SOURCE: Wimsatt, Mary Ann. “Antebellum Fiction.” In The History of Southern Literature, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., pp. 92-107. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985.

[In the following essay, Wimsatt surveys the mostly romantic prose fiction of the pre-Civil War American South.]

Antebellum Americans, especially in the South, relished the popular romance as it had developed from the mid-eighteenth century onward, given great impetus by the historical novels of Walter Scott; and it is to the romance tradition and its several offshoots, Gothic, sentimental, and domestic, that we may trace the main features of the fiction produced between 1830 and 1870. That fiction employs, with ingenuity and gusto, the motifs of romance in all ages—the mysterious births, concealed parentage, separated lovers, kidnappings, robberies, and shipwrecks, as well as the general emphasis on tribulations-preceding-rewards that are the stock-in-trade of the genre and of the Western myths from which it ultimately descends. Antebellum popular romance, more particularly, is action-packed, ornately descriptive, moralistic, fond of dabbling in the irrational or the bizarre, and openly, persistently symbolic. Whether it has a historical or contemporary setting, it exists within a framework of orthodox religious values that bolsters its firm divisions between right and wrong or good and evil, as well as its marked tendency toward providential or wish-fulfillment endings. The resulting stylized format of this fiction, which twentieth-century readers tend to deplore, expresses political, social, and moral attitudes of the public in a manner highly agreeable to a nineteenth-century middle-class readership thirsty for confirmation of its value systems and its own hegemony of taste. Hence the literary statement of the nineteenth-century writer about the meaning of the past for the present or the direction of contemporary life is more likely than that of his twentieth-century counterpart to be reflected in forms where private attitudes are deliberately subordinated to public views and where procedures are conventionalized to a sometimes surprising degree.

The climate for fiction, and hence the texture of fiction itself, changed during the course of the antebellum period, largely because of unstable economic conditions, developments in the book market, and steady expansion of the reading public. The 1830s saw the establishment of the historical romance as the dominant form for prose fiction in the country at large; all the major Southern antebellum authors tried their hands at this mode. Late in the decade, however, the panic of 1837, by curtailing the market for long novels, effectively sounded the knell for historical fiction of the Scott and Cooper type, though established writers continued to work in the form until after the Civil War. Appearing in the 1840s, partly in response to the changing book market, were cheap paperbound novels, mammoth weekly newspapers in which current British and American fiction was serialized, annuals, gift books, and numerous, sometimes short-lived periodicals—all of which resulted in several species of subliterature and in the marked decline in literary taste that James D. Hart in The Popular Book (1950) has noted. By the 1850s, long fiction was back on its feet, though shakily, but the market continued to move away from the dignified historical romances of the earlier era. In that decade, sometimes called the “feminine fifties,” emerged both men and women writers whose prodigious output for the pulp trade eclipsed the reputation and the sales of Cooper, Hawthorne, and Simms, as Hawthorne in particular was wont to complain. The market for long fiction, indeed for literature in general, was again disrupted by the Civil War; afterwards, as literary taste shifted toward realism and publishing houses like T. B. Peterson specialized in floods of cheaply issued books, fiction further altered its course.

But the authors of the early antebellum period felt themselves secure in the exploration of historical subjects. The most notable of these authors—John Pendleton Kennedy, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, William Alexander Caruthers, and John Esten Cooke—are linked by a thoroughgoing pride in the South, a concern for political issues, particularly slavery and secession, and a patriotic devotion to Virginia and its cavalier legend. All except Cooke began their literary careers in the 1830s and had quit writing long fiction by the end of the 1840s; Cooke, who belongs to a slightly later period, inherited from his predecessors the vision of a shining cavalier past that he wove into a series of works set in Virginia. Cooke was talented, but of this group, Kennedy (1795-1870) was the one best equipped to make Simms look to his laurels had Kennedy chosen seriously to pursue a professional literary career. That he did not choose to, preferring instead to involve himself in state and national politics and in the lively cultural life of Baltimore, is to some extent a measure of the man and an indication of his genial, public-spirited temperament. Throughout his life his family circumstances, his residence in the border state of Maryland, and his tranquil disposition would color his literary endeavors and his political views.

