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VOICE FROM THE BORDERLAND: REBECCA HARDING DAVIS AND THE SOUTHERN ROOTS OF AMERICAN SOCIAL PROTEST FICTION

Dawn Elayne Henwood

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto

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The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts fiom it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or othemise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. For Ken. Only he knows dl the rasons why. Voice from the Borderland: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Southern Roots of American Social Protest Fiction by Dawn EIayne Henwood Graduate Department of English University of Toronto Doctor of Philosophy, 1998

Rebecca Harding Davis's radical voice of social protest emerges out of her roots

in the lirninal culture of antebellum western Virginia. in her hometown of Wheeling.

Davis grew up positioned where East met West. where North met South, and where the

slaveholders' mythology of pastoral paternalism met the rising forces of industriai

capitalism. Reared north of the Mason-Dixon line but in a slaveholding society, Davis

always chenshed her Virginian background and preserved a fond nostalgia for the

Southern way of tife.

An important part of Davis's borderland cultural heritage was the rhetoric used to defend slavery, in both fiction and nonfiction. The tradition of the plantation novel and depictions of white 'wage slaves" in responses to Linde Tom 's Cabin suggest a link between Southem literary tradition and Davis's innovative social realism.

Davis's dualistic cultural vantage point led her to challenge readers' easy assurnptions about slavery. industridism. and Arnerican myth-making. Her disposition for provoking her audience into multiple-angle vision shows up especially strongly in her early, extremely socially-conscious work. "Life in the Iron Mills" and Margref Howth both invoke the rhetoric of wage slavery to present industrial povew as an overlooked social injustice threatening the very roots of Arnerican identity. Davis's other early stories in the Atlantic Monthly ais0 manipulate stereotypical Northem and Southem views of slavery to demonstrate the weak spots in both. As mystery fiction fiom the 1860s and later children's stories demonstrate, the slavery controversy was, for Davis, never a clear- cut issue. In Waitingfor rhe Verdict, she enacts her life-long tendency to see things fiom both sides of the North-South border. As a result, Davis's post-bellum miscegenation plot proves to be as much about recuperating ex-slaveholders as ex-slaves.

Davis's first-hand undestanding of and strong attraction to Southem culture makes her a more complex author than has been previously recognized as well as a significant bridge figure between the literature of the Old South and mainstrearn tradition. Acknowledgements

Davis and other nineteenth-century American women writers constantly remind me that the realms of the domestic and the political, the public and the private, are never discrete; the personal is inevitably inseparable fiom the professionai. Throughout the writing and research of this thesis, 1 have been fortunate to find myself supported both professionally and personally by a number of generous individuals. I am grateN for Banie Hayne's patient guidance and encouragement, for Demis Duffy's catalytic enthusiasm, and for Elaine Ostry's open ear ,as well as her practical assistance in procuring copies of Davis materiais. 1 am deeply thankfiil, as always, for Ken Nauss's sustaining companionship dong every step of the journey.

Like al1 recent Davis critics, 1 follow in the large fwtsteps of those who have gone before. especially Sharon Harris, Jean Pfaelzer, and Jane Atteridge Rose, whose pioneer scholarship has made my work possible. 1 am particularfy indebted to Jean Pfaelzer for encouraging me to pursue Davis's Wheeling roots and to Jane Rose for lending me unpublished matenal.

Several librarians were particuiarly helpful in my search for obscure resources, especially Jane Lynch of the University of Toronto's Inter-Library Loan Oflice, Kelly Bringman of the Ohio County Public Library in Wheeling, West Virginia, and Annewhite Fuller of the Huntington Public Library in Alabama. The following institutions graciously made available to me unpublished correspondence and manuscripts of Rebecca Harding Davis: Beinecke Library, Yale University; Boston Public Library; Bi-igham Young University; Columbia University; Connecticut Historical Society; Duke University; Folger Library; Hougbton Library, Harvard University; Huntington Library, San Marino, California; New York Public Library; Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, New York; Princeton University; University of Iowa; University of Virginia; West Virginia and Regional History Collection, West Virginia University.

Funding was provided by an Ontario Graduate Scholarship, a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, and a grant fiom the Associates of the University of Toronto Travel Grant Fund. Table of Contents

Preface ...... 2

Chapter One Life in the Borderland ...... 7

Chapter Two On the Border of a Vuginia Tradition: The Heritage of Proslavery ThoughtandFiction ...... 55

Chapter Three Shifting Borders and Subversive Tactics: Convention and Controversy in "Life in the kon Mills" and Margret Howth ...... 99

Chapter Four Borderline Allegiances: Davis on Abolitionists, Slaveholders, andslavery...... 155

Chapter Five Borderiine Nostalgia: Portraits of the Old South in Davis's Mystery Stones and Children's Fiction ...... 195

Chapter Six Border-dwellers as Bastards: Ulegitimacy and the Romance of Family Reunion in "The Promise of the Dawn" and Waiting for the Verdict ...... -226

Epilogue Looking Across Farther Borders ...... -281 1 have always had a perverse inclination to the other side of the question, especially if there was Iittie to be said for it. One hates to be smothered even under truth. What if al1 the world, as well as our senses, Say that the shield is silver? One wants the more to creep round to that solitary, dark corner yonder. and look out of the eyes of the one poor ghost who says that it is gold.

-Re becca Harding Davis, "Men's Rights," Putnam S Magazine, Febniary 1869 Preface

in "The Saar Secret," one of the lutid mystery stories she wrote for Peterson S

Maguzine as bread-and-butter work during the 1WOs,' Rebecca Harding Davis describes

a half-savage, half-civilized society existing on the edge of the Appalachian fiontier in the

first quarter of the nineteenth century. As an "htroduction" to her gothic mountain

setting and melodramatic plot, she comments:

Curious traces, indeed aiinost dl that we possess, rernain in these records, in the western part of virginia and Kentucky], of the condition of society, in the border, afier the first savage conflict with the indian and the wildemess was over, and before the finer manners and tastes of a higher civilization began to gain their sofier way. The social intercourse of those days was a strange cross of the rough pioneer habits and the stately courtesy of oid Virginia, with a heavy dash of the slangy mffianism of the fiontier West. To this anomalous mixture mut 1 refer the reader for the explanation of whatever may seem improbable in my story (253).

The picture of borderland society Davis paints in "The Saar Secret" is bizarre and.

as she anticipates. almost incredible in its contrats. The "savage Saars" (255) are a

distinguished race of exotic haif-breeds whose Indian blood gives them the appearance of

"light mulattoes" (256) and whose immense wealth gives them the air of royalty in the

surrounding temtory. Their remote, fortress-like homestead contains not only a curious

mélange of races (wfiites, half-Indians, mulattoes, and black slaves) but also a dark

%ecretY'involving an insane pnsoner, a concealed identity, and a swindled inheritance.

The ultramontane realm of the Saars is barbaric yet obsessed with the show of gentility

'Rebecca Harding Davis, "The Saar Secret," Peterson S Magazitte 56 (Apr -June 1874): 252-59.330-36,4054 2; hereafter cited parenthetically. 3

(the family pndes itself especially on the grand balls it regularly hosts), foreign and yet fmiliar to the young Eastern heuess whose visit provides the drama of the story. In the overblown, outdated portrait of the Saars, we witness society in a transitional, hybrid state caused by culturai, not merely biological, miscegenation.

Like the sensationai Saars, Davis, too, hailed fiom a region uniquely shaped by the influences of cuitural cross-fertiiization. The western temtory she gothicizes in 'The

Saar Secret" was the temtory of her youth, and the orninous undercurrents of race and inheritance she evokes in her seerningly-fiivolous mystery story symbolize real-life codicts of a region struggling to work out its cultuml destiny. In the chapten that follow, 1 attempt to place Davis fdyin the concrete and psychological space that constituted her hometown of Wheeling, Virginia in the decades preceding the Civil War.

Like the narraor of "The Saar Secret," 1 point to the "anomalous mixture" of this cultural and social setting as the bais of and justification for my tale.

One reviewer of the juvenile novel, Keni Hampden, mistnisting Davis's own insights into the cultural contradictions of the region she had known since early childhood complained: "The author makes the most of tirne and place by teferences to 'hot-blooded

Southerners' and -that early time,' but seventy years ago is too recent, and Wheeling,

West Virginia, is too near to home, to yield the necessas. glamour."' This dissertation challenges the levelling attitude of biographers, historians, and cultural geographers who have followed the lead of this anonymous reviewer by interpreting Davis's native ground

'Rev. of Kent Hampden, by Rebecca Harding Davis, Nafion 55 (1 Dec 1892): 4 15. as an area existing essentially under the unbrella of the Northem cultural hegemony.) My

study attempts to show that the Wheeling, Virginia of Davis's formative years was Mer

removed ffom the dominant "home" culture of the Northeast than most critics have

previously acknowledged.

Although Davis technically bled fiom north of the Mason-Dixon line, she was at

least partially a child of the Old South by virtue of her early exposure to the institution of

black slavery. Mer dl, as Brian Holden Reid has recently emphasized, it was not

geographical boundarîes or even cultural characteristics that made the South Southem but

rather its "peculiar" slaveholding economy. "The South," claims Reid, "was not a

distinctive but a self-conscious section.'* Growing up in the Northwestem panhandle of

the Old Dominion, closer to Pittsburgh than to Richmond, Davis was nonetheless strongly

affected by the prevailing Virginian mind-set of Southern self-consciousness. Situated on

the border of two worlds-Northem and Southem, slave and free-she drew her identity

and her artistic purpose fiom the hybrid c'culture heartW5 of her local experience.

As a Southemer by social if not geographical definition, Davis seems to stand

outside the Northem-spawned "ritual of consensus" Sacvan Bercovitch posits as the

'Cultural geographer. D. W. Meinig, sees antebellum Wheeling as exceptional even within western Virginia for its b'Northernness" (The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years ojHisrory, vol. 2 mew Haven: Yale UP, 19861 487).

'Brian Holden Reid, The Origim of the American Civil War (London: Longman. 1986) 83, 100-!01.

"*Culture hearth" is Meinig's term. which he defines as "an area wherein new basic cultural systems and configurations are developed and nurtured before spreading vigorously outward to alter the character of much larger areas" (Meinig, vol 1, 52). 5

hallmark of Amenca's liberal ideology.6 Heu to the South's inherent political and

cultural conservatism-what Louis Hartz calls the mentaiity of "an alien child in a iiberai

familyW7-as well as to the get-ahead fiee labour ideology of her neighbours across the

Pemsylvania border, Davis appears able to escape the '-y of culture" Bercovitch

describes as the foundation of the "Amencan way."' She is able, as it were, to step

outside the rhetoric of liberal idealism to scan, and crïticize, American society fkom both

sides of the border.

From her dualistic vantage point on the cutting edge of regional and ideological

divisions within her country, Davis produced in the years immediately preceding and

following the Civil War a remarkable body of social protest writings that dared to speak

out about not only overlooked sociai injustices but also about the insidious connections

between them. 1 have chosen, for the most part, to focus on Davis's early period, fiom

"Life in the iron Mills" (1861) to Waitingfor the Verdict (1867), because the works of

this era reveal Davis as a young artist still dose to her problematic cultural roots in

Wheeling. These first efforts fiom a bold pen have much to teach us not just about Davis

'~ccordingtu Bercovitch, what makes American culture unique is its capacity for "hmessing revolution for its own purposes." Because the very notion of protest is built into the concept of "America" and the "American way," revolution is at once fostered and contained by the controlling ideology (Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rires ofAssent: Tra~~~formufiomin the Symbolic Construction ofAmerica pewYork: Routledge, 19931 20,29-67).

'Louis Hartz. The Liberal Tradition in America: An Inrerpretation of American Political Thoughr Since !he Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace. 1955) 8. but eqdly about the unique mihchland culture of the Upiand South that both nourished and chailenged her radical vision of a fiactured, failing Amenca. Cbapter One Life in the Borderland

Reflecting at ihe turn of the twentieth century on the personal influences that

shaped her long career as a novelist, journalist, short story writer, and advocate for

women's rights, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps wrote: 'The lives of the makers of books are very

much like other people's in most respects, but especially in this: that they are either rebels

to, or subjects of, their ancestry. The lives of some literary persons begin a good while

after they are bom. Others begin a good while before."' Phelps's literary life, like that of

many popular nineteenth-century women writers, began a good while before she was bom

in the roots of the New England intellectual life that nurtured her voice of political and

artistic resistance. A little over six hundred miles to the West of Phelps's childhood home

in Andover, Massachusetts, Rebecca Harding Davis's literary life also found its roots in

the influentid pre-history of circwnstance-in the conflicted politicai and economic

climate of Wheeling, Virginia (now West Vugïnia), a fiontier town sixty miles southwest

of Pittsburgh, on the border not only of East and West, but also of North and South.

Late in life, Phelps rernembered her first exposure to Davis's "Life in the bon

Mills" as a hterary passport into an unknown "under-world." "From the placid top of

Andover Hill," she recalls, "1 glanced down into it fearfully and s~rrowfùlly."~If. as

Sharon Harris has suggested, Davis's "Virginia realism" covers ground foreign to the

'Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Chapters From a Life ((Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifnin. 1 897) 3.

'Phelps, "Stories that Stay," Cenrury 8 1 (Nov 19 10): 120. 8

"regional realism" of Northeastem femaie authon,' this is largely because Davis's own

voice of resistance was shaped by factors of environment and influence that would have

been alien to Phelps, Stowe, Freeman, or Cooke. The day-to-day world of Davis's

childhood and young adulthood was gittier, grimier, and more embattled with the forces

of rapid indumial change than were the dl-niral villages depicted by her eastem

counterparts. Even taking into account the gaiioping changes that overtook America as a

whole in the middle decades of the nineteenth-century, the northwest panhandle of

Virginia stands out as a region in extreme transition-an area straddling industry and

agrarianism, civilization and wildemess, slavery and abolition, Secessionism and

Unionisrn." The startiing new voice of "'Life in the bon Mills" arose out of a section of

the country hitherto unheard from and it grew out of and carried with it the unique

concems and controversies of a society on the edge.

As Davis herself commented, before the Civil War, region was divided from

region by ignorance as well as prejudice: "The Northemer actually beIieved his Southern

brother to be perpetually occupied in gambling, drinking mint juleps and torturing his

slaves. and he, in turn, was regarded by the far-off fire-eater as a mudsill, the grandson of

a cobbler, who lived by making wooden nutmegs. or green goods."* As a Wheeling

resident, Davis's fate during the war was, as she puts it. to occupy %e place of

'~haronM. Harris, Rebecco Harding Davis and Arnericun Realisrn (Philadelphia: U of Pennsyivania P, 1991) 94.

4These political tensions were so strong that they tore the Old Dominion apart into two separate States shortly afier the Civil War erupted.

5Davis' "The Ways of Our Fathers," Sarurday Evening POS~7 Apr 1906: 8. 9

Hawthorne's unfortunate man who saw both sides,'" as her community was tom apart by

its ties to both the North and South. Northwest Virginia's Janus-like stance played an

important part in shaping Davis's life-long cornmitment to the literature of social reform.

"Cultural mediation," Jane Atteridge Rose has argued, emerges as a centrai educational

goal in many of Davis's travelogues and local colour sketches of the 1870s and 1880s.' 1

wouid take Rose's argument one step Mer,or rather one step backward, and subrnit that

the concem with "cultural mediation" in fact anchors not only Davis's later journalistic

work, but also shapes her earliest and most radical social protest fiction.

An understanding of Davis's unique, dualistic regional perspective illuminates the

complexity of the cultural negotiations she accomplishes in her reformist writing. It

reminds us that "America" at mid-nineteenth-ce- was composed of many different

"Amencas," or, in the language of the domestic novelists with whom Davis has so much

in cornmon, many different versions of "home." Davis's home-ties linked her to an

unusually double-jointed socio-economic environment. As a result, she developed self-

confessed mixed feelings about regional and national patriotism. This capacity for

ambivalence aligns Davis with a group of fellow aliens to the New England literary

tradition, the fernale domestic novelists of the South. Establishing Davis in her uniquely

compIex time and place opens the way for an interrogation of both the cultural and

%lavis. Bits of Gossip (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904) 109; hereafier cited parenthetically . Davis does not identi& "Hawthorne's unfortunate man" specifically. Walter Hesford suggests the allusion may refer to Wakefield, Young Goodman Brown, or even Hawthorne himself ("Literary Contexts of 'Life in the Iron Mills," American Lirerature 49 [1977-781: 73).

7Jane Attendge Rose, Rebecca Harding Davis (New York: Twayne, 1993) 1 12. 10 literary conditions that helped engender her extraordinary career of radical social criticism.

Born in Alabama to a Pennsylvanian mother and Irish father, Rebecca Harding

Davis moved to Wheeling, Virginia when she was five or six years old, circa 1836.

Except for the three years of school terms she spent across the state border in

Washington, Pennsylvania, Davis remained in Wheeiing for the following 27 years, until marriage uprooted her and took her to Philadelphia. Wheeling would always be "home" to Davis, and she cherished her western Virginian ongins as long as she lived.

In her memoir, Bits of Gossip (1904), Davis fondty remembers her hometown through a haze of nostalgia. picturing it as a drowsy river town. Musing over her early home after half a lifetime spent in a very unpicturesque brick suburb of Philadelphia,

Davis writes: "The village in Virginia which was our home consisted of two sleepy streets lined with Lombardy poplars, creeping between a slow-moving nver and silent. brooding hills". in her pleasant reminiscences, no technological intrusions disturb the tranquil scene; there are no railways, stock markets, or newspapers ("Important news fiom the world outside was brought to us when necessary by a man on the galloping horse"). The idyllic Wheeling Davis recalls is rural, peaceful, and egalitarian: "Nobody was in a hurry to do anything, least of al1 to work or to make money. It mattered little then whether you had money or not. If you were bom into a good fmily, and were

'converted.' you were considered safe for this world and the next" (1-2). Davis's romantic memories oddly contradict, however, impressions conveyed

both by other contemporary observers and by later historians. Earl Chapin May, a

twentieth-century local historian, sums up, for instance, the Wheeling of Davis's

childhood as 'a hard-working, hard-drinking, high- betting, fast-trading, steamboating

town of 8,793 men, women and children-a hell-roaring jumping-off place into the West

of mystery and promise."' Davis's literary portrait of Wheeling in her autobiography thus

appears as a piece of self-conscious artistry influenced by tum-of-the-century mythologies

about the Old South. In her elderly musings, Davis seems to overlook the seamy

underside of the town she herself exposed in "Life in the ïron Mills" and other early, and

decidedly local, social protest fiction.

By 1839, when Davis was eight years old and the first city directory was

published to vaunt Wheeling's accomplishrnents to the world, Wheeling was clearly a

town on the rise. The FVheeling Directory and Advertiser could boast of paved streets.

brick sidewalks, a variety of shops and services, a thriving industrial base. newly

completed waterworks and soon-to-corne gas lighting. In its attempt to woo

entrepreneurs to the young city, the Directory's optimism about Wheeling's future knew

no bounds. as it declared %ere appears no eviction fiom the condition of Wheeling

prophetic of her delay upon her onward march to eminence and di~tinction."~Such blatant

puf3ery aside, statistics tell us that Wheelhg in 1840 had the fourth largest population in

'~arlChapin May, Principio tu meeling, 171 5-1 945, A Pageanr of bon and Sreel (New York: Harper, 1945) 1 1 1.

9J.B. Bowen, "Introduction," The Wheeling Directory and Adverriser (Wheeling: John M. M'Creary, 1839) n-pag. 12

Virginia and was on its way to becoming the second most prominent city in the state.

after Richmond. Frederick Hall had heard so many "encomiums" on the town that when

he visited that year he found it did not quite reach his magnrfied expectations. Somewhat

disappointed (perhaps he had in mind the idle mourof the '20s that Wheeling would be

the new national ~apital),'~he nevertheless found a vely bustling town, with "many

spacious and 10% stores, ware-houses, manufactories, and some elegant private

dwellings.""

Hall wouid bave observed on Wheeling's commercial smp, even at that eariy

date, buildings housing bookstores, newspaper offices, and possibly a library."

Al though Davis's biographer, Gerald Langfbrd. descn bes Wheeiing as an "unliterary

town."" Joseph Wilde vigorously refutes that image, pointing out that Wheeling in the

1840s had multiple literary societies, chief among these the Wheeling Lyceum, which

'"oug Fetherling, Wheeling: An i7Zustrated HLFtory (Woodland Hills CA: Windsor Publications. 1983) 29.

"Fredenck Hall, "Letters fiom the East and West" (1 840), quoted in Charles A. Wingerter, History ofGreater Wheeling und Vicinify(Chicago and New York: Lewis Publishing, 1912) 155.

etai ails swounding the history of Wheeling's library are sketchy. Wingerter locates a notice in the Wheeling Repository of 15 December 1807 regarding a meeting of the Wheeling Li brary Company (History of Greater WheeIing and Vicinity [Chicago and New York: Lewis Publishing Company, 19121 478.

"~eraldLangford, The Richard Harding Davis Years: A Biography of Mother and Son O\lew York: Holt, Rinhart and Winston, 1961) ix. 13 maintained "an musually fine library."14 By 1860, when a permanent library was opened in the Odd Fellows hall, subscribers supposedly had access to 2500 volumes.15

The Wheeling public also kept in touch with the literary, cultural, and political doings of the wider world through an active and diverse press. The newspaper industry was established in Wheeiing in 1807, with the birth of the Wheeling Repositoty, which lasted, however, only a year. By the 1820s, the local press was more solidly established, with the Wheeling Gazette competing with the Western Post & GVheeling Advertiser. The father of William Dean Howells contributed to the variety of Wheeling's press offerings by founding in 1829 the Eclectic Observer and Working People S Advocate and also The

Gleaner, or MontMy Mi~cellany.'~The 1839 City Directory could exdt that Wheeling residents enjoyed a daily press (with the exception of Sunday), as the town's two main papers each printed three times a week, on alternate days. In her autobiography, Davis recalls only two publications fiom her youth, the United States Gazette and the

Gentleman 's Monthly Magazine (Bits of Gossip 5), but during the 1840s Wheeling actually had not only rival English-lm yage newspapers (a third paper, the Argus, seems to have flourished briefly during the '40s) but also, by the end of the decade, a German- language paper, the Virginia Sraats Zeitung (established in 1849).

If, despite its wide-awake, bustling newspaper business, antebellum Wheeling still had an "overgrown country town aspect," with dogs and hogs running loose in the

I4JosephWilde, History of Wheeling During the Pasr For@ Yeurs (n-p. [c.l880]) 34-35. l5 W ingerter 192. l60tis Rice, West Virginia: A History (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1985) 76. streets." it also had a substantiai industrial economy. From its earliest beginnings.

Wheeling's position beside a deep channel of the Ohio had given the settlement a

distinctly commercial character, augmented after 18 18 by its position as terminus of the

National Road. As the iiontier overtook Wheeling and moved West in the early decades

of the nineteenth century, the river port became an important outfitting centre for the

ever-swelling tide of migrants. New Orleans and other Southem towns proved a ready

market early on for local goods, which. by the early 1830s included pottery. giass.

textiles, leather goods, and cigars.18 Discounting the rhetoncal ebullience of the 1839

Directory ("there is, probably, no city of the same population withui the U.States, that

does a greater arnount of manufacturing business." it brags), its author reliably records the

presence of five foundries, five glas works, two paper mills. five plough manufacturers.

a saw mill, a flou mill, and a boat yard in the Wheeling area. Out of the apparently

"exhaustless coal nuid" in the nearby hills, manufacturers required a million bushels

a~uallyto stoke the industrial fumaces of "Nail City," as Wheeling was becoming

nationally known.

As the city headed towards mid-cenniry, with a population of over 13 000.'9 it

faced a city's social problems. As a key embarkation point for steamboat travellers along

"~ultA.B. Hewetson, "Wheeling, West Virginia, During the Civil Wu," MA thesis. Ohio State University, l930,3-4.

I9peter Boyd gives the 1850 census figure for Wheeling as 13 161 (History of Northern West Virginia Panhandle, Embracing Ohio, MarshaII, Brooke and Hancock Coun~ies,vol. 1 [Topeka:Historical Publishing Company, 19271 129). 15

the Ohio, Wheeling, even in its primitive days, sprouted multiple hotels and, much to the

fiutration of local temperance activists, saloons. The emerging trade union movement in

Pittsburgh reflected regional discontent arnong ironworkers, and local editorids harped

on problems of ethnic disharmony sternming fiom the presence of a sizable Roman

Catholic community. Robbery and even murder frequently made the pages of the

Wheeling InteZZigencer in the 1850s. By 1860 ''thieving and rowdyism" had become so

prevalent that the city council decided to look into establishing a night watch. A year

later, the council was pressed to consider another risïng problem-prostitution."

The peaceful tree-lined village of Davis's memory was surely just that-a

memory-by the time Davis reached adulthood. Whether it ever existed is. historical

evidence seems to suggest, highly questionable. Davis's mernories in Bits of Gossip are

sheltered and selective, but even she remembers among the pastoral hills "the plague spot

of the village. a collection of wretched cabins tenanted by cinuiken fiee negroes and

Irish.'' "Among its other horrors," she notes, "were goats and jimson weeds and a fou1

pond covered with yellow slime" (22). After al!, the oppressive poverty and filth of "Life

in the lron Mills" occur, the story's narrator tells us, not in 1861, but in the Virginia

village of "nearly thirty years" ago.?' Even to a child's eyes, Wheeling, Virginia in the

early days of industrialization was apparently a town with many sides.

avis, "Life in the Iron Mills," Atlantic Monrhly 7 (Apr 1861), rpt. in A Rebecc~ Harding Davis Reader, ed. Jean Pfaelzer (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995) 5; hereafter cited parenthetically . 16

To live in Wheeling in the decades leading up to the Civil War meant to be pulled

two ways by feelings of regional belonging. Business ties, like family ties, extended both

north and south. Especially before the amval of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1853

Iinked the western and eastern halves of Virginia, Wheeling looked to the North to

finance its industry. Wheeling's first foundry, for example, the Top Mill, was started in

1 832 by a Pittsburgher and fed by pig iron fiom the Pittsburgh districts. The finished

product was. of course, shipped south, down the Ohio. In a semantic shift that

demonstrates Wheeling's position as a commercial pivot between North and South, the

Top Mill, still operated by Northem interests, eventually became known as the Missouri

Iron Works once the Southem mines became the chief source of raw product. Thus, in

the decade before the Civil War, as the Intelligencer was urging Wheeling residents to

forge bonds with Southem cotton planters in an effort to consolidate Wheeling's statu as

a major transportation hub,= most of Wheeling's industry was owned and operated by

men May describes as coming from "tough New England Yankee stock.""

The dualistic commercial outlook on which Wheeling seemed to thrive (at least

until the Panic of 1857) was not without its forcehl contradictions. Despite strong

financial ties to the North, a biner rivalry separated Wheeling fiom the nearest Northern

"~neditorial in the Intelligencer of 21 May 1853 insists Wheeling has the potential to be an important transportation centre for the cotton industry and argues that Wheeling residents "should take up the interest of the planter as their own-for it is so." In support of this philosophy, the Intelligencer also carried an ad for the "Cotton Plant,"' a new publication associated with DeBow S Review and biliing itself as "a Southem Commercial Organ Published at Washington City to promote Direct Trade, Agriculture and the development of our resources." 17 city, Pittsburgh. During the Wheeling Bridge controversy of the 1840s. Wheeling citizens routinely decried abolitionist interference, as they clashed with Pittsburghers over the extension of the National Road across the Ohio River. Both Wheeling and Pittsburgh strove to be the transportation axis of the West, and their intense debate over the

Wheeling Bridge aair eventually found its way to the Supreme Court of the United

States. Once Wheeling successfuily attracted the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, the bridge's commercial importauce diminished, but contempt for Pittsburgh did not. At the lavish banquet to celebrate the raihoad's amval, Wheeling revellers did not miss the opportunity to rub Pittsburgh's nose in the dirt with a special Song to mark the occasion:

Poor Pittsburgh is flung-for her steamboats no more Can whistle in scorn as they pass Wheeling's door. No chimneys to lower-no action to bring- For a flatboat, she'll find, will soon be the thing; She may war on the bridges-save one for herself- But her trade on the river is laid on the shelf."

Whee,ling7s simultaneous econornic dependence on and deep-seated hosti lity towards her Northem neighbours laid the ground for the town's painfbl rupture over the

Civil War. Bits ofGossip paints a picture of a town deeply divided, where neighbour looked upon neighbour with suspicion and "if you said what you thought you were liable to be dragged to the county jail and lefi there for months" (Bits of Gossip 1 17). Davis's autobiographical depictions of a border town ripped apart by conflicting loyalties and the hardships of military occupation have been justly singled out as some of her most gripping passages of essay writing, and historians support her literary documentation. 18

Although Wheeiing was the mon pro-Union tom in a largely pro-Union region,

Federalist sentiment was by no meam unanimous. Davis's brother, Dick, was warned by

town authorities in May 1861 that he wodd niin his fmily if he openly enlisted in the

Federal Ar~n~.'~Some of the town7sleading men were among the eighty-one who voted

"yes" in the referendum on Virginia's sece~sion.~~Wheeling even formed a small

Confederate Company, the Shriver Greys, which served under Stonewall Jackson. During

the early days of the war, Union troops drilled dong onetown block while Confederates

marched dong another. An anecdote conceming the Shriver Greys perhaps serves better

than any statistic to illustrate the schizophrenic political atmosphere in Wheeling on the

eve of the Civil War. The man commissioned to sew the Confederate unifonns was

swom to secrecy for fear of reprisai by the town's pro-Union majority; the tailor himself.

however, later served in the Union army."

The roots of Civil War confusion in Wheeling were evident in Davis's childhood.

as her hometown tottered on the border of Southem agariankm and Northem

industrialism and on the boundary between Southem slavery and Northem abolitionism.

Separated fiom Tidewater society by the formidable barrier of the Blue Ridge and

sandwiched narrowly between the fiee States of Ohio and Pemsylvania, the northwest

panhandle of Virginia yet retained, Davis's contemporaries witnessed, Southem qualities.

avis, letter to Jim Wilson, May 18611, quoted in Heten Woodward Sheaf5er. "Rebecca Harding Davis: Pioneer Reaiist," Ph.diss., U of Pe~sylvania,1947' 36.

'6Gi bson Lamb Cranmer, History of Wheeling Ciiy and Ohio County, Wesf Virginia and Representofive Citizens, vol. l (1 902; Apollo PA: Closson Press, 1994) 192-93. Nineteenth-century western Virginia was, to borrow John Inscoe's description of western

Northem Carolina, "charactenzed by a subtle interplay of its residents' identities as parts

of larger wholes." To paraphrase Inscoe, northwestern Virginians saw themselves as

northerners within western Virginia, as westerners within Virginia, as Virginians within

the South, and as southemers within the United tat tes.*' in westem Virginia politics,

westem rhetoric celebrating fke-spïrited, nanually democratic mountaineers CO-existed

with an overwhelming cornmitment to Southem social traditions and Southern rights.

Thus, the regional identity of western Virginia epitornized the paradox of Arnerica's

republican identity so long as she remained a slave-holding nation.

It was the long experience of living with the extremes of the nation's conflicted

politicai ideology that eventually enabled the westem part of Virginia to express her

loyalty to the Federal govemment by paradoxically acting on her Southem convictions of

a state's rights and performing the only successful secession in the history of the United

State~.'~Although West Virginia did not officially enter the Union as the thirty-fifh smte

until June 1863, objections in the westem counties to Virginia's secession ordinance led

to the formation of an ad hoc separate governrnent shortly afier the firing on Fort Sumter.

Davis lived in the very midst of the new state movement. Not only was Wheeling the

capital of the provisional government, but the building housing the First and Second

'*~ohnC. Inscoe, Mountoin Masters. SIavery, and the Seciional Crisis in Western North Carolina (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1989) 6.

29JohnAlexander Williams, West Virginia: A Bicentennial History (New York: Norton, 1976) 86-86. 20

Wheeling conventions (later known as hdependence Hall) was located across the Street

fiom the Davis family home.

The outbreak of the Civil War provided a direct catalyst for the creation of "New

Virginia." as the state first called itseif, but it only exacerbated the verbal war that had

been waging between the eastern and western counties of Virginia since the days of the

fmt transrnontane settlements. Inhabitants of the counties West of the Blue Ridge

considered themselves West Virginians" long before that title implied a separate state

citizenship. The first governor of West Virginia asserted in his inaugurai address that

"The East and West have always been two peoples." 'O Mountain farmers, shopkeepers,

and manufacturers felt removed fiom the piantation lifestyle of the Tidewater and

Piedmont. Ongoing arguments over the taxation of siave property, unequal representation

in the state House and Senate, and the need for transportation improvements (a constant

theme of westem lobbyists), Meralienated already-isolated western Virginians. Even

before the Revolutionw War, an attempt had been made by the Indiana Company to

came a fourteenth colony out of the westem districts. In 1829-30 the Virginia legislature

engaged in earnest in constitutional debate, and dismembennent of the state was urged by

politicians on both sides of the Alleghenies.

As Westerners (small-scale slaveholders) squared off against Eastemers (large-

scale slaveholders) over issues of taxation and representation, the rhetoric of Appalachian

egalitarianism emerged at the forefront of the debate. Mountaineer politicians warned of

'O~overnorArthur 1. Boreman7sinaugural address, Wheeling, 20 June 1863, rpt. in Ronald L. Lewis and John C. Hennen, Jr., eds., West Virginia: Documents in the History ofa Rural-lndustrial State (Dubuque: Kendall Hunt Publishing Company, 199 1) 1 10. "the energy which the mountain breeze and westem habits impart" to pure republican

pnnciples3' and argued that slavery was incompatible with the western way of life.

Charles Ambler replicates their legend-making when he writes of nineteenth-century

westem Virginia:

The pride and hast of this fiontier society was its democratic equality. Conditions of the wildemess were not favorable to Negro slavery or to the use of indennired whites. Thus, except in the cases of a few wards-youths bound out to pnvate individuals by county courts until they became of age-every person cleared his own Lands, raised his own crops, and made his own improvements. With the clearing of the forest, the professional hunter moved farther West, leaving behind a fairly homogenous society."

"Accustomed to equality arnong themselves," Ambler maintains, "[westerners] loathed

special ~nvileges."~~

Recently, however, scholars, following the lead of James Murphy, have begun to

revise the traditionai view of the homogeniety and equality of Appalachian society."

John Inscoe's illuminating study of slavery in western North Carolina and Wilma

Dunaway's detailed analysis of economic diversity and social stratification in eighteenth-

"Proceedings and Debates of the Virginia State Convention of 1829-30 (Richmond, 1830). rpt. in Lewis and Hennen 77.

"charles Henry Ambler, Wesr Virginia: The Mounrain State (New York: Prentice-Hall. 1940) 208.

"James B. Murphy. "Slaveholding in Appalachia: A Challenge to the Egalitarisn Tradition" Southern Studies 3.1 (1 992): 15-33. and nineteenth-century Southem ~~~alachia''have made major contributions towards a

new histoncal understanding of the region. "Montani Semper Liberi" ("Mountaineers

Always Free") may be West Virginia's rnott0.3~but it has not aiways. historians are

beginning to acknowledge, been the reality. in antebellurn Virginia, Wheeling was about

as far West and as fa.north as one couid live and still cal1 oneself a Virginian. North of

the Mason-Dixon he,Davis and her fellow citizens of the panhandle were nonetheless

very much Virguiians, heir to the peculiar patriotism as well as the "peculiar institution"

of the nation's fmt state.

Men Frances Troliope visited Wheeling in 1829. she found the town

distinguished by "al1 that seduious attention which in this country distinguishes a slave

state."" in her "Pen-Pictures of Society in the Ante-Bellum Days." published in the

Wheeling Infelligencer of 1902, local resident Dorothy Patterson describes fashionable

tife in Wheeling around the time of Trollope's visit as part of the gracious pageantry of

the Old South, in which "velvet-footed slaves waited upon every whim of my lady gay,

and hospitality brewed a toddy for the gallant ca~alier."'~Although throughout the

nineteenth-century the slave population in the panhandle was well under ten percent,

"Wilma A. Dunaway, The First American Fronfier: Transifionro Capitalism in Southern Appahchiû, 1700-1800 (Chape1 Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996).

''Frances Trollope, Domesfic Manners of the Americans (London: Rouîledge, 1 927) 15 3 - 54.

"Dorothy Patterson, "Pen Pictures of Society in the Ante-Bellurn Days." Wheeling IntelIigencer 24 Aug 1902, rpt- in Audra Rickey Wayne. "Wheeling West Virginia Before the Civil War" (Wheeling, West Virginia, 1990) 77. 23

many of the First Families of Wheeling were slave holder~.~~Slaves tended to bey

historian Doug Fetherling notes, "signs of wealth, not producers of wealth.'*' However.

if plantations in the western mountains were not common, they were not impossible.

Willa Cather creates a fictional example in Sapphira and the Slave Girl, and Davis

mentions in Kent Hampden the Shepherd plantation on the outskirts of Wheeling which.

at least in the early 1800s, featured slave quarters dong with its mill, barns, stables, and

Despite its burgeoning industrial ecommy and its large proportion of Gennan and

Irish residents, Wheeling was, Fetherling claims, the northermnost bastion of the

civilization of the Old South. Even the townts architecture. which favoured Grecian

rnodels, testified to its hindamental Southemness." Joseph Wilde's History of Wheeling

During the Past Forîy Years [c. 18801 describes Wheeling society circa 1840 as "quite

refined, and marked with the character of the old Virginia style." Part of this "old

Virginia style" was. of course, the Southern code of Honour which Davis recails in Bits of

Gossip as part of the social standard she knew as a youngster in Wheeling as well as

Alabama. Wilde recalls:

j91n 1850, there were 247 slaves in Wheeling, or about less than two percent of the total population. ("S lavery in West Virginia," West Virginia Herirage Encyclopedia, ed. Jim Comstock [Richwood WV: Jim Comstock, 19761 4392).

"Fetherling 39.

"Fetherling 28; Davis, Kent Hampden (New York: Scribners, 1908) 17; hereafter cited parentheticaily. Although in the extreme northern part of the State of Virginia, and very fa north of many of the cities of the fiee States, general sentiment was as essentially Southem as in many other localities of a similar sue hundreds of miles south of Wheeling. The term Yankee was not by any means considered a very high recommendation of any person coming to Wheeling to better his fortunes.

Slavery, Wilde admits, existed, but was "of a mild type":

Many of those who were slaves were merely the body sewants of those who owned them. Their entire nurnber in the city and county was but small, and as a class-were well treated, and liberally provided for, and seemed quite happy in their heritage. Very little patronage was extended to the "Underground Railroad" by this class of persons at the time. The city possessed what might be the cailed [sic] a quiet old Virginia dignity."

In her sentimental "pen-sketches," Patterson highlights nineteenth-century

Wheeling's typically Virginian graciousness and generosity when she recreates a féte held

by one of Davis's neighbours for her children's slave nurse:

As an evidence of the love and effection [sic] which was felt by the southem people for their slaves, 1 would picture to you the handsome bal1 given in her Wheeling home by Mrs. Stanton to her children's nurse, old "Mammy Sally." For the diversion of this faithful old negress she opened her doors and distributed her bountifûl hospitality with the same lavish hand as when her own fiiends were bidden to the feast. The best apartrnents in the house were thrown open to the dusky revellers."

These paternalistic festivities-which, as Patterson describes hem, echo a typical scene from Southem plantation fiction-seem to have taken place almost on Davis's doorstep. Patterson notes that at the outbreak of war, Stanton moved south and her home

"Wilde 16-17.

44Patter~~n95. was taken over by General Frérnont for his residence and offices- General Frérnont's

headquarters while he was commander of the Mountain Department of the Union Arrny at

Wheeling were located, according to Davis's personal correspondence, across the Street

fiom the Davis home. (Ln April 1862 she wrote to James Fields: "Here is Gen Fremont

has [sic] 'confiscated' one of my friends houses for headquarters just across the street?')

Articles and editorials hmthe Intelligencer of the early 1850s stress the northern

panhandle's unity with the traditional slaveholding culture of the rest of the state. An

August 1852 editorial, for instance, supports the Whig presidential candidate, Winfiield

Scott. by adamantly refùting the rumour that Scott had said "he (S.) would sooner cut off

his right hand than {end it to the support of ~iavery.""~On November 10, 1852, the

Intelligencer emphatically denies that Wheeling is an abolitionist stronghold and endorses

the Fugitive Slave Law as a necessary concession to the rights of the Southern States.

Speaking in the communal "we," the editors insist: "Our position is clear upon this

subject. We are Virginians, and expect to be ever such, and we unhesitatingly Say, that if

the endorsement of the Fugitive Slave Law caused our late defeat [in the presidential

election], then we glory in that defeat."

The January 8, 1853 issue of the Inrelligencer attempts to fiame local solidarity

with slaveowners in even more concrete terms. The paper reports a legal "case of rare

occurrence" in which a free black fiom Wheeling was sentenced to two years in jail for

"Davis, letter to James Fields, 14 April [1862], Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6 109): Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library.

461ntelligencer28 Aug 1 852. aiding a runaway slave. The lntelligencer acknowledges the human interest of a case "in

which there was much to enlist the sympathies of the court and public," but fully supports

the verdict. Moreover, it insists the generai population is behind the ruling as well.

the people of the North-West are behind none in their fidehy to the laws designed to protect the institutions of Virginia. We have aiways known and asserted, that our citizens, though not slave owners, were tnie to the interests of those of Virginia's citizens who were. and that they were as much opposed to Abolitionism and Free Soi1 agitation as any citizens of the State.

The same article Merstresses locd identification with slaveholding Virginia by

carping on the attempts by abolitionist Pittsburgh, the loathed commercial rival, to

"kidnap and harbor" Wheeling's few slaves. The fierce econornic competition between

Wheeling and her Northem challenger seems to have encouraged the western Virginians

to define themselves by opposition as Southemers first and f~remost.'~ui Apnl 1853: for

example. the Intelligencer once again testified to Wheeling's Southem, slaveholding

loyalties by forcefülly contradicting a mourin the press that the panhandle would like

to become part of free Pemsylvania?

Davis's apparent tolerance for "the institution" seems, then, germane to her sense

of regional consciousness. With characteristic Wheeling indulgence for the waning

47Thispattern of self-definition matches the conclusions of sociologist John Shelton Reed regarding contemporary Southerners. Reed finds that "marginality ofien produces high [regional] consciousness" because a cultural group's identity is often strongest at the point where it cornes in contact with another cultural group (John Shelton Reed, Southerners: The Social Psychology of SecrionaZism [Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 19831 27, 1 10- 12).

48"Secessionin Brook and Hancock," Intelligencer 19 Apr 185 3. lifestyle upheld by a local aristocracy, the opening chapter of Bits of Gossip romanticizes

local slaveholders: "In some of our old houses lived quiet fok, who fiowned upon balls

and card parties. In each of their households were a few slaves, some family portraits and

plate, a shelf or two of Latin and English classics-and very littie money" (1 5). Untainted

by the modem commercialism against which Davis rails so fiequently in her later years.

the "quiet," cdtured slave owners of Davis's childhood represent a benign remnant of a

eenteel tradition. In a later chapter, Davis expands on this impression when she insists: C-

Abditionkm never was a buming question in our part of Virginia. Nothing lay between any slave there and fieedorn but the Ohio River, which could be crossed in a skiff in a half ho W.... Hence the only slaves we had were those who were too cornfortable and satisfied with us to nui away. We knew %e hitution" at its best, and usdylistened to the furious attacks on it with indifferent contempt. (1 69-70)

In her recent landmark stuhidy of avis,^^ Jean Pfaelzer has admirably tried to

untangle Davis's thoughts on slavery and race, which are cornplex and often seemingly

contradictory. Davis's attitude towards abolitionists is a particularly dificuit thread to

unravel. in contrast to the nostalgically-tinted portrait Davis presents in her

autobiography, an 1898 essay, on the attempts of educated Afi-ican-Americans to reform

black education, hints at an obverse, and disturbing, side to the "institution" whose

workings she witnessed as a child. "1 came fiom a slave State," writes Davis, "and the

evils that 1 saw in slavery made me an Abolitionkt before these excitable young men

'9Pfaelzer. Parlor Rîtdicnl: Rebecca Harding Davis and rhe Origini of American Social Realisrn (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1 996). probably were b~rn."~~If Davis was able to witness in her neighbourhood the

condescension of kind slaveholders, she was also able to see the permanent slave auction

block located. ironicdly enough, beside an Underground Railroad station. the Wheeling

House Hotel."

In Bonnie Belmont, an episodic "romance" for "locai readen" that sketches

antebellurn rural life in Belmont County, Ohio, across the river fiom Wheehg, Judge

John Cochran recalls this auction block as a site of inhumane cruelty. Cochran's obscure

family fiction provides a valuable aitemative view of "the 'institution' at its best." In the

midst of his "farm scraps," Cochran inserts a lengthy, indignant chapter, The Slave

Auction Block," describing his first exposure, at the age of ten, to the trade in human

flesh. Cochran acknowledges that Wheeling's proximity to fiee territov made slavery,

for the most part, happily "unprofitable" in the northwest panhandle, but. from Cochran's

perspective, those few slaves who were found to the east of the Ohio looked across the

river with longing: "Frorn the Virginia side the slaves with cautious whisper pointed out

to each other 'the brick house' (Van Pelt's) by the log schoolhouse,' as the first station on

the hi11 and stopping place in Ohio on their way to fieed~rn."~'

''Davis. "Two Methods with the Negro," Independent 3 1 March 1898, rpt. in A Rebeccu Harding Davis Reader 424.

' Charles L. B lockson, Hîppocrene Guide to the Underground Roilroad (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1994) 160.

*'~udgeJohn S. Cochran, Bonnie Belmont: A Hisiorical Romance of the Duys ofSavery and the Civil War (Wheeling: Allied Printing, 1907) 3 1. 29

Reared in a town that looked two ways, culturaily and economically, Davis grew

up, according to Hamis, essentialiy a "Southemer at heart but a Northemer in her

abolitionist belief~.'"~More accurately. Davis grew up trained by divided cultural

allegiances to hold a deep affection for the Southem way of life dong with sincere

reservations about its economic basis in African-American slavery. Davis's lasting

attachment to the South would never ailow her to embrace whole-heartedly the radicalism

of the campaign for irnmediate emancipation. Instead, she tumed to a second cornponent

of her regional consciousness, the identity of a fiee-thinking Westemer, to cave for

herself an identity that enabled her mentally to transcend the discrepancies of her

contradictory cultural heritage.

It is important to remember that most of Davis's so-called formative years were

spent in the very heart of the slave-holding South. in Alabama, in the same district

clutside present-day Huntsville where fellow-novelist Caroline Hentz was first converted

ro the charms of plantation culture, Davis absorbed experiences and images that would

stay with her the rest of her life. Reflections of these images in Bits of Gossip

demonstrate the imer conflict over the Southem lifestyle with which Davis stmggled

throughout her life.

Bits of Gossip captures Davis's very early exposure to slaves and slavery through

her rnemory of her mother's memones:

1 have often heard my mother descnbe the mixed magnificence and squalor of the life on the plantations among which we lived; the great one-storied wooden houses built on piles; the pits of mud

S3 Harris, Re becca Harding Davis 79. below them in which the pigs wallowed; the masses of crimson roses heaped hi& on the roofs, a blaze of pure and splendid color; the bare floors, not too often scrubbed; the massive buffets covered with magnificent plate, much of it cups and salvers won on the turf (68-69).

The Hardings, we are told, remembered their time in Alabama "as an uneasy drearn":

The thick shade of the semi-tropical forests, the mile-long hedges of roses through which crawled rattlesnakes and the deadly upland moccasin, the darting birds Iike jeweis, the extravagant slovenliness of both nature and man, the fleas, the ticks, the chiggers, and countless other creatures that bite and sting, and through ail and over al1 the intolerable heat, made up for us children a strange, enchanted page of the pst family history (69- 70).

The dark, jungle-like landscape-home to poisonous snakes and foreign insects-threatens. but the slave presence is never named as part of that landscape. With her typical obliqueness on the issue, Davis does not even use the "s" word to descnbe black labourers. Southern women, she tells us euphemistically, spent much of their tirne disuibuting food and making clothes for their "field hands" (69).

Davis's brief description of the "semi-tropical forests" of childhood memory encapsulates her ambivalence towards both race and regional identity. If, as famiiy legend has it. Davis's earliest memory was of fleeing a burning house during a slave ins~rrection,~the vague, noxious biackness of her Alabama mernories takes on a much

more human shape. Davis, lîke her fellow citizens of Wheeling, no doubt always

considered herself a Southemer, but. the above passage suggests, she also grappled with

the subterranean anxiety that came with that identity.

Ln her intimate conespondence with Annie Fields, wife of her fist publisher,

James Fields, Davis manjfests a persistent and sometimes defiant ambiguity as to her

sense of regional loyalty. Contrasting her provinciai circurnstances with Anme's life

among the leading literary and intellecnial lights of Boston, Davis repeatedly refers to

herself, with a mixture of bashfulness and pride, as a Westemer. By 186 1, when Davis

began her correspondence with Annie, the western kontier had long since moved past

Wheeling. The gold rush had put California on the map, Oregon had been wrested fiom

the British. Mormons had settled the Salt Lake basin, and the United States had fought a

war to secure its hold over Texas. But Virginians on the remote side of the Blue Ridge

still defined themselves as "Westerners," even if they were no longer pioneers. For

Davis, Harris suggests, the "Westemer" identity evoked not the masculine myth of

conquest through violence but rather %e healthy capabilities of the individual (most

'"~heaffer20-2 1. AMough a panic over slave conspiracies swept across the South following Nat Turner's upnsing, standard histories of Alabama, such as William Warren Rogers et al.. AIabarna: The History of a Deep South State (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1994) and Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton, Alabama: A Biceentenniol History (New York: Norton. 1977) make no mention of a slave riot in the Huntsville area in the mid-1830s. Neither do general histones of slave uprisings provide any historical documentation for this piece of Harding farnily legend (for Uwance, Nicholas Halasz, The Raffling Chains: S'eUnrest and Revolt in the Anfebellum South pew York: D. McKay, 19661, Herbert Aptheker. American Negro Siave Revolfs, 2" ed. mew York: International Publishers, 19741, Joseph Cephas Carrol. Slave Insurrections in the United States, 1800-1865 pew York: Negro Universities P, 197 11). ofien referring to women) to carve their own paths-not necessarily to a particular region

but beyond their assumed limitations." 55

Davis's proud faith in Western individualism supported her as she forged her own

carefully balanced way between the conflicting ideologies of Southern and Northern

culturai beliefs. "Westem" was for Davis a superlative character description that she

applied to both women and authors she admited. When Davis wrote Annie in May 1863

to ask her help in establishing a widowed fÎiend as a book agent, the highest

recommendation she offered of her fiiend's character was to say 'We widow is a western

woman-energetic, common sensible."56 In another letter of the same year, Davis surns up

her ideal of independent western womanhood in her enthusiasm for Mary Abigail

Dodge's ["Gail Hamilton's"] writing: "What a thoroughly Western woman she podge]

is! 1 don't know how she made the mistake to be born in New England. Rough,

democratic. hardy. comrnon sense is the strengt!! of western people and if she had

belonged out there we'd have crowned her the genius of it-s~rely."'~

5 5 Harris. Rebecca Harding Davis 1 19.

56Davis,letter to Annie Fields, 6 May [1863], Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6109), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department. University of Virginia Library.

''Davis, letter to Annie Fields, 27 July [1863], Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6109). Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Davis's early fiction also provides strong portraits of her mode1 western woman. In "The W ife's Story'. (Atlantic Monthly 14 [July 18641: 1- 14) a misguided wife who falls prey to dangerously self-centred transcendental beliefs is contrasted with her husband's grown ward, Jacky-a healthy, free-spoken young woman with rough Westem manners but a kind heart and sound domestic values. Martha Ymow of "Stephen Ymow: A Christmas Story" (Atlantic MonthZy 1 3 [Jan 18641 : 67-88) is a similarly robust, forthright Western heroine. Her practical intelligence, self-assurance, and determination successfully redeem her forger husband afier he The mythology of ultramontane, westem autonomy played an important part in

shaping Davis's iiterary politics as well as her self-concept and her incipient feminism.

Even afier she moved to Philadelphia, Davis always felt that she "belonged out there." in

an early letter to Annie [Oct 18621, she jokhgly calls herself a "Western savage.""

Davis's self-described position of western marginality freed her to critique mainstrearn,

Northeastern culture fiom the perspective of an outsider. She defended her innate

western iconoclasm to Emerson in 1870, when she recalled her introduction to him and

what a relief it was to reaiize the great sage was human after dl: "For, as you doubtless

have noticed, to us downright, common-sensible Western people the gods are intel 1igible

just in proportion as their bones ache, or their clothes are cut like our o~n."'~Emerson

and his accolytes were fiequent targets of Davis's iconoclasm so it is perhaps surprising

that the above quotation cornes fiom a ietter of invitation in which Davis beseeches her

"oracle" to give her the "great pleasure" of staying in her home during his upcorning visit

to Philadelphia. The letter dernonstrates, however, not only Davis's typical ability to see

both sides of an issue but also the strategic possiblities of a marginal identity. in her

gracious invitation, Davis remembers Emerson's former kindness to a "raw Westem

girl:" thus fiaming her letter in terms of her native naïveté enables Davis to entice a released fiom prison. "Pungent" (66) is the adjective Davis chooses to sum up Manha's forcefûl. direct character.

saDavis, letter to Annie Fields, 9 Oct [1862], Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6 109), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library.

59Davis!letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 13 Jan 1870, Houghton Library, Harvard University bMSAm1280(776), by permission of the Houghton Library and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Mernorial Association. literary celebrity to her home while aiso ailowing her an excuse for rnaintaining her

unconventional attitude towards his New England idealism.

During her £ktyears as a nationally-published author. Davis mggled with what

it meant to assert an artistic identity fiom beyond the cultural borders of dominant New

England literary circles. Later, as an established author, she would welcome the prospect

of The Galaxy as a means of establishing an alternative literary community through a

magazine that would "fil1 a vacuum in our literature more apparent every year-a national

magazine in which the current of thought in every section could find expression so

thoroughly as that of New England does in The ~tlantic.'* Davis leamed only too

quickly the dificulties in marketing a literature grounded in regional realities unfamiliar

to a New England editor. The "gloom" of which Fields apparently complained in

Margret Howth can be largely attributed to the novel's self-proclairned "homely and

narrow" scope. Davis writes, she says, about her home, "that especial Sta?e of the Union

where 1 live", and that State, in the industriai rnid-west, is politically, socially, and

economically far removed fiom Fields's ost ton? (Indeed, by the time Davis was writing

Margrer Howfh, her "State" was truly in a unique position, existing in a kind of limbo

following its secession from Virginia and pending its acceptance into the Union.) Davis

in fact framzd her arguments with Fields over the manuscript of Margret Howrh in terms

60Davis.letter to F.P. Church. 4 June 1866. William Conant Church Papers. The Ga1u.q~ Series. Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

6'Davis, letter to James Fields, 10 May [186 1?] (FI 1 167), quoted by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Davis, Margret Howth: A aory of To-dizy (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862, rpt. New York: Feminist P, 1990) 3, 105. of an East versus West controversy. Consenting to a suggestion she change a reference to

the "Wabash to ''the river," she wryly quips: "Western people ought to be used to having

cities laid out in swarnps for them by Eastern specuiators by this time.'"' Eventually the

accumulation of various editorial pressures and length restrictions led her to comment on

her fust experience of serial publishing, "1 felt cramped, and we of the West like room.

Davis's cornplaints about a lack of understanding for her regional vantage point

begin as early as negotiations over manuscnpt revisions to "Life in the bon Mills." in

what must be a response to proposed changes to the market scene Hugh Wolfe views

from his pison cell, Davis chafes: "That 'pheasant9 cntic is not critical enough in his

knowledge. Our hot river soi1 yields melons late-last fa11 until the middle of October.

and Virginia game laws allow pheasants to be shot afier Sept 1 st. 1 am afiaid he knows

the hub of the universe more accurately than its outside.'* At the same time that Davis

was annoyed by her Boston publisher's parochiai viewpoint, however, she bernoaned her

isolation from America's cultural "hub? One of her first letters to James Fields afler the

publication of Margret Horuth is a request that he advise her on how to introduce her

work to a few New England authors whose work she has long admired. Her close

"Davis, letter to James Fields, 31 Dec [1861], Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6 109), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department. University of Virginia Library.

