frequently for this purpose, although he does not live there: his home is in South Carolina, his identity that of a Southern slave-owner. But if Roderick is pro-slavery, he is also framed as rational. While he is “a specimen of South Carolina chivalry,” experiences of
“culture” have made him more open-minded (112). Roderick ultimately concedes defeat in
Kansas, agreeing to honor the will of the people. “I cannot see why we should force our institutions upon a body of free people who reject them,” he states. “I will never be instrumental in subverting the will of the majority, thus overturning the corner-stone of the liberties of my country” (244).
This sets him apart from his father, an inflexible man who demands the expansion of slavery into
Kansas territory at any cost. “He is an enthusiast in the cause of the South,” explains Roderick,
“and is carried by his zeal far beyond and above the realms of reason and prudence” (244).
The border ruffians, meanwhile, are separated by both class status and regional identity from the rest of the novel’s characters. These self-identified “ruffians” are low-class and uncouth, speaking in a dialect that Humphrey uses to register their roughness. Relentlessly pro-slavery, they are also incapable of the “rational” thought that Roderick Delaney displays on the subject. Prone to mob mentality, they are hard-drinking, manipulative, uneducated, and murderous. Importantly, the Delaneys and the anti-slavery Northerners never initiate violence amongst themselves: murder is always committed by the Missouri border ruffians. In a characteristic subplot, one of the ruffians is first played for laughs as he ineptly attempts to woo the beautiful Grace; when rebuffed, however, he turns deadly and takes revenge by murdering her sweetheart Arthur Fairchild.
213 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
Humphrey also establishes a clear regional difference between the border ruffians and Delaney.
While Delaney identifies with the South and makes his home in South Carolina, the ruffians identify with Missouri and exclusively haunt the narrow Kansas-Missouri border.
The outcomes for each of these groups clearly cement the novel’s reconciliationist politics.
Ultimately, Humphrey kills off her most politically polarized and inflexible characters. The two
“radical” abolitionists—Edward Langtry and Arthur Fairchild—are both murdered by border ruffians, while Delaney Sr. dies fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War. The border ruffians are also killed off or banished from Kansas territory: their leader, for example, is forced further
West and later becomes a raider in the Civil War. Left in Kansas territory are the Aldens and the younger Delaneys, who represent more temperate perspectives. Although they have anti-slavery views, the Aldens are less knowledgeable and less radical than Langtry and Fairchild. While
Roderick is pro-slavery, he also believes—unlike his father—that slavery should not be forced on
Kansas when the citizens have rejected it. Both the Aldens and Roderick prioritize “rational” conversation about slavery, and come to like one another despite their opposing points of view.
Characters who are too inflexible, too radical, and too passionate in their beliefs—whether anti- slavery or pro-slavery—cannot be models for reconciliation, and so they do not survive. In this way, Humphrey’s pre-conciliation novel also boasts to resolve sectional divisions before the Civil
War even begins. Central to the reconciliation narrative that she presents is a valuation of reason over passion. Temperate and logical thought, according to Humphrey, is far better than passionate and emotional outcry. It seems no accident that John Brown barely appears in the novel, where he is mentioned just once as a “gallant” actor in the free state fight: his brand of militant abolitionism would have far exceeded Humphrey’s tolerance for radical leaders (342). Her politics, ultimately,
214 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters are far more oriented around the right of white Kansas citizens to make decisions for their own state than around the abolition of slavery and the rights of black Americans.
The widowed Agnes Langtry also stays in Kansas, where she spends her days helping female neighbors to achieve the ideal of the proper New England housekeeper, proposing
“improvements in their method of cookery and housekeeping, and also later, in their attire and manners” (349). Roderick becomes her neighbor, beginning a large-scale farming project that relies on the labor of the free white men whom he has encouraged to emigrate from South Carolina.
Although Delaney has represented South Carolina for the entire novel, refusing to actually live in either Missouri or Kansas, he finally sets down roots in the West. While Roderick and Agnes are friendly neighbors, Humphrey makes clear that they can never marry: Agnes is loyal to her husband’s memory forever. Instead, Roderick is destined for Grace Alden. While Grace is engaged to the abolitionist Arthur for most of the novel, his murder by border ruffians clears the way for
Roderick. This marriage cements the novel’s reconciliationist argument: Grace weds the rational
Southern planter, instead of the fervent New England abolitionist. Roderick’s sister Mabel, a classic Southern belle, also marries across sectional lines: she falls in love with a Bostonian before the Civil War, although she can only marry him after she is “freed from her duty to her father, who fell at the head of his troops bravely fighting for slavery and secession” (354).
The younger Delaneys and Grace represent a generation less partisan than that of their parents, despite the fact that they all come of age in the years immediately preceding the Civil
War. Indeed, the war itself barely appears in the novel: the final two chapters speed rapidly through the years 1856 to 1865, with only a brief mention of the war, and Humphrey concludes by reflecting on the happiness of the blended Delaney-Alden clan in its aftermath. While the narrative of reconciliation is familiar, this “pre-conciliation” novel presents a generation of young people
215 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters who resolve their sectional differences before the Civil War even begins. Their own children, moreover, continue to smooth down those divisions: “the toning down of [their] imperious natures, with each added year of culture and experience, bespeaks the mingling of Northern and Southern blood,” Humphrey explains (354).
The border ruffians thus play an integral role in The Squatter Sovereign, creating space for a reconciliation between anti-slavery Northerners and aristocratic pro-slavery Southerners. They enable Humphrey to venerate both of these groups, turning antebellum sectional strife between
North and South into a united effort against wild Missouri men. The border ruffians are convenient villains, onto whom Humphrey displaces the burden of error in order to venerate the aristocratic
Old South represented by the Delaney family. Bleeding Kansas thus proffers a new kind of antagonist, whose extreme and unthinking roughness allows pro-slavery Southerners and anti- slavery Northerners to sit comfortably together on the side of reason. Once the border ruffians are ejected from Kansas territory, the remaining characters—representatives of both North and
South—can join together to forge a new community. Suddenly, Kansas becomes a territory in which the aristocratic South Carolinian, the Ohio family, and the New England abolitionist widow can all live together in harmony. Here, they build a new community taking the “best” of all sections: Roderick brings his knowledge of large-scale plantation farming to a free labor system, while Agnes brings New England housekeeping. Kansas is a sectional utopia, one that the Civil
War does not touch. Indeed, Humphrey does not mention whether any of the remaining characters fight in the war—perhaps because, in her eyes, they have already fought the war in Kansas.
This coherent community is also enabled, Humphrey implies, by the absence not only of slavery but also of black characters altogether. As Baym has noted, there is a “shocking” absence of black characters generally in Kansas women’s writing from this period—especially given the
216 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters state’s “supposed origins in Abolitionist sentiment” (143). Humphrey clearly illustrates this trend, as the few black characters who appear in her book do so only fleetingly. Early in the novel, Arthur meets a free black man on the road and offers him work; described as “quiet and industrious,” he is given neither a name nor any dialogue (73). His presence merely allows Arthur and the other free state men to showcase their anti-slavery principles, as they defend him from a group of pro- slavery raiders. Shortly after this episode, the unnamed man leaves the territory. The novel’s second and last black character is a fugitive slave named Mose, who arrives at the Langtry home and is offered protection in an underground dug-out. Mose is smuggled out a few days later, heading for the Nebraska border (92). Black residents completely disappear from Kansas territory less than a third of the way through the novel, implicitly making it the territory of white Americans.
The Squatter Sovereign imagines Kansas as an ideal place for reconstructing the relationship between anti-slavery Northerners and Southern planters, a vision that fundamentally depends on the fantasy of Kansas as empty land. Humphrey allows Northern and Southern views to clash in a landscape seemingly devoid of the institutions of either. On one level, Kansas is presented as a land without plantation culture, a land that slavery has supposedly never touched.
On another level, it is also presented as a land without black settlers. This consistent absence especially notable, given that the novel appeared in the aftermath of the 1879 Exoduster migration.
Humphrey makes Kansas the site of an anti-slavery mythology about the past that circumvents the question of how to integrate black and white communities in the present. Since Kansas was contested territory in the 1850s, fugitive slaves indeed often merely passed through it on the way to Northern free states or Canada. The historical setting thus allowed Humphrey to portray Kansas as a state grounded in anti-slavery principles, while also allowing her to quickly shuttle fugitive slaves beyond its borders—laying the foundations for a postbellum Kansas without black settlers.
217 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
Mary Jackson’s The Spy of Osawatomie (1881)
Like The Squatter Sovereign, Mary Jackson’s The Spy of Osawatomie also dissolves the sectional conflict between North and South by uniting them against the unrepentantly evil border ruffians.
Distinguished by their low-class status and by their geographic association with the Missouri-
Kansas border, the ruffians in this novel also open up a relatively smooth path towards reconciliation. Heroine Ona Leland is a feisty New Hampshire girl, the daughter of a Boston
“belle” and a Scottish nobleman (9). Seeking her purpose in life, she initially embarks on the project of advancing women’s rights in her hometown. Her father is a member of the Anti-Slavery
Society, along with an abolitionist Englishman named Hayden Douglas. Both Ona and Hayden will eventually become “mysterious companions” of John Brown in Kansas. First, however, Ona is entangled in several subplots that hone her political views and her spying skills at home. Helping the young women in her town to achieve independence through work, she also helps to save a free black family from being kidnapped into slavery. In this episode, she goes undercover as a male spy called “Dicky Deane,” a persona that she will again adopt in Kansas. The novel’s early chapters also show that releasing white women from their “slavery” to men is as much, if not more, of a priority for Jackson as the abolition of slavery itself (31). If Kansas is the ultimate stage for Ona’s freedom-fighting on behalf of black Americans, it is also the stage for her own liberation as the gun-toting, mobile, independent Dickey Deane. Once the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 organizes
Kansas territory, The Spy of Osawatomie evolves into a full-fledged Bleeding Kansas novel. Both
Ona and Hayden end up on the Kansas-Missouri border, fighting alongside John Brown in the name of abolition. Ona sheds her given name, fully embracing her identity as Dickey Deane to gather invaluable information for her companions. In this guise, she crosses the borders of gender, race, and age as easily as she slips across the border between Missouri and Kansas. At various
218 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters points, she disguises herself as a school teacher, a soldier, a sailor, an artist, a peddler, an Indian boy, and a pro-slavery washerwoman. The sprawling novel becomes even looser as it nears its conclusion, speeding through Harper’s Ferry, the execution of John Brown, and the Civil War.
In this novel, border ruffians again prove to be the source of strife in Kansas territory. Their leader, the villainous Guy Wren, is characteristic of the type. Once married to Ona’s aunt, Wren was a tyrant husband who squandered her money and verbally abused her. He comes from a family, the reader learns, that “expected the women to be slaves” (24). It is only natural, Jackson implies, that Wren becomes a border ruffian: according to the novel’s logic, his crimes against his wife qualify him as a slave-owner. In fact, criminality itself is enough to define the border ruffians in this novel. Wren heads west to avoid being pursued for his crimes, and finds “congenial companions among the outlaws that infested Western Missouri…that already criminally corrupt district, where outlaws made their home and horse-thieves reigned supreme” (147). Wren himself does not have a personal stance on slavery, nor does he own property—either slaves or land—that he wants to defend. Instead, the border conflict represents “a promise of an opportunity to wrong his fellow beings, to indulge in his unholy desire for crime” and to feed “the insatiate greed that ever governed his actions” (230). According to Jackson, Wren is part of a villainous but apolitical underclass. Men like him are “compelled to go West” to avoid prosecution for their crimes, and there sow the seeds of conflict that rile up reasonable anti- and pro-slavery factions (157):
Thus, step by step, war began to rage on the Western border between the Anti- and Pro-Slavery factions. The outlaws and desperadoes who had congregated there, committed heinous crimes, pillaging and murdering promiscuously and charging the blame upon opposing parties, thus engendering a cruel strife, which marked the Missouri and Kansas borders as the second “dark and bloody ground.” Respectable men of either party held aloof from such depredations, until public opinion was strongly expressed and excitement ran high, aggravated and inflamed by roughs from every State.
219 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
The settlers were generally respectable men from Kentucky and Tennessee, who owned a few slaves and thought it no disgrace to work along with them in the field. The slaves were well contented with their lot. They fared as did their masters, having plenty to eat and to wear. (158–159)
According to Jackson, Bleeding Kansas emerged almost entirely from the actions of a criminal class of men from “every State.” These crimes are not motivated by sectional ideology, but rather committed “promiscuously” and only blamed on one faction or another. Moreover, Jackson claims that these “roughs” have excited public opinion to such a degree that “respectable” slaveholders and anti-slavery advocates alike have finally been drawn into the fray. Jackson’s revisionist history of Bleeding Kansas argues that the conflict was actually rooted in indiscriminate killing by
“outlaws and desperadoes,” and only retrospectively politicized in ideological terms as pro-slavery or anti-slavery violence. Instead of rooting the border conflict in the battle between North and
South over slavery, Jackson anchors it in the amoral, apolitical, and uncontrollable border ruffians: a criminal underclass drawn from every state of the Union, seemingly without sectional or ideological allegiances. These border ruffians stir trouble in an otherwise peaceful community— thereby leaving “respectable men from Kentucky and Tennessee,” who own “a few slaves” but work alongside them, free from blame. In an age of reconciliation, Jackson chose not to focus on the sectional division between North and South in Bleeding Kansas. The novel diverts blame away from pro-slavery Southerners for the conflict at the border, instead castigating the chaotically villainous—but here, politically indifferent—border ruffians.28
Jackson continues to deploy the border ruffians in this fashion, later using the character of
“Bill Quantrell” to further these ends. This character is a fictionalized version of the actual Bill
28 In this way, Jackson’s apolitical border ruffians echo the depoliticized Confederate bushwhackers whose westernized antics Matthew Christopher Hulbert traces through postbellum fiction. However, the antebellum Bleeding Kansas border ruffians remain intimately tied to the Civil War and its causes: as criminals and outlaws, in Jackson’s account, they stir more moderate men into conflict with one another.
220 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
Quantrill, a notorious Missouri “bushwhacker” who led a murderous raid of Lawrence, Kansas during the Civil War. Although he hailed from Ohio, Quantrill allied himself to the South, apparently motivated entirely by personal animosity towards the companions with whom he had traveled westward.29 Jackson’s version of Quantrill looks physically similar to Guy Wren—and in fact turns out to be Wren’s cousin, emphasizing the relatedness of this villainous underclass.
Jackson also frames his motives as personal rather than political: in this case, Dickey’s unfavorable comments about his character drive him to betray his Kansan neighbors and join Wren as “revenge upon ‘Dickey Deane’” (429).
