Harriet Martineau's Black Hero and the American Antislavery Movement

Harriet Martineau's Black Hero and the American Antislavery MovementAuthor(s): Susan BelascoSource: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Sep., 2000), pp. 157-194Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2903113 .

Accessed: 13/06/2014 07:22

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toNineteenth-Century Literature.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Fri, 13 Jun 2014 07:22:37 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2903113?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Harriet Martineau's Black Hero and the American Antislavery Movement SUSAN BELASCO

the middle of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom Cabin (1852), Henrique

St. Clair, the young son of a slave owner, delivers a vicious beating to his slave Dodo and, moments later, threatens Uncle Tom with the same. This incident sparks a debate between Alfred and Augustine St. Clair about the effects of slavery on society. Alfred, whose name conjures up his proud Anglo-Saxon origins, dismisses Augustine's suggestion that the slaves may revolt and overthrow their tyrannical masters, while Augustine contends that just as the French Revolution coincided with slave rebellions in the West Indies, so current revolutions in countries such as Hungary and Italy could well influence rebellions among American slaves. He taunts Alfred with a reminder of the highly successful 1791 slave rebellion in Haiti that all but destroyed the white master class. Alfred interrupts Augustine by exclaim- ing, "as if we hadn't had enough of that abominable, contempt- ible Hayti!" Contemporary readers of Uncle Tom s Cabin would have immediately understood this reference and its implications. In fact, the disagreement between the brothers is inten-

Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 55, No. 2, pp. 157-194. ISSN: 0891-9356. ? 2000 by The Regents of the University of California/Society. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California

PressJournals Division, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.

157



158 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

sified because of the influential role that the Haitian rebellion and its hero, Toussaint L'Ouverture, played in the United States in the minds of Northerners and Southerners alike. To Alfred a black hero was an unthinkable possibility, and he shouts to his brother: "The Anglo Saxon is the dominant race of the world, and is to be so."'

To Northern abolitionists Toussaint was a hero, a man who was just, noble, and capable of great leadership. To South- ern slaveholders, however, he was a rebel who embodied their worst fears, since he had been involved in the bloody uprising that killed hundreds of slaveholders in what had been a firmly supervised French colony. Following the unsuccessful rebellions in the South led by Denmark Vesey in 182 2 and Nat Tur- ner in 1831, white Southerners lived in constant fear of uprisings by slaves and passed a series of laws and legislation to deal with the potential problem.

Although the actual number of slave rebellions in the American South was quite small during the 183os and 1840s, rumors of rebellions abounded, and fears were high.2 The figure of Toussaint was a terrifying reminder of what might hap- pen if a slave rebellion were to succeed. In 1802 Wordsworth had affirmed in his sonnet "To Toussaint L'Ouverture": "Thou hast left behind / Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies; / There's not a breathing of the common wind / That will forget thee; thou hast great allies."3 It was these very "Pow- ers" and "great allies" that slaveholders, like the fictional Alfred St. Clair, feared and that the novelist Stowe celebrated. Tous- saint L'Ouverture- the black leader who rose from slavery, re- stored economic stability to his country, and created the first black republic in the new world-represented to slaveholders a fearful prospect of black power, while to abolitionists he represented evidence of the intellectual and moral potential of freed slaves.

1 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, ed. Elizabeth Ammons (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), p. 234.

2 See Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 2d ed. (New York: Interna- tional Publishers, 1969), pp. 3-4, 18, 368.

3 Wordsworth, "To Toussaint L'Ouverture," in "Poems, in Two Volumes, "and Other Po- ems, i800-M807, ed.Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983), p. i6i; 11. 9-12.



HARRIET MARTINEAU S BLACK HERO 159

What were the primary sources of information available in mid-nineteenth-century America about the history of Haiti, the slave rebellion, and especially its remarkable leader? Contem- porary articles on both the history and the character of Haiti, along with a few contemporary biographies of Toussaint, provided a variety of accounts. Northern and Southern periodicals alike often referred to the Haitian rebellion and Toussaint in articles about the influx of refugees from Santo Domingo in the lower South, as well as in arguments both for and against slavery. In antebellum America the resonant names of "Toussaint," "Hayti," and "Domingo" were commonplace. For Northern supporters of the antislavery cause and for the increasingly widespread abolitionist movement of the 1 840s and early 1 85os, an important and influential source of information about the de- tails of Toussaint L'Ouverture's life was in fact a contemporary novel. In 1841 the well-respected British writer Harriet Mar- tineau published The Hour and the Man: A Historical Romance, specifically to support the antislavery movement in the United States.4 Constrained by white middle-class values, essentialist notions of race, and her particular adaptation of utilitarianism, Martineau's "historical romance" of Toussaint reveals the strik- ingly conservative perspective of many of those involved in the early antislavery movement in Britain and America.5 But in its time the novel provided a rich and timely resource for those involved in the American movement, which by the end of the 1830s was moving into a more widespread and increasingly political phase. In The Hour and the Man Martineau presents Tous- saint as a tragic, larger-than-life hero, a husband and father

4 Several years later another British citizen saw the potential in the Toussaint story for the American abolition movement. John R. Beard, a noted theologian and editor, published The Life of Toussaint LOuverture, the Negro Patriot of Hayti (London: Ingram, Cooke, and Co., i853). For a discussion, see Douglas Charles Stange, British Unitari- ans against American Slavery, i833- 65 (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated Univ. Presses, 1984), pp. 179-81.

5 For an excellent evaluation of antislavery novels written by American women, see Carolyn L. Karcher, "Lydia Maria Child's A Romance of the Republic: An Abolitionist Vi- sion of America's Racial Destiny," in Slavery and the Literary Imagination, ed. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 81-103. The best study of women in the abolition movement is Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989).




who acted with conviction and courage to defend his people from slavery and who, as a general, was finally defeated by the overwhelming numbers and power of the French forces. The implications were unmistakable. Martineau depicted a black hero-and not a mulatto-who was intelligent, virtuous, family-oriented, and capable of great leadership for his country. She also affirmed revolution as the almost inevitable conse- quence of a slaveholding system and linked Toussaint to the heroes of the American Revolution. These images and themes would figure in the rhetoric of the American antislavery movement. For autobiographers like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, the strong, rebellious slave was a necessary part of a self- portrait. And for some of the few white American writers of imaginative literature who dared to tackle slavery as a subject, the figure of the noble, rebellious slave striving to protect a family against injustice offered a range of useful possibilities.