6'~avis,letter to James Fields, 10 May [186 1 ?] (FI 1 167), qwted by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

letter to James Fields, [ 186 1-62], Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6 1O9), Clifion Waller Barrett Library. Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. fiiendship with Annie, cemented by a long-remembered visit to the Fields' home in 1862,

made her long more than ever for the intellectual stimulation of the East. "At times." she

wrote Annie in one of her fiequent reminiscences over her Boston trip, "looking back

over al1 the wasted years I feel as if 1 could Say 1 have lost not a day-but a life.'*'

Afier her eastern visit, Davis joked that her "Virginia fnends" called her "a

'convert to New England."' But, as her autobiography codhns, Davis would never

abandon her western Virginia roots. In between rhapsodies over literary soirées. fish

chowder, and the Back Bay, she urges Amie to visit her on her native ground. She

wishes &mie couid have attended a recent wedding across the border in Pennsylvania, so

that she might have seen "a bit of life different fiom any you know," and, in her

enthusiasm for her home Nrfshe teases: Touwill think 1 gm going to quote [illegible]

Corne to the West to my own darling West."*

Growing up as a Virginian West of the Alleghenies, Davis naturally defined

herself in terms similar to those used by the western mountaineers. The rhetonc of the

free-thinking, fiee-spirited West fomed an influential part of her local heritage. Also

implicated in that cultural heritage. however, was an abiding fondness for conservative

Southem traditions. Like her fellow future West Virginians, Davis was hi11 y "Virginian'?

as well as fully "Western." In her correspondence, she fiequently identifies with the

typically Virginian pride in hospitality, for instance. A letter to Fields in January 1862

65~avis,letter to Annie Fields, 25 Oct 1862, Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6109), Clifion Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library.

"Davis, letter to Annie Fields, 6 Dec 1862, Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6109), Clifion Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department. University of Virginia Library. invites him for a visit and promises him "a welcome fiom al1 the family, half Irish and

half Virginian-will it tempt youF7 Looking back on her fim visit to Boston, Davis

expresses her appreciation for Annie's fiiendliness in terms of Southem custom: "You

met me ~t the do~you know. It was good in you to do that. It is Virginia fashion.'*'

Mer she settled in Philadelphia, Davis continued to clah Virginia hospitality as the

hallmark of her home. Writing to Josiah Houand in the mid 1860s, she look forward to

his visit and promises him, too, "a Virginia ~elcorne.'*~Many of the detective stories

Davis wrote for Peterson 's, especiaily the John Page mystenes, are set in Virginia and

make a standard convention out of the generous treatment of guests in the old Vûginia

homestead.

Probably Davis's most explicit surviving comment on her Southem feelings

cornes fiom another letter to Annie, also written during that hot, tense summer of 1862.

Davis. writing. as she says in Margrer Howth, "from the border of the battlefield" (3).

tells Amie, safe in remote Boston. of the horrible "war... surging up close about us."70

Illustrating, once again, the painfiil position of Hawthorne's man who sees both sides, she

67Davis,letter to James Fields, 25 Jan 1862, Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6 109)? CIifton Waller Barrett Li brary, Special Co 1lections Department, University of Virginia Library .

6gDavis,letter to Annie Fields, 10 Jan [1863], Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6 109), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library.

69Davis.letter to Josiah Holland, 30 Mar [186566], Josiah Gilbert Holland Papers. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

"Davis, letter to Annie Fields, 22 Aug 11 8621,Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6 109), CIifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. gives vent to her "inexpressible loathing" for a war she cdls "unjust." Anticipating

Annie's defense of Northern motives, Davis urges: "If you could only see the other side

enough to see the wrong the tyranny on both!" Davis articulates mixed convictions about

the war that were typical of many northwestem Virginians: "You will Say, 1 know, that

rny judgment is warped by sympathy. From the first 1 upheld the right of revolution,

granted to the South what Garibaldi, Emmet, Washington claimed, though 1-never

would-never ~ouldhave lived in a slave confederacy."

Davis's declaration that she "never could have lived in a slave confederacy"

cannot be detached from the rest of the letter in which it appears. After a bnef half-

paragraph of gloomy war-taik, Davis quickly changes the subject to Boston gossip and a

description of her travels on her route home to Wheeling. She takes the time to paint for

Annie the following glowing portrait of Baltimore, a city she describes in an earlier note

as being "in the midst of Southem sultriness & seces~ionisrn,"~'but whose Southem

charms Davis nonetheless found entrancing:

You corne into it by a railroad that runs dong the shore crossing now and then anns of the sea, that sofien the air quickly into southem toning, that yellow still glow that makes the landscape look like a picture under crystal. The city itself is southemi a prohsion of white rnarble-squares with fountains-gardens in front of the houses-the houses very stately sometimes ( I çouldn't Say that of 5th Avenue you know! 'the mark of the bank-note is over it dl') but these houses grew up stowly, you fancy, taking in air and light. Knowing their masters whim, and growing out fiom that. Knowing that they must yield to and accommodate and make a life of ease and quiet and beauty ....But dear 1 am me to my preference

"Davis, letter to Annie Fieids, 1O July (1 8621, Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6 1 09), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. for Boston after ail, meaning when my 'golden dawn' comes to spend my summers there.

In contrast to the hardships of life in a war zone, Baltimore is a reminiscence that

refieshes. with its soft "southem toning," its airy atmosphere, its quintessentially

Southem "quiet," "ease," and "beauty." Baltimore's soothing scenes contrast not only

with Wheeling's turmoil but also, Davis specifically points out, with the ugly, more

cornmerciaiized cities of the North. Moreover, Baltimore's serenity seems undisturbed

(is perhaps even augmented) by the shadow of slavery. The very houes exude an air of

contented obedience, of easy accommodation to the will of their "masters."

Davis goes on to elabrate for Amie this implied indulgence for Baltimore

slavery, which seems no more threatening than the "mild" form of Wheeling slavery she

describes in Bits of Gossip:

1 do wish you knew some of my Baltimore fiiends, though. You'd see a glirnpse or two of Maryland plantation Life. One acquaintance of mine-1 tell you this as a set-off to poor Tom's story-was having a boy-her slave-instmcted in drawing with her own children, fancying he was a genius and meant to send him to Itdy. My dear-hush-1 know that is nothing. I think slavery wrong, as you do?

Davis deliberately piques her Northem fiiend, intentionally setting Annie

momentarily off balance, then quickiy reiterates a devotion to Northem landscapes and

Northern causes. Davis's "patriotism"+r professed lack of it-seems to have been the

substance of a nuining joke between the two women. A postscript to a letter written

sometime in the middle of the war (probably 1863) mocks the red and blue edging of the

n'b~oorTom's story" refea to the article "Blind Tom" (Atlantic Monthly 10 [Nov 18621: 580-85), which 1 discuss in Chapter Four. paper it is written on: "Ody look at this patnotic paper! It is al1 1 have-You'll say it is

the only sign of patriotism you ever saw in me, 1 don? doubt.'" Lydia Maria Child took a

less light-hearted view of Davis's ambiguous loyalty. She complained to her Gnend,

Charlotte Forten:

al1 [Davis's] writings excite more or less antagonism in my mind. In her views of things she seems to me to drifi about, without any rudder or compas of moral principles.... I have thought severai times that she was confused in her ideas as to which was the right side. the U.S. or the Rebellion; a thing not to be wondered at' considering she is a Virgi~~ian.'~

For Davis, whose life in Wheeling had ken shaped by paradoxical social and

economic pressures only a border-dweller could understand, "patriotism" was a cornplex,

perhaps impossible, concept. Davis, despite her support for the Union cause, solved the

enigma the way most Southemers did-by declaring her devotion first and foremost to her

region. "1 am a patriotic West Virginian," she told Fields in a letter of Jan 1862 urging

him to commission a fi-iend @robably Arthur Campbell, editor of the WheeZing

hrelligencer) to write an article on the new state rno~ement.'~

Region, rather than nation, would always have Davis's first loyalty. The most

sustained profession of Davis's "patriotism" we have is also the clearest expression of her

Davis, letter to Annie Fields, "Wednesday [1863?]," Richard Harding Davis Collection Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia

74LydiaMaria Child, letter to Charlotte Forten, 6 March 1868, quoted in Carolyn Karcher, The Firsi Woman in die Republic: A Culturd Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham NC: Duke UP, 1994) 737, n. 124.

75Davis,letter to James Fields, 9 Jan [1862], Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6109), Clifion Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. sense of regional identity. Afier a trip home to Wheeling in the fall of 1866, she writes

It was so good and to go West. Nature there is prodigal of life. There is such absence of struggle, or straining such [sic] excess of beauty-of vigor,-such quiet strength-in absolute repose. 1 wish you could go to the West -New England may be the brain of the countxy-but 1 think its hem, the centre of its warm strong, life-giving blood is out yonder. I'm it is my home. 1 wonder what cded out that effort of patrioti~m.'~

For Davis to identify herself primarily as a Westemer in the war-tom America of

the mid-nineteenth-century meant, 1 would suggest, being able to avoid the difficult

choice between labelling oneself either a Northemer or a Southemer. As someone who

hails from "out yonder," Davis is able to stand, figurativeiy speaking, on the edge of

mainstrearn (Northeastem) society looking in. Davis's self-described marginal identity is

at the "heart" of her life-long cornmitment to social cnticism and literary

experimentation.

In the same letter in which Davis sings the praises of the invigorating West. she

also, ironically, points to the inadequacy of her rejuvenating pastoral imagery to cope

with the gritty reaiity of Wheeling. The natural abundance of Wheeling's environs, it

seems. could not overcome the oppressing industrial cloud over the city itself. Davis.

despite the "iife-giving" images she associates with her visit, could not find the energy to

write during her stay in her hometown. She explains: "al1 1 said or did there bore the

76Davis,letter to Annie Fields, 26 Oct [1866], Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6 109). Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. 42

mark of the beast on it, came out saddened and cloudy-as if smoke and soot had got into

the brain as well as skîn, in spite of its king my old home." Davis's "old home" was,

she must have recogaized, a tough fit for her own pastoral myth-making, whether on a

Western or (as in Bits of Gossip) a Southern theme.

Perhaps the dificulty Davis had sketching her own region-whose distinct identity

would not solidfi in the national conxiousness until derthe war, when "Appaiachia"

came into officia1 existence-lies behind her persistent dedication to celebrating America's

regional diversity. While Davis is ofien discussed as a regional or locai colour writer, she

cannot be pinned down very successfùlly to any one region. The western Virginia hills

and the rolling Pennsylvania countryside predominate in her early stories, but some of her

finest regional fiction paints fishing villages on the Jersey shore or mountain hamlets in

the backwoods of the Carolinas and Tennesee. An avid amateur historian, Davis

focussed throughout her career on alternative histories of America. insisting particularly

that Swedish and Dutch settlers, as well as native Americans, be given their rightful place

in history beside the Puritans and Pilgrims."

Davis seems to have travelled extensively, especially dwing her so-called

"retirement" during the 1880's," and her impressions of the vast variety of Arnerican

regional experiences became the basis of an educational mandate to teach the nation

about itself. As early as 1862, Davis, describing to Annie her Virginia fiiends'

77 See. for exarnple, "An Unwritten History" (Independent 27 Dec 1900.3082-84), which suggests that the colonization of New Jersey by Swedish settlers has "been too much overlooked by our historians and romance wuriters" (3082).

"Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis 202. 43

amazement at her dleged "conversion" to New England, wonders: "Why don't Amencas

know each other? The Boston literati, she points out. know England better than their

own country. Much of Davis's writing-whether it explores factories in the industrial

rnid-west, Indian resewations in Georgia, cabins in the Southem Appalachians, Virginian

homesteads, Louisiana plantations, or villages dong the Jersey shore-attempts to bnng to

light regions unexplored by readers of the Atlantic, Scribner 's, Lippincorr 's, Haver 's and

other Northern periodicals.

In her concern for the promotion of interregional understanding, Davis echoes one

of the chief interests shedby the domestic novelists of the Old South. Elizabeth Moss's

study of the five most prominent of these women divides the novelists into two

generations. In the first generation, Moss groups Caroline Giiman, Caroline Lee Hentz,

and Maria Mchtosh, ail of whom were bom around the tum of the nineteenth-century,

began publishing in the 1830s and '40s, and produced the first wave of domestic fiction

fiom below the Mason-Dixon line. In the second generation, she includes Mary Virginia

Terhune ("Marion Hariand") and Augusta Evans (Wilson), both of whom rose to fame in

the F OS.'^ It is with the first group, her predecessors and possible influences, that Davis

shares important connections that root her radicalism in Southem literary tradition.

At first glance, it might seem that Davis has nothing at al1 in common with the

women 1 have named. Gilman, Hentz, and Mcintosh al1 belonged to the elite planter

79Davis,letter to Annie Fields, 6 Dec [1862], Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6109). Clifion Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Depanment, University of Virginia Library.

''~lizabeth Moss, Domestic Novelisfs in the OZd South: Defenders of Southern Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1992). 44

class, whereas Davis, a businessman's daughter, was solidly middle-class; they owned

slaves, whereas she, at lest during her years in West Virginia, apparently did n~t;~'they

lived in and wrote about plantation districts, whereas she knew and descn bed a

transitional industrial district in the Appalachians. However, although Davis is never

mentioned in Moss's Domestic Novelists in the Old South (she does receive passing

notice in Anne Goodwyn Jones's Tomorrow is Another Day. The Woman Wriler in the

South. 1859-1936~3,she shared with these Southemers the domestic dream of rurai

cornmunity opposed to the individudistic rapaciousness of Northem industrial society.

Also like her Southem literary cousins, Davis was distrustful of organized reform, but'

following the mode1 of the plantation mistress, saw the work of individual women as

breaking down the ban-iers between "home" and "society." Most significantly, Davis

shared with the first generation of Southern domestics a cornmitment to what Moss calls

"intersectional educati~n."~~

Gilman, Hentz, and McIntosh were al1 unusually well-travelled for their era. Al1

three not only lived in various Southem locations but also spent a substantial arnount of

time in the North-long enough, Moss says, for them to become "directly familiar with

8'Censusdata unfortunately shed no light on the intriguing question of whether or not the Harding family owned slaves in Alabama. Virginia census information indicates the Hardings did not own slaves in Wheeling.

"~nnGoodwyn Jones, Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South. 1859- 1936 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP,198 1) 222-23. 45 free society and its limitations.'" (Gilman and Hentz were both, in fact, transplanted

Northerners.) These women may not have been placed in Davis's particularly uncornfortable position of seeing both sides of the issue at once, but they still saw both sides. The claim to a broad, national experience butîressed their pretensions to authenticity and gave them a tone of authonty. It also led them to favor a conciliatory approach. Plots commonly feature Northerners and Southemers overcoming mutuai prejudice, and interregionai marriages often serve as the final glue to bind their novels together.

A direct response to Lrncle Tom 's Cabin, Maria McIntosh's two-volume The Lofv and rhe Lowly; or, Good in AZZ and Nme Al[-Good (1853) serves as a prime example of the complex, carefdly uncontentious tactics of the Southern domestic novelists. The novel's action shifis back and forth between the North and South, as various scenes take place in an unnamed Northein city (probably Boston), a Georgia plantation, a resort in

Saratoga. and a rural New England homestead. McIntosh, like her sister dornestic authors. sees herself as a defender of the faith-the "faith" being the Southem way of life-. but she is willing to admit a few weaknesses, and she insists that her Northern and

Southem characters can leam fiom each other.

The story begins with a hard lesson for a widow, Mrs. Montrose, and her two children, Alice and Charles, in the callous selfishness encouraged by the Northern capitalkt rnind-set. Mrs. Montrose is plunged into debt at her husband's death and her brother, a wealthy merchant, offers help of the stingiest kind (an apprenticeship for 46

Charles and teacher training for Alice). The family is rescued fiom this uncornfortable

dependency by the generous offer of the dead man's brother, Colonel Montrose, to make

his Southem plantation their permanent home.

Alice and Charles grow up alongside theù Southern cousins, Isabelle and Donald.

Charles, in the face of his uncle's baement, desires a profession and enters the navy.

Donald tries to emulate Charles by enlisting in the army. His Southem-bred indolence

and contempt for financial considerations soon, however, make him easy prey for a

Northern card-shark and forger (ironicallyTAlice's cousin, Richard Browne). When

Colonel Montrose dies unexpectedly, Donald's astronornical debts put the family's hold on their plantation and theu slaves in jeopardy.

In the midst of these troubles, Donald's mother suddeniy becomes jealous of Alice and blames her for causing Donald's misfortunes by rejecting his romantic advances. No longer cornfortable in their Southem rehge, Alice and her mother (Charles is at sea) rem to the North to find a new home. Hardships await them there. Mrs. Montrose thinks Charles has drowned and her physical and mental health suffer. Child-like Alice manages somehow (with a little unobausive help fiom a kind landlord) to keep the household afloat but her strength is about to give out when she is rescued by her uncle's former slave, Daddy Cato. Daddy Cato is freed in Colonel Montrose's will but, hearing of

Alice's misfortunes, he leaves his own family to go to her aid. He defeats al1 attempts by abolitionists-including the stonning of Alice's cottage- to lure him away fiom his former mistress . Meanwhile, back at the plantation, fiiends and family rally at the eleventh hour to

Save the Montrose estate. One of these &ends is Robert Graharne. a Northem factory

owner who has already happened to save Alice and her mother fiom a burning hotel and

helped to nurse Donald back to health after a skirrnish with the villainous Browne.

Grahame aIso helps Save Alice fiom Browne, who tries to abduct her once he realizes that

his forgery of Dodd's IOU is about to be discovered and that Alice's inhentance fiom

her father is about to be recovered. The story concludes with Charles's return fiom the

desert island where he has been stranded, followed by a senes of North-South weddings

that resolve al1 the loose ends of the novel's scattered plots and sub-plots.

The convoluted meanderings of Mcintosh's story-line aim, according to the

author, to explore and eradicate mutual regional misconceptions. Her preface "To the

Reader" States: "They [the following volumes] had their ongin in the desire to remove

some of the prejudices separating the Northern and Southern United States, by a tnie and

Ioving portraiture of the social characteristics of each." McIntosh recognizes she is

performing a tricky balancing act, and she cautiously daims a woman's "privilege" to

cover her audacity:

If. in pursuing the course originally marked out for herself. the author has been led unwillingly within precincts which others have made an arena of controversy, she has not entered armed for combat, but, relying upon the privileges accorded to her sex by the chivalry of every age. she stands between the contending parties, bearing the olive- branch, and desiring only to pour bah into the wounds given by more powerful hands."

'5M.~.McIntosh, "To the Reader," The Lofi und the Lowly; or, Good in AI/ and None All-Good (New York: Appleton, 1853); hereafier cited parenthetically. Like Davis, the well-travelled Mchtosh fmds herself in a unique position, able to recognize. as not al1 of her fellow Arnericans can, that Northerners and Southemers do not always fit the prescribed stereotypes. Just as an elderly Davis would point out the common antebellum rnisjudgment of Vire-eaters" and "mudsills," McIntosh acknowtedges:

At the time of which we write the people of different parts of the United States were but Iittle known to each other. To the inhabitant of the Southem States, not only the New Englander, but everyone who dwelt north of the Potomac was a Yankee-a name which was with him a synonym of meanness. avarice and low cunning-while the native of the Northern States regarded his souîhern fellowcitizens as an indolent and prodigal race, in cornparison with himself but half civilized, and far better acquainted with the sword and the pistol than with any more useful implements (vol. 1, 15- 16).

McIntosh sets out to combat these enors of misunderstanding by adopting a narrative strategy that appears as non-combative as possible. Thus, she attempts to defend the values of a unique social system, predicated on slavery. by showing as linle as she cm of the South's "peculiar institution." Although the novel ostensibly replies directly to the subtitle of U'ncle Tom S Cabin, "Life Amongst the Lowly," the "lowly" feature very rarely in Mchtosh's fiction. Indeed Daddy Cato is the only Afncan-

Arnerican figure individualized enough to be reckoned a "character." instead, McIntosh chooses to refute Stowe by focusing on the "lofly" personages in her story, and their misunderstood strengths and weaknesses.

In accordance with her premise that there is "good in al1 and none dl-good."

McIntosh makes Donald partially responsible for his downfall, and she gives him an education in the Northem work ethic. Donald's Southem upbringing, McIntosh's narrator

emphasizes, makes him an easy dupe to Browne's swindle:

he had been taught in his Southern home, that the first characteristic of a gentleman was, to prove himself untainted with a namow, money-loving, or as they termed if Yank-ee spirit; and that this was to be done, not by a wise and systematic benevolence, but by thoughtless profusion and disregard of money. To have kept a regular account of his losses and gains, would have savored of the petty shopkeeper in bis opinion (vol. 1, 130).

Over the course of the novel, Donald cornes to change his opinion not only about the merits of persona1 accounting but also about the dignity of labour. At first, he cannot understand how Robert Grahame, to ali appearances a gentlernanly sort, stoops to

"ignoble labor" (vol. 1, 153) by ninning a factory to earn his living. Robert's sister, Mary. explains that Robert's career in the textile mil1 is actually a noble act of self-sacrifice: he has given up a college education to dedicate himself to paying off his deceased father's creditors. Later in the novel, when a minor character is thwarted in love and falls into dissipation, Grahame suggests that the needed remedy is for the young son of a planter

90 win his bread by the sweat of his brow." His Virginian cornpanion immediately agrees: "Ah! there it is; and that is the very thing in which the South is wanting-work for her children" (vol. 2,274).

Just as McIntosh's Southemers are led to adjust their attitudes about the Northern emphasis on personal productivity, her Northemers are forced to reconsider stereotypes of

Southem idleness, especially concerning women. Alice is quick to correct her cousin

Richard's impression that a planter's wife leads a life of pampered ease. Richard would soon change his mind, Alice asserts, if he could see her aunt "at sunrise in the dairy, or 50

see her arnong her own people, nursing the sick, supplying the wants of the destitute, and

cornforting the sorrowing" (vol. 1,97). Alice's mother also takes the trouble to explain

away this misconception, this tirne to Robert Grahame, who has many prejudices against

the South, despite his obvious commercial ties to Cotton planters: "1 found that my sister-

in-law, Mrs. Col. Montrose, was a ver-early riser; that she superintended the

arrangements of her own dairy, was her own housekeeper, visited, and ofien prescribed

for the sick on her plantation, and with the aid of seamstresses trained and directed by

herself, did the needlework of her farnily" (vol. 1, 184).

By accentuating shedsocial values, Mchtosh attempts to demonstrate that the

Northern and Southem social systems are not really that different derdl. She carefùlly

avoids using Grahame's factory as an oppobty to rant against the abuses of fiee labour.

Rather, she refutes extremist versions of the "white slavery" practiced by Northem

capitalists by taking Alice on a tour through an impeccably clean, efficient mill. The

young giris at the machines, Alice finds, are "pretty and intelligent" (vol 1 ., 189), and she

envies them the ability to help suppon their families. Similarities between the Northem

and Southern systems are Werreinforced by common paternalistic attitudes of the

"low on bot.sides of the Mason-Dixon line towards their "lowly." Alice is first

motivated to start a school for her uncle's "people" (slaves) when she observes Mary

Grahame's practical interest in her "work-people" (vol. 1,205). On the other side of the coin, Robert Grahame builds a tidy village around his factory that bears a rather uncanny resemblance to a Southem plantation. The language Grahame uses to explain his concem

for his workers directly links his actions to the attitudes of Southern slaveowners-he 5 1 believes God has placed him in a "peculiarly responsible position" (vol. 2,295, my emphasis), and his guiding principle as a mode1 industrialist is '?O bind his people to him" (vol. 2,3 1 1).

On the whole, Northerners in me Lofj. and the Lowly have more to learn than

Southemers. Stiil, McIntosh is, in general, much more critical of her home region than are most of the domestic defenders of the South. Caroline Lee Hentz's response to Uncle

Tom 's Cabin, The Planter's Northern Bride (1854), for example, pretends to a tone that is also eminently reasonabte, but her criticisms are one-sided, directed completely at the inadequacies and injustices of the North's fiee labour system. Foreshadowing Davis's personal strategy for deaiing with intersectional ideologicai tensions, Hentz uses a

Western figure to attempt to bridge the rift between Northern and Southem opinion in her novel.

Hentz's hero, a pious, compassionate Georgian planter named Russell Moreland, creates the story's initiai conflict by travelling to the North. Moreland is shocked by the treatment of domestic servants he witnesses there. He watches aghast as a white servant is discharged by her employer when she becomes consumptive, and gives her matenal aid. just as he would assist any sick slave. During his stay in the North, Moreland is hosted by a fiery abolitionist, Mr. Hastings, whose rhetoric is directly undermined by evidence his own household offers as to the injustices of a free economy. Moreland finds that the Hastings' white woman-of-dl-work struggles under the burden of her liberty and exists in a state of permanent exhaustion (her "labour would have shamed the toi1 of 52

three of Morelaad's stoutest ~laves").~After some cursory soul-searching regarding the

comparative virtues of fiee and slave societies, Moreland decides that his slaves are

definitely better cared for than are recently fieed Russian serfs, Irish labourers, English

factory workers and Northem hirelings. Lurnping ail the white labourers of the world

together as one unfortunate group, Moreland thus echoes the motivating belief Hentz

expresses in her preface, that Southem blacks form &'thehappiest Iabouring class on the

face of the globe" (6).

Hentz's plot thickens when Hastings's daughter, Eulalia, and Moreland fall in

love. Although Hastings at fim declares that he would rather see his daughter dead or

married to a missionary in "some heathen land," Moreland argues that al1 slaveholders

essentially act as missionaries to Afncan-Amerîcans (108-1 09). When Eulalia starts to

pine away through lovesickness, the match eventually wins the father's biessing and the

abolitionist's daughter makes the journey south to discover for herself the blessings to

both master and servant offered by the Southem system. She is soon impressed not only

by the harmonious domestic relationshi p between her husband and his A fncan-American

servants but aiso by the sense of securîty enjoyed by the slaves who, wilike Northern

workers, never have the constant anxiety of wonying about unemployment (336-37). She

also realizes a srark contrast between Moreland's kind treatment of his elderly workers.

especially old Aunt Dicey, and the cruel Northem altemative-the almshouse (552-53).

86CarolineLee Hentz, The Planter L Norlhern Bride (Chape1 Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1 970) 65; hereafier cited parenthetically. 53

With Northem Eulaiia happily made a Southem bride, al1 bodes well for a gradua1 reconciliation between Hentz's representative slaveholding and anti-slavery parties.

However, the base intervention of a scheming, duplicitous abolitionist minister, Mr.

Brainard, neady provokes a bloody insurrection on the Moreland plantation. Tragedy is narrowly averted only when Moreiand rnakes a personal appeai to his slaves that quells the riot.

An outsider whose main motivation is clearly pure maiiciousness and hunger for power. Brainard nearly succeeds in destroying at one blow the emerging respect Hentz so carefully fosters between her Northern and Southem types. To defeat her self-interested abolitionist villain, Hentz creates another outsider figure, a disinterested Westemer named Dr. Darley. Hentz attempts throughout her thoroughly prosouthem novel to preserve. like Mchtosh, a guise of dispassionate narrative objectivity (in contrast to abolitionist hyperbole), and the character of Dr. Darley supports this pretension by providing a crucial endorsement of slavery that seems to ovemde regional bias.

Darley. who hails fiom Cincinnati, is a kind, discerning gentleman who lives in the West but is an ardent defender of the South. In his role as symbolic healer, he plays a key part in exposing the fiaud of Brainard and a good-for-nothing slave who have joined together as a sensational lecture team to decry the alleged cruelty of plantation life. In a ciramatic scene near the novel's end, Darley and Moreland publicly denounce the two charlatans and finaily persuade Eulalia's father that he has ken the dupe of abolitionist propaganda. 54

Darley's personal testimony as to the benefits of plantation slavery holds special

wei ght in the conclusive conversion of the ultra-abolitionist, Hastings, to the Southem

point of view because Moreland deems the doctor's point of view completeIy impartial.

By virtue of his Iiminal position on the Ohio, where he dwells on the edge of slave and

free territory, Darley is supposedly able to see both sides of the pattern in the tenuous

weave holding the American social fabric together at mid-centlrry. His marginaiity seems

proof positive of his objectivity: "Surely," says Moreland, ''you, Dr. Darley, standing as you do on the borders of the West, with the North on one side and the South on the other, can speak with a far better grace than one whose personai interests are identified with either" (556).

Hentz's Dr. Darley physically embodies in his fictional person a dualistic vision of Amenca that both Mclntosh and Hentz, two of the South's best-selling authors, purported to present and which Rebecca Harding Davis wouid exploit a few years later in her radical critique of American class warfare, Northem and Southem. Davis would not have agreed with some of the tenets Mchtosh and Hentz held dearest-the author of "Life in the Iron Mills" obviously shedneither Mchtosh's optirnistic view of factory life nor

Hentz's whole-hearted support of slavery. But Davis, too, would use her distinct regional perspective to shape a literary course in social criticism that treaded a fine line between cajoling and alienating Northern and Southem sensibilities. The cntical woman's

"privilege" exercised by the Southem domestic novelists suggests a link between Davis's work and a significant regional literary tradition that constituted an important aspect of her border land cultural heritage. Chapter Two On the Border of a Virginia Tradition: The Heri!age of Proslavery Thought and Fiction

Hard evidence is lacking that Rebecca Harding Davis read or appreciated the

works of either Hentz or McIntosh, with whom I have linked her in a kind of literary

sorority. If, however, the pages of the W?zeelingIntelligencer are any indication, most

Wheeling residents both read and supported the popular prosouthem, proslavery

literature-both fiction and non-fiction-hat flourished in the 1850s and was jolted into a sudden growth-spurt by the publication of Uncle Tom 's Cabin. Young Rebecca

Harding's Wheeling, Iike the rest of the South, was thoroughly immersed in the rhetoric of proslavery pastoral patemaiism, a discourse Davis would later echo in her weil- published ambivalence towards aboiitionists and in her nostalgie post-war descriptions of

Virginia life.

in their efforts to came a niche for Davis in the cabinet of literary history, scholars have tended to emphasize the ways in which "Life in the lron Mills" represents an astonishing departure fiom the romantic, introspective literary tradition of the Northem- nurtured Arnerican Renaissance. Davis's shocking social relevance is, however. grounded in a strong regional literary heritage that mainstrearn scholarship has often overlooked. Far fiom representing an aberration from the central concerns of mid- nineteenth-century Arnerican literary culture, "Life in the Iron Mills" is steeped in the dominant literary discourse of Davis's native district-the mythos of the plantation South. 56

Davis's "pioneering" storyl looks back with nostalgia to its radical roots in the ami-

industrial diatribes of prosouthem apologetics, even as it undercuts the illusory existence

of a protected, pastoral space in the America of 186 1.

According to Davis's sparse account of her literary education in Bits of Gossip,

her childhood reading consisted of "only Bunyan and Miss Edgeworth and Sir Walter

[Scott]" (29). Because most of Davis's signed book reviews date fiom her elderly years,'

we have no definite record of her reading during her formative years as a young woman

and artist. We do know, however, that Davis, who was a dedicated student and

vaiedictorian of her class at the Washington Female Serninary, read avidly throughout her

life. Even her chatty, busy letters to Annie Fields, usually detailing the demanding antics

of two rambunctious little boys, often include a hasty comment or two on the latest

number of the Aflantic or the latest literary event (such as Dickens's American reading

tour in 1868 or the publication of Thoreau's letters). Helen Woodward Sheaffer's

interviews with local Wheeling residents who remembered the young Rebecca Harding

suggest she pursued a rigorous course of reading during her unrnarried years. in the

' Fairfax Downey established in 1932 the modem trend of viewing Davis pnmarily as a literary trail-blazer ("Portrait of a Pioneer," Colophon 3, Part 12, 1932). Arthur Hobson Quinn's influential Literature of the Arnerican People (195 1) entrenched the pioneer metaphor in lasting, concrete imagery. Quinn justified including a then-obscure author in his literary history with the comment. "[Davis] seems to deserve mention as a kind of pioneer who at least sharpened an axe if she did not cut much of a path through the romantic jungle" (Literature of the American People pew York: ~ppelton-Centuiy-Crofts,195 11 662).

'See especially the series of columns. entitled "Literary Folk-Their Ways and Their Work." Davis wrote for the Saturday Evening Post fiom 1903 to 1905. thirteen-year interval between graduation and the publication of "Life in the bon MilW3

During this period, she not only read widely in English, American. and French Literature.

but also wrote anonymous book reviews, probably for the Wheeling InteZZigencer: and

taught herse1f German by reading her brother 's college books. Characteristically, one of

Davis's fust prionties when she moved to Philadelphia after her marriage was to find her

way to the city library.'

Davis's voracious reading acquainted her, we know, with the work of Moss's

"second-generation" Southem domestic novelists. in a 189 1 article for the Independent

on "Women in Literature," Davis praises the "genre pictures" of fellow Virginian Mary

Virginia Terhune, who, like Davis, expanded her vision of the South to include city as

well as plantation life.6 Aiso, Davis recognized her close contemporary Augusta Evans

Wilson as the grandmother of the best-seller in American literanire7 and in her fictional

travetogue, "Here and There in the South (1 887), she acknowledged the popular novelist

'~ccordingto the niece of a former neighbor, Davis would tum down social invitations in order to spend time reading (Sheaffer 32).

'Davis. letter to James Fields, 26 Jan 186 1, Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6 109). Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department. University of Virginia Library. None of these reviews have been identified.

'jDavis, "Women in Literature," Independent 7 May 1891, rpt. in A Rebecca Harding Davis Reader, 403 . Much of Terhune's fmt best-seller, Alone (1 854) is set in Richmond.

'Davis, "Big Sellers," Suturdoy Evening Post 3 1 Jan 1903 : 15. as one of the most innuential women of her era, comparing her Mobile home to "a kind

of Mecca to which her admirers make pilgrirnages."'

Not only through the works of Harland and Wilson but also through the local

Wheeling literary culture, Davis would have been intimately acquainted by the tirne she

reached adulthood with the oppositional fûnction of the "genre pictures" conventionally

painted by the writers of her region. The Southem literary heritage was, after dl, a

tradition founded on controversy. As we have seen, even Southem domestic novelists~

who allegedly bore the olive-branch of womanly insight, resorted ultimately to a seif-

defensive posture. Hentz and McIntosh may have invoked a particularly ferninine brand

of polemic, but they drew on the rhetonc and conventions of severai generations of

proslavery arguments that the South had been waging in essays and oratory since the days

of the constitutional convention and in belles lethes since the early part of the nineteenth

century. Traditionally, cntics have blamed ubiquitous proslavery rhetonc for the failure

of antebellurn Southem literanire to rise above the level of politically self-serving

rnedi~crity.~From another perspective, however, the same rhetoric seems to have

generated a wide and diverse literary output. As a native Virginian, Rebecca Harding

8Wiison's talent was as revered in the South, Davis suggests, as George Eliot's was in England ("Here and There in the South," Horper 's New Monrhly 75 [Aug 18871: 440). Davis herself does not appear to have been overawed by Wilson's ability : she describes Beuloh ( 1859) as a pious but "rnild, weak story" ("Big Sellers" 15). Wilson does share with Davis, however, the distinction of being one of the first authors to depict the effects of industrialization on the South. The Southem heroine of her pro-Confederate war novel? Macaria; or, AItars ofSucrifice (1864): engages in charity work arnong the slums of Factory Row.

9See, for example, Lewis P. Simpson, "The Southern Writer and the Great Literary Secession," The Man of Letters in New Englund and the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1973) 229-55. Davis would have been thoroughly familiar with the various literary shapes the Southern

apology took before the Civil War."

The forceful rhetoric of western independence notwithstanding, Virginians

"behind the Blue Ridge"" were closeiy interested in the South's literary campaign to

defend its "peculiar institution" and peculiar civilization. Two of the best-known

romancers of Tidewater culture, John Pendleton Kennedy and WiIiiam Cmthers, had

western connections and were themselves foreigners to the lifestyle they celebrated in

fiction. Camthers, best-known for the chivalric, Scott-like portraits of Tidewater

colonials he painted in The Cavaliers of Virginia (1 834-35) and The Knights of the

Horse-Shoe (1 845), was bom to Scotch-lrish mountaineers and was raised and educated

in the Shenandoah Valley. Later he pursued medical training in Philadelphia and lived

several years in New York city. "He could scarcely," writes William R. Taylor ,"have

had less contact with the cultural heritage he examineci in his novels."" As for Kennedy.

he was a Marylander by birth and a western Virginian by adoption. having rnoved to a

farm near Charles Town (now in West Virginia) as an adolescent. Like Camthers, he had

'O~lthoughit always manifested proslavery leanings. the tradition of plantation fiction was by no means monolithic. As Jan Norby Gretlund has argued, the "renaissance" of the mid- 1830s saw a flourishing of Southem works that addressed regionai concems fiom a variety of perspectives (" 1835: The First Annus Mirabilis of Southem Fiction," Rewriting the South: Hisroty and Fiction, eds. Lothar Honnighausen and Valena Gemaro Lerda [Tübingen, Gennany: Francke, 19931 12 1-30.

"The title of an 1887 novel by Frances Courtenay Baylor (Behind the Blue Ridge: A Homely iVarrative philadelphia: Lippincott, 18871).

"~illiamR. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: George Brader, 196 1 ) 206. no direct family ties to the James River plantation lifestyle he depicted with such apparent

fondness in his ùinuential SwalIow Barn, or A Sojourn in the OZd Dominion (first

published in 1832). l3

In his usually authoritative West Virginia: A Hisrory, Otis Rice goes so far as to

claim Kennedy as a West Virginian writer, claiming that he lived in Martinsburg and

authored a novel set in West Virguiia, The Blackwater Chr~nicle.'~Rice confuses the

author of the best-known example of prosouthem plantation fiction with his younger

brother, Philip Pendleton Kennedy, whose single literary effort records a fishing

expedition by a Quixotic band of upper-class Virginians into the wildemess country dong

the Cheat river." Rice's error is an instructive one, illustrating how unstable the cultural

dividing line was after al1 between the eastem and western sections of antebellum

Virginia. The mountains of the Blue Ridge may have impeded the development of

interstate roads and railways, but the essentiais of Southern ideology apparently travelled

with fewer obstructions between planters and mountaineers.

John Pendleton Kennedy enshrined the core values of Southem slave-holding

ideology in his rose-coloured sketches of life at Swailow Barn plantation and established

"Taylor 188-89. What family ties Kennedy did have bound him to western Virginia. His mother, although she could trace her pedigree back to Tidewater aristocracy, hailed fiom a plantation in Martinsburg which Kennedy visited as a youngster.

'"Rice78. The current Library of Congress catalog entry for The BIackwater Chronicle notes that the book was formerly attributed to John Pendleton Kennedy.

""Pent" Kennedy's vurithg and the work of his more famous older brother are not easily confused on the basis of style. Phillip Kennedy's prose, a mix of the romantic and the farcical, is endlessly facetious, consistently overwritten, and liberaily sprinkled throughout with classical and Ii terary quotations. the basic conventions of the "Virginia" or plantation n~vel.'~By weaving a senes of

picturesque interludes into what he cornpared to a Shakespearean blend of comedy,

history, and pastoral," he created one of the earliest and most infiuential literary

portrayais of the Southem plantation as Arcadia. Even the book's free-flowing structure

embodies, according to its author, the bucolic tranquillity of the region it describes. What

originally begins as a collection of travel sketches becomes transforrned into an element

of the idyllic landscape itself, "a rivulet of story wandering through a broad meadow of

episode." l8

Kennedy's hybnd pastoral romance establishes the convention of a meandering

plot based loosely in the conversion of a Northern visitor to the nual charms of the

plantation South. His narrator, Mark Littleton, is a New Yorker who records his

impressions of day-to-day life in the Old Dominion during a visit to his cousin, Ned

Hazard. Swallow Barn is an old-fashioned James River plantation, owned by cousin

'%usan J. Tracy uses the term "Virginia novel" to distinguish plantation fiction fiom the other prominent genre of nineteenth-century Southern literature, the historical romance (In the Master 's Eye: Representations of Women, Blach, and Poor Whites in Antebellum Southern Literature [Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 19951 33). Although earlier works contain some elements of plantation fiction, Swallow Barn is generally seen as the landmark beginning of the tradition (Francis Pendleton Gaines, The Southern Plantation: A Stu& in the Development and Accuracy of a Tradilion [New York: Columbia UP, 19251 18).

"Kennedy insists that "Swallow Barn is not a novel" but rather "a series of detached sketches" that "has still preserved its desultory, sketchy character to the 1st.... Our oId &end Poloni us had nearly hit it in his ri parole of 'pastoral-cornical, tragical-comicai-historicd- pastoral'-which, saving 'the tragicai,' may well make up my schedule...." ("A Word fiom the Author to the Reader," Swallow Barn, or A Sojourn in the Old Dominion [New York: Hafher. 19711 10-1 1).

'8i'Kennedy's Preface, 1832 ed.," Ke~edyvii. 62

Frank Meriwether, a generous, hospitable gentleman who seems to mode1 his habits after

those of an English country squire. Kennedy goes to great pains to explain to his readers

the origins and customs of Tidewater Virginia's "feudal system" (Chapter VII, "Traces of

the Feudal System," 70-75). The crowds of cheerful, satisfied slaves are referred to as

'Young serfs" (3 IO), well-cared for according to the feudal mandate by their kind and

condescending master. The contentment and complacency of the African-Americans, a

generic hallmark of plantation fiction, contributes to the idealized, harmonious lifestyle of

the Meriwethers and their servants. The slave children provide fiequent amusement for

Hazard and his guest, fiolicking like a "race of swart faines" (3 10) and performing

minstrel antics, and the slave quarters are rude but ample and clean, forming "an

exceedingly picturesque landscape" (449). According to Littleton's observations, Mrs.

Meriwether considers the slaves part of her large, biracial "farni~y"and tends to their

needs accordingly (39). (One notes, however, that while her biack children gambol about

haif-naked in the '6costume of the golden age" [450] her own white children are more prosaically and more substantially clothed.)

Swallow Barn's episodic structure, whose only real nod to conventional plot

development is a tedious romantic connection between Hazard and the belle-next-door. enables Kennedy to treat his work as a kind of anthropological study divided into short descriptions of various distinguishing traits of plantation culture. A chapter entitled "The

Dimer Table," for instance, makes a culturai emblem of the traditional groaning table of

Virginian hospitality. Likewise, "A Country Gentleman" makes explicit Meriwether's 63

squirearchical character, and "The Quarter" diagrams the cornfortable domestic life of the

slaves.

Kennedy outlined for later practitioners of the genre many of the standard features

of plantation fiction: the open-handed planter hospitality; the soothing atmosphere of the

idyllic Southern environment (Kennedy devotes one whole chapter to a prose "Eclogue"

celebrating the pastoral landsape); the benevolent plantation mistress; the charmïng,

vine-entwined slave cabins; the "picturesque" culture of %e quarter;" and the graduai

but inevitable conviction of the visiting Northemer, whose prejudices against slavery

dissolve as he discovers the trdy beneficent nature of the institution. Moreover, although

it predates the era of intense controversy that would follow the publication of Uncle

Tom 's Cabin, Swallow Barn makes a point of demonstrating not only the virtues but also

the necessity of the paternalistic slave-holding system. The book's social philosophy

crystallizes in the miniature melodrama narrated towards its close. Here Kennedy seems

to anticipate and check Stowe's dramatic attack on the devastation caused when

slaveowners separate slave families. Littleton describes the inconsolable grief of an

elderly slave. Marna Lucy, who mourns for her rebellious son, Abe, whom Meriwether

sold off the plantation and who has since drowned working on a ferry. However, in this case, it becomes cIear that Master knew best and that, despite the mother's tean.

Meriwether's decision to sel1 Abe was the boy's sdvation. At Swallow Barn, Abe was a

rebellious trouble maker and a ne'er-do-well. What he needed, it seems, was work he

enjoyed. Once hard at work on the river, he became a new man, threw his heart and sou1

into his job and died a martyr's death attempting to rescue a shanded ship. Without 64

Meriwether's enforced career guidance, it seems. Abe would never have reached his

heroic potential as a human king.

Kennedy is an important author in the Southern tradition to which Davis was heir

not only because his popular novel was heralded in his lifetime as "one of the gems of

[Arnerican] literat~re,"'~but also because he grounded his regional sketches in the local

philosophical tradition of cautious Virginian liberali~m?~To a certain extent, Kennedy,

like many western Virginians, saw both sides of the question. The pastoral mode he uses,

Jan Bakker argues, naturally invokes its menacing contrary, the anti-pastoral." Beneath

the self-described "mirthfül mood"" of the book nuis a darker vein of critical satire.

Throughout Swahw Barn, Kennedy's Nonhem narrator slyly mocks the aristocratic

pretensions of the society he daims to fmd so appealing. Meriwether may be a mode1 of

modem gentility, but the behaviour of his close neighbours, the Tracys, seems to suggest

there is an underlying element of fantasy and iütility beneath the lifestyle of the planter

class. Bel Tracy, Hazard's sweetheart, has a ridiculous tendency to measure life in terms

of one of Scott's romances, while her elderly father seems to seek an excuse for existence

in the pursuit of a meaningless lawsuit over the property line between his plantation and

Swallow Bani.

lg~arnesHall, quoted in William S. Osborne "An Introduction," Kennedy xlii.

'°Classic i!lustrations of this rnind-set appear in Clement Eaton, The Mind of the Old Sourh (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State OP, 1967).

l an Bakker, Pastoral in Anfebellum Southern Romonce (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP. 1989): 40-54.

""Kennedy's Preface, 1832 ed." vii. 65

A more disturbing border in the novel, Bakker suggests, is the edge of Goblin

Swamp, which is the legendary home of a drunken white blacksmith, Mike Brown. who

is supposed to have made a pact with the devil. The swamp, suggests Bakker, represents

a "gothic inversion of idyll" within the pastoral romance?' Underlying this spooiq

reversa1 is the threat of a real social problem-the dislocation of destitute poor whites within the slave economy. The menacing spectre of class confiict haunting the hgesof

Tidewater civilization represents a bonafide threat to the aiready-fragile basis of planter

society, which is, Menwether admits, rooted in a fundamental injustice. After dl,

Meriwether, like many liberai Virginian planters of the 1830s, admits that slavery is a moral evil ("slavery, as an original question, is wholly without justification or defence," he acknowledges), but he fears the sudden social chaos he believes immediate emancipation wouid bring about: "We should not be justified," he maintains, "in taking the hazard of intemal convulsions to get nd of [those consigned to our care]; nor have we a right, in the desire to fiee ourselves, to whelm hem in greater evils than their present bondage" (455-56). Meriwether's sister is, perhaps not accidentally, named "Prudence."

Most western Virginians of Davis's dayaespite their political resistance to the slaveholding interests of the East and to the fiuther spread of slavery into ultramontane temtory-would have echoed Menwether's prudent speech on the dangers of abolitionisrn.

Even once they had deliberately engineered political "intemal convulsions" by wrenching their half of the state away fiom Confederate Virginia they were still reluctant to nsk radical social upheaval by abandoning slavery. in fact, the nascent state of West Virginia nearly foundered on the issue of emancipation. When, during discussion of the West

Virginia Statehood Bill, Senator Charles Sumner called for an amendment abolishing

slavery in the new state, his suggestion "enveloped the new state movement in d~ubt."'~

Only after nearly two weeks of heated discussion was a compromise finaily reached that

satisfied the outraged slavery interest?

In the Wheeling Intelligencer of the early 1850s, Davis would have read not only

editorials but also articles and book reviews that reinforced the dominant, conservative

ideology of the plantation belt. Plantation fiction came into its own as a genre during this

penod, as a bevy of proslavery pamphlets and speeches circulated in dialectical response

to the swelling tide of anti-slavery fiction coming fiom the North. Kennedy republished

SwaZZow Barn in 185 1, with only minor revisions, hoping to ressert its "good nanired

vision of Southern harmony against the "mawkish sentimentali ty... so busy of late in

inventing syrnpathy for the pretended oppression of the negroes."" Increasingly, though,

those writers who followed in Kennedy's footsteps presented their vision in tems that

were far less "good natured.""

"~mbler 3 87.

"~hecompromise provided for the gradua1 emancipation of resident slaves on their twenty-first birthday. As a result of this concession, slavery actudly existed in West Virginia for two years afier it had been abolished in Virginia and the other Codederate States ("Slavery in West Virginia" 4394).

?John Pendleton Kennedy, letter to William Gilmore Simms, Mar 1851, quoted in Osborne, "An Introduction," Kennedy xl.

"Robert Cnswell's " Uncle Tom 's Cabin " contrasted with Buckingham Hall, the Planrer 's Home, or A Fair View o/Bofh Sides of the Slavery Question (New York: 1852, rpt. New York: A.M.S., 1973). like the novels of Hentz and McIntosh. aspired to a conciliatory tone. The new breed of plantation novels descended fiom Swallow Barn took a self-

consciously infiammatory tone. George Frederick Hohes helped foment this new

incendiarïsrn through an infamously scathing review of Uncle Tom 's Cabin he wrote for

rhe Souihern Liserary Messenger. Holmes complained that most responses to Stowe' s

novel had not oniy ken wzitten by "weak and incompetent persons" but had also failed to

challenge the essential thesis of the novel, namely that any society that codd possibly

result in such instances of cruelty and suffering should be condemned. Arguing that the

structure of fiee labour society results in just as much suffering as does the slave system,

he called for a Southem rebuttal "couched in the same form as the attack." His plan for

the definitive answer to Stowe's accusations entailed "not a mere representation of a real

or imaginary state of beatitude enjoyed by fictitious slaves" but "'the portraiture of graver

miseries, worse afflictions, and more homble crimes familiar to the denizens of our

Northern cities and incident to the condition of those societies where the much lauded

white labor pre~ails."~'

in the heated social debate of the 185Os, as politicians packed pistols in Congress

and physical violence broke out on floor of the Senate, defenders of Southem slavery

Its preface asserts: "if the book proves to be one drop of oil cast upon the tempesiuous sea of agiration, [the author's] wishes will be accomplished" ("Prefatorial"). Most other writers of plantation fiction after 1852, however, seemingly aimed to contribute their "one drop of oil" to feed the Barnes of interregional hostility. J. W. Page, author of Unde Robin in his Cabin in PÏrginia and Tom Wirhout One in Boston (Richmond, 1 853; hereafter cited parenthetically), for instance, hopes his book will be "successlùl in removing odiurn fiom a much slandered Southem cornmunity, and in throwing it back upon the latitude to which it belongs" ("Preface" vi).

""~ncleTom's Cabin," Southern Litermy Messenger 18 (Dec 1852), rpt. in SZmery Defended: The View of the OldSouth, ed. Eric L. McKitrick (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice- Hall. 1963) 103- 104. enthusiastically ernbraced the offensive battie tactic of focussing on the alleged hypocrisy

of Northern abolitionists. Proslavery apologists did not stop at underlining the benefits of

plantation slavery but vehemently pointed out the contrasting hardships of tiee labour and

the alleged failure of the entire free labour economy." Following this same belligerent

trend, the plantation novel of the '50s soon incorporated the stylized sufferings of wage

workers as standard foils to the peacefûi, pastoral lifestyle of the slave South.

For many proslavety theorists, the very notion of a labourer's "wage" actually

implied another form of "slavery." Broad usage of the word "wage" was relatively new

in the mid-nineteenth-centuryturyMBefore then, a skilled labourer was compensated

according to the "price" he charged for the product-whether goods or services-he sold.

Under the factory system, however, a worker sold not the product of his work but the

work itseIf. By selling his labour on a daily basis, both labour activists and Southem

slaveowners reasoned, the worker seemed to sel1 himself.

Some of hemost extreme proslavery theonsts thus developed, paradoxically, a

kind of quasi-Manrist critique of the capitalist labour system." They maintained first of

29Fora comprehensive sampling of the rhetonc proslavery writers used to critique the North's free economy, see Wilfked Carsel, "The Slaveholders' Indictrnent of Northern Wage Slavery ," Journal of Southern Hisiory 6 ( 1940): 504-20.

'O~eforethis, the term "wage" was used only in reference to daily workers (Norman Ware, The Industrial Worker 1840-1860 [Chicago: Quadrangle, 1 9641 xiv).

"George Fitzhugh, one of the most radical in his claims on behaif of the slave system, was evidently farniliar with the Communist Mani/sto (1848), whose language he paraphrases in his Cannibals AU! ( 185 7) (Harvey Wish, George Fitzhugh: Propagandist of the Old South [Gloucester MA: Peter Smith, 19621 182). Eugene Genovese has used the perspective of a Marxist historian to argue extensively that proslavery thinkers saw themselves as presenting a viable critique of Northem capitalistic al1 that every social structure includes a slave class, whether the nomenclature of bondage

is used or not. in his farnous "mud-sill" speech delivered during the debate over the

troubled admission of Kansas into statehood, Senator James Hamrnond stated that every

society has as its bottom mga "mud-sill" class to "perform the drudgery of life."

Northern labourers, he asserted, were not ody slaves, but were also unprotected slaves

with none of the feudal rights of protection a Southern black could expect hmhis

master. Exclairned Hamrnond: "Why, you meet more beggars in one day, in any single

street of the city of New York, than you would meet in a lifetime in the whole s ou th.""

In his 1858 speech, the Senator fÎom South Carolina voiced sentiments that

Virginian George Fitzhugh had aiready gone so far as to develop into a full-scale social

philosophy. Fitzhugh was one of the first to use the new term ''~ociology'~~~when he

elaborated a "Sociology for the South," the title of his first book, published in 1854. The ideology. (For an introduction to some of the central ideas in Genovese's work. see The World the Stuveholders Made: Two Essrjs in Interpretation mew York: Pantheon, 19691 and The SZaveholders ' Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Soufhern Conservative Though~,f 820-1860 [Columbia SC: U of South Carolina P, 19921). Some of Genovese's claims have ken challenged by those who have pointed out the similarities between the Northem and Southem economies (for one such retort. see Howard Temperley, 'Capitalism, Slavery and Ideology." Pasf & Presenf 75 [1977]: 94- 1 18). However. whether or not the South was actually qualified to present a valid ethical critique of capitalism, is not, it seems to me, the real issue. What matters, as James McPherson has pointed out in his recent essay on the conundm of Southern exceptionalism, is not whether or not the South was distinctly different but that it believed it was different and saw itself as preserving an endangered way of life in the face of aggressive Northem fiee-labour capitalism ("Antebellurn Southem Exceptionalism: A New Look at an Old Question," Rrawn rvith the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil Wur mew York: Oxford UP. 19961: 3-23).

"James Henry Hamrnond, "Speech on the Admission of Kansas," US.Senate, 4 Mar 1858, rpt. in SZavery Defended, 122-23.

')The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first usage of the term as 1843. 70

belligerent title of his next, and probably most famous book, Cannibals All! Or Slaves

JVithouf Masiers (1857) sums up the controversiai premises of his social the01-y.~'

According to Fitzhugh, "ieedom" was an iI1usory concept for the Northem labourer,

whose standard of living was below that of the average Southern bond slave. Northem

"slaves" were, in fact, rnuch more wretched than their Southem counterparts because their

employers were not bound to fûlfiil the obligations of the master-slave relationship.

Whereas the planter remunerated his hirelings by providing food, lodging, and medicine,

the Northem capitalist did nothing but live, like the British "vampire capitalist class"

(1 18), off the profits of other men's labour. in fervent language buttressed by the suppofi

of extensive documentation fiom European history, Western philosophy, and

contemporary pamphlets, Fitzhugh aggressively articulates the exploitation of the

capitalist worker under the wage system. Addressing hirnself to the Northem middle

classes, he opens his argument by directly accusing his readers of "mord Cannibalism."

"You are a Cannibai!" he asserts, "and if a successtùl one, pride yourself on the number of

your victims quite as rnuch as any Fiji chieftain, who breakfasts, dines, and sups on hurnan

flesh-and your conscience smites you, if you have failed to succeed, quite as much as his,

when he returns fiom an unsuccessful foray" ( 16- 17).

Fitzhugh developed the logic of his provocative title by suggesting that the

Southem "master" should reaily be called "guardian" in recognition of his protective

responsibilities towards his servants (223). He, like the plantation novelists who

"George Fitzhugh, Camibals Ail! Or Slaves Without Masters, ed. C.Vann Woodward (Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1960); hereafter cited parentheticaily. anticipated his philosophy, emphasized the domestic appeal of the plantation economy. In

"Southern Thought," an important essay published in DeBow S Review the same year

Cannibals All! went to press, Fitzhugh suggests that the mode1 of benevolent Southem

"guardianship" shodd be extended to include al1 of the feeble members of society in its

paternalistic embrace. Lamenting the social chaos following the recent emancipation of

Russian serfs, he argues that the strong must keep the weak enslaved in order to protect

them. Included in Fitzhugh's definition of society's so-called "weak are the poor, the

aged, the infirm, and the fern~ile.'~

Marcus Cuniiffe and Drew Gilpin Faust, two of the leading scholars of proslavery

phiiosophy, see Fitzhugh's bombast not as the ravings of an eccentric but as the product of

a mind that followed the trajectory of prevalent Southem assumptions to its exaggerated

but logical end.36 Contrary to Louis Rubin's estirnate of him, Fitzhugh was, in his time

and place, no isolated 'Wlage ~rank."~~His exasperated defence of the Southem Wray

resonated at the same pitch as did much political and fictional writing of the day. Henry

Hughes, for example, another early Southem "sociologist," promulgated a similar world

view, arguing that white labourers, Fitzhugh's "slaves without masters," suffered without

"F itzhugh, "Southem Thought" and "Southem Thought Again" DeBow 's Review 23 (1 85 7): 3 3 8-50,449-62, rpt. in Drew Gilpin Faust, The Ideology of Slovery: Proslavery Thoughr in rhe Antebellum South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 198 1): 274-99.

