Lucinda MacKethan, Plantation Romances and Slave Narratives: Symbiotic Genres

Three of the most important plantation novels are John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn, first published in 1832 and then republished with a few revisions in 1851; William Gilmore Simms's Woodcraft, published in 1852, and Caroline Lee Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854). All of these novels were written (or revised) within the shadow of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and they can be read as constituting a kind of literary effort at damage control. Yet I would argue that they were doing more than simply building the case for the South as a place "different from" the North. They were also addressing, in a surprisingly resistant way, conditions of upheaval within the South that bear some scrutiny.

I will mention only one intriguing feature of the plantation genre as these three primary examples exemplify it – they all deal centrally with Revolution. Woodcraft, indeed, is set in the period of the Revolutionary War. Its opening scene is also revolutionary in a gendered way: it shows us the remarkable widow, Mrs. Eveleigh, taking on a British naval officer in his cabin in order to demand the return of her slaves, who to her mind are illegally confiscated property. Simms’s setting in the South Carolina countryside, visualized as ravaged by the British forces, is also instructive for an 1850s southern audience. Simms might have been thinking about the 1850s South as coming to grips with itself as a newly constituted revolutionary force, yet he is also expressing a society facing internal and potentially devastating upheaval. It is also notable that his woman character, Mrs. Eveleigh, is the one who has the upper hand throughout the novel, and not as a southern belle but as a savvy, bold, and even cynical central player with no interest in marriage or feminine frills. Why would Simms, in a novel that was taking on Uncle Tom’s Cabin's social criticism of the slaveholding South, make the hero of his southern allegory a proudly independent woman who is empowered to seize the reins of a society in the throes of both externally imposed and internally fraught upheaval? Woodcraft is a novel that is much clearer in expressing the South’s anxiety about power and order than in promoting the South's confidence in its "peculiar institution." And Swallow Barn, as well as The Planter’s Northern Bride, exhibits the same tendency, through similar scenes of troubling revolution. Near its end, Swallow Barn tells the story of the rebellious slave Ned. After a long period of incorrigible behavior, he finally becomes a loyal defender of his owners’ interests, but his early resistance raises a troubling specter – the master-slave relationship was not as uniformly idyllic as the slave owners claimed. The Planter’s Northern Bride dramatizes much more extensively an even darker threat of rebellion. The novel attempts to prove the courage and necessary mastery of its southern planter hero by having him quell an uprising orchestrated by discontented slaves supported by naive abolitionists. All three of these novels reflect, in their odd portrayals of internal upheaval, the vision of a deeply troubled southern planter of an earlier era, Thomas Jefferson. As he looked at his region’s system of manners, he admitted, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just . . . that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events . . . The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest." The word "Revolution," sacred to Jefferson’s thinking in one respect, in this statement becomes a terrible threat. The context of Jefferson’s remarks make it clear that the "country" he is thinking about is his own Virginia, that he is not thinking about a conflict involving outside forces – either the British or the American North, but he is thinking about internal rebellion, including foremost the threat of justifiable slave rebellion, as a perhaps foreordained "revolution of the wheel of fortune" for his region, tragically dependent as he believed it to be on "the existence of slavery among us."