As in America, few novelists in England were interested in probing the most important reform movement of the day- antislavery-and using it as the basis for fiction.6 The Hour and the Man was not only a popular success in England and America, however; it was also highly praised by British luminaries such as Thomas Carlyle, Maria Edgeworth, Florence Nightingale, and Henry Crabbe Robinson, as well as notable Americans like Margaret Fuller, William Ellery Channing, Orestes Brown- son, William Lloyd Garrison, Lydia Maria Child, Maria Weston Chapman, and Wendell Phillips. Martineau's Toussaint is a romantic hero, a "Black Prince" whose story is "not only beautiful and touching, but noble," as LordJeffrey, the influential former editor of the Edinburgh Review, said in a letter to his friend and

6 In critical discussions of Martineau's work and the British novel generally, The Hour and the Man is usually overlooked in favor of her other long work of fiction, Deer- brook (1839), a domestic drama of English village life that anticipates themes and characters that George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell would investigate with greater success. Brief discussions of The Hour and the Man may be found in Valerie Kossew Pichanick, Harriet Martineau: The Woman and Her Work, i802-76 (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1980), pp. 125-26; Gillian Thomas, Harriet Martineau (Boston: Twayne, 1985), pp. 92-94; R. K. Webb, Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1960), pp. 19 1-92; and Vera Wheatley, The Life and Work of Harriet Marti- neau (London: Secker and Warburg, 1957), pp. 2 18-21.




fellow contributor to the Review, William Empson.7 For Marti- neau, Toussaint demonstrated the great potential of the African race, a potential that she felt was being destroyed by the cruel system of slavery in the American South. The Hour and the Man was shaped by Martineau's direct experience with the abolition movement during her 1834-36 tour of the United States, her almost academic interest in the history of Toussaint L'Ouver- ture, her adaptation of utilitarianism and political economy as means for social reform, and the prevailing notion of race as essentially defined in early Victorian Britain. The novel also pre- figured Uncle Tom s Cabin, whose fame has tended to obscure the role that other works of fiction played in advancing the goals of the American abolitionist movement. Moreover, Martineau's portrait of Toussaint presented the abolitionists with a conve- nient and useful hero and would profoundly shape white abolitionist attitudes toward race.

Few commentators on Martineau, on the American antislavery movement, or on the Haitian rebellion have considered The Hour and the Man in their discussions. Scholars who have studied Martineau's works usually focus on her nonfictional prose or her important relationships with other literary figures of her day, and scholars of American history and culture have rarely considered the influence of a Brit- ish woman writer on the antislavery cause. With the termina- tion of the slave trade in 1807 and the emancipation of slaves in the British territories and the West Indies in 1833, however, England became a major force in advocating international

7 FrancisJeffrey, 1840 letter to William Empson, quoted in Harriet Martineau s Auto- biography and Memzorials of Harriet Martineau, ed. Maria Weston Chapman, 2 vols. (Bos- ton: James R. Osgood, 1877), II, 35 1-52 (hereafter cited in the text as Autobiography). LordJeffrey (1773-1850) was trained for the legal profession in Scotland but was also an active writer and critic who helped establish the Edinburgh Review and later served as its editor. William Empson (1 79 l-l 852) was a fellow writer who edited the Review from 1847 until his death. For additional tributes to The Hour and the Man, see Auto- biography, II, 577-81.




abolition, and Martineau played an active role, especially after her visit to the United States from 1834 to 1836.8

Although Martineau intended to be an impartial observer during this tour, her sympathies were with the antislavery advocates and increasingly with the more militant abolitionists. At the time of her visit, her views on slavery were already well known in the United States through her popular Illustrations of Political Economy-especially Demerara (1832), an antislavery sketch set in the West Indies-as well as her articles in the Monthly Repository. On her tour Martineau became increasingly friendly with abolitionists, to the horror of many Southerners and conservative Northerners. Her risky attendance at a meeting of the Boston Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society on i8 November 1835 was sufficient to cause her to feel some concern about her personal safety.9 That a person of her stature and influence would attend such a meeting and champion the cause-especially in the mid- 1830s, when abolitionists were generally perceived as dangerous radicals-was a highly important event in the American antislavery movement.'0 Martineau was also friendly with William Lloyd Garrison and in sympathy with his calls for immediate abolition. Eager to show her support, she wrote about the Liberator to friends and later made financial contributions to the periodical by donating fees she earned in England. But during her visit to the United States, Martineau's major way of supporting the movement was by associating her- self directly with abolition. After her return to England she re- sumed her writing: both her Society in America ( 1837) and Retro- spect of Western Travel contain pointed sections on the evils of

8 For studies that describe the British involvement in the American abolition movement, see Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Cooperation (Ur- bana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1972); Stange, British Unitarians againstAmeri- can Slavery; Howard Temperley, British Antislavery, i833-i870 (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1972); James Walvin, England, Slaves, and Freedom, I776-i838

(Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1986); andJames Walvin, ed., Slavery and British So- ciety, I776-I846 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1982).

9 Martineau describes this meeting in some detail in her Retrospect of Western Travel, 3 vols. (London: Saunders and Otley, 1838), III, 152-58.

10 In a 28 November 1835 letter to Lewis Tappan, James G. Birney observed enthu- siastically: "How providential it seems that Miss Martineau should just at this time be sent to give us the aid of her popularity!" (Letters ofjames Gillespie Birney, i83i-i857, ed. Dwight L. Dumond, 2 vols. [New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1938], I, 275).




slavery, and both sold well in the United States. John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a preface to her "Views of Slavery and Emanci- pation" (1837), a pamphlet made up of about eighty pages of Society in America that was specifically designed to promote the antislavery cause.'1 These publications firmly established Marti- neau as an abolitionist.

In early 1838 Martineau was busily reading and thinking about a new project for a novel. On 15 January she excitedly recorded in her diary that she had found her story while reading a review-article of several books on the history of Haiti in an old volume of the Quarterly Review. She noted that "it flashed across me that my novel must be on the Haytian revolution, and Toussaint my hero. Was ever any subject more splendid, more fit than this for me and my purposes? One generally knows when the right idea, the true inspiration, comes, and I have a strong persuasion that this will prove my first great work of fiction. It admits of romance, it furnishes me with story, it will do a world of good to the slave question, it is heroic in its character, and it leaves me English domestic life for a change hereafter" (Autobiography, JJ, 334) .12 In her journal for the next weeks she records her enjoyment in reading the literature she located and in discussing the project with friends, including Carlyle, who thought it was a splendid idea.13 A poem was especially important: one of John Greenleaf Whittier's first abolitionist poems, "Toussaint L'Ouverture" (1833), was published

11 See John A. Pollard, John Greenleaf Whittier: Friend of Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), p. 162.

