Race, Politics, and Nation in Albion W. Tourgée's American Historical Novels Series: The Example of Hot Plowshares

Abstract

In 1883, Albion W. Tourgée, the author of the bestselling novel A Fool's Errand (1879), published Hot Plowshares, a novel about the rise of antislavery activity in New York State from 1848 to the outbreak of the Civil War. His New York publisher—Fords, Howard, & Hulbert—presented the novel as part of “Tourgée's American Historical Novels” series, placing the novel's title beneath the name of the series on both the cover and spine. In advertisements in the back pages of Tourgée subsequent books, both fiction and nonfiction, the publisher highlighted the series as “The Story of an Epoch,” seven novels in total with the publication of Black Ice in 1885. The ad on the back pages of Tourgée's Murvale Eastman: Christian Socialist (1891), for instance, refers to the series as “A Word-Painting of the Spirit of Our Age,” and describes it as “an extraordinary line of Novels, graphically presenting the life of a generation, from the rise of the Anti-Slavery sentiment (1848), through the Rebellion (1861–1865), to the end of the Reconstruction Era (1876), and on into the days of the New South and its elements of hope.” For those who wished to read the series in the chronological order of its unfolding (and it's worth noting that unlike James Fenimore Cooper's five-volume Leatherstocking series there are no recurring characters), the publisher placed the novels in the following order: Hot Plowshares (1883), Figs and Thistles (1879), A Royal Gentleman (1880, but first published as Toinette in 1874), A Fool's Errand (1879), Bricks Without Straw (1880), John Eax (1882, though Tourgée claimed to have written this novella during the 1870s), and Black Ice (1885), a novel that, despite Fords’ marketing strategy, Tourgée did not view as part of the series. Seeking readers from all regions of the country, Fords remarked that “of these seven volumes, the scenes of three are laid at the North and four at the South,—the mirror of life being thus held up to both sections, completing a full picture of American life.”1 The question I want to pursue in this essay is what that picture of American life is, and I will do that by focusing on Hot Plowshares.Hot Plowshares is an important novel, both in and of itself and for its role among Tourgée's American Historical Novels. It ambitiously uses fiction to tell the story of the rise of antislavery sentiment in the United States, and in crucial ways it defines Tourgée's series by coming last in terms of the publication of the six books that Tourgée regarded as constituting the whole but first in terms of historical chronology. In that respect, it could be understood as having a role similar to that of The Deerslayer (1841) in Cooper's Leatherstocking novels (1823–41). Like Hot Plowshares, The Deerslayer was the last in Cooper's series to be published and the first in terms of chronology. In both cases, these simultaneously concluding and introductory novels press readers to rethink the earlier published ones, for if read in chronological order, the last novel published as the chronologically first in a series offers the author's final thoughts on what the series is all about.2 Anyone interested in Tourgée's two most popular Reconstruction novels—A Fool's Errand and Bricks Without Straw—should consider reading them through the lens of the neglected Hot Plowshares.3Most of Tourgée's novels have short prefaces or none at all. But with Hot Plowshares Tourgée provided an extensive preface that conveys his thinking about the primacy of historical fiction over history and biography. “Fiction is the handmaid of Truth,” he announces at the outset. “Imagination is almost always the forerunning of fact. History gives only the outlines of the world's life.” There are political repercussions to such claims. Fiction, Tourgée says, not only “fills out the outlines History gives, and colors and completes its picture,” but it can also inspire more informed political action by enabling those on one side of an issue to better understand those on the other side. The failure of understanding between the North and South, Tourgée insists, made the Civil War inevitable, and now he worries over the present moment of sectional tensions in the wake of the failure of Reconstruction. As he explains, he wrote his “series of works” about U.S. history from 1848 to 1877 in order to bring northerners and southerners “to a juster comprehension of these distinct and contrasted civilizations.” He reminds his readers that he knows the North from having been born and raised in the Midwest, and he knows the South from his post-Civil War experiences in North Carolina as a political reformer and Reconstruction judge. For that reason he claims that his series of “historical novels” can authoritatively address both northern and southern perspectives on America's history through “a climacteric era.”4As for the American Historical Novels series itself, he announces that Hot Plowshares is “the last of the projected series,” and that in it he has a specific purpose in mind, which is to depict the antislavery