36~arcusCunli ffe, Chattel SZavery and Wage Slavery : The A nglo Arnerican Context 1830-1860, Mercer University Lamar Mernorial Lectures No. 22 (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1979) 5; Faust 1 8- 19.

"Louis D. Rubin, On the Edge of the Swomp: A Study in the Lirerature and Society offhe Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana UP, 1989) 44-45. the protection of Southern "warranteeism." According to Hughes, "slavery" was a

misnomer for the condition of black labourers below the Mason-Dixon line. He

maintained: 'bbSlavesare persons who have no rights.' In the United States South. there

are no slaves. T'ose States are warrantee-commonwedths." Misnamed "slaves," he

charged, had dl the rights necessary for physicai survival satisfied and any wrongs they

occasionally sufked were "accidental" and not incidental to the socio-economic structure.

Like Fitzhugh, Hughes ofien presents Southem society as a feudal state through rhetoric

that could be mistaken in isolation as Marxist, as when he declares: "The Free-labor form

of society, must be abolished; it must progress to the form of munial-insurance or

warranteeism. It must progress fiom immunity to community. It must necessitate

association. It must warrant the existence and progress of alP8

Fitzhugh and Hughes fonned part of a contingent of Southem thinkers who agreed

with George Holrnes that the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the 1850s demanded an

offensive battle-plan to ensure their region's cultural self-presewation. More widely-read

and Uifluential than these politicai commentators were, however, their literary colleagues-

in-arms, who established in the early '50s a vein of Southem literary protest against

capitalism's exploitation of white labour. Romance selling better than philosophy.

Southem authors who retorted to (Inde Tom S Cabin mobilized a significant proslavery

"Henry Hughes, Treatise on Sociology: Theoretical and Practical (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grarnbo, 1854), rpt. in The Ideology of SZavev 252,270. offensive by painting vivid literary portraits of the suffering and injustice borne by white

wage

The dualistic title of J. W. Page's novel Uncle Robin in his Cabin in Virginio and

Tom without one in Boston (1853) clearly indicates the double strategy of the assaultive

brand of plantation fiction that emerged as counter-attack to Stowe. Page, like McIntosh

and Henw weaves a complex plot that takes the reader back and forth ben~eenNorthern

and Southern senings. Also following the lead of the domestic novelists, he engineen

interregionai courtships and marriages. However, whereas Mchtosh portrays Northem

society as redeemable (her characters are able to lem fiom one another and temper

Yankee greed with Southem generosity), Page pictures the Northem city as a den of

despair and death. When Tom, a gullible slave, is seduced by a Northern abolitionist to

escape fiom the light chahs of Southem bondage, he dies a consumptive beggar in a

Boston stable lofi.

Page's didactic plot is loosely structured around the experience of another

"planter's Northern bride," Ann Boswell, who leaves her childhood home in Pennsylvania

io become the mistress of a Virginia plantation. Doctor Boswell's plantation, Selma, is

39~emaleproslavery novelists, who exploited the popular format of the domestic novel, experienced the greatest commercial success. Mary Eastman's Aunt Phyllis 's Cabin (1 852), for example, soId 18 000 copies in a few months. Sales of Hentz's novels "went early into the hundreds of thousands" (Gaines 46,Sl). Elizabeth Moss asserts: "Although it is impossible to measure the impact of Southem domestic fiction in winning proslavery supporters, certainly the five domestic novelists [Gilman, Hentz, Mchtosh, Terhune, and Wilson] reached a broader audience than male apologists. Southern domestic fiction, which was published with rare exceptions in the North, flourished above and below the Mason-Dixon line." Moss attributes the phenomenal commercial success of the female writers who espoused black slavery to the women's public insistence that their works did not meddle in the masculine work of politics (Moss 11). 74 sketched as if it were a scene out of Srvallow Barn. Cabin Row is "very comfortable and neat," the family slaves are loyal and well-cared for (especially old Aunt Juno), and the thoughtful Doctor is a kind and generous master (he even provides an elaborate wedding feast, complete with cake and wedding dress, for one of his young housemaids). The picturesque quaiities of the tidy slave cabins and the pastoral revels of the slave marriage are no&however, allowed to stand merely on their own merit. The new plantation rnistress does not just exclaim with delight over the tidy slave quarters, she immediately compares them to the inferior lodgings of the Northem poor. She tells the story's main

African-Arnerican character, "1 don't know that 1 ever was in a negro's cabin before, Uncle

Robin, but 1 have been in a rnuch worse house than yours" (22).

Concrete examples of those "much worse" hovels soon appear as the newlyweds pay a doctoring visit to the local Irish shanty district. Whereas Uncle Robin's cabin-which barely provides room for two adults, three children and must double as a

Sunday meeting room-is descrîbed as a "houe," the Irish %hantiss" are, according to the definition Doctor Boswell gives his wife, mere -'hur for human beings to live in" (30).

Whereas Uncle Robin and his fellow black labourers are cheemil, intelligent, and pious.

Jemy and his half-clothed farnily are cantankerous, filthy, and diseased. The "stench" of their "stye" is so overpowering that Ann has to quickly step outside (30-3 1). To add to this dismal portrait, Jerry and his neighbours are drunkaards and-what seems to scandalize

Doctor Boswell even more-Roman Catholics. Their native laziness and ignorance offer little hope that they will respond to the Doctor9sprodding and better their lot. As a step towards self-irnprovement, the Doctor offers one of Fitzhugh's solutions

to white poverty, suggesting one of the Irishmen bind his children out to apprenticeships.

The poor man answers the Doctor indignantiy, "Please God, my shildren shall never be

taken from their poor rnither and bound out to masters...; no. rny shildren shall never be

made slaves onyhow" (35). Withùi the context of the novel and of the chattel-wage

slavery debate, this response is heavily ironized. The Doctor's homily on the carriage ride

home on specious definitions of liberty reminds the reader that cornmon mid-nineteenth-

century parlance dubbed the Irish the "white niggers" of the North."

Although Page pretends to expose the alleged "slavery" of the poor whites of

Virginia the stereotypical Irish "nigger" was usually a resident of a Nonhern city or, more

ofien, Europe. Doctor Boswell puts his visit to the Irish slums in this more conventional

context when he uiforrns his naïve bride that the shanties she has visited "do no

liberty in its most degraded modification; in the ould country (as they cal1 it) it is infinitely

worse" (37). Likewise, William Grayson's versified proslavery propaganda piece, "The

Hireling and the Slave" (1856), a long "didactic" poem in heroic couplets, draws upon

"English authorities" for its descriptions of the woes into which he believes fiee labour

inevitably degenerates."

Eastman's Aunr Phifi 's Cabin, for instance, a Southem character wimesses a Worthem baker abuse an Irish girl while calling her a "white nigger" (Mary H. Eastman. Aunt Phillis S Cabin; or Sourhern Life As Ir Is [Philadelphiô: Lippincott, 18521 72-73). Jonathan Glickstein traces the derivation of this epithet in Concepfsof Free Labor in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale UP, 1991): 340-4 1, n.3 1.

4 1 Grzyson explains that he views the poetics of Pope and Dryden as suiling his "didactic subject" ("Preface," "The Hireling and the Slave," The Hireling and the Slave, Chicora, und Other Poems [Charleston: McCarter, 1856, rpt. Miami: Mnesmosyne Publishing, 19691 xv, xiii; Grayson, like Page, is not content to defend slavery merely by celebrating its

benevolent features. instead, he opens his two-part poem by launching head-fmt into the

obverse side of his apology. The first half of "The Hireling and the Slave" thus borrows

the scenery and language of the English sociai novel to create a gniesome collage of the

pitfalls of a society built on the premise of so-called "fiee" labour. Lamenting the poverty

of those "Free but in narne-the slaves of endless toil" (22), Grayson creates miserable

tableaux of British working class life that might have been painted by a Dickens or a

Kingsley:

In squalid hut-a kemei for the poor, Or noisome cellar, stretched upon the floor, His clothing rags, of filthy straw his bed, With offal fiom the gutter daily fed, Thrust out from Nature's board, the hireling lies: No place for him that comrnon board supplies, No neighbor helps, no charity attends, No philanthropie sympathy befkiends; None heed the needy wretch's dying groan, He starves unsuccor'd, penshes unknown (23).

According to Grayson, while the English "serf' starves in squalor. the "pomp and

circumstance" of organized English charity officiously prescribes The proper nostrum for

each evil known / in every land on eanh, except their own" (23-24). Grayson goes on to

sketch an appalling range of social casualties ignored by the imperiaiistic program of

"England's saintly coteries": the "dninken hireling," child miners, empressed soldiers.

prostitutes, murdered infants, and corpses in typhus-infected slurns where "Gaunt Famine

prowls around his pauper prey, / And daily sweeps his ghastly hosts away" (24-25).

hereafter cited parenthetically.) Grayson accuses English busybodies outright with evading the grotesque reality of

such "homebred misery" to poke their philanthropic fingers in the Amencan pie. He

claims:

VainIy the starving white, at every door, Craves help or pity for the hireling por; But that the distant black may sofflier fare, Eat, sleep, and play, exempt fiom toi1 and care. Ali England's meek philanthropists unite With frantic eagerness, harangue and write; By purchased tools diffbse distrust and hate, Sow factious strife in each dependent state, Cheat with delusive lies the public mind, Invent the cruelties they fail to find, Slander. in pious garb, with prayer and hymn, And blast a people's fortune for a whim (26-27).

Grayson appears to have adopted George Holmes's mono that the best defence is an effective offence. Not until well into his work, does he bother to back up his attack on

English "slander" by expounding upon the American slave's blissful, protected, almost

Edenic state.

Grayson's vitriolic verses seem to have taken longer to tum than did most fictional responses to abolitionist accusations, most of which sprang up like dragon's teeth within a year afier the publication of Uncle Tom 's Cabin. Four years before Grayson's unmistakably offensive approach to the defence of American slavery, Caroline Rush and

Charles peterson4' penned works that reflected the Southern tradition of plantation fiction but that foregrounded the supposedly wretched ramifications of wage slavery rather than the pastoral benefits of black slavery. Their efforts, however crude and however

'"Peterson published under the pseudonym "J. Thomton Randolph." 78

compromised by their underlying racist assumptions, represent a pivotal shift in Amencan

fiction towards the development of a literature with an urban conscience.

Strident, melodrarnatic, and ovenvritten, Rush's North and South; or, Skzvery and

Its Contrasts is proslavery fiction at its most sensationdistic. Ruined by the careless

generosity of a good-natured but alcoholic father, the large Harley farnily struggles to

survive in the dog-eat-dog world of the Northem city. As the father sinks into despair and

then death, and the youngest child succumbs to starvation and disease, the loyal wife and

her eldest daughter strïve valiantly to eke out a living as seamstresses. Working night and

day, they are still unable to support the family and Mrs. Harley is forced to "bind out"

three of her children. Mimicking Stowe's emphasis on the separation of farnilies as the

chief of slavery's evils, Rush provides a graphic depiction of the sufferings of a white

mother as "the bondage of poverty'" forces her to "sell" her children to strangers for their

keep.

The brutalities suffered by bound apprentices become the central target of Rush's

outrage against the abuses of "white slavery" north of the Mason-Dixon line. Five-year-

old Lily, the first Harley girl sold into domestic service, is routinely whipped by her

mistress until her back bleeds and is often locked in a gamet with a skeleton and little food

for days on end. Ten-year-old Ellen, who is bound to a country couple, fares little better;

her mind eventuaily snaps under the physical and mental tonnent she endures and she

consequently drowns herself. Hany, apprenticed to farmer Hardgripe, is similarly

43CarolineRush, The North and South; or, Siavery and Its Contrasts (New York: Negro Universities P, 1968) 238; hereafter cited parenthetically. 79

maltreated (his master lashes him to a tree, whips him till he seems "to be grinding

[Hamy's] bones to powder," then rubs lemon juice in the boy's wounds [253]). Unable to

tolerate such abuse, he nins away nom the fan-and is jailed as a fugitive and an alleged

horse-thief. Meanwhile, the beautifid and noble Gazella, the eldest daughter, continues to

ply her needle bravely despite galloping consumption, but she undergoes another forrn of

torture at the han& of the master class as she is sexually harassed by one of the workers at

the store where she seils her needlework.

Nearly al1 the action in Rush's novel takes place in the North, with one important

exception. A young planter's wife, recentiy bereft of her own child, becornes acquainted

with the Harleys' hardships and offers to adopt the youngest girl, Ida, and bnng her up as

her own child. Mis. Harley is reluctant to give up another child to a stranger (perhaps

adoption by a Southem planter seems too much Iike binding Ida metaphoricdly to the

system of black slavery) but lives to rejoice in her decision. While her older sister sews

until her eyes, then her lungs. give out, Ida grows up happy and healthy, surrounded by

contented slaves and the pastoral beauty of the lwwious South.

Like Rush, Peterson aiso stnick closer to home than did Grayson in his indictment

of the faliacies of a fiee labour mentality. His Cabin and Parlor; or, Slaves and Masters

(1 852) has been called "probably the representative fictional apology for slavery of his

day? A prominent thread of this multi-plot novel traces the misfortunes of a 'Worthem

UBarrie Hayne, "Standing on Neutra1 Ground: Charles Jacobs Peterson of Peterson 5," Pennsylvania Magazine of History und Biography 93.4 (1969): 526. Hayne also points out that Cubin and Parior was the only one of many "replies" to Uncle Tom S Cabin that Stowe "deemed worthy of counterstatement" (in her Key to Uncle Tom 's Cubin) (Hayne 522). 80

Slave," Horace Courtenay, the young son of a banknipt Virginia family who travels to

Philadelphia to seek his fortune but soon dies of overwork and exhaustion as an errand boy

in a large store. Another sub-plot traces the ruin of an Afiican-American couple who,

despite assurances that they will not be separated, fear the results of the estate sale and flee

North. Northem maltreatment of blacks is a great shock to the young pair. When they

eventuzlly find rehge in a foui free-black suburb of Philadelphia, prliving conditions

and race riots soon destroy the husband. His wife survives him to return South and beg

her mistress's forgiveness.

In contrast to the Northem "slaves," Peterson's Southern slaves survive and

prosper. When the bankmpt Courtenay estate is sold, Uncle Peter and Aunt Vi'let are not

separated but are sold, dong with al1 their children. to a neighbour. Their new master is

not quite as indulgent as theu old master, but the Afncan-American family still enjoys a

neat. cornfortable cabin and has plenty to eat. In fact, the slaves have more to eat than

their poverty-stricken former mistress, for whorn they secretly leave presents of food. As

an old farnily friend explicitly points out, life in the Courtenays' desolate cottage is far

worse than in Uncle Peter's cabin. Commenting on the youngest child's near escape &om

death, the friend, also the family doctor, muses: '*if Alfred had been some slave child and

had failen sick in exactly the same circumstances, we should never have heard the end of

it. Bui because he is white, by Jupiter, thereYI1be no sympathy for him .... The Lord

knows, a black skin. in these nineteenth century days, is quite a blessing.'*"

"J. Thomton Randolph [Charles Peterson], The Cabin and Parlor; or, Slaves and Masrers (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson, 1852) 152; hereafter cited parenthetically. 81

Almost al1 of the action in Cabin and Parlot takes place afier the Courtenays have

been forced to sel1 their estate. If the plantation represented for many prosouthem writers

an idyllic state of human cornmunity, Peterson seems consciously to set his novel in a

post-lapsarian world. Rather than attempting to win sympathy for the pastoral ideal. he

tries instead, as Rush puts it, to "tum the tide of sympathy" (43) by eliciting compassion

for the poor outside the pastoral world-for the bankmpt young mistress stmggling to

support a feeble mother and a sickly baby brother on a schoolteacher's pittance; for the

Northem fican-Amencan struggling in a violent, putrid ghetto; for the exploited errand

boys and young apprentices of the mercantile North. It is no accident that Horace is

nursed in his last illness by a wretchedly poor but kindly Irish widow and her son, since

Peterson deliberately focuses on exposing the sufferings of the so-called "white Nggers''

of the modem urban economy.

Besides hideous depictions of Philadelphia slums, black and white. Cabin and

Parlor features another prevalent specialty of the more aggressive Stream of proslavery

fiction-an attack on the narrow refonn interests of abolitionists, especially British

abolitionists. who are charged with overlooking the slums on their doorstep in their furore

to improve the lot of distant bond slaves? A key scene in Peterson's novel features a

debate arnong Walworth, the heroic Southemer who befriends Horace and helps restore

"6Petersonreinforces his satire of abolitionists with an anecdote fiom real life. in his "Preface." he recounts the story of William Thomson, a Scotch weaver who recanted his ill- informed abolitionism after comparing the living conditions of English workers and Amencan slaves (3). 82 the Courtenay fdlyfortunes; Horace's stingy "master," the merchant, Mr. Sharpe; and a visiting British anti-slavery worker, Mr. Brawler.

In Mr. Brawler, Peterson invokes a stock figure commonly found in most replies to Uncle Tom 's Cabin. The arrogant, self-serving abolitionist (such as Hentz's Mt.

Brainard) ofien serves as villain in the plantation cirama usually insinuating his way into the bosom of a generous planter family only to lure its slaves away with false promises of a better life in the North. Uncle Tom of W. L-G. Smith's Life ut the South: or "Uncle

Tom S Cabin " As It Is (1852), for example, is seduced into Northern hardship through the machinations of an abolitionist who disguises hirnself as a schoolmaster in order to infiltrate a peaceful plantation. Poor Tom in Page's Wncle Robin is also tempted to his ruin by one of the seditionist Northemers who lurk on the outskirts of Selma and try to agitate slaves into discontent In The Plunter's Northern Bride, Hentz traces the sirnilariy disastrous flight of Cassy (an obvious reference to Stowe's female rebel), who is coaxed by an abolitionist couple, Mr. and Mrs. Softly, into abandoning her mistress in her hour of need. When Cassy cornes to realize (as she soon does) that the Softlys do not stand behind their personai promises and that the North is not flowing with milk and honey for the fiee black, she eventually rems to her kind Southern home.

Brawler, like his many literary cousins and CO-villains,profiles abolitionism as a rhetorician's pursuit. The loud, pompous Englishrnan is a world traveller who, Mr. Sharpe assures Walworth, "will make a noise yet" (166). In America, an anti-slavery lecture tour provides the ambitious Brawler with a trendy means of "making a noise." The caricature of Brawler reflects the common proslavery accusation that aboiitionists were caught up in 83

a war based on rhetorical rather than real premises. Grayson's "Preface" to his treatise in

verse specifically attacks one prominent abolitionist for having begun his public career by

taking up the subject of slavery "as a fit one for a college exercise in rhetoric," and then

tuming it into "a rhetorical exercise for life." "With these people [abolitionists]," says

Grayson. "the cruelty of slavery is an afFair of tropes and figures" (v). Characterizhg the

opposition's "rhetoric" as artificial, frenzied, and unfounded became a key mategy in a

proslavery rhetoric that paradoxically prornoted its own authenticiq by drawing attention

to the well-worn linguistic conventions that inevitably set the terms of the debate.

Entenng her twenties in Wheeling, Virginia just as Uncle Tom 's Cabin sent the

South into a literary fever, Rebecca Harding grew into adulthood in a literary atmosphere

forcibly shaped by the competing rhetorics of proslavery and anti-slavery campaigns. As a

Whig organ. the Wheeling Intelligencer kept the proslavery side of this national literary

debate steadily positioned before its readers' eyes . Like many Southern newspapers and

j ournals, it not oniy allotted plenty of column space to attacks on Stowe and her

controversial novel but it also actively promoted proslavery prose and fiction.

The Intelligencer did not feature a full-length review of Uncle Tom '.s Cabin until

fairly late in the day when the literary battle between Stowe and prosouthem plantation

novelists was already well under way. By January 1853, when the paper ran an article on

"The Uncte Tom's Cabin Mania" copied fiom the London British Army Dispatch, at least

eight n0ve1.s'~ had already appeared on the field specifically to defend Southem honour

17Jane Gardiner, "Pro-slavery Propaganda in Fiction Written in Answer to Cincle Tom S Cabin, 1 852- 1861 : An Annotated Checklist," Resources for American Literary St& 7.2 (1 977): 20 1-209. against Stowe's "'raw head and bloody bones stories.'*' The London reviewer opens his choleric critique (dated December 1852) by accounting for his procrastination. "We have not reviewed Uncle Tom's Cabin," he explains, "chiefly because we felt our views of the tendency and nature of that work to be so hostile that we could scarcely judge of it in a proper critical mariner."@ If the pages of the Infelligencer offer any indication, many

Wheeling residents must have shared the Dispatch reviewer's outrage.

Although the Infelligencer was not primarily a literary paper (as evidenced by its delay in running a review of the greatest litemry sensation of the day), its columns provide ample evidence that the citizens of Wheeling were both reading and wnting prosouthern, proslavery fiction. The editors ran for al1 of 1852 a quarter-column advertisement for

Smith's Life at the South, billing the work as "A book for the times," and describing the author's object as follows:

to represent the condition of the Slave in his rude but cornfortable cabin, his daily occupations and pastirnes, the relations between master and slave. the mistaken impulses and misconceived views of the Northem Philanthropist, &c. &c ... and at the same to represent as it is, a class of people; viz: The Planter, to whom justice has seldom been done...."50

Wi th similar proslavery zeal, a bookstore notice in a Febniary 1853 issue advertised

Peterson's Cabin and Parlor alongside Uncle Tom S Cabin as "the best answer thereto.'?"

In May 1853, manifesting its typical approvd of al1 things prosouthem, the Intelligencer

"Eastman 63. i9"The Uncle Tom's Cabin Mania," Inrelligencer 25 Jan 1 85 3.

501ntelligencer24 Aug 1 852.

at the Depot," Inrelligencer 1 Feb 1853. 85

applauded Caroline Rush's North and South as a legitimate assault on abolitionist

hypocnsy and announced with pnde that the author herself was in town to promote her

work. Under the headline, "TRUTH VERSUS 'UNCLE TOM'S CABIN,'" a Wheeling

reviewer recornrnends the work of "the gifted authoress" as "abounding in thrilling

incidents, and lofty and beautifid sentiments, drawn, not from imagination, but fiom actual

scenes in the North and South."s2

The literary offerings of the Intelligencer of August 24, 1852, in which 1 fnst

located the notice for Smith's book, give tangible form to the paradox of Wheeling's

cultural identity: on the page following the ad for Smith's proslavery fiction appears a

piece of Unionist propaganda in poetic form, entitled 'Wever! Never!! Never!!!" after a

speech by Henry Clay against the dissolution of the Union? In the borderland society of

northwestem Virginia, suppon for the culture of the siaveholders was not necessarily

separable, as the myth of Appalachian egalitarianism would have it, fiom support for

federalist principles. As John Williams w-rïtes, 'Wotwithstanding a persistent legend to the

contrary, there was no 'Yankee peninsula' extending southward through the western

Virginia mountains into the slaveowners' ses.""

'' Intelligencer, 30 May 1853. "Capt. C. W. Cutter, "Never! Never! ! Never! !! ." rpt. fiom the Washington Republic. lntelligencer 24 Aug 1852. The poem is preceded by the following epigraph: Y may be asked, and have been asked, when 1 am for a dissolution of the Union. 1 answer, NEVER! NEVER! NEVER! '-Henry Clay." 86

In the sarne year that it ran the prominent ad for Lijé ut the South, the Intelligencer also featured a barrage of articles that made its proslavery sympathies even more obvious by assaulting not merely Stowe's book but also her personal character. The articles, clipped fkom various Northem and Southern pubiications, follow the progress of Stowe's

European tour. Stowe is accused of taking "alms" fiom the English and of making a habit of not paying her hotel bills? Her meeting with a group of French tramlators of Clncle

Tom 's Cubin, none of whom could speak English, is satirized as a ndiculous farce? The real focus of the attacks, however, is Stowe's warm reception by the Duchess of

Sutherland, a fervent abolitionist who was criticized for meddling in American affairs while ignoring the problems at her own gate (she was accused of forcing poor tenants off her Scottish estate). The lntelligencer was delighted to copy a piece noting that "even the most enthusiastic admirers of Uncle Tom's Cabin are not altogether pleased with the manner in which the authoress has conducted herself in England."s7

The ire aroused over the Sutherland-Stowe comection can be surnrned up in the angry phrase used by the Dispatch reviewer of Uncle Tom 3 Cabin: 'Thysician, heal thyself?" In February 1853, the mouthpiece of Wheeling gave the bener part of a full page to a public censure of the Duchess of Sutherland written by the wife of ex-President, John

Tyler. The Duchess had lately incensed the women of the South by addressing an open letter fiom "the Noble Ladies of England" to their sisters in America urging their

55"~rs.Stowe." Intelligencer 22 June 1 853.

56*'Mrs.Stowe in Paris," Inrelligencer 11 July 1853.

"'*Mrs. Stowe." Intelligencer 22 June 1853. 87

assistance in the abolition movement. Tyler, a native Northemer married to a Virginia

planter. defended the rights of Southern women to govern their own households by ntming

the table, rhetorically speaking, on the "so called philanthropie ladies of England." She

declares:

Manage your own afFairs as best you may, and leave us to manage ours as we may think proper. Each of us will find abundant employrnent in the petformance of our respective duties. Ifyou wish a suggestion as to the suitable occupation of your idle hours, 1 will point you to the true field for your philanthropy: the unsupplied wants of your own people of England. 1 remember to have seen lateiy, that there were in the city of London alone 100,000 persons who rose in the moming without knowing how or where they were to obtain their "daily bread" .... Go, rny good Duchess of Sutherland, on an embassy of mercy to the poor, the stricken. the hungry and the naked of your own land .... Leave it to the women of the South to alleviate the sufferings of their dependants while you rake care of your 0~~1.~~

In an editorial follow-up to Tyler's lener, the Wteeling Intelligencer fully approved the

document's sentiments, applauding the reminder to the British of "their own faults and the

crying ills of their starving millions."59

The alleged contrast between England's "starving millions" and the well-fed. well-

clothed. well-contented black slaves of plantation fiction had become by the time of

Tyler's lener a stereotypical counterattack against the unwanted %terference'*' of English

'*"A Letter of an Amencan Lady. in reply to one fiom the Noble Ladies of England," Intelligencer 5 Feb 1 853.

59"Mrs.Julia G. Tyler," Intelligencer, 17 March 1853

60"Letter of an Arnerican Lady,'' Intelligencer 5 Feb 1853. abolitionists in American affairs. Wheeling readers were treated to another substantial demonstration of this rhetoricai strategy in the Intelligencer of 3 June 1853. in an article quoted fiom the Phitadetphia Presbyterian, the American "retort" of "Physician, heal thyself' is again raised, and British hypocnsy denounced. The author denies that English seamstresses, forced by "the iron law of necessity" to work 16-hour days or starve. are any more "fiee" than Amencan bond slaves: ''they [the needlewomen] have liberty to go elsewhere; but the liberty is the liberty to starve-the liberty to sacrifice virtue to gain bread-the liberty to live in prostitution and die in an almshouse." The anonymous defender of the Amencan way, like Tyler, finds fault with black slavexy6' but appears driven into a defensive position against the meddling criticisms of the old country. "We are'" he writes, "compelled to Say that we have never seen or heard of such things arnid

Southem slaves as we ourselves both heard and seen [sic] in Great Britain." As his outrage over Britain's blindness to her own problems mounts, his joumalism waxes oratoncal in its descriptive and interrogative flourishes:

In that very city of Edinburgh, we looked from our hotel windows, the first morning we ever gazed into its streets, upon a cluster of wan, half-starved wretches begging for bread. in the beautifid Emerald Isle we were pointed to multitudes who, as we were assured on the best authority, never enjoyed the luxury of a morsel of meat for months at a time. Who ever heard of a southem slave begging for bread? Who ever heard, except in the rarest instances, of their wanting meat from once to thrice a day? in what portion of the South are slaves compelled to work sixteen hours out of the twenty- four? Slaves are held in involuntary bondage, to be sure, but the condition of that bondage is such that the wretched poverty-stricken thousands of

6'Tyier hopes for graduai emancipation through colonization. Britain would cal1 it paradise, if a lot so easy and so well provided for could be made their owd'

At lest one Intelligencer reader was apparently so incensed by British abolitionist

involvement that he (or she) contributed a local literary mite towards the paper's suppon

of America's "peculiar" institution against outside meddling. The result was a highly racist

narrative essay simply entitled "Sla~ery.'"~ While the Inielligencer's editors did not

wholeheartedly endorse the piece, they recommended it as another antidote to the Wncle

Tom mania." ùivoking some of the most rnonstrous of the standard proslavery arguments

(that African-Amencans form a morally backward race, that slaves are incapable of

fending for themselves, that ernancipation would lead to the horrors of miscegenation). the

article condudes by summoning up the also farniliar menace of British busybodies.

Nothing less than international war threatens, the anonymous author insists, if the English

do not cease their hypocritical cant about "fieedom" and look to the liberation of their own

wage slaves. He argues:

If freedom be but a name and hypothetically it is so; [the English lower classes] have not even this empt[yJ boast; for they eat, they drink, they sleep, they move at the will of a landlord, or employer, and are. politicaily, as nugatory as our blacks, for their vote, if they can cast it at dl, is. in fact the purchased, or cornmanded expression of their master's wish. Let [Stowe] look into the cellars of London, the coal mines of New Castle, the factcnes of Manchester, the hovels of Ireland, and she may be tempted, in the fullness of her philanthropy, to publish a sequel to Uncle Tom's Cabin that may set the currents of flattery, on which she now floats, in a contras. direction.

""~bolitionisrn in England," Infelligencer 3 June 1853.

63W.B.B.,"Slavery," Intelligencer 25 May 1853. The by-line indicates the article was .-W~-ittenfor the Wheeling intelligencer." 90

Not by accident has Davis's Margrer Howth,the novel-length successor to the

daring critique of indusaialism begun in "Life in the bon Mills," ken suggested as an

early "Uncle Ton 's Cabin of Amencan wage ~lavery.'~Davis, like Stowe, was strongly

iduenced by those writers- such as Dickens, Disraeli, Reade, and Gaskell-who had

aiready looked into the hoveis and cellars of England's working class. instead of writing

the U.cle Tom 's Cabin of the British wage slaves, however, Davis went one step Mer

than the anonymous author of "Slavery" could foresee by drawing on the Southem

harangue against the free labour system to create a damning exposé not of misery in the

old country but of exploitation and oppression in the new.

Davis was wide-awake not oniy to the limits of abolitionist rhetoric but aiso to the

grim reality that the Southem "tirne-honored tu quoque argument'"' applied to American

as well as British capitalists. In this attitude, she followed in the wake of a literary tradition

that had, by 1861, become so well-established as to be almost cliché. For Jane Atteridge

Rose, "Life in the Iron Mills" is remarkable for being %e first [story] to have recognized

the industrial workplace, ghettoized poverty, and an immigrant subculture as the rnatter of

~merica.'& Yet these concerns had al1 been raised nearly a decade earlier by several of

the Southem novelists who responded so angrïly to Uncle Tom 's Cabin. When Tillie

Olsen resurrected Davis's masterpiece fiom obscurity in 1972, she charged her readers:

&Jean Fagan Yellin, "The 'Feminization' of Rebecca Harding Davis," American Literary Hisrory 2.2 (1 990): 2 10-2 1 1.

66Rose,Rebecca Harding Dovis ix. Remember, as you begin to read of the sullen, clinging industrial smoke, the air thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings: this was written when almost everywhere the air was pure; and these lives, brought here for the first time into literatwe, unknown, in~isible.~'

Today, in the tight of new scholarly studies of popular antebellum literature, both Northem

and Southem, it appears that Davis's outspoken portmyal of the dark, already decayed side

of life in the promised land draws its power from a Stream of literature that has itself

become "invisible" to many modem cntics.

Part of Davis's debt to the heritage of proslavery thought involved a deep-seated

suspicion of the abolitionkt platform. As 1 shall illustrate in Chapter Four, Davis

consistently cnticized anti-slavery reformers for pursuing a bigoted social agenda. She

was not aione in her skepticism. George Lippard, author of the lurid city-mysteries novel,

13re Quaker Cily; or the Monks of Monk Hall (1 845), and a prominent labour activist,

routinely compared the bondage of exploited Northern workers with that of Southem

slaves. Defending striking Philadelphia tailoresses in 1850, he iaunched his familiar

appeal on behaif of the overlooked Northem labourer:

Among the many forms of Slavery which curse the earth, none is half so fiightful, half so appalling as the Wage Slavery which, in the large cities of the North, cnishes wornan into a life of shame-of hopeless want+x into an untirnely grave.... It is well to exhaust your sympathies upon the acanslave, lashed or sold on a southem

67TillieOlsen, ed., Life in the Iron Mills and Other Sfories, by Rebecca Harding Davis (New York: Feminist P, 1985) 10. slave block; but here in your midst, before your eyes, at your doors, behold your WHITE SISTERS...?

The metaphor of "Wage Slavery" Lippard invokes was already well-established in

the radical labour press by the 1840s. It constituted, according to labour historian Bruce

Laurie, the antebellum 'battle cry of Northern workea.'" Although most abolitionîsts

eventually broadened their reform interests to express compassion for the status of the

Northern worker, the labour slogan of "white slavery" initiaily marked labour's aiienation

from the anti-slavery cause."' Historians disagree as to the depth and duration of the rifi."

686'WomenWage Slaves," speech delivered 4 Mar 1850 before a mas meeting called to defend Phi ladel phia tailoresses, Quaker City Wee Wy 9 Mar 1850, George Lippard, Prophet of Proresr: Wrifingsof an American Radical, 18224855, ed. David S. Reynolds (New York: Peter Lang, 1986) 2 13. Lippard's controversial and extraordinarily popular writings may have provided another important stimulus to Davis's spirit of literary protest. Davis's Waitingfor the Verdict ( 1867), opens with a description of the harbor of "the Quaker City," the Nckname Lippard invented for his Philadelphia of crime and moral pollution. Also, Pfaelzer hints at an intriguing co~ection between the interrogative narrative style of "Life in the bon Mills" and Lippard's favorite device of the insistent rhetorical question (Pfaelzer, Parlor Radical 246, note 18).

69~mceLaurie, Anisons inlo Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Noonday. 1989) 87.

70 George Lippard was an early and influentid exception to this generalization. He deplored the mutual slavery of blacks and whites. His apocalyptic dream sequence in The Quaker Ciy. for instance, pictures "the slaves of the Cotton Lord and the factory Prince" marching together as "one mass of rags and sores and miseiy" (The Quaker Ci@;or the Monh of Monk Hall [Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 19951 3 89-90).

"Philip S. Foner and Herbert Shapiro emphasize that "Neither the labor movement nor the forces of abolition were monolithic entities" (N~hernLabor and Antislavery: A Documentary Hisrory, Contributions in American History 157 [Westport CT: Greenwood, 19941 x). Neither %.as either movement static, and there is evidence to suggest that the two causes gradually formed an alliance as they matured. The continuing debate over the unstable relations between labour and abolition interests implies, nonetheless, that tensions between the two groups were both real and enduring. For a concise summary of current historical perspectives on this issue, see Foner and Shapiro's introduction. but it seems that many Northem labourers in the 1830s and '40s strongly resented the

attention paid to Southern slaves. As Bernard Mandel reports:

[abolitionists] had, aimost without exception, a blind spot for the ills that beset the working men, except as the abolition of slavery would benefit them. The abolitionists of course denied resolutely that wage-earners could be compared with the slaves, and devoted much space in their literature to prove it. Scarcely an issue of any of their papers lacked an article or poem demonstrating the nobility of fiee labor, refuting the arguments of labor leaders and refomers that the wages system was a disguised form of slavery, and presenting evidence of the constant improvement in the condition of the proletariat?

In The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class,

David Roediger claims that Northem labour was so deeply distrustfûl of the anti-slavery

movement that it actually embraced proslavery ideology. Down-trodden white labourers

in the North sought to create public sympathy by differentiating themselves from black

sufferers in the South. Because the analogy of "white slavery" necessarily involved a

racist cornparison, Roediger argues, "tbe very structure of the argument against white

slavery typically carried proslavery implications.""

Histonan Jonathan Glickstein has offered substantial evidence to justi@ the

cynicism that Davis shared with labour refomers and proslavery writen concerning the

limits of anti-slavery advocacy." According to Glickstein, devotion to the anti-slavery

"Bernard Mandel, Labor: Free und Slave: Workingrnen and the Anti-Slavery Movement in the United States (New York: Associated Authors, 1955) 89.

"David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whifeness: Race and the Making of the A mericon Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991) 76.

"Jonathan A. Glickstein, '"Poverty is not Slavery': American Abolitionists and the Corn petit ive Labor Markef " A nfislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the A bolitionists, 94

cause blinded many abolitionists to the oppressive working and living conditions of fiee

labourers. Black slavery, he submits, was an especially appealing cause to embrace

because it provided a clearly visible target for reformist energies to focus on, dong with

the promise of a quick, legalistic fix." Thus, Nonhem abolitionists-includiag

Stowe-situated their attacks on the abuses of slavery on the Southem plantation, whereas.

statistically speaking, the majority of Southern slaves worked as family servants and a

significant percentage were employed as skilled labourers or industrial workers." The

evils of the plantation were foreign evils that could be clearly tied to a "peculiar,"

somehow unAmencan, econornic basis. The sufferings of domestic senmnts and factory

worken, on the other hand, perhaps paralleled too closely the struggles of fiee blacks and

white workers in Northem cities. Glickstein's evidence suggests that anti-slavery

rhetoricians were very much atîuned to, and perhaps deliberately evaded, at least in the

early days, the proslavery taunt of "Physician, heal thyself?"

ed. Lewis Perry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Uf, 1979): 195-2 1 8.

750nthe appeai of chatte1 slavery as a remediable evil, Glickstein quotes O.B. Frothingham: "Pauperism, in al1 its dismal shapes, with al1 its temble sorrows, is an old fact resulting fiom man's ignorance, error, and generai imperfection, and will be outgrown as man becomes more wise and powerfûl .... Slavery, on the other hand, is an institution which the conscious will of man has built up, and which the same will, faithfully exerted, might ... abolish in a year, a month, a week, a &y...." CLPauperismand Slavery," Liberty Bell Xm (1 853): 167-70, Glickstein, "'Poverty is not Slavery'" 199).

'% 1850, in the Lower South the average number of slaves owned by an individuai was only twelve. Averages were even lower for the Middle South (eight) and the Border South (five) (William Freehling, nie Road to Disunion, vol. 1 wew York: Oxford UP 19901 quoted in Reid 83). Approximately 5% of the slave population in the 1840s and '50s worked in industry (Robert S. Starobin. "Preface," Industrial SZavery in the Old South mew York: Oxford UP,19701 vii). 95 Not only did abolitionists chwse a farsighted focal point-Deep South-style

plantation slavery-for their vision of social refom, but some of their prominent leaders

began by frankly opposing the Northem labour movement. Some, in fact, eagerly

welcomed the development of industrial jobs, which they regarded as more intellectually

stimulating than manual labour." (Peterson points to this complicity in Cabin and Parior

when Walworth tells Mr. Brawler, "The dficulty is, that ablitionists don't corne South,

but manufacture their facts here at the North, to suit their own purposes" [179, my

emphasis]). In addition, many abolitionists could simply not nse above the

environmental detemination of their own class consciousness. One of Garrison's most

strident attacks on slavery in The Liberator, Glickstein notes, appears alongside an also

strident attack on workingrnen's parties for circulating volatile notions about class

oppre~sion.~'

This apparent obtusmess to the plight of the fiee industrial worker grew out of the

Yankee confidence in the oppomuiities for social mobility in a capitalist economy. Anti-

slavery reformers, like most nineteenth-century social activists and charity workers,

usually drew the traditionai line in the sand between "pauperism" and "poverty," or

deserving and undeserving misery.79 This distinction enabled them to discriminate even

"Glickstein, '"Poverty is not Slavery"' 208-209.

"Glickstein, "'Poverty is not Slavery'" 203-204. Boston Liberator January 1, 183 1.

79Throughoutthe antebellum period, Amencan refonners smiggled with the concept of providing indiscriminate chantable relief. It was generally believed that over-generosity to the undeserving and unrepentant would only encourage laziness and social decline. See Marvin OlasIcy, The Tragedy of Arnerican Compassion (Washington DC: Regnery Gateway, 1992) 17- 18,24-26. 96 more finely between the inherited, lited fetters of bond slavery and the nominal chains of so-called "wage slavery." After ali, the poor worker on the bottom mgof a capitaiist society is, so the theory goes, always potentiaily able to transcend his status through intelligence and hard work.

If one reads, as HowelIs does in The Rise of Silas Lapham, the Amencan drearn as a kind of capitalist romance, Northern protesters against Southem slavery tendeâ to succumb to the romantic outiook. Compare, for instance, two contemporaneous literary representations of the Amencan shoemaker at work, one by Whittier and one by George

Lippard. Whittier's 1845 poem, "The Shoemakers," appears in his Songs of Lubor and, like his poems about Northern fishemen and lumberrnen, glorifies the dignity and rewards of fiee labour. His shoemakers are skilled artisans whose guild heritage reflects their traditional cornmitment to the ideal of liberty. Whittier addresses them as Freedom's heroes: "Let foplings sneer, let fools deride, / Ye heed no idle scomer; / Free hands and heaxts are still your pride, / And duty done, your honor." These lowly but noble workers. it seems, wield influence greater than their station, as even the rich and famous require their services ("The foot is yours; where'er it falls, / It treads your well-wrought leather, / On earthem floor, in marble halls, / On carpet, or on heather"). But pride in crahmanship is not, the poet points out, the only fitof the shoemakers' labour-the promised prize of capitalist aggrandizement hovers j ust above the workbench:

The red brick to the mason's hand, The brown earth to the tiller's. The shoe in yours shail wealth command, Like fajr Cinderella's! As they who shunned the household maid Beheld the crown upon her, So ail shall see your toi1 repaid With hearth and home and honor."

Dated oniy five years afier Whittier's poem, Lippard's sketch of shoemakers

depicts a radically different scen-ne more in touch with actual economic reality than

Whittier's elegiac celebration of a cottage industry. Lippard, who sees his oppressed

shoemakers as presenting "a type of the condition of the workers of dl trades, and dl over

the world," portrays the labourers as overtaxed automatons:

Do you notice the unnaturai position in which they are forced to work-the breast bent, the stomach cramped-no chance for a fiee breath, no chance for one fiee stretch of muscle-there they sit twelve hours per day. How long do you think the human machinery will last at this rate? How long before that young man's dark hairs will turn grey, or fa11 from his head like dried leaves in the fall? Now you know that God never designed that any Man should work, day in and &y out, just fourteen hours a &y at any kind of work. But this work-shoemaking you may cal1 it-which cannot be carried on, Save at sacrifice of digestion, lungs and muscle-what do you think of it?"

Depnved of individual human identity, denied even the basic fieedom of physical

movement, Lippard's fiee-bom shoemakers have become so enslaved to the industrial

system that they have tuned into machines. Mere pieces of industrial property, their status

mirrors those of the black Southem slaves Lippard so often twins with his depictions of

Northern workers.

*'John Greenleaf Whittier, "The Shoemakers," The Poetical Worb of John Greenleaf milrier, Vol. 3 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1892) 292-93.

"Lippard, nte Quaker Ciiy Weekly 16 Mar 1850, rpt. in George Lippard, Propher of Protest 47. 98

Growing up in Wheeling in the decades before the Civil War, Davis would have seen enough suBering in the iron mills, in the textile mills, and in the working-class slum of "~oosetown"" to make Whittier's and other abolitionists' exalted notions about the inherent beauty of so-cafled "fke"labour seem mocking anachronisms. She also would have imbibed with the very air she breathed the stereotypes of plantation fiction and the traditional Southem challenge to the forces of industriakt capitalism. As a member of a famiiy with persona1 ties to the North but aiso to the Deep South, as a fiiend of prominent abolitionists but also of slaveowners, as a readet of Dickens and Stowe as well as of the prosouthem Wheeling Infelligencer,Davis couid not help but have ken intimately acquainted with the ongoing literary combat that would soon turn into a national battle on her doorstep. Part of the western Vügînian heritage out of which Davis forged her most provocative social fiction of the early 1860s naturaily incorporated a significant dose of scepticism regarding abolitionists and their aggressive rhetoric along with an abiding comection to the opposing ideology of proslavery theorists and novelists. Chapter Three Sbifting Borders and Subversive Tactics: Convention and Controversy in "Lire in the Iron Mih" and M~rgre~Howth

One of the most striking recognitions in Davis's work of the tensions between the

Northem and Southern outlook on social injustice occurs as an exchange between a husband and wife in an 1873 story published in The Youth 's Cornpanion, "The Doctor's

Story." Reniming fiom a late-night visit to pay their poor washenvornan, the doctor and his wife have the following conversation:

"There is a more tragic story belonging to that poor washerwornan than you find in many a novel," said Melicent, as we went up the alley home.

'1 can easily believe it. She said she had beea a slave."

Just here 1 touched on the one sore spot between Melicent and myself 1 had ken brought up an abolitionist, at the feet of Wendel1 Phillips; she, bom a Virginian, took her politics geographically.

"Of course," she replied, coolly. '? rnight know you would look at it in that light. As if there were not just as wretched histones behind any of these shanty doors, belonging to free-born Dutch and Irish!"'

Taking into account the author's cultural beginnings and her later mmiage to a staunch

Philadelphian abolitionist, it is hard not to read this scene autobiographically as an exarnp!e of perhaps many such discussions which may have taken place between

Southem-bred Davis and her husband, Clarke. Indeed, the incongruous exclamation mark following the wife's "cool" reply seems to betray the author's emotional investment

'Davis, "The Doctor's Story," Youth 's Cornpanion 46.36 (Sept 1873): 28 1.

99 in her character's prosouthem convictions. These convictions receive Mer

endorsement within the story when the doctor, at the very beginning of the narrative,

gnimbles that his Virginian wife drags him out of bed "to satisfy her inexorable sense of

justice" (281). Later in the story, which traces the pst-war reunion of the

washerwoman's family, Peter, the invalid husband, echoes proslavery literary

conventions in his softened description of the initiai sepadon. He stresses, with some

dignity, that his former owner was "a gemplem; he want no slave-breeder, sah" (28 1) and

he points out that his wife was given the choice of remaining either with her husband or

her baby. Remarks Peter, "It was very considerate an' like a gemplen, 1 tought" (281).

"The Doctor's Story" emphasizes, as does so much of Davis's fiction, the dangers

of assurning a fixed rhetorical stance on social issues. Like the doctor's wife, Davis "took

her politics geographically," and her unique geographical vantage point typically

challenges her readers' easy assumptions-about slavery, about industrialism, and about

Amencan myth-making. Two radical works from the early 1860s that established Davis

as a social critic and Iiterary voice to be reckoned with speak with subversive power from

the borders where Northem and Southem attitudes towards labour and refonn intersect

with and confiont one another.' "Life in the ïron Mills" (1 86 1) invokes the rhetoric of

'~lthoughDavis is bea known today as the author of "Life in the Iron Mills," she may have been better known in her day as the author of Margref Howth, which she herself aggressively marketed by sending presentation copies to "two or three" prominent New England authors (Davis, letter to James Fields, 2 1 Jan 118621, Richard Harding Davis Collection [#6109], Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Vuginia Library). Although contemporary responses to "Life in the Iron Mills" have proved difficult to locate (short stories not undergohg the sarne review process as novels), Murger Howth was written up favourably in several respectable journals, including the Continental Monthfy. Louisa May Alcon recorded in her journal meeting "Miss Rebecca Harding, author of 'Margret Howth,' 101

wage slavery to present industrial poverty, usually portrayed by Americans as an Old

World problern, as a social injustice threatening the very roots of Amencan identity.

Margret Howth ( 1862), a kind of sequel to the protest fiction of "Life in the Iron Mills,"

similady concentrates on exposing the many sides of slavery in Amenca, uncovering an

urban "battle-field" beyond the ken of war-time jingoism. However, whereas "Life in

the Iron Mills" deftly manipulates incendiary polemic to create a safe space for

controversy, Margret Howrh collapses under the pressure of conflicting viewpoints and a

pervasive pessimisrn about Amencan democracy's chances for survival.

It is remarkable that Davis wrote both of these potent exposés of American

industrial Society while she was still, by her own confession, a junior writer, whiIe she

was helping to manage a busy household, and while her hometown was in a state of

extreme turbulence. Both works were written on the edge of the Civil War (Margret

Howth literally) and yet they carefuily avoid entanglement with the war at large.

Margret Howth actually seems to present its author as a kind of literary Copperhead3:

"Do not cal1 us traitors, then," Davis writes, "Who choose to be cool and silent through

the fever of the hour .... Do not cal1 me a traitor, if 1 dare weakly to hint that there are yet

other characters besides that of Patriot in which a man may appear creditably in the great

masquerade, and not blush when it is over; or if 1 tell you a story of To-Day, in which

which has made a stir, and is very good" (The Joumls ofLouisa May Alcoft, eds. Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy [Boston: Little, Brown, 19891: 109).

Richard Orr Curry documents the significant Copperhead influence in western Virginia in A House Divided: A Study of Sîatehood Poliria and the Copperhead Movement in West Virginia (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1964). 102

there shall be no bloody glue..." (5). Merthan focus on the action of the war, Davis

deliberately retreats fiom military battle scenes and focusses in her most imovative, most

strident early writing on the rhetorical combat over Amenca's socio-economic identity.

"Life in the Iron Mills," published in April 186 1, the month Amenca tottered on

the very precipice of war, enacts Philip Fisher's notion that mid-nineteenth-centwy

American writing instances a "civil war" between various rhetorics of representation,'

finding its radical voice in a contest of voices. Davis uses the rhetonc of the defenders of

Southem civiiization to challenge the narrow extremism of Nonhem abolitionists, but she

also tums the same rhetoric against itself to question the very notion of Southern

exceptiondism. Throughout the story, Davis treads a fine line between satisfj4ng and

offending Northem and Southern readen. Circula and ambivalent image patterns,

strategies of geographic and temporal displacement, and an enigmatic silence at the core

of her text constitute complicated persuasion tactics fiamed by Davis's bi-focal vision of

a hctured audience.

In ways both direct and indirect, Davis gestures throughout "Life in the Iron

Mills" to the heritage of social criticism found in apologies for slavery. The very first

characters to appear on stage are "dninken Irishrnen" (3), those stereotypicd "white

niggers" of proslavery diatribes. Significantly, the men are smoking "Lynchburg

tobacco," a detail that irnmediately connects the crowd of western industrial workers to

the black slaves of Vuginia's central plantation region. Also noteworthy is the language

' Philip Fi~her,~~Introduction,"The New American Srudies: Essaysfrom Representations, ed. Philip Fisher (Berkeley: U of California P, 199 1) xv. 1O3

Davis uses to describe the miIl workers' "massed, vile, slirny lives, like those of the

torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-butt" (4), which foreshadows the reptilian imagery

she would later use to describe the deformed slave pianist, "Blind Tom."

As Judith Fetterley has pointed out, Davis presents her narrative tour of the

industrial town and its mills as a kind of local colour experience.' Mitchell and the other

visitors function as a sightseeing group explo~gwhat is to them a foreign, even exotic,

environment. Before the outsiders even arrive on the scene, the narrative voice ironically

contrasts their touristic attitude, which she goads her 'diletfante" (4) reader for sharing,

with Deb's native perspective. Notes the nanator: "Perhaps, if she had possessed an

artist's eye, the picturesque oddity of the scene might have made her step stagger less, and

the path seem shorter; but to her the mills were only 'summat deilish to look at by night"'

(8). Mitchell's visit to the mill, undertaken "merely for amusement" (12), resembles

quite specifically the particular kind of local colour experience that forms the basis of plot

in most proslavery novels, narnely the leisurely visit of the Yankee sceptic to discover the

"picturesque" virtues of plantation culture. According to the narrator, Mitchell is "a

stranger in the city,-spending a couple of months in the borden of a Slave State, to study

the institutions of the South" (13). in this case, however, the "institution" under

inspection is not the "peculiar" one the scenario usually dictates.

One of Mitchell's fellow tourists, the journalist, also represents a familiar cliché

and hints at the narrator's emotional syrnpathy with a Southem perspective. By

'Judith Fetterley, Provisions: A Readerfiom Nineteenth-Century American Women (BIoomington: Indiana UP, 1985): 3 1 1. 1O4 descnbing the journalkt as "a sharp peering little Yankee" (12), the narrative voice seems to take on a distinct Southern drawl. The mill' s owner, Kirby, who plays the role of the tour conductor and acts as a kind of local colour narrator within the story's Iarger narrative, also reflects a familiar Southem stereotype. He embodies in the flesh the irresponsible capitalist villain of proslavery apologetics. Like Fitzhugh's exemplary cannibal and Peterson's Mr. Sharpe, who refùses to admit his dying errand boy has any right to ask him for medical assistance, Kirby represents the antithesis of the benevolent plantation patnarch. As if to make his archetypal role even more obvious, Davis puts in

Kirby's mouth an econornic philosophy that Fitzhugh and Hughes wouid have been pleased to cite as validation for theu accusations. Maintains the mil1 owner, "What has the man who pays pands] money to do with their souis' concems, more than the grocer or butcher who takes it?" 17).

We hardly need Mitchell to point out that by borrowing the language of Pontius

Pilate ("1 wash my hands of al1 social problems,-slavery, caste, white or black" [16]),

Kirby vilifies himself. He also vilifies the entire mode of capitaiist exchange, which the

South pretended to oppose. Through Kirby, Davis ironically presents the slaveholders' critique of the Northem "fiee" economy in a nutshell. Not only the capitalist factory owner but also the grocer and the butcher are guilty of participating in what Marx would later describe as the alienation of the worker. From a proslavery point of view, Kirby is right in his excuse; the fault is systemic. Davis again points out the essential hud the wage system perpetrates on "fiee" workers in Hugh's cnsis scene. As the mil1 worker 105 contemplates the bank note that would seem to offer a solution to al1 his problems, al1 he can see is "a little blotted slip of paper, nothing in itself' (23).

This tuming point in the story also duplicates a common rhetûncal moment in proslavery fiction and prose, the inevitabte discussion over the hypotheticai "fieedom" of the wage labourer. As we have seen, the debate over the relative "liberty" of black and white slaves constituted a stapie in the diet of prosouthem apologetics. So farniliar was the convention that Maria Mchtosh offers a spoof on the traditional theme in The Lofp and the Lowly. Her devoted slave, Daddy Cato, delights a group of hectoring abolitionists by describing the terrible bondage he has been under al1 his life: "Bondage for pue. maussa, we al1 in bondage to bery hard maussa, work we day and night, neber stop till we fa11 down and dead; he feed we wid husk and make we back sore wid he heaby burden." To the crowd's surprise and dismay, however, he asserts that the cruel tyrant under whom he has served is not a human master but rather the cruel and universai despot. "SN' (vol. 2,98-99).

Despite the comic punch line, Mclntosh's point is a serious one: slavery, in her view, is a ubiquitous phenornenon. Iust as the Irish shanty-dwellers in Page's Uncle

Robin appear more enslaved to poverty than the contented plantation workers, Hugh's moment of decision seems to put him in a situation more desperate than that of the bond slave. Hugh's desire for liberation from the drudgery of wage slavery echoes abolitionist fiction's typical spiritual awakening of the chattel slave on the verge of escape: "A consciousness of power stirred within him. He stood up. A man,-he thought, stretching out his haads,-fkee to work, to live to love! Free! His right!" (24).6 The narrator's

comment on Hugh's thoughts makes even more clear the counterfeit nature of the white

wage worker's nominal "fieedom." As Hugh fingers the money, the narrator tells us, he

succumbs to the b'temptation"and "lap[s] it in fancied rights, in drearns of improved

existences, drifting and endless as the cloud-seas of color" (24).

The "rights" Hugh fancies for himself are substantially the same as those Stowe's

Afiican-Arnerican escapees al1 seek-the power of self-detennination-and the crime to

which he is '9empted" seems a perfect equivalent as well. Hugh's decision to take

Mitchell's property is essentially no different than a bond slave's decision to rob his

master by stealing himself away. And yet, in Hugh's case, the outlook seems bleak, since

his "drearn~'~are "drifiing" and fanciful, mere cotton-candy coloured clouds of fantasy. If

Hugh were a black slave living "in the borders of a Slave State" on the edge of the Ohio

River, escape from bondage wouid be readily practicable. However, because the "Slave

State" in which Davis's hero exists has metaphorical rather than geographical

implications, here is no such easy way out.