Born in Baltimore to an Irish immigrant father in the merchant business and a mother from a tidewater Virginia clan, Kennedy studied law, dabbled in literature with the Addisonian Red Book (1819-1820), and then commenced writing in earnest with Swallow Barn (1832), his first and in many ways his best book. It reveals his grounding in Washington Irving and the eighteenth-century British essayists, and perhaps the influence of William Wirt's Letters of the British Spy (1803) which, like Kennedy's volume, portrays the reaction of a Northern visitor to the South. In Kennedy's words, “a rivulet of story wandering through a broad field of episode,” Swallow Barn shows his sympathetic, judicious appraisal of Virginia institutions and customs, ranging over such diverse topics as the history and resolution of the boundary dispute between neighboring property owners, comic devil-doings in the inset “Mike Brown” yarn, and an earnest discussion of slavery. Kennedy concludes, through his characters and in accents familiar to the times, that slavery, though morally wrong, must be dealt with by the South without Northern interference. For readers content to move at Kennedy's leisurely pace, Swallow Barn represents the author at his best—rambling, charming, and desultory. Both by inclination and talent he was apparently more suited to imaginative excursions in the essay form than to the historical fiction he was next to write.

Yet his two historical novels, Horse-Shoe Robinson (1835) and Rob of the Bowl (1838) have substantial merits, though these may be dimmed for twentieth-century readers by Kennedy's prolixity and his tendency to digression. Set in Virginia and South Carolina, the two states that had suffered most from the Revolution in the South, Horse-Shoe Robinson, like Simms's Revolutionary War romances of the same decade, uses military history for its framing action, which culminates in the battle of King's Mountain. Making patrician characters and their opponents symbolize aspects of the historical situation, Kennedy mirrors the divisions caused by war in the various political stances of the Lindsay family, in standard fashion pitting the British villain St. Jermyn (masquerading as Tyrrel) and his servant James Curry against the partisan hero Arthur Butler and his companion Horse-Shoe. That Kennedy, like Simms, knew and relished Southern backwoods humor is shown through the character and speech of Horse-Shoe, who uses terms like “obstrepolous” and “flusterification” and boasts, “My name is Brimstone, I am first cousin to Belzebub.”

If in his first two books Kennedy paid tribute to his mother's native state, in his third one he traced some elements in the colonial history of his own. Rob of the Bowl: A Legend of St. Inigoe's, set in the extreme southeastern portions of coastal Maryland, is a more unusual if finally a less successful venture into historical fiction than is Horse-Shoe Robinson. In it Kennedy treats the Roman Catholic/Protestant clashes of 1681 as they affect the families of the proprietary Charles Calvert and his collector of the port Anthony Warden; threading in and out of this account is the tale of the title character, Robert Swale, who has lost both legs and must walk with their stumps in a trencher or bowl. Like Cooper in Lionel Lincoln (1825), Kennedy includes a story of mysterious parentage that is resolved when Rob turns out to be the father of the young hero, Albert Verheyden; like Simms in The Yemassee (1835), he makes pirates the main villains of the piece and the particular enemies of Albert and his sweetheart Blanche Warden. After Rob, Kennedy returned to portraits of nineteenth-century life and to Irving as a model in Quodlibet (1840), an anecdotal account by the pretentious Solomon Secondthoughts that pillories Jacksonian democracy somewhat as Irving had pilloried Jeffersonianism in A History of New York.

Among Kennedy's notable nonfiction works bearing on Southern matters are his two-volume biography of William Wirt (1849), his pamphlet The Border States (1860), and his pseudonymously-issued Mr. Ambrose's Letters on the Rebellion, published serially during 1863 and 1864. Here Kennedy, who in 1852 to 1853 had been secretary of the navy and hence aware of Union interests, forcefully argues that states have no right to secede and that the real motive for secession was not slavery but the South's desire for national political domination.

Very different from Kennedy's reasoned stand on political issues was the embittered sectionalism of Beverley Tucker (1784-1851), the author of three novels—George Balcombe (1836), The Partisan Leader (1836), and Gertrude (serialized 1844-1845)—along with several political treatises. Of patrician family, Tucker was the son of St. George Tucker and the half brother, through his mother's first marriage, of John Randolph of Roanoke, who schooled him in political matters. As a federal judge, he spent about seventeen years, from 1815 or 1816 to 1833, in Missouri, where George Balcombe is partially set. A frontier romance of the sort Simms and R. M. Bird were writing, it uses the familiar romance device of a missing will as a hook on which hang diverting scenes of Missouri backwoodsmen, thugs, Indians, and swindlers.

