"GOODBY TO SAMBO" THE CONTRIBUTIONOF BLACKSLAVE NARRATIVESTO THE ABOLITION MOVEMENT I . In 1962 Kenneth Lynn wrote in the invited to give a personal testimony to introduction to the Harvard edition of the society's membership or the public, Uncle Tom's Cabin: and the more articulate were frequently The shame of American literature is hired to ride the abolitionist circuit, the degree to which our authors of raising funds and propagandizing for the 1830's and 1840's kept silent the abolition of slavery. Armedwith during the rising storm of debate the recommendations from presidents of on the slavery issue.1 local societies many former slaves, We need not feel quite so ashamed if we such as Lewis and Milton Clarke, James stretch our notion of "American litera- W. C. Pennington, and Frederick Douglass, ture" and "our authors" beyond Cooper made a career out of lecturing about anLdPoe, Hawthorne and Melville, to their personal experiences and exposing include a large group of black writers the institution of slavery. Their nar- which made a significant contribution ratives were simply outgrowths of their to the anti-slavery debate during the public accounts. James W. C. Pennington's very years which Kenneth Lynn finds so preface to his account is typical: barren. The brief narrative I here intro- I want to focus attention on black duce to the public, consists of out- contributions to the abolitionist cause line notes originally thrown to- and specifically on the fugitive slave gether to guide my memorywhen narratives which appeared in large num- lecturing on this part of the sub- bers on Northern book markets during the ject of slavery.3 1830's and 1840's.2 First, abolition The slave narratives had two main societies sponsored them--sometimes even purposes. One was to expose the work- directed, produced and ghost-wrote them; ings of slavery by cataloging the hard- secondly, they added the literary form ships, sufferings, and cruelties which of the autobiography and adventure story the institution caused. The other was to the largely prosy production of ser- to build a sympathetic picture of the mons, tracts, speeches, and essays which narrator. Some played up one side. we tend to think of as making up the "This little book is a voice from the bulk of abolitionist writings; and, most prison-house, unfolding the deeds of important of all, they provided new darkness which are there perpetrated," images of the Negro and the Southern read the preface to the Narrative of plantation system which challenged the William Wells Brown.4 ThEy'als-oplayed current stereotypes and gave to Mrs. up the sentimental or the sensational. Harriet Beecher Stowe the needed models Whowould have paid attention to the and materials to transform into the most pious preface of Henry Box Brown's effective popular indictment of American narrative, which stated that the book slavery in the nineteenth century. had not been introduced to the public II. "for the purpose of administering to The period between 1831 and 1851, a prurient desire 'to hear and see some between the appearance of William Lloyd new thing,???5 when the title read: Garrison's Liberator and Uncle Tom's Narrative of Henry Box Brown, who es- Cabin, saw both a growing public inter- caped from slavery enclosed in a box est in the slavery question and an ever- three feet long, two wide, and two and increasing flow North of fugitive slaves. a half high!" But, sensational or seri- Looking for temporary relief or for aid ous, the "prison-house view" helped to in locating housing and work, fugitives wipe away from Northern eyes the mists often visited the offices of anti-slavery of sentiment through which they, with societies for help. Many of them were the aid of saccharine plantation roman- 79 cers like Caroline Howard Gilman, were tury, Douglass had published three sep- only too apt to view the workings of arate autobiographies. At least one the "patriarchal" institution. version was available in England, France, For readers who felt that slavery Germany, and Sweden. was basically a sound institution whose The dominant image that emerges of abuses were open to reform without Frederick Douglass in his 1845 narrative emancipating the Negro, the portrait is that of the intelligent and militant of the sympathetic black narrator was black reformer whose method of handling probably more persuasive. Negro nar- ambiguous and threatening situations in rators were anxious to show that their life is confrontation. own aspirations matched those of their Born of a slave mother whomDouglass white contemporaries. They described saw only twice in his life and of a their yearnings for freedom, their at- white father whomhe never saw, he was tempts while in slavery to get indepen- sent when quite young to the city of dent work, to get an education, to join Baltimore