6Compare, for instance, Madison Washington's ruminations in Fredenck Douglass's Heroic Slave (1853): "But what is fieedom to me, or 1 to it? 1 am a slave,-born a slave, an abject slave.-even before 1 made part of this breathing world, the scourge was platted for my back; the fetters were forged for my limbs. How mean a thing am 1. That accursed and crawling snake, that miserable reptile, that has just glided into its slimy home, is fieer and better off than 1. He escaped my blow, and is sa& But here am 1, a man,-yes, a man!-with thoughts and wishes, with powers and faculties as fat as angel's flight above that hated reptile,-yet he is my superior and scorns to own me as his master, or to stop to take my blows .... Can it be that 1 dure not nui away? Perish the thoughrt, 1 dure do any thing which may be done by another .... Liberty 1 will have, or die in the attempt to gain it" (Thtee Classic Afiican-American Novels, ed. William L. Andrews [New York: Penguin-Mentor, 19901: 27). 1O7

Repercussions of the proslavery argument in "Life in the iron Mills" thus enable

Davis to question the very viabiiity of the American Dream. The very notion of universai

potential for social and economic advancement in a fke labour society, so dear to the

abolitionist argument, becornes suspect. Even Kirby sardonically recognizes the

limitations of what Eugene Genovese calls the Northern rhetoric of "bourgeois

individualism"' when he tauats Mitchell: "1 have heard you cal1 our Amencan system a

ladder which any man can scaie. Do you doubt it?" (16). The open manipulation of the

votes of so-called "free" men by Kirby's father mercalls into question the entire

democratic system on which Arnerica's economy is based. The mono of the mil1 hands'

political Party, "Our country's hope" (13), is blealcly ironic.

Davis's doubts about the plausibility of the concept of so-called "progress"' in a

capitalistic, industrial Amenca Merresonate through the imagery of "Life in the iron

Mills." Central to her effort to try, like Caroline Rush, to "tum the tide" of abolitionist

syrnpathy is the prominent symbol of the river that runs through the middle of the smoky

town. As Richard Hood has pointed out, water imagery mingles with descriptions of the

'Genovese, The Sfaveholders ' Dilemma 49.

Davis, like many Southemea, opposed throughout her career what Genovese calls the modem "cult of progress" (Slrneholders ' Dilemma 13), which she saw as the triumph of the money-grubbing spirit over traditional domestic values. Her late jounialism makes this stance especially clear. in a June 1903 article for the Independent, she vents her disenchantment with '%e incessant whooping of this triurnphant To-day" and wonders what Amenca has lost to progress. Among the apparent casualties, she concludes, are farnily pride, religion, fiendship, and woman's sense of domestic mission ("Lost," Independent 55 [25 June 19031: 1504- 1 507). ubiquitous smoke throughout "Life in the Iron Mills" and permeates the story9 The Ohio

lies at the center of the story's opening scene and of its symbolism: "The river, du11 and

tawny-colored, (la belle rivière!) drags itseif sluggishiy dong, tired of the heavy weight

of bats and coal-barges. What wonder? When 1 was a child, 1 used to fancy a look of

weary, dumb appeal upon the face of the negro-like river slavishly bearing its burden day

after day" (3). In Davis's hands, the "sluggish and black" river (8) (she ironically uses the

French name for the Ohio, "'la belle rivière") becomes a powerful metaphor for the

oppressed condition of the "slow Stream of hurnan life" the narrator sees daily "creeping

past" to the mills. (3) But Davis does not stop at associating the plight of the white miIl

hands with that of the African-Amencan. In an extended passage, the narrator goes on to

revise the earlier cornparison:

My fancy about the river was an idle one: it is no type of such a life. What if it be stagnant and slimy here? It knows that beyond there waits for it odorous sunIight,~uaintold gardens, dusky with soft, green foliage of apple-trees, and flushing crimson with roses,-air, and fields, and mountains. The fiinue of the Welsh puddler passing just now is not so pleaçant. To be stowed away after his grimy work is done, in a hole in the muddy graveyard and after that,-nor air, nor green fields, nor curïous roses (4).

The brown, "negro-like" river has access to an old-fashioned, lush, naturally vital world.

The slave-like river, in other words, can still escape into the pastoral realm of the

agriculturd plantation South, that "old," "almost worn out" dream-world to which the

narrator looks back wistfully (3). For the white "slaves" of industry, on the other hand,

there is no such no such compensating vision, no such hope of escape.

9Richard Hood, "Framing A 'Life in the Iron Mills,"' Studies in American Fiction 23.1 (1995): 76. The àrearn vision of pastoral fantasy that shimmers like a mirage throughout "Life

in the iron Mills" has evoked a great deal of scholarly controversy. Many cntics have

experienced logical difficulty in attempting to reconcile the story's grim depictions of

working-class poverty and its naturalistic pessimism with the caged canary's hackneyed

"dream of green fields and sunshine" (3)' with Deb's retreat into pastoral tranquillity, and

with the glowing "promise of the Dawn"(34) that flickers over the bal scene."

Davis's much-bemoaned "romantic" optimism does not, however, suddenly rear its

compromising head at the story's conclusion, as some have implied . The story's

epigraph, taken fiom Tennyson's In Memoriam, the record of a soul's spirituai evolution

fiom despair to faith, establishes a teleology of hope before the story's action even

begins." Davis's story, like Tennyson's poem, breaks ground by exploring in

'O~ndrewSchreiber, for instance, is suspicious of the glamourizing "painterly touches" of the closing paragraph ("An Unknown Infiastructure: Gender, Production, and Aesthetic Exchange in Rebecca Harding Davis's 'Life in the iron Mills,"' Legacy 1 1.2 [1994]: 1 13). Like Sharon Harris, Schreiber sees the story's radiant ending as severely compromised by the grim realism and trenchant ironies that precede it (Harris 55-56). Deborah Carlin has added to the atmosphere of critical dissatisfaction by raising the farniliar lament that Davis, like many nineteenth-cenniry women writers, fdls short of suggesting any practical solution and offers only stoic "Christian passivity" instead ("'What Methods Have Brought Blessing': Discourses of Reform in Philanthropie Literature," The [Other] Antericon Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers, ed. Joyce W. Warren pew Brunswick NJ: Rutgers UP,19931 65). "In the end," writes Pfaelzer, "because the narrator remains trapped in her house, her womanhood, and her middle-class aestheticism, she fails to answer the 'temble durnb question.' She is Davis's first portrait of a romantic self whose masterfid perspective has deteriorated into an image of female isolation" (Pfaelzer, Parlor Radical 52).

"The Tennyson quotation is, in fact, a loose paraphrase of two separate lyrics fiom In Memoriam. The last two lines of the paraphrase corne fiom one of the most readily recognizable sections of the poem, in which the poet grapples with the threat posed to his belief by the emerging idea of evolution, the ominous concept of a 'Nature, red in tooth and claw" (56,l. 14). Stniggling to see beyond naturalistic determinism, the pet cries: "O life as futile, then, as fil!/ O for thy voice to soothe and bless! / What hope of answer, or redress? / Behind the veil, behind 110

excruciating detail the social and spiritual desperation of the modem age, but it also

remains fmly rooted in an alternative, pre-modem vision. in Davis's case, the pre-

modem alternative accentuates her traditionai Christian values but emphasizes just as

obviously her regional identity. The hop she expresses for America's future appears

rooted in emotional sympathy with the literary tradition espousing slave-supported

Southern pastordism. l2

The way Davis portrays &cm-Amencan characters in "Life in the Iron Mills"

provides strong testimony of her amaction to the tucolic Southem ideal premised on an

agriculturai, slave-driven economy. Davis seems to insinuate throughout "Life in the Iron

Mills" that the condition of the white mil1 workers is not merely equivalent to but actually

worse than that of black slaves. The figures of the two mulatto characten who appear in

the story serve, like the river, as foils to a situation more desperate than legal bondage.

The fiee mulatto woman who tries to urge the hunchback, Deb, to accornpany her on a

spree is the most drunken and violent of Deb's degraded cohorts. She could easily appear

in a proslavery novel as a typical illustration of the miserable state of blacks outside

slavery's supposedly protective bounds. The woman's wretched condition contrasts with

that of her double-the tall, attractive, laughing mulatto girl Hugh Wolfe watches fiom his

the veil" (11.24-27). Although Davis's narrator struggles throughout "Life in the Iron Mills" to see beyond recuning veils-the "nightmare fog" (4) the ''partial1 y veiled" fumaces (7) and "veiled crime" (9) of the mills, the curtain that hides the korl statue in the narrator's library, the clouds of Hugh's daydream-the hingwords from Tennyson anticipate an eventud penetration.

"Myview here differs sharply with Sharon Harris's conviction that Davis debunks the romantic myth of "pastoral possibility" propagated by romantics both North and South (Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis 3 1). prison celi near the end of the story. The narrator presents the girl to us through Hugh's

envious eyes:

A fiee, hstep, a clear-cut olive face, with a scarlet turban tied on one side, dark, shining eyes, and on the head the basket poised, filled with hitand flowers, under which the scarlet turban and bright eyes looked out half-shadowed. The picntre caught his eye. Zt was good to see a face like that. He would try to-morrow, and cut one like it. To-morrow! He threw down the tin, trembling, and covered his face with his hands. When he Iooked up again, the daylight was gone (30).

Hugh is attracted to the mulatto by his artistic sensitivity to the colourfûl "picnire"

she forms, but he is equaily moved because, with her bold step and shining eyes, she

seems a portrait of liberty. While Hugh languishes behind prison bars, perhaps moaning

with his fellow prisoners the spirituals of white slaves, 'Yhem vile songs of the mills"

(27), the mulatto servant fairly glows with health and energy. Ironically, though, the girl's

legd statu is actually ambiguous. Because we are only told that she walks behind her

"mistress" (30) we cannot tell whether she is a slave or a fiee servant. However, the

basket of fruit and flowers she camies on her head seems to make her a walking portrait of

a prosouthem literary stereotype-the happy, well-fed, wellclothed rural plantation slave.

Davis builds up to this salient contrast between wage slavery and bond slavery by

highlighting throughout "Life in the Iron Mills" the whiteness of her white slaves."

Although al1 the faces in that vile "stream of hurnan life" (3) that crawls daily to the mills

appear blackened with smoke, undemeath the filth of the Welsh immigrants, the narrator

"Roediger argues that the labour movement itself typically emphasized the whiteness of wage slaves, making racism an inherent part of its lobby. "White slavery," rather than "wage slavery," was, for instance, the terni most comrnonly used by the labour press of the 1840s to descnbe the oppression of fiee workers (Roediger 72-73). 112

believes, pumps "a pure, unmixed blood," manifest in "slight angular bodies and sharply-

cut facial lines" (5). The racial purity of Hugh's young cousin, Janey, shows in her white

arm (21) and her "real Milesian eyes" (7). The cursory sketch of Hugh's father describes

him as a "pale, meek Iittle man with a white face"(6). As for Deb, both her body and her

life are consistently described as pathetically white: she is a "faded thing," her eyes are

"pale," and her face is "washed-out-lookingy' (9). The narrator sums up her entire

existence as a "colorless life" (9).

In his fmai moments, Hu&, too, is emphatically white. The narrator tells us twice

that the sukide dies bathed in "pearly" moonlight (3 1). The white glow over Hugh's

death scene makes the tragedy of his wasted life ail the more stark and jarring as the

moonlight's %de of white splendor" illuminates the "black nauseous stream of bIood dripping slowly fiom the pallet to the floor" (32). That gruesome "black stream" returns the reader to the dark "negro-like" river of the story's opening and the conspicuous contrast it implies between the pastoral benefits of plantation slavery and the utter hopelessness of white wage slavery.

The shocking whiteness of suffering in "Life in the Iron Mills" is also demonstrated much earlier in the story in Mitchell's reaction to Hugh's astonishing creation, the korl sculpture. Initially, we note, the narrator defines "korl" as "a light, porous substance, of a delicate, waxen, flesh-colored tinge"(l0). "Flesh-colored" is, of course. an arnbiguous adjective. Later, however, Mitchell's sudden reaction to the statue accentuates the korl woman's startling whiteness: "Mitchell started back, half-fiightened, as. suddenly turning a corner, the white figure of a woman faced him in the darkness,-a Il3 woman, white, of giant proportions, crouching on the ground, her arms flung out in some

wild gesture of waming" (14). Towards the close of the story, the narrator notes that the

expression on the sculpture's face is similar to that of "horses dying under the lash" (34).

Thus, in more ways than one the most fundamentai symbol of "Life in the Iron

MillsY'-this giant "woman, white9'-like the symbolic river, deliberately invokes the

apparition of "white slavery" which angry proslavery novelists tried to bring to the

forefiont of the slavery debate.

Davis's invocation of the Iiterary conventions of proslavery prose enables her to

draw on a ready-made, fully-developed arsenal of rhetorid weapons in her radical

assault against the demonic "machinery of system" (7) operating her infernal iron rnills.

What makes Davis's attack on indusûial capitalism such an astonishing performance and

indeed "one of the revolutionary documents in American writing,"" however, is that she

siniates her dark satanic rnills arnong the South's own green hills rather than in England or the Yankee North. If we define a literary convention as a pre-agreed understanding between writer and audience, Davis cunningly twists the desof the contract. in her attzmpt to reach a tnily national public with her exposé of a distinctly American instance of social injustice, Davis adrninisters a kind of literary shock therapy by precariously balancing cornfortable reader expectations with stanling reversais and counter indictments.

Because the story's precise setting is not definitively established until the narrative is well under way (the narrator's reference to the "borders of a Slave State" cornes approximately one third into the story), the first hint that Davis targets a problem

that transcends regional boundarîes occurs before those boundaries are Wly established

in the text. Since Pittsburgh and Wheeling both sit on the Ohio River and both were

home to a highly cornpetitive iron industry in the 1830s, and since the cinuiken Irïshrnen

lounging in the story3 opening scene were typically seen as constituting a Northern

immigration problern, Davis's scenes of oppression seem at first to be part of the

landscape of the industriai Northwest rather than the Upper South. ïhe narrator quickly

points out, however, that North and South are CO-conspiratorsin the economic

enslavement she depicts. Whether the fictional "Kirby & John's rolling mills" are located

North or South of Mason and Dixon's line becomes a moot point once the narrator

reminds us that "They took the great order for the Lower Virginia railroads there last

winter" (5). The question of the industrial mills' exact geographical location aside, the

plantation South, as a primary customer, appears a silent partner in the suffering they

cause. From a reverse perspective, Deb's employment in a cotton mil1 further strengthens

the notion of complicity between two systems that pretend to stand in the strength of their

fundamental opposition to one another. If Deb works in a Northern factory-as the reader

initially has every reason to believe, given the usual literary context nurturing the

depiction of industrial poverty-then she owes her misery in large measure to Northern

manufacturers' equivocal participation in the South's slave-driven cotton ec~nomy.'~

l5 Harris notes that "Deborah's labonng in a cotton mil1 in a border state closely aligns her with her enslaved Southem counterparts" (Rebecca Harding Davis 33). The complicity of Northem capitalists in Southem slavery is ofien vaguely pointed out by prosouthem novelists. The peace of the idyllic plantation in Page's Uncle Robin, for instance, is threatened by the heartless tactics of invisible Northem creditors. Likewise, the financiai difficulties that tear the 115

Had Davis chosen to concentrate, as she initiaily seems to, on the hardships

endured by Northem wage slaves, "Life in the Iron Mills" would stand as one of the most

radical works of its the, more focussed and more explicit in its anti-industrial protest

than any of the well-known texts in the proslavery heritage upon which it builds. Because

Davis chooses, however, to tum on its head the very accusatory tradition on which she

builds, "Life in the hnMills" serves as a landmark literary event in the development of a

truly national, tmly modem vein of American social protest literature. By setting her

industrial nightmare in the South, Davis avoids completely alienating her Northem-based

Atlantic audience but she dso, to use one of her favorite metaphors, unveils a hideous

aspect of Amencan civilization that defied the popular myths of both Northem and

Southern patriots.

Davis broke important new ground by laying literary siege to the injustices

perpetrated in a specifically industrial setting on specifically Amencan soil. Despite the

strong anti-industrial critique established in proslavery fiction and prose, most

prosouthem novelists, even those most inclined to take an offensive approach to selC-

defense, had chosen to highlight Northern abuses in the domestic rather than the

commercial reaim. Thus the rnembers of Caroline Rush's Harley family suffer one by

one from the cruelty of individual rather than corporate masters and mistresses. Rush

mainly aims to uncover the hidden abuses heaped on bound apprentices, and this strategy

enables her to draw a particularly neat allegory between Northem and Southem types of

family plantation apart in Peterson's Cabin and Parlor seem somehow linked to the suspicious machinations of a Northem firm, Skin and Flint. 116

"bondage." Although Peterson's unfortunate Horace is employed in a commercial capacity, his status as office boy similarly fits into a convenient pseudo-domestic scenario. Because Horace is so young and because he works for a small business rather than a factory, his employer's refusal to assist hirn in his hour of need seems a plain failure to live up to a master's paternalistic responsibiiity. Other litemy defenders of slavery who appeal to prosouthem sympathy by illustrating the maltreamient of freemen in Northem cities, such as John Page (Uncle Robin) and W.G. Smith (Life ut the South). also find their negative exemplars among the ranks of poverty-strîcken domestic servants rather than factory labourers. (Smith's misguided Uncle Tom, for instance, trades the easy bonds of his Southern master for a life of misery in New York state as a servant in a village inn.)

In Aunt Phillis 's Cabin, Mary Eastman culls her examples of capitalist injustice fiom more varied sources, but she provides few details to substantiate her claims. In fact, most of her accusations against the North appear in the form of hearsay. The reader does not witness the abw directly but simply overhears snippets of traveller gossip. A

Southemer tells his fellow stage passengers, for instance, that he once saw an Irish servant slapped by her mistress in a Northem bakery and insulted as a "white nigger"

(72). In the same manner, the narrator claims to have met a Northem raiIway superintendent whose fist was "cailoused with knocking down Irishmen" (265).

Although one of Eastman's Southem informants reports having met sights in Northern cities that nvalled Dickensian scenes of urban squalor (95), he does not render the wretchedness concrete through detail. Similarly, Eastman's narrator speaks assertively of "the evils of the factory system in England, or the factory and apprenticeship system in

our own country" (277) but fails to name those "evils" more precisely.

In most proslavery writing, then, Northern abominations against fiee workers,

especially industriai workers, remain seemingly unspeakable, or at least unspoken. The

reticence of Eastman's witnesses is typical; as a lump sum, Southern charges against

Northern industriai society are myriad but vague. When slavery's literary supporters do

hoid Southem pastodism up against the capitaiists' gehema, they usuaiiy set their

industrial nightmares in England rather than in Yankeedom. Even Grayson, who goes to

poetic lengths to illustrate the homfic adversity perpetrated under the free labour system,

takes al1 his examples of "dninken hireling[sJW(25), chiid miners, prostitutes. and

empressed sailors fiom the Old ~ountry.'~Robert Criswell ( "Uncle Tom 's Cubin "

conrrasfed with Buckingham H.typically aims his rhetoncal torpedoes at the English

rather than the Yankee ship of state when he declares:

It is a well known fact that in the manufacturing and mining districts of England, (especiaily the latter,) the poor are obliged to endure more hardships than we cm imagine. There are men working in some of the mines who have rarely beheld the light of day, there have they ken brought into the world, and there, without education of any kind, have they been obliged to work, some of them harnassed, like dogs, to a cart, and crawling on theù hands and feet through the dismd chambers of these damp cavems, till an eariy death terminates their miserable existence. O shame, where is thy blush? Can it be possible that such things are suffered in the nineteenth cenwy? And by the very people, too, who presume to lecture us on the treatment of our slaves! The two subjects should not be mentioned on the same day-no, not even in the same year (40).

16Grayson's"Preface" credits "English authorities" for his "facts relating to the poverty, vice, brutality, and ignorance of the British laborer" (xiii). 118

Fitzhugh, who only ever made one trip North (to debate Wendel1 Phillips in

1855)" also launches his attack on Northem masters with ammunition largely supplied

by foreign sources. He documents in detail the inadequacy of the English poor laws, the

plight of the English industrial worker, and England's hordes of homeless beggars.

Typically, his chapter concemïng "Distressed Needlewomen" features the "immortal

lines" of the English pet Thomas Hd's"Song of the Sbirtn as its emotional

centerpiece (150). As the literature sarnple fiom the meeling Intelligencer demonstrates

in miniature, the charge "Physician, heal thyself!" was most consistently directed not

against the Yankee North but against abolitionist Britain.

As Marcus CunlifTe has pointed out, this strategy of using Britain rather than

Boston or New York as the officiai opposition had several advantages. First, it enabled

Southemers to defend their perceived rights without seeming to threaten national unity.

Second, it presented an argument that appeaied to Northem industriaiists as well as

Southem planters. The concentration on Britain's failings enabted Northerners to sustain

the traditional utopian vision of the New World as the land of plentifid opportunity for al1

workers. The myth of Arnerican exceptionalism served both slavery's defenders and its

accusen well. As Davis notes in "David Gaunt?" "it was an American's birthright to jeer

at the English."" In the mid- 1800s, Arnerica still defined itself mainly in opposition to

the former mother-country and the Anglo-American relationship, according to Cunliffe,

"C. Vann Woodward, "George Fitzhugh, Sui Generis," Connibals AU! xiii.

""David Gaunt,"Atiantic Monthly 10 (Sept-0ct 1862), rpt. in A Rebecca Harding Davis Reader 56; hereafter cited parenthetically. Il9 was "hedsomewhat dramatically, indeed melodramatically, above al1 as a contest of rival principles, republican and m~narchical."'~There were, then, "psychologicai" as well as politicai advantages. Cunliffe suggests, in the rhetorical act that ailowed one '30 transfer one's imtated anxiety to the British scene.""

As obviously as Davis taps into the fhliar language of proslavery apologetics, however, she refws to take advantage of the usual ernotional escape hatch by

''transferring" her condemnation of industrial abuse to the conventional, comfortably distant tyrant-the superannuated, oppressive English social structure. Rather, she muddies the rhetorical currents that, like the syrnbolic river, flow through her story by locating her wage slaves firmly in Amencan-and not just Amencan, but Southem-soil.

Even once we take into account the weighty heritage of proslavery writing and thought,

Olsen's demand that we consider Davis a radical innovator continues to deserve consideration. As much as previous authors fiom her native region strove to illuminate the plight of the urban worker, Davis broke significant new gound by depicting the plight of the industrial worker in the American factory. The down-trodden lives she brought into her literature constituted Amencan originals because they had local colour and startlingly local relevance.

Ironically, then, part of the radicalism of "Life in the Iron Mills" is that it disturbs exceptionalist assumptions about both America's labour history and its literary history.

In the incendiary atmosphere of the spring of Fort Surnter, Davis flouted political caution by vaïting about Arnenca's labour problems as if they duplicated England's. Perhaps one

reason existing scholarship continues to waffie on the position of Davis's work in

American letters (is she a Hawthornesque Romancer or a pre-Howellsian Reaiist? A

Naturalist or a Sentimentalist?) is that her work, despite its strong regional influences, ist

in a fûndamental sense, profoundly unAmerican. Davis's grim portrait of industrial

poverty owes much more to the tradition of the English social novel than it does to Ttte

ScarZer Letrer or Moby-Dick or even The Monk of Monk Hall (which is concerned more

with the sensational depiction of moral pollution than with the nitty-gritty details of

everyday working-class life).2'

Davis herself was consciously aware of her debt to the British social novel. In a

letter to James Fields conceming the soon-to-be-published Margrer Howih, she womes,

probably in reference to Shirley: "You did not think 1 irnitated Charlotte Brontë, did

you?"" Recognizing her writing as an anomaiy on the American scene, Davis repeatedly

"In her treatment of life in the Arnerican mills, Davis obviously echoes earlier British novels that exposed the injustices experienced in English factones. She greatly adrnired Dickens, for instance, and was delighted to attend one of his public readings during his tour of the States in 1868 @avis, letter to Annie Fields, 1 Mar [1868], Richard Harding Davis Collection [Ml 091, C 1ifion Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Li brary). Commentators have pointed out specific resemblances between the smoggy opening of "Life in the Iron Mills7' and the smoke of Coketown or the foggy London of Bleak House (William Grayburn, "The Major Fiction of Rebecca Harding Davis," PhD diss., Pemsylvania State U, 1965.4; Hesford 78).

"Davis, letter to James Fields, 9 Aug [1861], Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6109). Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Speciai Collections Deputment, University of Virginia Library. Traditionally, cntics have taken this comment as a hint to look for similarities between Margrer Hoivrh and Jane Eyre (see, for instance, Pfaelzer, Parlor Radical 59). Strikingly close resemblances in plot and character suggest, however, that Davis is aimost certainly thinking here of Brontë's later novel, which takes place in a northem mil1 town and focusses on scenes of industrial stri fe. asked Fields and other publishers and fiends about the possibility of publishing in

England. As earl y as September 186 1, she began soliciting information fiom James

Fields about the protocol of transatlantic publication? in May of the following year, she

voiced her £?utration with the limits involved in writing for a American audience, when

she told Fields: "If 1 write a story about this war as 1 wish! And 1 could do that for

English reader~."~*

Davis's portraya1 in "Life in the Iron Mills" of the ongoing civil warfare between

the Arnerican industriai system and its exploited white "slaves" seems hampered, or at

Ieast complicated, by the manoeuvres required to bring home to the American public the

harsh reality of industrial wretchedness. The narrator's eyewitness authority

notwithstanding, a pattern of rupture, displacement, and obscured silences characterizes

Davis's efforts to tread the fine line between impressing and alienating her native

audience.

As if to draw attention to the delicacy of her task, Davis accentuates geographical

displacement in her story. She places her story in a setting that is at once easily located

and yet indeterminate. The town is easily recognizable as Wheeling, nationally farnous

')Davis, letter to James Fields, 9 Sept 118611 Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6109), Clifion Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library.

'4Davis, letter to James Fields, 1 May [1862] Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6109), Clifion Waller Barrett Library, Specid Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. As late as 1877, Davis was still trying to publish her yet-controversial work abroad. She wrote journalist Kate Field, an old acquaintance, to ask for advice on trying to publish a six-month serial (A Law Unto Herselj) simultaneously in Lippincott 3 and an English magazine (Davis, letter to Kate Field, 3 Feb [1877], courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library). "Blind Black Tom" would remain, however, Davis's only transatlantic publication (AZZ the Year Round 8 [Oct 18621: 126-29, also published as "Blind Tom," Atlantic Monrhly 10 wov 18621: 580-85). 122

by the tirne of Davis's writing as "Nail City," but the nanator leaves it nameless. The

Ohio serves as a definite landmark, yet the larger sening seems nebulous-smoky, fog-

enshrouded, overcast by a sky that is "muddy, Bat, immovable" (3). Although the

narrator can see clearly enough into events of the past to sketch the "outline" (4) of

Hugh's life, Davis's story-teller seems to have trouble taking the bearings of the

immediate situation. Details of the henarrative's setting are blurry and barely visible to the narrator, who confesses, "1 open the window, and, lookhg out, can scarcely see through the rain the grocer's shop opposite" (3).

Davis situates her iron works in a special, cloud-enveloped zone that appears

sealed off fiom the reader's world, impenetrable to al1 but the narrator, whose historicai

X-ray vision is able to see the "fragments of an old story fioat up" (4). The space Davis

carves out for "Life in the Iron Mills" seems strategically unlike any previous space in

American literature. The narrator sums up the uniqueness of the locale that appears so difficult to describe with the introductory comment: "The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke" (3). The smoke, the grime, the industrial poverty are dl, in other words,

uniquely peculiar to the imaginative space of the narrator's single tale rather than broadly representative in any way. The story's setting thus presents itself as eccentric, outside the pale of referentiality. The mills are located not just on the border of North and South but

"in the borders" (1 3, rny emphasis), enclosed in a kind of self-contained, liminal no- man's-land. On a smailer scale, the mi11 scenes also take place in a similar kind of indefinite border-zone, since Hugh tends the fiunace that is "near the bounds of the works" ( 12). The comforting ambiguity in which Davis ensconces her story' s geographical

setting, displacing it into a fictional zone al1 its own, is matched by the text's temporal

ambivalence. Throughout her career, Davis characteristically insisted on the irnmediacy

of her social message and spoke of herself as a writer for "to-day."" In "Life in the Iron

Mills," however, Davis takes the unusual tactic of addressing a contemporary problem

through the mask of history. The mills Davis describes are still ninning ("They took the

great order for the Lower Virginia railroads there last winter"), but she chooses to bring to

life the characters and manufacnuuig processes of a generation past. There is no

indication that the situation of mil1 hands has improved in any way since the squalid day

of the Wolfes, but, as we have seen, present circurnstances seem largely unknowable,

thanks to the fog that baffles the narrator's perception. Unable to see through the

"nightrnare fog" that hides the "temble dumb question" of the present generation of mil1

workers, apparent "duplicates" of the Wolfes, the narrator changes the story's vantage

point to focus on the suffenngs and trials of "nearly thirty years since" (5).

AIthough the narrator provides a lengthy philosophical preamble to the historical

action that forms the substance of the story, the moment in which the shifi fiorn present

description to past action occurs goes strangely unmarked. The sudden beginning of the

historical narrative seems, moreover, to represent an abrupt shifi away from the dificult

'5The subtitle of Davis's fim novel, "A Story of To-day," conveys more of its author's explicit purpose than the final title, Murgret Howth, as the book strïdently insists on its contemporary relevance fiom the very opening sentence: "Let me tell you a story of To-Day ...." (4). "1 have a fancy," Davis once told her editor, Fields, "for writing of rPdiay you see" (Davis. letter to James Fields, 30 Dec 1861, Richard Harding Davis Collection [#6109], Clifion Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library). problems of the present. The narrator leads up to the real story-within-the-story with a

string of despairing reflections on the current possibilities for social rejuvenation:

It is nearly thirty years since the Wolfes lived here. Their lives were like those of their class: incessant labor, sleeping in kennel- like rooms, eating rank pork and molasses, drinking-God and the distillers only know what; with an occasional night in jail, to atone for some dninken excess. 1s that dl of their lives?~fthe portion given to them and these their duplicates swanning the streets to- &y?-nothing beneath?-dl? So many a political reformer will tell you,-and many a private reformer, too, who has gone among them with a heart tender with Christ's charity, and corne out outraged, hardened (5).

The introductory fiame namative seems to reach a dead end of hopelessness, from which

the immediate shifi to the histoncal narrative of Deb's redemption ("One rainy night,

about eleven o'clock.. .") provides, ironically, at least a temporary way out.

The historical displacement of the story's main action is hught with ironies as

the dl-pervasive smoke and grime of the frame setting of "Life in the iron Mills" seem to

ignore îhe temporal boundaries constructed by the narrator, and seep hto the setting of

Hugh's story as well. Funhermore, despite the many plaudits she has received for her

"realistic" descriptions, Davis seems to tamper significantly with the accuracy of her

history. For instance, she pictures a family of Welsh immigrants as the untouchables of

industrial society even though, historically speaking, the Welsh were no poorer or more

miserable than other immigrants.26 Since in Wheeiing, as elsewhere in mid-nineteenth-

century Amenca, the Irish usually occupied the unenviable position of the poorest of the

poor, perhaps the author's own Irish heritage had sornething to do with this alteration of

26Pfaelzer,"Rebecca Harding Davis: Domesticity, Social Order and the Industrial Novel" 241. 125

identity. Davis's own position as a struggling young female artist may aiso have

influenced her portraya1 of Hugh's hardships, which appear starkly exaggerated.

Historically speaking, as a "puddler" in the iron-works Hugh would not have ken the

degraded sufferer we witness in "Life in the bon Mills" but rather would have been

considered a labouring "aristocrat" and something of an industrial "artist."*' Probably

the significant changes Davis makes to the historical basis of her narrative reflect the

difficulty she herself experienced in shaping a work of art out of such controversial

materials at such a volatile moment in Amenca's national history.

Besides toying witb the historical accuracy of her text, Davis also introduces

ruptures in histoncal tirne. Many commentators on "Life in the Iron Mills" have ken

fascïnated by the complex narrative layering of the story, due largely to Davis's creation

of an obviously sophisticated but gender-ambivalent narrative voice? in addition to

creating a narrator with a teasingly elusive identity, Davis also shifts between different

"A puddler in a Wheeling mil1 typically earned about twenty times the wage of an unskilled labourer. Without the benefit of any scientific instruments, a puddler had to gauge the precise moment at which the boiled metal was sofi enough to be balled and extracteci fiom the fumace. The job required a combination of ski11 and stamina that made the puddler a kind of Herculean "artist" (May 10 1- 103). "The gender of this voice seerns to me deliberately arnbiguous. Sharon Harris is right, I think, to point out the distancing techniques Davis uses to separate herself from her narrative persona (Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis 3 1). Although P faelzer argues strongl y for seeing the narrator as a feminist "ironic female persona" (ParforRadical 26, "Rebecca Harding Davis: Domesticity, Social Order. and the Industrial Novei" 239), it does not follow that the voice of a feminist consciousness must necessariiy be ferninine. The slipperiness of Davis's narrative voice renders ultirnately unconvincing efforts to give the narrator a concrete identity (Mitchell and Deb have each been suggested as possible story-tellers by William Shurr and Richard Hood respectively; see Shurr "Lijè in the Iron Mills: A Nineteenth-Century Conversion Narrative," Americun Transcendental Quarterly 5,4 [1991]: 245-57 and Hood, "Framing 'Life in the bon Mills"') . 126 narrative voices and varies the narrative tense. The author's use of multiple nanative

perspectives in this story about white slavery accentuates, as do her later writings

conceniing black slavery, the difficulty of establishing any single, monoiithic vision of

the issues involved.

Throughout most of the story, the "narrator" altemates between two distinct

narrative voices. The fhtvoice is that of the sekonscious, willingly intrusive story-

teller who sketches the contemporary setting, observes the world fiom behind a wïndow and philosophizes on its suffering. This voice is not the voice of a stranger to the scene,

since it nuninates on its childhood impressions of the "negro-like river," but neither can it

be pinned down to a place of permanent residence. The old Wolfe house that inspires the story-within-the-story is not home to this narrator but simply "this old house into which I happened to corne today" (4). It is actually more accurate to discuss the "nanative voices" rather than the "nanator" in the text because the story-teller's identity is apparently as disembodied and drifcing as the fiagmented story that 'Yioats" into shape before us.

The originai narrative voice, whose faculties of observation are so Iimited by the surrounding fog, soon gives way to a clear-sighted, omniscient voice once the story shifts to the historicai past. This voice is, by contrast, able to see what most observers cannot.

We are informed, for instance, that 'Wot many even of the inhabitants of a manufacturing town know the vast machinery of system by which the bodies of workmen are govemed, that goes on unceasingly from year to year" (7). Yet this privileged avatar of the narrative voice can, it seems, pierce through the smoke and class barriers and take us inside the "machinery'' of industriai poverty- inside the rnill, inside the Wolfes' cella, and inside

the souls of the chief characters.

At key moments when the narrator attempts to take us inside the machinery of

Hugh's and Deborah's skulls, the narrative voice suddeniy switches fiom detached, third-

person historian to the intrusive, badgering voice of the fiame nanative. This, to use

Robyn Warhol's terrn, b'engaging"29narrative voice punctures the narration's own

established division between past and present and thus prevents the reader fiom

relegatïng the Wolfes' misery to the comfortably irrelevant zone of accomplished history.

Despite the frame narrative's careful attempts to place the story's main action in the

distant pst, the intervening narrative voice demands that the reader recognize history as a

continuum. It insists:

1 want you to corne down and look at this Wolfe, standing there arnong the lowest of his kind, and see him just as he is, that you may judge him justly when you hear the story of this night. 1 want you to look back, as he does every day, at his birth in vice, his stamed infancy; to remember the heavy years he has groped through as boy and man,-the slow, heavy years of constant, hot work. So long ago he began, that he thinks sometimes he has worked there for ages. There is no hope that it will ever end.

Significantly, this interventionkt passage reinforces the characterization of Hugh as a

white wage slave. Davis's naturalistic argumenp places the puddler in bondage to his

environment. Manumission fiom the slavery of circumstance does not even seem a

"~obynR. Warhol, "Toward a Theory of the Engaging Narrator: Earnest Interventions in Gaskell, Stowe, and Eliot," PMU 101 (1986): 8 11-8 18.

30~arris,who sees Davis as a forerunner of later naturaiists such as Dreiser, Crane, and Noms, argues that Hugh's "decline" is bbenvuonmentallyinduced" (Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis 30). 128 possibility, since the narrator tells us quite directly, "There is no hope that it will ever end" (1 1).

This strongly opinionated, strongly Southem voice of the story's "he" (it is the frame voice, we recail, that constnicts the conceit of the "negro-like river" and the canary's pastoral dream) is not the only voice to perforate the historical narration at the centre of "Life in the lron Mills." Hugh's trial and imprisonment are mostly described by a third narrative voice-that of Haiey, the jailer. Haley's mini-narrative, another story within the story-within-the-story, merdisrupts the border between past and present.

The historian's voice quotes Haley at length, apparentiy verbatim. The tirne-fhme of

Haley's recorded speech is, however, unstable. The narrative begins in the past: "'When he was fïrst caught,' the jailer said aftewards, in telling the story...." (26). Both Hugh's impnsonment and the jailer's description of it are, it seems, completed events, documentary evidence. As Haley's narrative progresses, however, the reader is suddenly jolted into the irnmediate present, as Haley turns to address his audience directly: "There he sits, in there. Goin' to-morrow, with a batch more of 'em. That woman, hunchback, tried with hm,-you remember?-she's ody got three years .... Here she is in this next cell.

I'm a-goin' now to let her in" (26-27). As the voice of the henarrative has completely disappeared at this point and no particular audience is pictured as the object of Haley's rernarks, the reader becomes that audience. In the absence of another "you," the question

"you remember?" summons the reader into immediate, contemporaneous participation in the story. A curious lapse in narrative time occurs in the gap between Haley's "l'm a- 129

goin now to let her in" and the resumption of the historic narration with the intejection:

"He let her in" (27).

The obvious shifis not oniy in narrative voice but also in narrative persona raise

the question whether the "narrator" at the end of the story is the same "narrator" who

introduces the story. Certainly the narrative vantage point is not the same. Whereas the

initial namator look out of the window of an "old house" into which he or she has

"happened to corne" (4), the narrator at story's close is much more at home, seated in his

or her library, surrounded by familiar objects, "homely fragments" (34) rather than

mystenous floating "fragments" of an elusive "old story." Because "Life in the Iron

Mills" does not end where it begins, its nested narrative structure leaves an impression of

fundamental asymmetry, of multiple perspectives not quite harmonized. As Maribel

Molyneaux suggests, it is fitting that the story's final scene frnds the narrator amidst a

"half-moulded child's head"(34) and other unfinished worksof art." Marked by

narrative disturbances and discrepancies, "Life in the iron Mills" enacts the dificulties

involved in seeing "both sides of the shield." Both insider and outsider, window-watcher

and omniscient narrator, stranger and resident, Davis's shifiing narrator emerges through

a collage of evasive but provocative voices.

Not only is Davis's composite narrator conspicuously unable to see the whoIe

picture at once, but he or she appears notably reluctant to even try. Fear as well as fog

seems to inhibit the possibility of holistic vision in "Life in the iron Mills." At the same

"Maribel Molyneaux, "Sculpture in the Iron Mills: Rebecca Harding Davis's Korl Woman." Women S Siudies 17 (1 9!W): 175. tirne that the narrative voice of the story's introductory fiame urges us to "corne right

down...- here into the thickest of the fog and mud and fou1 effluvia" and hear the "secret down here, in this nightmare fog, that has lain dumb for centuries," it cautions, "1 dare not put this secret into words" (4). An elaborateiy constnicted strategy of evasion substitutes for articulation of the "secret," which remains unspoken through to the storyosend. The narrator hedges, offering circumlucution in lieu of explmation:

1 told you [the secret] was dumb. These mec, going by with dninken faces and brains full of unawakened power, do not ask it of Society or of God. Their lives ask it; their deaths ask it. There is no reply. 1 will tell you plainly that I have a great hope; and I bring it to you to be tested. It is this: that this temble dwnb question is its own reply; that it is not the sentence of death we think it, but, fiom the very extremity of its darkness, the most solemn prophecy which the world has known of the Hope to corne. 1 dare make my meaning no clearer?but will ody tell my story (4- 5)-

On one level, this baffling invitation into the grim world of Davis's mills has the appearance of a kind of artistic credo, a hesitant manifesto that captures the essence of the author's burgeoning reaiism. If the characters themselves are "dumb," the artist's portrayal of their oppressed lives-her mimetic presentation of social reaiity-seems to offer new possibilities of expression on their behalf. The realistic illustration of the

"dumb question" becomes, the narrator seems hopefully to imply, a solution of sorts.

From another point of view, however, the narrator's confidence in the powers of story- telling seems exposed in the above passage as a dubious sham, mere scaffolding thrown over a vacuum. If the unarticuiated '%embledumb question is its own reply" (4), then 13 1 speech itself seems paradoxically annihilated in the story. At the centre of Davis's story is an unexpressed rhetorical question that fimctions as a lcind of black hole in the text.

The closest Davis cornes to giving her elusive question substance is the "awfûl question" she writes on the face of the dumb korl figure: "'What shail we do to be saved?"' (1 7). The Bibücal monance of this intangible interrogative ody further destabilizes the rhetoncai situation, however. At £ktglance, Davis's invocation of the sacred voice of scnpture might appear to offer a way out of the narrator's confessed dilernrna of ûying to give expression to a question that will be its own answer. The rhetorical weight of the Biblical language invests the enigrnatic question with a homiletic authority that seems its own closure. Upon Merinspection, though, Biblical rhetoric in "Life in the bon Mills" proves highly suspect becaw it appears malleable to ideological purposes. Just as Kirby mocks Mitchell's rhetoric of bourgeois individualism and capitalistic progress, Mitchell scoffs at Kirby's unconscious echo of Biblical language when the mil1 owner declares, "1 wash my hands of dl social problems,-slavery, caste, white or black" (16). Sneers Mitchell: "1 think 1 remember reading the same words somewhere:-washing your hands in Eau de Cologne, and saying, '1 am innocent of the blood of this man. See ye to it!"' (17). Despite the aptness of the parallel he draws between Kirby and Pilate, Mitchell's use of Biblical langusge is a testimony, Davis makes clear, to rhetonçal expedience rather than religious conviction. When Kirby angrily charges his accuser of pontificating fiom Scripture, Mitchell replies: "Do 1 not quote correctly? 1 think 1 remember another line, which may amend rny meaning:

'hasrnuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these, ye did it unto me.' Deist? Bless 132

you, man, 1 was raised on the milk of the Word (17). Mitchell's half-quizzical attitude

towards scriptural authority ironically undercuts the very aptness of his quotations. in

Kirby's and Mitchell's debate over white slavery, as in the national debate over biack

slavery, the singular "Word" of scripture proves subject to multiple manipulations and

transformations.

"Life in the bon Mills" is thus a text that manifests a marked self-awateness of its

own fragmentation. It is remarkable as much for what it does not say as for what it does

say. The narrator's unasked "temble dumb question" looms as an eioquent gap at the

core of the text, demonstrating the profound failwe of various Amencan rhetorics-both

proslavery and mi-slavery rhetonc, the rhetoric of Southern paternalism and bourgeois

individualism, even Biblical rhetonc-to address an ugly, glaring hole at the centre of

America's political and social self-consciousness. In her first nationally published story,

Davis establishes what would become a life-the cornmitment to educating Americans

about ~rnerica." In "Life in the kon Mills," Davis pre-empts Gerald Graff's post-

modem pedagogics by teaching her readers the harsh reality of Arnenca's interna1

"culture ~ars."~'

%ne Rose writes the following about Davis's "urge to mediate difference": "Eveqwhere in her fiction and her essays she tries to heal a fiagnented nation by educating its readers. Ofien about regional difference, but also about race, economics, gender, and class-her stones mediate difference wherever she sees it hgmenting or oppressing people" ("Lntroduction," Silhouettes ofAmerican L &fe by Rebecca Harding Davis, unpublished: 4,23).

"~erald Gr&, Beyond the Culture Wurs: How Teaching the Conflicts Con Revitalize American Education (New York: Norton, 1992). 133

Davis's first Atlantic readers would have found in "Life in the Iron Mills" an

affecthg stoewhose poignancy could be undemwd in the light of two different but

equall y familiar interpretive codes. Those harbouring a fondness for Southem culture and

values would readily recognize Davis's hearkening back to the tradition of proslavery

thought, whilst stauach Yankee readers would have found the anti-industrial critique

palliated by the story's ambiguous but definitely Southern setting. By creating a unique

narrative zone for her industrial exposé, however, Davis does not obscure the social

issues but rather discloses a distinctly American space usually overlooked by both sides.

Many years after its publication, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps would thus remember her

reading of "Life in the lron Mills" as a moment of revelation. In a 1910 article for

Cenrury Magazine entitled "Stones that Stay," she recalls: "It was never possible after

reading it to ignore. One could never say again that one did not understand.""

And yeti at the end of her ground-breaking, eye-opening story, Davis seems to

grant her characters a retreat fiom difficult understanding. She redeems Deb by moving

her West, "over the river" (32) to Ohio. beyond the border of the industrial city and

beyond the contentious border between the North and South. Deb's exit into the western

sunset parallels the escapist ending of Gaskell's Mary Batton in which the heroine and

her mechanic husband fiee England's industrial oppression to begin life anew in a

Canadian cottage. But Davis's characters, who suffer from English-style social problems,

3J~ccordingto Pfaelzer, "The sympathy of sentimentalism rather than the inevitability of naturalism shapes both the structure and the desired reaction in 'Life in the iron MiHs"' (Parlor Radical 35).

35~helps,"Stones that Stay," 120. 134 cannot escape to the new world because they are already there. Deb herself points up this difficulty when she camoufiages her robbery in the language of old-world fairy-tales. She urges the stolen money on Hugh by presenting herself in the role of "one of t' witch people. .., them we heard of t' home" (2 1). She desperately coaxes, "If one of t' witch dwarfs wud corne fiom t' lane noors to-night, and gif hur money, to go out,-ouf, 1 say,-out, lad, where t' sun shines, and t' heath grows, and t' ladies walk in silken gownds, and God stays al1 t' the,-where t' man lives that taiked to us to-night,-Hugh knows,-Hu& codd walk there like a king!" (22). For Deb, the old world ironically holds more potential than the new; Wales, not Wheeling, inspires dreams of riches and romance. By having her surviving character escape from the borderland of mid-America where North rneets South and industry meets agriculture, into the uncharted West, Davis preserves, by however dubious means, the myth of western renewal that was centrai to the national self-def~tionof mid-nineteenth-century America. The myth of utopian possibility beyond the westem fiontier is the tenuous thread that holds together Davis's fiagrnented, self-conflicting portrait of a hitheno neglected pocket of the Amencan national psyche.

The Fragile thread of western optimism, already hyed in "Life in the iron Mills." disintegrates beyond repair in Davis's next effort to strike out at the issue of industrial exploitation and urban poverty. In Margref Howth, Davis shifts her novel's action entirely to the West, setting her story in Indiana. This time, however, the western hills do not offer refuge but become themselves the scene of urban distress. Although Margrer has been routinely criticized for its veneer of artificial optimism (a documented product 135 of Fields's editond dernand~~~),it does not use the same kind of regional escape valve that the conclusion of "Life in the Iron Mills" does. The Howth family's misfortunes are indeed incredibly restored by the discovery of oil on the family property, but this miracle does not solve the problems of the other characters in the novel or of the many unnamed suffering faces Davis brings to our attention. Rather, Murgret Howth concludes on the same note on which it opens, gmdy probing the conflicts and controversies that threaten the core identity of a nation embattled on more fionts than one.

Davis's begins "A Story of To-Day," we have seen, by positioning her first-person narrator in the midst of the raging Civil War. "1 write fiom the border of the battlefield," the narrator reports, "and I fmd in it no theme for shallow argument or flimsy rhymes"

(3). Neither does the "1" through whom we view the action of Margret Howth find in the battlefield border-zone the stuff of war-time adventure. Written in the heat of the war,

Murgrer is actuaily set before the opening of hostilities between the States. The story begins, very specifically, on "October 2, 1860," the heroine's first day as bookkeeper for a large wool manufacturer. Addressing her novel to the underlying causes rather than the flagrant effects of the war, Davis directs our attention to the "warehouses" and "back- streets" (6) of America, to the econornic and spiritual battle that commonplace citizens fight every day. Having drawn her readers in with the hint of an eyewitness war story,

Davis quickly shifts the scene to the front lines of the battle between poverty and greed.

She situates her "outline" of "one or two lives that 1 have known" in a commercial rather than rnilitary context, descnbing her subject as one dealing with "Very cornrnon lives, 1

36SeeYellin. 136 know,-such as are swanning in yonder market-place" (7). Resisting the jingoism of war slogans and partisan doggerel, the stuff of "shallow argument" and "flimsy rhyrnes," the narrator tunis fiom the battlefield to the market-place to explore instead the competing rhetoncs of the national stniggle against economic and social injustice. The feeble, fractured plot of Mwgret, with its forced romance and ineptly happy endïng, becomes little more than an awkward skeleton on which Davis hangs a philosophical debate among competing visions of the American dream.

Davis's western factory town, iïke Melville's Pequod, is a multi-ethnic microcosm of American society at large. Characters represent not only a broad variety of political beliefs but also a wide range of racial backgrounds. Margret and her family are of oid Virginia stock, Dr. Knowles is part Indian, the saintly Lois is a mulatto, and the doctor who attends Stephen Holmes is a half-French, half-German Alsatian. In Margret's first glimpse of the interior of the mill, we get a picture of the diverse faces of industrial poverty that undergird Amerka's economic life: "men swanned out of every corner,-red- faced and pale, whiskey-bloated and heavy-brained, Irish, Dutch, black, wi th souls half asleep somewhere, and the destiny of a nation in their grasp" (16). In the "grasp" of these "hands," Davis implies, and not in the hands of soldiers or politicians, lies the future of America.

The degraded statu of the factory workers, whose lives are grotesquely fragmented, bodes il1 for both the ideological and economic survival of Amenca. Always prodding her readers to put social problems in a larger-than-local perspective, Davis fiarnes her dismal depiction of life in the woollen mills in terms of a persistent fiacture in 137 her society-the ongoing debate over the relative advantages of the Northern and Southern versions of Amencan civilization. The perpetual argument between Margret's father, the old Southern-bred schoolrnaster, and the ardent reformer, Dr. Knowles, echoes throughout the novel, as Davis repeatedly uses the language of the national debate over slavery as a rhetorical foi1 to her exposure of industrial misery.

Like "Life in the bon Mills," Margret Hawth operates in two contrasting zones, city and country. The story opeos in the symbolic heart of the trade-ùlfected town-the dark, noisy, fume-filled dl. Margret's first exposure to the factory's intemal workùigs is disorienting and debilitating. The poorly lit passages temporarily blind her so that she has to "grope" her way, and the noise and shaking of the looms is both deafening and dizzying (1 5). Margret's personal expenence of the mill confhs the poetic tmth of

Lois's vision of the factory as an "uncomprehended monster" (1 7 1). The quaking mill is a dark, cavernous labyrinth, an above-ground parallel to the "black mouths of the coal- pits" (1 8) that literally undermine the town's vitality. The consurning maw of industrial commerce has, the nanator suggests, devoured the town's strength of character. imprinting it with "an anxious, harassed look, like a speculator concluding a keen bargain" (1 7).

Both Margret and Lois are able, nonetheless, to escape temporarily fiom the monstrous horrors of the mil1 and its urban precincts to the pastoral refieshment of the suburbs. Whereas the narrator tells us that "Nature itself had tumed her back on the town," Margret's road home afier the work day eventually leads to a scene of organic renewal: "when the road had crept through these hills, it suddenly shook off the cinden, 138 and tumed into the brown mould of the meadows,-tumed its back on trade and the smolq town, and speedily lefi it out of sight contemptuously, never looking back once. This was the counay now in eamest" (1 8). The genuine pastoral refuge to which Margret retreats provides a sMng contrast to the industriai town in more senses than one. The road between the mill and Margret's home takes her not only nom city to country, fiom unnatural stultification to natural rejuvenation, but also fiom the sphere of Northem-style entrepreneurial indusaiaiism to her father's Southem idealism.

On the Howth "plantation" (202), Margret's father lives in an old-fashioned world of chivalric values, in contrast to his former pupil, Holmes, who is a modem-thinking emotional and commercial capitaiist, devoted to the pursuit of self-interest in both the market-place and the inner man. in what seems a rather long digression fiom the development of the main plot, Davis invests a substantial amount of ink and paper at the beginning of her book in exploring the complicated implications of Mr. Howth's archaic ideas. These ideas are hardly tangential to Davis's concerns, however. If Mr. Howth has no direct part to play in the evolution of the nove17saction, he stands as a symbolic patriarchal presence be hind the scenes, a controversial representative of a signi ficant

Stream of Arnerican thought that pretended to offer an alternative to the eviscerated reality of Davis's mid-western mill town.

The daily arguing between Howth and Knowles recalls the long-winded speechifj4ng of Squire Romilly in Sarah Hale's 1852 reprint of her 1827 novel,

Northwood. with a key difference. Although Romilly, a Northemer, goes to great pains to defend the Southem institution of slavery as compatible with republican values, Howth calls into question the entire premise of the American democratic experiment. In the

initial scene between Howth and Knowles and throughout the novel's later pages, Davis's

narrator proves shockingly sympathetic to this fundamental, Southem-style scepticism

about the nature and viability of Amencan liberty?'

Howth is an extreme but pitiable heretic who, like the radical Fitzhugh, pushes the

Southem position to its logical end and challenges the notion of universal equality for

whites as well as blacks. He discourages Knowles's utopian schemes for his House of

Refuge with the conviction that "Any plan, Phalanstery or Community, cal1 it what you

please, founded on self-government, is based on a sham, the tawdriest of sham." By

extension, then, the American national cornmunity mut also be a "sharn": "There never

was a thinner-crusted Devil's egg in the world than democracy," declares the old man

(24). As we watch Knowles skillfùlly goad his opponent into heated proclamation, we

also watch Davis pull the Puppet strings of rhetorical convention. Davis, like her later

contemporaries James and Twain, manipulates the character of the Southern dissident to

offer a resounding critique of mainstream American compla~ency.~~At the height of his

anti-democratic passion, Howth blazes:

37The expression of prosouthem sympathies in Margret Howth as well as other pieces Davis published in the Atlantic during the early 1860s seems especially startling given the journal3 history as a magazine founded on abolitionist principles (see Ellery Sedgwick, The Atlantic Monrhiy 1857-1901: Yankee Humanism ar High Tide and Ebb [Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 19941, esp. 4,29-32).

38~.Vann Woodward, "A Southem Critique for the Gilded Age: Melville, Adams, and James," The Burden of Southern History, 3" ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP,1993) 109- 40. "What is it the boys used to declaim, their Yankee hemthrobbing under their roundabouts? 'Happy, proud Amenca!' Somehow in that way. 'Curseà, abased Amerka!' better if they had said. Look at her, in the warm vigour of her youth, most vigorous in decay! Look at the gerrns and dregs of nations, creeds, religions, fermenting together! As for the theory of self-government, it will muddle down here, as in the three great archetypes of the experiment, into a puling, miserable failure!" (26).

The narrator fosters sympathy for Howth's deviant perspective by making both the

man and his views romantically appealing. Remarkably, Howth and Knowles carry on

their dispute without ever mentioning the word "slavery." The closest they corne to

broaching directly the subject that underlies the rhetorical foundation of their discussion

is Howth's generai assertion that "Any despotism is better than that of newly enhanchised serfs" (26). instead of focussing on contemporary politics, Howth

glamourizes the pst, propounding a Southemer's romantic, feudalistic interpretation of history. Both Knowles and his opponent think in ideal absolutes, an approach that, judging by the narrator's reaction, makes their opinions inspiring rather than politically tiresorne. Gushes Davis's eye-witness, "That was a fight, 1 can tell you! None of your shallow, polite clashing of modem theones,-no talk of your Jeffersonian Democracy, your high-bred Federalism! They took hold of the matter by the roots, clear at the

Howth's brand of idedism proves particularly attractive to the narrator, who enthuses: "How he caught the salient tints of the feudal life! How the fine womanly nature of the man rose exuiting in the fiee picturesque glow of the day of crusader and heroic deed! How he crowded in traits of perfected manhood in the conqueror, simple trust in the serf, to colour and weaken his argument, not seeing that he weakened it!" (3 1).

The old schoolmaster's vision of history, of knights and ladies and noble quests, hearkens back to the legendary golden age of feudaiism touted as a social mode1 by Southem slaveholders . With his pitifùlly "earnest" face and a laugh like "some old and rare wine"

(31 ). Howth is a sincere, if deluded, apostle of his historical creed. The seductive power of his fantasy world seems to move both the narrator and perhaps, the narrator suggests, even Knowles. The namator appears to succumb to the spell of the "dream" even while recognizing its escapist tendencies, describing the schoolmaster as a kind of entrancing epic pet:

The master's voice grew low and lingering now. It was a labour of love, this. Oh, it is so easy to go back out of the broil of dust and meanness and barter into the clear shadow of that old life where love and bravery stand etemal verities.-never to be bought and sold in that dusty town yonder! To go back? To drearn back, rather. To drag out of our own hearts, as the hungry old master did, whatever is truest and highest there, and clothe it with name and deed in the dim days of chivalry. Make a poem of it,-so much easier than to make a life!" (32-33)

The schoolmaster's poetic "hunger" for the illusion of past simplicity is at once stimng and pathetic. Old Howth inspires in his person both respect and condescension, as the narrator describes him as a relic of innocence in the modem world: "Old and gaunt, hunger-bitten even it may be, with loose-jointed, bony limbs, and yellow face; clinging, loyal and brave, to the quaint, delicate fancies of his youth, that were dust and ashes to other men. In the very haggard face you couid fmd the quiet purity of the child he had been, and the old child's smile, fresh and credulous, on the mouth" (32). If Davis satirizes the figure of the decrepit schoolmaster to point up the bigotry of the secessionist 142

argument,39the satire is gently, even reluctantly, delivered. Not until the Christmas Day

feast that ends the novel does the narrator deign to associate the "quaint, delicate fancies"

(32) of Magret's father with the tawdriness of rd-world politics, grudgingly admitting,

"1 may as well corne out with the whole tmth, and acknowledge that at the present writing

the old gentleman is the very hottest Secessionist 1 know." Even then, the narrator uses

sarcasm to ay to prevent harsh rnisjudgment of the "old gentleman," interjecting

querulously, "If it hurts the type, write it down a vice of blood, O printers of New

England!" (250).