12 See [John Barrow], "Past and Present State of Hayti," Quarterly Review, 2 1 (1 8 1 9), 430-60. The review lists four books in the headnote: "Me'noires pour servir a i'Histoire de la Revolution de Saint Domingue. Par le Lieutenant General Baron Pamphil6 de Lacroix, &c. Tom. II. Paris. 1819; History of the Island of St. Domingo, from its First Discovery by Co- lumbus to the present period. London. 1818; RNflexions sur les Noirs et les Blancs, la Civiliza- tion de lAfrique, le Royaume d'Hayti, &c. Relation de la F^te de S. M. la Reine dHayti, &c. Par le Baron de Vastey, Secr6taire du Roi au Cap Henry; and Almanach Royal d 'Hayti. i8i8." For Barrow as author, see Hill Shine and Helen Chadwick Shine, The "Quarterly Review" under Gifford: Identification of Contributors, I 809-I 824 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Caro- lina Press, 1949), p. 66.

13 See Autobiography, II, 336. See also Martineau's appendix to The Hour and the Man: A Historical Romance, 3 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1841), III, 247-64, in which Martineau discursively explains her methods of research and the materials she read. Hereafter cited in the text as Hour.




by Garrison in the Liberator on 30 June 1837. In this poem Whittier graphically describes the brutality of slavery in Haiti and the violence of the slave rebellion (including a shocking account of the rape of a white woman). But Whittier emphasized the fact that, in the midst of the rebellion, Toussaint saved his master's family by smuggling them safely out to a waiting ship. Whittier concludes his ode with the suggestive lines: "Be mine the better task to find / A tribute for thy lofty mind, / Amidst whose gloomy vengeance shone / Some milder virtues all thine owne, / Some gleams of feeling pure and warm, / Like sunshine on a sky of storm, / Proofs that the Negro's heart retains / Some nobleness amid its chains."'4 Sharing Whittier's view of the potential nobility of blacks freed from slavery, Martineau thought that her own tribute would be an important contribution toward influencing Americans to push harder for the emancipation of the slaves.

Martineau began to research and write what eventually became not her novel but the "Account of Toussaint L'Ouver- ture," which appeared in 1838 in The Penny Magazine, the inex- pensive, popular illustrated magazine published in both Eng- land and America by Charles Knight and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. As Martineau worked on what she referred to repeatedly in her diary as her "noble" story, she wrote to her longtime friend Fanny Wedgwood on 2o February 1838: "My chief object is to get at the Southern States, where they reprint the P. M. [Penny Magazine] fearlessly, and will never -dream of meeting me. I hope a few hundred people there will learn what a negro has been, and what other negroes therefore may be. I have only just sent my paper, and it may be rejected, so don't set any body expecting it till it appears. The old negro has given me three happy days, if he does no further good."' 5 The profile was common to the format of The Penny Magazine,

14 "Toussaint L'Ouverture," in The Works ofJohn Greenleaf Whittier, 7 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1848, 1892), III, 19. For a brief discussion of the power of Whit- tier's poem, see Perry Miller, 'John Greenleaf Whittier: The Conscience in Poetry," Har- vard Review, 2, no. 2 ( 1964), 23-24; rpt. in Critical Essays on John Greenleaf Whittier, ed. Jayne K Kribbs (Boston: G. K Hall, 1 980), pp. 2 1 9 - 20.

15 Martineau, in Harriet Martineau s Letters to Fanny Wedgwood, ed. Elisabeth Sanders Arbuckle (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1983), p. 1 .




which often published articles that read like encyclopedia en- tries designed to educate its largely working-class audience, partly through the lavish use of illustrations.'6 Martineau's "Ac- count" was itself published with some arresting illustrations: a large, full-figure engraving of Toussaint in the "costume of the commander of the Black Army of Hayti"; a scene of the stately temple erected in Haiti to commemorate black emancipation; and, at the end of the article, a facsimile of Toussaint's signature.

Martineau began the article by directly stating her position:

It is an important question whether negroes are constitutionally, and therefore irremediably, inferior to whites in the powers of the mind.... Many persons have ventured upon peremptory decisions on both sides of the question; but the majority are still unsatisfied as to the real capabilities of the negro race. Their actual inferiority of mind is too evident to be disputed; but it may be accounted for by the circumstances amidst which negroes have lived, both in their own countries and abroad; while, if one single instance can be adduced of a man ofjet-black complexion who has exhibited a genius which would be considered eminent in civilized European society, we have at least a proof that there is no incompatibility between negro organization and high intellectual power. Among a very few individuals of the African race who have distinguished themselves by intellectual achievement, Toussaint L'Ouverture is preeminent: and while society is waiting for evidence of what the negro race at large can do and become, it seems to be rational to build high hopes upon such a character as that of the man who was, as a Dictator and a General, the model upon which Napoleon formed himself; who was as inclined to peace as renowned in war; and who will ever be regarded in history as one of the most remarkable men of an age teeming with social wonders.'7

Here Martineau confronts the issue of racial superiority, central to nineteenth-century attitudes toward slavery and abolition. Outlining the racial view that she will develop more fully in The Hour and the Man, Martineau suggests that, on the one hand,

16 For a useful study, see Scott Bennett, "The Editorial Character and Readership of Tle Penny Magazine: An Analysis," Victorian Periodicals Review, 17 (1984), 126-41.

17 [Harriet Martineau], "Account of Toussaint L'Ouverture," The Penny Magazine, 7 (1838), 121-22.




the environment of slavery has promoted "inferiority of mind"; on the other hand, she uses Toussaint as her example of "a man of jet-black complexion who has exhibited a genius." She then offers a lengthy biographical sketch, carefully demonstrating Toussaint's intellect, concern for his family, character, and shrewd abilities as a leader and soldier. Although initially Tous- saint had nothing to do with the slave uprising in 1791, Marti- neau shows him loyally joining with his "brethren" and "step- p[ing] in a moment out of slavery into freedom" ("Account," p. 123). The treachery of the French and their cruelty prompts necessity for action and continued rebellion, and Toussaint strides courageously forward to lead his people. Martineau ends the article with a ringing endorsement of Toussaint's greatness and the potential that he embodies for other blacks released from slavery.