movement in sectional terms “by tracing its growth and the influence of the sentiment upon contrasted characters.”5 Like his publisher, he puts the six novels of the series in the order in which they should be read chronologically and not in the order of their publication dates. At a time when Tourgée and other northern reformers were despairing at the failure of Reconstruction, he invites readers to immerse themselves in a long novel (over six hundred pages) about the pre-Civil War history of antislavery activity mainly in the North. The last novel published in the series therefore insists on the importance of antislavery to the Civil War and Reconstruction at a time when rituals of reconciliation between northern and southern whites risked losing sight of the predicament of the freedpeople.6Hot Plowshares begins in upstate New York's Mohawk Valley in 1848 and ends with a mention of John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, making it the only novel in the series that does not depict the Civil War or Reconstruction. It narrates the intersecting stories of two families who exemplify the nation as a “house divided”:7 the Kortrights, who are New Yorkers, and the Hargroves, who are North Carolinians but have recently purchased an estate near the Kortrights in New York's Mohawk Valley. There are no mysteries about the Kortrights: Harrison is the father, Mattie is the mother, and Martin is the twelve-year-old son at the novel's opening who eventually aligns himself with John Brown and the forces of antislavery. Working in a gothic mode, Tourgée provides a more enigmatic account of the shadowy Hargrove family. The father is Merwyn Hargrove, and his daughter, Hilda, around Martin's age, is described as “the brown-skinned, dark-eyed little girl.”8 Hargrove also has a number of Black servants, including the loyal Jason Unthank, who emerges as one of the novel's main characters. (His name suggests his fidelity; he does not have to be thanked.) Because Hilda's mother is dead (or simply absent), mystery surrounds the question of her racial identity. Is she Black or white? Mystery also surrounds the question of what this southern family is doing in New York in the first place.In an opening scene, the boy Martin rescues Hilda from runaway horses, and over the course of the novel the relationship between the two deepens. In terms of the conventional house-divided theme, the novel works with what had become by 1883 a fairly common trope of a marriage plot between a northerner and southerner.9 Can a marriage between Martin and Hilda bring the national house together? The idea of a house divided is also central to the Hargrove family itself. What is Hargove's relationship to his slaveholding family in the Carolinas? Is that a house divided? And crucial to the gothic plot: what are we to make of the Hargroves’ genealogical house, especially given the developing love interest between the apparently white Martin and the racially ambiguous Hilda? Is the novel addressing divided racial houses as well?Hot Plowshares is a powerful work that I deeply admire, but I will allow that the plotting of the circuitous Hargrove family history can be confusing. Tourgée devotes a large portion of the novel to chronicling relatives, relatives of relatives, enslaved people, doomed romances in the South, and so on. My simplified version of the Hargrove family story goes as follows: Hargrove moved to New York because he came to detest slavery, but not for the reasons, say, of John Brown. For Hargrove, the problem with slavery is that it is bad for white people, sanctioning forms of power that, as Thomas Jefferson had warned in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), destroy moral character. He thus announces to Martin when the young man is courting Hilda (and considering joining Brown in Kansas): “The white race has suffered more from slavery than the colored people ever can” (270). Hargrove also believes that Blacks and whites “can never commingle” (271), which raises questions about how he views the developing romance between Martin and Hilda if Hilda indeed has Black blood. Hargrove believes that Blacks should be colonized to another country for the sake of white people. At the same time, we learn that he and Jason Unthank have been undertaking a series of guerrilla missions to North Carolina to free enslaved people on the extended family's plantations. Ironically, those Blacks who escape to New York end up working at Hargrove's estate as types of slaves: they are not paid, presumably because Hargrove believes that servantry is their “natural” place. One of those servants is a woman named Alida who is white to the eye, but apparently had earlier escaped from slavery. She acts oddly and seems mentally unhinged; she also believes that she is Hilda's mother.In short, the romance plot between the northerner Martin and southerner Hilda—both now based in upstate New York—comes with a host of complications, some of which Tourgée had addressed in earlier novels. Toinette, the first novel of the American Historical Novels series in terms of publication order, portrays sexual relations across the color line, providing a