Returning to Virginia, in 1834 Tucker accepted appointment to the College of William and Mary, where his views on states' rights and slavery were influenced by those of the chancellor, the eloquent Thomas Dew. Those views are expressed in The Partisan Leader: A Tale of the Future, the best known of Tucker's novels and one which attracted considerable attention in its time. Issued under the pseudonym Edward William Sidney with a spurious date of 1856 on its title page, it purports to describe events in 1849, including Martin Van Buren's election to an unprecedented fourth term and the formation of a successful Southern confederacy. Although the book is less a novel than a protracted political screed approaching allegory, it follows standard fictional practices of the time in having its leading characters symbolize different social or political positions and mating or separating them accordingly. It speaks strongly against wrongs the North dealt the South through the tariff, paints a fervent picture of slave-master loyalties, portrays the situation of Virginia divided between allegiance to the Union and sympathy for the Confederacy, and depicts armed conflicts, in which colorful Virginia mountain men take part, between Union and militia troops. Tucker enthusiastically viewed the volume as “the first Bulletin of that gallant contest, in which Virginia achieved her independence; lifted the soiled banner of her sovereignty from the dust, and once more vindicated her proud motto … Sic Semper Tyrannis! Amen. so Mote it be.”

Like Tucker, William Alexander Caruthers (1802-1846) was a loyal Virginian, though a son of the mountain region rather than the tidewater; trained as a physician, he lived in various places in the North and South but used Virginia as the main setting of his three novels—The Kentuckian in New York (1834), The Cavaliers of Virginia (Vol. I, 1834; Vol. II, 1835), and The Knights of the Horseshoe (1845). Unlike Tucker, he disliked slavery and, especially through The Kentuckian, tried to promote intersectional goodwill while capitalizing on current literary trends. The book, which has a contemporary setting, is partly straight narrative and partly epistolary. It uses a journey structure into which are incorporated several love stories involving Southerners traveling north and a Northerner who goes south; and it includes a number of travelogue descriptions of Northern and Southern scenery. Its title character, Montgomery Damon, a boisterous Kentuckian who accompanies two Virginia aristocrats to New York, is modeled on Davy Crockett as filtered through James Kirke Paulding's Nimrod Wildfire, a chief character in The Lion of the West (1831). Caruthers had seen the revised version of the play—significantly retitled The Kentuckian, or A Trip to New York—when he was living in New York.

Jay B. Hubbell calls The Kentuckian in New York “a mixture of the sentimental, the lachrymose, and the Gothic”—but it is scarcely more so than The Cavaliers of Virginia, Caruthers' first attempt at the historical mode and, according to Curtis Carroll Davis, the book that fueled the cavalier legend in fiction. Its ostensible subject is Bacon's Rebellion of 1676 against the royal governor Sir William Berkeley; but its actual emphasis throughout much of the narrative is on the violent melodramatic ordeals, heavily seasoned with the Gothic, to which Nathaniel Bacon and his fiancée are subjected, brought about in part by the decrees of “The Recluse,” a huge and somber figure who, like Hawthorne's Grey Champion, is one of the regicide judges seeking solitude in America.

Caruthers's final novel, The Knights of the Horseshoe—called “The Knights of the Golden Horse-Shoe” in the serialized version—is generally considered his best book on the basis of its sprightly style and coherent, clever plotting. Like The Cavaliers, it uses colonial Virginia history—in this case, Governor Alexander Spotswood's expedition across the Blue Ridge Mountains into the Valley of Virginia—as a background for several complicated love stories, punctuating the whole with episodes of murder, treason, and Indian fighting. Among historical novelists of the period, North and South, Caruthers is noteworthy for his lively prose, a refreshing change from the ponderosities of Simms or Cooper, his use (sometimes overuse) of varied kinds of narrative material, and his ability to shift from playful to melodramatic or lachrymose manner as his need requires.

Artistically, John Esten Cooke (1830-1886) was the beneficiary of these several attempts to glorify Virginia in fiction, a debt he acknowledged by his history of Virginia (1883) and by his unrelenting work in historical romance after the form had reached its zenith and begun its decline. A cousin of John Pendleton Kennedy, the younger brother of Philip Pendleton Cooke, and devoted friend and admirer of Simms, he was the most talented of the novelists whose careers span the antebellum and early postbellum eras. Descended on both sides from distinguished Virginia families, he was born in Winchester but spent much of his early life at his mother's plantation in the Shenandoah Valley. The family moved to Richmond when Cooke was ten, and unable to attend the University of Virginia, while studying law he attached himself to the Southern Literary Messenger and its editor John R. Thompson, turning out in profusion poems and other items for the journal. It was probably his long association with the Messenger that accounts for the marked element of “magazine fiction” in his writing—easy charm, superficial grace, and rosy, romantic pictures of Virginia living.