Jackson’s portrait of the Old South, meanwhile, is highly favorable. Her wealthy
Southerners are reasonable and civilized, unlike the border ruffians, and ultimately their disgust with the ruffians wins them to the cause of the free-state settlers. Before heading west, the abolitionist Hayden Douglas is drawn into a high society romance subplot that highlights two types of Southern womanhood: the virtuous but frail Lillie Calhoun of South Carolina, and the manipulative belle Ava Hayes of Georgia. When Hayden falls in love with Lillie during a visit to
Washington, DC, Ava jealously attempts to separate them—an endeavor that ends in Lillie’s death, and sends the grieving Hayden westward. Before her death, however, Lillie represents the rational
Southern attitude that Roderick Delaney embodies in The Squatter Sovereign: Lillie and Ona become “devoted friends” despite their ideological differences, which they discuss “in an argumentative, reasoning, unprejudiced manner” (131).
Rather than league the members of this high society world with the border ruffians, Jackson pits them against the ruffians in order to valorize the Old South. The Georgian belle Ava comes to embody this realignment. Repenting for her earlier machinations, Ava eventually marries a
29 Etcheson 233; for Bill Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence, Kansas, see 236–240.
221 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters wealthy South Carolinian, General Blair, who is eager to go West in support of “establishing
‘Southern rights for all’ upon the soil of Kansas” (247). She accompanies him to the Kansas-
Missouri border, on a train trip that brings the very worst class of Southern men along with them:
“Jails and penitentiaries were depopulated to procure the class of men desired for the work in hand; hardened, wicked, wretched, inhuman beings were gathered up and sent without cost to battle— more appropriately, to rob and murder—on the Kansas borders” (247). The wealthy Blairs seem to be a lone exception to this rule of criminality: Jackson notes that “by the last of autumn, 1855, thousands of criminals had been taken from the prisons and penitentiaries and enrolled in the ranks of that ‘Army of the Border’” (218).
Once at the border, the Blairs allow Jackson to sharpen her distinction between reasonable upstanding Southerners and the criminal border ruffians. Ava is threatened with tar and feathering shortly after her arrival in Missouri, for making favorable statements about the generosity of “the people of the North and East” (278). She is later seized and tortured by border ruffians, who mistake her for Dickey Deane when she arrives alone at their camp. The men bind and gag her, even tying a string to her tongue and pulling on it repeatedly until she can no longer speak. When
General Blair discovers what they have done, he not only vents his outrage but entirely disavows the “unholy warfare” on the border (279). “There are two sides to every question,” he states, “and for once I acknowledge I am in error in making my selection” (279). Jackson sets the border ruffians in opposition to this pair of aristocratic Southerners, although they are ostensibly allies.
The ruffians’ barbaric treatment of white women wholly differentiates them from the honorable
General Blair, who is valorized and redeemed by his encounter with them. Their villainy convinces both husband and wife to support the free-state cause instead. Ava notes that “witnessing and experiencing the atrocities committed by their own men” brought about her “corresponding
222 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters sympathy for the Free-State settlers,” an admission that proves the ruffians’ conduct—not the status of slavery—to be the deciding factor in her allegiance (323).
In an episode that truly stretches credulity, General Blair even initiates friendly relations with Old John Brown himself. Visiting Brown to discuss his support for the free-state cause, Blair is overcome with “awe and reverence” in his presence and expresses displeasure at the
“ungenerous” conduct of the border ruffians (341, 342). Brown agrees with him, feeling “assured that all bloodshed could have been avoided had not this mercenary element established itself as the dictator in the matter” (342). Ultimately, Blair’s aversion to the conduct of the border ruffians is stronger than his desire to see slavery extended into Kansas—so much so, that he allies himself with Brown and commits to “personally use my influence in a prompt discontinuance of these
[pro-slavery] invasions” (347). Remarkably, the novel subordinates the conflict over slavery to a conflict over the proper tactics of war, a reorientation that suddenly allies a Southern pro-slavery general with a radical abolitionist revolutionary. Blair and Brown emerge as partners, in an episode that exonerates both: Blair is valorized for supporting the free-state fight, while Brown’s controversial militant tactics are validated as a necessary response to the border ruffians’ outrages.
At the same time, Jackson does take the opportunity to revise a common trope of the
Southern “lost cause” narrative: the association between the American South and the Scottish
Jacobite rebels of Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, which had a special resonance for the Southern planter class. In Life on the Mississippi (1883), Mark Twain famously castigated the influence of
Scott’s romantic “enchantments” on antebellum Southern culture (265). “Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war,” he quipped there, “that he is in great measure responsible for the war” (266). Rather than reinforce Scott’s cultural affiliation with the Southern planter class, however, Jackson actually attributes a romantic Scottish heritage to her
223 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
New Hampshire heroine.30 Ona is said to have descended from the Macdonalds, a famous Scottish
Jacobite family “of which one of the late members won great distinction with Bonaparte” (311).
Flora Macdonald, who assisted Bonnie Prince Charles in his escape after the Battle of Culloden, is generally thought to be Scott’s model for Flora McIvor in Waverley. Jackson, however, repeatedly emphasizes Ona’s Scottish Highland heritage in the fight against slavery in Kansas.
After helping a fugitive slave and her child escape to John Brown’s camp, Ona dresses in the traditional “‘kilt and kirtle’ of the Scottish lassie” and sings a song about her home state of New
Hampshire (327). The song deeply moves a Scottish emigrant in the group, sending his thoughts
“back to ‘Bonnie Scotland’…the land where freedom found friends and liberty was a birthright”
(328). Symbolically linking New England and “Bonnie Scotland,” this episode suggests that both are forces for freedom and right in Kansas.
Detaching Scott’s chivalric romance from the Southern planter class, Jackson relocates it in Ona and her gender-bending alter ego Dickey Deane—thereby claiming this romantic heritage for both abolition and women’s rights. Ona blends Scottish heritage with New England hardihood, making her a formidable antidote to romancing the South through Scott. Affiliating the Kansas free-state fight with a more global pursuit of freedom, Jackson frames an alternate romanticism on the side of right. Moreover, she frames Bleeding Kansas as a conflict that inspires an array of
European freedom-fighters to join the cause: in addition to Englishmen and Scots, John Brown’s company includes Irish, Polish, and Hungarian freedom-fighters (359–360). “Noblemen and scholars of other lands have joined me in this strife for freedom here on the broad prairies of the
30 Southern affinity for the Jacobite rebellion began long before the Civil War but was intensified by the loss of the Confederacy, which made the parallel even more trenchant; Jefferson Davis himself connected the two narratives, in his 1876 pamphlet Scotland and the Scottish People. See Mike Goode, “The Walter Scott Experience” (2016), 219– 220. On Scott’s influence in the American South, see also: Celeste Ray, Highland Heritage (2001); Ritchie Devon Watson, Normans and Saxons (2008), ch. 2; and Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott (2012), ch. 4.
224 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
West,” observes Brown. “Then why should I cease to hope?” (309). Moving Walter Scott west to
Kansas, Jackson showcases the romance and nobility of the anti-slavery fight—and also elevates
Bleeding Kansas to a position of honor among well-known “freedom” struggles across the world.
Jackson’s heroes are all strong anti-slavery advocates, and her lovingly drawn portrayal of
John Brown indicates that she held a more radical abolitionist stance than Humphrey. Venerating
Brown as a fatherly hero and martyr, her novel concludes with the dedication of an Osawatomie monument in his honor. Yet like Humphrey, Jackson never indicts her novel’s pro-slavery
Southern gentleman even as she claims Scott for the North. Instead, she merely redirects him through contact with the low border ruffians. And like Humphrey, Jackson also evacuates Kansas territory of black communities. Dickey Deane twice assists fugitive slaves in escaping from
Missouri. Yet Kansas does not become a permanent home to any of these individuals, who, the novel suggests, must hurry on to safer states. Jackson quietly suggests her support for colonization instead: Ona later solicits funds for the Anti-Slavery party, in order “to purchase the freedom of slaves and colonize them in Liberia” (389). The novel’s final chapters also remove virtually all of its freedom-fighting abolitionist heroes away from Kansas. Ona emigrates to Europe with most of her family and friends, and spends most of the Civil War in Scotland; when she does return to
America, it is as an advocate for “the interest of women” in Washington, DC (438). Left in Kansas, implicitly, are white settlers like Jackson herself. Jackson ultimately suggests that the freedom- fighters of Bleeding Kansas have made it possible for her—a small white child growing up in
Osawatomie during the 1850s—to flourish in Kansas after the Civil War.
Both Humphrey and Jackson use the Bleeding Kansas conflict to pre-conciliate North and
South at the Kansas-Missouri border, reconciling “reasonable” Northern and Southern forces against a common enemy before the Civil War even begins. In these novels, Southern defenders
225 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters of slavery—men like Roderick Delaney and General Blair—are ultimately redeemed through their encounters with the chaotic and evil border ruffians. This revisionist history ironically privileges
Bleeding Kansas over the Civil War itself, which takes place in a few pages at the end of each novel. For Jackson and Humphrey, Bleeding Kansas is less the precursor to the Civil War than it is an end in and of itself. With little to no sentimental appeal, and heavy doses of historical romance, these novels complacently recover and celebrate a Kansas history that also lays the foundation for a future dominated by free white farmers instead of black Exodusters.
The Bleeding Kansas Historical Romance, 1890–1905
Between 1890 and 1910, a second wave of historical romances about Bleeding Kansas appeared in print. As both Bleeding Kansas and the Civil War receded further into the background, these novels ritually reviewed the struggle by white abolitionists to make Kansas a free state during the
1850s. The titles alone speak to this preoccupation: The Jayhawkers: A Tale of the Border War,
Kansas in the Early Days (1892), by Thompson B. Ferguson (1857–1921); For Freedom’s Sake
(1896), by Arthur Paterson (1862–1928); Sons of Strength: A Romance of the Kansas Border Wars
(1899), by William Rheem Lighton (1866–1923); The Jay-Hawkers: A Story of Free Soil and
Border Ruffian Days (1900), by Adela E. Orpen (1855–1927); and Before the Crisis (1904), by
Frederick Blount Mott. All of these novelists were born within a few years of the Civil War and grew up largely in its aftermath. All of them were white, and most appear to have lived in or traveled through Kansas—although their connections to the state seem to have been largely transient. Much further removed from Reconstruction and the Exoduster migration than the novels of the early 1880s, their novels are likelier to indulge in strident sectionalism—to unite the evil border ruffians and the Southern planter class against valiant anti-slavery freedom fighters—but just as likely as their predecessors to frame Kansas exclusively as a white homeland.
226 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
On the one hand, these novels represent a pocket of stridently sectional historical fiction at the height of the reconciliation romance: often they do not exonerate the Southern planters through a pre-conciliation plot, but rather strongly reinforce the abolitionist movement while tying
Southerners to the evil Border ruffians. They lean heavily into the narrative of Kansas as a training ground for militant abolitionists—led by John Brown, almost universally portrayed as a heroic martyr. In these novels, the Silber narrative of the West as a “locus of sectional unity” begins to fracture: instead, many of these turn-of-the-century authors take this Western pre-war conflict as an opportunity to revisit and reinforce sectional divides. And while Hulbert has traced the depoliticization of Confederate bushwhackers in the war’s aftermath, these Bleeding Kansas novels reactivate border ruffians as pro-slavery advocates whose actions directly contributed to the onset of the Civil War. Reverting back to a pre-Civil War conflict, this group of Bleeding
Kansas novels do not generally rehabilitate Southern planters at the expense of the border ruffians.
Instead, Bleeding Kansas seems to afford them an opportunity to indulge in rehearsals of sectional strife unusual in an age of reconciliation. Ultimately, this indulgence suggests that the borderline nature of Bleeding Kansas—on the borders of the Civil War, both in terms of geography and memory—also made it an opportune setting for resistance to reconciliation. The very fact that
Bleeding Kansas took place before the Civil War, as well as on its geographic edge, encouraged this rehearsal of resistance: most of these novels end before the Civil War even begins, and more specifically right after the 1859 execution of John Brown—an event that only intensified pre-war divisions between North and South. Instead of emerging reconciled on the other side of the war, their heroes are left anticipating the larger fight to come. Moreover, these Bleeding Kansas novels firmly entrench the roots of the Civil War in the contest over slavery at a time when reconciliation narratives increasingly obfuscated that history. Against a tide of post-Reconstruction
227 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters reconciliation narratives, this small pocket genre used Bleeding Kansas to re-center the battle over slavery as a root cause of the Civil War. Shifting the war to a temporal and geographic “border,” these novels make Kansas a place to remember the anti-slavery fight. In so doing, they are at once radical and incredibly conservative: while remembering the abolitionist movement, they also displace the struggle for black rights in Kansas entirely to the past.
Like Jackson and Humphrey in the early 1880s, Thompson B. Ferguson had a personal interest in Kansas history. Born in Ohio, he spent his childhood and young adulthood (1858–1892) in Kansas, where he became a schoolteacher and a Methodist minister. He would eventually move to Oklahoma, where he became a newspaper publisher, postmaster, and later the Governor of
Oklahoma Territory.31 His 1892 novel, The Jayhawkers, celebrates the heroic abolitionists who resisted pro-slavery forces on the Kansas-Missouri border. Dedicated to “those who fought in freedom’s vanguard during the dark days of ‘Bleeding Kansas’ and to loyal friends who have aided the Jayhawker state on her ‘journey to the stars,’” the novel has little patience for reconciliation.
Indeed, it does not use the border ruffians to exonerate the Southern planter class—but rather yolks them together in their villainy. The self-appointed “Colonel” Higgins is a rough Missouri “border leader,” who speaks in the uncouth dialect characteristic of the ruffians (90). Unusually for a border ruffian, he has established a plantation in Kansas territory, flaunting his ownership of slaves “on northern soil” (90). He is leagued with the Hon. Theopholis Spilkins, “a prominent South
Carolinian, who had come to the front to assist the border sovereigns to squat in Kansas” (93).
Spilkins represents the Southern planter class, and speaks in a high-toned oratorical style:
“Missourians, South Carolinians, and friends in a glorious cause,” he opines, at the opening of a thunderous pro-slavery speech that ties together Missouri border ruffians and “prominent” South
31 See John Bartlett Meserve, “The Governors of Oklahoma Territory” (1942), 225–226.
228 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
Carolinians like himself (94). Indeed, the pro-slavery forces on the border include “Missourians,
Carolinians, Georgians, Mississippians, ‘Arkansawyers,’ Texans, and representatives of nearly all the other grades of creation, mingled in one heterogeneous mass, actuated by one purpose—the subjugation of Kansas to the interest of the slave power of the South” (99–100). Ferguson uses the border ruffians to expose the crass underbelly of the Southern cause: instead of contrasting his
Southern aristocrats with the ruffians in order to exonerate the former, he shows Spilkins to be merely a better-spoken version of his rough counterpart Higgins, a “representative ‘Westerner’”
(90). The novel venerates its Northern abolitionist heroes, culminating in an extended paean to the heroic John Brown, whose “name stands inseparably connected with the history of freedom in the
United States” (372–373). Although Ferguson does not cover the Civil War itself, the final chapters revisit Kansas during a postwar reunion: the novel’s heroes, matured by war, return to celebrate their victory on the free Kansas soil that they once defended. Staging a Civil War battle reenactment on the Kansas plains, Ferguson makes a flourishing claim for Kansas’s prominence in Civil War history: he defines Bleeding Kansas as an episode “that heralded the great American rebellion,” and only shows a version of that rebellion play-acted on Kansas soil.