gothic history of white male enslavers sexually abusing enslaved Black women. In that novel, the Black character Belle, Toinette's mother, kills her former master, with whom she'd had sexual relations. She then hides out, conceives of herself as “the ghost, the terrible ghost” of the plantation, and years later nearly kills her daughter when she, too, becomes sexually involved with her white master.10 The ghost-like Belle, who has been maddened by her desire for revenge, anticipates the seemingly crazed Alida in Hot Plowshares. Those reading the earlier-published Toinette after Hot Plowshares would be even more inclined to wonder about Belle's mental stability, as opposed, say, to interpreting her as a politicized rebel. In A Fool's Errand, Tourgée's most popular novel (Karcher estimates a readership of approximately six hundred thousand), the narrator conveys his sympathies for the white southerners who describe themselves as the “victims” of Radical Reconstruction, presenting them as motivated less by outright racism than by the defense of caste.11 That sense of white victimhood is underscored by reading Hargrove's remarks in the chronologically first novel, Hot Plowshares. In Bricks Without Straw, published shortly after Fool's, Tourgée offers a compelling picture of Black agency during the Reconstruction period, but in that novel, as in Fool's, the focus moves from racial and political conflicts to a marriage plot involving a white northern woman and white southern man. Both novels present such marriages as offering the metaphorical promise of white racial unification across the two sections. Hot Plowshares revises that plot by having a northern white man court a southern woman he assumes to be white, but the effect, at least on the surface, seems to be the same: moving the focus from Black people to whites and in that way appearing to uphold racial hierarchies.All this said, given the ambiguities surrounding both Alida and Hilda, Hot Plowshares also complicates questions of race, Black vengeance, and sectional unification through marriage, and in that respect further complicates the novels that follow chronologically in the series. I will return to the question of how this last published novel in his American Historical Novels series to some extent revises the overall series, but suffice it to say that the novels addressing slavery—Figs and Thistles addresses monopoly capitalism and will not figure in this discussion—share similar concerns about the politics of section and race, and that reading Hot Plowshares as the chronologically first in the series can provide insights into how Tourgée in 1883 wanted his readers to respond to the earlier published novels.From the vantage point of 1883, Tourgée's decision to explore in Hot Plowshares the rise of antislavery sentiment in the United States and in New York State in particular had political resonance. Given what he and many others regarded as the failure of Reconstruction, he wanted to remind Americans that the Civil War was fought over slavery, and in that respect he felt it was of crucial importance to depict the history of antislavery, a history he tells mainly through the Kortright family. At the beginning of the novel, set in 1848, Harrison Kortright, like many northerners, stands opposed to the radical politics of the abolitionists. His anti-abolitionism changes after he harbors a woman who claims to be a fugitive from slavery, even if this woman, probably Alida, had already been manumitted from slavery by Hargrove. Tourgée remarks early in the novel that the “State of New York was really the theatre in which the first political battles of the Anti-Slavery movement were fought” (80). He depicts those battles not only in discussions between the Kortrights and Hargrove but also in essay-like chapters on key developments in the antislavery movement. Those chapters, with their sometimes potted history, help move the story forward to 1854, when the eighteen-year-old Martin, now in love with Hilda, proclaims he wants to fight with John Brown in Kansas. Although Hargrove discourages him from doing so, Martin remains loyal to Brown's antislavery mission for the rest of the novel.Hot Plowshares moves back and forth between the Kortright and Hargrove families, with the aim of providing a larger cross-sectional political history of how the rise of antislavery—both in the North and South—led the nation to the Civil War. The novel suggests that a complete understanding of the pre-Civil War period means attending to both the personal and the political. Martin's debate with Hargrove on fighting with John Brown leads to a chapter on the problems created by the Missouri Compromise. Conflicts both between and within the novel's two main families then lead to a chapter on the rise of the Republican Party and the emergence of Abraham Lincoln as the nation's most significant political leader. Lincoln, Tourgée writes in that chapter, “rose at once from obscurity” with the key proposition: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. . . . The American nation must be all free or all slave” (421). Tourgée then elaborates on Lincoln's famous metaphor in a way