Loyal Subjects: Bonds of Nation, Race, and Allegiance in Nineteenth-Century America

Chapter 4: Loyalty’s Slaves

4 / Loyalty’s Slaves A cartoon published in the Chicago Inter-Ocean on May 30, 1898, shows two soldiers on a pedestal engraved in bold black letters with the word “loyalty” (fig. 6). The man on the left carries a U.S.A. ’61 canteen, identifying him as a Union veteran; his companion, mounting the pedestal, has a C.S.A. ’61 canteen and wears the Confederate’s slouch hat. Both men are draped in the national flag as they stare off at a distant fire, Cuba in flames. “One decoration will do for both this year,” its caption asserts, underscoring the cartoon’s message that the Spanish-American War finalized the reconciliation of North and South. Southern newspapers, like the Atlanta Constitution, proudly proclaimed that former Confederates soldiers, now “profoundly loyal to the stars and stripes,” “are eager to exhibit their fidelity upon the field of battle.”1 “The forces of fraternity have culminated in the Spanish-American war,” Southern reformer Belle Kearny enthused in her 1900 memoir.2 Northerners celebrated as well, flocking to revivals of plays like Shenandoah, which lauded the martial prowess of the American soldier.3 To the contemporary viewer, the cartoon soldiers might summon no specific connotations. Fin-de-siècle Americans, however, would have quickly recognized them as modeled on a common type of Civil War monument. A testament to the valor of the enlisted man, sculptures of average soldiers celebrated “the American citizen-soldier as a superior native, white ‘type’ of manhood,” Kirk Savage explains. While people across the nation celebrated this “white ‘type’” of loyalty, a handful of 138 / loyalty’s slaves organizations were working to memorialize another kind of loyalty, also associated with the Civil War. In 1896, Confederate veteran Samuel White provided the money to erect a simple monument—a small obelisk with two relief panels—in Fort Mill, South Carolina. It sought “to teach generations yet unborn that though black in skin, and servile in station, there existed between the negro and the master a bond of love broken only by death.” An inscription on the monument explains that it was “dedicated to the faithful slaves who, loyal to a sacred trust, toiled for the support of the army, with matchless devotion, and with sterling fidelity guarded our defenseless homes, women, and children, during the struggle for the principles of our ‘Confederate States of America.’” Rather than national allegiance, the loyalty lauded by the Fort Mill monument is domestic, a “bond of love” located on the plantation. Whereas standing soldier monuments were common in the late nineteenth century , memorials to loyal slaves were not—although not for lack of planning . Prohibitive costs prevented the realization of most of the projects, and, because these memorials were “really about sentiment not slavery,” it was easy enough for planners to indulge their nostalgic sentimentality about the peculiar institution in other, less expensive ways.4 A popular figure 6. Memorial Day, 1989, from Cartoons of the War of 1989 with Spain from Leading Foreign and American Papers (Chicago: Belford, Middlebrook, 1898). loyalty’s slaves / 139 outlet for these feelings was provided by the plantation narrative, which recalled the gentility of the Old South, often through the fond memories of an ex-slave who recalled the “bond[s] of love” that had inspired his or her ceaseless fidelity to his or her former owner.5 These two monuments—one imaginary, one actual—concisely indicate the complicated and sometimes contradictory assumptions about memory and loyalty operative at the end of the nineteenth century. If it is difficult at the close of The Bostonians to determine whether Basil Ransom is taking Verena Tarrant captive or rescuing her from a dangerous captivity, it is equally difficult to understand how to correlate the meanings of loyalty—one an affiliation purportedly predicated on commitment to a set of political ideals, the other a premodern attachment to an individual person—represented by the two monuments. But as George Fletcher points out, “inequality reigns” in the “realm of loyalty.”6 The next two chapters examine the problems generated by these divergent and unequal understandings of loyalty, revisit the relationship between sympathy and loyalty, and explore the implications of the correlated reconstruction of these important concepts at the end of the nineteenth century. The questions that motivate this chapter are derived from thinking about the Fort Mill monument. Why did the loyal slave become a nationally important figure thirty...