The appearance of this profile in the pages of the popular Penny Magazine, following the highly publicized antislavery sections of Society in America, touched nerves in the American South and firmly put an end to the popularity that Martineau had earlier enjoyed there. Another essay of Martineau's, "The Martyr Age of the United States" (1838), had several additional effects.'8 First, it offered British citizens a positive presentation of the history of the abolition movement and glowing tributes to its principal American players. Second,-many American abolitionists were highly gratified by the enthusiastic account, and they became avid supporters of Martineau. Although Whittier was considerably less impressed by this essay than he had been by Society in America, his opinion was in the minority.'9 Indeed, "The Martyr Age of the United States" became an important and effective propaganda device for Garrison and his followers, who quickly arranged widespread publication of the essay in

18 See [Harriet Martineau], "The Martyr Age of the United States," Westminster Re- view, 32 (1838-39), 1-59.

19 Whittier wrote an open letter to The Pennsylvania Freeman on 4 February 1839, saying that Martineau had met only Boston abolitionists, and consequently the book "does gross injustice to many of the best and earliest friends of the cause, men who have made great sacrifices, and given the strongest proofs of the sincerity of their pro- fessions" (The Letters ofJohn Greenleaf Whittier, ed. John B. Pickard, 3 vols. [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1975], I, 321).




pamphlet form in i 839. Their efforts were notably successful: for example, after Thomas Wentworth Higginson read Martineau's essay and Lydia Maria Child's An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (1836), he became an active member of the antislavery movement.20 By the late 1830s Martineau was firmly established in the United States as a well- known British celebrity who could provide useful and popular materials in support of the abolition movement.

Discouraged by some friends about the suitability of the Haitian Revolution as the subject for a full-length novel, Marti- neau turned to completing Deerbrook and made plans to begin a long tour of northern England, Scotland, and then Europe. But she forgot neither Toussaint nor her antislavery friends in America. As editor of Martineau's Autobiography, Maria Weston Chapman comments on the letters that Martineau continually wrote to her friends during this period, noting that "the idea of still further serving the antislavery cause in America never left her" (Chapman, in Autobiography, II, 338). Chapman reprints the gracious letter of acceptance that Martineau wrote to Abby Kelly, who in June 1838 had sent her an official certificate of membership in the Massachusetts Antislavery Society. Minimiz- ing her own accomplishments in the abolition movement, Mar- tineau praised her "American sisters" and advised Kelly: "You and your sisters, my dear madam, have a far harder battle to wage, in which I beg to assure you that you have all my sympathy, and, I believe, the sympathy of this whole nation. Not one of your efforts is lost upon us.... I regard the work of vindicat- ing the civil standing of negroes as more arduous and dangerous than freeing them from the chain and the whip. Both you and I have a long and hard task before us there, when the first great step is, as in our colonies, safely accomplished" (Autobiog- raphy, II, 341) . Comparing the condition of the American slaves to members of the British working class, Martineau sensed the problems that society would face in a post-slaveholding world and correctly surmised that the hardest task was yet to come. That, of course, was also a major emphasis of the proslavery

20 See Douglas C. Stange, Patterns of Antislavery among American Unitarians, I 83 I-

i86o (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated Univ. Presses, 1977), p. 109.




arguments, but radical abolitionists like Kelly and Garrison flatly rejected this analogy, fearing that such arguments would distract attention from their main concern, the emancipation of all slaves.

In reading the accounts of Haitian history in the Quarterly Review, Martineau saw in the republic that Toussaint had created a possible vision for the future. That vision included a strong leader, but one who worked in relation to a strong colonial presence, as The Hour and the Man would clearly demonstrate. In these histories Toussaint is shown to work most effec- tively at the level of the state, when he is serving his people under minimal but operative French influence, while at a more local level his Haitian republic retains much of the plantation system, but with paid laborers instead of slaves.2'

Toussaint's story continued to intrigue Martineau as the topic for an antislavery novel. During her European tour in 1838 she made a detour to visit the prison, Chateau de Joux, where Toussaint died. She was deeply moved by the dreari- ness of the setting, by the isolation of the prison, and with the cruel end of a hero's life. The solitude of Toussaint's death and the apparent stoicism with which he faced his inevitable end helped her shape her design for her book. It was as if seeing his place of death was the last impetus she needed to begin the book, as her diary suggests (Autobiography, II, 346-48). Return- ing from her travels in the spring of 1840, Martineau began writing The Hour and the Man with the scene of Toussaint's arrival at the French prison (Autobiography, I, 446).

In writing The Hour and the Man Martineau used fiction as a new venue for advancing the cause of antislavery, much in the way that ten years later Stowe would use fiction as her means for providing an illustration of the lights and shadows of the peculiar institution. But unlike Stowe, who envi-

21 This system is reminiscent of one of Martineau's sketches in the Illustrations of Po- litical Economy series, Brooke and Brooke Farm (1 833), her blueprint for a well-ordered, prosperous village society achieved through strict adherence to the principles of political economy.



HARRIET MARTINEAU 'S BLACK HERO 169

sioned a short sketch for the National Era rather than the long, multi-plotted novel that Uncle Tom s Cabin would become, Mar- tineau saw her project as a historical romance or a fictionalized biography of a single person. Such terms have a variety of mu- tually contradictory meanings, but Martineau recorded in her journal fairly clear notions of how she wished to proceed with her novel. Having a plot in hand and a compelling character ready-made, as well as a strong moral purpose (the exposure of the general failings of slaveholding), she was ready to write her novel. Her purpose, as she explains in the novel's appendix, was to set the record straight about the character and career of Toussaint. Martineau saw in the story of the black leader an opportunity to write fiction with a clear moral purpose, and she set about writing what is essentially a historical novel, based on the prevalent nineteenth-century notion of history as pro- gressive. The result is a novel much in the style of Walter Scott, whose works she had been reading throughout the late l 830s.

Martineau also called her book a "romance," a term particularly fraught with connotations in nineteenth-century Amer- ica.22 Unlike Scott or American writers of romance, however, Martineau was not dealing with her own national history in her "historical romance." Instead, she wished to take the accounts of Santo Domingo and Toussaint L'Ouverture that she had read and-much as Hawthorne did in his conception of the Ameri- can romance -depart from the novelist's dedication to minute fidelity in order to emphasize the larger moral dimensions of her hero's story. Paradoxically, Martineau's hero is a black man born a slave in the possession of a "master"-and is therefore a nonperson, without rights or even recognized needs. This fact complicates and subverts even this most loosely defined genre, based as it is on conceptions of human agency and change. The Hour and the Man is also a Victorian novel with a purpose-it is the story of a brave and courageous man, narrated in the service of reforming society and providing a positive example for others to follow.

22 See Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lon- don: Merlin Press, 1962), pp. 19-88. For an excellent analysis of American "romance," see Michael Davitt Bell, The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980).




The structure of the book generally follows the chronol- ogy of historical events that began in 1791 with the initial rebellion in Haiti and ended in 1803 with Toussaint's death in France. Martineau dramatizes the events by using rebellion against tyrannical oppressors as the thematic center in each of the novel's three volumes. Volume One opens with Toussaint as a slave on a plantation at Breda, who rebels against the French Assembly when it refuses full rights to people of color in St. Do- mingue (as Haiti was then called). Following the successful rebellion, Toussaint's army gains control of central Haiti, despite incursions from the Spanish and the English. In this volume Toussaint of Breda becomes Toussaint L'Ouverture, literally the one who opens or prepares the way. Martineau depicts him as a father-like leader who watches, waits, and then acts swiftly for his people. When the French Assembly officially abolished slavery on 4 February 1794, Toussaint and his followers rejoined the French and gradually drove the Spanish from the colonies.