In For Freedom’s Sake (1896), Arthur Paterson follows the heroic Boston abolitionist
Robert as he joins John Brown in the fight against slavery in Kansas territory. Paterson himself was born and educated in England, but traveled through the American West between 1877 and
1880. He raised sheep in New Mexico and farmed in Kansas, then returned to England and began writing historical romances.32 Instead of uniting North and South against the border ruffians,
Paterson also pits the Northern abolitionists against the combined forces of Southern planters and
Missouri border ruffians. Indeed, his pair of villains—the Virginian slaveholder Captain Howlett
32 See John Sutherland’s The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (1989), 492.
229 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters and the Missouri border ruffian Pat Laughlin—are completely aligned in their terrible cruelties.
Only the abolitionists are truly willing to fight for the end of slavery: most free state Kansans are portrayed as weak or even in league with the pro-slavery forces, in a novel that venerates John
Brown’s militant abolitionist tactics. Also at stake are the heart and the politics of Ruth, a Virginia heiress living in Missouri. The novel’s long and convoluted plot inevitably ends with the marriage of Ruth and Robert: after peace is established in Kansas, they wed and relocate to the abolitionist stronghold of Boston. On the one hand, Ruth’s conversion to abolitionism is a pre-conciliation plot of sorts: she is both romantically drawn to the hero and politically drawn to his cause. On the other hand, her conversion is only in preparation for further sectional division. The novel ends on the cusp of the Civil War, just after the execution of an unequivocally heroic John Brown, and intimates that Robert has merely been saved for the fight to come. Paterson ends with unreconciled divisions: the rehearsal of antebellum strife during Bleeding Kansas, in other words, offers him an opportunity to revisit sectional conflict in an era of reconciliation.
Before the Crisis (1904), by Unitarian reverend Frederick Blount Mott, echoes For
Freedom’s Sake in allying Southerners and border ruffians. Mott’s hero is Oliver Wentworth, an abolitionist Kansas emigrant who is so aligned with John Brown that he looks as if he could be his son. The villains are Southern military officers and Missouri border ruffians, led by the pro-slavery
Colonel Jefferson Mendenhall of Virginia and the “hardened ruffian” Captain Buckskin Bill of the
St. Clair Rangers. While the border ruffians commit most of the novel’s brutalities, Colonel
Mendenhall is just as vicious and vengeful as his rougher counterparts. At stake are the heart and the politics of Barbara Fairfax, another beautiful Southern girl in Missouri. Willing to question her assumptions about slavery (she wants to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin), Barbara ultimately falls in love with Oliver and allies herself to the abolitionist movement. In the end, John Brown encourages
230 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
Oliver to leave Kansas because he is too valuable to lose his life in the border conflict. Mott has very little to say about the future of Kansas territory, ending the novel with Brown’s 1859 execution. Although he allies the Southern belle and the Northern abolitionist, Mott frames
Bleeding Kansas as a dress rehearsal for the Civil War. The novel does not end in postbellum reconciliation, but abruptly cuts off as the shadow of the larger conflict looms.
William Rheem Lighton’s Sons of Strength (1899) follows a similar pattern in refusing to pre-conciliate—although curiously, it also does not yoke Southerners and border ruffians together.
Lighton himself was a journalist and novelist, who primarily wrote romances and histories set in the American West. Born in Pennsylvania, he lived in Kansas and Nebraska before settling on a farm in Arkansas.33 Sons of Strength follows Illinois abolitionist Pokey Upjack to Kansas in his quest to stop “the spread of human slavery” (43). Pokey also allies himself with John Brown, eager to fight and disdainful of more moderate Kansans who wish simply to do whatever it takes to maintain the peace. Although raised by Quakers, he finds himself rejecting the “gentle caution and counsel for peace” now that he is faced with “the business of fighting” in Kansas (91). The antagonists are the Blue Lodge, a secret society of pro-slavery Missourians who are portrayed as an uncouth and drunken mob. In the novel’s climax, Pokey helps John Brown to stave off an attack from these ruffians, one of whom turns out to be Pokey’s own long-lost father! While Pokey allows his father to escape execution by Brown in the name of family, this Bleeding Kansas plot is far from achieving reconciliation. It does not even introduce a plucky Southern heroine, to be converted to the abolitionist cause: Pokey’s sweetheart is a fiery Ohio woman who already abhors slavery. The novel stops short of the Civil War, as Pokey braces for the fight to come: “There was
33 See Nan Lawler’s entry on William Rheem Lighton in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, available at https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/will-lighton-1046/
231 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters no reasonable hope that our border warfare was yet at an end; I would take my place with the fighters, and might yet find chance for doing something worthy of a man” (240–241). Again, the
Bleeding Kansas plot merely prepares its heroes for a still greater fight ahead. However, Lighton’s use of the Kansas-Missouri border scuffle also distances his narrative from the Old South. In this novel, the drunken mob of Blue Lodge ruffians—while pro-slavery—share little else with the
Southern planters whose ways of life and motivations for waging war became romanticized in the elegy of the Lost Cause. Lighton actually absents the Southern planter class from the border fight altogether, disconnecting it in certain ways from the larger sectional conflict.
Adela Orpen’s The Jayhawkers (1900), meanwhile, argues against John Brown’s militant tactics even as it supports an anti-slavery message. Orpen herself was born on a Virginia plantation, but moved with her family to Kansas as a small child in 1862. Her family supported the Union, and her father fought for the Union army. After the war, she made her permanent home in Ireland.34
This novel spans the years 1860 to 1863, ending with Bill Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence, Kansas.
While Orpen valorizes the anti-slavery cause, she clearly rejects the militant tactics characteristic of border warfare: both the terrible raids of the border ruffians, and the raids of John Brown. Her young hero Heaton is a Vermonter raised in “almost militant abolitionism,” who initially takes up
Brown’s mantle in Kansas (58). Indeed, it is Brown’s execution that inspires him to travel there in the first place. Arriving in May 1860, Heaton—as his name suggests—is a bit too heated: he shoots a man in haste while raiding a Missouri plantation, only to later discover that he has murdered the father of the woman he loves! This young woman, “Missouri girl” Nancy Overton, meanwhile slowly recognizes the evils of slavery and brings her slaves across the border to Kansas, intending to set them free (86). Heaton will eventually redirect his fighting spirit to legitimate combat as a
34 Philip Bull, “Orpen, Adela Elizabeth (née Richards” (2013).
232 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters soldier in the Union army, in symbolic “expiation” for the crime that he committed on the border
(201). Returning to Kansas on sick leave in the middle of the war, he ends up rescuing his sweetheart from Missouri bushwhackers and marrying her. Rejecting all forms of guerrilla warfare, Orpen is more critical of her young abolitionist hero than the other novels in this group:
Heaton is saved for the Civil War like many Bleeding Kansas heroes, but also punished for his militant abolitionism. Yet the border ruffians, by comparison, are a completely irredeemable mob.
Dubbed “Missouri scum,” they represent “the last effort of expiring slavery” (204, 205). Yet again, this drunken mob of pro-slavery ruffians substitutes for the Southern planter class. Orpen never actually shows Civil War combat between Union and Confederate troops, focusing instead on the chaotic and brutal killings at the border that—while preoccupied with slavery—also proffer an enemy disconnected from the Southern planter class exonerated in the romance of reunion.
These turn-of-the-century Bleeding Kansas novels, much farther removed from both the
Civil War and the Exoduster migration, thus iterate on earlier 1880s entries into the genre. While
Lighton and Orpen disconnected the border ruffians from the Old South, in an echo of the 1880s historical romances, the other three—Ferguson, Paterson, and Mott—deployed the border ruffian to heighten the villainy of the Southern planter class, framing pro-slavery Southerners merely as more aristocratic and well-spoken versions of the border men. In an age of reconciliation, these historical romances of the 1850s Kansas-Missouri border curiously reinscribe sectional divisions
and often refuse reunion by concluding short of the Civil War itself.
Exodusters: An Eden Erased
The later Bleeding Kansas novels have no stake in the question of whether Kansas would become a refuge for black migrants. Long after the excitement of the Exoduster migration, the question had been decided in the negative: even in Kansas, racist violence surged against black Americans
233 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters at the height of the Jim Crow Era. Not one of these novels features a major black character; instead, they consistently usher fugitive slaves out of Kansas territory almost as soon as they enter. Only one black character appears in all of Paterson’s For Freedom’s Sake, a runaway slave who is quickly helped north to Canada. The same is true in Lighton’s Sons of Strength: a single slave girl appears in a melodramatic tableaux, defended by an abolitionist son from his brutish pro-slavery
Missouri father, but disappears completely once rescued (80). Ferguson’s The Jayhawkers, however, is especially notable because it actually alludes to the Exoduster migration in the process of erasing it from Kansas history. Towards the end of the novel, Ferguson imagines John Brown’s raid on the fictional Missouri plantation of one Colonel Snobkins. Originally from Georgia,
Snobkins is a wealthy resident of Missouri with a vast estate and many slaves. His purpose,
Ferguson notes ironically, is “missionary work for the absorbing enterprise of the South—slavery and slave labor” (325). Brown and his followers rescue twenty slaves from the plantation, rushing them across the border to Kansas. Throughout their flight to Kansas, however, Ferguson repeatedly uses the term “exoduster” to describe the fugitive slaves. “A merrier company of exodusters never exodusted,” he quips as they celebrate on the road (331). When “news of the exodus” reaches the
Colonel, he instigates a bungled hunt as “the exodusters” travel sixty miles to the border—where they are to be shipped “over the underground rail road, at the earliest opportunity possible” (338,
350). While the Biblical Exodus is certainly in the background of this episode, Ferguson’s use of the term “exoduster” specifically recalls the 1879 Exoduster migration.
This episode makes explicit what is implicit in the novels by Humphrey and Jackson ten years prior: Ferguson effectively rewrites the Exoduster migration, reframing it as an antebellum escape from slavery. He celebrates the abolitionist spirit in Kansas, embodied in John Brown’s rescue of the Missouri slaves; and yet he also pushes the fugitive slaves out of Kansas territory as
234 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters soon as they arrive, sending them on to an undisclosed location via the underground railroad.
Detaching the term “exoduster” from the hopeful 1879 migration of black Southerners to Kansas, he reattaches it to the antebellum Bleeding Kansas conflict. This historicizing of the Exodusters perfectly embodies the moment in which Ferguson’s novel appeared: twelve years after the actual
Exoduster migration, Kansas was not an Edenic refuge for black Americans fleeing the South. By adapting the language of the Exoduster migration to the 1850s, Ferguson effectively contains the promise of Kansas for black Americans to the antebellum period. Unwittingly, he exposes what was perhaps the true promise of Bleeding Kansas for white Kansans after the Civil War: the
Bleeding Kansas historical romance can at once celebrate Kansas as an embodiment of freedom and anti-slavery principles, while also projecting Kansas as a white homeland by shuttling antebellum “exodusters” through the state to other locations.
In the Bleeding Kansas historical romance, Kansas is both a symbol of freedom and always also just a stopping point—never a permanent home—for fugitive slaves. This is the only version of the “exoduster” migration that Ferguson is willing to consider—and the only one that he needs to confront, in a historical novel of the 1850s. Sure enough, the last chapter of The Jayhawkers passes to the aftermath of the Civil War. The scene is set on a prosperous Kansas farm, belonging to one of the novel’s white heroes. An emigrant from Indiana, he fought in Bleeding Kansas and the Civil War before establishing himself and starting a family. He relies on his sons, who “are essential to the farm,” to help him with the agricultural work (412). In 1892, Ferguson’s vision of peaceful Kansas rejects the Exodusters entirely. Displacing the Exoduster migration to an antebellum past, he envisions a future grounded in the family farms of Bleeding Kansas heroes whose efforts on behalf of black Americans are also part of that antebellum past.
235 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
The Failed Promise of Free Kansas
These 1890s and 1900s novels are especially stunning in their veneration of Kansas history, given events in Kansas since the Exoduster narrative had faded. For in addition to its national prominence during the Exoduster migration, Kansas also made national headlines in the post-Reconstruction period for a completely contradictory reason: racist discrimination and violence, specifically lynching. As David Blight has shown, white Americans in the postbellum period traded racial equality for reconciliation; and numerous histories have charted the rampant violence against and disenfranchisement of black Americans during this time.35 Yet scholarship largely ignored the history of racist violence in Kansas until Brent M. S. Campney’s This is Not Dixie (2015) carefully marshaled historical data to show that postbellum Kansas, contrary to popular belief, was also wracked by violence against black Americans. According to Campney, the Midwest “has been viewed through a conceptual prism much more forgiving than the one applied to the South” since the time of the Civil War (1). This framework has helped to popularize the idea that the postbellum
Midwest was a land of “racial harmony” exempt from racist violence (10). “By branding the South as the racist section of the country, those narrating the identity of other sections have found a foil against which they can compare their own racial goodness,” Campney observes (9). Kansas, in particular, has been subject to a romantic “Free State narrative” framing it “as a land of freedom and justice” while ignoring “the racist attitudes of many Free Staters” (41).
After Reconstruction, news reports about racist violence in Kansas began to emphasize the contrast between this reality and the free state mythology.36 While much of the reporting on Kansas
35 See, for example, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stony the Road (2019); R. Volney Riser, Defying Disenfranchisement (2010); and Stewart Emory Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence (1995).
36 As Campney shows, newspapers picked up on this contrast as early as the Exoduster migration. When a Kansas mob lynched a black man, Bill Howard, in an “exhibition of anti-Exodus sentiment” during the spring of 1879, white Southern newspapers “sarcastically exploited the contradiction between the Free State mythology and the reality of
236 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters violence was limited to local newspapers, one lynching in particular sparked an outpouring of national coverage that highlighted the irony of racist violence in the “free state.” On January 15,
1901, a white mob brutally lynched a black man, Fred Alexander, in the town of Leavenworth.