Howth's blindness is also handled with an ambivalent defhess on the part of the

narrator. The schoolmaster's visual impairment, while symbolic of his blindness to the

reality of "to-day" that is so important to the narrator, is not immediately apparent. He is

already well-embarked on the development of his idealistic notions before the reader

receives the first indication fiom Mrs. Howth that her husband's eyesight has recently

been affected by a "miserable fever" (27). The evening's heated discussion is over

before the narrator reveals, in plain words, that "the school-master was blind" (36).

Thüs, although Davis uses Howth's physical handicap to underline the inadequacy of his

sugerannuated fantasies, she does not undercut her evangelist of Southern romanticism

until he has had Ml opportunity to present his ideas in their most appeaiing light.

Moreover, aithough Davis blinds her spokesman for the philosophy of Southem culture,

she also gives him the narne of a Biblical prophet-Samuel.

39~faelzermaintains that Margret is "repulsed by Mr. Howth's dreams of secession, his admiration for Napoleon, and his tiresome investigations of the Middle Ages" (Parler Radicol 66). 143

As an embodiment of what C. Vann Woodward bas called "the South's un-

Arnencan adventure in feudal fantasy,'* Samuel Howih represents an alternative, non- mainstrearn vision of Amenca's destiny. His oppositional idealism is validated not only through the namtor's sympathetic perspective on his introductory argument but also in several significant passages later in the novel. As in "Life in the Iron Mills," Davis uses principles of the Southem planters' cuiturai defense throughout Margret Howth as an illuminathg background to the social problems she explores in her factory town. Free- born Lois's haunting memory of the mills that maimed her as a child contrast, for instance, her father's indulgent reminiscences of his days as a plantation slave. On the night he turns arsonist, Joe Yare recalls the generosity of his former master compared to the pitiless severity of Holmes, the man he presently calls "Mas'r" (206). As he reflects on Holmes's ruthless sense of justice and determines to murder the one man who could send him back to jail, Yare's mind drifts back occasionally to "a pleasanter thought of things that had been warm and cheerhil in his life,-of the corn-huskings long ago, when he was a boy, down in 'th' Alabam','+f the scow his young master gave him once, the first thing he really owned: he was almost as proud of it as he was of Lois when she was bom" (1 69). Morally and spiritually deformed by a personal history of "oppression and vice" (167), Yare ironically harboun a nostalgic fondness for the days before he "owned" himself. Lois, on the other hand, looks back on her childhood. nine years of which were spent in the mill, with "bewildered pain (68). Her rnemones are nightmarish-she remembers the choking atmosphere, the day-long "thud, thud" of the looms, and

40Wood~ard,7le Burden of Southern History 22. machinery that cast shadows "like snakes creepin"' (69). Summing up the crushing poverty of her early days, she tells Margret, "'nier' 's places in them deys 'n' dark holes, Miss Marg'et, like th'openin's to hell, with th' thick smells 'n' th' sights yoh'd see" (70).

Margret's response to Lois's troubled mernories reveals the extent to which rhetoric fiom bot& sides of the slavery debate informs the whole of Margret Howth:

Margret did not speak; let the poor girl sob herself into quiet. What had she to do with this gulf of pain and wrong? ... No wonder that the huckster-girl sobbed, she thought, or talked heresy. It was not an easy thing to see a mother dnnk herself into the grave. And yet-was she tu blame? Her Virginian blood was cool, high-bred; she had learned conservatism in her cradle. Her life in the West had wtyet quickened her pulse. So she put aside whatever social mystery or wrong faced her in this girl, just as you or 1 would have done. She had her own pain to bear. Was she her brother's keeper? It was mie, there was wrong; this wornan's sou1 lay shattered by it; it was the fault of her biood, of her birth, and Society had finished the work. Miere was the help? She was fiee,-and liberty, Dr. Knowles said, was the cure for al1 the soul's diseases, and- (7 1-72).

hitially, Margret's Virginian, slaveholding heritage, as well as her self-pity, makes her as blind as her father to the real-life pain of the lower classes. Only gradually, as she listens to Lois ramble, does she awaken, the narrator tells us, '?O the sense of a different pain in the world fiom her own,-lower deeps fiom which women like herself draw delicately back, lifting their gauzy dresses" (70-71). If slaveholders are blind to the soul-shattering suffering caused by their "peculiar" institution, however, the above passage seems to suggest that Northemers+ven Westerners-aiso share this condition of social myopia. Knowles believes "liberty" will cure dl, but it has not. Lois's wrongs 145 began in her slave roots, in her c'blood" and "birth," but fiee "Society," has only exacerbated them. Symbolically, Margret's meditation on the mulatto girl's woes ends on an inconclusive note. The double-length dash at the end of Margret's interior soliloquy highlights the failure of the Northern econornic system to, as the proslavery apologists liked to Say, heal itself.

Margret's Southem attitudes wme into play in an even more obvious way in her second vivid confrontation with the wretchedness of the downtrodden, when Knowles takes her to a squalid tavern to view some prospective members of his philanthropie commune. Huddled together in a "putrid" room are "drunken Irishmen," vagabond women, half-clad children, and escaped slaves (1 50). As in her depiction of the mill's workforce, Davis presents a multi-racial portrait of misery. ironically, Knowles, the abolitionist, echoes the language of proslavery apologetics as he forces Margret to face the nauseating spectacle. Although he prefaces the shock with a sneer at Margret's

"'High Norman blood"' (1 50), he essentially aliows that the horrific suffenng Margret sees is symptornatic, as old Howth argues, of the failure of democratic ideals. Like his enemies, slavery's defenders, Knowles is forced to recognize that the slavery of class and condition crosses the colour barrier. Dragging Margret towards a wretched heap of humanity, white and black, he asks, "Can they help it? Think of the centuries of serfdom and superstition through which their blood has crawled" (15 1 ). His closing comment on the tavern scene also reinforces Howth's despair conceming the republican mode1 as well as Margret's insight into the limits of mere "fieedom" to solve social problems. As

Margret stops to look back on the tableau of misery, Knowles cries out: "Did 1 cal1 it a bit 146 of hell? It's only a glimpse of the under-life of America,-God help us!-where al1 men are bom fiee and equal" (152).

By the end of the novel, Knowles fmds himself compelled not only to abandon his plan for a full-scde utopian comunity but also his abolitionist, libertarian ideals. He confesses to Holmes: "Fact is, I'm beginning to think there 's a good deal of an obstacle in blood. I find difncuity, much difficuity, Sir, in giving to the youngest child mie ideas of absolute fieedom, and unselfish heroism" (1 87). Adrnitting that he hdsit necessary to whip his pupils in the House of Refuge to maintain discipline, he unwillingly acknowledges a kind of wisdom in his old debating opponent's Southem pessimism about egalitarian experirnents: "Old Mr. Howth says that is the end of all self- govemments: from anarchy to despotism, he says. Brute force must corne in. Old people are apt to be set in their ways, you know. Honestly, we do not find unlimited fieedom answer in the House [sic]" (1 88).

In contrast to Knowies's bitter, hard-headed determination to rescue the wretched fiom bonds of drunkemess, poverty, and moral degradation, Margret responds to the suffering before her with a human, and distinctly Southem, touch. The brief scene between Knowles, Margret, and a young black slave demonstrates this difference in approach and cornes near to reproducing the traditional proslavery charge that abolitionists are more racist and less compassionate than slaveholders:

In the corner slept a heap of half-clothed blacks. Going on the underground railroad to Canada. Stolid, sensual wretches, with here and there a broad, melancholy brow, and desperate jaws. One little pickaninny dbedits sleepy eyes and laughed at them. "So much flesh and blood out of the market, unweighed!" [ICnowlesj

Margret took up the child, kissing its brown face. Knowles looked at her.

"Wouid you touch her? 1 forgot you were born down South. Put it down, and corne on." (1 5 1)

This passage demonstrates, as do Davis's later stories that feature Mcan-

Amencan characters more prominently, the complex but persistent relationship between

Davis and the work of prosouthem novelists. in the above excerpt, the narrator uses both the language and the strategy of a Southem apologist, describing the young "pickaninny" in stereotypically brutish terms. The girl is objectified, however, not so much by the narrator as by Knowles, who sees her as mere "unweighed" poundage and as an "it" rather than a "she." Margret, on the other hand, rnakes a drarnatic, if silent, statement on behalf of her aristocratic, slaveholding heritage when she caresses the child. Pfaelzer makes a convincing argument for seeing Margret's compassion as a sentimental, essentially ferninine response that contras& Knowles's "rhetoric of human comrnerce,'"l' but the text itself, we note, imrnediately attributes the Sectionate gesture to a fundamental difference in regional consciousness rather than gender.

From beginning to end, then, Margrer Howth pursues the debate over the Iimits of "unlimited fkeedom" (1 88) in Amencan society. The theme encompasses Lois's suffering and Knowles's reformist endeavon as well as Holmes's metaphysical seduction by Fichtean philosophy and Margret's struggle to find her own sense of vocation.

'' P faelzer, ParZor Radical 66. 148

Margret is prolific in metaphors of slavery, which becomes a rnultivalent tem in the

novel. Holmes, for instance, becomes a voluntaxy "slave" (138) when he sells his self-

respect for the dowry of a weaithy, but insipid heiress in order to gain the material means

to fulfill his goal of self-development." Knowles condemns this marriage of

convenience, "cursing ... men who put themselves up at auction,worse than Orleans

slaves" (81). As for Knowles, he is weighted dom by the invisible fetters of bis mixed

racial heritage: "he, coming out of the mire, his veins thick with the blood of a despised

race, had carried up their pain and hunger with him" (50). Like the Yares and his

intractabte pupils, he, too, encounters "an obstacle in blood" (1 87). A minor character, the Howth's "fiee-bom sening-man" (252),Joel, serves as yet another example of the variety of foms the "slavery of intolerance" (4) takes in Amencan society. Regarding

Joel's politics, the namator comments wryly: "Joel, in Company with five thousand other sovereigns, consulted, as definitive oracle, 'The Daily Gazette' of Towbridge. The school-master need not have gnimbled for the old tirne: feodality in the days of Warwick and of 'The Daily Gazette' was not so widely different as he and Joel thought" (41). Here again Davis's sceptical narrator openly sympathizes with the anti-democratic tendencies of S~uthernconservative thought.

As in "Life in the Iron Mills," the ubiquity of slavery in America is the unspoken,

"durnb" secret at the centre of Margrer Howth. Holrnes's slavery to self-interest provides initial complication for the romance plot, and an ex-slave, Joe Yare, instigates the novel's crisis by setting fire to the woolen mill. Even more significantly, at the

""Images of slavery surround Holmes," notes Pfaelzer (Parlor Radical 69). 149

nucleus of the novel's key events and their meaning is the tragic figure of Lois, who is a

martyr to both her slave heritage and the industrial slavery of the rnill. Despite the

proliferation of images of slavery and serfdom, however, the narrator seems reluctant to

identifi the controlling metaphor directly. An exchange between Lois and Holmes

illustrates the namtor's typical reliance on the subtlety of innuendo. When Holmes finds

Lois teaching her father to rad during his night watch at the miIl, Yare bashfully

acknowledges his "slow" progress. Protests his daughter to Holmes, "'It's not slow, Sir.

seein' father hed n't 'dvantages, like me. He was a'-" (165).

The incompleteness of Davis's prose at this crucial juncture reflects the author's

own recognition of her novel's fragmentation. in July 1861, she voiced a deep sense of

personal frustration over Murgret to Fields, larnenting, "If 1 could have dared write a true

history of today ! But even in its poorest phases 1 was afraid to touch forbidden subjects

so only the husk of the thing was left, of course?' Lois is apparently unable to finish

her sentence because a "hot flush of shame" overspreads her face (1 65); like her creator,

perhaps, she is partially silenced by ferninine modesty. And yet, as heaps of anti-slavery

and proslavery speeches, pamphlets, treatises, and novels testi fied, c hattel slavery was

hardly a "forbidden subject" in 1861. Davis's curious ellipsis acknowledges that the

syrnbolic use to which she puts Yare's unarticulated "slave" status audaciously engages

concems that are immeasurably larger and more delicate than the question of the simple

right or wrong of Afncan-Amencan bondage. Writing proto-realist fiction for the pro-

"Davis, letter to James Fields, 30 July [1861], Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6 109 ), Clifion Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. 150

Union ~tlunric~in the midst of the Civil War, Davis dared to challenge not just the limits

of genre but also the limits of American republican ideology. There is perhaps real cause

behind the narrator's expressed fear of king labelled a ''ttaitor" (5)-

Davis's fm Ml-length novel thus continues the rhetorical strategy that supports

"Life in the Iron Mills," forging carefully indirect but unmistakably poignant connections

between the twin American social plagues of wage slavery and chatte1 slavery. In the

later effort, however, the story-line seems to collapse under the compiex entanglement of

the issues. Along with the novel's overall development, the metaphor of slavery

becomes, to use Jean Fagan Yellin's term, "feminized," and Margret, rather than social

injustice, becomes the artificial focus of the book. Although Davis onginally rejected the

novel's final title because, as she told Fields, she saw Margret as "the completest failure

in the story, besides king the nucleus of it,'"" she uses her heroine to centralize and

sentimentalize the issue of slavery in the novel. Plainly unable to resolve the cornplex

ramifications of Arnerican slavery in al1 its disguises, the novel's obsession with the

slavery debate boils down to the much more manageable, more conventional

concentration on Margret's stniggle to find an appropriate "master" for life.

Margret, initial depictions seem to suggest, suffers a fom of double enslavement;

as a factory worker, she is a white wage slave, and as a woman she is a slave to gender

Atlantic maintained a fmFederalist, Republican stance throughout the war (Sedgwick 102- 105).

"Davis, letter to James Fields, 17 Aug [186 11, Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6109), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. 151

restrictions. As she leaves the mil1 afker her fust day of work, thinking of Holmes, the

narrator obsewes, "One might have fancied her a slave puning on a mask, fearing to meet

her master" (17). Spurned by the selfish Holmes because she would have been a clog on

his fortune, she is treated eqdly as cruelly by Knowles. who views her just as

irnpersonally as a mere tool for his own purposes. Watching her, Knowles "[takes] in

every point, as one might criticdly survey a Damascus blade which he was going to carry

into battie" (23). The Doctor's desue for mastery over his tool is expressed in disturbing

imagery of sexual domination. As he tries to "read" Margret's soul, Knowles ruminates:

"what a triumph the man had gained, whoever he might be, who had held the master-key

to a nature so rare as this, who had the kingly power in bis hand to break its silence into

electnc shivers of laughter and team,-temble subtile pain, or joy as tembleTT(45).

It is a mark of Davis's essential conservatism regarding both the anti-slavery and

the wornen's rights movements that her heroine does not rebel against the idea of male

masteryper se, but is content to wait for Master Right. Unlike Caroline Rush, Davis does

not harp on the obvious analogy between Margret's exploitation by the men in her life

and the situation of the Southem slaves who form a background presence to the novel's

thematic development. For Rush, the socially-sanctioned oppression of women

represented the ultimate hypocnsy of "white ~lavery.'~~Davis, on the other hand, places

'% a lengthy, irate digression in North and South, Rush States: "If you want to see slavery in its worst fom-the slûvery that trammels mind and body, and holds in life-long chah its wetched victims, you have only to visit the homes of many married people. How many women will take up this book, and read these pages, and sigh over the truth contained in this one. How may women are irrevocably tied to men, who, before marriage, seemed the very perfection of al1 goodness, but who, when once in possession of that magical word, power, displayed to view tempers and passions more worthy of fiends than men" (1 64). less emphasis on her heroine's oppression by the men in her life than on her attitudinal

adjustment towards her exploitation. Margret's finai interview with Holmes bears

sadomasochistic overtones reminiscent of Knowles's point of view. Holmes, whom

Margret characterizes as "a master among men'' (62), is motivated in this scene by a "mad

desire of conquest" (225). Like Knowles, who considers it "his right" (47) to channel the

inner power of the woman's personaiity into his own schemes, Hoimes sees Margret as a

spirit to be possessed. As he approaches the woman he loves, his thoughts betray the

master-slave mode1 that has hedtheir relations since the beginning of the novel and

now guides his taunting conversation. He thinks: "She might be cold and grave as he, but

undemeath he knew there was a thwarted, hungry spirit,-a stmng, fine spirit as dainty

Ariel. He would sting it to life, and tarne it: it was his" (225). Early in the novel, Margret

recognizes Holrnes as her righthil "master," for whom she must arrange her feanires like

a "mask"(l7) and whose step touches her like a "sceptre" (87); the novel's ending

justifies rather than redraws this master-slave analogy. Ariel, we remember, awakened at

the touch of Prospero's magic to a slave's servitude.

The conclusion of Murgret Howth turns away fiom the discussion, let alone the

solution, of social problems to privilege instead a sentimental response." Margret, her

"master" insists, "shall be no strong-willed reformer, standing alone." Rather, she is to be

"a sovereign lady with kind words for the world, who gives her hand only to that man

"Pfaelzer conducts an in-àepth examination of Davis's "affectional discourse" and concludes that by "fastening the emerging strategies of literary realism ont0 felt expenence, Davis reclaims fiom sentimentaiism its subjectivity and intensity of feeling" (Parlor Radical 56, 75 .) 153 whom she trusts, and keeps her heart and its secrets for me alone" (242). Like George

Eliot's later heroine, Dorothea Brooke, Margret turns away fkom the realm of "strong- willed" action to invest her energies in the "kind," domestic art of feeling right. Davis's repossessed Margret seerns left to hug the cornfort of Eliot's disenchanted heroine, "That by desiring what is pedectly good, even when we don't quite biow what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil-widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.'*'

From Dorothea's rather mystical vantage point, one does not need to articulate the good in order to reap the emotionai satisfaction of desiring it. This is the baffling note on which Davis's hctwed novel, which fails apart through the over-articulation of so many rival perspectives, also ends. The narrator tries to "grope" after the larger meaning of events, particularly Lois's death, but admits that "the story of the yet living men and women of whorn 1 have told you grows vague and incomplete, like unguessed riddles"

(263-64). The finai result is a kind of logical and emotional staIemate, which the nmtor is compelled to acknowledge: "My story is but a mere groping hint? It lacks determined truth, a certain yea and nay? It has no conduit of God's justice dng through it, awarding apparent good and ill? 1 know: it is a story of To-Day. The Old

Year is on us yet" (264). If one of the novel's minor characters, an insightfid clergyman named Vandyke, manages to see beyond the confusion of Civil War to an "etemal prophecy of coming content" (265), Davis's subdued heroine "has no prophetic insight"

(265). Margret, the narrator implies, has learned, like Lois, to "find it enough to hold no

'*George Eliot, MiddZemurch (New York: Penguin, 1985) 427. 154 past and no hture, to accept the work of each moment" (266). In a novel preoccupied with competing visions of America's ideological genesis and her economic hiture,

Margret' s tuming away nom the work of history signals the final collapse inwards of the disjointed and divided social commentary of Murgret Howth. Chapter Four Borderline Allegiances: Davis on Abolitionists, Slaveholders, and Slavey

The background of proslavery thought and rhetonc that helps generate the social criticism of "Life in the Iron Mills" and Margret Howth continued to shape Davis's artistic voice and vision throughout her career. In particldar, Davis's scepticism regarding abolitionists and abolitionism proves a stub body enduring perspective that fiavours much of her work with a defiantly equivocal outlook on slaveholders and their culture. Throughout her life, Davis mingled with abolitionists but kept her ideological distance fiom them. in the writing that imrnediately followed "Life in the iron Mills" and

Margret Howth in the Atlantic Monthly, she portrays abolitionists as problematic figures who often seem uncertain about their aims, thus projecting ont0 these confïicted literary creations her own unsettled attitudes towards the most obstreperous reformers of her day.

At the sarne tirne, these texts evince a generous tolerance for the inherited attitudes of slaveholders, even though Davis identified herself-in an abstract rather than corporate sense-as a life-long "abolitionist."

Davis devotes an entire chapter of her autobiography to describing and judging the abolitionists she has known. And she knew some of the most prominent figures in the movement. Before her marriage, her family's fnendship with F. Julius LeMoyne, a radicai ab01 itionist fkom her mother 's hometown of Washington, Pennsylvania, seems to have prepared her for a close fiiendship with the most fiery, outspoken abolitionist in western Virginia, Archibald Campbell. Backed by Republican funds,' Campbell took

'William Seward, a prominent Republican, helped fund the Intellzgencer (Rice 1 1 1).

155 156

over as owner and editor of the Wheeling Infelligencer in 1856 and transformed the paper

from a cautious, proslavery mouthpiece into western Virginia's leading abolitionist

~rgan.~It was while Campbell was editor that Davis probably submitted some of her first

work for publication.'

Clarke Davis was a strong believer in the abolitionist cause and through him

Rebecca heard and met many abolitionist celebrities: Wendel1 Phillips, Horace Greeley,

Frances Harper, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Ward Beecher, and Lucretia Mott. Davis

admired many abolitionists, but usually with qualifications. Sharon Harris's apologetic

claim that Davis, despite echoes of a more conservative ideology in her work, "did

believe in the abolitionist movement"" fails to take into candid account the satirical

scepticism with which Davis consistently treated abolitionists in both her fiction and non-

fiction. in Bits qfGossip, Davis devotes an entire chapter to personal reflections on

abolitionists she has known. These reminiscences provide an obvious point of access into

Davis's complicated, ironical perspective on abolition as a refonn movement.

Interestingly, the chapter on abolitionists follows directly on the heels of a chapter

describing the strategies of various con artists Davis has encountered through her literary

and charitable activities.

or a sample of the strong abolitionist sentiments expressed in the Intelligencer under Campbell see Jon Reed Donnelly, "Opinions on Slavery in the Wheeling Area As Evidenced in the Pages of the Daily intelligencer 1859-60," Upper Ohio Valley Historical Review 1.1 (1 968): 1-7.

'Harris believes Davis began to contribute matenal to the paper in the late 1850s and even served bnefly as editor in February 1859 (Rebecca Harding Davis 26-27).

'Harris, Re becca Harding Davis 78. 157

In a satiricai twist typicai of her attitude towards the subject, Davis entitles her chapter on abolitionists "A Peculiar People." Clearly, in Davis's view of the world, matured by the experiences of a life-tirne, it is not the institution of slavery but the extremism of abolitionists that seems deviant fiom national social attitudes. In Davis's view, most abolitionists were ultra-abolitionists, "Radicals" whom she plainly blarned for

"sowing the seeds whose deaâiy outgrowth was the Civil War" f 16 1). Images of fire and flarne augment Davis's depiction of abolitionists throughout the chapter. Most

Southemers and Northemers, she insists wanted to end slavery's reign, but infiammatory abolitionists, "fired with one idea" (1 63), were dangerously impatient: "these Radicals would not temporize nor wait. 'Abolish the evil now; cut out the cancer now, at any cost,' they cried" (16 1).

Davis's doubts about the effect of such drastic surgery on the national body manifests itself in her detailed physiological descriptions of famous abolitionkt speakers.

MostIy satincal, her portraits nearly al1 veer towards the grotesque. Davis recognizes the exaggerated iconography usually invoked to characterize abolitionists and does ber best, at the very outset, to debunk it. She fiankly admits: "1 certainly never found the mark of

Cain on the foreheads of these reformers, which their fire-eating neighbors declared was there; nor did I see the 'aureoled brows of warrior saints,' which Lowell and Whittier sang" (1 63). instead, her sketches reveal men and women whose personal appearance is a mix of the repulsive and the engaging, the ugly and the noble, the comic and the inspirational. Her distorted, incongnious imagery makes concrete her cornplaint that an 158 inevitable "touch of eccentricity" rendered slightly bizarre al1 fanatics of the abolitionist

"sect" (1 64).

The sketch of Doctor LeMoyne, probably the abolitionist celebrity Davis lmew best, displays this typical toucb of the Ereakish. As if to emphasize this aspect of the

Doctor's personaiity, Davis goes to great length to describe LeMoyne's French father, whom rurai Pennsylvanians regarded as a kind of snange wizard-figure, on account of both his foreignness and his scientific apparatus. "He was," she exaggerates, "as unlike the townspeople as if Neptune or Mars had put on trousers and coat and gone about the streets" (1 66). Davis represents Doctor LeMoyne, Junior, as inheriting his father's apparent outlandishness. A large, charismatic reformer with "a singular compelling, intolerant eye, which once seen you never forgot" (1 67), he is seemingly as fanatical in small things as in great. Afier emancipation, he devoted his single-rninded energies and the force of his "singular" eye to the cause of cremation. Notes Davis: "The rotting bodies under ground fietted him as much as the living slaves had done" (1 68).

In like manner, Davis exposes and slyly ridicules the personal eccentrkities of

Horace Greeley and Henry Ward Beecher. Greeley she presents as a man who

"ernbodied ... fdly [Abolitionism's] exaggerated phases" (1 8 1). Davis recalls hearing

Greeley speak during her schoolgirl days in Pemsylvania Her description of the farnous speaker's stage presence, over half a century afier the event, is as fiesh and as farcical as if she had heard him only the &y before:

And now, there he was himself, the great northem prophet and leader! He stood down in fiont of the pulpit, near to us. His head was a round, shining ball, the few hairs straggted wildly over it, his blue, round eyes were those of a baby, his voice was a shrill squeak.. .. His legs and amis wobbled continuously, as though every joint were unhinged. At las& in the height and paroxysrn of his argument, when he had clenched you, wrestiing with your reason as for life, he suddedy stopped, and taking out a huge yellow bandana handkerchief heid it at Iength by the two corners, and stooping down sawed it energetically across his legs. (1 8 1 -82).

Although Davis sarcastically deflates "the great nonhem prophet" into a wobbling

baby puppet, she admits, nevertheless, that Greeley's performance was strangely moving.

Behind the absurd comedy, she acknowledges the force of a "passionate," sincere appeal

that left the audience overcome with emotion and plunged into "an awed silence" (1 82).

Her reaction to Beecher is similarly mixed. On the one hand, she hdshirn

unselfconscious, a genuine humanitarian (remarkably, he seemed "an Abolitionist, not so

much fkom love of Freedom as love of the poor black man hirnself'), and a leader gified

with a "powerful intellect and tender sympathy". On the other hand, she records an

inexplicable feeling of repugnance in Beecher's presence: "But, back of the heavy jaws

and thick iips and searching eyes swathed in drooping lids.. . there was a nameless

something in Mr. Beecher which repelled most women. You resolved obstinately not to

agree with his argument, not to laugh or cry with him, not to see hirn again" (1 W).'

While Davis gratefully remembers the personal kindness of the famous preacher, she

emphasizes her physical repulsion fiom him-fiom the "heavy jaws," ''thick lips," and

"drooping" eyelids of "this huge, lumbering man" (1 89).

'The irony in Beecher's case-which Davis is perhaps too delicate to mention-is that Beecher was in fact extraordinarily popular with female audiences and that at least one married woman, Libby Tilton, found him scandalously attractive. 160 Davis's carefully detailed yet self-contradictory response to some of the leading abolitionists of her day follows her realist credo to "make a tnithful picture of them"

(1 63),independent of the usual cant. At the same tirne, it demonstrates Davis's natural distrust of organizational reform and the propensity of the individualist to attempt to separate men and women from so-called "movements." Ultimately, the grotesque irony with which she treats abolitionists reflects a mind tom between honest respect for noble personalities and a deeprooted cynicism conceming the misapplication of their ardour.

Davis maintains ber quizizical attitude even toward those abolitionist leaders she admires most openly, notably John Frémont and Lucretia Mott. She ironically pomays

Frémont, for instance, through the vocabulary of the Southern chivairic code. The heroic, strong-minded "first emancipator of the slavesy' (1 77) was in her eyes a perfect pattern of the Southem cavalier hero. He had the "ardent blood of a Frenchman and a

South Carolinian" and was, according to Davis, the "incarnation of the chivairic and noble side of Abolitionism," the "ideai hight" (1 75). In short, he was "the Arnerican

Sidney," with "the carriage of a soldier and the face of a pet" (1 76).

If Davis seems to take satisfaction in portraying Frémont, her personal hero and close fkiend, as a mode1 of Carolinian gallanuy, she adrnittedly takes real glee in imagining Lucretia Mott as an ideal planter's wife. Describing the powerful female branch of the Quaker abolitionist movement, she writes: "The queen bee of this buuing swmwas Lucretia Mon, one of the most remarkable women that this country has every produced" (192-93). The insect imagery Davis uses here surely makes this a raîher back- handed compliment. As always, Davis shows a comic reluctance to infiate the stature of reformers whose extremist cause she viewed as slightly touched by the ridiculous. Davis

knew Mott personally and offea high praise for her eloquence, her compassion, her sense

of humour, and her domestic ability. Davis closes the character sketch, however, with a

bit of deliberate drollery. She notes:

won] had, oddly enough, the persona1 charm, the temperament, the hospitable soul of a southern woman. I used wickediy to wish that she had been born on the other side. How she wouid have glorified her duty as a slaveholder and magnified her office! And how they would have appreciated her beauty and charm down there! (195)

As Mon is the 1stabolitionist Davis discusses in "A Pecuiiar People," her chapter on

abolitionists and abolitionism culminates on this "wickedly" ironic note.

For Davis, the personal heroism of the "peculiar people" never quite managed to compensate for their essentiai ignorance of the "pecuiiar institution." She fond abolitionists' one-sided views "exasperating to any one who knew that there was another side to the question" (1 89).6 Following her assertion that slaves in her native section of

Virginia were 300 cornfortable and satisfied with us to run away," Davis launches into an incident of comic exasperation involving the "most vehement Abolitionkt that 1 ever saw-' (1 70). The episode squarely juxtaposes Southem realism with deluded abolitionist heroics. Davis recalls receiving a letter during the war-time chaos of Jul y 1862 announcing the arriva1 of a French scientist who had corne to Amenca with high hopes of helping to fiee the slave. The letter, fiom a Boston abolitionist, asked Davis to use her

Confederate connections to ensure the Frenchman safe passage through the lines. Her

6Davis makes this comment with specific reference to Whittier. response to the request was shocked "dismay" (17 1). Even as she finished reading the

note, she remembers, "temfied cries" came from the street as two young girls were seized

for playing "Dixie" on the piano. In view of the everyday reality of martial law in the war

zone, the request fiom Boston seemed crudely ludicrous to Davis, who recollects:

Some of our fiends who were secessionists were in an old theatre just in sight which had ken turned into a jail. Others were in a prison camp on a pretty island in the river. The change in the drowsy town was like that made in those little vine-decked villages on the flanks of Vesuvius after the red-hot lava had passed over thern. Nothuig but gloom and suspicion and death were reai to us now. The range of mountains just out of sight was dive with rebel guerillas, quite as Littie minded to peace and mercy as our guards.

And 1 was asked to send a foreign slave-stealer safely through them! (1 72-73)

Typically, this passage shows Davis sttaddling the rhetoncal fence.' That the

"Abolition leader in Boston" (1 71) would think of asking the favour of her suggests that

Davis mut have had fiiends active in the "rnovement."' At the same the, however, her

reaction to a request she sees as absurd sympathizes with the "fue-eating" (163) language

of her proslavery neighbors. The anger behind the "slave-stealer" label she pins on the

Frenchman spills over into a full-blown caricature of the man, whom she pomays-

exploiting his heavily accented, imperfect English for its full comic effect-as an

7The fence metaphor is one of Davis's own: "My family lived on the border of Virginia. We were, so to speak, on the fence, and could see the great question fiom both sides. It was a most unpleasant position. When you crossed into Pennsylvania you had to defend your slave- holding fiiends against the Abolitionists, who dubbed them al1 Legrees and Neros; and when ou came home you quarreled with your kindly neighbors for calling the Abolitionists 'emissaries of hell"' (Bits of Gossip 165-66).

'The abolitionist author of the note requesting Davis's assistance has not been identified. over-excited fool. The irony in this episode may be hard to read, but the indignation at il\-informed abolitionist assumptions (marked with the concluding exclamation point above) certainly is not. Significantly, when the Frenchman does finally fmd someone to try to conduct him through the Iines, his chaperone is a compassionate Confederate slaveholder. In this hurnourous episode, Davis once again lets her Southem sympathies take the uppex hand.

Ultimately, Davis opposes in Bits of Gossip, and throughout her canon, narrow extrernism in any fom. Her chief cornplaint against abolitionists does not derive sirnply from their oddball ways ("Why, because these good folk wanted to fiee the slaves, should they refise to cut their beards or to eat meat, or have run afier new kinds of fantastic medicines or religions? [164]) but fiom their apparent monomania. In a key passage that sheds as much light on the commentator's vision for social reform as on the abolitionist agenda, Davis remarks:

1 remember, too, that when you were with the Abolitionists you were apt to be kindIed at first by their great purpose, but after a while you were bored by it. They saw nothing else. Like Saint George, they thought that one dragon filled the world. Their narrow fury angered you. "1s the Devil dead?" you said. "What of his old works? What of dnuikemess and hate and lies? Let us talk of these, too." But they ignored them dl. (165)

Although many abolitionists gradually broadened their reform platform- eventually uniting their cause, for instance, with that of the white worker-Davis clings here to the prevalent stereotype of her youth and of proslavery fiction. She captures the effect of this cartoon image on the Southern imagination when she recalls, in an 1897 article for The Bookbuyer, the visit of a woman *ter to her childhood school. Recreating the excitement the woman's visit causeci, Davis writes: "None of the children

had ever before seen a woman who had written a book. She was to us a something apart

from the actual world, like a cornet or a two-headed dog.... Was she an abolitionist? Or

an atheist? Something monstrous she must be?

By taking up the abolitionist cause dong with her pen, Davis would have made

herself, according to her own ùiherited expectations, doubly monstrous. Davis, however,

always kept a half-mocking, half-wary distance fiom the anti-slavery crusade. The

irreverent tone she adopts in Bits of Gossip is consistent with her attitude towards

abolitionists throughout her life, in her fiction as well as her nonfiction. On this point,

her response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's work is illuminating. In Davis's view, Uncle

Tom's Cabin was not, as so many have considered it, Stowe's masterpiece, but rather a

literary fad. Stowe's later, less famous novels constituted, in Davis's opinion "much

more accurate and fiwr ~ork."'~Apparently, Davis followed the extended proslavery

'Davis, "Some Hobgoblins in Literaîure," The Bookbuyer, 3fdser. 14 (Apr 1897): 229.

'''The enonnous sales of Uncle Tom's Cabin were due to another characteristic of our people. It was read because its subject was the one which at that instant was upheaving the country to its foundations. The American is apt to tear and rend an idea to tatters in the fervor of the moment. But. the moment gone, he suddenly regards the whole matter de haut en bas, and with good humored indifference refuses ever to be bored by it again" (Davis, "Big Sellers" 15.) Regrettably, Davis does not specify which aspects of Stowe's subsequent work she regarded as improvements. Did she, for instance, consider Stowe's second portrait of Southem slavery, Dred: A Tale of the Great Disrnaf Swump (1856)' a "finer" and "more accurate" book than its famous predecessor? Dred not ody expands the range of Afiican-Amencan characters presented in Uncle Tom's Cabin (its hero is modelled on the slave rebel, Denmark Vesey) but paints a far more varied portrait of Southem society, black and white, than does Uncle Tom 's Cobin (Stowe examines, for example, the plight of poor whites, benevolent planten, and the clergy). Davis, one can imagine, might well have appreciated the increased play Stowe gives in her later slavery novel to so many of the tangled concems she herself would investigate in her own fiction a few years later. 165

repercussions to MeTom S Cabin with some zeal, and judged that Stowe was worsted

in the fray. In Febniary 1863, she wrote to Annie Fields: "Mr Davis keeps me supplied

with English and Scotch papers-how savagely they do cut up Mrs Stowefs'replyt-Had

she fiiend to warn her off of logic?""

In her own intensely sociaily conscious writing of the early 1860s, published in

the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, Davis holds up for scnitiny the figure of the abolitionist

and his (or her) rhetoric. These early texts, produced while Davis was still single and

living at home in Wheeling, bear, like "Life in the Iron Mills" and Murgret Howth, the

impress of the author's participation in a slave culture. "Blind Tom," "John Lamar," and

"David Gaunt," al1 published in 1862, candidly probe the tensions that were tearing the

country apan, focussing directly on the issues of slavery and abolition. These pieces are

remarkable not only for their fine characterizations, well-crafted plots, and detailed

touches of local colour but also for their detennined inconctusiveness. Wntten at a time

when propaganda overwhelmed the book stalls, Davis's war stories are relevant without

being didactic. Inevitably, Davis's borderland double-vision separated "slavery" and

"abolition" into two separate issues. Thus, while the stones 1 am about to examine have

been convincingly interpreted as significant critiques of the slave system, they aiso, 1

contend, illustrate Davis's deep suspicion of abolitionists and their crusade. Her

criticism of slavery does not prevent her fiom undermining her abolitionist characters nor

' 'Davis, letter to Annie Fields, 18 Feb [ 18631, Richard Harding Davis Collection (#fi 1O9), Clifion Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. fiom reminding readers, as did the proslavery novelists, that there were other problems on

their doorsteps besides slavery-besides, even, the war.

"Blind Tom," a piece of joumalism rather than fiction, demonstrates particularly

forcefûily Davis's dudistic perspective on slavery as a social issue because the author

narrates in her own voice. This moving eyewitness account of a black idiot-savant pianist

is not written in the terse, no-nonsense style that wodd later chatacterize Davis's non-

fiction, but is as intensely gripping and poignant as any of her best fiction."

Jean Pfaelzer asserts that in Davis's stories featuring Afncan-Arnerican figures

'73~0discursive traditions collide: rhetorics fiom abolition, Quakerism,

transcendentalism, and the social gospel conflict with rhetorics of early eugenics,

southem romanticism, and proslavery apol~getics."'~Both Pfaelzer and Harris view this

"collision" of different ideological perspectives in "Blind Tom" as seriously

compromising the article's instructive value, which they see as the denunciation of

slavery. Regrets Harris: "Davis's] love of the South, its people, and its culture was

deeply imbedded; and in spite of her abhorrence of slavery, she, like Hdet Beecher

Stowe and Theodore Parker, did not always rise above the nation's racism, even when she

was, as in 'Blind Tom,' 'Lamar,' and Waitingfor the Verdict, at her abolitionist best.""

"In her Rebecca Harding Davis Reader, Pfaelzer groups "Blind Tom" under the heading "Fiction" rather than "Essays." Although Davis exercised a cenain degree of poetic licence in her portrait, the piece is clearly meant to be a journalistic narrative from real life. Pfaelzer herself carefully documents the existence of the blind pianist, Thomas Greene Bethune, who was something of a celebrity in the siave states (Parlor Radical 99-100). 13Pfaelzer,Parlor Radical 20.

''Harris, Rebecco Harding Dovis 98-99. Davis herself would hardly, 1 think, have concurred with a Iiterary standard that

measured artistic success in tenns of abolitionkt content. "Blind Tom" in fact

chalIenges the dominance of any one single-minded rhetoric. It is a text that insists on its

own instability, that questions the polarization of politicai vision, and that recreates in the

reader the pull between syrnpathy and judgment that Davis knew first-hand as a close

observer of both slavery and slaveholders.

Davis begins her story of Blind Tom by emphasizing the partiality of her own

knowledge about Tom, even though she has seen him perform with her own eyes and has

carefùliy researched his life." Despite this personal knowledge of her subject, Davis

points out that she cmoniy conjecture as to some of the key facts of his existence. Her

essay begins with the vague statement, "Sometime in the year 1850, a tobacco-planter in

Southem Georgia (Perry H. Oliver by name) bought a likely negro woman [Tom's

mother] with some other field-bands? Not oniy is Davis unable to specie the exact

date Tom and his mother were purchased but, as Pfaeizer's historical research has shown,

she incorrectly names Tom's owner." Not content merely to underline the speculative

avis likely saw Tom play more than once. Pfaelzer notes only that Davis saw Tom in Baltimore in 1862 and undertook a biographicd fact-fmding mission then (Parlor Radical 100- 10 1 ). The narrator of "Blind Tom" claims, however, to have seen the slave perform when he was touring 'hpper Virginia towns" in 1860 (1 09). Davis probably saw- Tom play for the first time in Wheeling in 1860 when "a blind negro pianist" visited the town and drew a large crowd (Hewetson 68).

16Davis, "Blind Tom," A Rebecca Harding Duvis Reader 104; hereafter cited parenthetically.

"Mr. Oliver was the original owner of Tom and his mother. The rd-life Blind Tom, Thomas Greene Bethune, was bought by a Colonel Bethune in 185 1 (Pfaelzer, Parlor Radical 99, 103). nature of her biography, Davis goes on to philosophize about it in one of the article's

most remarkable passages:

The two slaves were purchased, I believe, from a trader: it has ken impossible, therefore, for me to ascertain where Tom was bom, or when. Georgia field-hands are not accurate as Jews in preserving their genealogy; they do not anticipate a Messiah. A white man, you know, has that vague hop unconsciously latent in him, that he is, or shall give birth to, the great man of his race, a helper, a provider for the world's hunger: so he grows jealous with his blood; the dead grand-father may have presaged the possible son; besides, it is a debt he owes to this coming Saul to tell him whence he came. There are some classes, free and slave, out of whom society has crushed this hop: they have no clan, no farnily-names among hem, therefore (104).

in this excerpt, Davis carefully balances her narrative voice between personal and

impersonal judgment, between empathy and blame, between anti-slavery sentiment and

broader humanistic cornmentary. Unable to give the precise details of Tom's ongins,

Davis is forced to fa11 back on what she "believes." Thus, she builds on Tom's apparent anonymity to protest the evil of a system that deprives an entire race of the power of self- naming. And yet, it is not the institution of slavery but rather "society" at large that she castigates. and she points out that the articulation of selfhood is denied to "classes" rather than to a single ethnic group. Tom's narnelessness becomes a metaphor for the powerlessness of slaves of al1 colours who languis11 for want of even the hope of deliverance. If a Messiah is to appear, his apocalypse will not threaten Southem slaveholders alone, it seems. Unravelling the causes of Tom's social suffenng, Davis

implies, is as difficult as ascnbing blame for his physiological suffering. "Deeper than slavery." she concludes at the close of her introduction, 'Vie evil lies" (104). 169

Throughout "Blind Tom," Davis dwells on Tom's physical disfigurement to point out the limitations of abolitionist rhetonc as well as slavery. As narrator, she pretends to preserve a detached, objective stance, but part of her distancing technique, as Pfaelzer points out, is her use of "higbly raci~t"'~language to describe Tom. This racist language, however, seems as much the product of Davis's emotional response to Tom's grotesque deforxnity as to his blackness. As she narrates her immediate experience of the grotesque, Davis subjects her reader to the pull of opposing emotions and convictions that always complicated for her the issues of slavery and abolition.

Davis's depiction of Tom is complicated first by her portraya1 of his owner. indeed, Mr. Oliver's portrait is really inseparable fiom Tom's. Oliver, like the narrator. provides a filter for the reader's perceptions of the slave boy. Our fmt picture of the

Uifant Tom emerges as the narrator reads Oliver's thoughts. Oliver purchases Tom, Davis tells us, because he does not want to separate mother and child. Davis's joumdism does not, as we have seen, always restrict itself to its self-proclaimed mandate of "plain, known facts" (107), though, and she offen an imaginative reflection on this compassionate decision: "Charity only could have induced him to take the picanimy, in fact, for he was but a lump of black flesh, bom blind, and with the vacant grin of idiocy, they thought, already stamped on his face" (104). The identity of 'Wiey" in this sentence is not exactly clear. Probably, Davis uses 'Wey thought" as an impersonal third-person expression, like the French "on dit." Nonetheless, her description of the baby as a

"picaninny" identifies her voice here with the Southemers who surround Tom at the

'8Pfaelzer, Parlor Radical 10 1. moment of his purchase. That Oliver is at once able to see Tom as an objectified "lump

of black flesh" and a creature worthy of "charity" speaks volumes of the paradoxes of slaveownership. Clearly a benevolent slaveholder, Oliver is no more a monster than his spirituaily gified slave is a mere thing.

One of the most controversial moments in "Blind Tom" is Davis's description of

Tom's early life on the Oliver plantation, a passage that shows the mixed influence of

Darwinian and racist rhet~ric:'~

Southemers know nothing of the physical shiver of aversion with which even the Abolitionists of the North touch the negro: so Tom, through his very helplessness, came to be a sort of pet in the family, a play-mate, occasionally, of Mr. Oliver's own infant children. The boy, creeping about day after day in the hot light, was as repugnant an object as the lizards in the neighboring swamp, and promised to be of as little use to his master. He was of the lowest negro type, fiom which only field-hands can be made,-coal-black, with protruding heels, the ape-jaw. blubber-lips constantly open, the sightless eyes ctosed, and the head thrown far back on the shoulders, lying on the back, in fact, a habit which he still retains and which adds to the imbecile character of the face (1 05).

The first thud of this description cm not be separated fiom the rest, as Davis here toys once again with perspective. Her iternization of Tom's grotesque characteristics is, afier all, prefaced by a statement that qualifies, and judges, the reader's reaction. If it is not slaveholders but abolitionists who feel a "physical shiver of aversion" towards black flesh, then is not the notion of Tom's "repugnance" as much the product of abolitionist bias as Southern racism? Davis, aware she is writing in the Atlantic for a predominantly

Northem audience, can authoritatively describe Tom as "repugnant," certain the heartless

'9Pfaelzer,Parlor Radical 10 1- 102. 171

adjective will be approved by her audience. Tom's owners, on the other hand. somehow

manage to transcend the repulsion of the grotesque and are drawn towards the child by

pity and tolerance. Mason and Dixon's line is not necessarily, Davis's narrative indicates,

the dividing line between chanty and cailousness.

For a late twentieth-century reader, the final third of the above quotation probably

forms one of the most disturbing sentences in the entire essay. Davis enmerates Tom's

physical deformities in such a way as to make Tom at once the representative of a racial

me"and an aberration fiom that type. Davis amibutes Tom's monstrous. animalistic

appearance at least partly to his genetic heritage as the offspring of field-hand stock. On

the other hand, Tom's grotesque aspect is, the article as a whole makes clear, unique to

him, the outward mark of his musual, inexplicable musical talent. Davis's grotesque

description of the "idiot" both builds on and disrupts conventional racist stere~ty~es.'~

The shockingfi.isson it causes, a shiver of both aversion and awe, forces readers to

question the authenticity of any conveniently uniform view of slavery, an institution with

many sides.

Geoffrey Harpham, one of the leading theonsts of the grotesque, encapsulates the

modus operamii of this affective mode in language that seems especially relevant to the

conditions under which "Blind Tom'' was written. "The grotesque," he writes, "is always

a civil war of attracti~n/repulsion."~*Embodying a fundamentai incongruity-or set of

''Davis's portrait is partly "a critique of popular assumptions about the black performer as a 'comic Negro"' (Pfaelzer, Parlor Radical 99).

"~eoffie~Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiciion in Arr and Lirerature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982) 9. This pithy definition represents the ccinunon incongruitiesthe grotesque figure generates in its audience a sensation of ambivalence,

even confusion, by frequently yoking together the animal and the hurnan, the mechanicd

and the animate, the elevated and the degraded, or the sacred and the profane.

Davis's portrait of Blind Tom-with his lizard-like crawl, his "ape-jaw,"his

"blubber-lips," his "vacant grin," his open mouth, his "idiotic" laugh-fulfills the

traditional criteria of the grotesque. It presents the reader with an image that is at once, so

Davis forces us to acknowledge, "repugnant" and pitifùl, homfic and amusing,

stereotypical and subversive. Tom's speech, like his appearance, is essentially duali stic.

Vocally, he is a cornedian who laughs loudly, sbrieks with "delight," and cheen

hysterically (1 11). His musical expression, on the other hand, is pathetic and haunting.

Tom's own impromptu compositions form an eene contrast to his boisterous laughter:

Never, by any chance, a meny, childish laugh of music in the broken cadences; tender or wild, a defiant outcry, a tired sigh breaking down into silence. Whatever wearied voice it took, the same bitter, hopeless sou1 spoke through dl: "Bless me, even me, also, O rny Father!" A something that took ail the pain and pathos of the world hto its weak, pitifid cry (1 11).

Regarding Tom's laugh, Davis cornments, 'Wothing indexes the brain like the

laugh; this was idiotic" (1 10). It is also, she might have added, grotesque, a loud "Yha!

yha!" that explodes f?om the boy's gaping mouth as he squirms and twists "incessantly"

(1 10) on the piano stool. Tom's Laughing but bizarrely inarticulate mouth is a

ground of several centuries of nimination on the elusive nature of the grotesque. Theorists generally agree that grotesque imagery is fundamentaily distinguished by the emotionai tension it mates in the viewer or, in the case of the literary grotesque, the reader. Two notably influentid modem treatises on the grotesque are: Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (1957) and Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His Wodd (1 965). conspicuous feature in his grotesque portrait. It embodies the essence of Tom's

strangeness a situation by no meam undin the grotesque mode. Milchail Bakhtin

goes so far as to propose that "the most important of al1 human features for the grotesque

is the mouth. It dombates al1 else. The grotesque face is actually reduced to the gaping

mouth; the other features are only a &une encasing ~hiswide-open bodily abys~."~

nie prominence given to wide-open bodily orifices (such as the mouth, the belly,

the anus) in grotesque imagery focuses, Bakhtin argues, on the grotesque's quintessential

evasion of closure. "The grotesque body," he writes, Y.. is a body in the act of becoming.

It is never finished, never ~ompleted."~The openness of the grotesque figure thus

typically magnifies its instability. 24 Davis's grotesque makes it impossible to see a fixed

or one-sided vision of her character. The central revelation of her article is that Tom

appears ut once hideous and wonderful, repulsive and nobly gifted, dumb and strangely

articulate. Although critics have been quick to pick up on the &nities between Tom's

communication problems and Davis's own struggles as an artist," "Blind Tom" is, der

dl, a piece that is as much about vision as it is about speech. Davis uses the figure of the

blind pianist to enlarge her readers ' capacity for simultaneous multiple vision, the

"Milchail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tram. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984): 317.

"Bakhtin 3 17.

'*For Bakhtin, this openness signals the potentiai for transformation (through ingestion, digestion, the birth process), whereas for more cynical cntics, most notably Wolfgang Kayser, the "bodily abyss" points to a profound existential tenor. ose, Rebecca Harding Davis 47; Pfaelzer, Pador Radical 103. paradoxical and sometïmes uncornfortable insight of the grotesque. Suitably, the essay's

ending, like Tom's mouth, hangs open:

You cannot help Tom, either; al1 the war is between you. He was in Richmond in May. But (do you hate the moral to a story?) in your own kitchen, in your own back-dey, there are spirits as beautifid, caged in forms as bestial, that you could set fkee, if you pleased. Don't cal1 it bad taste in me to speak for them. You know they are more to be pitied than Tom,-for they are dumb (1 11).

Davis's ending resists closure, preventing an end to Tom's difficulties ("You

cannot hetp Tom") and leaving the solution of the larger problem, the unnamed dumb

"spirits," in the reader's hands. Since distance and war lie between her readers and Tom.

Davis knows that perfect vision of his situation is, in the end, impossible. Thus, in the

tradition of proslavery witers, she urges her readers to abandon the pretense at telescopic

vision for practical action directed at problems ready to hand. For Pfaelzer and Harris the

picture Davis presents in her "moral" of poor whites and Northem blacks worse off than

Tom must necessarily detract from the coherence of her "abolitionist best? Davis's

self-consciously cheeky "bad taste" highlights for me, however, the controlling logic of

"Blind Tom"-to disconcert and deliberately fragment conventional, monolithic modes of

viewing and discussing slavery.

To recognize the precarious poise of perspectives in "Blind Tom" is not to obviate

its author's racisrn. After dl, within the very article in which she appears to balance so

carefully controversial attitudes towards blacks and black slavery, she undemines the

'6Pfaelzer acknowledges but downplays Davis's debt to '?he conventional southem view that impoverished whites and free blacks in the North were worse off than slaves." (Parlor Radical 105) pretense of narrative objectivity by invoking pejorative stereotypes of Native Americans.

The spiritual quaiity of Tom's music is underlined at the satirical expense of his

Appalachian audiences, whose capabilities for musical appreciation are limited, according to Davis, by their Indian heritage. Describing the context in which she fmt heard Tom play, the narrator jeers:

The audience was large, aiways; such as a provincial town affords: not the purest bench of musical criticism before which to bring poor Tom. Beaux and belles, sifigs of old country families, whose grandfathers trapped and traded and married with the Mans,-the savage thickening of whose blood told itself in high cheek-bones, flashing jeweîry, champagne-bibbing, a comprehension of the tom-tom music of schotîisches and polkas ... (1 09).

"John Lamar" is no more immune than "Blind Tom" from the lingering taint of mid-nineteenth-centuxy biases conceming race and genetics. However, the story is nonetheless rernarkable for its strategic questioning of received attitudes about slaves and slavery. The plot involves a Confederate soldier, John Larnar, who is captured by a childhood fnend in western Virginia and imprisoned. Lamar plans to escape with the assistance of his slave, Ben, but, inspired by the abolitionist ranting of a white Federal soldier, Ben kills Lamar and makes his own escape. On one Ievel, "John Larnar" is about the awakening of a black slave's consciousness; on another level, it explores the consciousness of Ben's owner, Lamar, and records the consciousness-raising of the white abolitionist, Dave Hall. By focussing on obstmctions to perception and employing a shifiing narrative perspective, Davis places her reader in the sarne disonenting position in which her charactes find themselves. Moreover, by metaphoricaily reinforcing 176

similarities between the situation of the imprisoned slaveowner and the slave, she blurs

the distinction between hero and villain in her melodrama. Throughout the story, Davis

draursattention to the moral inadequacy and the political malleability of mere rhetoric,

especiaiiy abolitionist rhetoric, when it cornes to cutting through the Gordian knot of

Amencan slavery.

Davis begins her story by descnbing its setting, a Federal encampment that forms

"a son of wedge in the Rebel Cheat counties of Western Virgi~~ia."'~The Union troops

are established on the fmof their Captain, Charley Dorr, who is, ironically, a childhood

fiend of Larnar. Davis's story, like Dorr's farm, creates a son of baer zone between

two extrerne literary conventions-the abolitionist novel and the proslavery novel. Like

the farm, the text enjoys a threshold statu," offering a door (the pun on Charley's

patronyrn seems too irresistible to be coincidentai) into two different ideologicai worlds.

Davis introduces us to the intemediary space in which the action evolves through the

voice of a third-person omniscient narrator whose panoramic perspective takes in within a

few sentences the make-shih prison (a fami shed), the Dorr farm, and the larger

geographical settïng of the "Cheat counties." Soon, however, this narrative voice

becomes both more flexible and more limited, taking on a variety of viewpoints in rapid

succession.

'7Davis, "John Lamar," Atlantic Monthly 9 (Apr 1862), rpt. in A Re becca Harding Davis Reader 3 5; hereafter cited parentheticaily.

"~faelzer,PurZor Radical 84. The fim eyes through which the narrator ternporarily pers are those of Dave

Hall, as he observes the Codederate prisoner in his charge:

The sentry, a raw boat-hand from Illinois, gaped incessantly at him war] through the bars, not sure if the "Secesh" were limbed and headed like other men; but the Novernber fog was so thick that he could discern nothing but a short, squat man, in brown clothes and white hat, heavily striding to and fro (35).

Even as the narrator adopts Dave's vantage point, however, he (or she) hoids it up to

ridicule. Dave's imagined vision of his prisoner is grotesquely exaggerated and

completely unredistic. His actual vision is, furthemore. hardly any more reliable, on

account of the reduced visibility caused by the weather. Literally and metaphoricdly,

Dave sees his enemy and his surroundings through a kind of blinding fog.

The reader is given only this brief, clouded glimpse into Dave's psyche before the

narrative shifts back irnmediately to an apparently omniscient point of view. The

narrator's description of the prison-shed and its environs continues as follows: "A negro

was crouching outside, his knees cuddled in his arms to keep wm:a field-hand, you

could be sure fiom the face, a grisly patch of flabby black, with a dull eluding word of

something, you could not tell what, in the points of the eyes,-treachery or gloom" (35).