In an autobiographical sketch, Cooke claimed that he was “a Virginian, a monarchist, what is called a cavalier by blood and strain and feeling,” insisting “I believe that any merit of my writing … will be found in the fact that I am Virginian and Cavalier.” He furthermore claimed that in fiction his aim had been “to paint the Virginia phase of American society, to do for the Old Dominion what Cooper has done for the Indians, Simms for the Revolutionary drama in South Carolina, Irving for the Dutch Knickerbockers, and Hawthorne for the weird Puritan life of New England.” Taken together, these statements suggest the derivation and the dominant cast of his books. His first novel, Leather Stocking and Silk (1854), an attempt to paint early nineteenth-century life in Martinsburg in northern Virginia (now West Virginia), is an obvious outgrowth of the short fiction he had published in the Messenger and in Harper's. It traces through several generations the fortunes of families connected with the town and the nearby mountains, looking to Cooper for its title and some traits in a leading figure (hunter John Myers) and to Irving for its breezy manner and its picture of a mock-supernatural prank.

The two novels generally considered Cooke's best—The Virginia Comedians (1854) and its sequel Henry St. John, Gentleman (1859)—treat tidewater Virginia on the eve of the Revolution. Both use the device, dear to Irving and to eighteenth-century British writers, of memoirs edited from manuscript, a ruse that allows Cooke to mingle comments in his own voice with quotations from his ostensible source. The Virginia Comedians, a brisk but uneven blend of history and romance, depicts, in Cooke's words, “the curiously graded Virginia society” of the late colonial era, represented by the patrician Cavalier clans of the Effinghams and Lees, by stalwart plainer people such as Charles and Ralph Waters and (at the historical level) Patrick Henry, and by various dialect-speaking low figures who furnish comic relief. Although purportedly about Patrick Henry's efforts to integrate colonial-political elements before the approaching military conflict, the book, as its title hints, is more directly concerned with a troupe of actors in Williamsburg and the abortive passion of Champ Effingham for the troupe's leading lady, Beatrice Hallam, who prudently marries Charles Waters instead.

Henry St. John continues Cooke's emphasis on the mixture of social elements in Virginia culture by making the title character, who shifts from loyalism to patriotism during the story, a descendant of Champ Effingham and a great-grandson of Pocahontas. It is less successful than its predecessor in uniting history and fiction, as it tends to alternate between long disquisitions on the Revolution by Patrick Henry and other characters and equally long love passages between Henry St. John and a heroine with the ultraromantic name of Bonnybel Vane, who furnished the title Miss Bonnybel for a later edition of the novel.

Cooke served throughout the Civil War with the Army of Northern Virginia; his seven books about the war develop the Cavalier legend in the service of the Lost Cause. Among the more notable of these books are his biographies of Stonewall Jackson (1863) and Robert E. Lee (1871) and his novels corresponding to those biographies, Surry of Eagle's-Nest (1866) and its sequel Mohun (1869), which treat military developments from 1861 through 1865, chiefly in Virginia, and which lovingly describe Jackson, Lee, Jeb Stuart, James Longstreet, and other Confederate officers. Both Surry and Mohun continue the ruse of the edited manuscript that Cooke had used in The Virginia Comedians and Henry St. John, and both profit from Cooke's firsthand experiences in some of the military events he describes; but both unfortunately show the faults that had marred his earlier books and would mar his later ones—an inability to integrate historical and fictive material or to fashion orderly plots and subplots, together with a willingness to cater to popular taste evidenced in his tendency to desert story lines in order to serve up romantic pictures of battles and military leaders.

In charm, sprightliness, and easy grace, Cooke's other books, ranging from Pretty Mrs. Gaston (1874) to The Virginia Bohemians (1880) and My Lady Pokahontas (1885), resemble the local color of Louisiana that George Washington Cable and Grace King were beginning to produce. But as Cooke himself knew, he was born too late for the vogue of historical romance that he insisted on cultivating, and forced to earn money by his pen, he wrote too much, too hastily, and too superficially to rival Simms or Kennedy at their best.