Volume Two concerns the rise of Toussaint to complete command of Haiti through the establishment of a constitution that guaranteed him powers for life. Martineau gradually shows Toussaint embroiled in the problems of leadership in a complex society of whites, blacks, and mulattoes. The central story of Volume Two is based on what is historically known as the Moise Rebellion. In Martineau's account Toussaint's nephew, Moyse (as the name is spelled in the book), is engaged to Tous- saint's daughter, Genefred&. Moyse is dissatisfied with Tous- saint's rule (as were many Haitian blacks) and wants more indi- vidual power for himself and for others. Especially dissatisfied with his leniency toward whites, Moyse defies Toussaint's order of no retaliation against the whites remaining in Haiti and marches on a settlement of colonists, killing many. Quickly gaining control, Toussaint orders the execution of Moyse, despite his daughter's bitter protests.

Volume Three deals with the year after the 1 8o 1 Moise Re- bellion and the significant internal difficulties in the republic. In this volume Martineau concentrates on the story of Tous- saint, his wife, and their children as they come to terms with Moyse's death. That domestic drama is set against the backdrop of world events over which Toussaint can exercise little control,




as the French, led by Napoleon, decide to reinstate the profitable slave trade and regain control of Haiti. Unsuccessful in his final rebellion against the French, Toussaint is forced to retreat to the mountains, where he is captured, arrested, and taken to France. The last chapters of the book deal with Toussaint in prison at Fort de Joux and with his death on 7 April 1803. In her appendix Martineau documents the events following Tous- saint's death: a few months later, Jean Jacques Dessalines, Tous- saint's second-in-command, forced the French to evacuate the island for good; on 31 December 1803 Dessalines finished the job that Toussaint had begun and declared Haiti an indepen- dent republic.

Toussaint is the central character, the undoubted hero of the work, and Martineau keeps him almost epically distant from the reader. Part Shakespearean hero, part George Wash- ington, and part Count of Monte Cristo, Toussaint is portrayed throughout the novel as extraordinary. Martineau signals her intention with regard to the character of Toussaint in her introduction of him at the beginning of Volume One, where he sits reading a book outside his plantation cottage at Breda while his wife makes dinner and his children play around him. The book he is reading is a volume of the Discourses of Epictetus, a freed slave who became a noted philosopher and teacher of Stoicism. Toussaint's son, Denis, asks his father what the book is about, and Toussaint replies that it is about a slave, albeit a white one, and adds: "It is all about bearing and forbearing. It has taught me many things which you will have to learn by-and-by" (Hour, I, I l) . "Bearing and forbearing" are the keys to the character of Toussaint, as are the tenets of Stoicism as practiced by Epicte- tus. Considered by the historian Arrian to be the most important documents of Stoicism of the Roman Empire, Epictetus's works are notable for their religious outlook and for defin- ing the role that the philosopher plays in society, serving as a father-like missionary of divine providence. It would be hard to imagine a clearer description of Toussaint's beliefs and actions: as Martineau's narrator explains, Toussaint spent his youth in acquiring "a habit of endurance" (Hour, I, 120). In a sense, this stoic philosophy creates the ideal turn of mind for a slave. In a descriptive passage early in the novel, Martineau tells us:




With all the force of youth, he had been by turns the stoic and the quietist; and, while busied in submitting himself to the pressure of the present, he had turned from the past, and scarcely dreamed of the future. If his imagination glanced back to the court of his royal grandfather, held under the palm shades, or pursuing the lion-hunt amidst the jungles of Africa, he had hast- ily withdrawn his mind's eye from scenes which might create im- patience of his lot; and if he ever wondered whether a long suc- cession of ignorant and sensual blacks were to be driven into the field by the whip every day in St. Domingo, for evermore, he had cut short the speculation as inconsistent with his stoical habit of endurance, and his Christian principle of trust. It was not till his youth was past that he had learned anything of the revolutions of the world-too late to bring them into his speculations and his hopes. (Hour, I, 1 20-2 1)

To survive as a slave, Toussaint learned the lessons of endurance and trust, lessons that Martineau clearly thought would be better used by freed men and women who could look to the future as well as cope with the "pressure of the present."

Written at the end of her decade-long preoccupation with popularizing the lessons of utilitarianism and political economy for middle- and working-class people in England, Martineau's historical romance demonstrates the combination of both the economic and personal costs of slavery to society. When she wrote Demerara Martineau had been largely concerned with the economic disaster of slavery, which she then viewed as the primary argument for abolition. In The Hour and the Man she presents the costs of maintaining a system of slavery in a far- away colony, as well as accounts of the more profitable sugar in- dustry that immediately emerges once Haiti, under Toussaint's rule, is free of slavery. But following her observation of slavery in the United States and her involvement with the American abolition movement, Martineau had come to view slavery as more than an impediment to the greatest economic happiness of the greatest number: in The Hour and the Man her concern is the depiction of its costs to human dignity and ability. Tous- saint's many strengths as a responsible, educated worker are lost on a society that views him as property; and in Martineau's view of political economy, his loss consequently affects all.




Martineau also offered specific rebuttals to the negative French accounts of Toussaint that had circulated throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. As Horace Greeley noted in his front-page review for The New- Yorker (which he edited before he founded the New York Tribune), much of the general knowledge about the Haitian rebellion had "been drawn from the reports of the discomfited French, which, for very obvious reasons, are to be received with many grains of allow- ance."23 In The Hour and the Man Martineau was particularly engaged in correcting these versions of Toussaint. French accounts had ascribed cruelty and hypocrisy to him, but in her appendix Martineau explains that these qualities are at odds with the written evidence that she had examined in researching her book: "The wars of St. Domingo were conducted in a most barbarous spirit before the time of Toussaint's acquisition of power, and after his abduction. During the interval, the whole weight of his influence was given to curb the ferocity of both parties. He pardoned his personal enemies, . . . and he pun- ished in his followers, as the most unpardonable offence they could commit, any infringement of his rule of 'No RETALIA-

TION"' (Hour, III, 249). In addition to her view of the negative effects of the envi-

ronment of slavery on blacks as a race, Martineau also clearly subscribed to the commonplace Victorian notion of separate races. As K. Anthony Appiah has explained, most Victorians believed that people could be divided easily into groups called races, and that these races shared certain "fundamental, heri- table, physical, moral, intellectual, and cultural characteristics with one another that they did not share with members of any other race."24 These characteristics were thought to be essen- tial- that is, they were necessary and sufficient conditions for

23 [Horace Greeley], rev. of The Hour and the Man, by Harriet Martineau, The New- Yorker, io (1840-41), 289. The previous week Greeley had run the following notice: "The admirers of Miss MARTINEAU will be glad to learn that an American edition of her new romance 'The Hour and the Man' will speedily be published in this City. It is now in the press of the Harpers" ("Literary Intelligence," The Newl)-Yorker, 1o [1840- 41], 286).