Although we readily recognize the thoughts in this passage as the narrator's and not

Dave's. Davis Mercornplicates the issue of perspective here by directly surnrnoning the reader to collaborate in observing the scene. Oddly enough, however, the narrator's second-person address (?ou could be sure fiom the face") assumes the reader's viewpoint only to negate it. The implied reader-').ou"-is able to read the slave's face but not his eyes, with their mystenous meaning. By inviting the reader into her text only to 178

highlight the Limits of readerly participation, Davis seems to imply that her audience, like

Dave, also gazes tbrough a metaphysicai fog.

White characters are not the only figures in "John Lamar" to sufTer fkom a kind of

visual handicap undei the story's "soggy sky" (37). Ben, the lone African-American

character and the real protagonist of the piece, is also befogged by prejudiced vision

based on stereotypes rather than persona1 experience. The initial conversation between

Ben and Dave gives us access momentarily to Ben's sight. The slave first rrsponds to the

Union soidier, the narrator tells us, "contemptuously; for Dave's trousers were in rags like his own, and his chilblained toes stuck through the shoe-tops. Cheap white trash, clearly"

(35). Ben's restricted notions about white caste prevent him fiom seeing the similarity between Dave's raggedness and his own. Just as Dave's vision is warped by his tendency to see al1 slaves as "Uncle Toms" and al1 slaveowners as "Legrees" (36),Ben's point of view is twisted by the rhetonc of proslavery apologetics. To Ben, Dave is a "miss'able

Linkinite," a poor "white nigger." Significantly, Ben squints when he look the sentry over; apparently his "critical survey" is not conducted with both eyes open (36).

The changing lenses through which the narrative voice is filtered over the course of "John Lamar" make it difficult to detennine who the narrator identifies with when using a first-person plural address. Usage of the possessive pronoun "our" seems especially prob!ematic in two particular instances. The first instance occurs in a passage that gives us a great deal insight into Dave's character and into Davis's attitude towards abolitionists. Dave recovers fiom Ben's insults by "choking down an oath into a grim

Methodist psalm" (36), and eying Lamar (obliquely, of course) with deep suspicion and hatred. If curses and psalm-singing seem strangely incongrous, the narrator explains:

"Our men of the Northwest have enough brawny Covenanter muscle in their religion to

make hem good haters for opinion's sake" (36). Here, the voice of the narrator seems to

identify itself plainly with the reader as well as with the people Davis knew best,

Westerners. At the moment that she intrudes a personal narrative presence into th2 text

through the inclusive pronoun "our," however, she undercuts the tie between her audience

and herself through her obvious ~arcasrn.*~

The second unsettling use of "our" occurs as part of a character sketch of Dorr,

whom the narrator hails as "one of those souls bom and bred pure, sent to teach, that can

find breath only in the fiee North" (39). Here the narrative voice seems to identifj its

interests wholeheartedly with those of the fiee North. However, as we shall see, the ideal

of the "fiee North" is highiy suspect. Dorr appears, therefore, as a mode1 rather than a

representative citizen. The narrator describes him thus: "A puny littie man, with thin

yellow hair, and womanish face: but not the less the hero of his men,- they having found

out, somehow, that muscie was not the solidest thing to travel on in war-times. Our

regiments of 'roughs' were not altogether crowned with laure1 at Manassas!" (39). Like

Blind Tom,Dorr is typical yet exceptional. Hence, the narrator's endorsement of Dorr

'9~anyyean later, in journalistic reminiscences and in Bits of Gossip Davis would expand on her scepticism about the stemness of evangelical religion. See, for example, "Religion in the Days of Our Father," in which Davis relates with heavy-handed irony her encounter at age 15 with a minister who, she writes, "reasoned with me until midnight to convince me that if 1 were one of the hordes bom to be sent to hell 1 should submit and thank God." Davis was not convinced by the man's Calvinin logic and the minister stayed up al1 night praying for her: "-not that 1 should be saved; his prayers, he believed, could not touch that-but that I should be willing to be damned" (Saturday Evening Post 178 [24 Mar 19061: 4). only serves to mock the Union "roughs" who bungled the fim battle of Bull Run.

interestingly, although Davis's narrative voice plainly affiliates itself with the Union

cause here, the battle location is identified by the name the Confederates u~ed.~'How

readily, one wonders, were Atlantic readers able to sympathize with a narrator who

embraced "our" cause whilst effectively dending (note the comment's exclamatory force)

its efforts ?

Creating sympathy does not, in the end, seem the either the goal or effect of

Davis's oddly inclusive language. btead, the ambivalent narrative perspective creates a

sense of uncertainty and unease. Like the story's title character, the reader finds herself in

a moral and politicai landscape that is disorienthg and di6cult to interpret.

John Lamar contemplates fiom his prison window his ugly, stenle environment

much as the anonymous narrator meditates on the grim, smob scene of "Life in the iron

Mills." The landscape that meets Lamar's eyes seems to rnirror his own dejection:

The November day was dead, sunless: since moming the sky had had only enough life in it to sweat out a few muddy drops, that fioze as they fell: the cold numbed his mouth as he breathed it. This stubbly slope was where he and his grandfather had headed the deer: it was covered with hundreds of dirty, yellow tents now. Around there were hills like uncouth monsters, swathed in ice, holding up the soggy sky; shivering pine-forests; unmeaning, dreary flats; and the Cheat, coiled upon the fiozen sinews of the hills, Iimp and cold, like a cord tying a dead man's jaws (37).

This glimpse into Lamar's consciousness demonstrates the power of individual

perception to colour, and even distort, the perceived object. To Lamar's troubled minci,

"James M. McPhemn, Battie Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford UP, 1988) 346. 181 the farniliar terrain of childhood vacations appears grotesquely foreboding, an ominous personification of the land as a political cadaver and a symbolic foreshadowing of

Lamar's Unminent deaîh. The view fkom the prison-shed is both paralyzed and paralyzing; the fiozen, dead atmosphere produces oniy enough weather activity to

"numb" Larnar's mouth with a few drops of precipitation. Ironicaily, Lamar, unaware of the way his interpretation of his enviromnent reflects his psychologid condition, finds his "dreary" surroundings '~eaning."Although the vision is his own, he cannot fathom the symbolic depth of the imaginative insight that rnakes this passage one of

Davis's strongest protests against the waste and htility of war.

By enabling us to see through the eyes of lamarTsdespair, Davis encourages her readers to see the Codederate prisoner as a rather pathetic character. Cont~vyto Dave's expectations, the situation in which Lamar fînds himself seems monstrous @orrYs fann appears surrounded by "hiIls Iike uncouth monsters"), but the man hirnself is no rnonster.

In her portrait of Lamar, Davis both acknowledges and subverts the stereotype of the

Southem planter as a sensual barbarian. She admits that, "[tlhe man among his brother officers in Richmond was coarse, arrogant, of dogged courage, keen palate at the table, as keen eye on the turf" (38). Like the "Legree" Dave takes him to be, Lamar first appears in the story in the midst of delivering a round of curses upon Ben's head. However,

Davis is equally quick to point out Larnar's redeeming qualities. His curses are

"abruptly" cut short wben Ben asks for tobacco, and Lamar gratifies the slave's request

"kindly enough" (35). As more concrete proof of Larnar's essential hurnanity, we have the testimony of Ben's thoughts. As the slave ponders his possibilities of escape, he 182 considers "how ofien Mars' John had interfered with the over-seers to Save him fiom a flogging." In parentheses, the narrative voice asserts: "(Lamar, in his lazy way, was kind to his slaves)" (45).

That the narrator expresses this 1st conviction parenthetically points out, however, Lamar's ambivalent presentation throughout the story. The narrator-seemingly able to embrace a mdtiplicity of viewpoints-hesitates tu endorse wholeheartedly any single character or bis outlook. As Pfaeizer has persuasively demonstrated, even Lamar's well-documented affection for his younger sister, Floy, has disquiethg implications. The pnsoner's intense and almost incestuous concem for "Baby Florence" (39)' alone and sexually vulnerable on the Georgia plantation, shows up domestic ideology as the dubious accomplice, rather than the saving grace, of the slave system. The image of the plantation as home. with Floy under the motherly protection of her black "maumer," is overshadowed in Larnar's rnind by a nightmare vision of rape and not that he fears could take place in his absence: "[he] fancied he saw [Snake-hunters] skulking through the fields at Cedar Creek, closing around the house, and behind them a mass of black faces and bloody bayonets" (39).)'

Even the title of "John Lamar" embodies Davis's ambivalent attitude towards her

Southem soldier. Harris blames James Fields for choosing a title that inaptly reflects the

"focus" of the story, but also notes that Davis fully agreed with her editor's suggestion."

The "focus" of "John Lamar" is, of coune, a twin one. Ben and Lamar share the spotlight

"Pfaelzer, Parlor Radical 87. j2Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis 76-77. 183 as Davis probes both of their characters and the complex relationship between them. By giving the white slaveowner star billing even as she makes the slave the centrai actor on stage, Davis actuaily highiights the Doppelgiinger effect that joins her two protagonists throughout the story. John Lamar is indeed the hero of the piece because, metaphoncally speaking, he is also Ben's double.

A series of image patterns that link Lamar and Ben seem expressly to elici1 sympathy for the story' s title figure. The racist animalistic language the narrator typically uses to characterize Ben, for instance (most honendously, the slave is compared at one point to a "gorilla" [45] and another tirne to a "polypus" [42]), is somewhat undercut by a sirnilar description of the master, whose imer bbhungeryyturns his face paie, "as that of a savage or an animal" (37). Duruig the coune of the story, Larnar and his servant are, of course, both prisoners-one of war and one of slavery-and Davis metaphorically reinforces their shared condition. Reflecting on his long fnendship with Lamar, Dorr sees the Southemer as imprisoned by more than the walls of his provisional jail. As he recalls the taunts "poor John" received at Yale, Dom thinks: "No wonder the Northem boys jeered him. with his slothways, his mouthed English, torpid eyes, and brain shut up in that wont of rnudrnoulds,-belief in caste" (40). In his present situation, Lamar feels "like a rat in a trap" (39). Through the image of the penned rat, Davis suggests that both master and slave are prey to a form of mental as well as physical incarceration. Later in the story, as Ben digests the words of the abolitionist and begins to meditate on his slave statu, his thoughts corne "creeping out of their hiding-places through the torpor, like rats to the sunshine" (4 1). 184 Davis's narrator seems to beg further compassion for "poor John" through the tale

of his mistrated courtship of Dom's wife, Ruth. Larnar. like Ben, appears cruelly

separated fiom the domestic happiness other men enjoy. From Larnar's point of view, the

Dom' marital bliss throws up an impassable banier between the contented couple and

himself: "A guif lay between them and the rest of the world. It was hardly probable

[Charley] couid see muth] as a woman towards whom another man looked across the gulf, dumb, hopeless, defhuded of his right" (40-41). The unrequited lover, like his

slave, is shut out fiom the common cornforts of humanity and is as "dumb" and downtrodden as the sufTering masses who, Davis tells us, are more to be pitied than Blind

Tom. The story's imagery reinforces once again the strength of the parailel Davis draws between her MO main charactea. Lamar's last sight of Charley and Ruth catches the couple retiring behind a closed door (47). Similady, the narrator conveys Ben's mistrated longing for freedom through an allusion to the door that shut on the ten foolish virgins of the Biblical parable (45).

Once image patterns corne înto play, Lamar perhaps becomes more of a hero than he initially seems. His character as slaveholder is, the story clearly communicates, at least as difficult to unravel as the mentality of his brutaiized slave. At one point, Larnar seems tci take on in his own mind the stature of a truly tragic hero, Harnlet. Facing the corpses of dead civilians, he thinks, "Something was rotten in fieer States than Denmark"

(37). If this borrowing fiom the agonîzed Dane seems slightly histrionic, it is not gratuitous. Laying aside the question of blame, Lamar's position as a planter is, Davis goes to great pains to show, complicated and agonizing. Consequently, Lamar, like 185

Hamiet, is deeply suspicious of sirnplistic solutions. Davis's portrait of the naïve

abolitionist, Dave, seems to justifl this scepticism by cobingmany of Larnar's

insights into Dave's extremist behavior.

Dave appears as a highly contradictory character fiom the beginning. In his first

conversation with Ben, we find him seated, "nursing his musket across his knees, baby-

fashion" (35). An anomaious combination of innocence and potentid violence, Dave

seems to merge in his person masculine milibrisrn and the mothe~ginstinct. In his

Northern figure, as in the sketch of Lamar's Southem plantation, domestic imagery

appears entangled with the weaponry of Civil War. Nevertheless, Dave, at the story's

opening, seems essentially innocent, even though, as the narrator remarks, he perverts his

Biblical name by becoming hirnself an instrument in Lamar's murder (49). Dave's

naïvété makes him the unenlightened reader's representative in the text. As the plot

evolves, Dave also evolves, leaming tough lessons about the limits of abolitionism's

narrow perspective and the failure of manipulative rhetoric to solve deep-seated social

ills.

"John Lamar," like Uncle Tom 's Cabin, is a text that focusses on the political

exploitation of difEerent discourxs.)' Davis, like Stowe, is especiaily aware of the

adaptability of Biblical language and libertarian rhetoric to dogrnatic ends. Notably,

"Catharine O'Comell's exploration of the "cornpetition" of different rhetoncs in Lrncle Tom 's Cabin has served as a theoretical mode1 for much of my discussion of Davis's work. (Catharine E. O'Connell, "The 'Magic of the Red Presence of Distress': Sentimentality and Competing Rhetorics of Authority" The Siowe Debare: Rherorical Struregies in Uncle Tom's Cabin, eds. Mason 1. Lowance, Jr., Ellen E. Westbrook and R.C. De Prospo [Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1 9941: 13-36). 186 neither of her soldiers buys into the so-called "slogans" (the tenn is Lamar's) popularly attributed to their respective armies. Lamar, for example, is a "Secesh" who does not believe in the nght of secession. Dorr, for his part, is a Northemer who refuses to see the aim of the war as the abolition of slavery. Codederate and Federaiist unite in their condernnation of the use of African-Amencan emancipation as a war-cry. Selling the war through the image of the suffering bond slave, maintaias Dom, 'puts a false face on it"

(43).

Dorr is, we must remember, a native Virginian, like Davis. On opposite sides of a constitutional debate, he and his childhood fiiend nonetheless share a "contempt" (4 1) for

Dave, whom Dom calls a "canting Abolitionist" (41). The narrative voice, too, manifests its contempt in a subtle way: whereas the narrator typicaily refers to John Lamar and

Charley Dorr, both officers, by their surnames, Dave Hall, a mere foot soldier, is either

"the boatman" or "Dave." Lamar's scorn for Dave holds significant weight because he recognizes the substance of Dave's accusations as "true" but "despise[s] the man as a crude, unlicked bigot" (41). Lamar, Dorr says. is "shrewd" (44). Uniike his slave, he is able to separate the message fiom the inflamrnatory medium.

The first hint that Dave's religious rhetoric is grossly distorted, and perhaps even perverted, occurs when Ben insuits "the boatman" and Dave responds by tuming a curse into a psalm. This preliminary incident colours the next episode in which Dave speaks, which describes the religious meeting of the Union soldiers. Neither Lamar nor Dorr are available for comment in this scene, which cornes to the reader through the mixed filter of

Ben's eavesdropping and the narrator's commentary. Ben first hears Dave's speech as an 187

incoherent "wild &one" (48). In keeping with this initiai impression, the narrator

describes Dave's "exhortation" in terms of its emotional impact rather than its intellectual

content. The speaker sways and trembles with feeling, and his voice is "shrill" (48) with

agitation. This emotion, the narrator notes, is not faked: "For the men were honest, God-

fearing souls, members of the same church, and Dave, in al1 integrity of purpose, read aloud to them" (48). The narrator, lilce Larnar, acknowledges that Dave's fervour is genuine, but this does not make his rhetoncal appropriation of Biblical language any less suspect.

Dave's abolitionist appeal seems loosely based in the language of Jeremiah 50, which describes the destruction of Babylon by a northem nation ("For out of the north there cometh up a nation against her, which shail make her land desolate," Jer 50:3).

Although he roughly paraphrases the chapter. Dave gives the misleading impression of quoting directly fiom scripture: "What saith the prophet Jeremiah? 'Take up a burden against the South. Cry aioud, spare not. Woe unto Babylon, for the day of her vengeance is corne, the day of her visitation!'" (49). The quotation marks are, in this instance, inaccurate. What seems to Ben the direct "voice of God" (49) is in fact a selective compilation edited to achieve a certain rhetoncai effect. Note, for instance, how Dave rephrases Jeremiah's prophecy to put it in the imperative, offensive mode. Whereas the

Biblical passage asserts, "out of the north there cometh up a nation," Dave urges his audience to "Take up a burden against the South."

Lamar and Dom,both educated men, see through the textuai manipulations of sacred texts that typically authorize abolitionist rhetonc. Despite, however, his ability to 188 recognize the exploitation of Biblical laquage, Larnar seems ignorant of his own twisting of the rhetoric of Amencan independence. "We will be fiee to-night, old boy!"(47) he tells Ben, oblivious to the cruel irony in the statement. Lamar's implicit tnist in the dornestic bond between himseifand his body sentant camouflages to his mind the different rneanings of "fiee" for master and slave. This fatal blindness seems al1 the more obvious because in several other incidents in the story Lamar shows himself particularly aware of the diverse significations that can be attributed to the words "liberty" and

"freedom." He engages Dom, for instance, in a cynical toast: "To Liberty! It is a war-cry for Satan or Michael" (46). Even earlier in the story, he ponders his friendship with his political enemy and realizes he would have readily killed his old chum in the name of what he considered "Liberty." It is Lamar, we remember, who sarcastically speaks of the

Northem army's need for a taking slogan that will give passion to its cause. "Try human freedom," he urges. "That's high and sharp and broad (44).

The character in the story who comes to realize most füily the deceptive dangers of rhetoric that is "high and sharp and broad" enough to adapt to a variety of political meanings is, of course. Ben, who tragically ends more of a prisonet than he began. The final irony of "John Lamar" is that what seems Biblicai "txuth" does not make Ben tdy

"free." Afier he has killed his master, Ben becomes a "maddened" (5 l), demonic figure, a captive of his own sudden insanity for revenge. His muscles seem to turn to iron, as his shackles become internai ones. Realizing he has become an outcast, he finds himself recaptured by the South, the "Babylon" he had hoped to escape. 189

Sharon Harris has remarked that, at the conclusion of "John Lamar," "Lronically,

as the slave fin& his voice, the abolitionist loses hi^."^ This is not strictly correct, since

Dave. not Ben, has the story's last word and the final pair of eyes through which we see

Lamar's "murdered" body (53) belong to the abolitionist. That the abolitionist voice is,

however, significantly changed seems part of the story's moral message. Dave feels

disturbed and uneasy ancl, as a result, his last speech is c%humble,unceaaio." Although he

reiterates the apocalyptic rhetonc that had inspired Ben's bloody act, his tone has changed

fiom irnperative to interrogative: "'The day of the Lord is oigh,' he said; 'it is at hand;

and who can abide it?'"(53).

At the same thethat she makes a point of underminhg the confidence of her

representative abolitionist, Davis preserves her dualistic perspective by leaving her

ending. like the ending of "Blind Tom," essentially open. That a text that takes great

pains to illustrate the unreliability of Biblical rhetoric should end on a Biblical note (the

Iast haif of Dave's question cornes fiom Joel2: 1 1) seems oddly contradictory. Davis

seems to seek maximum emotional punch for her conclusion through the very strategy the

text itself has painstakingly debunked. Consequently, Davis's open ending leaves both

Dave and the reader in a curiously transitionai state. By invoking the very rhetonc she

has taught us to mistrust, Davis leaves Dave and the reader teetering between ignorance

and eniightenment, between confidence in the abolitionist cause and suspicion of its

rnethods, and between syrnpathy for the slaveholder and the ultimate nddle of divine j udgment.

34Harris,Rebecca Harding Davis 77. 190

Given the fùndamental doubts about the abolitionist movement that "John Lamar"

makes manifest, it is perbps surprishg that Davis referred to the next story she wrote for

the Atlantic, "David Gaunt," as "a very abolition story.." "How can 1 help it?" she teased

James Fields. "Here is Gen Fremont has 'confiscated' one of my fnends houses for

headquarters just across the Street, and Zagomya is charging continually past the windows

on the staring boys in the gutters- My secessionist proclivities (if 1 had any) are oozing

out at rny elbows, lüce Bob Acres' courage."35 Davis's 't41Y abolition story" has,

however, for ail intents and purposes, very little to do with abolition, or even the siavery

issue. The story, which has markedly pacificist ovefiones? focusses instead on its

western Virginian heroine, Theodora (Dode) Scofield, her rebel father, and her two Union

Iovers. The tnte theme of the piece is not military conflict or even family loyalty but

rather fmding and following one's personal vocation. Dode, and not David, is really the

centrai character.

Dode refuses to take sides in the war and is tom between her love for Douglas

Palmer, a manly Federal officer, and her devotion to her secessionist father. Having lost

his onIy son in the Confederate amy at Manassas, Dode's father, Joe, is bitterly opposed

at the beginning of the story to the fnendship between Dode and Douglas. He cornes to

his senses, though, and becomes reconciled to his son's hiend just before leaving for a

dangerous hike to infonn Confederate troops of local Union movements. Joe never

"Davis, letter to James Fields, 14 Apr [1862], Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6109), Clifion Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. 191 rems fiom his self-appointed mission; he is shot fiom behind by his close fkiend, David, who has recently enlisted in the Union army, even though he is a Methodist minister.

The main obstacle in the development of Davis's domestic romance (for, despite its reaiistic and critical war-time detail, "David Gaunt" essentially foIIows a conventional courtship plot) is the "great gulf" (73) of religious ciifference Dode sees between herseif and the man she loves. Dode and Douglas are divided not by politics but by Dode7sstrict belief, taught her by David's severe brand of piety, that Christians should not be, as Paul says, "unequally yoked together with ~nbelievers"~':''It was not the division the war made, nor her father's anger that made the bar between them. Her love would have borne that down. There was something it could not bear down. Palmer was a doubter, an infidel" (68). Once again, Davis downplays sectional differences to emphasize the heart- wrenching complexity of private loydties and personal choices.

It takes a bullet in her lover's side to convince Dode to overcome her narrow sectarian prejudice. Then, like a female knight-errant with the family slave, Uncle Bone, as her tnisty squire, she rescues Douglas and takes him home as her husband. The end of the story finds the Scofield homestead dive with spring ('quivering with the luxury of being" [IOl]) and recycling soldiers' blood into vibrant flora. The whole farm, which

Bone thinks of as Dode's rather than Douglas's, pulses with life and basks in "a genial atmosphere of peace." It has become not just a field hospital, but a true asylum fiom the war: "the wounded soldiers who corne there often to be cured grow strong and calm ...; the

"2 Cor 6:14. 192

war seems far-off to them; they have corne somehow a step nearer the inner heaven"

(1 02).

By the close of "David Gaunt," Davis's ambivalent attitude conceming political

allegiance has tunied into a wishful pacifist fanm. Dode's husband, however, continues

to fight: "he has yet the work to do which he calls just and holy" (102, my emphasis). If

this were tdya pacifist parable, sureiy the soldier would not get the girl. The central

crux of "David Gaunt" is that war seems an honourable pursuit for manly, heroic

Douglas, but not for the title character, a sensitive, effemhte preacher. The contrasting

characterizations of Douglas and David suggest that the refusal to take sides is an

appropriately femlliine response to war. David's participation in the butchery constitutes

a sin against his effeminate nature, which ought to keep him, like Dode and his author,

out of battle.

From a moral point of view, Davis seems to use "David Gaunt" to launch a

feminist protest against the senselessness of war. in this self-described "abolition story,"

she hardl y, however, advocates or even investigates the abolitionist cause. Dode's

ferninine outlook, mimred in the namator's female voice, opposes the war absolutely and

refuses, so Douglas grumbles to himself, to "accept it as a fiery, chivainc cause, as the

Abolitionist did, nor as a stem necessity, like the Union-saver" (77). Douglas himself,

we have seen, espouses the latter attitude rather than the former. There is certainly no hinr in "David Gaunt" that Davis could ever have aiigned herself with the radical, militant wing of the anti-slavery movement, as Harris infers she does in "John Lamar." Surel y, as an "abolition story," "David Gaunt," which features only one slave and not a single abolitionist, must be viewed as something of a doubtful anomaly.

Even references to slavery are few and far between in the piece we rnight expect, on the basis of Davis's own words, to show the author at her "abolitionist kt." The only slave, Uncle Bone, Joe's biood relative and long-tirne cornpanion, seems well-treated and content. Like LamarysBen, he has a supercilious attitude towards "whinîn' pore-white trash" (58) such as David. He also seems to enjoy a fairly large degree of autonomy in his personal movements. His comings and goings seem unregulated (he is able, for instance, tc follow Joe secretly on his fatal hike and retrieve his corpse). The narrator tells us that Dode "cned hot, weak tears ... over the wrongs of the slaves about hery' (69)' but these troubling "wrongs" are never defined or demonstrated. If every slave is as loyal and cornfortable as Bone, where, a Southemer might ask, is the "wrong"?

The sole glimmer of abolitionist sentiment "David Gaunt" evidences comes very near its end in a surprising passage worth examining at Ml:

But Bone learns something fkom [the Union soidiers] in exchange. He does not boast so often now of being "ole Mars' Joe's man,"-sits and thinks profoundly, till he goes to sleep. "Not of leavin' yer, Mist' Dode. 1 know what fiee darkies is, up dar; but dar's somefm' in a fellah's 'longin' ter hisself, af'er ail!" Dode only smiles at his deep cogitations, as he weeds the garden-beds, or fodders the stock. She is a half-Abolitionkt herself, and then she knows her State will swn be fiee (102).

This is the passage Davis must have had in mind when she told Fields to "expect a very abolition story in David Gaunt." It creates nonetheless a rather startling moment in the text. Other than the brief allusion to Dode's unexplained tears, this is the fnst indication 194 we have of the heroine' s abolitionkt sympathies. Even here, however, Dode's feelings are, significantly, only "haif-Abolitionist." Her anti-slavery convictions may be as

"weak" and ineffectual as the tears she weeps in private. In factTto borrow a modem analogy, Dode never appears to "corne out" as an Abolitionist. Her position on the subject of slavery remains passive rather than proactive, as she waits for a legislative rather than a pragmatic resolution of her qualrns.

For his part, Uncle Bone, we note, awakens to the idea of personai liberty but' echoing fears of Northem poverty bred by slavery's defenders, expresses no intention of ever leaving his Southem home. Similarly, his mistress hopes to see the "wrongs" of slavery righted without abandoning her regional roots. Dode knows that "her State will soon be free" because, by early 1862, when Davis was writing "David Gaunt," preparations were well under way for the declaration of an independent West Virginia.

As Dode looks fonvard to seceding from the Secessionists as an escape nom the Logic of a difficult situation, Davis's ending leaves essentially untouched and unpunished the conundrum of the South's "peculiar" economy and civilization. Like her pacifist heroine,

Davis maintains in "David Gaunt," as she does throughout her literary career, her reluctance to take sides against the region and culture that had nurtured her. Chapter Five Borderbe Nostatgia: Portraits of the Old South in Davis's Mystery Sforia and Chitdren's Fiction

in contrat to her ambivalent attitude towards abolition and abolitionists, Davis

preserved throughout her life an emotional comection to the Southern ambiance of her

Virginia childhood. Two veins of her fiction, the detective stories she wrote for

Peterson 's Maguine and her children's stories, prove particuiarly rich mines of Southern

nostalgia.' This nostalgia is rarely, however, entirely naïve and often features a subtext

of anxiety about pressing contemporary social concerns centring on questions of slavery

and Southern regional identity.

The Peterson 's stories, which Gerald Langford refers to as "potboilers,"' appeared

contemporaneously with some of the fmest fiction Davis wrote for the Atlantic during the

early 1860s. Peterson 's catered to a different readenhip than that of the Atlunfic,as

Davis, always a shrewd judge of her audience, was well aware.' In retrospective, though,

we can see that material fiom Peterson 's and fiom the Atlantic shared some significant

common concerns. The series of Peterson 's stories featuring the lawyer-detective John

1 Interestingly, the editor of Peterson 's Magazine was none other than Charles Peterson, author of the prosouthem novel, Cabin and Parlor.

'Langford 29.

'In an 1864 story, "The Lost Estate," Davis self-consciously toys with the commercialized milieu of Pe~ersonS, the most popular ladies' magazine in the country. Her hero, she says, fights the "dragon Circumstance" in order to win the "prize" of a cornfortable home and to have "about him 'whatsoever things were lovely, whatsoever things were of good report,' fiom a wife herself to the wonderhl fîills and flutings on the wife's breakfast wrapper, pattern of which you will most probably find not many pages off, and which we know are good to look at and to have" ("The Lost Estate," Peterson's 45 [Jan 18641: 42). Page, which Davis wrote between and 186L and 1868: depict, as do many of her Afhtic stories, Afiican-American characters and Virginia settings. In these deliberately lowbrow works, Davis apparently gives full reign to her sentimental attachment to the cultural and literary heritage of the Old South, even as she reveds the dark side of a culture based on slavery.

Beginning with "The Murder of the Glen Ross," which appesued in November

186 1, the John Page stories typically take place on an old Virginia homestead, since Page is a Virginia lawyer. (In some of the stories he has retired to Philadelphia, but the mysterious occurrences that tend to befall him dl nonetheless take place on visits to fiends in the Old Dominion.) The standard setting for the mysteries Page unravels is mongly rerniniscent of the milieu of plantation fiction, temporally as well as physicaily.

As in SwuZlow Barn, Page's romantic adventures are distanced in timc fiom the reader's world and take place years ago, when the Old Dominion shone, so literary legend has it, in her mie glory. "The Murder of the Glen Ross," for instance, is set specifically in

August 1830, just before Nat Turner's revolt and the harsh reactionary measures it provoked.

'The eight John Page mystery stories (hereafter cited parenthetically) are: "The Murder of the Glen Ross," Peterson's 40 (Nov-Dec 1861): 347-55,4384. "The Locked Chamber," Peterson 's 4 1 (Jan 1862): 42-54. "The Asbestos Box," Peterson S 4 1 (Mar 1862): 2 10- 18. "A Story of Life insurance," Peterson 's 41 (Jun 1862): 447-54. "My First Case," Peterson 's 42 (Aug 1862): 120-26. "The Second Sight," Peferson 's 44 (Dec 1863): 447-53. "The Daughter-in-Law," Peterson 's 53 (Feb 1868): 121-32. "The Tragedy of Fauquier," Peterson 's 53-54 (Apr-Aug 1868): 27 1-8 1,353-62,420-26, 27-37, 107-1 13. 197

The occasion of John Page's visit to the vicinity of the Glen Ross is a farnily event many Southem wrïters have used to illustrate the cultural pride of the Old South-a cousin's old-fashioned Virginia wedding. Page waxes eloquent on his fust glirnpse of the plantation mansion fiom his caniage window, where he is seated beside the soon-to- be bride:

No doubt Berkley Place wouid have wrung the heart of a landscape gardener, for there were neither ravishing views or 'picturesque possibilities;' the trees grew, the creeks ran as nature pleased. But the forests were centuries old; the creeks were dimpled with the rarest of trout, where ail the world, black or white, was fiee to corne and go, hunt or fish as it pleased. (349)

In his imaginative return to his native region, Page, writing fiom his retirement home in urban Philadelphia, evokes the elements of a lush natural scene. Berkley Place is clearly an ideal locale apart fiom the narrator's current world. The slaveholder's realm fosters a kind of Arcadian equality between blacks and whites, who enjoy together the pastoral pursuits of hunting and fishing on the estate. Page seems to expect that the plantation will seem an exotic space to his readen, and he celebrates its essential foreignness to mainstream, northeastern Arnerican culture. He muses:

1 suppose a canny New England fmer, fresh from his ruch-ploughed fmof ten acres, would have shuddered to look at the great fallow fields, the broken fences, the dilapidated barns, the wild profusion, the riot, waste, thriftlessness. He would have reason. Over this plantation, aimost equal in extent to a German principaiity, prodigality, careless idleness, unbounded hospitality, reigned as in an old Irish kingdom. (349) 19%

Page's metaphors expand the Virginia estate into a separate country. The two cornparisons to European monarchies stress not ody the plantation's alien but also its essentially autonomous character. Beside its picturesque vastness, the typical New

England farm diminishes to the size of a mere handkerchief or, more accurately, the trim on a wvornan's dress, its "ruch-pioughed fields pleated as if by a seamstress.

Page's enthusiasrn causes him to gush over not only the natural beauty of Berkley

Place but also its social harmony. His glowing description of the mansion and slave quarters rnight have been lifted directly out of a piece of plantation fiction, such as

Swallow Barn:

The house, wide, rambling, stood in the center as warm and full of genial comfort as the hem of its owner. As we passed near the negro quarters that lined the road like straggling villages, 1 caught glimpses of hundreds of dark faces turning to answer the cheery srnile that shone on them fkom out of the carriage window (349).

The delighted namator goes on to emphasize Merthe peaceful, prosperous relations between the slaves and their kind master and mistress. Most of the slaves, he notes, are proud to have been in the family for generations and stand on fiiendly, if not intimate, terms with "Marster Tom." Explains Page: "Their grandfathers had served his grandfather, and so they thought it must go on ad infinitum. For the Berkleys had pride in saying that no servant had ever ken sold from their plantation" (349-350).

Eventuaily. even the long-winded Page has to cut his praises short and get on with his narrative. Afier such a long prologue, though, his story begins on a wistful note, as he makes the transition to his detective advennue: "1 wish 1 could stop here, and plunge into 199 the warm, spicy memory of the life there, in that most heartsome of ail country homesteads. But 1 must be bnef with my story" (350). Like the happy Berkley

"servants," Page seems entranced by the idea that the paternalistic plantation culture might "go on ad infinitum." However, as his readers know fiom the moment they first glance at the title of his narrative, trouble intervenes in this apparent paradise. Like

Swailow Barn, the plantation district in which Page's fkiends reside is bordered by a patch of dark, orninous ground. In this case, the threatening space is not a swamp but a gloomy glen, overgrown with "monstrous" weeds and choked with bcpoisonouseffluvia" (352).

The black Stream that runs through the ravine seems to the groom, Geofiey Hope, to reflect faces of dead men. In the midst of the swampy glen lives Lucky Jenkyll, an old

Afican-American woman who, lîke a fernale Dred, occasionally harbours free blacks and escaped slaves.

Lucky is a shadowy figure whom the reader never meets, aithough she is at the very heart of the murder mystery. Described as "a harmless old negro" (352). she ironically plays a catalytic role in the very unlucky circumstances that threaten to destroy the happiness of Page's cousin and her fiancé. An ostensible message fiom Lucky sumrnons Hope to the evil ground of the glen. There he encounters a former wife he long believed dead, only to witness her shot by an unseen sniper before his very eyes. Hope is arrested for the crime and is only fieed at the last minute when Page's Afncan-Arnerican sidekick, Pine, fmds a due that pins the assassination on a mysterious stranger, the wornan's second husband. 200 Lucky never enters the courtroom drama because, as a slave, she is not allowed to give evidence. The faceless harbinger of danger and death, she is an ominous counterpart to the happy Berkley servants and Page's own valet and CO-counsel,the jovial Pine. None of the John Page stories are specific as to the latter's legal status. By the end of "The

Murder of the Glen Ross," as the conclusion flashes forward to the present &y, Pine has become a jolly, middle-aged "unclel" as devoted to "Mars' John" as any of the Uncle

Toms or Robins or Petes of plantation fiction. We are left to wonder whether or not such devotion is voluntary. In his attitude towards the poor whites of the area surroundhg the

Berkiey plantation, Pine eerîainly expresses the conventional viewpoint of the contented slave of plantation and proslavery fiction. He deports himself, Page tells us, "with the supercilious contempt which the pampered house servants never faii to feel for the poorer whites" (348). Pine's genial relations with his master are, however, sornewhat clouded by the disturbing background figure of Lucky Jenkyll. In the dark chasm of murder. the invisible slave woman 's dangerous presence haunts and undermines the peace ful prospenty of the aory's visible blacks.

Throughout "The Murder of the Glen Ross," Davis's narrator clearly aligns his sympathies with those of the planter class. (In a later adventure, "A Story of Life-

Insurance," we discover that Page is himself a plantation owner.) He hlly concurs, for instance, with Pine's estimate of the poor whites around Berkely Place, whom he labels

"a whisky-drinking, cock-fighting crew, living for the most part on the charity of the landholders of the neighborhood" (348). Later in the story, as he recalls the events of

Hope's trial, he parenthetieally comments that "despite the popular outcry against the 20 1 influence of caste," it is ofien hardest to obtain justice for the rich. The jury, composed of yeoman farmers and mechanics, seems to him to be stacked against his "paaician" client

(442)-

Despite Page's infatuation with the luxurious hospitality of Berkley Place and his obvious allegiance to the aristoctatic ide& it embodies, the contaminating influence of the Afncan-American in the swamp seems to infect the story's entire social system, class conflict between whites presenting one more symptom of the corruption emanating from the poisonous air of the Ross Glen. According to Page, the Glen Ross murder rapidiy becomes a cause célébre in the neighbourhood because it directly touches so many members of the community. He claims: "No trial in the valley of the Blue Ridge ever excited more gloomy consternation. No family whose plantation lay in the boundaries of the four counties whose blood was not mixed with the Hopes or the Berkeleys" (441).

The crime of which Geoffrey Hope is accused is bloody in more than one sense. Closely bound up with the murder is the threat of bigamy, a crime Hope would have cornmitted had he married Page's cousin before the shooting took place. Behind the murder of the

GIen Ross thus lies a barely averted threat to family honour and the family bloodline. In this, Page's first mystery prefigures the focus of his later adventures, which typically involve issues of concealed marriages and lost inheritances. Through Page's initial foray into the mysteries hidden in Virginia plantations, an inquiry which carries the interests of an entire cornmunity, Davis probes submerged anxieties over the dissolution of the entire slave-based Southem social system. In "The Murder in the Glen Ross," Davis becomes 202

one of the earliest developers not ody of detective fiction but also of the haunted, violent

social landscape of Southem gothicism.

In this early story, written during the first year of the Civil War, Davis puts

Southern "Hope" on triai before ber national audience. Her disconcerting southem

murder rnystery has, nonetheless, a happy ending. The scandai is umveled by a

Southemer, the bridegroom is absolved of guilt, and Hope survives to become a

benevolent Virginian patriarch. The murder is attributed to a stranger to the

neighborhood, a Frenchrnan fiom New Orleans who is evenhially arrested in the North.

The plot's apparent mord-that the South can take care of her own problems-seems

reinforced by the fact that the foreigner is eventually tracked down in Massachusetts, the

home of radical abolitionism.

"The Asbestos Box," a John Page mystery published in March 1862, similarly

features a South seemingly haunted by slavery and the threat of social instability but that

ultirnately resolves its own dilemmas. This story of a lost will begins as an interruption

to a traditional Virginia feast. The meal, Page recalls, was a particularly spectacular one, meant to impress foreign guests: "my housekeeper, intent on upholding the cuisine of old

Virginia against al1 France, outdid herself' (2 10). Page is called away nom the groaning

board to hasten to the bedside of a cantankerous old man, where he is asked to draw up a will reinstating the man's devoted daughter as heir. A month later old Pierse, the moody miser, dies and, to Page's surprise, the will he authorized appears to have vanished.

Piene's long-sufTering daughter, Hester, who is a mode1 citizen in every respect, is left nearly penniless and the eight hundred family slaves are put up for auction. Thus, a 203

narrative that begins as a disruption of one Virginian tradition soon witnesses the

disintegration of the larger regional myth of the benevolent, protective plantation

lifestyle.'

Faced with this catastrophe, Hester is distraught, but not on her own account.

Like MacIntosh's bankrupt Donald Montrose, Hester's immediate concem is for her

"people," who dread king shipped away fiom their happy home to the Georgia market.

Hestsr's grief and outrage at this prospect is uncontrollable: "The girl burst into tears,

pacing the floor. 'My own people! They were kind to me when no one else was kind-not

even my own mother! Old Maurner! that nursed me in her amis! They shall not go!

They shall not!" (21 3). Heroically, she decides to postpone her maniage and to work as

a schoolteacher to try to earn the money to buy back her slaves. Her resolution not only

makes her a heroine but tums her would-be husband, Bob Johns, into a hero. The

hitherto la- law student takes courage fiom his be1ovedysdetermination and abandons

his native Southem indolence to work towards Hester's noble goal.

Five years later, Hester and Bob are still a long way fiom their goal of buying

back the plantation and its servants, but the pursuit of a shared objective has brought them

closer together and Hester agrees to marry her long-time suitor. In the meantime, the

Pierse homestead has gained a reputation as a haunted house and has remained ominously

uninhabited On a late-night ride past the mansion only a rnonth before Hester and Bob's

wedding, Page discovers the reason for the fieakish noises and lights that have scared

'A long-standing Virginian mythology held that slavery existed in its most rnild, "humane" form in the Old Dominion (Tracy 62). 204 away prospective tenants: Old Pierse's mean-spirited mulatto housekeeper, who hated the saintly Hester, has concealed herself for years beneath the mansion in a "secret cellar" known only to herself and has produced fiom there the "unnanuai lights and noises that had brought upon the house the name of 'uncanny'" (216). Page quickly deduces that this nameless black witch possesses Pierse's last will, and he secretly arranges to restore

Hester' s fortune.

In "The Asbestos Box," the peaceful Virginia plantation becomes a spooky,

"uncanny" place. Its foundations are cavemously hollow and easily become the source of

"unnatural" emanations. Once again, the affable Page seems to take us on an incongruously dark journey into the gothic labyrinths of the slaveholding consciousness.

Once again, however, gothic disturbances are also eclipsed by the story's happy ending.

Page's rapid detective work enables him to restore the Pierse plantation to its original condition for Hester's wedding night. The story's final scene recreates the jubilant crowd scene typicai of family celebrations on Swallow Barn and other fictional plantations:

"The lighted hall was crowded with black faces bright with joy. We heard a tumult of laughter, and shouts. and weeping." Bob and Hester gladly give up their bridal tour to spend their honeymoon with their "people." Declares Bob, "No Canada now; this is better" (2 16).

For Bob, the blessings of Canada-the ultimate destination of the slaves'

Underground Railroad to fieedom-cannot compte with the benefits of plantation paterndism. The concluding lines of the story find Hester and her old "uncle Joe" hand in hand, sending up a prayer of thanksgiving together. In the midst of this tableau, 205 apparently unnoticed by Hester but pointed out by Page, is the incorruptible asbestos box in which Pierse deposited his final wiii. Despite repeated efforts, the jealous mulatto woman was unable to destroy the receptacle. Thus, at the centre of her drama, Davis places an inviolate, indestructible symbol of the Law as the ultimate peacemaker and means of restoring order. The problem that faces Hester Pierse and her slaves is the sarne problem that faces Stowe's Mr. Shelby and his servimts-the indulgent slaveowner's loss of control over financial circumstances. In Davis's story, however, the escape route to

Canada is decidedly not an option for any of her characters. Whereas Eliza and George

Harris find peace and prosperity in Montreal through the aid of abolitionist fkiends,

Hester's Joe finds deliverance in the preservative legal powers of the asbestos box.

Admittedly, the rather rushed ending of "The Asbestos Box" leaves many gaps.

Most notably, it glosses over the five-year period during which the Pierse family slaves were removed fiorn their home plantation. We are never told precisely where the slaves go or how Page manages so rniraculously to gather them al1 together again at a moment's notice. We are lefi to wonder what trials and tribulations the Pierse servants may suffer while the master's legai wili is missing and the power of the Law temporarily suspended.

In "A Story of Life-Imurance," a John Page mystery that followed in Peterson's only two months after "The Asbestos Box," Davis is more pessimistic about the hidden fkilties of the slave system and its legal protections. Page manages, of course, to Save the day, but this time he must abandon legal expedients entirely in order to resolve the mystery he discovers. Even so, in this adventure, Page cannot engineer the happy-ever-after dénouement his audience must, by now, have corne to expect. 206

The mystery of "A Story of Life-Insurance" involves a dark, anonymous woman with a faintiy foreign manner of speech who unexpectedly visits Page one &y in his legal office and asks him to take charge of an insurance policy she has taken out on her life.

The beneficiaq is her daughter, whose name remains unknown to Page but who is to contact him upon her mother's death. Several years derthis mualrequest, Page frnds himself visiting an old fiiend, John Spaiding, on a plantation just outside Richmond.

During Page's visit, on the eve of drawing up freedom papers for his slaves, Spalding suddeniy dies. Shortly aftewards, Page learns that Spalding's lovely "niece," Annie, is really Spalding's daughter by his deceased mulatto housekeeper and, therefore, a slave.

Fortunately for Amie, Page had previously recognized in a daguerreotype of Spalding's

"housekeeper" the mysterious woman of the life insurance policy. Annie king ignorant of her mixed blood, Page takes it upon himself to break the appalling news and then, thanks to the insurance money, help the girl escape to Canada. There she soon dies of a weak heart.

Davis's mystery story closely echoes the conventional plot of the nsigic mulattress made especially popular by Dion Boucicault's 1859 play, The Ocroroon. Like

Boucicault' s beautifbi Zoe, Annie Spalding is an accomplished and admired young woman, raised in the lap of luxury and courted by an eager young lover. The shock of self-discovery leads ultimately to death for the two heroines: Zoe kills herself to fiee her lover fiom his impossible troth and Annie graduaily succumbs to a feeble constitution.

The wo stories involve different complications and have different endings, but they both lead the reader to a logical and emotional impasse. Annie's story is unique in Page's 207 experience. but the girl's melodramatic predicament is really a hackneyed one. Behind

Annie's Iife-drarna is a mystery Page's legal resources can neither unravel nor overcorne.

From start to finish, this lawyer's narrative demonstrates the total failure of legal means to cope with dortunate side-effects of the slave system. in "A Story of Life-

Insurance," the Law does not just experience a temporary breakdown as in "The Asbestos

Box." Rather, it is clearly inefftctual fiom the beginning. Louisa Carew, Annie's slave rnother, presents herself to Page as a kind of outlaw, as someone, that is, who is outside the law. Her furtive movements, her veil, and her faltering accent that seems to Page deliberately fake together suggest the woman is fugitive fiom justice. When Page tries to assist the woman into an omnibus, she will not let him touch her, insisting, "You do not know what I am" (448). If Louisa conducts herself as a social pariah, she defines herself as a legal outcast. Page offers to counsel her daughter in the event of her death, but,

"with a du11 look of pain on her face," she informs him point blank, "There is no help, nor law for her or me" (448). For his part, Page discovers by the end of the story that the law is so helpless in this particular situation that he, a hg-standing member of the Virginia bar, has to break the law in order to preserve his personal sense of justice. Davis tries to put a humourous spin on Page's flagrantly illegal activity, as her narrator facetiously cornments: "Shall I tell you how John Page, at that time the owner of two or three hundred negroes, tan a slave over the under-ground railroad to Canada.?" (453).

Despite the text's apparently cynical portraya1 of the legal state of society in slaveholding Virgùiia, however, Davis makes a point of sketching her planters as contradictory but compassionate human beings. John Spalding takes this paradoxical 208

status to the extreme. At least twice during his life he has been on the point of fkeing his

slaves, but has somehow fdlen short of his ambitions. Once, Page redis, he nearly sent

his slaves to Liberia and another time he almost joined a "communist fraternity" (449).

Spalding himself sees his position as both ludicrous and pitiable. The night before his

death, he explains to Page: "You know circurnstances have made me a slave-holder; in

principle 1 am almoa a Fourierite. You srnile! But there is no tyrant like circumstaace,

after dl" (451).

Whether Spaiding's self-pity excuses the sufEerïng he causes his own daughter is

an issue the story leaves unresolved. Page's attitude as narrator is profesdy non-

judgmental. He tries to maintain a forensic objectivity: "1 tell my story curtly. Incidents

are al1 1 attempt to give. I draw no inferences to 'point a mo rd...."' (450). Reflecting

early in the story on the impatience of Annie's would-be father-in-law to see a definite

engagement between Spalding's niece and his son, Page thinks to himself: bbhowcareless

Egan seemed of the girl's feelings in providing chance and change for Philip. But then,

Phi1 was 'his boy.' 1 never had a boy; so managed, generally, to see dl the sides of the

picture" (449). Page's apparently off-hand comment in this overlooked and supposedly

second-rate story demonstrates just how intimately Davis's alleged "hack" writing was

comected to the concerns of her more so-called "senous" writing. Page's declared ability

to "see al1 the sides of the picture" echoes Davis's repeated self-description as a writer

who saw "both sides of the shield'* and nursed a "perverse inclination to the other side of

6Davis,Bits of Gossip 166. "Both Sides of the Shield" is also the title of an article Davis published in Scribner 's Monthly 10 (May 1875): 88-89. 209

the question."7 ïhis "perverse inclination" is the hallmark of Davis's social criticism,

which ever eschews concrete allegiance to a pdcular social movement. In later years,

Davis would insist on seeing both sides of the temperance movement, of the stmggle for

women's rights, of the Spanish-American war, and of the national Indian removal policy,

jus

"A Story of Life-Insurance" uncovers in a "curt" and incornpiete fashion the

bizarre ambiguities of antebellm Southem civilization that tore at Davis's heartsnings.

Within Spalding's circle of influence, there is great suffering, just-missed nobility, and

tme compassion. In Davis's version of the familiar tragedy, the planter, John Page, is

closer to overcoming racism than is the doomed lover, who, unlike Boucicault's romantic

George Peyton, imrnediately rejects his beloved once he finds she has Afncan-Amencan

blood. By contrast, Page continues to treat Annie with sincere gentlemanly respect until

the end of her life. When he visits her on her deathbed, he does not hesitate, in his "old-

fashioned way" (454), to kiss her hand, just as he had insisted on handing Amie's mother

into the omnibus. Page, a slaveholder, relates to the AfÎîcan-American characters around

him with a grace and hurnanity that seems impossible to young Philip Egan, whose

middle-class upbringing has separated him from his ancestral roots in aristocratie planter

culture. John Page's actions are living reinforcement of the traditional Southern

argument that those who are bound to African-Amencans by legal ties love them best.

7 Davis, "Men's Rights," Putnam's Magazine 3 (Feb 1869), rpt. in A Rebecca Harding Davis Reader 343. And yet, despite Spalding's heroic intentions and Page's patemal concem, Davis's

story has a bleak, even apocalyptic ending. Annie dies, the family doctor implies,

because of a "latent disease" (450) she inherits fiom her white father. Corruption and

deceit destroy the "heart" of the Spalding family just as surely as does genetic

abnormality. Annie's escape to Canada does not bring her happiness or health because

Page caonot clear up this detective case by pushing it outside the national borders.

Ultirnately, Page has to look beyond space and tirne to find a final solution. In the last

lines of the story, the narrator discards his usual chatty tone in favour of oracular

pronouncement. Mer recreating for the reader Annie's dying moments, he concludes

with an emotional epitaph for his suffering heroine: "And so she slept until the morning:

the morning of the Resurrection!" (454)- For Annie, neither the plantation nor Canada is,

ultimately, a safe haven. Page, like Stowe in her "Concluding Remarks" to Oncle Tom 3

Cabin, places his hope ultimately in God's own Judgment.' In "A Story of Life-

Insurance," Page falls short as lawyer, detective, and story-telier. Annie Carew 's distress

remains an unsolved social puzzle even afier the narratot poetically pronounces her case

artificially closed.

'The final lines of Stowe's "Concluding Remarks" to Linde Tom 's Cabin read: A day of pceis yet held out to us. Both North and South have been guilty before God; and the Christian church has a heavy account to answer. Not by combining together, to protect injustice and cruelty, and making a comrnon capital of sin, is this Union to be saved, -but by repentance, justice and mercy; for, not suer is the etemal law by which the millstone sinks in the ocean, than that stronger law, by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on nations the -th of Almighty God! (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom S Cabin or, Life Arnong the Lowly pew York: Penguin, 198 11 629). 21 1

Amidst the twisted confusion of Davis's Virginia rnysteries, one point seems

clear: under the social circumstances of the Southern economic system, no life-neither

the slave's, nor the slaveowner's, nor the middle-class white man's-is insured against

heartbreak and disaster. In her children's stories, most of which she wrote afier the Civil

War, Davis paints a more purely pictuesque portrait of the Virginia Iifestyle she

remembered fiom her chiidhood and youth. In these more forihrightly nostalgie pieces,

Davis invokes many of the aspects of grafious Southem living John Page finds so

appealing but, unlike Page, later nanators do not usually probe beneath the surface of

plantation culture to expose its troubling gothic side? instead, aping the conciliatory

tactics of much pst-bellurn fiction set in Old South, they serve up their rerniniscences of

slave society with a sense of humour and a lenient dose of good-natured irony.

Davis began to write for a juvenile audience once she had a young audience of her

own. She published her first children's story in 1871, when her oldest son, Richard

("Hardy") was seven and his brother, Charles, was five. By the time sister Nora was born

the following year, Davis had become a regular contributor to Youth 's Companion. For

the rest of her life, almost until her death, Davis would be a remarkably prolific author of

children's literanire, publishing a total of over 120 stories and sketches in Si. Nichoh.

and Youth 's Companion. In Jane Atteridge Rose's bibliography of published works

90ne notable exception to this trend is "The Fire Opal," a juvenile mystery much in the vein of the Peierson mystenes (Youth 's Companion 53 14 Nov 18801: 389-90). 212

attributed to Davis, juvenile titles account for approximately one quater of Davis's total

recognized literary output. Io

The creative outlet Davis found in children's fiction resulted in a fhitfid parallel

career, one which produced a less self-reflexive but substantial body of work that testifies

as strongly as does Davis's adult fiction to the influence of regional identity on her art.

The ihîpiece Davis published expressly for children, "Hard Tack," is a war story set in

Confederate territory that tells of an abandoned baby who is adopted by Union troops,

taken to a Cincinnati orphanage, and eventually reunited with his siblings." In a later

version of the tale, featured in the 1876 story, "How the Widow Crossed the Lines,"

Davis sets the events more specifically in the border region of westem Virginia." By

exploiting local experience and focussing on the potential for cooperation beiween parties

on oppocite sides of the North-South border, this initial foray into the realm of juvenile

fiction establishes an important trend.

In her children's fiction, Davis documents, as she does in her autobiography, what

life must have been like in western Virginia during the generation before the Civil War.

She indulges in detailed descriptions of her beloved native landscape, as in the following

passage from "The Paw-Paw Hunt": "Mt. Hale was one of the steep hills that overlook

the Ohio. Undemeath, the black bituminous smoke of the town drified like a passing

'O~ose,"A Bibliography of Fiction and Non-Fiction by Rebecca Harding Davis," American Litermy Realism 22.3 (1990): 67-86. Rose's bibliography is far from complete because much of Davis's anonyrnous journalistic writing has not ken identified.

' 'Davis, "Hard Tack," Youth 's Cornpanion 44 (5 Jan 187 1 ): 46-54.

avis, "How the Widow Crossed the Lines," Lippincort 's 18 (Dec 1876): 7 1 7-26. 213

cloud across the broad landscape of sunlighted, rolling hills and misty valleys. The river,

yellow and glistening, wound Corn one horizon to the other. Here and there a trail of

white smoke showed where a steamer lay."" Besides providing a bird's-eye view of

Wheeling's topography, however, several of Davis's children's stories help sketch a

cultural profile of the area. As nostalgic portraits, these glimpses into antebellurn West

Virginia were likely influenced not only by Davis's &ection for the place she would

always cail "home" but also by sentimental pst-war representations of the Old South,

such as those circuiated by Thomas Nelson Page.

Davis was very proud of the one full-length juvenile novel she set in the South of

her youth, Kent Hampden (1892). She began the project as an effort to please her two

grown sons, who had been urging her to give long fiction another serious try after her

semi-retirement of the 1880s, and she dedicated the final product, "this little story of our old home," to the pleasure of her two brothers. "Kent," as Davis referred to the book, was clearly a work dear to its author's heart. So must have been the numerous other nuratives and vignettes Davis set on and around her native turf. In her children's fiction, the conflicted border zone sketched in Bits of Gossip emerges as a place where danger and adventure &se but also as the location of happy endings and sentimental reconciliations.

""The Paw-Paw Hunt," Youth 's Cornpanion 44 (9 Nov 187 1): 36 1. 214

Kent Hampden, set in the Ohio Valley and the Al leghenies of the 1820s, appears

to have been the only one of Davis's novels to be reprinted during her lifetime." Its

popularity is well deserved, as it is a wellcrafted, suspenseful adventure story with a very

human, but channingly noble, boy-hem. Its old-fashioned, half-exotic setting may have

helped its appeal. Publishing at a time when literary nostalgia for the Old South was

flourishing, Davis imbues her sethg witb a distinctly Southem flavour. in the later Bits

of Gossip, Davis paints Wheeiing as a town "on the fence" between North and South, but

in Kent she sketches a thoroughly Southern outpost of the Old Dominion.

