Race, Romance, and Rebellion: Literatures of the Americas in the Nineteenth Century

Conclusion

Conclusion Un petit blanc, que j’aime, En ces lieux est venu. Oui oui c’est lui meme! C’est lui! je l’ai vue! Petit blanc! mon bon frère! Ha! ha! petit blanc si doux! —Lydia Maria Child, Romance of the Republic After the Civil War, Lydia Maria Child attempted to convert the genre of tragedy—the tragic mulatta story that she helped shape in her short story “The Quadroons”—into a historical romance that resolved the problems of slavery. But as Frances Harper’s Minnie’s Sacrifice clearly articulates, the romantic ideals of racial and gender equality that inspired Julia Collins’s Reconstruction optimism or Elizabeth Livermore’s millennial Christian republicanism had little currency in a decade when the Ku Klux Klan formed, former abolitionists and suffragists went at one another’s throats, and the nation reeled from the violence and destruction of a catastrophic war. There was little to romanticize about rebels, and, for more and more white writers and historians , the memory of the Haitian Revolution would become an object lesson in the consequences of civil war and the dangers of racial equality. Perhaps what ushered the United States into the modern era—and marked the demise of American romanticism’s quest for freedom—was the relative abandonment of antiracist work by white reformers. Elizabeth Cady Stanton invoked the myth of the black rapist; her cousin Gerrit Smith (who bankrolled a colony for John Brown and a community of free blacks in Upstate New York in the 1840s) recapitulated; and journalistic realism took the place of romantic idealism as a literary form. For this reason, the insidious racist images that romance and rebellion had challenged during the era of reform continued to evolve and thrive in a newly redefined white space. The similarities between the 1860s and the second decade of the twenty-first century, furthermore, are eerie. Not unlike the infamous 158 Conclusion New Yorker cover entitled America’s Worst Nightmare, representations of Abraham Lincoln from the 1860s cast the president as an insurgent , an Islamic sympathizer, and a secret conspirator against the most “sacred” tenets of democracy. For example, a Confederate etching that was first printed in 1861 (and republished as late as 1890 in Cosmopolitan ) features Lincoln in his office in stocking feet, one of which rests on the Constitution. The artwork surrounding him includes a portrait of “Ossawatomie” Brown and a landscape of “St. Domingo” that depicts naked Haitians sacrificing infants. Entitled Writing the Emancipation Proclamation, this visual image places the perceived race radicalism of the Civil War in an insurgent and international context. Several images in the same series depict black Union soldiers kidnapping and assaulting southern white women. These reactionary caricatures provide a dramatic counterpoint to the way that radical abolitionists imagined the Haitian Revolution, cross-racial coalitions, and Christian republicanism as symbols that could shape a postslavery United States culture of universal emancipation.1 By the 1860s, the romantic hero in Anglo-American fiction could no longer be a race rebel or, by any means, a woman. As J. Michael Dash has pointed out, Lydia Maria Child’s The Freedman’s Book (1865) presented an extremely pacifist version of Toussaint Louverture (Haiti and the United States 9). Child claims his “harshest action” was to execute his own nephew, General Moyse, for slaughtering whites (Freedmen ’s 55). More importantly, Toussaint “knew that the freedom of his race depended on their good behavior after they were emancipated” (56). This post-Emancipation pedagogy of passivity reemerges in 1867. Child’s Romance of the Republic subtly invokes the gothic and dark memories of the Haitian Revolution, but quells those dark images of the past with the intervention of benevolent and reliable white heroes. The story begins in the 1840s in New Orleans and seems to whisper a didactic message. The epigraph of this conclusion, “Un petit blanc, que j’aime,” is a song that the almost-tragic mulatta Flora sings to a suitor. It subtly and perhaps even inadvertently reminds the reader of the dangers of integrating the Caribbean past into the historical romance of North and South. Described by the novel’s hero, Alfred King, as a song from the “French West Indies” about a “young negress” who falls in love with a white man, the fact that this white man is a “petit blanc” makes the song far more ominous (31). Flora, an “octoroon” and technically a “negress” herself, sings the song in a manner described as “roguish” and “mercurial...