24 K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997), p. 54. For a detailed historical study of race in nineteenth-century America, see George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in tile




membership in a particular race. Although Martineau avoids the usual physical descriptions of Toussaint as stereotypically black, she provides him and the other characters with the central traits of the black race as constructed by early-nineteenth- century racialists. For example, Martineau equates the love of music as a fundamentally black characteristic. In a scene toward the end of Volume One, a minor character, Aimee, provides an explanation: "The heart of the negro was, she said, as naturally charged with music as his native air with fragrance. If you dam up his mountain streams you have, instead of fragrance, poison and pestilence; and if you chain up the negro's life in slavery, you have, for music, wailing and curses. Give both free course, and you have an atmosphere of spicy odours, and a universal spirit of song" (Hour, I, 269). Another com- monly held notion was that blacks were physically unable to survive cold and inclement weather, and in the final scenes of the novel, when Toussaint is in prison, the jailers talk about the impossibility of a black man surviving the cold and dampness of St. Joux. These two characteristics, the love of music and the inability to withstand certain kinds of weather, were widely understood to be black characteristics that had biological origins. Along with the majority of American abolitionists, Martineau clearly accepted the prevailing notion of racial differences, conceptualized in biological terms, and she consciously under- scores these differences in The Hour and the Man.

But Martineau also makes a distinction between heredity and environment. Much of the point of The Hour and the Man is that Toussaint is a man who is perfectly capable of seizing his "hour" when the opportunity for action arrives and when the boundaries of slavery are lifted. When his brother, Paul, is unwilling to participate fully in the development of the new republic and argues for the status quo, Toussaint upbraids him with an impassioned speech: "It seems that you are unwilling to do your part of the great duty of our age and our race. Heaven has appointed you the opportunity of showing that blacks are men,-fit to govern as to serve;-and you would rather sleep

White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, I8I7-I9I4 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). I am grateful to Phillip Richards for his thoughtful sugges- tions about nineteenth-century views on race.




in the sunshine than listen to the message from the sky. My own brother does what he can to deepen the brand on the forehead of the negro!" (Hour, I, 260). Suggesting that his brother con- tinues to brand himself as a slave, Toussaint has only harsh words of criticism. To his wife, Toussaint explains: "We negroes are ignorant, and have been made loose, deceitful, and idle, by slavery. The whites have been made tyrannical and unjust, by being masters. They believe us now ambitious, rebellious, and re- vengeful, because it would be no wonder if we were so. All this injustice comes of our former slavery" (Hour, II, 103-4). Mar- tineau's depiction of Toussaint is designed to illustrate how the absence of slavery enables blacks to function fully and effec- tively: "fit to govern as to serve" (Hour, I, 260). Many American writers, highly influenced by Martineau's depiction, would take up similar themes in the years between the publication of The Hour and the Man and the Civil War.

Despite the contemporary popularity of a book that both demonstrated the negative effects of slavery on society and humanity in general and contributed a larger-than- life hero, Martineau's book is usually ignored in the literature of the American antislavery movement.25 Reasons are not hard to find. In general, scholars have tended to underestimate the importance of the figure of the foreign Toussaint L'Ouverture in the American abolitionist movement, concentrating instead on the role of American slaves who dared to rebel, such as Den- mark Vesey and Nat Turner. Only recently, for example, have

25 The influence of the Haitian Revolution, however, on both antislavery and proslavery activists is the topic of several studies. For an important overview as well as for one view of the image of Toussaint in American culture, see Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti's In- fluence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisi- ana State Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 84-101; for the Haitian Revolution, Douglass, and Melville, see especially Carolyn L. Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville ' America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1980); and Eric J Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1993); see also Robert S. Levine, AMIartin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1997).




scholars taken a closer look at the coverage of world events in the American periodical press and examined the effects of events such as the Haitian rebellion and the European revolutions of i848 on American thought and literature.26 In the concern to discover indigenous sources of American literature, scholars have also underemphasized the extent to which British and European culture continued to shape American thought throughout the nineteenth century. One of the many reasons that Garrison used "The Martyr Age in the United States" was simply to exploit the cachet of having a well-known and well- respected British author advocate the abolitionist cause. At the same time, American newspapers and journals covered Euro- pean news in great detail and kept international events of the world before the American public on a daily basis.

Martineau's novel has also been slighted for aesthetic reasons. At three volumes and nine hundred pages, The Hour and the Man is not a book for the weak of arms nor for the short of sleep. To a reader today the plot is bewilderingly complex, a vast number of characters come and go, and the exposition is frustratingly sparse. An understanding of the early Spanish and French colonization of the Caribbean island first known as His- paniola and then as Santo Domingo is required, as is a knowledge of the revolution and politics that later split the island into two parts-Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In fact, even the first edition of the novel, published in London in 1841, included a tinted, fold-out map of "Hayti; or St. Domingo" that showed the division of the island into the French- and Spanish- dominated territories.

But the general outline of this history was common knowledge in the first half of the nineteenth century, and The Hour and the Man was a work that was well received and widely reviewed in both England and America. In a generally favorable review in The Athenaeum, the reviewer commented: "Miss Mar- tineau . . . has chosen her subject judiciously, and treated it well, because she has treated it historically. She has thought, read, collected, and compared evidence, always indeed under

26 See especially LarryJ. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Re- naissance (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1988).




the strong light of her own generous sympathies and convic- tions."27 Thomas Carlyle wrote glowingly (though perhaps with a touch of irony) to John Sterling about the "beautiful enthusiasm" of the work.28 In April 1841 William Ellery Channing wrote to Martineau: "You have given a magnificent picture of Toussaint; and, in truth, I know not where the heroic character is more grandly conceived."29 Florence Nightingale wrote en- thusiastically to friends about the book, and Chapman reprints excerpts from several letters in Martineau's Autobiography.30 Sa- rah Morewood sent a copy of the book to Herman Melville, just as he was signing the contract with Harper's for the publication of Moby-Dick and considering the subject of his next book.3' Wendell Phillips, who would make Toussaint the subject of one of his most popular lectures, is reported to have carried a copy of Martineau's book with him to his speaking engagements, and Garrison was prompted to write a sonnet to honor Marti- neau's involvement in the abolition movement the year after the American publication of The Hour and the Man.32

27 Rev. of The Hour and the Man: A Historical Romance, by Harriet Martineau, The Athenaeum, 5 December 1840, p. 958.

28 See Thomas Carlyle, letter to John Sterling, 7 December 1840, in The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. Charles Richard Sanders, et al. (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1970-), XII, 348.