that helps us to understand why the house-divided metaphor speaks so well to the novel's New York setting. “‘Mason and Dixon's line’ was no longer the boundary of evil consequences resulting from slavery,” Tourgée writes. Instead, there was a new political reality, created by Lincoln, placing ideology over geography. The nation may well be a house divided in terms of slavery and freedom, but families, too, could be divided as individuals wrestled with the moral challenges of the time. As Tourgée remarks, “‘All free or all slave’ stood at the threshold of every Northern home, and compelled father, brother and son to decide upon the dread alternative before they crossed the lintel” (421–22). That is precisely the struggle Tourgée depicts in the Kortright and Hargrove families: the two Kortright men chose to embrace antislavery (their politics are not a simple matter of living in a particular section), while the Hargrove family divided on the matter of slavery. Tourgée works with Lincoln's metaphor of a house divided to shape the novel into something more complex than a sectional allegory, and for that reason (among others) Lincoln is the novel's spiritual hero. As the narrator exclaims over the emerging antislavery leader: “Offspring of the sadly smitten South; nursling of the favored North; giant of the great West—his life was the richest fruitage of the liberty he loved!” (428). In this formulation, the Civil War has to be understood as a liberty war and not, as Thomas Dixon and other white supremacists would later hold, a race war.But as the novel develops, some readers might wonder about just how different Tourgée is from Dixon,12 for when Tourgée resumes his account of the romance between Martin and Hilda, the novel's politics of liberty becomes complicated in disturbing ways. Basically, Tourgée shifts the focus from slavery and freedom to a house divided between Black and white, and when that happens the novel can appear to be championing notions of racial purity. But racial purity, as Tourgée makes clear in Toinette, the first novel published in the series, has nothing to do with the reality of race in the United States. As Tourgée, Charles Chesnutt, Frances Harper, and many other writers of the time point out, the U.S. nation has a large population of light-complected people capable of passing because of the long history of interracial sexual relations, including the white masters’ violation of enslaved women. I will be suggesting two ways of reading Hot Plowshare's culminating chapters on race and divided houses in relation to Tourgée's American Historical Novel series. But first we need to attend to Tourgée's plotting.Hot Plowshares builds to a crisis for Hilda, the daughter of the southerner moved to New York whose marital and sexual history remains unclear. We had been told earlier in the novel that Hilda's mother was dead, but her brown skin begs the question of whether her mother was an enslaved Black woman. Her father's position is that the two races “can never commingle” (271), even as the novel hints that Hargrove at one point “commingled” with Alida to produce Hilda. Then again, Hilda may be Hargrove's adopted Black stepdaughter, for we learn that his half-brother Eighmie fathered a daughter with one of his own enslaved Black women (perhaps Alida). It is all quite confusing! Questions about Hilda's racial identity and genealogy assume a special urgency when, in a surprising and abrupt moment late in the novel, Hargrove is killed in North Carolina while attempting to free enslaved Black people. Hilda is suddenly alone, unprotected by her father. She is then seemingly unmasked as a Black person.At the time of her father's death, Hilda is eighteen years old and attending a seminary school in Massachusetts, where she has been exposed to abolitionism and even witnessed John Brown delivering an antislavery speech. Immediately following the death of her father, an attorney representing the estate of Hargrove's half-brother emerges to claim that she's the daughter of Eighmie's Black paramour and therefore legally enslaved. Whatever the source of her brown skin, Hilda, for all of her budding abolitionism, now fears that she is “debased” (464). Long conceiving of herself as a white woman, she has a chilling nightmare in which she views a disembodied face somewhat like her own, and then realizes: “The face was black!” (468). The gothic alarm at her recognition of herself as a Black woman looks forward to the moment in Harper's Iola Leroy (1892) when Iola, in a northern white school, first confronts what she regards as the ghastly news of her Blackness. That novel moves toward an embrace of Black solidarity and Black mothers; by contrast, Hot Plowshares attempts to recuperate whiteness and in this way save Hilda from fugitive-slave hunters as well as from what she regards as the even greater horror of Blackness.Hilda's horror is exacerbated by her concern for Martin: how could she let the man she loves marry a Black woman? For that reason, she flees to Boston, and in a scene looking forward to the moment when the light-complected Rhoda Aldgate of W. D. Howells’ Imperative Duty (1891) learns that she is