Accused of assaulting and murdering one white woman, and attempting to assault another,
Alexander was dragged from his jail cell and burned at the stake before a reported audience of some 8,000 people (Campney 90). His murder was “the most widely publicized lynching in state history,” covered by The New York Times and other newspapers across the nation. (90).37 Many articles highlighted the contrast between the brutal lynching and the state’s vaunted anti-slavery past. As Campney shows, responses to the lynching—which fundamentally challenged this beloved Free State narrative—varied in different parts of the country. White Kansas newspapers unleashed “a flood of Free State sentimentality” in an attempt to frame the violence as an exception rather than the rule, while black Kansas newspapers instead emphasized “the disconnect between white mythology and black experience” (99, 101). Northern and Southern newspapers alike contrasted Alexander’s murder with the principles of freedom on which Kansas was founded. Yet
Northern newspapers usually invoked Bleeding Kansas to express their dismay over the lynching, while Southern newspapers generally invoked the same history to express smug satisfaction (91).
The day before Alexander’s murder, for example, the Austin Daily Statesman ran a headline about the mob that threatened him in his jail cell: “In Bleeding Kansas — Even In That Land of Cranks
Kansas” (65). While there was actually more racist violence in Kansas during Reconstruction, the reporting on racist violence became more open towards the end of the century (29, 31).
37 According to Campney, most instances of racist violence in Kansas were reported only in local newspapers; the widespread national coverage of the Alexander case was unprecedented. Yet as Christopher Lovett points out, this wider coverage of the lynching all ultimately relied on the original reports in local Kansas newspapers—often quoting verbatim from these articles (108). On the response of black Kansas newspapers to racist violence, see also Marie Deacon, Kansas as the “Promised Land” (1973).
237 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters and Isms They Want to Lynch a Negro Rape Fiend — The Mob Was Dispersed — While They
Denounce the South for Such Acts, the Crime is Now Brought Home to Them. Seek Retribution.”38
However, what I find most striking about the national coverage is the fact that these papers often had far less to say about Alexander himself than about Kansas history. In some cases, this obsessive focus on state history nearly erases Alexander from the story altogether.39 Articles persistently superimposed Bleeding Kansas onto the murder, framing it as the shocking conclusion to the state’s heroic anti-slavery past. “From bleeding for the negro to burning one at the stake is a long jump, but Kansas is capable of long jumps and extraordinary acts,” reported The Nashville
American. “As early as 1850 it began to bleed for the negro, and by 1865 armed conflicts between the free soilers and pro-slavery men had taken place in its borders. In 1901 it burns one at the stake!” The article, entitled “Bleeding Kansas,” transfers the epithet from the blood spilled in the
1850s anti-slavery fight to the blood spilled in racist violence fifty years later. It proceeds to march through several paragraphs of Kansas history, which contextualize the burning of Alexander— who is never named—with a fiery state history: the burning of Ossawatomie, “the firebrand” John
Brown, and the “burning issue” of Bleeding Kansas itself. The final paragraphs bridge the 1850s border scuffle, the 1879 Exoduster migration, and the 1901 lynching with a rhetorical flourish:
It [Kansas] next attracted attention in the latter seventies when some 40,000 negro emigrants moved there from different parts of the South, and, in 1893, it again came into public notice when rival claims to the Legislature were set up by the Republicans and Populists. The former took forcible possession of Representatives Hall, and the militia was called out. Now it burns a negro at the stake, a crime so barbaric as to be almost inconceivable.
What would John Brown and the other free soilers say if they could hear the news?40
38 “In Bleeding Kansas,” Austin Daily Statesman, January 14, 1901: 1.
39 In my own survey of these articles, it appears that newspapers outside of Kansas were more likely than local papers to replace the actual story of the lynching with an extended survey of Bleeding Kansas history.
40 “Bleeding Kansas,” The Nashville American, Jan. 21, 1901: 4.
238 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
On January 17, two days after the lynching, a Chicago Daily Tribune article entitled “‘Bleeding
Kansas’ and the Negro Problem” also opened with a historical retrospective:
The burning at the stake of a negro on the soil of Kansas will strike many people as being a historical paradox. For the ten years just previous to the civil war the battle for the negro’s freedom was mainly fought in the then Territory of Kansas, at least so far as actual physical violence was concerned. John Brown lived in Ossawatomie, Kas., with his sons, and there commenced the attacks on slavery which ended with his capture at Harper’s Ferry. There was civil war in Kansas over the slavery question as early as 1856.41
This article also proceeds to survey the major events in the 1850s border scuffle, and reflects on the once-bright hope of the Exoduster migration. “In 1879 began a great emigration of colored people into the State,” the author recalls. “Badly treated in the South, they naturally looked upon
Kansas as a haven of refuge.” Strikingly, the article is accompanied by sketches of several famous white men associated with Bleeding Kansas history: John Brown, free soil leader James Henry
Lane, territorial governors A. H. Reeder and Wilson Shannon, and state governor Charles
Robinson. Noticeably absent is any depiction of Alexander, although a sketch did circulate at the time. The article ostensibly about his murder buries his body under Bleeding Kansas history, and obscures his face with white faces from this anti-slavery past.42 Beginning with a sentence about the victim, it reverts to rehearsals of Bleeding Kansas history and never returns to his story.43
41 “‘Bleeding Kansas’ and the Negro Problem,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 17, 1901: 6.
42 The same article also appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer. See “‘Bleeding Kansas.’ A State That has Had a Stormy History From Its Birth. Events Recalled by Recent Stake Burning,” Cincinnati Enquirer, January 26, 1901: 12.
43 After Alexander’s murder, Bleeding Kansas continued to appear in headlines about violence against black Americans in the “free state.” In July 1902, for example, The Baltimore Sun reported on the burning of a black man’s house in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. “Riots in Bleeding Kansas!” read the headline. A reader who signed his name “Unreconstructed” took the opportunity to mock the situation, again calling the Bleeding Kansas narrative into question: “Well, well! Is this the bleeding Kansas that was settled by religious and abolition purists on the one high moral idea—the freedom of the negro and the elevation of him into the ‘Christian man and brother?’…. who could have ever anticipated that the ‘general sentiment’ of such a religious, intelligent, philanthropic and law-abiding population as the settlers of ‘Bleeding Kansas’ would indorse the chasing out by a mob and the destruction of the homes of the negroes whom they had invited by their professions of brotherly love through so many years to come to
239 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
Alexander’s lynching received very different coverage in the Colored American Magazine, a Boston-based monthly devoted to African-American literature and culture. Founded in 1900, the
Colored American addressed the lynching of Alexander in its February 1901 issue, with far more sympathy for Alexander and outrage on his behalf than most news coverage. A two-column article, entitled “Kansas versus New Jersey,” compared the Kansas lynching with a New Jersey criminal case involving white men.44 In the left-hand column, under the subtitle “New Jersey, Thirty Years’
Imprisonment,” three short paragraphs narrate the punishment for a group of white men found guilty of raping and murdering a white woman: three of them received “thirty years’ imprisonment at hard labor,” while the fourth received fifteen years (314). The right-hand column, “Kansas,
Burned at the Stake” offers an extended account of Fred Alexander’s horrifying death. This narrative is a slightly abridged version of the New York Times account, which had run under the headline “Negro Dies at the Stake” the previous month.45 It is not hard to see why the Colored
American chose to repurpose this account, which vividly depicts both the horror of the murder and
Alexander’s own protestations of innocence. With no references to Bleeding Kansas history or the free state mythology, the extended description of Alexander’s final minutes defines Kansas solely as the site of brutal racist violence. This narrative also gives Alexander a voice: he proclaims his innocence three separate times, as the mob drags him from his cell and douses him in oil at the stake. His final words mix defiance and pathos: “You’re burning an innocent man. You took
their State as the paradise of the ‘nation’s ward?’” See “Riots in Bleeding Kansas! Former Seat of Alabama Abolition Sentiment Declared To Be ‘Backslider’ — Philanthropic Suggestions,” The Baltimore Sun, July 22, 1902: 10.
44 “Kansas versus New Jersey—The Only Difference Was In The Color of The Skin.—The Same Old Race Question,” The Colored American Magazine 2.4 (February 1901): 314–315.
45 As Christopher Lovett points out, all newspapers that addressed the lynching ultimately drew their material from reporting by local Kansas newspapers (108). The Wichita Searchlight’s “Colored Man Burned at the Stake in Kansas” (January 19, 1901), for example, contains language that later appeared in the New York Times.
240 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters advantage of me. You gave me no show. Can I see my mother?” While Bleeding Kansas fiction usually emphasized the state’s contiguity with the North in order to highlight its anti-slavery principles, the Colored American contrasted the Kansas lynching with the lenient prison sentence in New Jersey—thereby emphasizing a continuum of racism from the North to the West. As the article’s subtitle proclaims, “The Only Difference Was In The Color of the Skin.—The Same Old
Race Question.” In New Jersey and Kansas alike, the “same old race question” plagued both the judicial system and public opinion. The Colored American’s account completely ignored Bleeding
Kansas history: instead of reverting to rehearsals of the abolitionist past, it gave an extended narrative of the brutal murder.
At the time of the Alexander lynching, forty-three-year-old Pauline Hopkins (1859–1930) was working as an editor at the Colored American. A prominent essayist and novelist in her own right, Hopkins had assumed the editorship in 1900 and went on to publish three serial novels in the magazine over the next three years. One of these, Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest, was in fact a Bleeding Kansas novel. Serialized from May to October 1902, a little over a year after the Alexander lynching, Winona both embraced and rejected the tropes of prior
Bleeding Kansas novels. While Tourgée and the Kansas novelists pitched competing visions of
Kansas as paradise—for black migrants, for white free staters—in the aftermath of the Exoduster migration, Winona reflects a far more ambivalent vision of Kansas. Although she celebrates the
1850s abolitionist movement in the territory, Hopkins ultimately frames Kansas as a ghostly wilderness—one that must be abandoned by the novel’s black heroes in a border-crossing that reverses the Exoduster migration. Contextualized by Alexander’s murder, which would have come to Hopkins’s attention in the Colored American’s coverage, Winona offers the most ambiguous portrait of Kansas in the genre of the post-Reconstruction Bleeding Kansas historical romance.
241 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
Abandoning Kansas: Border Crossings in Pauline Hopkins’s Winona
In 1903, Pauline Hopkins wrote a laudatory three-part biographical sketch of Lydia Maria Child for the Colored American. “A review of the life and times of Mrs. Child is eminently instructive at the present period of our history,” Hopkins reflected from the midst of the Jim Crow era, marked by widespread disenfranchisement and racist violence towards black Americans.46 “Were she living to-day, her trenchant pen would do us yeoman’s service in the vexed question of disenfranchisement and equality for the Afro-American.”47 Lauding Child’s strong moral center,
Christian sympathies, and unflagging resistance to “the cruelty of caste prejudice” at a moment when most prominent abolitionists had passed into mere memory, Hopkins also quoted liberally from the posthumous Letters of Lydia Maria Child (1882). Another memorial to the abolitionist movement, this volume featured an introduction by John Greenleaf Whittier and an appendix by
Wendell Phillips. Hopkins closes the essay with one of Child’s last letters, which is full of praise for her fellow abolitionists. “Such was the character of Lydia Maria Child,” adds Hopkins, “one of Christ’s elect when on earth” (459).
Although separated by a generation, both Child and Hopkins were prolific writers and editors whose works unsparingly addressed racial injustices. Child’s An Appeal in Favor of that
Class of Americans Known as Africans (1833) was one of the earliest anti-slavery works in
America. In novels, essays, histories, short stories, and poems, she advocated throughout her life for the rights of African Americans, Native Americans, and women. The last of Child’s four novels, The Romance of the Republic (1867), posed interracial marriage as part of a hopeful vision
46 Hopkins, “Reminiscences of the Life and Times of Lydia Maria Child I” (1903), 279.
47 Hopkins, “Reminiscences of the Life and Times of Lydia Maria Child III” (1903), 454.
242 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters for the future of the nation.48 Hopkins, meanwhile, began her literary career as Child’s was ending: she started acting and writing plays as a young woman in the late 1870s, although she was most productive as a writer between 1900 and 1905.49 The author of numerous essays, short stories, plays, and novels, Hopkins also served as an editor at the influential Colored American Magazine from 1900 to 1904. Her first novel, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life
North and South, was published in 1900 by the Colored Co-operative Publishing Company, which also oversaw the Colored American.50 Her last three novels were all serialized in the magazine:
Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice appeared in 1901–02, followed by
Winona in 1902 and Of One Blood: or, The Hidden Self in 1902–03.
Given her admiration for Child and her idealization of the abolitionist spirit, it is not especially surprising that Hopkins wrote a Bleeding Kansas novel forty-six years after Child published The Kansas Emigrants. In Winona, the titular heroine escapes from slavery in Missouri to freedom in Kansas at the height of the border conflict, with help from John Brown and other abolitionists. Like the novels of Jackson, Humphrey, and Tourgée in the early 1880s, Hopkins’s turn to Bleeding Kansas is as much about post-Reconstruction Kansas and Missouri as it is about the antebellum conflict. Post-Reconstruction history is as relevant to her polemic in Winona as
Bleeding Kansas was to 1850s texts like The Kansas Emigrants, and Hopkins’s novel should be contextualized by Bleeding Kansas journalism and fiction after 1880. Published at the height of
48 On the scope and the limitations of Child’s vision, see Carolyn Karcher, “Lydia Maria Child’s Romance of the Republic” in Slavery and the Literary Imagination (1989), ed. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad; and Dana D. Nelson, “Introduction” to A Romance of the Republic (1997). On Child’s life and works, see Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic (1994).
49 On the life of Pauline Hopkins, see Hanna Wallinger, Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography (2005) and Lois Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution (2008).
50 In 1904, however, the New York-based Moore Publishing and Printing Company assumed publication of the Colored American Magazine; Moore published it until the magazine’s run ended in 1909.
243 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters the Jim Crow era, Winona revives Kansas as an unstable and contested territory—one that is rejected by the novel’s black heroes, who migrate instead to England in a plotline that that I argue specifically revises the hopeful Exoduster narrative of the early 1880s.
Scholarship on Winona has situated the novel within a national historical context at the turn of the century, highlighting the novel’s message of resistance to racist violence and oppression across the nation. As Hazel V. Carby has shown, each of Hopkins’s novels grapples with the legacies of racist discrimination and violence fifty years after the Civil War.51 Carby illuminates the role of antebellum history in Hopkins’s fiction, arguing that Hopkins “concentrated on what the readership could learn from a re-creation of the history of the South in a causal relation to the present” (129). By invoking “the ‘spirit’ of abolitionism,” Hopkins sought to “encourage among her readership a resurgence of the forms of political agitation and resistance of the antislavery movement” (129). More specifically, Carby understands Hopkins’s reversion to Bleeding Kansas in Winona as a reflection on the Jim Crow era: “Winona was transparently a call for organized acts of resistance against contemporary persecution displaced to a fictional history” (155). Claudia Tate likewise notes that Winona’s antebellum setting allowed Hopkins “to recover the abolitionist fervor and definitively relate the Civil War to the abolition of slavery, a relationship that would be effaced with much of the historiography of the twentieth century” (374). And as Jill Bergman points out, an episode of near-lynching—in which a white man is almost burned at the stake—is clearly also a commentary on racist violence at the turn of the twentieth century (107–109).
