Lost Writings of Howard Weeden as "Flake White." (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 146 exhibited a keen understanding of the nation’s money markets. Yet in the end, the fact that most traders revealed modern business acumen hardly proves that the late antebellum South functioned as a capitalist society. Northern businessmen, Deyle observes, transformed their region into an industrial, free labor society, while southern traders, “despite their best efforts at market development, ended up making human property the most valuable form of capital investment in the South” (p. 141). Equally revelatory are Deyle’s last chapters, which examine how northern abolitionists used the traffic to attack slavery as a domestic institution and how slaves themselves—the forgotten abolitionists in far too many studies—resisted the trade. Since abolitionists understood the extent to which unfree labor was protected on the state level, they focused on the area where the federal government held undisputed and unshared legal authority: interstate commerce. New York judge William Jay, son of the nation’s first chief justice, observed that it was the commerce clause that allowed Congress to close the Atlantic trade in 1808, establishing the precedent for halting the traffic in humans between Washington and New Orleans. Without a fresh supply of black labor for the fields of the frontier South, the very existence of slavery in Texas (or the lands seized from Mexico) was threatened. Deyle’s study concludes with two detailed appendices that chart the number of slaves sold within a historiographical context. Scholars are aware of some aspects of Deyle’s account, but never have all the pieces been pulled together in such a way. As a result, Carry Me Back may well become that rarest of all things in the modern publishing world: the definitive study. Writers will no doubt find some obscure aspect of the trade to write about, but it is hard to imagine that any scholar will soon undertake another major account of the traffic after the publication of this study. DOUGLAS R. EGERTON Le Moyne College Lost Writings of Howard Weeden as “Flake White.” Edited by Sarah Huff Fisk and Linda Wright Riley. Huntsville: Big Spring Press, 2005. xiv, 216 pp. $22.95. ISBN 0-9765836-0-7. This book, written for the general reader, is a collection of religious essays , stories, and poems by the Huntsville artist and writer Maria Howard Weeden (1846–1905). Weeden achieved a measure of fame with the publication of four volumes of poetry between 1898 and 1904, written in A P R I L 2 0 0 7 147 “Negro dialect” and featuring sensitively rendered portraits of former slaves. The contents of Lost Writings date from an earlier period. They were originally published in various newspapers between 1866 and 1896, and were “lost” because Weeden wrote them under the pseudonym of Flake White. The editors, both warm admirers of Weeden, have combed the pages of the Louisville Christian Observer and several Huntsville newspapers to retrieve these pieces and present them to their readers as small gems of artistic and religious inspiration. The works of Flake White have a quiet appeal. Her unpretentious but evocative style resembles her delicate artwork, some of which has been reproduced in this volume. Although well educated, she wrote with a simplicity that made her essays and stories accessible even to children. None of the articles in this large-print book exceeds seven pages. As the editors point out, however, the deliberate naïveté of Weeden’s essays cloaks some trenchant cultural criticism. For example, the article entitled “Rev. Sam Jones at Huntsville,” written as a letter to a doctor of divinity, is an apologia for popular revivalism. “The world always credits a miraculous power to such men” as Jones, Weeden writes. “There is a conspicuous absence of contemporary fashions and flavor of learning” (p. 34). The themes Weeden treats will be familiar to students of domestic ideology : the beauty and spirituality of nature, the goodness of home and motherhood, the hidden power of humble people, the need for self-denial , the mysterious workings of providence. Weeden’s emphasis differs, however, from many writers of domestic fiction. Physically delicate, she...