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CHAPTER FOUR Domestic Literature and the Antislavery Household At a time, alas! when every thing displeased me; when every object was disgusting ; when my sufferings had destroyed all the energy and vigour of my soul; when grief had shut from my streaming eyes the beauties of nature ; when frequent disappointments had bowed my soul, and rendered the whole universe a dreary tomb; when prejudice had barred the door of every honourable employment against me, and slander too held up her hideous finger; when I wished that I had not been born, or that I could retire from a world of wrongs, and end my days far from the white man’s scorn; the kind attentions of a woman, were capable of conveying a secret charm, a silent consolation to my mind. Oh! nothing can render the bowers of retirement so serene and comfortable, or can so sweetly soften all our woes, as a conviction that woman is not indifferent to our fate. —”Female Tenderness,” Freedom’s Journal (1827) Long married to a successful caterer and blessed with three children, Solomon Northup could not wait to leave behind Bayou Boeuf, Louisiana, the scene of his twelve-year captivity in slavery, and return to the “happy and prosperous life” he had once led as a farmer, carpenter, fiddler, and family man in Upstate New York. In the closing paragraphs of his 1853 narrative, Twelve Years a Slave, Northup described the moment he, his wife, and two of his children were reunited. As he entered their “comfortable cottage” in Saratoga Springs, his younger daughter, Margaret, only seven years old at the time of his kidnapping , failed to recognize him. For his part, Northup was stunned by the change in Margaret’s appearance, for the “little prattling girl” he remembered was now “grown to womanhood—was married, with a bright-eyed boy standing by her side.” Then Northup learned that “not forgetful of his enslaved, unfortunate [82] Chapter Four grand-father, she had named the child Solomon Northup Staunton.” Next, Northup ’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth, entered the room, and his wife, Anne, came running from the hotel in which she worked. They embraced him, “and with tears flowing down their cheeks, hung upon [Northup’s] neck.” Solomon and Anne’s youngest son, Alonzo, was not present for the reunion, for he had traveled to the boomtowns of western New York in hopes of earning enough money to redeem his father from slavery. Still, the scene ends with domestic tranquility restored, with family members reunited and “the household gathered round the fire, that sent out its warm, and crackling comfort through the room.” Northup’s decision to end his slave narrative with this family tableau was not inconsequential, for descriptions of domestic space and tropes of familial relationships had long held extraordinary political significance in the United States. During the revolutionary era, for example, American spokesmen used the metaphor of family relationships—specifically those centering on parental obligations to children—to dramatize the North American colonies’ disintegrating relationship with imperial Britain. Immediately after the establishment of the republic, political commentators used the example of companionate marriage to evoke the bonds that united the states for mutual happiness and the common good. These familial tropes would continue to be invoked to explain an array of political developments and debates in the nineteenth century, even providing one of the most enduring interpretations of the Civil War: brother against brother. With respect to antislavery politics, however, the connection between domestic discourse and political ideology became even more pronounced. And as Chris Dixon has argued, “Radical abolitionism was premised on the interdependence between domestic life and the outside world.” In fact, as historian Mary Ryan demonstrates in her analysis of antebellum domestic literature, “the abolitionist polemicists of the 1830s . . . first invested the question of slavery with domestic sentiments.” And by the 1850s, the abolitionist critique of slavery had become so thoroughly intertwined with domestic discourse that the premier abolitionist novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was itself a work of domestic fiction. For African Americans such as Northup, home and family held even more personal political significance. Free blacks needed only to contrast their situation with that of their brothers and sisters in the South to recall that the right to have one’s marriage protected by law was a privilege millions of African Americans did not share. And this knowledge shaped northern blacks’ perceptions of their privileges as free men and women as well as their critique of slavery...

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