The book's openhg panorama, for instance, emphasizes primarily the tom's

Southem commercial connections: the steamboats lying at the wharf are fieighted with

Cotton "fiom the south" or with goods brought to the Ohio via the new National Road, for

which Wheeling is the "southern terminus" (1 -2). Characterized by an oxymoronic "air

of lazy industry" during the day, Wheeling's tendency to Southem languor surfaces more

obviously at evening: "in the twilight. wharf and streets were deserted, and through the

windows of the scattered dweiling-houses, each haif hid den in its big garden, shone the

red lights of the huge coai fies within. The people inside were doing nothing, with true

Southem zest" (2). Domestic coal fires remind the reader of 1892 that Kenf takes place in

a region which, even at the time of the story, was marked for a future in mining and

industry. Davis, however, draws attention to the scene's pastoral he-the gardens

14 According to the National Union Cotolog, Pre- 1956 Imprinfs, Scribner's reprinted Kent Hampden twice, once in 1903 and once in 1906. 1 have also located a 1908 edition. 215 engulfing Wheeling's hearths-and the typically pastoral indolence of Wheeling's residents.

Not surprisingly, then, Kent unapologetically feahues Southem slavery in its best light. The cmof the story involves a false accusation against Ralph Hampden, Kent's father, who apparently loses a large nun of money enmisted to him to deposit in a

Phiiadelphia bank The action of the novel traces young Kent's heroic efforts to locate the money, which has actually been stolen, and restore his fatherysgooà narne. In his time of trouble, Hampden's loyal slaves stand behind their good master. When he retunis home fkom his journey in disgrace, Hampden's compassionate servants join with the rest of the family in comforting him:

Aunt Elsy thereupon spread the news that some temble misfortune had befallen her maste- and every negro in the kitchen came to the rescue to console him. Sukey brought in a basket of paw-paws; old Sentry piled up the grate with huge lumps of coal; and little Poz followed with half a dozen yelping puppies (49).

It seems that Davis actuaily goes out of her way to highlight the echoes of plantation fiction in her depiction of the Hampden household. Hampden, who dreams of purchasing

"the old Sheppard plantation" (1 7), seems already to possess a rather large number of black slaves. The happier counterpart to the scene sketched above, Ralph's retum fiom the public rally where he clears his name, features a jubilant welcome home by no less than a dozen slaves (1 46). Kent is a highly autobiographical novel carefülly steeped in local history, but on this point Davis seems to stretch historical verisimilitude. Even in the 1820s, such a large number of household slaves wodd have been highly unusual West of the Appalachians. 216

Ultimately, of course, Davis's novel for youngsters is less about history than about

adventure and the defense of honour, a typically Southem value. Even though thefi

cannot be definitely proved against his father, Kent sets out to prove his father's

innocence to preserve the family dignity. The boy's heroism is, it seems, part of his

genetic heritage. Hampden's notable reticence about his mystenous pst haunts him

throughout the novel, until the townspeople learn that he once made an honourable

sacrifice he has wished to keep secret. (As a young man in Maryland, he forfeited an

ideritance by restoring it to the cousin he considered its proper owner.) Once the secret

is revealed at the town meeting, Hampden is wildly cheered by his fellow citizens.

Explains the narrator, "The chilvaric unnasonable act appealed to the hot-blooded

Southernersy'(137). The happy ending of Kent Hampden thus celebrates the triurnph of

Southern chivalry, which Davis perpetuates as the stuff of absorbing action-adventure for

her young readers.

Davis's juvenile Southem romance builds on a trend of regional nostalgia that had

already been established in her writings for Yourh 's Cornpanion. In these stories, though,

Davis tentatively probes some of the conflicts that fiactured antebellum Southern society

at the same time that she consecrates her mernories of the Old South.

"The Major's Story," printed in 1878," ostensibly presents a tale of two white

foster-brothers, a wealthy Irish boy and the son of his wet nurse, but because the setting

is antebellum West Virginia, issues of race and political allegiance inevitably enter into

''Davis, "The Major's Story," Youth 's Cornpunion 5 1 (12 Dec 1878): 426-27; hereafter ci ted parenthetically. 217

this story of class conflict. The Major prefaces his tale with the observation that "[the

relation between foster-brothers] is a feature of domestic iife silmost unknown in this

country" (426). However, while the Major's story does seem unique in that it discusses

the relationship of two white foster-brothers, the existence of foster-brothers of mixed

blood was, of course very common in antebellum Virginia- Davis, who devoted Wairing for the Verdict to exploring the complications of miscegenation, was painfully aware that

such foster- brothers were often blood-brothers too.

By making the poor foster-brother, the son of the servant, the hero of his story, the

Major seems to link the boy's fate to those of mulatto foster-children throughout the

South. The narrator himseif draws attention to this natural connection when he describes

the racist, classist prejudices of his hometown. He describes the small-tom society of

pre-war western Virginia by cornmenting, "We had no slaves and Iittle money among us;

but we were bitterly pro-slavery, and were more arrogant in our petty notions of

aristocracy than the great slave-owners of the eastem part of the State" (426). Thus,

although Davis removes the very mature topic of miscegenation fiom her children's story,

she does not remove the troubiing presence of slavery. Mike, the poor brother who

selflessly serves the tyrannical aristocratie brother, Arthur, functions as a stand-in for the

stereotypical martyr mulatto of adult fiction. This symbolism becomes even more clear

when Mike volunteers to take the punishrnent for one of his brother's wild pranks and is

punished by a stint on the local chain gang.

Mike is linked to the Southem institution of slavery not only through his

subservience to his wealthy brother but also through his defence of Southern civilization. 218

Mike becomes a prisoner because of Arthur's attempt to pull down a revered statue of

Caihoun in the town square. Although he seers for his brother's actions, Mike opposes

the sacrilege. Later, he joins the Codederate army in the war between the States, while

his brother joins the Unionists.

Even though he is himself victim of a kind of slavery, Mike's politicai loyalty

ciings to the slaveholding South- By the end of the Major's narrative, he becomes,

indeed, a Southem martyr. Arthur, the Major insinuates, is a coward who becomes a

Union paymaster only to avoid the fighting. Mike saves his brother fkom complete moral

corruption by interfiring with Arthur's efforts to turn informer, but dies on the scene. As

in Kent Hampden, Southern chivalry has the final victory. Mike 's honour and heroism

are cemented by his death, but Arthur, according to the Major lives to become "a mean,

and. consequently, a miserable man" (427).

That the hero of "The Major's Story" is at once a symbolic slave and an armed

defender of slaveholding interests may be ironic, but the irony only highlights the

prosouthem mentality of the piece. This sentimental partiality is Meraccentuated in

the person of the narrator, who served in the Union anny but plainly empathizes with his

Confederate hero. Davis's Southem sympathies show themselves even more clearly in

two other noteworthy stones she wrote for the Youth 's Companion towards the turn of the

century, "Quarrelled (1 888) and "The Twins (1 890).16 Both pieces demonsirate not only

Davis's fond and vivid recollections of her early home but also a fundamental harmony

avis, "Quarrelled," Youth S Companion 61 (27 Dec 1888): 66 1-62, hereafier cited parenthetically; "The Twins," Youth S Companion 63 (12 Jun 1890): 326. 219 between parties who are politicaily opposed. Besides providing quaint lessons in regional history, the stories offer didactic assurances of national conciliation and cooperation.

"Quarrelled is set on Davis's home turf, in "a drowsy river town on the western border of Virginia" in "the fhthalf of the century." It is the story of the Reno twins,

John and Harry, who are famous "for their remarkable likeness and their strong affection for each other" (661). The brothers fa11 to fighting, for the fkt time in their lives, over a

Presidential election. Harry, who owns a plantation down river angers his brother by breaking with family tradition and deciding not to vote for Clay, the Whig candidate. in a ddenrage, John shoots Hamy, then flees across the river into the wildemess. He is regarded as a lost soul, but Peter, John's loyd slave, searches out his master to give him the good news that his brother has rniraculousIy suvived a bullet to the head. Thanks to

Pete's heroic detemination, the brothers are completely reconciled, live in restored amity to a ripe old age, and are eventually buried together, with Pete's grave nearby.

The greater moral implication of "Quarrelled," that political differences do not injure the health of the national family, hearkens back to both the message and the means of antebellum prosouthem fiction. The motivation for Pete's extraordinary devotion is positively established in the story's opening scene, in which Davis paints slave society in its brightest colours. Pete is a happy, dancing slave, who freely joins in the general carnival atmosphere surroundhg the political rally, tuming handsprings in front of the parade. When a neighbour comments on Pete's sprightliness and offers to buy him fiom

Captain John, his master, like any benevolent patriarch out of a proslavery novel. is highly insulted: "'The Renos do not sel1 their people,' [says] Captain John, haughtily." 220

Davis underlines this stereotypical response of the stereotypical Good Master by

following John's retort with an explanation in the namator's voice: "A man who sold a

slave boni in his house was always looked on with contempt by the better class of

Virginians" (66 1).

Pete's faithfulness thus appears the natural result of a mutually beneficial and relationship between master and servant. His courageous proof of affection seems, moreover, a deliberate contrast to one of the best-known scenes fiom abolitionist fiction-Eliza leaping the ice floes of the Ohio. The fiozen river Pete makes a desperate dart across in order to find his master is most certainly the same one Stowe's heroine crosses to find fieedom. (The precise setting of the story's events is never named, but we do know that the brothers are eventually buried in Moundsville, a town just south of

Wheeling-) Whereas the land beyond the Ohio represents for Eliza the promise of liberty, however, for Pete it represents the terror of the unknown. As Pete approaches the river bank, Davis's narrator reads the boy's fearful thoughts: "Peter's heart sank. He knew that the unbroken forest came close to the river. It was the hiding-place for al1 refugees fiom slavery or justice. A man lost in the wiiderness of the West was as lost to view as he would be now, in the Arctic seas of ice" (66 1 ). Like a later black hero,

Twain's Jim, Pete heads towards free land only to remto slave country. Pete returns, however. not because of an error in navigation but because the known temtory of slavery is more familiar and safe than the lawless b'wildemess" beyond.

In "The Twins," Davis puts almost the entire story in the mouth of a character who, like Pete, could have stepped out of a proslavery novel. Aunt Beeny is an ex-slave 22 1 fiom Accomac County, on the Virginïa seacoast. The setting may be far removed fiom the part of Virginia Davis knew best, but the sentimental portrait of plantation life is very much of a piece with Davis's other pst-war detective and children's stories. Aunt Beeny still occupies a plantation cabin, even though the former slave quarters are now empty.

She lives arnong ruins and dwells upon mernories of more lively times: "She sits al1 day in her chair at the door in the sun, looking at the sea, and the fields, and the deserted quarters which were once filled with her brothers and children and kinsfolk."

Beeny reminisces about her life as head nurse on the plantation and about her two favourite charges, the twins, John and Charles. These twias, like their precursors, the

Reno brothers, are joined by an extraordinary affection and only quaml once in their lives-over politics. John joins the Union army, while Charles joins the Confederates.

The twins are not reconciled until after the war, during a fever epidemic, when John, a doctor, is called unknowingly to treat his own brother. Charles dies the next day in his brother's arms, and John follows soon after, nursed to the death by his faithful foster- mother, Beeny.

The dominant image in this familiar war plot of separation and reconciliation is the motherly breast. Beeny larnents that brothers who 'War nursed at de same breast!" should be so cruelly separated by war. She refers to the boys as "my twins." She is a second mother to the twins, not just because she suckled them but aiso because she is their birth-mother's dosest servant and best fîiend. Beeny remembers keeping watch with "Miss Jenny" through nights of cannon fire, and she faithfully cares for her mistress in her last illness. AAer the war, when Charles is forced to fade the plantation, Beeny, now a free woman, insists on following him to town to "take keer" of him, in his

mother's stead. She brings with her Miss Jenny's workbag and John's photograph as

remembrances of the "ole place," which she is 10th to leave ("my hem was nigh dead wid

leabin' de ole place," she recalls).

in "The Twins," as in "Quarrelled," the central slave figure is once again the agent

of reconcïiiation. In her sentimental children's fiction, Davis refhses, it seems, to burden

the South's "peculiar institution" with the responsibility for fracturing the country. Not

the issue of slavery but rather some other, obscure and anonymous force divides the

"Win" regions of North and South. in "Quarrelled," John's drinking makes hun hot-

headed; in "The Twins," the impersonal force of "de wah, what tore dis ole country into

pieces. an' bugal1 de bloodshed" is to blame. In her juvenile fiction, Davis, identi-ng

with Aunt Beeny's elderly nostalgia, glances back at her Southem heritage through tinted

lenses, emphasizing the lessons to be learned in the healing of old wounds rather than

fully investigating the wounds themselves.

Davis's simplified attitude towards the South in her children's fiction agrees with

her use of the Old South in her late journalism as an obvious foi1 to Northem, materialist

society. In a number of articles in the Independeni and the Saturday Evening Posr, as

well as in Birs of Gossip, she attacks the modern "disease of money getting,"I7 which she

17Contrastingthe steady thriftiness of earlier generations with the modem fever for speculation, Davis larnents in Bits of Gossip: "We have grown used to rnoney. The handling, the increase of it, is the chief business of life now with most of us. The farxner's wife no longer gives her mind to the small ambitions of sewing rag carpets or making jelly. Even she has her little investrnents. She keeps an eye on certain western gold mines, in which she has secretly 'taken a flyer' now and then; she even buys on a margin through a broker, unsuspected by her husband or the boys" (104). For other strident critiques of the money-gnibbing attitude, see associates with Northem capitaiïsm. in her most mident essay on the topic, she charges,

"The greed for money has been developed among us since the Civil War with the force

and swiftness of an epidemic."" Davis contrasts the rampant commercialism and

consumerism that began in the Gilded Age with of the attitudes of simpler, less arnbitious

days. She upholds the tradition of Southem hospitality and urges Iackadaisical hostesses

to "reform" their ways.19 She interviews "mad rurai Southemen whose madness

consists in thinking there is more to iife than hard cash.*' She critiques the selfish

pragmatism of Northem young people who postpone marriage because of hancial

cons ide ration^.^' The antithesis of Davis's money-grubbing North is the nval South,

where, she maintains, the air is more morally pure. Because the "noxious" influence of

materialism is less feit there," domestic values remain more intact. Southern couples

hold the mariage bond more sacred, for instance; according to Davis, they are apt to

marry earlier and they are less likely to divorce."

"Does it Pay?" (Saturday Evening POS~175 [13 Dec 19021: 12), "One or Two Plain Questions" (Independen2 65 [22 Oct 19081: 94-46), and "The Disease of Money Getting," Independent 54 (1 9 Jun 1902): 145740.

"Davis, 'The Disease of Money Getting" 1458 .

I9Davis, "Amencan Hospitality," Independent 5 1 (24 Aug 1899): 2279-8 1; "Old-Time Hospitality," Sarurday Evening Post 177 (3 I Dec 1904): 10- 1 1.

"Davis, "The Disease of Money Getting" 1458.

"Davis, "To Marry or Not to Many," Saturduy Evening Posr 176 (24 Oct 1903): 14.

"Davis, "The Disease of Money Getting" 1459.

')Davis, "A Rope of Sand," Saturdoy Evening Post 175 (14 Mar 1903):14. "Here and There in the South" refers to divorce as the social plague of the North (595-96). 224

The personal reminiscences of Bits of Gossip can be read as variations on this

favourite theme of Davis's elderly years-the contrast of rurai, Southern values with

modem "money getting." One of the distinguisbing features of Davis's Southern

childhood home she draws our attention to ht, we remember, is its apparent fieedom

from capitalist greed. In the initial chapter of her autobiography, Davis depicts America

in an impossibly Edenic state of economic innocence: "Nobody was in a hurry tu do anythmg, least of al1 to work or to make money. It mattered little then whether you had

money or not" (2). Later in the book, in her sketch of the Scotch-Irish who settled the

Alleghenies, she asserts: "The mad crue for money, which clutches at our souls to-day as

la grippe does at our bodies, was hardy known then" (101). As we have seen, such

idyllic generalizations fidfill Davis's rhetoricai needs more than they do historical reaiity.

Throughout her career, Davis found the image of the Old South a useM counterpoint to her grievances against the abuses of Northem-bred industrial capitalism.

As much as she shunned association with any officially organized reforrn platform, Davis readily adapted the far-reaching syrnboiism of Southem pastoralism to her arguments against the contemporary corruptions of American society. Despite its problematic racist heritage, the myhc South held a iasting appeal for her Virginian hem.

In Bits of Gossip, Davis playfully surns up her inbred contempt for the Yankee mentaiity and her enchantment with the South. In a passage describing the pinched habits developed in the New Englander by his harsh environment, she argues: "Why did he [the

New Englander] not in the beginning push on away from the barren Coast to the lands 225

below-rÎch as the garden of the Lord? It was no doubt a very poetic, pictutesque thing to

la.on Plymouth Rock; but surely it was a stupid thing to stay there" (90).

The opposition between the "stupid" civilization of Plymouth Rock and the

southem "garden of the Lord" shaped Davis's vision of America throughout her career as

one of its most vehement social critics. As much as she adrnitted in her mystery and

juvenile fiction to a dark underside to the OId South, she remained attracted to the legend

of the region's pre-industriai, pre-commercial charm. Although the author of "Life in the

Iron Mills" realized first-hand the histoncal inaccuracy of such mythology, she saw the

myth itself as providing a constructive reproach to Northern consumer capitalism. Davis

never abandoned her emotional loyalty to the legendary plantation South *' because in its

pastoral idealism she saw embodied the values needed to restore post-bellurn America to

herself.

24~sFrances Pendleton Gaines long since pointed out, the plantation was only ever "the ideal community of the South" (Gaines 146, my emphasis). In actuality, the econornic and social life of the Old South was rnuch more complex than popular symbolism allowed, and the idyllic plantation lifestyle was a goal to which many aspired rather than the predomùiant reality (Rubin 47). Chapter Su Border-dwellers as Bastards: Ikgitimacy and the Romance of Family Reuniott in "The Promise of the Dawn" and Wuaimgfor the Verdict

Restoration and reconciliation serve as the central themes of much of Davis's

social protest writing, particularly in her pst-bellum work. In the radical industrial

protest fiction of "Life in the Iron Mills7' and Murgret Howrh, she delves into the volatile

rhetonc of proslavery fiction and prose to recover a group of exploited labourers who

appeared abandoned by a nation obsessed by one ovenuhelming labour question-the

fiiture ofblack slavery on Americansoil. han important syrnbolic sense, Davis's fim

stones claim as legitimate the suffering of the forgotten, neglected progeny of the

Arnerican industrial Revolution. The final two works 1 shall examine show Davis tuming

even more obviously to themes of social illegitimacy and reintegration to focus

specifically on the trope of bastardy as a means of exposing and exploring fused

prejudices of gender, clsss, and race. The 1863 short story, "The Promise of the Dawn: A

Christmas Story," invokes the well-used Victorian plot of the bastard-foundling to

investigate candidly the urban plague of female prostitution. Meanwhile, the pst-war

novel, Waitingfor the Verdict (1867),' interweaves two simdtaneous plots of bastardy

and self-discovery, one centred on a white woman and the other on a mulatto man, to

examine the most difficult obstacles involved in the Reconstruction of the Arnerican

national family, especially the recuperation of the former Slave South.

' Wai~ingfor the Verdici was serialized in The Galqfrom February to December 1867. The novel was published by Sheldon & Company in book form the sarne year. 227

"The Promise of the Dawn" holds a significant place in the Davis canon for

several reasons. Davis herself considered the piece one of her most ambitious efforts.

She fïrst submitted the story for Fields's approvai with the comment: "Here is the

Christmas story, which 1 hope you will like. I am sure my heart never wrote one as much

before."' Davis found herself so passionately engaged with her subject that what was

initially intendeci to be a children's story becaxne a Ming, shockingly graphic excursion

into the underworld of Victorian sexual commerce. Once the story was fuiished, Davis,

evidently having had to defend her messto both her editor and her own conscience,

declared to AM^ Fields: "1 confess 1 never wrote anything so hard or repugnant to my

feelings to write or about which, when done, 1 was more indifferent to censure or praise.

1 jcmw 1 was right.'73

The passion with which Davis spoke of "The Promise of the Dawn" manifests

itself in the sto~~'semotional intensity, which emerges out of a blend of melodrama,

pious sentimentality, and stark realism. Rhetoricaily, the piece is ciosely related to "Life

in the hon Mills," which it echoes not only in its title but dso in narrative voice and plot

structure. It aiso represents a significant transitional moment in Davis's early career as a

writer of social protest fiction. The story of Lot Tyndal, a filthy young prostitute driven

to take her own life in desperation over her own helplessness, marks the increasing trend

'Davis, letter to James Fields, 20 Oct [186î], Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6 log), Clifion Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library.

'Davis, letter to Annie Fields, 18 Feb [1863], Richard Harding Davis Collection (#6109), C li fton Waller Barrett Library ,Speciai Collections Department, University of Virginia Li brary . in Davis's work towards the anaiysis of women's issues4 and foreshadows her

challenging of stereotypes of sexuai and social contamination in Waitingfor the Verdict.

"The Promise of the Dawn" is an exposé of prostitution as "winite slavery" several

years before the phrase became a popuiar reform slogan specifically applicabIe to

streetwalkee, or "magdalens," to use the polite term of Davis's day.' As Sharon Harris

points out, Davis is interested in the "environmental forces" that lead young girls like Lot

into prostitution and keep them in its bonds6 For Lot would like to escape her horrific

situation-the starvation and abuse, the filth of the gutter, the sores of venereal disease, the

addiction to opium-but leams the harsh lesson that "when a woman's once down, there's

no raising her up."' The story, set in contemporary war-time Wheeling, traces Lot's

desperate attempt to find redemption on Christmas Eve. Selflessly, Lot thuiks not of

herself but of the six-year-old brother in ber care, whom she has always sheltered fiom

the reality of her workaday life. She first tries to find work as a singer in the chorus of a

concert hall (she has a ''mange" but peculiarly moving voice [18]) and, when that attempt

'Much of Davis's most powerfùl writing of the the late 1860s and 1870s focusses directly on women's issues, particularly on women's struggle for economic and social independence. See. for example, "In the Market" (Peterson 's Magazine 53 [Jan 1868]:49-57 ); "Earthen Pitchers" (Scribner S lMonlhly 7 FJov 1873-Apr 18741: 73-8 1, 199-207,274-8 1,490-94,595-600,714-2 1); and A Law Unto HerseZf(Phi1adelphia: Lippicott, 1878).

'"White slavery" came into cornmon usage as a metaphor for prostitution towards the end of the nineteenth century. The terni was initially used to describe the problem in general, although a later distinction was drawn between "forced" and "fiee" prostitution (Kathleen Barry, The Prostitution of Sexuality FJew York: New York UP, 19951 1 14- 15).

'Harris, Rebecca Hording Davis 100.

a avis, "The Promise of the Dawn: A Christmas Story," Atlantic Monrhly 1 1 (Jan 1863): 19; hereafier cited parenthetically. 229

fails, she seeks out her uncle, Adam Craig, and his new wife to beg work from them.

Unaware that Lot is the illegitimate child of his dead sister, Nell, Adam tums Lot angrily

fiom his door. The girl's 1stdesperate attempt to find a good home for her brother, Ben,

is to take an overdose of opium and bequeath innocent Ben to Adam's care.

Davis deliberately -es Lot's tragedy in the historical context of the ongoing

war but, as in "Life in the lron Mills" and Margret Uowth, she focusses on the civil

battlefield and the cdtiesof social rather than military strife. Although Davis does

not emphasize the connection, Lot's presence in Wheeling is probably a by-product of the

rnilitary occupation of Wheeling. On the story's limited stage, "Devi1 Lot" appears as a

lone figure, a refugee fiom the dens of New York's notonous Five Points district on a

western pilgrimage to seek the protection of her one known relative. However, in

Davis's actual experience, fiom which the portrait of Lot is undoubtedly drawn: crowds

of prostitutes appeared simultaneously with the troops. By the end of the war, the army

tents on Wheeling Island had attmcted so many of these fernale camp followers that the

city was, a local historian notes, "infeste&' with tl~ern.~

War, the mamed explanation for Lot's defiling presence in the quiet, snow-

whitened western town, further disturbs the story's vision of Christmas-Eve civic

avis told Annie Fields: "'Lot' is fiom life. You know, here, in a town like this it is easy to corne into direct contact with every class and the longer 1 live-the more practicd my observation is ..." (Davis, letter to Annie Fields, 6 Dec 1862, Richard Harding Davis Collection [#6 1 091, Clifion Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library.).

'Hewetson 75. Harris proffen evidence fiom the meeling Intelligencer that Wheeling's prostitution pro blem began, however, long before the war (Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis 100). tranquillity in more concrete ways. From Adam's cornplacent point of view, Wheeling

wears an especially appealing aspect under the influence of seasonai glamour: 'The city

itself, he fancied, had caught a new and curious beauty; this winter its mills were stopped,

and it had time to clothe the steep streets in spotiess snow and icicles (1 l)." While Adam

"fancies" the war as having a purimg effect on the mil1 town, however, the city's

unusually clean appearance actuaily whitewashes the uaderlying economic hardship

brought about because of the military ccnfiict. With the miils stopped and other avenues

of decent employment (even theatncal work) closed to her, Lot has no other option than

to ply the trade she learned in the Bowery slums. "My Gd!,"she cries, "1 had to live!"

(19). Although Lot appears in Davis's story as an interloper, her howl of desperation

perhaps represents the predicament of other unemployed mil1 girls during Wheeling's

temporary war-time slurnp. 'O

Wrapped up in his own cozy self-satisfaction, Adam seems to think the warm

glow of Christmas temporarily shuts down the war dong with the mills. in his

sentimental musings, he imagines the sun as an especially bbcalmand loving" glow

shining on fiend and foe alike, ''though he [the sun] knew the most plentiful harvest

which the States had yielded that year was one of murdered dead" (1 0). Despite the

''AS Pfaelzer notes, mil1 girls were generally "Milnerable" and became "fiequent victims of rape, seduction, alcohol abuse, unwanted pregnancy, opium addiction, and prostitution" (Parlor Radical 1 1 1). Wheeling's female labour force probably suffered the most during the war. The mills to which Adam refers are likely the textile mills, which were, of course, dependent on Southem conon. Wheeling's iron mills, on the other hami, thrived on war-the orders for military equipment (Henry Dickerson Scott, Iron and Steel in Wheeling [Toledo OH: Caslon, 19291 33- 34). 23 1

nearby evidence of war's brutality, Adam nurses an illusion of universal harmony, telling

himself: "Why, God had the world! Let them fiet, and cut each other's throats, if they

would. God had thern: and Christ was coming" (1 1). Davis is carefid, however, to

dissociate her narrator's voice from Adam's ruminations, which, she infonns us, are

merely "fancied" (1 1). Her story demonstrates that, in contrast to Adam's optimistic

daydreams of temporary truce on the battlefield ,there is never any armistice for Lot and

her kind. As in her earlier fiction, Davis uses the Civil War in "The Promise of the

Dawn" as a symbolic fiame for less glorified, more insidious matters of national crisis.

The only prostitute to be featured as a main character in Davis's fiction,' ' Lot is

linked to other marginalized groups more typically portrayed by Davis-mil1 hands,

African- Amencans, and theatre workers-but is also more desperate than these. The

lowest of the low, Lot occupies a social no-man's-land, catering to the illicit desires of the

wealthy and powemil yet shunned by even the socially ostracized ("Those that have made

you what you are hold good stations among us," the helplessly apologetic theatre manager

tells her [19]). Lot's isolated, equivocal status in the cornmunity is cornpounded by her

representation as an illegitimate child, even though she is nineteen years old. "Devil

Lot's" illegitimacy is both another stigma and the sign of her potential to be redeemed; as

a bastard child, Lot embodies social and sexual transgression, but she also calls to mind

fairy -tale fantasies of foundling children rniraculousl y recovered. As Jenny Bourne Taylor

o or a depiction of prostitutes as background figures, see Margret's visit to the tavem in Margref Howth. Lot is not the only "fallen woman" in the Davis canon. "The Long Journey" (Peterson 's JJan-un 1867) describes the seduction of a young girl fiom the Jersey Coast who lives with her seducer as his mistress and gives birth to his illegitimate child. Like Lot. the woman is associated explicitly with the image of the Magdalen. 232

asserts, "fictions of bastardy are not only arnbiguous but embody epistemological

ambiguity, and this is one of the sources of illegitimacy's extraordinary range of narrative

possibilities." In "The Promise of the Dawn," Davis begins to explore what Taylor calls

"the limind, fluid figure of the bastard."12 This conflicted, controvenial figure, dweliing

on the borders of social consciousness and self-definition, wodd later become the central

thematic focus of Waitingfor the Verdict.

Davis associates Lot fint of dl, as we have seen, with the miIl workers whose

cause she espoused in "Life in the bon Mills" and Mmgret Howth. The connection

between Lot's arrivai in Adam's "quaint American town" (12) and the war's curtailing of

Wheehg's textile ïndusûy is confïrmed by a significant detail: the tenement where Lot

and her brother have rooms is a former Cotton factory. Lot is also associated with

African-American characters, whose social status, like hers, is arnbiguous. When Adam

strikes out at Lot to thnist her grimy hand away fiom the flowers he had purchased for his

wife, it is a "black" boy from the gutter to whom Lot tenders her injured am. Wheuier

the boy is an Afncan-American or is simply blackened by life on the streets is unclear, as

is his attitude towards the streetwalker. Does the gamin "plaster" her amwith "grime

from the gutter" (14) as a gesture of goodwill or to add insult to injury? Davis leaves this

expression of potential solidarity between Lot and the Street urchins abmptly unfinished,

shifting her namator's perspective suddenly back to Adam's intenor monologue and his

damning reflections concerning Lot's poisonous influence.

"Jenny Bourne Taylor, "Representing Illegitirnacy in Victonan Culture," Vicrorian Ident aies: Social and Cultural Formations in Nineteenth-Century Liferafure, eds. Ruth Rob bins and Julian Wolfieys (London: Macmillan, 1996): 124'12 1. 233

Lot's attempt to find work in the theatre also features a background African-

Amencan presence, with similarly dubious connotations. Both African-Amencan characters present at Lot's interview with the theatre manager and the prima donna seem to sympathize with the girl. It is apparently at the instigation of a "black maid" that the prima donna urges the manager to let Lot give a sample of her singing (1 7). The biack porter who is also part of the scene actually has a history of assisting Lot (he has helped her to the jail &er one of her drinking sprees) and speaks "kindly" to her even as he drives her fiom his employer's door (18). Notably, however, the porter is careful to show only contempt for Lot in front of the white characters, ostentatiously drawing his coat aside to avoid even touching her. On the official social scale, Lot clearly occupies a position lower even than Amerka's most outtageously oppressed. Since, at the time of

Davis's writing, slavery was not yet abolished in the provisional state of West Virginia, there is no way of telling whether the African-Arnerican characters in "The Promise of the Dawn" are slave or fiee. The porter's conspicuous treatment of Lot as the stereotypical contented Afncan-Amencan of proslavexy fiction treats stereotypical "poor white trash" suggests that Lot's situation may indeed be worse than that of the legally enslaved. Deprived of the opportun@to exercise her voice in public, Lot is perhaps one of the nameless "dumb" spirits who, according to Davis's narrator, are more to be pitied than even the defonned, pathetic Blind Tom.

Davis Merhighlights the extreme degree of Lot's degradation by comparing and contrasting her with the singer, Madame -. In her Iater career, Davis, who claimed fiiendship with some of the leading theatrical lights of her day, would fiequentIy challenge conventional depictions of theatre people as debauched and vicious

characters." As 1 have noted, Madame feels enough sympathy, or curiosity, conceming

Lot to agree to hear her sing. She fails to recognize, however, similarities between her

own image and the face before her of "one that lives in the suburbs of hell" (1 7). The

narrator describes Madame as follows: "the rankest bloom of fi@ summers, in white

satin and peatls: a faded dahlia Women hinted that the fragrance of the dahiia had not

been healthfd in the world; but they crowded to hear her: such a wonderful contralto!"

( 1 7). The contrast between the concert singer, an ironic " type of purity" ( 17), and the

prostitute accentuates the hypocrisy of Victorian sexual stereotyping.

Lot's multiple names in the aory emphasize the instability of her social identity

and underline her peculiar role as a "liminal" figure on the fringes of even indecent

society." On the streets of Wheeling, the girl is commonly known as "Lot," or "Devi1

Lot" in honour of her savage moods. She remembers wistfidly, though, a dead lover

"Clarke Davis was an avid theatre-goer and through him Rebecca met, and even entertained in her home, such theatrical worthies as Edwin Booth, Ellen Terry, Dion Boucicault, and Augustin Daly (Charles Belmont Davis, Adventures and Leiters of Richard Harding Davis pewYork: Scribner's, 19171 11 - 12). In stones and sketches such as "Across the Gulf' (Lippincott 's 28 [July 18811: 59-71), "The Baiacchi Brothers" (Lippincott 3 10 [July 1875]:66- 79, "They Ran Away" (Youth 's Companion 60 [2 Nov 18871: 285), and "Dolly" (Scribner '.Y MonrhZy 9 mov 18741: 89-92) Davis portrayed actors and performers as ordinary, kind citizens cornmitted to domestic virtues despite their unconventional, nomadic lives.

'"The Biblical heritage behind the name "LotT'also resonates ambiguously. Lot was Abraham's well-loved, but misguided, nephew. He left Canaan for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah but was later rescued fiom its annihiliaùon. The female characters surrounding Lot are even more arnbiguous figures, ail associated with transgressive behaviour. Lot's wife is destroyed because she disobeys God's order not to look back at the carnage; Lot's daughters deliberately perpetuate the family line by getting their father dnink and then cornrnitting incest with tiim. 235

(probably her seducer) who called her "Lottie." Her younger brother, fiom whom she has

somehow managed to conceal her livelihood and reputation, affectionately calls ber

"Charley." At no point in the story is Davis's protagonist ever called by what must be her

fùll name, Charlotte. Known only by her various nicknarnes, "Lot" has no fixed

linguistic identity of her own. She appean, as her most popular alias connotes, a tool of

Chance whose signiticance lies in its interpretation by others. In Adam's eyes she is a

transitional, Lamia-like figure, as his fïrst perception of her implies. "Yes;" he thinks, "if

it had been a slimy eel standing upnght, it would have been less fou1 a thing than this"

(14)-

Not only is Lot more marginaiized than the mginal figures who frame her story,

but she is also more of an untouchable than her mother, a so-called "fallen woman" who, according to Lot's own testimony, "drank herself to death in the Bowery dens" (19).

Despite her erring ways, Adam remembers his sister, Ellen, fondly as his beloved and

innocent "Nell." "1 don't blame her," he tells his wife, Jinny, as he recalls the stoxy-a common one-of Nell's downfall: "She was Young, unlarned. No man cared for our souls.

So, when she loved him well, she thort God spoke to her. So she was nik fÎom me. She went away" (1 6). Jinny, too, empathizes readily with Nell's misfortunes, identifyùig with the wayward woman's self-abandonment to love, exclaiming: "So as she loved him! You

know, my husband. As 1 love you. An' he left her! What wonder what she did? All alone! So as she loved him still! God shut His eyes to what she did."

JinnyTssympathy for the magdalen carries her so far that she fûmishes Nell's

story with her own happy ending: "So, when she was a-tryin' to forget, the only way she 236

knew, God sent an angel to bring her up, an' have her soui washed clean." Adam,

however, corrects this indulgent speculation with the comment, "That's not the way men

told the story, child." Nelly's end, it seems, did not fit the mercifùl plot of the fallen

woman redeemed through suffering and self-sacrificial maternai love." Amving in New

York six months aAer his sister's death, Adam found in an old newspaper the story the

way men told it: "The woman, Ellen Myers, found dead yesîerday on one of the docks,

was identified. Died of starvation and whiskey" (1 6- 17).

If Ne11 does not fit Jinny's picture of the reformed magdalen, Lot is even less of a

match for the "angel" Jinny substitutes imagimtively for Nell's illegitimate child. Davis

does not spare any of the gritîy, repulsive details of Lot's diabolical appearance: "a dirty

hand, with sores on it, and a woman thrust her face fiom under her blowzy bonnet into

[Adam's]: a young face, deadly pale, on which some awful passion had cut the lines; lips

dyed scarlet with rank blood, lips, you would think, that in hell itself would utter a coarse

jest" (14). Lot is not just a "fallen woman,"like her mother, but a working "fallen

woman." Although she plies her sex as her trade, her aggression makes her, ironically,

unferninine (two of her identities, "Lot" and Tharley," are usually considered masculine

narnes). The "dark trade-mark" (20) that cornes into her eyes as she resents Adam's

cmelty towards her alienates her fiom her family and from social help. Brought face to

face with Lot's predicament (but unaware of her family daim), Jinny, a sincere but

narrow-minded Christian, hds that %e kind of religion she learned did not provide for

' IFor examples of plots built on this convention, see Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth (1 853) and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Hedged In (1 870). 237

anomalies of work like this" (21). Davis's language in this passage has, as it so often

does in "The Promise of the Dawn," a slippery, imprecise ambivalence. Lot's case

presents an "anomaly of work" first of al1 because Jinny, a committed abolitionkt and

supporter of missionary activities, is UIlfami1ia.r with the work to be done for the suffering

on her own doorstep ("So near at hand, you know. Lot was neither a Sioux nor a Rebel,"

quips the narrator [21]). In addition, Lot's existence also represents an "anomaly of work," a hidden labour problem whose story a naîion preoccupied by a single labour question, the slavery controversy, has no way of telling, let alone solving.

As Davis's plot progresses, she focusses increasingly on the anomaly of Lot's statu as not only a streetwalker but also an illegitimate child. The fiendish "Devil Lot" appears in a new light as sister Charley, and the '%aman" (14) who thrusts her diseased face into Adam's becomes a "girl" who plays with her brother's toys, "as much of a child as he" (20). Lot's dualistic character demonstrates the antithetic syrnbolism inherent in the Victorian image of the illegitimate child. At once emblem of her mother's sin and sentimentalized innocent, the illegitimate child's identity is so deeply self-contradictory that Taylor believes "there is a sense in which the children become impossible to represent." Thus Magdaien, the trickçter heroine of WiIkie Collins's No Name (1 862) becomes not only unnameable but also virtually unidentifiable after the scanda1 of her illegitimacy is revealed. The socially-defined, ever-fluid category of illegitimacy, Taylor maintains, "suggests an identity constnicted as aporiethe indeterminate space in which an opposition breaks down and difference collapses into sarnene~s."'~ 238

The sentimental ending of "The Promise of the Dawn," which dwells on Lot's suicide as an act of self-sacrifice and spiritual salvation, testifies that bastardy is at once a subversive and self-destructive denomination. As Lot changes before the reader's eyes fkom harlot into penitent child, Christmas Eve tums into the &wn of Christmas Day and the prostitute, deprived of an earthly home, overcomes the sharne of her social condition and fin& a heavenly one:

While she, Lot, lay there compt, rotten in sou1 and body, it came to her how, long ago, Magdalene, more vile than Lot, had std closest to Jesus. Magdaiene loved much, and was forgiven. So, after a while, Charley. the child that might have ken, came to His feet humbly, with bitter sobs. "Lord, I'm so tired!" she said. "I'd like to try again, and be a different girl." That was ail. She clung close to His hand as she went through the deep waters (24).

The effusive piety of this passage is unusuai for Davis. So exceptionai is the emotionally ovenvrought tone here, in fact, that Sharon Harris, although she recognizes Lot's death as

"redemptive," concludes that the "promise" of the Christmas dawn that rises over Lot's deathbed must be meant ironically." Davis's style, however, simply shows the strain of the tensions germane to her subject matter. The split between realism and sentimentalism in the prose of Lot's death scene underlines the difficulty of representing consistently the inconsistent subject of the illegitimate child.

Davis manages to b~gabout a bittersweet ending to her grim portraya1 of the displaced "harlot" (25) by focwing on the obverse side of the conventional plot of bastardy-the recovery of the lost child. On her sentimentalized deathbed, the untouchable

"Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis 101,99. 239

prostitute is subsumed by the fantasy she describes to Ben: "Some day you and 1'11 go out

to the country, and be good children together" (23). in other words, Davis rewrites Lot's

tragedy according to Juiny's ferninine version of the conventional tale of fallen

womanhood and illegitimate childhood. Davis's transfomation of Lot fiom living

bastard into angelic orphan finds support in the successfûl recovery of other foundlings in

"The Promise of the Dawn." It is worîh noting that Ben, who reaiizes Lot's dream of

adoption into his uncle's family, looks very much like his sister. Jinny, too, also

resembles the dead girl, although she is, ironicdly, at first unable to recognize the

similarities between the trajectory of Lot's life-story and her own. A poor orphan, Jinny

had no reai home before she married Adam and was, like Lot, a transient woman, who

used to "go about fiom house to house sewing" ( 16). Also like Lot, Jinny appears as a

child-woman. The adult responsibilities of marriage and motherhood have the unusual

effect, it seems, of turning back the clock for her, "making a child out of the thwarted woman" (1 5). The story's closing scene finds, then, a family group of former foundlings

(Adam, too, was orphaned at an early age), clustered around the ultirnate symbol of the

bastard-foundling plot's redemptive power, "the white figure of the loving Christ-cbild" nestled in the branches of the Christmas tree (24).

The apparent triurnph of emotional famiiy reunion over the social disruption of

illegitimacy does not, however, resmect Lot. If the foundling plot represents the romantic side of Victorian bastardy, this fantasy eventually founders in "The Promise of the Dawn." Jinny, a legitimate orphan, can enter the family circle as a lost child but Lot, the compt bastard orphan, must die in order to be "found." Because Lot is illegitimate, 240

her identity seems doomed to self-destnict. Self-annihilation thus becomes the only way

out of the "aporia" of illegitimacy; Lot can only be recovered by society as an idealized

child-martyr, not as a real woman.

The troubled Magery and logic surrounding Lot's death anticipate Davis's more

extensive exploration of the theme of social illegitimacy and social reconstruction in

Waitingfor the Verdict. Davis's most elaborately constructed novel, Waiting for the

Verdict marks the close of a period in the Davis canon. In this complicated. controversiai

book, Davis perseveres dong the pattern of her early fiction, combining her compassion

for the labouring class, her concern for African-American slaves, and her understanding

of regionai temperaments to grapple head-on with the dilernmas facing a nation just

recovering from civil war. In her later career as a nuvelist and short story author, Davis

would continue to tackle the pressing issues of her 'bto-day''-abuse of the mentally ill,

political corruption, woman's struggle for economic and legal independence-but never

again would she attempt a social novel of such sweeping complexity. Even Robert

Spiller's 1969 edition of Literary History of the United States, hardly ceiebrated for its

endorsement of nineteenth-century women writers, recognizes that Davis "barely missed

creating a great novel in Waitingfor the ~erdict.""

FVaitingfor the Verdict consists of two ioosely comected plots which cause the

novel's action to rotate around twin axes-the figures of Rosslyn Burley, the illegitimate

white daughter of an Alabama planter, and John Broderip, a mulatto surgeon. That

"Robert E. Spiller et al., Literary History of the United States, 3" ed. (London: Macmilian, 1969) 573. 24 1

neither of the novet's story-lines can properly be called a "subplot" testifies to Davis's

continued interest in the connections between socid oppression of al1 kinds and colours.

Subordinating one of these plots to the otber would perhaps have saved Davis's book

fiom criticisms of unwieldiness,l9 but such a strategy would not have enabled its author to

exploit the fui1 symbolic capacity of her central thematic tie between Ross and

B roderip-the socially-constnicted notion of illegitimacy .

Throughout the novel, both Ross and Brode!rip stxuggle to escape the seemingly

impermeable "stain" of their hidden backgrounds. Ross lems at a tender age that she is

"not like other children" (26)*' and defiantly rejects the surname of her dead step-father to

take on her mother's name and her disgrace. The young heroine's "shamefid childhood"

(147) is a source of "stains" (83) her grandfather urges her to conceal, but, according to

society's rules, Ross is obliged to 'Teel always guilty for James Strebling's ber biological

father's] crime" (92-93). Even &er Ross apparently overcomes her squaiid beginnings

as a huckster girl by acquiring, with the aid of a benevolent Quakeress, an education and

fine manners, she thinks of herself as a social outcast. In a moment of spiritual agony,

she reflects bitterly : "Home,husband, child, she had drearned of them dl, as al1 young

girls do. They could live down obstacles to their love, but a shameful birth, a beggarly

childhood, these never could be undone" (147).

I9In his notoriously bilious review of Waitingfor the Verdict, Henry James cornplains, 'The chief fault, artistically... is that [David has made two complete plots with no mutual comection" (" Waiting for the Verdict," rev. of Waitingfor the Verdict, by Rebecca Harding Davis, Nation 5 [2 1 Nov 18671 4 10.)

''~11references to Waitingfor the Verdict are taken fiom the book version (Sheldon, 1867, rpt. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Gregg Press, 1968). 242

Ross's identity cnsis becomes acute when an elegant, wealthy Kentucky planter,

Garrick Randolph, begins to court her. The fastidious Randolph prides himself

paaicularly on his untainted farnily bloodline and on the fact that the family estate has

never been "alienated fiom the direct line" (79). Ross, though, knows herself to be

"alienated," through her illegitimate birth, fiom al1 decent society. Deeply in love with the beautifid and winsome heroine, however, Randolph pictureç himseif as a chivairic knight and exercises a self-conscious magnanimity in overlooking Ross's indecent history and marrying her.

For John Broderip, on the other hand, the "stain" of illegitimacy is not so readily overlooked. Broderip's story, too, involves a courtship plot. A prominent Philadelphia surgeon, Brodenp has successNly passed as a white man for many years but is prompted by his love for a white wornan, Margaret Conrad, to reveal his tnie colour. Margaret clearly loves Brodenp and the two are obvious soul-mates, but she is unable to overcome her deep-seated antipathy towards his race and her horror of miscegenation. Brodenp anticipates Margaret's shocked reaction to his disclosure when he wams her, somewhat cryptically, of "The jeers-the loss that 1 have always known, to corne on you and your chiidren! The stain of it that you never could be rid of?" (201).

Davis's twin courtship plots explore the penonai suffering of the illegitimate, but they eventually evolve into a larger quest to redefine the social meaning of "legitimate" amidst the national chaos and still-contested boundaries of pst-bellurn America.

Rejected by the one penon he had üuly loved, Broderip is motivated by an unexpected reunion with a long-lost slave brother, Nathan, to dedicate his energies to seeking le@ 213

legitimacy for his race. With Namby his side, Broderip becomes the head of the first

dl-black regiment and dies a glorious martyr's death following the liberation of

Richmond. Meanwhile, the Ross-Randolph plot also develops far-reaching, even

national, implications for Davis's theme of illegitimacy. First, Randolph is confionted

with a long-concealed farnily mystery hinting at a hidden will and the possibility that the

family estate has indeed ken "aiienated." (ironically, circumstances suggest that James

Strebling, Ross's biological father, is the true owner of the Randolph plantation.)

Second. interconnected developments between the Ross-Randolph and Broderip-

Margaret plots focus sympathetically on the peculiar situation of the aristocratie,

slaveholding South and the reintegration of the rebellious bastard of American democracy

into the national family.

Through a string of convoluted plot twists and remarkable coincidences, Davis

manages to tie together the loose ends of her novel in a series of spectacular family

reunions after the war. The old slave, Hugh, whom Randolph had sent to Georgia, turns

out to be the father of Broderip and Nathan, and Ross's repentant husband undertakes a

special pilgrimage to the South to restore him to his family. Ross is finally reconciled to

her father, Strebling, on his deathbed, and Nathan's long-searching wife, Amy, finally

finds her husband. The novel's closing scene, which fmds Ross and Randolph celebrating the reunion they have helped conîrive between Nathan and his wife and son, even manages to include Broderip in its hannonious closure. George Markle, one of

Burley's companions-in-arms during the war, retums to report to Margaret Conrad (also one of the guests invited to Ross's "holiday" [352]) the details of the hero's death. 244

Margaret, however, reveais that she had already known, through some son of spirihial

telepathy, when and how Broderip died. Margaret's mystical conviction that "Some day

my fiiend will corne to me.... There is no such word as dead, to me" (359), reiterates

Broderip's faith in the eventual reconciliation of the two lovers separated by race alone.

"1 think," Broderip claims in his dyhg moments, "there is somewhere a world where my

color will not keep me fiom her" (324). As Cooper does in nie Lasr of the Mohicam,

Davis falls short of envisaging a marriage for her mixed-race lovers in this world but

orchestrates a heavenly reunion for them in the next.

Like Uncle Tom S Cabin and McIntosh's The Lofiy and the Lowly, to both of

which it has ken corn~ared,~'Waiting for the Verdict features action on both Northem

and Southem fronts and exhibits as many doubles as a hail of mirrors. Ironically, rnuch

of the story unfolds in Philadelphia, the "city of brotherly love." The far reaches of the

novel, however, take the reader fiom Pennsylvania to Missouri, Kentucky, Alabama, and

Ohio, and nom market-place scenes to rural countryside to the venues of high swiety.

Davis bolsters the tenuous connections between geographically remote scenes and

amongst her large cast of characters through conspicuous paralleis. The thematic

association between Ross and Broderip, for instance, is reinforced by the information that

Brodenp began life as a slave on the Strebling plantation. Strebling himself, described as

a weakly, effeminate man. is an older mirror image of Garrick Randolph's innate

deficiencies-a pictwe of what Randolph might become without Ross's healthy influence.

'' Enca Rechtin Bauenneister, "In a Different Context : Rereading Works by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Maria Cummios, and Rebecca Harding Davis," Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1989, 137ff. 245

On a structural level, just as Burleyysjoumey south to find Amy brings together Ross and her father, Randolph's journey to find Hugh alço brings together Ross and her husband by enabling Randolph to recover his true self and establish his marriage relationship for the first time on a fïrm footing.

Margaret, the dark, dathomabie ferninine personality, and Ross, the fair domestic heroine, are two more doubles, obvious incamations of the traditional split heroine of gothic and romantic fiction. If Margaret does not earn our syrnpathy as Ross's darker half, Davis seems to elicit a minimal compassion for her position by suggesting unmistalcable links between her situation and that of the man she wrongs. For instance, both Margaret and her ''fiend" have fathers named "Hugh" who are seriously handicapped-one by a sudden, devastating onset of blindness and the other by the shackles of slavery. More significantly, the narrator depicts both Margaret and Broderip as prisoners of prejudice. Faced with the choice between acknowledging his brother and continuing to live a prosperous, but deceitful, life, Brodenp contemplates the skin on his am and thinks, "It was an iron mask that shut him in fiom al1 the hopes, the ambitions, the enjoyments of other men" (3 13). Later in the story, Ross characterizes Margaret using identical imagery. Describing Margaret's reaction to Broderip's departure, she writes her grandfather, "She is not like a woman to me, but a dangerous, lawless man in an iron mask. 1 could not tum my eyes, though, from the pale, high-bred face in the twilight beside me, and the shut lip. 1 could not tell what temble cry they wouid utter if they opened" (326). 246

The metaphoncal ties between the failed lovers are not merely ironic but rather form part of Davis's emphasis throughout Waitingfor the Verdict on the hidden bonds of syrnpathy linking white to black, slaveholder to abolitionist, Rebel to Unionist. Her representative Northem and Southern characters are not mere stock figures but rather complicated, contradictory individuals. As a result, the novel that shows Davis espousing her strongest anti-slavery views aiso dernonstrates most skilfûlly her determineci sophistication in evoking empathy for the unique position of the slaveholders as well as the slaves. Woitingfor the Verdicr, written afier Davis's permanent move to Philadelphia with her abolitionist husband, represents the author's careful reappraisal of the Southem code under which she spent her formative years. At the same the, the novel constitutes a plea for national unity that judiciously emphasizes the attractive features of Southem culture and the South's worthiness to take its place in the national farnily as a kind of

Prodigal Son returned.

Waiting for the Verdict begins, in effect, where so many Southern domestic novels and proslavery novels end-with the couriship and then marriage of an abolitionist

Northemer and a slaveholding Southemer. Produced after the abolition of slavery had become fact rather than speculation, however, the novel differs significantly fkom its typical predecessors in celebrating rather than resisting the work of history. Davis presents John Broderip's fight to fiee his people as a noble campaign, complicated but not diminished by disconcerting sketches of helpless contrabands swarming into Union camps. As the book's central heroine and moralistic touchstone, Ross fblly endorses the slaves' notion of an "abolition war" (1 77). In her eyes, the national struggle is, as her 247 long-time chaperone, Friend Blanchard says, "a crusade, on which [the Union regiments] go to recover something better than a sepulchre-liberty for the slave" (56).

Contemplating her baby's future towards the close of the war, Ross can wish no more heroic work for ber son than that of emancipating the Southem slaves. She tells her husband: "1 hope there will be some great generous work ready, like this of fieeing the negro, when he is a man. 1 want hun to be a helper in the world" (328).

Ross herself seems Davis's mode1 feminine "helper in the world," and as such she appears to throw her full moral weight behind the anti-slavery cause. Ross reaiizes the nineteenth-century's ideal of woman's ability to influence her social world without abandoning the domestic sphere. Randolph's perception of this aspect of the heroine's character is, for once, astute: "wherever ~oss's]home might be, the air in it, he felt, was electric with energy; it was but a focus from which opened fields of work-fields where help was needed" (55). Mr. Ottley, one of Ross's society fÎiends, sums up Ross's consistent devotion to those around her when he tells her: "You have the truest, most fkiendly eyes 1 ever saw. When 1 fmt looked at them, 1 thought, that woman will be a helper in the world" (135-36). It is Ross's essentially feminine style of charity to which

Randolph attributes her enthusiasm for the abolitionist cause, which he initially denigrates as "a woman's puny view ... of a great political subversion" (56). However, by the end of the book, the "woman's puny view" of the war has clearly üiumphed-in John

Broderip's glorified martyrdom, in the sentimental reunion of Nathan and his family, in

Margaret Conrad's surprising self-dedication to the education of poor blacks, and in

Randolph's own apparent conversion to the anti-slavery perspective. The Kentuckian, a 248

vehement defender of the peculiar institution, leams eventually not only to accommodate

but actuaily to appreciate the reality of AErican-Arnerican emancipation. During his trip

south in search of Hugh, he fin& himself unconsciously "echoing" his wife's abolitionist

opinions. The narrator notes, "The very tones of his voice had, somehow, a tang like

those of Ross" (335-36).

interestingiy enough, however, despite her zeal for the cause of Afncan-American

liberation, Ross does not seem to belong in any way to the official abditionkt cause. She

is by nature a fieelancer rather than a party follower, preferring to deal charity on her

own, essentially personal ternis. Merthe war, when Randolph's Aunt Laun warns Ross

not to degrade herself by participating in such philanthropie "philandering" as the

Freedmen's Aid Societies, Ross assures her Tmnot fit to be in a society.... 1 always

quarrel with the other women" (33 3-34)." As we shall see, Ross's "puny," ferninine

point of view causes her to prefer to bring dislocated Afiican-Americans home to the

asylum of her cherished fmrather than to seek charity work on their behalf elsewhere.

If Ross does not seem to Randolph a stereotypical abolitionist (he expects "the old

Southem type of the Yankee, lank-legged, long-haired with coat-tail flapping between his

legs" [57]), perhaps this is partly because she appears so tenuously affiliated with the

anti-slavery movement as an institutional force. Even her work for the Underground

--Ross's7 7 loner attitude reflects her creator's own feelings about organized group activity. Davis once confessed to Annie Fields, "The fact is when our sex get into corporate bodies 1 have an instinct that warns me off-haven't you? '1 am never less a woman than when 1 have been arnong women' as Seneca say" (Rebecca Harding Davis, letter to Annie Fields, 6 Nov [ 1865?], Richard Harding Davis Collection [#6109], Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library). 249

Railroad seems straagely independent. She rescues Randolph with the level-headed aplomb of a hardened professional, but we are never given any explanation as to exactly how she cornes by her practised poise. We do know she uses her grandfather's lurnber office as a depot for refbgee slaves, but Ross's portrayal of her activity there is similarly ambiguous. The engraving Ross shows Randolph to explain her anti-slavery feelings pictures an unsuccessfut escape from slavery, the corpse of an old Afnc-American, arriving in a packing crate in Burley's office. Randolph denies the homfic picture could have been drawn fiom life, but Ross infonns hirn, "But this is true ... There is room there, you see, for another figure. That was 1" (57). The engraving that accompanies this scene in Davis's 1867 text shows three men peering at the body in the packing crate, with the transparent, kif-sketched figure of a woman positioned on the edge of the group (see copy on following page). Ross's shadowy self-portrayal in what Randolph calls "some

Abolition den" (57) may well reflect Davis's own ambivalence about dîrectiy espousing the anti-slavery cause in her own art. "By witing Rosslyn in and out of the engraving,"

Pfaelzer comrnents, "Davis may be revealing her uncertainty about the reiationship behveen politics and repre~entation.'"~

At the beginning of the novel, Ross expresses dong with her passionate abolitionist views a remarkable tolerance for the predicament of benevolent slaveholders.