Alongside the historical novels that tried to portray with some dignity important events in the country's past that shaped its nineteenth-century condition, there developed in the 1830s and 1840s a more lurid strain of fiction in which historical trappings function chiefly as an excuse for the exploration of violent criminal or sexual passions. Emphasizing improbable melodramatic elements that in earlier fiction had been subordinate to weightier matters, this strain makes melodrama the main business of the tale. Such is the case in the novels and stories of Joseph Holt Ingraham (1809-1860), whose books, though little known today, were nineteenth-century best sellers outranking better books by more established authors, owing largely to Ingraham's ability to work in different modes of popular writing ranging from travel sketches to historical romance, topical treatments of antebellum life, and vast novels on biblical themes. Ingraham, in fact, provides an instructive contrast to the more famous writers of the era. Kennedy, Caruthers, and Cooke, though they might chafe at the restrictions imposed by their genre or their readers, all wrote more or less in service to established social, political, and religious positions, depicting episodes from American history in a manner that echoed the nation's public interpretation of its past. Ingraham seized upon what has been called the “dark underside” of romance increasingly visible in the genre since the eighteenth century, and at the beginning of his career turned out sensational volumes on historical subjects that barely escape being sordid. (Longfellow, supposedly quoting Ingraham, called them “the worst novels ever written.”)

A native of Massachusetts, Ingraham migrated to Mississippi in 1831, producing The South-West, by a Yankee (1835), a series of travel essays, as a memorial to his experience. He then published, in swift succession, Lafitte; or The Pirate of the Gulf (1836), Burton; or, The Sieges (1838), and Captain Kyd; or, The Wizard of the Sea (1839), historical novels using a thin thread of fact in elaborately embroidered fictional episodes recalling Gothic romances like The Monk as well as the more respectable fiction of Walter Scott. All three works focus on the crime-and-seduction sequences central to Gothic fiction; all use the figure of the Byronic hero-villain socially exiled yet capable of good deeds and yearning to repent; and despite their flagrant, probability-violating scenes, all exist within the value matrix formed by popular religion and supported by the social fabric. Lafitte treats the well-known privateer who helped American forces in the War of 1812 (Jacob Blanck, Bibliography of American Literature [New Haven, 1963], IV, 460, says Ingraham may have plagiarized Lafitte from the manuscript of a Cambridge graduate. Evidence exists for an 1828 edition of the novel subtitled The Baratian Chief); Burton is a fictionalized account of episodes from Aaron Burr's life; and Captain Kyd, the least integrated and most lurid of the three, portrays the fortunes of a noble seventeenth-century Irish family improbably transplanted to America. Influenced equally by Scott and Monk Lewis, Captain Kyd blends extremely detailed descriptions of Irish customs with sensational accounts of piracy, robbery, murder, and witchcraft. After The Quadroone (1841), set in New Orleans, Ingraham, sensing that money was to be made through magazine fiction, turned out narratives like The Dancing Feather (1841) for periodicals at a furious pace.

Then in the early 1850s, the purveyor of semisalacious lore suddenly and dramatically changed his course. He became an Episcopal minister and produced several best-selling novels based on biblical subjects—The Prince of the House of David (1855), The Pillar of Fire (1859), The Throne of David (1860)—that foreshadowed the vogue for biblical narrative in the postbellum era. His switch from pulp to religious fiction is less surprising than it seems, for religion, chiefly Roman Catholicism, had formed a colorful undercurrent in his earlier books whose pirates, called “demoniacs,” and innocent, pious characters are secular versions of the figures who play major roles in his late works. One of his last books, The Sunny South (1860), a series of travel letters purportedly written by a Northern governess in the South, unites the vein he had opened in The South-West with the epistolary form of his late novels to produce a volume that, on the eve of the Civil War, spoke forthrightly for the individuality and charm of Southern culture.

If Ingraham veered in the course of his life from the dark to the bright sides of the romance tradition, Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth (1819-1899) and Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz (1800-1856) kept their forays into Gothic domains firmly within what Leslie Fiedler calls the white or antiseptic formulas of popular writing. Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, who was born in Virginia, set many of her novels in that state and in Maryland, where her ancestors had lived. In 1849, separated from her husband and forced to support herself and two young children, she began to write, serializing her first novel, Retribution, in the Washington, D.C., National Era. Many of her later works first saw print in the Era or the Saturday Evening Post and, after 1857, in the New York Ledger, run by Robert Bonner.