to be trained for the reputedly a church, to insure family stability easy task of the house-servant. His and, once in the North, to take part master and mistress, a Mr. and Mrs. in a freer society on its own terms. Hugh Auld, are to begin with quite The successful Negro freeman had many friendly to the young boy. But this faces and occupations. Whether he was kindness does not last for long. Mr. a farmer, like Charles Ball; a minister, Auld catches his wife trying to teach like Pennington; an abolitionist, like young Frederick how to read and lec- Douglass; a businessman, like Paul tures her that teaching him is "unlawful, Cuffe; or a laborer and small trades- as well as unsafe,? and that learning man, like William Grimes, the success- spoils "the best nigger in the world" ful black freeman was the most effective by making him "unmanageable," "discon- indictment against the Negro as slave. tented,? and "unhappy.??8 But the young III. boy has been listening at the door and The narratives of Henry Bibb, Wil- these are the thoughts he takes away with liam Wells Brown, Solomon Northup, him: Frederick Douglass, and Josiah Henson It was a new and special revelation, were popular then and are still quite explaining dark and mysterious things, readable today.6 The last two, the with which my youthful understanding Narrative of Frederick Douglass (1845) had struggled, but struggled in vain. and the Life of Josiah Henson (1849), I now understood what had been to me contributeci the models for Uncle Tom a most perplexing difficulty--to wit, and for George Harris in Uncle Tom's the white man's power to enslave the Cabin7- -characters which significantly black man. It was a grand achieve- altered the American public's image of ment, and I prized it highly. From the Negro before the Civil War. William that moment, I understood the path- Grimes, a less respectable fugitive than way from slavery to freedom.9 Henson or Douglass, accomplished nothing Frederick Douglass now takes to the as remarkable as they, but the sale of streets to continue what Mrs. Auld began. his more average account at least helped By bribing little white street urchins keep his head above water and showed with bread, Frederick Douglass manages something of the fate of the fugitive to trick them into repeating to him in the inhospitable Northern city. their lessons in school. Frederick Douglass' narrative was From the Aulds, he is sent to the most popular slave account which another Baltimore relation to work on appeared before the Civil War. It ap- a plantation. Here he proves so trouble- peared in 1845 and a first edition was some that he is sent away to be tamed by sold out in four months. Within the year, Edward Covey, a "slave-breaker" in the four more printings supplied the popular neighborhood. Fed a steady diet of whip- demand, and it was re-issued in 1848 ping and work, Frederick Douglass admits and 1849. By 1850, 30,000 copies had that Covey succeeded in breaking him: been sold in the United States and the I was somewhatunmanageable when I British Isles. By the turn of the cen- first went there, but a few months 80 of this discipline tamed me. Mr. Brought up in the family of kindly Covey succeeded in breaking me. I and jovial Dr. McP., Henson writes: was broken in body, soul, and spirit. 'My master and fellow servants used to My natural elasticity was crushed, look upon me, and speak of me, as a my intellect languished, the disposi- wonderfully smart fellow, and prophesy tion to read departed . . . and behold the great things I should do when I be- a man transformed into a brute!l1 came a man."'l4 First he is made a driver The burden of Douglass' social criticism and when he is able to turn in his over- is given in the last seven words: "behold seer for cheating, his master gives him a man transformed into a brute!" His the job and he is able to turn out double early separation form parents "to hinder crops with a cheerful labor force. the child's affection towards its One day, he hears the preaching of mother??;ll the joint efforts of Mr. and an evangelist and becomes converted. Mrs. Auld to keep him from learning to This conversion he regards as the great- read and write; the humiliation of being est change in his life: ranked with pigs, cows, and horses on the . . . I date my conversion, and my plantation; and the efforts of Mr. Covey awakening to a new life . . . from to break him all point to the same conclu- this day so memorable to me. I sion: that slavery far from being the used every means of inquiry into vaunted school for civilizing Africans was religious matters; and so deep was instead a school for institutionalizing my conviction of their superior blacks to slavery. importance to everything else, so Douglass' simple discovery explains clear my perception of my own faults, the angry note in the