Racial Stereotypes in Antislavery Fiction

Abstract

N THEIR IMPASSIONED DEFENSE of the peculiar institution, proslavery writers freely exploited racist ideas. Slavery was morally justifiable, they argued, because Negroes were essentially different. They were inherently childish and easily contented, and their only wish was for a good song or a gay dance or a hearty laugh. They had no desire for freedom and would be ill-prepared, if they ever attained it, to deal with liberty's difficult responsibilities. Those who pretended otherwise, who would thrust an unwelcome freedom upon a backward race and take the slave from the watchful supervision of his paternal master-such men did not understand the nature of Negroes. Men in antebellum America and many historians since have made the easy mistake of assigning to those who opposed slavery whatever characteristics, ideals, and beliefs were required to make them exactly opposite to their opponents. It makes a neater package if enemies can be opposites; then no matter how profound or superficial the differences, this law of opposition holds steady. If slave-owners were visualized as patrician gentlemen who loved and understood Negroes, then abolitionists must be seen as irresponsible agitators. If slave-owners were regarded as power-mad tyrants, then abolitionists had to be selfless idealists dedicated to freedom. And-to come to the central question of this article-if proslavery advocates believed Negroes to be racially in. ferior and if they portrayed them that way, then, the antislavery spokesmen must have believed only in human equality and the value of every man regardless of the color of his skin. Unfortunately, the facts cannot be so neatly packaged. At least those antislavery writers who chose to enlist support for slaves through fiction manipulated the very same stereotypes employed by their opposition. Those who attacked slavery in fiction portrayed the races in precisely the same terms as those who defended it.