Among Southworth's most popular books after Retribution were The Curse of Clifton (1852, other editions titled Fallen Pride and The Mountain-Girl's Love); The Hidden Hand (1859, also called Capitola's Triumph); and Ishmael (1863) and its sequel Self-Raised (1864), both based loosely on the life of William Wirt and originally serialized as a single work with the title Self-Made. There is a strong element of juvenile literature in these and other Southworth volumes, in which children are sometimes prominent figures. Thus Vivia (1856) traces the fortunes of three counterpointed heroines from childhood through education to maturity, meanwhile interweaving a tale, straight from Gothic romance, of lovers secretly married, wickedly separated, and serving in Roman Catholic orders before being finally, chastely reunited. Ishmael, which opens with an unhappy version of the Cinderella legend, focuses heavily on the incredible goodness and ability of the boy Ishmael, who rises through wit and pluck to fame. Byronic heroines appear in Ishmael and The Curse of Clifton, one appropriating “the ambition of Lucifer,” the other declaiming, “I ask no leave of earth or Heaven for what I do!” Beneath her melodramatic plots, which even a contemporary woman writer of her breed stigmatized as “possibility-scorning,” Southworth stresses such traditional virtues as honesty, purity, trust, and love; she repeatedly warns against secret marriages and other forms of deception practiced on parental or guardian figures. And like Ingraham, she seasons her writing with homely humor based on dialect-speaking characters, blacks and whites, from the lower class.

The ten novels of Caroline Lee Hentz are more even in texture, somewhat less crammed with incident, and slightly less sensational than Southworth's, though they too run the gamut of melodrama standard to the pulp trade. Born in Massachusetts, Hentz lived in several parts of the South and West after her marriage to a French immigrant, whom she assisted in running and teaching at various girls' schools. After early success with Aunt Patty's Scrap Bag (1846) and The Mob Cap; and Other Tales (1850), she produced her first novel, Linda; or, The Young Pilot of the Belle Creole (1850), which treats a young, dutiful Louisiana plantation heiress, her weak-willed father, her unkind stepmother, and her contrasted suitors, Roland Lee and Robert Graham (who lent his name to the sequel to Linda published in 1855). Through such figures as Graham, Claudia in The Planter's Northern Bride (1851), and the title character of Ernest Linwood (1856), Hentz displays the corroding effects of passion unchecked by reasoned restraint.

The Planter's Northern Bride, which remains Hentz's best-known book through its status as the answer to Uncle Tom's Cabin, like Caruthers' Kentuckian in New York tries to soothe the sectional prejudice by showing Southerners traveling in the North and Northerners in the South, while like The Partisan Leader it imprints nearly every page with impassioned propaganda for the Southern cause. Centering on the magnanimous Southern planter Russell Moreland and his New England bride Eulalia, it contrasts an honorable and a flagitious abolitionist, paints an abortive slave uprising, discourses lengthily and, to mid-twentieth-century ears, offensively on the innate inferiority of the Negro, and in phrases typical of the times excoriates the economic system that bred the Northern “wage-slave” and the wretched seamstresses of Britain. For all its emphasis on the saintly Eulalia, this book, like Marcus Warland (1852), has male figures in the foreground. But in Eoline; or, Magnolia Vale (1852) and Helen and Arthur (1853), Hentz emphasizes sturdy, independent single women as well as rebellious younger heroines who eventually come around to sensible points of view.

In contrast to Ingraham, Southworth, and Hentz, whose novels were aimed more or less at adults, Francis Robert Goulding (1810-1881), a minister and native of Georgia, wrote his several books for the juvenile market. After Little Josephine (1844), composed for the American Sunday School Union, he published in 1852 his most popular work, Robert and Harold; or, The Young Marooners on the Florida Coast, which went through many reprintings. It contains characterizations of educated, responsible parents, a good deal of interesting naturalist and medical lore, and a Robinson Crusoe plot in which children accidentally shipwrecked are forced to live by their always-ethical wits. As their subtitles indicate, the Woodruff stories, including Sapelo; or, Child Life in the Tide Waters (1888), Nacoochee; or, Boy-Life from Home (1871), and Sal-o-quah; or, Boy-Life Among the Cherokees (1870), trace children's progress from home through school into semi-independent adolescence sprinkled with Indian adventures. In their emphasis on childish pranks and on children forced to live without consistent adult supervision yet abiding by their parents' values, Goulding's works form an interesting contrast to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