Black and aimlessly wanders Boston's streets, Hilda feels utterly dislocated as a Black woman. From Martin's point of view, the love of his life could not possibly be Black, for this staunch John Brown abolitionist seems to believe that a white man could never fall in love with a Black woman. When he arrives at Hilda's Boston school as her rescuer, he fights against both Hilda's possible kidnappers and the very notion that she might be Black.Martin is assisted in his fight by Jason Unthank, Hilda's father's still-loyal Black servant, who plays a key role here because he claims to know Hilda's genealogical history. Jason maintains that she was born in the West Indies to a white mother with dark eyes who was Italian, hence Hilda's olive skin. After the mother died when Hilda was still a young child, Jason recounts, Alida served as her nurse for several years and, as a result of the psychological stress of losing her own daughter, seemingly to slavery, claimed Hilda as her own. In telling this story, Jason seems unsympathetic to Alida, and instead works himself into a rage at the “lie” that Hilda is a Black fugitive slave. He exclaims: “My Miss Hilda a nigger! Bress her heart, dat she ain't” (513). Learning that Hilda has been hiding out from Martin for fear that he will be upset by her Blackness, Jason says he completely understands: “I see. She was afraid there might be jes’ one little drap of colored blood in her veins, an’ she'd rather die than see Mare Martin agin ef there was. I don't blame her nuther—I don't blame her” (517). Along the same lines, Martin keeps his faith in Hilda, “his love, his lily,” vowing to “prove her purity” (550).Soon enough, after Hilda returns to the school and reunites with Martin and Jason, documents are produced that support Jason's story and establish her as a white woman. Hilda experiences something like deliverance at this “happy” news, and even an abolitionist, who had urged her to challenge the concept of racial purity central to the slave system by affirming her Blackness, experiences “joy” (581) at the confirmation of her whiteness. The narrator declares near the end of the novel that Hilda “had come through the ordeal unscathed. The hot plowshares she had been called upon to tread beneath her feet had not scorched even the tender soles” (588). All of which leads us to ask whether Tourgée concluded his American Historical series with a white supremacist fiction. If so, what does that mean for the series?Let's first consider the possibility that in 1883 Tourgée had come to worry about racial mixing and amalgamation, which at least on the surface of Hilda's story would appear to be the case. If we were to follow Tourgée's advice and read the novels in their chronological order, the next novel in the series is Toinette (1876). That novel tells the story of a sexual relationship between a white man, Hunter, and an enslaved woman, Toinette, which can seem either a romantic relationship or rape (or something of both, given that Hunter and Toinette for most of the novel act under the constraints of slavery). It is a complex novel, and so rife with contradictions that Tourgée himself seemed to be confused about the significance of this interracial relationship. Thus he not only eventually changed the novel's title to A Royal Gentleman but also wrote three different endings, the first depicting Hunter and Toinette choosing to live together in Boston (with Toinette attempting to pass) and the next two depicting Toinette more aggressively choosing to live apart from her former lover/rapist because of his racism. Tourgée's decision to change the initial ending does at least two things: it makes Toinette more independent as a Black woman, whether or not she decides to pass, and it also rejects an ending that has a white man and Black woman living together.13 We could say that the revised endings of the second and third versions of Toinette, when read through the lens of the chronological initiator of the series, advocate keeping the races apart, at least in terms of sexual relations. A similar perspective comes across in the way both A Fool's Errand and Bricks Without Straw conclude with marriages between northern and southern whites, and in the way the odd novella John Eax also concludes with a marriage between whites, in this case between a southern white man who had turned against slavery and a southern belle who throughout the Civil War had supported slavery. In that sense, John Eax offers an oddly happy union between what had been a southern house divided. All of which is to say that the climactic scene in Hot Plowshares, with Hilda taking pleasure in her whiteness, would seem to push the entire series in the direction of the racial separatism advocated by Hargrove, at least when blood commingling is concerned.14But here's another and I think more likely possibility: In the spirit of William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853) and Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1893), Tourgée, by looking backward and forward in American history, depicts a nation that, in its obsession with race, is something like a madhouse. In that respect, we