narrative. For and so undoubting my observation of Douglass, the method of handling attempts the darkness and sin that surrounded to squeeze him into docility and obedience me, that I could not help talking much becomes confrontation. Following a beat- on these subjects with those about me, ing by Covey, Douglass turns on him, grabs and it was not long before I began to his throat, and fights with him for two pray with them, and exhort them, and hours. The result is that Covey doesn't to impart to the poor slaves those dare lay a finger on the sixteen-year old little glimmerings of light from another Douglass for the rest of his stay. world, which had reached my own eye.l5 Douglass writes: Like Uncle Tom, who Harriet Beecher Stowe This battle with Mr. Covey was the modeled after him, Josiah Henson takes turning-point in my career as a slave. care of both the plantation and his master. It rekindled the few expiring embers Like Uncle Tom, Josiah Henson has no rea- of freedom, and revived within me a son to think highly of his master's sense of my own manhood. It restored moral character, "but it was my duty to the departed self-confidence, and in- be faithful to him in the position which spired me again with a determination he placed me,"116 and he helps him home to be free.12 after drunken brawls, visits to taverns, Frederick Dkuglass finally escapes gambling-houses, and cockfights. He after all attempts at bettering himself even brings himself to forgive his master in Baltimore fail. In New Bedford, he "the causeless blows and injuries he had finds work and fellow blacks "who had inflicted upon me in childhood and youth.??l7 not been seven years out of their chains" So well has Josiah Henson learned to do his living better "than the average of slave- master's bidding that when the latter is holders in Maryland.??13 bankrupted, Josiah Henson leads his fellow The Life of Josiah Henson, which ap- slaves through the free state of Ohio and peared four years after Frederick Douglass' delivers them back into slavery to his narrative, tells the story of a remark- master's brother in Kentucky. able slave who was well-treated in his Whenan attempt to sell him fails, he youth and was respected and admired as flees to Canada before a second attempt a preacher by blacks as well as whites. materializes. Here, after a few years of Eventually, he flees to Canada and es- workingfor others, he settles himself and tablishes himself as a respected farmer his family on a plot of land and helps and colonist. found a colony to enable other fugitive 81 slaves to learn what Josiah Henson feels driver, and spent two terms in jail. are the essential values of the Yankee In jail he also finds the Lord: spirit: "energy, enterprize, and self- About this time, I began to realize reliance.",18 that I was a sinner, and that hell The 1825 Life of William Grimes does would be myportion if I should die something else againi. His is essentially in mypresent situation: and after- a string of hard luck stories. He does not wards . . . I sougnt and obtained the triumph over any obstacles; in fact he is hope of salvation. Blessed by God, I lucky to emerge with his head above water. knowthe path to heaven. I have had William Grimes does not control events as sweet communionwith the Lord; but does Josiah Henson, nor does he confront alas! I have erred, and gone astray them as does Frederick Douglass. Instead, fromholiness.19 he changes his behavior to suit the moment. Eventually he escapes fromSavannah by His chief virtue is his adaptability. His ship. On Staten Island, he manages to deception of various Southern masters, avoid the health officials and arrives his numerous small jobs in the North, safely in NewYork. Here, one of the his chameleon-like capacity for changing first persons he sees is his former with his environment might have earned master fromConnecticut, Mr. Sturges! him the motto of a Simon Suggs: "It's good Fromhere on the narrative becomes to be shifty in a new country!" confusing. Driven on fromone location Like Dr. McP., Josiah Henson's first to the next out of fears, real or imagined, master, one Colonel Thornton lets him of seeing formermasters, he tries on a be keeper of the house-hold keys--to the series of jobs at different locations jealousy of the other slaves. Later, he as barber, laborer, pimp, and grocer. is sold to a relative living near Thornton. Like Deacon in The Sound and the Fury, Whena passing stranger asks him whether he Grimescaters to Yalees by runninga wouldn't like to live with him in Savannah, shop. But just as other shop keepers William Grimes senses better things to come are going to run him out of townon a and takes him up on his offer. But when morals charge, a formermaster catches he finds out that his new master is up with him and forces him to sell his Jewish, Grimes