Two developments in the 1840s, the increasing popularity of travel writing and the spread of periodical literature, made possible the careers of David Hunter Strother (1816-1888) and Joseph Addison Turner (1826-1868), whose literary production, though markedly slimmer than that of their more important contemporaries, tells a good bit about conditions for authors near the end of the antebellum era. A native of Virginia and a relative of John Pendleton Kennedy, Strother was fortunate in being able to illustrate the several travel pieces he wrote in the 1850s for Harper's Magazine. Those were Virginia Illustrated, North Carolina Illustrated, A Winter in the South, and A Summer in New England. His fondness for travel, his ability for both art and writing, and a meeting with Washington Irving led him to adopt the pen name Porte Crayon for his work. When published in book form (1857), the five parts of Virginia Illustrated, which appeared in Harper's during 1854 and 1856, incorporated Strother's earlier account of “A Visit to the Virginia Canaan,” a tale of an expedition into the Blackwater Falls area of Virginia. Influenced by British and American travel narratives, Virginia Illustrated recalls Smollett and Sterne in its use of a story thread for its travel adventures, its sharp portrayals of the travelers, and its bantering presentation of scenery and character. As Strother's chief chronicler Cecil D. Eby remarks, the work also resembles Southern humor in its persistent realism and its comic portraits of a farmstead romance and a boasting backwoodsman. North Carolina Illustrated, a less interesting piece, shows typical Virginia snobbery, as Eby notes, toward the Old North State. Strother served with Union forces during the Civil War, and afterward refused to return to the pleasantries of his earlier writing, preferring instead, though with little success, to entice his Harper's public into a serious examination of the war through a series of personal recollections.

The Georgia planter Joseph Addison Turner is remembered chiefly for his encouragement and support of Joel Chandler Harris, whom as a youth he helped educate in literature, printing, and publishing. But in his own right he was something of a minor litterateur, editing and writing for several Southern periodicals—among them Turner's Monthly (1848), Plantation: A Southern Quarterly Journal (1860), and Countryman (1862-1866), in which his poem in heroic couplets, “The Old Plantation,” appeared. The Countryman shows the continuing influence of eighteenth-century Britain on Southern magazines, for Turner consciously modeled it on the Spectator, the Tatler, and the Rambler. He assiduously sought, as Simms had done before him, to “contribute … to the creation of a separate and distinct Southern literature.” But he was even less successful than Simms had been in stimulating that literature through periodical publication.

Of somewhat special interest in antebellum Southern fiction, if only because of their color, are the two black writers William Wells Brown (1814?-1884) and Martin R. Delany (1812-1885). Both are historically important in Afro-American literature.

Brown was born in the Kentucky bluegrass in or near the town of Lexington, but was taken by his owner to Missouri in 1816. A pronounced octoroon, he claimed at least once (erroneously, it seems) to have been a grandson, through his mother, of Daniel Boone. From 1827 until the very end of 1833, under three successive owners, Brown's home was in St. Louis. On New Year's Day in 1834, stealing away from a river steamer belonging to his last owner and docked at Cincinnati, he began a walk that propelled him, suspicious of everyone he saw, entirely across the state of Ohio in the dead of winter to a relatively secure haven in Cleveland. Within the next quarter of a century he became justly famous as a lecturer for both the abolitionists and the crusaders for temperance (who were often, as in his case, alternately each). For the last twenty-four years of his life, however, he practiced medicine in Boston, Massachusetts.

In the Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself (1847), Brown wrote one of the best and most widely circulated of all slave narratives. The title of his The Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings (1848) speaks for itself. His play, The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom: A Drama in Five Acts (1858), is credited with being the first play by a black American writer. In 1849 Brown had gone abroad. He stayed abroad, principally in the British Isles, largely because of the harsh provisions against fugitive slaves included in the Compromise of 1850. In London he assembled and had printed a collection of his own letters, Three Years in Europe; or, Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met (1852), the first book of travels by an American fugitive slave to be published in England. Attesting to his perennial interest in black history are four works: St. Domingo: Its Revolution and Its Patriots (1854); The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1863); The Negro in the American Rebellion (1867); and The Rising Son; or The Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race (1873). Even so, the feat that uniquely distinguishes him is his authorship of Clotel (1853), written in London and issued to the world by a London printer, but still the first novel ever published by an American black.

Four versions of Clotel exist: the original version; Miralda; or, The Beautiful Quadroon: A Romance of American Slavery, Founded on Fact (1861), which ran as a serial of sixteen installments in the Weekly Anglo-African from December 1, 1860, through March 16, 1861; Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States (1864); and Clotelle; or, The Colored Heroine: A Tale of the Southern States (1867). Essentially, all four versions repeat the same story. Yet they differ considerably in detail, as they do in the spelling of the name Clotel. The original version, significantly subtitled The President's Daughter, explicitly attributes to Thomas Jefferson a liaison with his attractive light-skinned slave Currer, by whom he has two daughters of surpassing beauty, Clotel and Althesa. All three of these fair creatures, after the death of their aging second owner, are auctioned off in Richmond. Subsequently, with a profusion of melodramatic incident and no lack of abolitionist polemic, the novel pursues each of them to a dire and woeful demise. Currer and Althesa both perish of the yellow fever—the mother in Natchez, the daughter in New Orleans. Clotel, barely thwarting the professional slave catchers closing in on her, plunges deliberately into what becomes her watery grave from a bridge across the Potomac, within sight and almost within sound of the Capitol at Washington. A much happier fate awaits Clotel's daughter and only child, Mary. As the novel ends, she, the beneficiary of an amazing series of possibly even more amazing coincidences, marries in France the one man she has long loved dearly. It was for complicity in the handsome fugitive slave's escape that Mary was sold into slavery in the Deep South.

