“Her Little Maid Mandy”: The Abolitionist Slave Owner and the Rhetoric of Affection in the Life and Early Fiction of E. D. E. N. Southworth

This essay explores newly discovered evidence that novelist E.D.E.N Southworth, whose career began as a contributor to the anti-slavery National Era, was a slave-owner during the years she was publishing abolitionist fiction in the Era. The awareness of this status both complicates and clarifies our understanding of Southworth's early fiction, which has been labeled both abolitionist and pro-slavery apologism. The essay explores Southworth's vacillating thinking on slave-owning and recovers her predilection for an affectionate view of the master-slave relationship even as her fiction demonstrates the danger of this view. The concluding section of the essay explores evidence, emerging from an 1854 public dispute between Southworth over the ownership of a slave, that Southworth learned the lesson of her own fiction as she set aside sentimental views of slave-owning and manumitted her slaves.