Even as she models for the reader an appropnatefiisson of horror in reaction to her own sensational abolitionist text (the engraving), she makes allowances for Randolph, suggesting, "You will think us fanatics, Mr. Randolph. You know slavery oniy through

------"P faelzer, P~rlorRadical 145.

your own kind mastership, perhaps" (57). Near the end of the novel, however, she revises

her notion of "chivalric" Southern culture and declares, "That word chivalry has ken

brought to mean a fine generosity to your equals, and your foot on the neck of al1 beneath

you; hospitaiity in the house, woman-whipping in the quartes, and starvation in the

pnsoners' peu" (329). Ross's angry words here seem at odds with the "quiet" tone in

which they are supposedly delivered They appear not ody out of character for Ross but

also strangely contradictory in terms of the novel's overall portraya1 of plantation tife and

manners, which is often sympathetic. It is important to note that, at this point in the story,

Ross is as yet unreconciled with her biological father, the planter James Strebling. The

heroine, like her husband, still has much to leam before the story's close.

Although RandoIph may seem towards the end of the novel to become a kind of

ventriloquist for his wife's anti-slavery sentiments, the voice of slavery's advocates is

never completely carnouflaged or silenced in Waitingfor the Verdict. Like the more

extreme defenders of the South's honour during the Reconstruction era such as Thomas

Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris, Davis accentuates, as she does in so much of her

other work, the appealing aspects of the lifestyle defended by the soldiers of the Lost

Cause. Ln his pithy way, Joe Burley imparts the genn of the pst-war nostalgia that

would alter a war between two sovereign states into an essentially domestic struggle,

fought by brother against br~ther.~'Burley chastises a fellow soldier who jokes about

"AS Benedict Anderson points out, there has ken, since Davis's day, a "vast pedagogical industry" promoting the conception of the war between the states as a htricidal war. The symbolism of brother battling brother helps Americans conceive of their community as essentially uruuptured (Imagined Communities: Rejlections on the Origin and Spread of Nar ionalism [London: Verso, 19931 20 1-202). 252

"picking off Johnny Reb" with the sentimental explanation, "When we fired at that sguad of graycoats down on the creek t'other &y, seemed as if 1 could see the home each on them had lefi behind, the wife, or little ciiildren, may be" (1 52).

In actuality, Davis devotes much of Waiting for the Verdict to exposing the homes the Southern soldiers left behind. While her sketches of Southem life are not romanticized to match the epic dignity of Page's Red Rock, they do manifest a fundamental understanding of the rnind-set of the OLd South and a sincere appreciation of its paradoxes. Davis's text recognizes, even as it challenges, the cornfort in the appeal of proslavery rhetonc to both Southemers and Northemers. Furthemore, complex portraits of slaveholders, such as the Randolphs and the Strebiings, present the South as a region worth recovering and welcoming back into the national fold.

Like Stowe, Davis recognizes that the Southem planter class consisted of many

Shelbys and St. Clares, kind-hearted but apathetic owners who turned a blind eye to slavery's abuses because they witnessed so few of them on their own plantations. Garrick

Randolph is one of these. As Ross surmises, Randolph would generally be considered a

"kind" master by his peers. His family prides itself on the benevolent treatment of its blacks, and one of Randolph's first concerns when faced with the loss of his estate is the possible dislocation of his slaves ("Why, they have ken bom and died side by side with the Randolphs for generations!" [8 11). The old slave, Hugh, protects the family honour by concealing the will that would cost Randolph the plantation because of the cherished memory of the camaraderie he enjoyed with Randolph's father, Coyle. If Hugh has not been singled out for special consideration duruig Randolph's tenue of the plantation, his memones of earlier days, when he and Coyle camped and hunted together as chums, are

fondiy nostalgie. The younger Randolph's relish for his role as benevolent guardian

appears to give some credence to the old slave's reminiscences. Upon his remto

Kentucky immediately following his marriage tu his abolitionist sweetheart, Randolph

reassures himself of his identity as a Southem slaveholder with the comforting gestures

and rhetoric of the benevolent guardian. He greets the "mwd of black faces" that tums

out to welcome him with genuine warmth, "shaking hands on one side and the other, with

a hearty glow in his face, remembering how different was this cordial relation between

himself and the negroes to the servile hired labor of the North" (247).

Davis's readers are about to learn, of course, how fragile the "cordial patriarchal

relation'' acnially is on the Randolph plantation. Randolph's interview with Hugh

follows shonly on the heels of the cheemil homecoming and exposes both the physical hardships of slavery and the moral decrepitude induced by slave ownership. Hugh's

room over the tool-house is not one of the vine-covered "picturesque" cabins depicted in so many plantation novels. Davis deliberately strips Hugh's lodgings of ail romantic airs.

Randolph, who has ken fietting over the rumour of the concealed will, hdsthat the ordinary, humble poverty of Hugh's brings him immediately down to earth:

pandolph] went up the ricketty ladder to the loft with something of the cornfortable sense of mastenhip rehiming to him, and pushed open the door afier a tap on it. The room was familiar and cornmonplace enough. There was the negro's wood-heap in one corner. and his cot in another; a tailow candle and a plate of rice, boiled with flitch, on the table; a brown and yellow jug of tea simmering on the brick edge of the grate. (250) 254

Davis's realist vision in this passage plainly reveals that Randolph's "cornfortable sense of mastership" depends on the c'commonplace" facts of Hugh's material degradation. The emotional bond Randolph is so proud to feel between himself and his slaves is in actuality fragile and unstable, easily cracking under the influence of the racism endemic to the Southem way of life. Contemplating Hugh through the eyes of a practical planter,

Randolph wonders: "Of how much more value was mugh's life] than the cm's that lay gnawing his bone before the fire? To Randolph's philsophic eye, a negro had always been a necessary part of the world's machinery of labor; fitted to the Southern climate as the draught home was to English mining sections, or the light mustang to the Western flats" (254).

That Randolph regards his father's loyal cornpanion as a mere Yool" (254) does not alter the master's apparently sincere affection for his servants as a group. In Davis's various portraits of slaveholders in Waitingfor the Verdict, abusive behaviour exists side by side with randorn acts of real compassion. Nathan's inability to condemn his masters,

Strebling and his son, Bob, even when his own chance at fieedom hangs in the balance, reflects the reader's own interpretive predicament over the course of the novel. Nathan rescues Markle and Burley at great risk to himself and determines to head to the Northern army camp with his new fnends. At the 1st moment, however, the escape plan runs afoul and Nathan has to choose between shooting his master and fleeing for his Iife. The narrator's description of the slave's consternation as he stands with his finger on the trigger dramatizes the cautious ambivalence that characterizes Davis's treatment of

Southern slaveowners throughout the novel: Against his will there rose before him remembmnfes of kindnesses which Strebling, in his stiff, pompous way had shown to him; of money he had thrown hirn when passing through the stable yard, of littie dishes sent fkom the house table when he was sick in his loft. Trifling kindnesses, perhaps; but the money had ken given with a joke, and Strebling had heaped the dishes with his own hand, choosing of the best. As for young M's-; he was angry that the usual warm, jolly feeling crept into his heart which the thoughts of the genial, vain young fellow always brought with it. Once or twice the boy had lashed him with his own hand, in his tempests of fury. Therc was a sw across Nathan's bald pate where his leaded whip had laid the flesh open to the sM1, one day, while the gray- headed man stood humbly holding his horse. But none of the servants remembered these things. He was always ready to beg a holiday for thern, to contrive that they shared his own. On the days when Nathan had been going to see Anny, at Fairview's, the lad had never failed to get him off an hour or two earlier, or to nin out with some gaudy cravat or jacket of his own, in which Nathan rnight look his best. More than that, he had inspected him anxiously, as if he cared how he looked. (182)

In the above passage, it is as difficult for the reader as for Nathan to interpret the inconsistent personaiities of the Streblings, who seem to fit opposite stereotypes of b~th the cruel aristocrat and the benevolent, patriatchal master. In Wailingfor the Verdict, it becomes impossible to conceive of the national controversy over black slavery as a strictly politicai affair; for Davis, the persona1 side of the master-slave relationship penistently tangled the issues. When Bob Strebling, like Garrick Randoiph, acts "as if he cared." neither the slave nor the narrator is able to penetrate to the roots of Bob's contradictory character and gauge his sincenty. Consequently, both Davis and Nathan withhoid executing fmal judgment on young Bob, leaving the ultimate verdict to the higher jwisdiction of "One that night who looked with like tendemess into the hearts of master and slave, and judged both with juster eyes than ours" (1 83). 256

By the tirne Waitingfor the Verdict began publication, Southem slavery and

slaveholders had already, of course, been tried and condemned by the bloody due process

of Civil War. Davis, however, rnay well have begun work on the noveI before the

official close of hostilities, and her treatment of southern scenes reflects the ambiguity of

a national conscience still at war with itself. Her portrayal of the Wilder plantation,

which Nathan visits in his attempt to discover idonnation to take with him to the Federal

camp, confirms the enigmatic impression of Southern slaveholding culture conveyed

through the environment and actions of central characters, such as Randolph and the

Streblings. Colonel Wilder is a mere name rather than a character in the novel's cirama,

so the reader has no particular reason to sympathize with his situation or behaviour. Yet

Davis takes the theat an especially tense moment in the plot (Nathan's trip to the Wilder

plantation causes the critical delay that costs hirn his chance to escape) to provide her

audience with yet another detailed sketch of the paradoxes of plantation Iife.

Nathan's visit to the Wilder plantation takes hirn to one of the homes in the slave

quarters, a "cornfortable cabin" (1 77), where slaves enjoy gossip, fiddle music, a roaring

fire, and a bountifiil herof leftover turkey, cranbeny pie, and white bread. in theù

warm, coq setting, Wilder's slaves appear as content and well-cared for as any of the

'SSwiving correspondence suggests that Davis began negotiations for the serial publication of Waiting for the Verdicl in the autumn of 1866. in a letter to the magazine's editors dated 1 November, she refers to a "long story" she had previously completed but "afte~tards destroyed..., having determined to entirely remodel and extend it" (Rebecca Harding Davis, letter to William Conant and F.P. Church, 1 Nov [1866], William Conant Church Papen, The GaZq Series, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tiiden Foundations). It is possible, then, that Davis may have begun the first version of the novel before the end of the war. 257 happy blacks of plantation fiction, so many duplicates of the "hypothetical fat, laq, sensud nigger" (263) Burley's Captain expects to hdsouth of the Mason-Dixon line.

When the narrative voice interposes with the question, "What better than this could they have?," the tone is only gently ironic. "Colonel Wilder," explains the narrator, "out of sheer kindness of heart, gilded the blank until it seemed very like a prize" (177). For

Wilder's slaves, who have never known any other state of existence, there seems, rnateriaily speaking, little to desire. After ail, even Nathan admits that he may find himself worse off in terms of food and clothing in the North.

The invisibility of its owner gives the Wilder plantation the appearance of an archetype. As a faceless representative of his class, the absent Colonel suggests a host of other typical Southem faces, equally kind-hearted and generous in their mastership.

However, even Colonel Wilder's slaves share what Randolph sarcastically calls '%e hobby of [their] people" (25 1kthe thirst for freedom. They truly occupy the position of

Davis's "man who saw both sides" regarding Southem society and the Civil War. Old

Mussy, an aged slave with the "owl-like face" of wisdom, synthesizes fidelity to his master with support for the "abolition war," declaring: "God forbid as I'd leab M's

George, as he's bin like a son to me. But I'm no hyp'crit. t'se work for him fiee better dan slave, an' 1 tell hisself so, of en" (177-78). Likewise, young Jim provides Nathan with information against the graycoats even as he explains his rationale for staying by the side of his Confederate master. He tums down Nathan's invitation to escape with the excuse, "Mars George'll be poor enuff 'fore long. I think 1'11 stay an' see it through.

He's been moughty kind to me" (1 78). 258

Just as Waitingfor the Verdict carefully and consistently separates personal

realities from political generaiizations, it also makes a point of differentiating the dnuna of persona1 experience fkom political rhetoric. in her moa complex novel, Davis highlights, as she does in so many of her early texts, the instability and malleability of the jargon of the slavery debate. WhiIe Randolph applies bahto a prickling conscience by echoing familiar proslavery reasoning, for instance, Wilder's Jim mouths standard related arguments as a means of disguishg his espionage activities on behdf of the Yankees

("They only want to get us North to sel1 us agin. Will any of the dam Yankees give me clothes like these, or Miss Clarindy her ear-bobs?" [177]). Significantly, although

Davis's sketches of plantation life in Waitingfor the Verdici provide partial evidence that seemingly supports some of the claims of proslavery polemic, the novel's most extended instances of proslavery rhetoric appear ironicaily compromised.

One of the mon explicit rehearsals of proslavery apologetics takes place as an exchange between Margaret Conrad and one of the Randolph slaves, Uncle Cole.

Although Margaret is one of the novel's staunchest backers of the Union cause, she is obviousiy disgusted by Cole's notion that the underlying purpose of the war is to right the wrong of African-American slavery. She darnpens Cole's hope by sketching an image of a capitalistic, cannibalistic North as inhospitable towards the ex-slave as Boston proves to poor, doomed Tom in Uncle Robin 's Cabin. Freedom, she asserts, only worsens the lot of Southern blacks:

There are few of them [in the North] like you, Uncle Cole-your people. They are like Mose. He does light work here; he shaves beards, or whitewashes walls, or steak; he does the same in Philadelphia. He is thick-lipped and thriftiess and aectionate, go where he will; only in the South they hunt him with dogs, and in the North they calculate how many years of competition with the white race it will need to sweep him and bis like off the face of the earth (43-44).

The language of racism, Davis illustrates, is not always pronounced with a Southern accent. Despite her justification of slaves: Margaret is as far fkom comprehending

Randolph's "cordial patriarchal relation" with his slaves as understanding is hmmere speech.

Waitingfor the Verdict refuses to pass final judgment on the validity of proslavery logic, which appears by tums as a substantial representation of a complex reality and as a convenient tool in the hands of racists, bigots, and fools. Davis adds a dash of comedy to her ironic treatment of proslavery rhetoric as mere rhetonc through the lamentations of

Ross's free Afncan-Arnerican servant, John. John, Ross thinks, escaped fiom slavery to nui away "fiom work. .. as much as his master" (140). He is as lazy and as helpless in a fiee labour economy as "Mose" is in Margaret's diatribe and oniy manages to survive thanks to Ross's indulgence. His exaggerated, ridiculous bellyaching borrows the typical accusations of his former masters. He complains: "Folks in de Norf is no better dan slave-drivers.... What'd 1 kum hyur fur, but to draw one comf ble breff of fieedom More

1 died? An' its 'John hyur!' an' 'John dar! ' fiom mornin' till night. Down in Virginny 1 was among ladies and gen'men, anyhow" (141).

The ductility of proslavery arguments in Wairingfor the Verdict shows Davis, as always, refusing to waik a party line and take sides against deeply entangled cultural forces. During the course of the novel, slavery and the rhetoric that certified it manifest 260 aspects, as Brodenp says, of "a two-edged sword" (359). By suspending its "verdict" on the Southern social creed as well as on the prospects facing the newly emancipated

African-Americans, the novel addresses the problem of integrating into rnainstream

American society the two parties who have most seriously suffered through exposure to the dual-cutting blade of the peculiar institution-the slaves and the slaveholders.

Throughout Waitingfor the Verdict, Davis links the fate of former master and former chattel through two prominent tropes that stress the alienation, but dso the potential for redemption, shared by the two parties. The Darwinian imagery applied to both Randolph and Broderip enhances the association between slaveowners and slaves as two groups in a state of retarded but ongoing development; the motif of the foundling child, especially as it operates in the case of Ross and her father, Meremphasizes the progressive work of reconciliation which underpins the novel's entire evolution.

Probably half-brothers, Randolph and Broderip serve as doubles to one another as they pursue the twin heroines, Ross and Margaret, and as they each struggle to re- establish a sense of family icientity. From his introduction, Randolph is defined metaphoncally by images of shellfish in an evolutionary state of transition. Randolph himself originates the comparison as he contemplates the dangerous journey he plans tu undertake as a Yankee spy-his first real work in the world. The narrator's cornrnentary on Randolph's decision to undertake this romantic, self-appointed mission goes straight to the heart of the indolent Southemer's character:

Shrewd, wide-awake, town-bred fellows, full of pluck and energy, who pant for the day when they cm cut loose fiom "the govemor" and make theù own way, can hardly understand what it cost the young Kenttuckian to leave this homestead, never, in ail probability to come back. He thought to himself with a quiet, inward mile that it was Iike tearing a shell-fish fiesb fiom its rock; some of the flesh and nerves would be lefk (4 1).

Randolph's tearing hirnself away fiom his bamacle-like existence on his secluded plantation to become involved in the war threatens at first to repeat his earlier failed attempt to enter active commercial Iife at the North. Then, the narrator relates, once he

"crept" out of the familiar, clannish world of provincial Kentucky society, he was quickly baffled, "a crab, raw fiom its shell, bruised at every tum" (42). As a result, he soon crawled back home to his sequestered, tranquil life in the South. During Randolph's first days in Philadelphia, history seems destined to repeat itself. He spends his time at the

Academy of Sciences among petrified articles of the pst, pacing "between the cases of minerals and mummies" (99). His own favowite metaphor to describe his personality appears a self-fulfilling prophecy: "he began to feel as if he belonged as little to this world about him, as did the little dried-up skeletons of birds and fishes, staring at him with fleshless eyes, and as if he had come out of as narrow and remote a groove as their's

[sic] had been" (1 00).

Davis, however, makes it clear from the very beginning that Randolph possesses a character in development. Margaret notices this fiom the moment the reclusive scholar decides to undertake his quixotic journey north in the clothes of a dead Union soldier.

Stepping into Margaret's train of thought, the narrator again invokes the image of a crustacean to express confidence in Randolph's eventual transformation: "Miss Conrad would have said the shell was only breaking off which had crusted over him in the old college library, fiom which he had been dragged, and that a few more touches of the knife

would bring al1 that was in him of good or il1 to the light" (48). Later in the story, as

Randolph becomes more and more susceptible to Rosslyn's influence, the narrator turns

the evolutionary concept behind the shellfish imagery associated with Randolph into an

explicit allegory. As a preface to the chapter in which Randolph fint ventures to seek

Ross's fiiendship, the aarrator inserts the following paragraph:

The Japanese thnist a gritty mould into the shell of the oyster, which checks its Iife slowly. But when the bioodless thing is dead, they find in the shell a pearl in the likeness of one of their gods. There is such a mould thrust somewhere into the lives of al1 of us-human oysters-if we only know what use to make of it. It came fïrst to work this "sea change" in Garrick Randolph's life, in a day which he spent among the mountains. (84)

Blending her shellfish metaphor with the Christian language of self-sacrifice and

resurrection, Davis makes her representative consemative Southemer into a type of

humanity's potential for gradua1 redemption. As "hurnan oysters," even slaveholders are

capable of undergohg a Darwinian "sea change" and evolving out of their husks into a

higher, nobler life form in the hurnan community.

As Randolph sîruggles to throw off his shell, his blood-brother, Broderip, strives

to liberate his mind and sou1 from what he considers the brutalizing circumstances of his

birth. Initially, Broderip seems to think he can accomplish this goal by hiding his

Afncan-Amencan ancestry and passing as white. Like Ross, he hopes to "stand higher"

(28) by raising himself above the stains and shame of his childhood. The mdatto's elevated spirituai aims recall the evolutionary hope behind the Tennysonian epigraph to 263

"Life in the Lon Mills" as well as Lot's sacrificial death in "The Promise of the Dawn." 26

Just as the pet of "In Memoriam'' desires to "Move upward, working out the beast, / And

let the ape and tiger die,"27 Broderip longs 90slough off the animal some day, and bring

the man out fiom it" (309).

Broderip's conviction that his biack blood constitutes the beast within reflects

Davis's acceptance of the popular miscoastnu:tion that the mental and mord

development of Anican-Arnencans as a race had ken arrested by slavery. Markle's

portrait of Broderip's brother, Nathan, for instance, emphasizes "the hunger, the vacuity,

the animai passion" which has taken the place of "unused braui-power" in the slave (1 64).

Broderip's confrontation with Nathan reveals to the surgeon that ail of his previous

atternpts to smount the obstacle of his racial heritage-the pursuit of education, culture,

wealth, self-discipline, and charitable works-weigh nothing in the public scale. In

society's eyes, and in his own, he remains an African-American and, therefore, a brute.

It is Nathan, however, who finally provides Broderip with the key to progress up the

ladder of spiritual evolution. When the surgeon expresses surprise that Nathan would

volunteer for the army, Nathan responds to his brother's sarcasm with the statement, "De

white men hes kep me like a brute in my life, dat's clar, but dey kent hinder me fiom dyin

'%the same letter in which she stresses to Amie that "'Lot' is fiom life," Davis also expresses to her fnend the faith in spiritual evolution that undergirds her social vision. She declares: "1 am convinced that the two natures remain in the most degraded sou1 until the last-and stniggle until the end for victory" (Rebecca Harding Davis. letter to Annie Fields, 6 Dec 1862, Richard Harding Davis Collection [#6109], Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Specid Collections Department, University of Virginia Library).

27Tennyson,"In Memoriam," 1 18,11.27-28. 264

like a man" (302). Taking his brother's words as his new mono, Davis's tragic hero

marches to his death with the resolve that vaiiant self-sacrifice will at last enable him to

become a man and leave the "brute" behind.

Broderip apparently incdcates his notions about the dual nature of man and the

need to aspire abve humanity's bestial nature fiom his foster-mother, the simple, kind-

hearted Ann Yates. Yates attempts to assure the mulatto of his shared bond with

humanity by likening his situation to that of the universal man, her ideal son, whom she

pictures as striving to let "the true man in him grow out of al1 Iikeness or traces of his

lower nature." In language that closely recalls descriptions of Randolph's character, the

old Quakeress maintains: "We al1 have au ugly, loathsome shell to creep out of, vices and

passions left by sorne accursed old grandfather in our blood" (1 17).

Yates's comment on the common "shell" of humanity's camal nature

metaphorically links the social quandaries of Ross, Randolph, and Broderip. Over the

course of the novel, the illegitimate white woman, the displaced Southem planter, and the

African-American slave each battles to overcome the handicap of hereditary influences

and find a place in modem, mainstream Arnerican society. Of these three symbolic outsiders, however, only two, Ross and Randolph, eventdly achieve that place of belonging. The motif of the recovered foundling, woven throughout the text of Waiting for the Verdicr, plays a particularly prominent role in the reconciliation of Ross with her slaveholder father, signalling to Northem readers the urgency of reaccepting the alienated

South after the war. In Brodenp's case, on the other hand, the familiar fairy-tale plot fails to reach its traditional happy ending. For Davis's tragic mulatto, the "ultimate" 265

embodiment of bastardy's liminal, "hybrid" q~alities,~~the romance of farnily reunion

remains a sentimental ideal rather than an achievable reality.

Althougb the htpart of the novel presents Ross in the character of the lost chiid

(as a very young girl, the mechanical repetition, "I'm an orphan" [19] constitutes her

version of her entire personal history), the reunion of Strebling and his illegitimate

daughter draws its emotionai force fiom its emphasis on the fathet's, rather than the

child's, recovery. An ambiguous figure throughout the novel, Strebling enjoys his fmest

moments on his deathbed with Ross beside hîm. As even Joe Burley overcomes his deep-

seated abhorrence of the man he has considered his single enemy in Iife, the reader is

compelled to acknowledge that Strebling, like Randolph, proves a Southemer worthy to

(re)enter Ross's farnily circle.

The narrator's initial physical description of Strebling hints at a character that

evades classification. The Philadelphia ferryman cannot decide whether the man is a

saint or a rake, a "country parson corne up to town" or a "regular leg" (6). Certainly, the

villain in Ross's life-story neither looks nor acts the typical part: "his head was bald on

top, a thin fnnge of red hair and whiskers framing a sandy-skinned face, the features of

which had never been compacted together by any definite meaning; round, lightish eyes

looked through a pair of spectacles... with a polite and deprecating smile" (6). Although

Ross and her grandfather are unnerved by the sound of Strebling's footsteps following

'me "child of 'mixed' parentage" is, for Taylor, the 'Wtimate hybrid ... in which metaphors of illegitimacy, racial ambiguity and miscegenation are inextricably entwined" (Taylor 12 1). 266 them home, when Strebling confronts Burley at the fannhouse he hardly appears as a threatening presence. Instead, he bbcolor[s]and giggle[s] feebly" (22).

The lack of definition in Strebling's facial features and the effeminate mannerisms that irritate Burley provide the outlines of a weak, unsteady individuai. Strebling's indecisiveness during the war (he oscillates between supporting the Confederacy and the

Union) Mercontributes to this impression, which the namator seems to confixm by referring derogatively to Strebling' s braia as a "weatber-coc k" (40). Randolph, ho wever. maint- that Ross's father is "a sincere man, though vacillating" (34). ALthough this insight may tell us as much about Randolph's character as it does about Strebluig's, it underlines, as does the narrator's visual description, the difficulty in interpreting, let aione judging, such an equivocal, unstable personality. Strebling's apparent foibles prove, in the end, his greatest strength, earning him in his parting scene the unreserved sympathy of ail those he has wronged most-Joe Burley, his slaves, and even Ross.

The chapter that describes Strebling's 1st days is aptly entitled, "Old Wrongs

Righted." Davis clearly intends to "right" not only the "wrong" that Ross has suffered as a result of her "stained" childhood but also the "wrong" that Ross and Burley have done

Strebiing over the years by condemning him as an evil, heartless man. In his defeat after the war, Ross's father is a poignant, even noble figure. As soon as Burley sets foot on the

Strebling plantation, a spot he has long regarded as cursed ground, he finds himself forced to revise his opinion of the one man in the world he has consistently hated. He is surprised, first of dl, to hear the scoundrel of his family drama referred to quite placidly as "the old gentleman." The narrator explains: "~urley's]ancient enemy king his only 267 one, he had always made him a sort of receiver for ail the gall and virulence of his nature; and, having fdlywrought himself up to proper fighting heat of wrath against father and son, would have thought it only natural to hear them popularly cdled slave-cirivers or hell-hounds" (341).

According to the narrator's analysis, Burley appears to have set up Ross's father as a kind of efligy of the unnaniral tyrant. He feeds the Hames of his own resenmient by castigating Strebling as a "slave-àriver" as well as his daughter's seducer. As abolitionists, Ross and Burley habinially, it would seem, judge Strebling for his public as well as his private sins. Throughout the first forty-one chapters of the novel, the Burleys'

"ancient enemy" serves as a symbol of the corrupting, hannful infiuence of not merely male desire but an entire regional way of life. Strebling is an unnaturai, dishonourable blackguard twice over4nce on account of king too cowardly to claim as his wife the poor fmgirl he had ruined, and once more on account of his emblematic position as a

Southem slaveholder. As the representative source of the socially unnanual and illegitimate within the novel, his transgression is twofold: he is the symbolic generator not only of a bastard child, Ross, but also of a bastard social system, a social structure definitively branded illegitimate by the Emancipatiùn Proclamation and the eventual

Northern victory in the Civil War.

Despite his status as illegitimate interloper, Strebling is also, however, Ross's biologically "natural" parent. The final reunion of chastened father and foundling daughter, prelude to the reunion of Ross's extended family in the novel's grand finale, asserts the triurnph of nature over nurture, the victory of family blood ties over blind 268 prejudice and misunderstanding. Significantly, the decision to accept or reject these ties falls to Ross rather than her father, and Strebling, rather than the daughter he abandoned, becomes the symbolic foundling needing to be rescued and reinstated.

When Burley encounters Strebling, the Southemer is near his end. Both Strebling and his plantation are in sharnbles. Strebling is living in the former slave quarters and looks much older than Burley, his senior by many y-. Buriey sees immediately that the formerly wealthy planter will soon be completely helpless and sen& for Ross to help him with the motherly work of nursing. Knowing Ross's hostility towards her father, Burley refrains fiom telling Ross any more than, "1 will b~ga sick man to clah shelter from you" (345). In the meantirne, as Strebling symbolically heads north under Burley 's care, the reader witnesses a remarkable conversion, framed in unmistakeably sacramental terms. By the time Ross reaches the hotel in Harrisburg where Strebling breathes his lm,

Burley has not onîy wholly forgiven his old adversary but seems to join in the narrator's apparent admiration for a decrepit figurehead of the Southem slaveocracy.

Burley's shocked reversal of opinion can best be summed up in his own words:

"Ther's two sides even to this man" (344). Burley is startled to lea.,for example, that

Strebling, whom he considered a wealthy aristocrat, has been left completely bankrupt by the war. He is even more surprised to discover that Strebling owes his sudden poverty as much to his charitable disposition as to his spendthrift habits and the failure of

Confederate currency. The boatman who delivers Burley to the Strebling plantation expresses oniy compassion for its broken owner, telling Burley, 'Wobody never corne to 269

[the Streblings] needy an' was turned away. 'Seems hard he's so put to for even his victuals in his last &YS" (342).

Burley seriousiy begins to re-evaiuate his feelings toward the former slave owner once he encounten him in peson. Whereas Ross's grandfather has entered the plantation full of a vindictive spirit, Strebling dismantles Burley's belligerence by shaking his hand

"cordially" (342) and welcoming him to share his humble meal of fiitch and potatoes.

The Southemer's finer qualities continue to shine through his dilapidated environment as he clarifies the myçtery surrounding the Randolph inheritance. Rob Strebling, it tums out, nobly resolved Randolph's womes by buming the concealed will Hugh sent him as soon as he received it. Strebling's description of his son's generous act gives him the opportunity to defend the underlying ethic of his entire regional culture. With the native pride of a Southem gentleman, Strebling "haughtily" idomis his guest: "The Streblings have never been covetous, whatever were their vices. The will was a bit of spite work of a splenetic old man. It would hardly be in accordance with Southern notions of honor to rob a kinsman through it" (344).

Davis allows Strebling to plead eloquently in his own self-defence during his final houn. He speaks with "grave dignity" as he tells Burley: "It is no time to cal1 up old crimes, Joseph Burley. They have gone before me for judgrnent. 1 am but a lonely, dying old man. She moss] is my child. There's never been a day of my life when I've not been hungry for her" (345). In the face of the sick man's pathetic hunger for acceptance and reconciliation, Burley's animosity completely breaks down, as does the narrator's apparent objectivity. Previous mannerisms that seemed marks of weakness 270 turn into signs of me. Strebling's "effeminate minauderies" no longer offend Burley but appear "patient and gentle on a dying bed" (345). The narrator, too, sympathizes with the new man who seems to aise out of the ashes of the old image of Burley's prejudice, commenting, "Strebling's courteous tact was alive, though half of his body was dead"

(347). Thrown off his guard by his glimpse of Strebling's "two sides," Burley resigns his bittemess aitogether and concludes that Rosslyn's grudge against her father is "downrïght onchristian" (345).

The language and imagery of Christian atonement suggested in the metaphorical resurrection of Strebling's better nature fiom his deathbed becomes concrete in a brief but intensely symbolic exchange between Strebling and Nathan's son, Tom, who helps his mother, Amy, nurse their former master. When Tom takes a drink into "ole Mars" for the last time, the narrator presents the seemingly minor incident as a kind of eucharistie tableau:

"Free now, Tom, eh?" said Strebling, quiuing the boy as usual.

"Yes, 1's fiee," with solemn, awe-struck eyes. giving him the glas, his warm, yellow hands touching the cold, ringed ones. That cirink, and the kind word had al1 the solemnity of a sacrament to the boy. Al1 his life afierward it would set apart to him slavery fiom the slaveholder. (346)

Ross, too?experiences a sense of sacramental atonement as she clasps Strebling's hand and feels "as though some unclean substance had been taken fkom her, which had been made part of her since her childhood." The sense of sacred mystery expands into a mystical impression of universal harrnony as Ross keeps vigil by her father's side: ïhe world was clean and strong, as if the breath of God had fieshly passed through it. Somewhere in the wide night her husband hastened to her; her baby slept; this man who had been her ody enemy held her hand close as his soul trembled out into Death; the blue starlit heaven, and the loving soul of Jesus beyond, bent nearer, nearer over al1 (348).

The sacramental moment that unites former master and ex-slave as well as father

and daughter also separates Strebling finally fiom the "crimes" of his past. By explicitiy

detaching "slavery fiom the slaveholder," Davis establishes Strebling's legitimate "claim"

to the shelter of Ross's forgiveness and affection. She also enables Ross to become the

legitimate heir of her father's positive charactenstics, notably his Southem hospitality. A

sure sign that Burley is moving towards accepting his enemy is the thought that

irnrnediately flashes across his mind when Strebling greets him and invites him to share

his paltry dinner: "it was easy to see where Ross had gained her eager, irrational

hospitaiity" (342).

Ross's replication of her father's better qualities makes Waiting for the Verdict's

circle of reconciliation complete. Rather than tuming her back on her Southem heritage.

Ross accepts, even embraces it. There are, in fact, earlier signais in the novel that,

despite her abolitionist activities, Ross's own sense of social responsibility is not as far

removed from the Southem ideal as she might think. Like the mode1 patemaiistic planter,

Ross creates a rural community to care for those who cmot, she believes, fend for

themselves. Like the busy plantation mistress of fictional she plays Lady

'9Defenders of Southem culture often invoked the figure of the industrious plantation mistress to counter Northem charges of Southern indolence. Caroline Rush sumrnarizes the exhaustive roster of the typical Mistress's housekeeping duties, which often involved playing grocer, tailor, and doctor to the entire plantation "family," black and white: Botintifid on a well-regdated domestic and deliberately private plan. Under her

management, her grandfather's fmbecomes a secluded rehige, an idyllic retreat for the

downtrodden and dadjusted. According to the narrator, "Ross gathered a queer set of

people about her; one or two runaway slaves unfit for work; a lame, liale field-boy, a

crabbed old cook; every inch of the little fami was taxed to make a plentifid and pleasant

home for them" (1 0 1). UnWte Margaret Conrad, who &et the war takes on the public

work of teaching in a school for Afncan-Americans, Ross does not venture outside her

domestic circle to work for social change but rather draws the oppressed and needy into

her home orbit. Randolph points out the centripetal effect of Ross's social compassion

when he declares, "My wife's hearth and heart would take in al1 the orphans of the world"

(3 ~O).~O

Every Saturday aftemoon the slaves are lefi off fiom work, and fier putting every thing in order at their homes, they go up to the house and receive their week's supply of meats, flour, meal, etc. Al1 this duty falls upon the mistress, and where there are several hundred negroes to provide for. it is a considerable job. Every plantation has its smoke-house, and their well-preserved meats rival any thing I ever tasted at the North. There is also, as a general thing, a small building near the mansion, where several women are employed in sewing for the plantation negroes. On Sanirday, the &y for making known their wants, if they stand in need of any new clothing, they are taken to this house and fitted fiom the large supply that is kept constantly on hand. In cases of sickness, the best medicd attendance is provided, and every thing is done for the comfon and recovery of the patient (North and South 33 1-32). in fact as well as fiction, the planter's wife supervised virtuaily every aspect of plantation life except agriculture. So vast were her duties that historian Catherine Clinton dubs the plantation mistress the "slave of slaves" (Clinton, The PIantation Misîress: Woman S World in rhe Oid South mew York: Pantheon, 19821 16-35).

''Davis explicitly regretted the passing of this domestic mode1 of matemal involvement. In 1889 she complained: "The Lady Bountifül no longer doles out flannels, soup and good counsel to men and women (every one of whom she knows), or feels herself responsible for their 273

Ross's Northem fm,run largely for the benefit of ex-slaves, seems inevitably to

invite cornparison with a Southern plantation. Not surprisingly, when Randolph first pays

a visit to Ross at her home he hds himself treated to the "Vïrginny biscuits" of Ross's

old Afncan-Arnerican cook, Matsy (142). Lazy John's cornplaints about Northern slave-

drivers are, in light of Ross's obvious indulgence, doubly ironic. John is able to

"tonnent" Ross with his overacted grumbiing about the good old &ys "down in

Virginny" (141) precisely because his cornfortable life under his new mistress so closely

matches the nostalgie ideal he pretends to remember. By the end of the novel. Ross's

niral haven actually takes on the topography of a Souihern plantation, with Nathan and

hy's cabin established as a post-emancipation version of the archetypally picturesque

"quarters." Whereas Strebling's and Randolph's estates lie in ruins. the Southem

ideology of domestic patemalism seems dive and weil on Ross's mock Pennsylvanian

plantation afier the war-

Herself a stigmatized bastard tumed foundling, Ross makes it her life's purpose to

adopt, as her husband States, as many "orphans of the world" as she can, including

displaced Southemers, ex-slaves, handicapped whites, and the child of a Georgian schooi

teacher killed in a Ku Klux Klan-style attack. The motif of the foundling child awaiting

adoption is such a fimdamental part of the moral and emotional fabric of Waiting for the

Verdicl that it is even woven into the book's landscape. In one of the novel' s darkest

moments, as Burley searches the war-tom Cumberland mountains for Markle, the land clothes, stomachs and morality. She belongs to a Guild or an Association for the Suppression of Mendicancy and trusts to its machinery to do this gracious work for her" ("At Our Gates," Independent 4 1 [Il Apr 1 8891: 45 1). itself seems to dramatize the age-old plot. Later recalling his impressions of his dismal

surroundings, Burley echoes the Biblical prophet, Jeremiah, when he says, "1 could hear

the voice of one in the wildemess, cryin' for her children, like one who would not be

comforted, because they were not." Davis's narrator merinterprets:

in which poor Burley stumbled blindly on a truth deeper than al1 facts. For that great and awful Presence, that Cornforter who was to come, who stniggles to touch us in the living sunlight or in the healing wind, who gropes vaguely up through wayside dut, or fluttering leaf, who calls aloud to us in the wailing sea, who wraps us at last in the wann mould, the thing which philosophers familiarize as Nature, and for whose human tendemess and strength men can find no other name than that of Mother, does so mourn for its maimed children, does so rejoice with those who inherit their birthright, that the terrible pathos of its voice grows sometimes audible to natures more obtuse than that of this old man (1 57-58).

Despite the cosmic implications of this passage, however, not al1 the disinhented,

''maimeci" children of Waitingfor the Verdict manage to recover a "birihright" and a

family. In John Broderip's case, the traditional foundling story simply fails. The mulatto

remains a bastard outcast, whose only hope for recuperation lies in the shadowy country

where he imagines his reconciliation with Margaret after his death.

Both Ross and Broderip picture their lives as variations on a familiar fally-tale

plot. Ross not only waits eagerly for the &y when her prince charming will come to

awaken her capacity for love but also draws a direct cornparison between her own

expenence and the notorious real-life fantastic tale of Caspar ~auser.~' Randolph, too,

''ROSS tells her patroness, Friend Blanchard, " 1 owe you more than birth, 1 think. You made me, after the fashion in which Caspar Hauser was made by those who found him" (95). Caspar Hauser, farnous as the "Child of Europe," was a Iegitimate German prince who was abducted by political intriguers and spent nearly his entire childhood in absolute seclusion. Iikes to picture Ross as a romantic orphan, "one of the orphan little ones of whom the

Lord had especial care," or %e unfathered Undine who had grown up out of the foul,

stagnant strearn" (232). For his part, Broderip describes his life-situation to Randolph

through the cryptic symbolism of a familia. legend, the Arabian tale of the king with two

sons. In Broderip's view, however, fm-tales do wtnecessarily entail a happy-ever-afler

ending, but rather the opposite: "The king has always two sons, and to one falls the

princess and the trïumphs; the people shout for him; the kingdom is his in the end; while

the other, whom the gocd God made the same in the beginning, is driven out, for no fault

of his own, with Stones and hootings; and that is dl: the story ends there" (237). In

Brodenp's story, the bastard son remains a permanent exile fiom his family: "There is no

alleviation, no redress, aflerward (23 7).

Although Davis stresses throughout the novel that Ross and Broderip, both

outcasts by bhh, share similar circumstances, she is unable or unwilling to imagine a

solution to Broderip's illegitima~y.~~As Ruth Mayer has recently asserted, Davis's

When he appeared mysteriously in Nurnberg in 1828, he appeared to be a youth of about severiteen but could neither walk nor taik. He later proved to be a remarkably sensitive and gified individual, and the international press eagerly exploited his life story. (Jacob Wasseman, "Introduction to the English Edition of 'Caspar Hauser,' Caspar Hauser: The Enigma of a Century, trans. Caroline Newton wew York: Liveright Publishing, 19561 ix-xiv.)

3'Ruth Mayer suggests that Davis's "pessimistic" ending may involve a kind of moral rnimesis of actual social conditions rather than a capitulation to racist views. Mayer rads the conclusion to Woitingfor the Verdict '%s a thorough, if helpless reflection of contemporary provisions and thus neither as per se regressive nor progressive move" and sees the novel's "dead end" as illustrating "the conceptual and moral impasse of late nineteenth century culture" (Ruth Mayer, "'Ther's somethin' in blood, after dl': Late Nineteenth Centwy Fiction and the Rhetonc of Race," REAL [1995]: 125-26). 276

"rhetoric ... analogizes 'race' and 'class' ody to emphasize their fundamental difference.'"'

Thus, Ross can declare to Randolph, "1 not only belonged by birth to the class which

you place on a par with your slaves, but 1 worked with thern" (230), but her lot at the end

of the novel proves to differ substantially from that of the displaced ex-slaves whom

Broderip and his brother represent. Ross tells her friture husband: "There is a fable that al1 men are bom free and equai in this CO untry.... It only needs you and me to stand face to

face to prove the baseness of the falsehood" (229). Within Waitingfor the Verdict, it also proves to be a "fable" that ail bastards are bom equal.

Ross, who serves as the novel's moral and structural touchstone (it is her Iife that ties together the loose threads of Davis's sprawling plot), also plays surrogate foundling to Broderip's tragic bastard. Like Lot's younger brother, Ben, in "The Promise of the

Dawn." Ross recovers the farnily and stanis Brodenp is too tainted in society's eyes to receive. Whereas Davis allows Ross and her father to live out the romance of the traditional foundling story, Broderip's life takes instead the shape of the flip side of the coin-the other, darker plot of bastardy and banishment. Unlike the "stain" upon Ross's birth and childhood, Broderip's illegitimacy appears to imply a serious threat to the society around him. Romantic foundling references do apply to Broderip: Markle imagines the mulatto as Joseph ("wathan's] brother, who would be discovered yonder in purple and fine linen, as Joseph was of his brethem" [173]), and Nathan sees his brother as a second Moses (3 14- t S)." The surgeon, like mon African-American characters in

the novel, is also associated with infantile irnagery and characteristics, as when he

discusses the "old hurt" of his racial heritage with his foster-mother and his face appears

"like that of a weak, uncertain boy" (1 16):' But Davis's probiematic invocation of one

stereotype-the Afncan-American as child4oes not prevent Broderip fiom assurning the

aspect of another, equally disturbing, stock figure, the Dangerous Bastard.

Broderip's bastardy represents a particularly serious menace to social stability in

the novel because he, like the scheming illegitimate prince of a Jacobean tragedy, has

managed to infiltrate the cultural e~tablishment.'~in her early portraits of Brodenp, Davis

emphasizes the tremendous control the doctor wields over his patients as their lives hang

by a thread at the end of his surgical knife. Broderip's extraordinary position of power

sends Mrs. Ottley's flighry imagination reeling after the image of a melodramatic

murderer. Descnbing Broderip's "grim, cunning" expression to Matgaret Conrad, she

"~heconcept of the foundling who is educated among the oppressors and then recovers and liberates his tme kin ais0 appealed to the African-American novelist, Frances Harper. Her 1869 novel, Minnie 's Sacrzjke, applies the Moses legend specifically to the life of Louis, a mulatto raised as his master's adopted son who, like Broderip, eventuaily confronts the tnith of his racial heritage and chooses to become a leader in the cause of Afncan-Amencan liberation (Frances Smith Foster, "Introduction," Minnie 3 Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph by Frances E. W. Harper, Frances Smith Foster ed. Boston: Beacon, 19941 xxx).

"Compare the nmtor's description of Nathan's physiognomy: "The very eye which should have discovered his separate identity, with dl of its reticence and melancholy, had yet that conscious, irresolute look of a child or idiot, who knows itself a parasite, and dependent on a more adult nature" (1 60).

36~romthis perspective, Broderip fits Taylor's class of "the masculine malcontents of early modem drama who dwell not in a pauperised underworid but in the heartlands of power, the place where matters of sovereignty, state authority and gendered identity are most rigorously contested" (Taylor 120). declares: "His look quite makes me shudder. 1 always think-what if 1 were lying

mangled, fastened to a board, with that little, hard, cruel face over me, and a knife in his

hand" (6 1 ). A later scene showing Broderip actually at work over an operation threatens

to translate Mrs. Ottley's fantasy into reality. Agitated by his fminterview with

Randolph, Broderip strikes fear into the hearts of his assistants, who seem to regard hirn

as a half4emonic monster, "keeping as uneasy a watch on his sallow, sober face as if. .. it

was the devil that had them in charge" (108). One of the young doctors present at the

surgery privately compares his superior to a savage "beast of prey" (1 09).

Although in Broderip's version of the faity-tale the unwanted son is banished "for

no fault of his own," in the eyes of characters such as Mrs. Ottley and the assistant

physician Broderip seems essentiaily guilty by symbolic association. His bastardy

appears to cast him automatically in the pre-scripted role of dissembler and villain. He

himself seems aware of the culpability society attaches to his compromised position when

he decides he had "Better be Sap in the shambles... than the trichter 1 have made of John

Broderip" (304). As trickster, demon, and would-be-murderer, Brodenp embodies the

horrific potential of the illegitimate to disrupt the artificial boundaries society defines as

normal and, therefore, natural.)' Factors of colour and class that complicate Broderip's

illegitimacy make hirn too alarming a figure for hirn to be retrieved into Ross's seemingly

"In Frances Harper's Iola Leroy, or Shdows Lpiifred (1 892)' an advocate for white supremacy explicitly attributes the persistence of racial discrimination to the shame of illegitimacy. According to Harper's Dr. Lairobe, the prevalent aversion to the idea of treating educated mulattoes as social equals "grows out of our Anglo-Saxon regard for the marriage relation. These white negroes are of iliegitimate origin, and we would scom to share our social life with them. Their blood is tainted" (Frances E.W. Harper, Iola Leroy, or Shadows UpiHed [New York: Oxford UP,19881 228). 279 dl-embracing domestic circle. Ross welcomes the Southern "enemy" into her heart and home as well as fican-Americans direct fiom slavery, but Davis's mulatto hero, who has lived a tdybastard Life between the plantation stables and Philadelphia's haute monde, fmds no real place there.

Unable to be reclairned hirnself, Broderip donates his abandoned mansion to charity to become an orphanage for other lost, dispiaced individuals. Like Los Broderip discovers that his only chance of redemption cornes at the cost of self-destruction in a noble cause; in the next world, he may become, like Ross, "one of the orphan little ones of whom the Lord ha[s] especial care," but in this world he will always be the homeless, unwanted bastard son. in Waitingfor the Verdict's final scene, even Broderip's opportunity to step into the role of Taylor's "heroic bastard" appears to elude him. The mulatto ieader's Christ-like martyrdom is, it seems, finally eclipsed by the actions of another white surrogate, George Markie, as the narrator concludes: "Broderip, in his grave yonder, has not saved his people from their balked, incomplete lives. The country which he and they have served is still silent, whiie they stand waiting its verdict. Does that mean that he, George Markle, in any village in Arnerica can to-day find Christ's very work to do; fmd His obloquy, and in God's good the, His reward?" (361).

In the final analysis, the unfortunate John Brodenp ends where he begins-as a marginalized, permanently dislocated tigure. His destiny seems to confim that Davis's novel dedicates itself primarily to addressing the problems of reconstnicting a nation rather than contesting the dividing lines of racial identity. Margaret's physical stance during the 1st chapter as she listens to Markle3 description of Broderip's 1st hours 280 syrnbolizes the sbaping attitude behind Davis's story of miscegenation and misunderstanding. Three times over the course of Markie's speech, the narrator informs us that Margaret stands with her face "turned to the South" (3 58,360'36 1 ). In Waiting for rhe Verdict, the real foundling Davis attempts to rescue fkom shame proves to be neither Broderip nor Ross but derthe dispossessed, discreclited society of the Old

South. Epilogue Looking Across Farther Borders

Sometime between 1904 and 1908, the elderIy Rebecca Harding Davis stnick up

an intimate correspondence with the young Virginian novelist, Mary Johnston. Davis

probably made Johnston's acquaintance during one of her retreats to Warm Springs,

Virginia for the benefit of ber hedth' and, despite the difference in years (Johnston was in

her thirties), the two women seem to have formed a wann fiendship. The surviving

letters fiom the older author to the younger are poignantly reveaiing, as Davis attempts to

mentor Johnston and prevent the latter from falling into professional traps she herself

must have recognized fiom personal experience.' in one mernorable letter, Davis stresses

her matemal regard for her fnend by addressing her as "my dear little Virginia girl,"' a

fond epithet that suggests Davis's sense of kinship with Johaston developed out a sense

of regional as well as literary connection. Davis seems to relate to Johnston because the

'Langford 271.

2Timeafter time, Davis cautions Johnston againn the dangers of overwork, in one letter comparing the demands of authorship to "vampire children who have been draining your life for years" (Rebecca Harding Davis, letter to Mary Johnston, 28 Jan [ 1904- 19081, Mary Johnston Papers [#3588], Speciai Collections Department, University of Virginia Library). In another note. no doubt remembering the ordeal she had publishing Waitingfor the Verdict in the Galmy (see Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis 132-33), she voices strong regrets that Johnston plans to begin publishing a novel serially before the manuscript is complete (Rebecca Harding Davis, letter to Mary Johnston, 23 Dec [19O4- 19081, Mary Johnston Papers [#3 5881, Speciai Collections Department, University of Virginia Library ).

'Rebecca Harding Davis, letter to Mary Johnston, 23 Dec [ 1904- 19081, Mary Johnston Papers (#3 5 88), Special Collections Department, University of V irginia Library. young writer is not simply a novelist but a Virginian novelistl Perhaps especiaily

because of this regional bond, Davis seems somehow able to see in Johnston's career the

replaying of her own, even though Johnston's overblown romantic portraits of colonial

Tidewater society are far removed fkom the dismal social portraiture of "Life in the Iron

Mills."

The Davis-Johnston correspondence suggests the dim outlines of a regional

literary sisterhood, a matrilineal heritage in whkh Davis plays the conscious part of

benefactor and mentor. During her later years, when she generated her greatest output as

a book reviewer and literary cntic, Davis helped develop this heritage by stimulating

interest in Johnston's romances and in the novels of fellow Virginian, Ellen Glasgow.

While she expressed reservations about the younger women's aesthetic approaches, she

praised their efforts in the main. Conceming Glasgow she predicted: "Another Virginia

girl, Miss Ellen Glasgow, has made a deep and probably lasting mark upon ber tirne."'

She also endorsed, we have already seen, the "genre pictues" of yet another Virginian

author, one of her own generation, Marion Harland (Mary Virginia Terh~ne).~Although

Davis never liked to be forced into playing a group part, in her own tentative way she

4~avisjokes with Johnston about taking up '%e state question" with some fellow vacationers at the Springs. The "question" seems to be one of regional loyalty-an issue on which Davis assumes she and Johnston agree (Rebecca Harding Davis, letter to Mary Johnston, "niursday the 21":' [1904-19081, Mary Johnston Papers [#3588], Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library).

"'Literary Folks-Their Ways and Their Work," Saturdoy Evening Posr (1 7 June 1905): 15.

6"Women in Literature" 403. 283 herself seems to hint at the possibility of further exploration into connections between her

heavily regionally-ïnfiuenced work and the writing of other "Virginia girls." While 1

have attempted to situate Davis carefully in a very specific place and moment, much more

work needs to be done to refine our knowiedge of the regional literary culture in which

Davis seems to have located herself.

Significdy, in one of her 1st novels, Doclor Wurrick S Daughters (1 8961, Davis

herself broaches the subject of the South's pressing need to estabiish its own literary identity

and traditions. One of the book's major characters, John Soudé, is a Louisianan joumalist

and would-be pet who publishes sketches of local life in the Picayune. Soudé's literary

efforts give rise to a discussion of the fûture of Southern, and by extension, Arnencan letters.

To his Southem audience, Soudé is "the Scott of L~uisiana,"~the author of "The fmest bits

of word-painting, sir, in our literature!" The Warrick family's local guide is particularly

proud to be able to show off these examples of regional literary prowess, convinceci that "The

North had been insolent long enough with its jrvùigs and its Hawthomes! Now it would be

forced to recognize men of real genius in the South land! [sic]" (96). However. as Dr.

Warrick's more astute daughter points out. Soudé's prose is actually mgid and

cornmonplace" (98) and does not bode well for the foundation of a solid Southem literature.

She explains: "How are the Southem people to have a literature if they set up such cheap

gods as that? They fa11 in adoration before every man or woman who writes tawdry verses

as they might before a saint who worked miracles" (98).

7 Rebecca Harding Davis, Doctor Warrick 's Daughters (New York: Harper, 1896) 98; hereafier ci ted parenthetically . 284

For Davis, who was so concemed in the pst-war years about the salvation of a

national identity, the (Re)constmction of Southem literature seems to play a key part in the

reintegration of Southemers and their culture into the Union. Throughout her career, she

appears to poise on the banks of two distinct literary traditions, dtawing inspiration fiom

Kennedy and other Southem writers as wel as fkom such New England literary heroes as

Hawthome, Emerson, and H~tmes.~If, as Catherine Clinton claims, Southern women are

the "half sisten of history," Davis appears a kind of half sister of Iiterary history, sharing

bonds of influence with two distinct regional traditions yet fitthg neatly into neither literary

heritage. This makes her an ambiguous and ambivalent figure, even though she is now

generally recognized as a canonical nineteenth-centuy authore9 However, as Clinton

proposes, "Mfsisters may have an advantage over their comfortably ensconced siblings; as

both farnil y and outsiders, they possess doubled perspectives." 'O Davis's "doubled

perspectiveT'-on regional identity, race, gender, and genre-gives her the status of an

'Davis acknowledged Hawthome as her greatest literary influence, recailing in Bits of Gossip the lasting impact sorne of his short stones had on her as a young girl (Bits of Gossip 30- 3 1 ). The best illustration of Davis's admiration for Hawthome and his circle is the chapter in Birs of Gossip describing her visit to Boston and Concord in 1862 ("Boston in the Sixties," Bits of Gossip 28-64).

9Davis's consistent inclusion not only in anthologies of nineteenth-century woman's writing but also in such mainstream academic textbooks as the Norton Anthofogy of American Lirerarure gives some indication of her recovered prominence. The dust jacket of Pfaelzer's Par-lov Radical exaggerates only slightly in its claim that Davis is now considered a "major writer" (review comment by Jean Fagan Yellin).

' 'Catherine C linton, Half Sisrers of History :Southern Women and the American Pasf (Durham NC: Duke UP, 1994) 1. 285 important bridge figure between the various strains of the transitional literature of mid- nineteenth-century Arnerica.

The work of such critics as Jean Pfâelzer, Sharon Harris, Jane Rose, and Jean Fagan

Yellin has clearly demonstrated Rebecca Harding Davis's fiction as a significant and influentid link between the major competing trends in the literary culture of her day-romanticism and reaiism, sensationaiism and idealism, sentimentalism and naturalisrn.

Davis's capacity as culturai rnediator Merextends itself when we consider her role in interweaving the conventions and attitudes of mainstrearn, Northern-dominated literature with the traditions of Southern plantation fiction. Further connections still beg to be drawn between Davis and the yet-marginaiized literature of "the South land." What light does the cultudly hybrid character of Davis's stories and novels shed on the work of other borderland writers, such as John Pendleton Kennedy, for instance? On the writing of other Southem women writers, especially those fiom the Upper South, such as Mary Virginia Terhune? On our long-standing conception of mid-nineteenth-century America as two literary nations, one subjugated to the other. rather than as a single cultural arena in which reciprocal influences were played out? By picking up and retying these and other connecting threads between

Davis and her environment, we will continue to generate more hoiistic pictures of the

Iiterary-cultural tapestry of mid-nineteenth-century Arnerica than those we now have. Works Consulted

Primary Sources

Correspondence and manuscripts of Rebecca Harding Davis found in the following locations:

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Cather, Willa Supphim and the Slave Girl. New York: Knopf, 1940.

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--- . "Blind Tom." Atlantic Monthl' 1 0 (Nov 1 862): 5 80-85. Rpt. in A Rebecca Harding Davis Reader. 104- 1 1 1. ---. "Both Sides of the Shield." Scribrier's Monthly 10 (May 1875): 88-89. ---."The Daughter-in-Law." Peterson's Magazine 53 (Feb 1 868): 12 1-32.

--. "David Gaunt." Atlantic Monthiy 10 (Sept-Oct 1862): 259-71,403-2 1. Rpt. in A Rebecca Harding Dovis Reader. 54-103.

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--- . "Men's Rights." Putnam 's Magrnine 3 (Feb 1869): 2 12-24. Rpt. in A Rebecca Harding Davis Reader. 343-6 1. -- - . "The Murder of the Glen Ross." Peterson's Magazine 40 (Nov-Dec 1861): 347-55, 438-48.

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--- . "Old-Time Hospitality." Saturday Evening Post 177 (3 1 Dec 1904): 10- 1 1.

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