becomes so disgruntled house and property. The end of the book that he tries to break his own leg to leaves him legally free but destitute. avoid traveling further. While the Yet his formerexploits leave little master succeeds in bringing Grimes to doubt in the reader's mind that he will Savannah, his troubles do not end there. endure. Once in Savannah, Grimes goes on a While William Grimesachieved no- hunger-strike. For several months, he thing either remarkableor respectable, refuses all food sent him by his master, his narrative showedthat a black man though he keeps alive by smuggling food needn't have the leadership capacities of undetected from the kitchen. In despera- a Josiah Henson or the oratorical abili- tion, his master sells him to a free black ties of a Frederick Douglass to stay man whomGrimes has coached to buy him. alive in the hostile environmentof the Only a few days later, his former master Northerncity. That the narrative, is chagrined to see his former slave though, suggested a kind of failure to perched as a coachman on top of the achieve a stable life was taken up later carriage of a new master--an Oliver Sturges by pro-slavery writers who were to take of Connecticut. such a character as William Grimes, make Successive episodes find him changing him a little happier in the South, a masters almost at whim. He works for a little less successful in the North, and printer, a doctor, on a plantation; is have him return after failure to a life sold to a navy agent; then works as a of limited but secure happiness back on cook and a steward, then again, as a the homeplantation. coachman. He does undeterminable work The images that emergeof Frederick for a Mr. White and a Mr. Welman. By Douglass, Josiah Henson and even William this time he has also met awitch, lived Grimesare miles apart fromthe Negro in two haunted houses, bitten off the figures of popular imagination. They nose of a fellow servant, beaten up a countered the tendencyof the public 82 to see the Negro in the light which and no thanks to him--I've learned it novelists of the day depicted him: in spite of him; and now what right the comic-erratic household servant has he to make a dray-horse of me? Caesar of Cooper's The Spy; the senile- To take me from things I can do, and dependent bodyguard Yaap of his Little- do better than he can, and put me to page Trilogy; the unsteady synthesis6of work that any horse can do?.O civilization and barbarism of Scipio in WhenGeorge is pursued by slave-catchers, Simms' Mellichampe; and the half-monkeys he chooses, like Douglass, the way of and chilen of Kennedy's Swallow Barn. confrontation, and he shoots at Tom For the aboliton societies who sponsored Loker. His destiny up North follows that and promoted newspapers, magazines, alma- of the self-made man. In Montreal he nacs, tracts, and speeches, the slave nar- is employed as a mechanic during the ratives, whether oral or written, provided daytime while he finishes up an education raw materials and models of black men and at night. An unexpected sum of money lets womenwhich showed what the black man had him study further in Paris and travel to suffered and what he could do when re- Liberia as a sort of missionary of Anglo- moved from slavery. These were the sources Saxon progress. to which Harriet Beecher Stowe turned Mrs. Stowe adapted Josiah Henson more when she visited the so-called Anti- imaginatively. From his Life she took the Slavery Rooms in Boston to bolster the figure of the forgiving, totally trust- book which was to become Uncle Tom's Cabin. worthy and earnestly religious black preach- Here she found Theodore We-ld's Slavery as er and made his personal ethic--his prac- It Is, and the narratives of Josiah Henson, tice of the simplest kind of Christian Lewls Clarke, and, probably, Frederick piety, familiar to every graduate of the Douglass. From Josiah Henson and Fred- nineteenth-century American Sunday school erick Douglass emerge Uncle Tom and --cast dark shadows on the morality of George Harris. his masters. IV. Can Uncle Tom's love redeem characters The two main lines of action in both black and white so that they, through Uncle Tom's Cabin lean heavily on the love, will loosen the hard bonds of slav- two most familiar lines of action found ery? This question is posed to Senator in the slave narratives: the journey Byrd, who abandons political expediency through slavery followed by the escape to help Eliza. It is posed in different North. The escape sequence was adven- ways to Mrs. Shelby, to Augustine St. turous and later gave the narrator a Clare and the figures of Eva and Topsy; chance to show what he could do once in to Sambo and Quimbo; and most dramati- the land of freedom. The other enabled cally to Simon Legree. The entire Legree the narrator to sketch a series of pictures sequence