Hopkins herself embraced the free state narrative of Bleeding Kansas in her essay “Famous
Women of the Negro Race—Educators,” published in the Colored American in May 1902:
51 See Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood (1987), 121–162. See also Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire (1992), ch. 7; and Jill Bergman, The Motherless Child in the Novels of Pauline Hopkins (2012).
244 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
Intermarriage between Northern and Southern white families, the introduction of Southern teachers into the schools, and a natural feeling of kinship between the Northern and Southern Anglo-Saxon, may cause happenings in New England which smack of prejudice towards us as a race. But such things are as nothing when we remember that New England principles gave us a free Kansas way back in 1857; that New England blood was first shed in the streets of Baltimore when the tocsin of war sounded the call to save the union; that New England cemented the Proclamation of Emancipation in the death of Col. Shaw; and greater than all, stern New England Puritanism in the persons of Garrison, Sumner, Phillips, Stearns, Whittier, Francis Jackson, and others, gave the black man the liberty that the South would deny even to-day, if possible… (130)
Rehearsing a familiar narrative about Bleeding Kansas, Hopkins proclaims that the state was saved from slavery by the “principles” of New Englanders who both moved to the territory to defend it and advocated for the free state cause from afar. She clearly invokes the abolitionist fighters of
Bleeding Kansas as an emblem of New England’s “principled” past, a timely reminder at the turn of the twentieth century when race prejudice continued in New England as well as in the South.
Carby has read this article’s “blatant dismissal of racism” as a sign “of Hopkins’s failure to negotiate the contradiction between her belief in a tradition of Northern radicalism and the fact of
Northern racism” (130). Yet given the failures of the free state narrative, embodied horrifically in the lynching of Fred Alexander, I suggest that Hopkins—while celebrating the abolitionist movement—also used her novel Winona to revise Bleeding Kansas history in telling ways.
It is clear that Hopkins was familiar with a variety of source material on Bleeding Kansas, some of which she even adapted for her novel. In 2015, JoAnn Pavletich discovered that Winona relies on unattributed quotations from at least fifteen sources—including large sections of abolitionist John Doy’s The Narrative of John Doy of Lawrence, Kansas (1860).52 Kina Patterson has noticed, meanwhile, that Hopkins’s portrayal of John Brown as a sympathetic and fatherly
52 See Pavletich, “…we are going to take that right” (2015). Geoffrey Sanborn’s “The Wind of Words” (2015) first identified Hopkins’s “plagiaristic aesthetic” in Of One Blood, while Lauren Dembowitz’s “Appropriating Tropes of Womanhood and Literary Passing in Pauline Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter” (2018) finds the same practices present in Hagar’s Daughter.
245 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters hero relies heavily on The Life and Letters of John Brown (1885), a popular biography by Brown’s longtime supporter Franklin Sanborn.53 However, any reading of Winona would also be benefited by resituating the novel within Kansas state history during the post-Reconstruction period, when the moniker “Bleeding Kansas” recurred in national news to describe racist violence against black
Kansans like Fred Alexander. I argue that Winona takes its cue much more closely from contemporary reporting and fiction than has been previously recognized. Hopkins’s decision to return to Bleeding Kansas in 1902 took place at a moment when two contradictory narratives about
Kansas circulated: as white authors published abolitionist historical romances about Bleeding
Kansas, newspapers were reporting on the Alexander lynching in Leavenworth as another kind of
“Bleeding Kansas.” At a moment when the Kansas free state narrative itself was under siege,
Hopkins explicitly revived it in her contributions to The Colored American: from “Famous Women of the Negro Race,” to her profile of Lydia Maria Child, to her Bleeding Kansas novel. However,
Winona’s evocation of the free state narrative is not an uncomplicated celebration—especially not on the heels of the Alexander lynching. Winona certainly evokes the Free State narrative, and does indeed celebrate the abolitionist spirit of the 1850s fight for Kansas territory. Yet I argue that
Winona also revises the Free State narrative, to reflect the inherent contradictions in Kansas’s post-
Reconstruction reputation as an emblem of both freedom and racist violence.
Winona both celebrates the abolitionist spirit of the 1850s and confronts the absence of legal protections for black Americans in the supposed “free state” at the turn to the twentieth century. Revisiting the antebellum border conflict, Hopkins foregrounds black heroes in the origin story of Kansas’s freedom and rewrites a tradition of Bleeding Kansas literature that—despite its focus on abolition—portrays no black leadership. In addition to protesting lynch law generally,
53 Kina Patterson, “Kin’ o’ Rough Jestice Fer a Parson” (1998), 452.
246 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
Winona specifically rewrites the Bleeding Kansas narrative articulated by historical romances at the turn of the twentieth century. At a moment when the Free State narrative was proving highly incompatible with the racist reality of Jim Crow, Winona uses the antebellum border conflict to subtly reject the Exoduster-era myth that Kansas was a haven of freedom for black Americans. By
1902, Tourgée’s hopeful vision of Exodusters at the St. Louis train depot had long faded.
At the start of Winona, the titular heroine lives with her father White Eagle—a white man
“adopted” by the Seneca tribe—and her adopted brother Judah on the shores of Lake Erie.
Winona’s mother escaped from slavery years ago with Judah, whose own mother died in the escape. Married to White Eagle in Canada, Winona’s mother died shortly after giving birth to her.
Winona’s peaceful youth is upended when a pair of slave-hunters—the nefarious Colonel Titus and his overseer Thomson—plot to murder White Eagle, abducting Winona and Judah to a slave plantation in Missouri. The British lawyer Warren Maxwell, who has become acquainted with the pair and romantically interested in Winona, determines to rescue them. Assisted by anti-slavery allies, Warren helps Winona and Judah escape across the border to John Brown’s camp in Kansas.
Warren himself is caught in the process, and almost burned at the stake by a mob of angry
Missourians. At the last moment, he is instead subjected to a sham trial and thrown in prison.
Winona leads a daring rescue mission, with the help of John Brown. Dressing up as a young slave boy named Allen Pinks, she successfully breaks Warren out of jail and brings him back over the border to Kansas. In the novel’s denouement, the heroes fight off Titus and Thomson once more.
Winona is revealed as the heiress to an English estate, she and Warren declare their love for one another, and they depart with Judah for England on the eve of the Civil War.
There are three key geographical borders in Winona, each marked by a body of water that must be crossed: the border between the United States and Britain, separated by the Atlantic Ocean;
247 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters the border between New York and Canada, separated by Lake Erie and the Niagara River; and the border between Missouri and Kansas, separated by the Missouri River. The novel itself is structured as a series of border crossings over these bodies of water, with the Kansas-Missouri crossings contextualized by larger national crossings between the United States, Canada, and
Britain. These national border crossings bookend the novel. The Canada–US border is the first obvious border between slavery and freedom, as reflected in White Eagle’s initial trip across the border to legally marry Winona’s mother. Yet while Canada is always visible from the lake, Judah and Winona live on a nameless island on the border—unable to benefit from the protection that
Canadian citizenship would offer them. On their island, they are susceptible to the Fugitive Slave
Act, which empowers Titus and Thomson to drag them back to Missouri after murdering their father. The Canadian border reappears to bookend the novel at its conclusion, on the other end of the Bleeding Kansas plotline: most of the fugitive slaves whom Brown rescues from Missouri travel “over the border into Canada,” not stopping until they are “rejoicing on free soil” (431).
Like the Canadian border crossings, British border crossings also serve as bookends and establish Britain—unlike the United States—as a nation without race prejudice. At the beginning of the novel, British lawyer Warren Maxwell crosses into the United States, where he confronts slavery and race prejudice for the first time. At the end, he brings Winona and Judah back to
Britain, where each of them will flourish in ways that they could not in America. Winona becomes a member of the English gentry and marries Warren, while Judah enters “the service of the Queen,” is knighted for his bravery, and marries “into one of the best families in the realm” (435). Normally in a Bleeding Kansas novel, Warren Maxwell’s position is filled by a Northern anti-slavery advocate—someone who identifies deeply with the Kansas free-state cause. That Hopkins chose a
British protagonist for this role is significant. In fact, many of Winona’s secondary characters—
248 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
White Eagle, Colonel Titus, and the overseer Thomson—also have British roots, having crossed over to American before the novel begins. White Eagle is actually an English gentleman, Henry
Carlingford, who fled to America after he was unjustly accused of his brother’s murder. Colonel
Titus is his cousin, desperate to win the inheritance that is due to Winona as Carlingford’s heir.
Thomson is Titus’s valet, who murdered Carlingford’s brother for seducing and abandoning
Thomson’s sister. In a prescient commentary on genre, Hopkins converts a British backstory of class revenge into a story of American slavery: the British character types of the evil gentleman and his murderous valet become the perfect types of Southern plantation owner and his overseer when left long enough in America. While Titus is “an Englishman by birth,” his years in America have transformed him into “one of the most bitter partisans on the side of slavery, contrary to the principles of most of his nationality” (316).
Between these bookends, however, most of the novel’s border crossings take place at the boundary between Kansas and Missouri. Warren, Winona, and Judah all cross the Missouri River three times. First, Warren helps Winona and Judah to escape from Titus’s Missouri plantation to
Kansas. When Warren is captured and brought back to Missouri, Winona and Judah cross over again to rescue him from prison. Then, all three cross the river once more in their final flight back to Kansas. The river crossings echo the novel’s other border crossings, where moving from the
United States to Canada or Britain is clearly defined as a crossing to freedom. At first, it seems like Winona is going to uphold this pattern with Kansas: crossing from Missouri to Kansas, the novel’s black heroes must be crossing from slavery into freedom. Hopkins even links the Missouri
River with the US–Canada border, noting that it sounds like “a mimic Niagara as it swelled beyond its boundaries” (391). By recalling Niagara, Hopkins encourages readers to see the state border crossing as a journey to freedom that parallels the journey into Canada.
249 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
Yet this Bleeding Kansas novel actually shows that crossing into Kansas is decidedly not like crossing into Canada or Britain. There is no Eden in Kansas, not in the 1850s and certainly not in 1902. The series of parallel border crossings emphasizes that Kansas is ultimately contiguous with the rest of the country. There is no Edenic free state in the middle of the United
States: Kansas, Missouri, and New York are all equally precarious for Winona and Judah, whose only viable options are Canada or Britain. Hopkins’s attention to the Missouri and Kansas landscapes, respectively, helps to establish this point. While pre-conciliation romances often decoupled the border conflict from the larger national conflict, the South and Missouri are deeply linked in this story. Hopkins explicitly joins the South and Southwest in the novel’s title, and clearly paints Missouri as an extension of the South. She is the only Bleeding Kansas novelist to depict not only a working slave plantation but actual slave labor in Missouri territory. Colonel
Titus’s cotton plantation, Magnolia Farm, is an extension of the deep South: his thousand acres of cotton fields reach “to the very edge of the muddy Missouri,” while the plantation flora— magnolias, honeysuckle, and Virginia creepers—are standard Southern icons (317). If Missouri is a vast plantation, however, Kansas itself is an ill-defined wilderness. The Kansas of Winona is all forests and creeks and crags and makeshift camps: the closest that Hopkins comes to a town is a distant glimpse of Lawrence. While the fugitives briefly visit a rustic cabin and John Brown’s encampment, Hopkins never presents settled Kansas towns or the white communities who have settled there. Kansas is a liminal, contested, empty space.
Hopkins reflects the state’s liminality through the eyes of Warren Maxwell, who has two geographic visions in the Kansas wilderness on either side of his imprisonment. After safely crossing into Kansas territory for the first time, Warren has a vision of his English home while riding through the forest. These “dreary woods” are marked by “barren fields and broken fences,
250 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters and the ghostly ruins of charred houses [that] lifted their scarred skeletons against the sky in a mute appeal for vengeance” (360). As he passes through these signs of desolation, however, he superimposes a new scene upon them: “Warren’s mind, by one of those sudden transitions which come to us at times, seemed to carry him bodily into his peaceful English home. He could see the beautiful avenues of noble trees, and the rambling, moss-covered manse; he could see the kindly patrician face of his father, and his brothers and sisters smiled at him from every bush” (361).
Moments later, Missouri ruffians descend and capture him. How to interpret this brief English vision, sandwiched between the images of the desolate skeletal farm houses and the violence of the Missouri forces? The moment blurs Kansas territory and England, briefly superimposing the latter on top of the former. On one level, Hopkins flirts with the possibility that this could be a vision of Kansas’s future: the association suggests that Kansas could become a land of freedom like England, as the novel’s patterns of border crossing suggest. On another level, however,
Hopkins seems to suggest England as a replacement for Kansas: it is England, not Kansas, that will eventually become Winona’s homeland after all.
In a parallel episode, Warren has a second vision that blurs Kansas territory with another geography—but this time, it is Missouri, not England. The second crossing from Missouri to
Kansas occurs when Winona and Judah help Warren to escape from imprisonment. During the escape, however, a delirious Warren confuses the two territories: “Soon the smiling sunlit valley they were entering became to his disordered fancy a return into the dangers and sufferings of a
Missouri prison” (398). The confusion, however brief, is a significant one—reflective of Kansas at the turn to the twentieth century, when its reputation as an abolitionist beacon and a refuge for black Americans was incoherent at best. If Hopkins indicts both Missouri border ruffians and
Southern planters, she also frames Kansas as anything but a haven—a place easily confused, in
251 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters this moment, with its ostensibly ideological opposite Missouri. These two episodes cast Kansas into uncertainty: will it be a free state, or will it be effectively an extension of Missouri? Winona never answers this question, though Warren’s delusion of Kansas as a “return into the dangers and sufferings of a Missouri prison” is reinforced by their permanent departure from the state.
In addition to ambiguating the future of Kansas territory, Winona also reframes the
Bleeding Kansas narrative that Hopkins derived from her sources, decentering the role of white
Kansas settlers and the Kansas territorial government in the fight. Virtually none of her heroes identify with Kansas territory, and most abandon it by the novel’s end. As Pavletich has shown,
Hopkins based Warren’s trial and imprisonment largely on abolitionist John Doy’s The Narrative of John Doy of Lawrence, Kansas (1860). Pavletich also illuminates how Hopkins subversively transformed this material: borrowing the character of Allen Pinks from Doy’s account, she turned this figure from a clownish slave into Winona’s heroic gender-bent alter ego. Yet Winona makes another significant adjustment to the Doy narrative. In recasting John Doy as the Englishman
Warren Maxwell, Hopkins edited out the former’s affiliation with and devotion to Kansas territory.