29 Channing, letter to Harriet Martineau, i April 1841, in Memoir of William Ellery Channing, with Extracts from His Correspondence and Manuscripts, 3 vols. (London: John Chapman, 1848), III, 239. While Channing inspired a number of people who became active abolitionists, his own involvement was moderate and limited to his sermons and to the publication of Slavery (1835) . Maria Weston Chapman, who had been persuaded by a sermon of Channing's to enter the antislavery movement, was particularly disappointed by his unwillingness to play an activist role (see Jack Mendelsohn, Channing& The Reluctant Radical: A Biography [Boston: Little, Brown, 1971], pp. 236 -37) .

30 See Webb, Harriet Martineau, p. 191; and, for example, Autobiography, II, 578. 31 See Melville, letter to Sarah Huyler Morewood, September 1 85 1, in Correspon-

dence, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, vol. 14 of The Writings of Herman Melville (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press and The Newberry Library, 1993), p. 2o6.

32 See Wheatley, Life and Work, p. 2 19. Garrison's sonnet, "Harriet Martineau," was published in his Sonnets and Other Poems (Boston: Oliver Johnson, 1843), p. 54: "En- gland! I grant that thou dost justly boast / Of splendid Geniuses beyond compare; / Men great and gallant-Women good and fair- / Skilled in all arts, and filling every post / Of learning, science, fame-a mighty host! / Poe[t]s divine, and Benefactors rare- / Statesmen-Philosophers-and they who dare / Boldly to explore Heaven's vast and boundless coast. / To one alone I dedicate this rhyme, / Whose virtues with a starry lustre glow; / Whose heart is large, whose spirit is sublime, / The friend of Lib-




As these responses indicate, Northern abolitionists, already impressed with Martineau's earlier antislavery works, immediately recognized the usefulness of her latest contribution and set about to take advantage of the book's popularity. Nathan- iel P. Rogers, the first editor of the National Anti-Slavery Stan- dard, published the first two chapters of The Hour and the Man in a three-part serialization in January and February i 841. In a squib in the paper on i 1 February 1841 Rogers encouraged readers to attend a "lecture on the Haytian Revolution, by James McCune Smith, M.D.," noting: "no one who goes to hear him will come away disappointed. The subject is well chosen, being one which has excited much denunciation, and but little inquiry. Toussaint L'Ouverture is the hero of Harriet Marti- neau's new work, 'The Hour and the Man.' Those who have read this delightful production, will not, we trust, neglect an opportunity of becoming more enlightened as to the life and character of one who wrought his own and his country's fame, through adversity and hardships such as men rarely over- come."33 A week later Rogers reprinted part of Greeley's laudatory New- Yorker review of the novel, in which Greeley praised Martineau for offering an alternative to the negative French view of Toussaint and focused on her portrait of Toussaint as "a great and heroic man: prudent and far-reaching in his policy, humane and regardful of the rights of others, unyielding in his integrity-calm, unselfish and humble in his exaltation, and sternly 'true to himself' in the depths of his adversity."34

But the most extensive and enthusiastic review of The Hour and the Man was written by Lydia Maria Child for the National Anti-Slavery Standard. Child castigated the press in general for not giving the novel sufficient attention, charging that "the American press, itself a slave to slavery, has, of course, taken little notice of a novel whose heroes are blacks, immortalized

erty, of Wrong the foe: / Long be inscribed upon the roll of Time, / The name, the worth, the works, of HARRIET MARTINEAU!"

33 National Anti-Slavery Standard, 1 (1840-41), 142. For the serialization, see 1 (1840-41), 136, 140, 144. Smith later wrote the introduction to Douglass's My Bond- age and My Freedom (1855) . I am indebted to Linck C. Johnson for his helpful and stim- ulating discussions on the roles of Rogers, Child, Phillips, Garrison, and Emerson in the abolitionist movement.

34 Greeley, rev. of Hour, p. 289. For the reprint, see NationalAnti-Slavery Standard, 1 (1840-41), 148.




by their victorious efforts for freedom. They have indeed said of the author, that, 'in her eagerness to glorify a nigger, she has sacrificed the truth of history."'35 Child had written her own sympathetic account of Toussaint in An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, where she had portrayed Toussaint as a freedom fighter, comparing him favorably to the American patriots who fought in a noble cause for liberation from Great Britain. Child praised Toussaint's reestablishment of religion in Santo Domingo and stressed the fact that, while Toussaint had been born a slave, once he had the opportunity to learn to read and write he quickly rose to be a wise and brave leader for his people.36 As Bruce Mills has suggested, Child had a great deal to do with promoting the figure of Toussaint as a revolutionary hero and with changing opinion about the value of Haiti to the antislavery movement.37 But Child sensed in The Hour and the Man an even more valuable portrayal than her own: in her review she emphasized Toussaint's heroic qualities and downplayed the faults of execution that others had found. Clearly seeing in Martineau's depiction of Toussaint the potential that could be realized in the liberation of black slaves, Child ringingly endorsed the novel and sketched out what she optimistically termed a new "age of moral sentiment":

Men have learned that it is better to be wise than strong; and now they are learning that it is better to be good than either.

At such an epoch, great changes are in preparation, for woman, the victim of physical force, and universally acknowl- edged type of the affections;-and for the negro, still more cru- elly the victim of brute strength, yet mild and docile amid his suf- ferings; with an intellect capable of incalculable improvement, but ever destined to be in subordination to the feelings of the heart. Of such events, Toussaint, with his vigorous intellect, soft-

35 Lydia Maria Child, rev. of The Hour and the Man, by Harriet Martineau, National Anti-Slavery Standard, 2 (1841-42), 2. Child had assumed the position of editor with the 2o May 1841 number. For a thorough discussion of her editorship of the Standard, see Carolyn L. Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Ma- ria Child (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 267-94.

36 See Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, ed. Carolyn L. Karcher (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1996), pp. 157-60.

37 See Cultural Reformations: Lydia Maria Child and the Literature of Reforn (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1994), pp. 49-5 1 .




ened by religious sentiment, and an almost feminine tenderness of spirit, is the appropriate hero and prophet. (Standard, p. 2)

For many white abolitionists Toussaint was the "appropriate hero and prophet," and, for all the reasons that Child had recognized, Martineau's depiction was perfectly suited for the antislavery campaign. Martineau was a well-respected public figure, and her account was closely documented, historically based, and designed to appeal to a wide range of readers. Anti- slavery sympathizers for whom early abolitionists were too radical found in Martineau's account a rationale for participation. And Martineau's depiction may have had an even deeper reso- nance for antislavery women, touching (as Child noticed) on the linkage between the rights of white women and the plight of slaves, as well as on Toussaint's softer, less gender-specific qualities, especially his feminine "tenderness of spirit."