is a long struggle between Uncle of life on different plantations and to Tom and Simon Legree for the possession reveal the abuses found there. of each other's souls. Legree's God is The George Harris escape sequence Mammonand his gospel that of production. gets fairly conventional treatment. Uncle Tom dies because he refuses to join Like Frederick Douglass, George Harris Legree's church,21 because he refuses to is simply a man whose intellectual reveal the whereabouts of Cassy and Emmy, abilities and moral qualities--and skin and because he insists upon forgiving color--have placed him above his social Legree. rank. He chafes in bondage. To Eliza Mrs. Stowe's biographers have found he justifies his escape North in the same some of the origins for the emotional angry tone as Frederick Douglass. Speak- power behind Uncle Tom's Cabin in her ing of his master} George Harris asks: troubled years in GCiinSThhti-hd her . . . what right has he to me? I'm a emotional break with some of the rigid man as much as he is. I'm a better remnants of Calvinistic theology. The man than he is. I know more about latter explains some of the sympathywith business than he does; I am a better which she treats evangelical piety in managerthan he is; I can read better Uncle Tom. Whateverher unconscious than he can; I can write a better hand struggles were, though, Charles Foster --and I've learned it all myself, remindsus that they had to be worked 83 up in terms of images and imaginative in Five Slave Narratives: A Compendium, patterns made available to the conscious Series of the American Negro, his History mind. The role of the slave narratives, and Literature (New York: Arno Press and it seems to me, was exactly this: they the New York Times, 1968), p. vii. made available to Mrs. Stowe and to the Pagination is separate for each narrative. abolition movementat large new images 5Henry Box Brown, Narrative of Henry and imaginative patterns of the Negro Box Brown, Who Escaped from Slavery, En- as an individual, of the society of which closed in o tre feet long, two wide, he was a part, and of his future. and two7ana -T1f.aWith hi 7. . Remarks upon tle RemedyforbSlvey7y Charles Paul D. Johnson Stearns (Boston: Brown and Stearns, 1849), University of California p. v. at Davis 6Gilbert Osofsky has edited three highly readable narratives in Puttin' on Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Notes Reiir-yBibb-,Wililam Wells Brown, an Solomon Nort (New York, Evanston, London: Harper and Row Publishers, 1969). lHarriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's 7Harriet Beecher Stowe discusses her Cabin or, Life among the Lowly, edi use of these narratives in her A Key to by Kenneth S. Lynn (Cambrige:T The Uncle Tom's Cabin and in her introdTuc{ton Belknap Press of Harvard University to Uncle Tom's Cabin for the Riverside Press, 1962), p. vii. edition of her complete works, published 2About sixty separate accounts in 1896, a few months before her death. published before the Civil War are 8Frederick Douglass, Narrative of listed in Dwight L. Dumond's Biblio- the Life of Frederick Douglass, an g of Anti-Slavery in America (Ann American Slave, Written At Himself. rbor:University o M3Thigan Press, Edited by~Benjamin Quarles (Cambridge: 1961). Mr. Dumond's listing is not The Belknap Press of Harvard University exhaustive. Press, 1967), p. 58. "The 3James W. C. Pennington, 9Douglass, pp. 58-59. Fugitive Blacksmith or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington, lODouglass, pp. 94-95. Pastor of a Presbyterian Church, New 1lDouglass, p. 24. York, formerly a Slave in the State of 12Douglass, pp. 104-105. Maryland, United States," in Five Slave 13Douglass, p. 150. Narratives: A Compendiun, Series of the 14Josiah Henson, The Life of Josiah American egro,THis history and Litera- Henson, formerl a Slave, now an In- ture (New York: Amo Press and the New habitant of Canada, as Narrate~bTVHim- York Times, 1968), p. iv. self (Boston: Arthur D. Phelps, 1849), 4William Wells Brown, "Narrative of William Wells Brown, a fugitive Slave," 75Henson, p. 13.

5William Rose, Heine: Two Studies (Musgrave, continued from page 93) of his Life and Feeling (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), p. 125. 6Prosper M2rim6e, Oeuvres Completes 4King, "A Royalist View of Colored (Paris: Maurice Levaillant, 1933), Castes in the Venezuelan War of Indepen- X, 49. dence," ibid., p. 528. See also Richard / 7Merimie's editor, or possibly Ivbrse, "Th~eNegro in Sao Paulo, Brazil," Meriime himself, thoughtfully included Journal of Negro History, XXXVIII (July a diagram of how slaves were packed 1953), 290-306; and Irene Diggs, "Color "spoon-fashion" into the hold of a typical in Colonial Spanish America," ibid., slaver, so that every slave lay in his pp. 403-426. own and in others' bodily wastes. 84