could read Hot Plowshares as a brilliantly implicating study of false consciousness that anticipates W. E. B. Du Bois’ elaboration of “double consciousness” in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Jason's self-loathing statements about Blackness provide one of many instances of how the dominant culture's notions of race can infiltrate the consciousness of Blacks. Hilda's nightmare about her Blackness anticipates the similarly disturbing dream in Chesnutt's The House behind the Cedars (1900), when the white Warwick imagines his beloved white-to-the-eye Rena as “a hideous black hag.”15 In both cases, Tourgée and Chesnutt, who became close friends,16 depict the psychopathology central to the desire for racial purity. Before she learns what appears to be the truth of her racial identity, Hilda experiences the shame of being viewed by Martin as Black, which again points to Du Boisian double-consciousness: the pain of imagining oneself being viewed from the perspective of white racists. Adding to the overall sense that we're reading about the U.S. nation as a kind of madhouse is the figure of Alida, who is literally mad but also pitiable and in some respects the novel's most sympathetic character. As with Jane Eyre's madwoman in the attic, Bertha Mason, the novel allows us to view the world from Alida's perspective, as she has legitimate grievances that lead her, in the manner of Bertha, to burn down buildings belonging to white people.17Arguably, one of the most impressive things about Hot Plowshares is its political contradictoriness and open-endedness about race and nation, which captures something essential about U.S. culture at the post-Reconstruction moment. At such a historical moment, when the promise of Reconstruction would seem to have been lost, revision remains essential, an act of the moral imagination. As I've been arguing, revision is central to Tourgée's series in a number of ways, starting with the fact that he revised the first novel published in the series three times. Bricks Without Straw revises A Royal Gentleman and A Fool's Errand by giving extra emphasis to the role of Black activism. Hot Plowshares revises and concludes the series in multiple and sometimes uncertain ways. But if we read the novel as about the nation's irrational and paranoiac racial politics, Hot Plowshares guides us to be much more sympathetic to Toinette's predicament in all versions of that novel; it presses us to see the marriages between white characters at the end of A Fool's Errand, Bricks Without Straw, and John Eax as exactly what one could expect from whites obsessed with whiteness; and it helps us better understand Tourgée's moral and political decision in the early 1890s to serve as the lead counsel for the light-complected Homer Plessy in his fight against Louisiana's segregationist “separate but equal” laws. Tourgée lost that battle when the Supreme Court ruled against Plessy in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, but reading Hot Plowshares in the way I'm suggesting, as a novel about the politics of racial consciousness, helps us to see a writer and activist committed to racial egalitarianism.18 Nevertheless, Tourgée was a white man of the late-nineteenth century who may have been anxious or paternalistic about race; such tensions and contradictoriness also inform Hot Plowshares and are part of the reason why the novel is such a challenging work.19Still, the essential point about Hot Plowshares is that as the final novel published in the series but its chronological beginning, Tourgée foregrounds the importance of antislavery to U.S. history from 1848 to 1877, which to a significant extent makes all of the novels that follow chronologically about the consequences of the battle between proslavery and antislavery forces. When all is said and done, Hot Plowshares and thus the series as a whole emphasizes an essential fact in 1883: that the Civil War was fought, not in the abstract name of states’ rights, but because of the history of slavery in the United States. In that regard, it is useful to see how Tourgée revises the novel's key metaphor—the biblical idea of beating swords into plowshares—near the end of the novel. He first invokes the metaphor with respect to Hilda's survival of the “hot plowshares” of her racial ordeal. Tourgée uses the phrase one more time in the novel's penultimate sentence: “The nation faces the ordeal the Past has prepared. HOT PLOWSHARES lie along her path and she is led blindfold and barefoot to the trial. The ages wait to sit in judgment!” (610). The stakes have risen considerably from the personal, with “hot plowshares” now referring to national struggles that continue into 1883. The swords of war remain “hot.” Something has gone wrong because of the racial thinking depicted in the novel. Future ages will offer their judgment of a nation that has failed to follow through on the spirit of the antislavery struggle, the sacrifices of the Civil War, and the promise of Reconstruction. At least that would appear to be the thrust of Tourgée's decision to conclude his American Historical Novel series with a novel that puts antislavery at its very center.