Although Doy was originally from Rochester, NY, he repeatedly emphasized his status as a
Kansan—beginning with his title, which identifies him as “John Doy, of Lawrence Kansas.”
Claiming a 160-acre farm just outside of Lawrence, Doy identifies as one of “the Free State men of Kansas” (13), refers to his abduction from Kansas as a kidnapping “from our own territory”
(57), and explicitly calls Kansas territory his “home” (115).
Warren Maxwell, however, is a British citizen: he never identifies with Kansas territory or its laws, nor is he an emissary of its people. A comparison of the trial sequences in the two texts makes this change especially clear. The Narrative of John Doy includes a brief written statement, wherein Doy and his son protest the court’s “farcical mockery of justice” in their trial (40):
252 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
“We, the undersigned, citizens of Kansas, do hereby protest against every step taken thus far by the State of Missouri in this case, on behalf of the people of Kansas, whose laws have been infamously violated and trampled upon. “John Doy “Charles F. Doy” (40, my emphasis)
Warren makes a similar statement in Winona, also protesting the “farcical mockery of justice” in court—with one key change (382):
“I, the undersigned, a British subject, do hereby protest against every step taken thus far by the State of Missouri in this case; declaring that my rights as a British subject have been infamously violated and trampled upon. “Warren Maxwell” (382, my emphasis)
Doy situates himself and his son as symbolic Kansans, making his individual protest representative of the larger Bleeding Kansas struggle. But where the source text emphasizes Doy’s Kansas citizenship and the violation of Kansas law, Hopkins absents Kansas law and citizenship from the trial entirely. Instead, the court violates Warren’s rights as a British subject. By 1902, Kansas had been proven not to be a land of freedom. Instead of identifying with Kansas, Warren transfers the
“free state” myth to England: “In my country we think not of the color of the skin but of the man— the woman—the heart,” he explains (405).
Hopkins also absents Kansas territorial leaders and lawmakers—figures central to John
Doy’s narrative—from her depiction of this history. Doy’s defenders are members of the Kansas territorial government, and his rescuers are white Kansas free-state men—his neighbors from
Lawrence. While Doy supported John Brown and was clearly inspired by him, Brown himself was not involved in Doy’s rescue. Instead, Doy is supported entirely by his Lawrence neighbors and by Kansas territorial officials. The pro-slavery ex-governor Wilson Shannon and attorney-general
Davis visit him in jail, sharing the news “that the Legislature of the Territory had unanimously voted a thousand dollars to defray the expenses of our trial, and that the governor [Robinson] had appointed them to act in our behalf” (74). Doy engages them to employ a Missouri attorney on his
253 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters behalf, and depositions are later taken from “several citizens of Kansas, as witnesses in my case,” although the prosecution refuses to receive the evidence (74–75). Doy is later rescued from prison by “Kansas freemen,” who rush him back across the border to Lawrence (115).
Kansas territorial government and lawmakers are entirely absent from Hopkins’s narrative.
The primary force fighting on behalf of Winona, Judah, and Warren is John Brown and his roving band of abolitionists—who also leave Kansas for good at the end of the novel. By largely absenting white Kansans from the heroics of Bleeding Kansas, Winona revises the free state narrative that so many white Kansans touted through the post-Reconstruction historical romance, challenging the mythology of its freedom-fighting citizens, institutions, and laws. While Winona celebrates the abolitionist spirit of the fight for Kansas territory, it re-centers this narrative in the heroic actions of black Americans, supported by an anti-slavery Englishman and Old John Brown. Winona does not pre-conciliate, nor does it frame Kansas as a refuge for its heroes. Rather, it extricates them from Kansas and the United States altogether, in anticipation of the Civil War to come.
Winona’s numerous border crossings initially seem to suggest that the Kansas-Missouri border will be like the Canada-New York border or the England-United States border—that Kansas will become a beacon of freedom, as countless prior Bleeding Kansas novels proclaimed. Instead, crossing the border into Kansas comes to mean rather little: it is only one step on the journey that will eventually take Hopkins’s heroes out of the United States altogether. While Ferguson blithely portrayed fugitive slaves escaping from Missouri into Kansas as “exodusters,” Hopkins pointedly reverts to Kansas to both celebrate abolitionist history and emphasize its once-again contested nature: postbellum Kansas was not a refuge for black Americans, or a beacon of freedom in the way that the free state narrative implied. At the turn to the twentieth century, the reputation of
Kansas as an abolitionist beacon and a refuge for black Americans was incoherent at best. If
254 4: Border Ruffians and Free Staters
Hopkins indicts both Missouri border ruffians and Southern planters, she also frames Kansas as anything but a haven—a place easily confused with its ostensibly ideological opposite Missouri.
Winona’s open-ended conclusion suggests that the fight for Kansas has not ended, a suggestion generally not offered by the historical romances of the 1880s and 1890s. Warren Maxwell's ride through the state’s “dreary woods,” filled with “barren fields and broken fences, and the ghostly ruins of charred houses,” reflects not only the territory ravaged by border warfare—but also, symbolically, the state of Kansas at the turn of the century (360). As those houses lift “their scarred skeletons against the sky in a mute appeal for vengeance,” the novel itself interrogates the very foundations of the celebratory Bleeding Kansas historical romance that had unfolded against the past twenty years of the state’s scarred racial history.
255
Conclusion
When I began this project, I thought that I would be tracing the postbellum careers of the most popular antebellum sentimentalists—showing how authors like Susan Warner, Mary Jane Holmes, and Harriet Beecher Stowe continued to develop the sentimental tradition in the second half of the nineteenth century. Instead, the dissertation evolved from a consideration of sentimentalism to an examination of its borders with other genres—and from the longer careers of these authors to their fundamental engagement with the Civil War and Reconstruction. While I have found examining their works from this period to be incredibly generative, I do believe that there remains much more to be said about the evolution of antebellum sentimental novelists in the second half of the nineteenth century; and I hope that the generic experiments in these chapters will lead to further exploration of their later works.
Most surprising for me, however, is how this dissertation has ended up situated in the geographic interstices of the war’s aftermath. In many ways, it has evolved into a story about the narrative strategies whereby largely white, largely Northern, largely middle-class writers envisioned the nation’s future—one that was also white, Northern, and middle-class—through their engagement with these peripheral geographies. In Hugh Worthington, Mary Jane Holmes’s titular hero emancipates his slaves and moves with them to the North—but names his new property
Spring Bank, after his original slave plantation. In Britomarte, The Man-Hater, Southworth’s castaways grow their own cotton on an island in the Indian Ocean, producing a better crop than has ever been seen in the South. Stowe’s Palmetto Leaves imagines a world of self-cultivating orange groves in Florida, a vision that Warner’s Bread and Oranges imitates and then amplifies on a deserted Caribbean island. In the wake of the Exoduster migration, Jackson and Humphrey envisioned Bleeding Kansas as a conflict that permanently moved slaves out of Kansas—leaving Conclusion no room for black settlers in the postbellum period, when they imagined the Kansas plains cultivated by white landowners. The heroes of Pauline Hopkins’s Winona, in turn, reject the failed promise of Kansas altogether. So many of the narratives covered here falter in attempting—or simply refuse—to reimagine labor relations in the aftermath of the Civil War, and specifically to imagine a system of agricultural production that integrated independent black Americans. The imaginative appropriation of these contested spaces—Florida orange groves, deserted islands,
Kansas prairies—by white Northern writers in the war’s aftermath unifies this dissertation in ways that I could not have imagined when I began a project ostensibly about sentimental borders. In choosing Florida and Kansas as my primary case studies, I have made an initial foray into a regionalized study of reconciliation that I hope can and will be extended to include other border geographies not typically associated with the literature of Civil War and Reconstruction.
257
Bibliography
Primary
“A Thrilling Account of the fight between the Cumberland and Congress and the Merrimac, by one who was concerned in the action.” The New York Weekly 17 (20), April 10, 1862: 8.
“Another Great Story.” New York Weekly 17 (13), February 20, 1862: 4.
Barbour, George M. Florida for Tourists, Invalids, and Settlers. D. Appleton and Company, 1882.
“Battle Ballads.” New York Weekly 17 (16), March 13, 1862: 4.
Bill, Ledyard. A Winter in Florida. Wood & Holbrook, 1870.
“Bleeding Kansas.” The Nashville American, January 21, 1901: 4.
“‘Bleeding Kansas.’ A State That has Had a Stormy History From Its Birth. Events Recalled by Recent Stake Burning.” Cincinnati Enquirer, January 26, 1901: 12.
“‘Bleeding Kansas’ and the Negro Problem.” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 17, 1901: 6.
“Blood money; or how southern rebels encourage piracy.” United States: s.n., between 1861 and 1865. American Antiquarian Society: American Broadsides and Ephemera (series 1, no. 25471).
“BRADY’S PHOTOGRAPHS.; Pictures of the Dead at Antietam.” The New York Times, 20 October 1862: 5.
Buntline, Ned. The Rattlesnake; or, the Rebel Privateer. A Tale of the Present Time. Frederic A. Brady, 1862.
Bushnell, William H. “Estelle, the Vivandiere; Or, Dark Days and Daring Deeds.” New York Weekly 17 (14-18), February 27–March 27, 1862.
“Case of the Privateer Savannah: Closing Arguments.” The New York Times, October 29, 1861: 2.
Child, Lydia Maria. “The Kansas Emigrants.” In Autumnal Leaves: Tales and Sketches in Prose and Rhyme. C.S. Francis & Co., 1857. 302–363.
———. Letters of Lydia Maria Child with a Biographical Introduction by John G. Whittier. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1883. Bibliography
“Colored Man Burned at the Stake in Kansas. Fred Alexander, of Leavenworth, Meets a Horrible Death at the Hands of a Mob in Leavenworth, Kansas. His Last Words Were That He Was Innocent.” The Wichita Searchlight 2, no. 34 (January 19, 1901): 1.
Cummins, Maria S. Haunted Hearts. J. E. Tilton and Company, 1864.
———. The Lamplighter. Rutgers University Press, 1998.
———. “The Veteran Eagle.” Our Young Folks, October 1866: 616–622.
Davis, Rebecca Harding. Waiting for the Verdict. Sheldon & Company, 1868.
De Forest, John William. “The First Time Under Fire.” Harper’s Monthly, September 1864.
———. Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty. Penguin Books, 2000 [1867].
———. A Volunteer’s Adventures: A Union Captain’s Record of the Civil War. Yale University Press, 1946.
Doy, John. The Narrative of John Doy, of Lawrence, Kansas. “A Plain, Unvarnished Tale.” Thomas Holman, 1860.
Duganne, A. J. H. “Battle Ballads – No. 1. The March to the Capitol,” New York Weekly 17 (16), March 13, 1862: 5.
“Extract from a Letter of a Returned Union Prisoner,” New York Weekly 17 (19), April 3, 1862: 7.
Ferguson, Thompson B. The Jayhawkers. State Capital Printing Company, 1892.
“Give us this day our daily bread.” 1827-1853. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Available at https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2110/m1/2. University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Rare Book and Texana Collections.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Letters, 1835–1856. Ed. Thomas Woodson et al. Ohio State University Press, 1987.
Hazel, Harry. “The Yankee Governess: Or, The Rival Brothers.” New York Weekly 17 (19–26), April 3–May 22, 1862.
———. Yankee Jack; or, The Perils of a Privateersman: A Romance of the War of 1812. H. Long & Brother, 1852.
Holmes, Mary Jane. “Annie Graham’s First Love.” New York Weekly 22 (29-38), June 6–August 8, 1867.
259 Bibliography
———. “Bad Hugh; Or, the Diamond in the Rough and How It Was Polished.” New York Weekly 17 (33)–18 (22), July 10, 1862–April 23, 1863.
———. “Family Pride; Or, Purified by Suffering.” New York Weekly 20 (1–36), November 24, 1864–July 27, 1865.
———. “Rose Mather and Annie Graham; Or, What Women Can Do For the War.” New York Weekly 17 (10–28), January 30–June 5, 1862.
———. Darkness and Daylight. G.W. Carleton, 1864.
———. Doctor Hathern’s Daughters: A Story of Virginia, in Four Parts. G.W. Dillingham, 1895.
———. Ethelyn’s Mistake; Or, The Home in the West. G.W. Carleton, 1869.
———. Hugh Worthington. G.W. Carleton, 1865.
———. Queenie Hetherton. G.W. Dillingham, 1883.
———. Rose Mather, A Tale of the War. G.W. Carleton, 1868.
———. Tempest and Sunshine. G.W. Carleton, 1854.
———. The Cameron Pride: Or, Purified by Suffering. G.W. Carleton, 1867.
Hopkins, Pauline. “Famous Women of the Negro Race—Educators.” Colored American Magazine 5, no. 1 (May 1902): 41–46.
———. “Reminiscences of the Life and Times of Lydia Maria Child I.” Colored American Magazine 6, no. 4 (February 1903): 279–284.
———. “Reminiscences of the Life and Times of Lydia Maria Child II.” Colored American Magazine 6, no. 5 (March 1903): 353–357.
———. “Reminiscences of the Life and Times of Lydia Maria Child III.” Colored American Magazine 6, no. 6 (May–June 1903): 454–459.
———. Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest. In The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins, ed. Hazel V. Carby. Oxford University Press, 1988. 285–437.
Howells, William Dean. “Editor’s Study.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 74, May 1887: 482– 486.
———. Heroines of Fiction. Harper & Brothers, 1901.
260 Bibliography
———. My Literary Passions. Harper & Brothers, 1895.
———. “Reviews and Literary Notices.” Atlantic Monthly 20, July 1867: 120–122.
Humphrey, Mary A. The Squatter Sovereign, Or Kansas in the ‘50s. A Life Picture of the Early Settlement of the Debatable Ground. Coburn & Newman Publishing, 1883.
“In Bleeding Kansas — Even In That Land of Cranks and Isms They Want to Lynch a Negro Rape Fiend — The Mob Was Dispersed — While They Denounce the South for Such Acts, the Crime is Now Brought Home to Them. Seek Retribution.” Austin Daily Statesman, January 14, 1901: 1.
Jackson, Mary E. The Spy of Osawatomie; Or, The Mysterious Companions of Old John Brown. W. S. Bryan, 1881.
“Jeff. Davis, "president" of traitors, robbers, and pirates; the Nero of the 19th century.” United States: s.n., between 1861 and 1865. American Antiquarian Society: American Broadsides and Ephemera (series 1, no. 25402).
