Race and the American Romantics (review)

BOOK REVIEWS187 1854-1890, or standard accounts of Sheridan's winter campaign against the Indians. Richard N. Ellis University of New Mexico Race and the American Romantics. Edited by Vincent Freimarck and Bernard Rosenthal. (New York: Schocken Books, 1971. Pp. xi, 328. $12.50.) In the preface to their anthology, Messers Freimarck and Rosenthal have attempted "to define the place of slavery and race in American romantic imagination." Their thesis, enunciated in a twenty-one page introduction to the selections, is that most of the romantic writers who flourished in prc-Civil War America evinced no passionate antipathy to slavery, shared the anti-Negro prejudices of their peers, and at worst were out and out "racists." The passages from articles, essays, fiction, letters, and speeches that make up the volume have less to do with the role of the Negro in the romantic imagination than they do with the attitudes of Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman , Bryant, and Lowell toward slavery and the Black race. That these writers, Whitticr excepted, shared the pervasive belief of Negro inferiority comes as no surprise to any one familiar with their writing. The most authoritative "scientific" opinion of their day sustained them. Indeed, the editors might have strengthened their case against at least two of the romantic culprits, Hawthorne and Whitman , by extracting damaging excerpts from their letters. They might have pointed out as well that devoted anti-slavery fighters like Theodore Parker displayed on occasion a distinct "colorophobia" and that even Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whom they single out as one of the writers "who might pass muster as an activist and idealist without guile or racism," regarded many of his Black soldiers as children and referred to them as "dusky darlings." In general, the selections are apposite and suggestive. Lowell's antislavery papers written during his radical youth deserve wider attention than they have received. Today's readers, alert to racial nuances, may be taken aback by the complacency and insensitiveness with which our classical writers (most notably Whitman) disposed of the Negro problem or placed decorum and constitutional principles above human rights. But the anthology is bound to be misleading if only because each writer's views on race are never projected against the total context of his life and work. One might cavil about a few of the editors' judgments (surely Emerson between 1860 and 1865 did "commit himself" to "public activity"), but on the whole their commentary is accurate and well-balanced. The only serious blunder that mars the book is their ascribing to Poe a review of James K. Paulding's Shvery in the United States (1836) and another anonymous pro-slavery work. This fierce anti-abolitionist at- 188CIVIL WAR HISTORY tack—the first selection in the anthology—was not written by Poe (as Sidney Kaplan pointed out a few years ago) but by Judge Nathaniel Beverly Tucker. Daniel Aaron Smith College The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material . By Henry Irving Tragle, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971. Pp. 489. $15.00.) There is by now a substantial body of literature on the uprising of slaves led by Nat Turner in Tidewater Virginia in 1831. The work by Mr. Tragle—a native of that area—is the fullest available; it reflects prolonged and scrupulous effort. In addition to a generous selection of photographs—including all known representations of Nat Turner, himself—the volume contains good maps. The text contains 150 pages of selections from contemporary southern and northern newspapers; the verbatim records of the trials of the rebels; the diary and correspondence of Governor John Floyd in the months just preceding, during and following the outbreak ; fairly full selections from accounts published by later commentators ; texts of interviews held by Mr. Tragle with Black people now living in the locale of the uprising (and retaining keen folk memories thereof); significant official documents, as the governor's reward proclamation , the auditor's accounts for slaves executed or banished—the masters being compensated by the State—from 1819 through 1831; and a good 21-page bibliographical essay. Mr. Traglc's labors convinced him of the shoddy history in William Styron's best-selling historical...