Liberal visions of reconstruction: Lydia Maria Child's A Romance of the Republic and George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes

Studies in American Fiction

Volumn 31, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 164-190

  Piep, Karsten H ^a  

^a MIAMI UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949895768     PISSN: 00918083     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/saf.2003.0014     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. David M. Potter, The South and the Sectional Conflict (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1968), 295
2. Texas v. White 74 U.S. 700 (1869). In this often cited case, The Supreme Court held that individual states could not unilaterally secede from the Union and that the acts of the insurgent Texas legislature - even if ratified by a majority of Texans - were "absolutely null."
3. Quoted in Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 76
4. Thomas Nelson Page, The Negro: The Southerner's Problem (New York: Scribner, 1904), 8
5. Frederick Douglass, "An Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage," The Atlantic Monthly, January 1867, 112-18
6. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1974), 20
7. David Brion Davis, "The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823," The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), 102
8. George William Curtis, "The Good Fight," Orations and Addresses of George William Curtis, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1894), 153, 172
9. In Eric Foner's assessment, "liberal reform was at one and the same time a moral creed, part of an emerging science of society, and the outcry of a middle-class intelligentsia alarmed by class conflict . . . and its own exclusion from power" (492)
10. See Nancy Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1914 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2002)
11. On the rise of liberalism during Reconstruction, see esp. chapter 2, "A Civilizer's Errand."
12. Cohen, 77
13. For an excellent survey of scientific racism in the nineteenth century, see John S. Haller, Outcasts From Evolution: Scientific Attitudes to Racial Inferiority, 1859-1900 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1971). Haller's study concludes that nineteenth-century "science became an instrument which verified the presumptive inferiority of the Negro and rationalized the politics of disenfranchisement and segregation into a social-scientific terminology" (x)
14. John W. De Forest, "The Man and Brother," Atlantic Monthly, Oct. 1868, 425
15. Frederick Douglass, "The Color Line," North American Review, Jun. 1881, 568
16. Notes Eric Foner: "The free labor ideology simultaneously inspired efforts to guarantee civil and political equality . . . and inhibited efforts to provide an economic underpinning for black's new freedom"(278)
17. Lydia Maria Child, A Romance of the Republic, ed. Dana Nelson (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1997), 403. Hereafter cited parenthetically
18. Lukács, 29 (emphasis added)
19. Lukács, 58
20. George Washington Cable, The Negro Question, ed. Arlin Turner (Garden City: Doubleday, 1958), 10
21. George Washington Cable, The Grandissimes (New York: Penguin, 1988), 143. Hereafter cited parenthetically
22. Davis, 64
23. One might say that Child's and Cable's reform impulses fall prey to an uncritical adaptation of the rational language of the enlightenment, which, through its purported clarity and objectivity, conceals contradictions and clashing (class) interests. As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer write in Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1998), "even the best-intentioned reformer who uses an impoverished and debased language to recommend renewal, by his adoption of the insidious mode of categorization and the bad philosophy it conceals, strengthens the very power of the established order he is trying to break" (xiv)
24. Cable, The Negro Question, 16
25. Nathan Southgate Shaler, "An Ex-Southerner in South Carolina," Atlantic Monthly, July 1870, 61
26. Shaler, 60 (emphasis added). De Forest gave a similar assessment. "The acceptance of the negro as the social equal of the white in our country dates so far into the future," he declared, "that, practically speaking, we may consider it as never to be, and so cease concerning ourselves about it" (419)
27. Carolyn L. Karcher, "Lydia Maria Child's A Romance of the Republic: An Abolitionist Vision of America's Racial Destiny," Slavery and the Literary Imagination, ed. Deborah McDowell and Arnold Rampersad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989), 82
28. Bruce Mills, Cultural Reformations: Lydia Maria Child and the Literature of Reform (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 136. Later in the same chapter Mills concedes, "Child constructs a more enlightened but not completely unprejudiced rendering of racial integration" (138)
29. Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Anti-Slavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989), 75
30. Responding to Yellin, Stephanie A. Smith argues in Conceived by Liberty: Maternal Figures and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994) that "dark" Rosen Blumen, "neither fabulously rich nor working poor . . . mediates black and white in the tableau" (66). While Rosen assumes the middle position in the tableau's racial and social hierarchy, her "protective" hand still prevents "working poor" Benny from rising up. Protective of its precarious status, the petit bourgeoisie, it appears, is much more likely to uphold than challenge existing hierarchies
31. Lydia Maria Child, Letters of Lydia Maria Child with a Biographical Introduction by John G. Whittier and an Appendix by Wendell Phillips, ed. John Greenleaf Whittier (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882), 132
32. Dana Nelson, "Introduction," A Romance of the Republic by Lydia Maria child, ed. Dana Nelson (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press), xiv
33. Consequently, Mr. Bright's conversion to the abolitionist cause is triggered by an advertisement, promising a reward for the return of an "intelligent," sandy-haired, and blue-eyed runaway slave, who "will pass himself for a white man" (322). "By George!" Bright recalls his reaction, "that's a description of me" (322)
34. Karcher, 95
35. Walt Whitman, "Democratic Vistas," Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose, ed. Lawrence Buell (New York: Modern Library, 1988), 468
36. Foner, 575, 585
37. Charles Swann, "The Grandissimes: A Story-Shaped World," Literature and History 2 (1987), 260
38. Thomas J. Richardson, "The Grandissimes' Southern Dilemma," Southern Quarterly 4 (1980), 1-12
39. Richardson, 5
40. Lawrence Berkove, "The Free Man of Color in The Grandissimes and Works by Harris and Mark Twain," Southern Quarterly 4 (1980), 67
41. Michael Kreyling, "Introduction," The Grandissimes by George Washington Cable (New York: Penguin, 1988), xvi
42. Swann, 259
43. Robert Stephens, "Cable's Grandissime Saga," American Literary Realism 1 (1987), 12
44. Henry Summer Maine, Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and its Relation to Modern Ideas (New York: Holt, 1906), 164-65. I am indebted to Charles Swann for this reference
45. Foner, 163
46. Foner, 164
47. Thomas L. Haskell, "Capitalism and Human Sensibility, 2" The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation, ed. Thomas Bender, (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), 155-56. Haskell presented his ideas on the humanizing effects of early capitalism in a dispute with David Brion Davis about the roots of the antislavery movement in the Anglo-American world
48. Cohen, 83 (emphasis added)