“Jeff’s knave-y. ‘Seven wise men of Gotham went to sea in a bowl.’” United States: s.n., between 1861 and 1865. American Antiquarian Society: American Broadsides and Ephemera (series 1, no. 25413).
Jones, L. Augustus. “The Promised Bride.” New York Weekly 17 (16), March 13, 1862: 6.
“Kansas versus New Jersey—The Only Difference Was In The Color of The Skin.—The Same Old Race Question.” The Colored American Magazine 2.4 (February 1901): 314–315.
King, Edward. The Great South; A Record of Journeys in Louisiana, Texas, the Indian Territory, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland. American Publishing Co., 1875.
Lanier, Sidney. Florida: Its Scenery, Climate, and History. J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1876.
Lighton, William Rheem. Sons of Strength: A Romance of the Kansas Border Wars. Doubleday & McClure, 1899.
Manville, A. H. Practical Orange Culture Including the Culture of the Orange, Lemon, Lime, and Other Citrus Fruits, As Grown in Florida. Ashmead Bros., 1883.
Moore, T. W. Treatise and Hand-Book of Orange Culture in Florida. E. R. Pelton & Co., 1881.
Mott, Frederick Blount. Before the Crisis. John Lane, 1904.
261 Bibliography
“Mrs. Holmes’ New Story.” New York Weekly 17 (10), January 30, 1862: 4.
“Mrs. Holmes’ New Story.” New York Weekly 22 (19), March 28, 1867: 4.
Murphy, D. F. The Jeff Davis Piracy Cases. Full Report of the Trial of William Smith for Piracy, As One of the Crew of the Confederate Privateer, the Jeff Davis. King & Baird, 1861.
“Negro Dies at the Stake: Fred Alexander Dragged from Leavenworth Jail by a Mob.” New York Times, January 16, 1901: 2.
“Next Week We Will Commence Mrs. Mary J. Holmes’ New and Original Story of the Present Rebellion, written expressly for the New York Weekly, entitled Rose Mather: or. What Women Can do for the War.” New York Weekly 17 (10), January 23, 1862: 4.
Orpen, Adela E. The Jay-Hawkers: A Story of Free Soil and Border Ruffian Days. D. Appleton and Company, 1900.
Paterson, Arthur. For Freedom’s Sake. J. B. Lippincott Company, 1896.
Phelps Ward, Elizabeth Stuart. “Confession of St. Augustine.” Atlantic Monthly Vol. 37, Issue 220 (February 1876): 129–140.
———. “Going South.” Atlantic Monthly Vol. 37, Issue 219 (January 1876): 25–34.
———. A Lost Winter. D. Lothrop Company, 1889.
———. The Story of Avis. James R. Osgood & Co.. 1877.
“Power of Romance.” The New York Weekly 17 (11), February 6, 1862: 4.
“Riots in Bleeding Kansas! Former Seat of Alabama Abolition Sentiment Declared To Be ‘Backslider’ — Philanthropic Suggestions.” The Baltimore Sun. July 22, 1902: 10.
Robbins, Sarah Stuart. One Happy Winter; or, A Visit to Florida. Lockwood, Brooks and Company, 1878.
Ropes, Hannah Anderson. Six Months in Kansas. John P. Jewett and Co., 1856.
Southworth, E. D. E. N. “Britomarte, the Man-Hater.” New York Ledger 21 (33) – 22 (29). October 14, 1865–September 15, 1866.
———. Fair Play; Or, The Test of the Lone Island. T. B. Peterson & Brothers, 1868.
———. How He Won Her, A Sequel to “Fair Play.” T. B. Peterson & Brothers, 1869.
262 Bibliography
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. “An Appeal to the Women of the Free States of America, on the Present Crisis in Our Country.” Independent 6, no. 273 (February 23, 1854): 57.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. “Our Florida Plantation.” The Atlantic Monthly 43, no. 259 (May 1879): 641–649.
———. Palmetto Leaves. University Press of Florida, 1968 [1873].
———. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. The Modern Library, 2001 [1852].
Sumner, Charles. “The Barbarism of Slavery: speech of Hon. Charles Sumner, on the bill for the admission of Kansas as a free state, in the United States Senate, June 4, 1860.” Thaddeus Hyatt, 1860.
“The Inauguration at Richmond.” Harper’s Weekly 6 (272), March 15, 1862: 176.
“The Pirate Flag.” The New York Times, 20 April 1861: 4.
“The Privateer Savannah: Arguments on Both Sides.” New York Times, October 28, 1861: 3.
“The Privateer Savannah: Documents and Authorities in the Case—Progress of the Trial.” The New York Times, October 26, 1861: 5.
“The Savannah Privateer: Trial for Piracy—Great Throng in Court.” The New York Times, October 24, 1861: 8.
Tourgée, Albion. Bricks Without Straw. Edited by Carolyn L. Karcher. Duke University Press, 2009 [1880].
———. Hot Plowshares. Literature House / Gregg Press, 1970 [1883].
Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi. The Modern Library, 2007 [1883].
Warburton, A. F. Trial of the Officers and Crew of the Privateer Savannah on the Charge of Piracy. Baker & Godwin, 1862.
Warner, Anna B. Susan Warner (“Elizabeth Wetherell”). G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909.
Warner, Susan. Bread and Oranges. Robert Carter and Brothers, 1875.
———. Daisy in the Field. Carter, 1869.
———. Daisy. J. B. Lippincott & Company, 1868.
———. The Little Camp on Eagle Hill. Carter, 1873.
263 Bibliography
———. Melbourne House. Carter, 1864.
———. Queechy. George P. Putnam, 1852.
———. The Rapids of Niagara. Carter, 1876.
———. Scepters and Crowns. Carter, 1875.
———. The Wide, Wide World. The Feminist Press, 1987 [1850].
Whittier, John Greenleaf. Poems of John Greenleaf Whittier, New Revised Edition. George Routledge and Sons, 1857.
Woods, Oliver Evan. “The Pending Conflict.” Philadelphia, 1863. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Available at https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2008661653/.
Critical
Aaron, Daniel. The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War. The University of Wisconsin Press, 1973.
Andrews, William G. Civil War Brockport: A Canal Town and the Union Army. The History Press, 2013.
Appleby, Joyce. “Reconciliation and the Northern Novelist, 1865–1880.” Civil War History Vol. 10, Issue 2 (June 1964): 117–129.
Athearn, Robert G. In Search of Canaan: Black Migration to Kansas, 1879–80. Regents Press of Kansas, 1978.
Baker, Mabel. Light in the Morning: Memories of Susan and Anna Warner. Constitution Island Association, 1978.
Baptist, Edward E. Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier Before the Civil War. University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Barker, Nettie Garmer. “Mary Vance Humphrey.” In Kansas Women in Literature. S. I. Meseraull & Son, 1915. 11–12.
Barnes, Elizabeth. Love’s Whipping Boy: Violence and Sentimentality in the American Imagination. The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
264 Bibliography
———. States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel. Columbia University Press, 1997.
Baym, Nina. “Introduction.” The Lamplighter, by Maria Cummins. Rutgers University Press, 1988.
———. “Introduction.” Three Spiritualist Novels, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, University of Illinois Press, 2000, pp. vii–xxiii.
———. Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870. Cornell University Press, 1978.
———. “Women’s Novels and Women’s Minds: An Unsentimental View of Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Fiction.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 31, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 335– 350.
———. Women Writers of the American West, 1833–1927. University of Illinois Press, 2011.
Benigni, Amanda M. Rereading, Rewriting, and Recovering the Literary Legacy of Susan Warner. 2015. Indiana University of Pennsylvania, PhD Dissertation. ProQuest, http://search. proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/1674843643?accountid=11311.
Bennett, Kathryn Conner. “Illustrating Southworth: Genre, Conventionality, and The Island Princess.” In E. D. E. N. Southworth: Recovering a Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist, ed. Melissa J. Homestead and Pamela T. Washington. The University of Tennessee Press, 2012. 77-106.
Bergman, Jill. The Motherless Child in the Novels of Pauline Hopkins. Louisiana State University Press, 2012.
Berlant, Lauren. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Duke University Press, 2008.
Berman, Jacob. American Arabesque: Arabs and Islam in the Nineteenth Century Imaginary. NYU Press, 2012.
Bisel, Deborah Goodrich. The Civil War in Kansas: Ten Years in Turmoil. History Press, 2012.
Blair, William A. With Malice toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era. The University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.
265 Bibliography
Boudreau, Kristin. Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiments from Jefferson to the Jameses. The University of Florida Press, 2002.
Boyd, Steven R. Patriotic Envelopes of the Civil War: The Iconography of Union and Confederate Covers. Louisiana State University Press, 2010.
Brown, Gillian. Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America. University of California Press, 1990.
Brown, Lois. Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution. University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
Bull, Philip. “Orpen, Adela Elizabeth (née Richards).” Dictionary of Irish Biography. ed. James McGuire and James Quinn. Cambridge University Press, 2013. Available at https://dib. cambridge.org/viewReadPage.do?articleId=a9581.
Burke, Diane Mutti. On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s Small Slaveholding Households, 1815– 1865. University of Georgia Press, 2010.
Campney, Brent M. S. This is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861–1927. University of Illinois Press, 2015.
Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. Oxford University Press, 1987.
Carson, Grace, “The Works of Mary Jane Holmes: A Brockport Union Catalog” (1988). Mary Jane Holmes Documents. 5. http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/holmes_docs/5.
Clark, James C., ed. Pineapple Anthology of Florida Writers. Vols. 1–3. Pineapple Press, 2013.
Clark, Suzanne. Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word. Indiana University Press, 1991.
Cogan, Frances B. All-American Girl: The Idea of Real Womanhood in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America. The University of Georgia Press, 1989.
Cohn, Jr., Samuel K. Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS. Oxford University Press, 2018.
Cooper, Benjamin. Veteran Americans: Literature and Citizenship from Revolution to Reconstruction. University of Massachusetts Press, 2018.
Cox, Karen L. Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture. The University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
266 Bibliography
Cummins, Amy. “‘An Honor to be a Teacher’: Antebellum Literary Depictions of Schoolwomen.” Women’s Studies 38, no. 7 (September 2009): 799–817.
Dattel, Gene. Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power. Ivan Dee, 2009.
Deacon, Marie. Kansas as the “Promised Land”: The View of the Black Press, 1890–1900. MA Thesis, University of Arkansas, 1973.
Dembowitz, Lauren. “Appropriating Tropes of Womanhood and Literary Passing in Pauline Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter.” ALH 30.4 (Winter 2018): E21–E30.
Denning, Michael. Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America. Verso, 1987.
Diffley, Kathleen. Where My Heart Is Turning Ever: Civil War Stories and Constitutional Reform, 1861–1876. The University of Georgia Press, 1992.
Diffley, Kathleen, ed. Witness to Reconstruction: Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, 1873–1894. University Press of Mississippi, 2011.
Dobson, Joanne. “The Hidden Hand: Subversion of Cultural Ideology in Three Mid-Nineteenth- Century American Women’s Novels.” American Quarterly 38, no. 2 (July 1986): 223–242.
———. “Introduction.” The Hidden Hand, by E. D. E. N. Southworth. Rutgers University Press, 1988. xi–xlvi.
Dobson, Joanne. “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature.” American Literature 69.2 (June 1997): 263–288.
Dolan, Kathryn Cornell. Beyond the Fruited Plain: Food and Agriculture in U.S. Literature, 1850– 1905. University of Nebraska Press, 2014.
Dovell, Junius Elmore. Florida: Historic, Dramatic, Contemporary. Vols. 1-2. Lewis Historical Publishing Company, Inc., 1952.
Eacker, Susan A. “Gender in Paradise: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Postbellum Prose on Florida.” The Journal of Southern History 64.3 (August 1998): 495–512.
Elliot, Mark. Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson. Oxford University Press, 2006.
Ellis, Markman. The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
267 Bibliography
Ellison, Julie K. Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion. University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Epps, Kristen. Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas-Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras. University of Georgia Press, 2016.
Etcheson, Nicole. Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era. University Press of Kansas, 2004
Fahs, Alice. The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861–1865. The University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Faust, Drew. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. Vintage Books, 2008.
Fellman, Michael. “Rehearsal for the Civil War: Antislavery and Proslavery at the Fighting Point in Kansas, 1854-1856.” In Antislavery Reconsidered, New Perspectives on the Abolitionists, ed. Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman. Louisiana State Press, 1979.
———. Inside War: The Guerilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War. Oxford University Press, 1990.
Fick, Thomas. “Genre Wars and the Rhetoric of Manhood in Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty.” Nineteenth Century Literature 46 (March 1992), 473-494.
Fisher, Philip. Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel. Oxford University Press, 1985.
Foster, Edward Halsey. Susan and Anna Warner. Twayne Publishers, 1978.
Foster, John T., and Sarah Whitmer Foster. Beechers, Stowes, and Yankee Strangers: The Transformation of Florida. University of Florida Press, 1999.
Frazier, Harriet. Runaway and Freed Missouri Slaves and Those who Helped Them, 1763-1865. McFarland Books, 2004.
Gallman, J. Matthew. Defining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home Front. The University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
Gardner, Eric. Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. University of Mississippi Press, 2009.
Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. Penguin Press, 2019.
268 Bibliography
Gardner, Sarah. Blood and Irony: Southern White Women’s Narratives of the Civil War, 1861– 1937. University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Gates, Sondra Smith. “The Edge of Possibility: Susan Warner and the World of Sunday School Fiction.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 60.4 (Winter 2004): 1–31.
Gilmore, Donald L. Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border. Pelican Publishing Company, 2006.
Gilpin, R. Blakeslee. John Brown Still Lives!: America’s Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality, and Change. The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
Gold, Robert L. “That Infamous Floridian, Jesse Fish.” The Florida Historical Quarterly 52.1 (July 1973): 1–17.
Goode, Mike. “The Walter Scott Experience: Living American History after Waverley.” In Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism, ed. Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle. Fordham University Press, 2016.
Goshgarian, G. M. To Kiss the Chastening Rod: Domestic Fiction and Sexual Ideology in the American Renaissance. Cornell University Press, 1992.
Greeson, Jennifer Rae. Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature. Harvard University Press, 2010.
Halttunen, Karen. Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination. Harvard University Press, 1998.
Hamelman, Steven. “Orientalism and Sympathy in Maria Susanna Cummins’s El Fureidis.” Legacy 25.1 (2008): 62–82.
Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth- Century America. Oxford University Press, 1997.
Hendler, Glenn. Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. The University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Hendrick, Joan D. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. Oxford University Press, 1994.
Hess, Earl J. The Civil War in the West: Victory and Defeat from the Appalachians to the Mississippi. University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
269 Bibliography
Hickey, Donald R. The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, Bicentennial Edition. The University of Illinois Press, 2012.