In its repetition of basic characteristics of the slave narrative as a form, no less than in the racial protest that virtually informs its every line, Clotel belongs very much to Afro-American literature. Yet it belongs also, if not more, to all Southern and all American literature. Its weltanschauung is quite thoroughly and unselfconsciously that of a person raised in America, especially in the American South. And despite its bitter, unceasing denunciation of the huge majority of white Americans who then indulged in racism, it espouses integration, not black separatism.

Martin R. Delany, as black of complexion as Brown was white, was born free in Charles Town, near Harper's Ferry, in what is now West Virginia (abolitionist John Brown was hanged at Charles Town). Delany, at the age of nine, was taken by his mother to live in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, primarily because Chambersburg was “free.” At nineteen, a youth taking charge of his own life, he trudged on foot across the Allegheny ridge to Pittsburgh, where he spent his early manhood and married the half-Irish daughter of a son of the prosperous black entrepreneur “Daddy Ben” Richards. Restless and searching, Delany practiced as a physician and surgeon (adept at the cupping and bleeding still reputable in orthodox attempts at healing before the Civil War), published newspapers, studied medicine for a semester at Harvard (he was denied further matriculation because of his color), visited Africa, emigrated with his wife and children to Canada, returned with his family to the United States, received (near the end of the Civil War) a major's commission in the Union army, and spent almost all of the last twenty years of his life in South Carolina, far from the family he had managed before then to keep with him. He died, reunited with this family, in Wilberforce, Ohio.

Delany was one of the very few Negro leaders of his day who championed the Negro's return to Africa. In his The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States Politically Considered (1852), he emphasized the fatuity, as he conceived it, of the American Negro's failure to leave America and go back to Africa. Black pride was a sentiment about which Delany felt strongly and most positively. It is the sentiment that pervades his last book, Principia of Ethnology: The Origin of Races and Color with an Archeological Compendium of Ethiopian and Egyptian Civilization (1879). And it is the sentiment that colors, and dignifies, with the darkest of sable hues, the manly, well-featured, highly intelligent protagonist of Delany's only novel, Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859). Fittingly, in his every action this paragon of virtue in ebony exemplifies not simply black pride but also black leadership of the most enlightened and sincerest (hence, militant and separatist) kind.

In the beginning of the novel, Blake is introduced as the slave Henry Holland who, when his slave “wife” is sold away from him to Cuba, takes unauthorized leave of his master, whom he hates monumentally, and travels through the South organizing a secret network of blacks sworn to participate, given the proper summons, in a general insurrection of America's slaves. Next he goes to Cuba, resumes his true identity as Blake, recovers and legally marries his “wife.” He is, incidentally, a native Cuban—named, in Spanish, Carolus Henrico Blacus—and a cousin to the black Cuban poet and patriot, Placido. Blake's story, as given in his novel (some six chapters of which are not extant), concludes with Blake, a true heroic slave, deeply involved in the capacity of commander-in-chief with another secret network of blacks sworn to the overthrow of slavery, albeit not in America, but in Cuba.

As Clotel speaks for integration, so Blake advocates black separatism. Also, only David Walker's Appeal (1829) antedates Blake as a fiery expression of black militancy. Delany had reacted with resolution and great courage to an action of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania which, in 1838, declared that Negroes could not be citizens of the state. He made, in the very next year, an excursion into the South as far as Texas prospecting for land that Negroes could settle on terms amenable to his concepts of their humanity. This excursion, to some extent, underlies Blake. It did not make Blake less American than Clotel. After all, the same American environment conditioned similarly both Delany and Brown. But it did make Blake, of the two novels, much the more political. For Delany, a combative pragmatist, was constitutionally disinclined to accept, as did Brown and other Garrisonians, any hypothesis that American slavery could be demolished by moral suasion. However love might affect men, in Delany's view the lust for power tended always to exercise on human behavior a stronger influence. And so Blake is not only about right and wrong. It is also about power and powerlessness, only one of which, Delany obviously believed, could ever, for minorities, be right.