Higham, C. L. The Civil War and the West: The Frontier Transformed. Praeger, 2013.
Hillyer, Reiko. Designing Dixie: Tourism, Memory, and Urban Space in the New South. University of Virginia Press, 2014.
Hoffer, Peter Charles. Uncivil Warriors: The Lawyers’ Civil War. Oxford University Press, 2018.
Howard, June. “What is Sentimentality?” American Literary History 11.1 (Spring 1999): 63–81.
Hulbert, Matthew Christopher. The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West. The University of Georgia Press, 2016.
Ingram, Annie Merrill. “Change of a Dress: Britomarte, the Man-Hater and Other Transvestite Narratives of the Civil War.” In E. D. E. N. Southworth: Recovering a Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist, ed. Melissa J. Homestead and Pamela T. Washington. The University of Tennessee Press, 2012. 129–151.
Janney, Caroline. Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. The University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
Jones, Jane Anderson, and Maurice J. O’Sullivan Florida in Poetry: A History of the Imagination. Pineapple Press, 1995.
Jones, Paul Christian. Against the Gallows: Antebellum American Writers and the Movement to Abolish Capital Punishment. University of Iowa Press, 2011.
Kansas State Historical Society. “Twentieth Biennial Report of the Board of Directors of the Kansas State Historical Society.” W. R. Smith, 1916.
Kaplan, Amy. “Manifest Domesticity.” American Literature 70, no. 3 (September 1998): 581– 606.
Karcher, Carolyn. The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child. Duke University Press, 1994.
———. “From Pacifism to Armed Struggle: L.M. Child’s ‘The Kansas Emigrants’ and Antislavery Ideology in the 1850’s.” Emerson Society Quarterly 34 (1988): 141–158.
———. “Lydia Maria Child’s Romance of the Republic: An Abolitionist Vision of America’s Racial Destiny.” In Slavery and the Literary Imagination, ed. Deborah McDowell and Arnold Rampersad, John’s Hopkins University Press, 1989.
270 Bibliography
———. A Refugee from His Race: Albion W. Tourgée and His Fight against White Supremacy. The University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
Kelley, Mary. Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford University Press, 1984.
Kellow, Margaret M.R. “‘For the Sake of Suffering Kansas’: Lydia Maria Child, Gender, and the Politics of the 1850s.” Journal of Women´s History 5.2 (Fall 1993): 32–49.
Kennedy-Nolle, Sharon D. Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the Postwar South. The University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
Kert, Faye M. Privateering: Patriots and Profits in the War of 1812. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.
Kete, Mary Louise. Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. Duke University Press, 2000.
Klein, Rachel Naomi. “Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Domestication of Free Labor Ideology.” Legacy 18.2 (2001): 135–152.
Klein, Shana. “Those Golden Balls Down Yonder Tree: Oranges and the Politics of Reconstruction in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Florida.” Southern Cultures 23.3 (Fall 2017): 30–38.
Korobkin, Laura Hanft. Criminal Conversations: Sentimentality and Nineteenth-Century Legal Stories of Adultery. Columbia University Press, 1998.
Lambert, Frank. The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World. Hill & Wang, 2005.
Landers, Jane G. Black Society in Spanish Florida. University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Landers, Jane G., ed. Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida. University Press of Florida, 2000.
Lawler, Nan. “Will Lighton (1866–1923).” Encyclopedia of Arkansas. Last updated March 4, 2015. Available at https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/will-lighton-1046/.
Lenard, Mary. Preaching Pity: Dickens, Gaskell, and Sentimentalism in Victorian Culture. Peter Lang, 1999.
Lovett, Christopher. “A Public Burning: Race, Sex, and the Lynching of Fred Alexander.” Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 33 (Summer 2010): 94–115.
271 Bibliography
MacKethan, Lucinda Hardwick. The Dream of Arcady: Place and Time in Southern Literature. Louisiana State University Press, 1980.
Mandel, Jay. Not Slave, Not Free: The African American Economic Experience since the Civil War. Duke University Press, 1992.
McGuire, Barbara. “The Orphan’s Grief: Transformational Tears and the Maternal Fetish in Mary Jane Holmes’s Dora Deane; or, the East-India Uncle.” Legacy 15, no. 2 (January 1998): 171–187.
McIntyre, Rebecca Cawood. Souvenirs of the Old South: Northern Tourism and Southern Mythology. University Press of Florida, 2011.
McPhee, John. Oranges. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967.
Merish, Lori. Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Duke University Press, 2000.
Meserve, John Bartlett. “The Governors of Oklahoma Territory.” Chronicles of Oklahoma 20, no. 3 (September 1942), 218–227. Available at https://web.archive.org/web/20150326180229/ http:// digital.library.okstate.edu/chronicles/v020/v020p218.html.
Miner, Craig. Seeding Civil War: Kansas in the National News, 1854–1858. University Press of Kansas, 2008.
Monaghan, Jay. Civil War on the Western Border, 1854–1865. Little, Brown and Company, 1955.
Moss, Elizabeth. Domestic Novelists in the Old South: Defenders of Southern Culture. Louisiana State University Press, 1992.
Navakas, Michele Currie. Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.
Neely, Jeremy. Border Between Them: Violence and Reconciliation on the Kansas-Missouri Line. University of Missouri Press, 2007.
Neff, Stephen C. Justice in Blue and Gray: A Legal History of the Civil War. Harvard University Press, 2010.
Nelson, Dana D. “Introduction.” A Romance of the Republic. University of Kentucky Press, 1997.
Nickerson, Catherine Ross. The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women. Duke University Press, 1998.
272 Bibliography
Nicoletti, Cynthia. Secession on Trial: The Treason Prosecution of Jefferson Davis. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Noble, Marianne. The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature. Princeton University Press, 2000.
Noel, Mary. Villains Galore: The Heyday of the Popular Story Weekly. The Macmillan Company, 1954.
Notehelfer, F. G. American Samurai: Captain L. L. Janes and Japan. Princeton University Press, 1985.
O’Connell, Catherine. “We Must Sorrow: Silence, Suffering, and Sentimentality in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World.” Studies in American Fiction 25, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 21–39.
Oertel, Kristen Tegtmeier. Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre-Civil War Kansas. Louisiana State University Press, 2009
Oritz, Paul. Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920. University of California Press, 2005.
Painter, Nell Irvin. Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction. W.W. Norton, 1976.
Patrick, Rembert W. “The Mobile Frontier.” The Journal of Southern History 29, no. 1 (February 1963): 3–18.
Patterson, Kina. “Rough Justice for a Parson: Pauline Hopkins’ Winona and the Politics of Reconstructing History.”
Pavletich, JoAnn. “…we are going to take that right”: Power and Plagiarism in Pauline Hopkins’s Winona.” The College Language Association 59.2 (December 2015): 115–130.
Pelletier, Kevin. Apocalyptic Sentimentalism: Love and Fear in U.S. Antebellum Literature. The University of Georgia Press, 2015.
Peskin, Lawrence. Barbary Slavery and the American Public, 1785–1816. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Phillips, Christopher. The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border. Oxford University Press, 2016.
273 Bibliography
Powell, Lawrence N. New Masters: Northern Planters During the Civil War and Reconstruction. Second Edition. Fordham University Press, 1998.
Ray, Celeste. Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans in the American South. The University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Revels, Tracy J. Florida’s Civil War: Terrible Sacrifices. Mercer University Press, 2016.
———. Sunshine Paradise: A History of Florida Tourism. University Press of Florida, 2011.
Richardson, Heather Cox. West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War. Yale University Press, 2007.
Rigney, Ann. The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Riser, R. Volney. Defying Disenfranchisement: Black Voting Rights Activism in the Jim Crow South, 1890–1908. Louisiana State University Press, 2010.
Ritzenberg, Aaron. The Sentimental Touch: The Language of Feeling in the Age of Managerialism. Fordham University Press, 2013.
Robbins, Bruce. The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction From Below. Duke University Press, 1986.
Robinson, Sarah. Kansas: Its Interior and Exterior Life. Crosby, Nichols and Company, 1856.
Rowe, Anne E. The Enchanted Country: Northern Writers in the South, 1865–1910. Louisiana State University Press, 1978.
———. The Idea of Florida in the American Literary Imagination. Louisiana State University Press, 1986.
Royce, Edward. The Origins of Southern Sharecropping. Temple University Press, 1993.
Sanborn, Geoffrey. “The Wind of Words: Plagiarism and Intertextuality in Of One Blood.” J19 3.1 (Spring 2015): 67–87.
Sanderson, Dorothy Hurlbut, ed. They Wrote for A Living: A Bibliography of the works of Susan Bogert Warner and Anna Bartlett Warner. The Constitution Island Association, 1976.
Saulsbury, Rebecca R. ‘Strong and Brave’: The Culture of Womanhood in the Novels of Maria Susanna Cummins. 1999. Purdue University, PhD Dissertation. ProQuest, http://search. proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/304522997?accountid=11311.
274 Bibliography
Schaefer, Michael W. What War Is: The Civil War Writings of De Forest and Bierce. University of Tennessee Press, 1997.
Schafer, Daniel L. Thunder on the River: The Civil War in Northeast Florida. University Press of Florida, 2010.
———. William Bartram and the Ghost Plantations of British East Florida. University Press of Florida, 2010.
———. Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. and the Atlantic World: Slave Trader, Plantation Owner, Emancipator. University Press of Florida, 2013.
———. “Zephaniah Kingsley’s Laurel Grove Plantation.” In Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida, edited by Jane G. Landers, 98–120. University Press of Florida, 2000.
Scharnhorst, Gary. “Introduction.” Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, by John William De Forest, Penguin Books, 2000, pp. ix–xxxiii.
Scharff, Virginia, ed. Empire and Liberty: The Civil War and the West. Autry National Center of the American West, in association with University of California Press, 2015.
Schultz, Jane E. “The Turn against Sentiment: Kate Cumming and Confederate Realism.” Literary Cultures of the Civil War, edited by Timothy Sweet, University of Georgia Press, 2016, pp. 189–206.
Shofner, Jerrell H. Nor Is It Over Yet: Florida in the Era of Reconstruction, 1863–1877. The University Presses of Florida, 1974.
Silber, Nina. The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900. The University of North Carolina Press, 1993.
Simpson, Lewis P. The Dispossessed Garden: Pastoral and History in Southern Literature. University of Georgia Press, 1975.
Sizer, Lyde Cullen. The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850–1872. The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Smith, Julia Floyd. Slavery and Plantation Growth in Antebellum Florida, 1821–1860. University of Florida Press, 1973.
Smith, Sandra Wilson. The Action-Adventure Heroine: Rediscovering an American Literary Character, 1697-1895. The University of Tennessee Press, 2018.
275 Bibliography
Smith, Valerie. “‘Loopholes of Retreat’: Architecture and Ideology in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” In Reading Black, Reading Feminist, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New American Library, 1990. 128 –138.
Stewart, Veronica. “The Wild Side of The Wide, Wide World.” Legacy 11, no. 1 (January 1994): 1–16.
Stockton, Elizabeth. “E. D. E. N. Southworth’s Reimagining of the Married Women’s Property Reforms.” In E. D. E. N Southworth: Recovering a Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist, ed. Melissa J. Homestead and Pamela T. Washington. The University of Tennessee Press, 2012. 243–263.
Streeby, Shelley. American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture. University of California Press, 2002.
Stronge, William B. The Sunshine Economy: An Economic History of Florida Since the Civil War. University of Florida Press, 2008.
Sutherland, John, ed. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1989.
Talley, Sharon. Southern Women Novelists and the Civil War: Trauma and Collective Memory in the American Literary Tradition since 1861. The University of Tennessee Press, 2014.
Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text by the Turn of the Century. Oxford University Press, 1996.
Templeton, Peter. The Politics of Southern Pastoral Literature, 1785–1885: Jeffersonian Afterlives. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Thulesius, Olav. Harriet Beecher Stowe in Florida, 1867–1884. McFarland & Company, 2001.
Tolnay, Stewart Emory, and E. M. Beck. A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882 –1930. University of Illinois Press, 1995.
Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs; The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. Oxford University Press, 1985.
Tracey, Karen. Plots and Proposals: American Women’s Fiction, 1850–90. University of Illinois Press, 2000.
US Department of Agriculture, “Agriculture of the United States in 1860; Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census,” Washington: Government Printing Office, 1864.
276 Bibliography
Available at the United States Department of Agriculture, Census of Agriculture Historical Archive, http://agcensus.mannlib.cornell.edu/AgCensus/censusParts.do?year=1860.
Wallinger, Hanna. Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography. University of Georgia Press, 2005.
Watson, Ritchie Devon. Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War. Louisiana State University Press, 2008.
Weinstein, Cindy. Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Weitz, Mark A. The Confederacy on Trial: The Piracy and Sequestration Cases of 1861. University Press of Kansas, 2005.
Weitz, Seth A., ed. A Forgotten Front: Florida During the Civil War. University of Alabama Press, 2018.
Westman, Lee Ann Elliott. “How (And Why) Mary Jane Holmes Saved the New York Weekly, And Other True Stories.” In Popular Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Literary Marketplace, ed. Earl Yarington and Mary De Jong (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007): 297–317.
Westman, Lee Ann Elliott. The Novels of Mary Jane Hawes Holmes and the Nineteenth-Century American Literary Tradition. 1997. Florida State University, PhD Dissertation. ProQuest, http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/304394519?accountid=11 311.
Wexler, Laura. Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism. The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Williams, Cynthia. “Susan Warner’s Queechy and the Bildungsroman Tradition.” Legacy 7, no. 2 (Fall 1990): 3–16.
Williams, Susan S. Reclaiming Authorship: Literary Women in America, 1850–1900. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
Williamson, Jennifer A. Twentieth-Century Sentimentalism: Narrative Appropriation in American Literature. Rutgers University Press, 2014.
Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. Oxford University Press, 1962.
277 Bibliography
Winters, Jamie. “Imperfectly Imperial: Northern Travel Writers in the Postbellum U.S. South, 1865–1880.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95, no. 2 (June 2005): 391–410.
Yarington, Earl F. “Legacy Profile: Mary Jane Holmes (1825–1907).” Legacy 25.1 (2008): 142– 150.
Yarington, Earl F. Relational Capacity Theory in the ‘Sentimental’ Works of Mary Jane Holmes. 2004. Indiana University of Pennsylvania, PhD Dissertation. ProQuest, http://search. proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/305095380?accountid=11311.
Yarington, Earl F. The Portrayal of Woman’s Sentimental Power in American Domestic Fiction: The Novels of Mary Jane Holmes, 1825–1907. Edwin Mellen Press, 2007.
Young, Elizabeth. Disarming the Nation: Women’s Writing and the American Civil War. The University of Chicago Press, 1999.
278