As Child well knew, of course, not everyone was equally impressed with The Hour and the Man. In a rather cranky notice of the American edition in Godey ' Lady ' Book, Sarah Josepha Hale observed: "Harriet Martineau is the author of this work, and it is Harriet Martineauish throughout-good, bad, and in- different, prejudice and intolerance. We prefer believing Na- poleon Bonaparte, in reference to the torturing and death of Toussaint in France, to Miss Martineau. There may be a want of gallantry in this assertion, nevertheless we make it. We cannot but bear in mind the, to say the least of them, queer stories that Miss M. related of our own country."38 Although Hale opposed slavery, she remained uncertain about what the role of women should be within the movement, and along with many of her Northern contemporaries she was concerned about the nar- rowness of the abolition movement.39 Nonetheless, it is a mark of the book's popularity that it appeared for review in Hale's "Editor's Book Table" column of the popular Godey 's. By Marti- neau 's own account, The Hour and the Man sold well and went

38 [SarahJ. Hale], rev. of The Hour and the Man, by Harriet Martineau, Godey's Lady ' Book, 22 (1841), 144.

39 For a discussion of Hale's attitudes toward slavery, see Patricia Okker, Our Sister Editors: Sarahj: Hale and the Tradition of Nineteenth- Century American Women Editors (Ath- ens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1995), pp. 80-82.




through several editions in both England and America (see Au- tobiography, I, 448).

Martineau's assumptions about ideals of behavior and conduct were in contrast to many of her contemporaries, who believed that blacks were inferior but that slavery was wrong on Christian principles. Her opinions earned her book an admir- ing review from the usually combative Orestes Brownson, the first of the Transcendental circle to notice the book in print. At this time Brownson was opposed to slavery but much more deeply engaged in the aftermath of his controversial "Laboring Classes" essays, published in 1840, in which he suggested that violent class struggle was likely to be the result of the unequal wage system and the relationship between labor and capital. In his review of The Hour and the Man in his Boston Quarterly Review (which he had established in 1837), Brownson praised Marti- neau and commented: "She has thrown somewhat of the charm of romance over the negro character, and made us feel as much interest in the fate of her personages, as if they were white men and women. In Toussaint L'Ouverture she has drawn a noble character, and that, too, without deviating far from historical truth. Her book will serve to make us study the past history and present condition of Hayti, and, perhaps, to make us think more favorably of the capabilities of the negro race."40 Brown- son was quite right. As Martineau emphasizes repeatedly in her appendix, she based her characterization of Toussaint on historical accounts that demonstrated his characteristics of loyalty, simplicity, truthfulness, and Christian beliefs, and she attacks those accounts that offered another picture of Toussaint (see Hour, III, 250-51). Her portrayal of "the capabilities of the negro race" would eventually have an important effect.

Like Brownson, however, many Transcendentalists were not yet prepared to enter into what they saw as the extremism of abolitionist literature and activism, and their response to Mar- tineau reflected their hesitations. For example, James Freeman Clarke, who had met Martineau in Boston on her American tour, had given a generally favorable review of Society in America

40 Brownson, rev. of The Hour and the Man, by Harriet Martineau, The Boston Quar- terly Review, 4 (1841), 260.




when it appeared in 1837, although he disliked her occasion- ally harsh judgments. He commented that in Society Martineau 'judges us by no foreign standard but by our own professed principles. She blames us for not being pure, true, magnani- mous republicans. She blames us for our aristocracy, our slaveholding, our mob-law, &c.-because these things are inconsistent with the Declaration of Independence. She fears we have not come up to our ideal." He concludes his review by observ- ing that he "disliked Miss Martineau's intolerance," suggesting that although he could not blame her for "siding with the abolitionists," she had too often made this "the test by which to judge every thing."'4'

Although Clarke would later become very active in the abolition movement after he returned to Boston from Louisville in 1840, his early reservations were typical of many of those in the Transcendentalist circle. In her generally positive review of The Hour and the Man in The Dial, Margaret Fuller avoided the issue of slavery altogether and seemed more comfortable in criticizing the defects in presentation and execution of the work. She observed that although "the conception of Tous- saint's character is noble and profound," in general "the men are not real live men, but only paper sketches of such."42 At this point Fuller was still several years away from the antislavery position that she would adopt first as the literary editor of the New York Tribune and then as a foreign correspondent covering the European revolutions of 1848 from Italy.

But Martineau's Toussaint slowly began to serve as a model for the members of the Transcendentalist circle as well as many other Americans involved in the antislavery movement during the 1840s. This model, however, had rather complicated dimensions, and one aspect of it revealed the fear of violent

41 Clarke, "Miss Martineau's Society in America," The Western Messenger, 4 (1837), 257, 260. At this time, Clarke, living in Louisville, Kentucky, was pastor of a Unitarian church and writer and then editor for The Western Messenger, a new periodical.

42 [Margaret Fuller], rev. of The Hour and the Man, by Harriet Martineau, The Dial, 2 (1841), 134-35. Fuller also commented that the book was "overladen with incident and minute traits of character," and added: "As an artist Miss Martineau wants skill in selection among her abundant materials, and in effective grouping of her figures" (p. 134).




confrontation. As George F. Tyson has argued, white abolitionists were much more inclined to view the middle of Toussaint's career with enthusiasm and ignore the beginning (when Tous- saint was actively involved in the bloody rebellion) as well as the years after the rebellion during which the black republic of Haiti struggled with effective leadership and direction.43Just as Martineau wrote about Toussaint as a capable leader who failed because of the treachery of the French colonists, so the Ameri- can abolitionists who took up Toussaint as, in Lydia Maria Child's words, "an appropriate hero and prophet" for blacks, tended to downplay the more problematic parts of the historical record. In part the neglect of the whole story is understand- able: as a propaganda tool for use in disarming Southern slaveholders, the life of Toussaint had to be presented as a model for what the effects of peaceful emancipation would mean. Con- sequently, focusing on Toussaint's admirable and recognizable character traits would, in Brownson's words, "make us think more favorably of the capabilities of the negro race." Convinc- ing the Alfred St. Clairs of the South of such capabilities required that the character traits be represented in Anglo-Saxon terms.

Many other white abolitionists, who were adamant about freeing blacks from slavery but tended to repress or obscure the issue of the future relationship of the races, valued Tous- saint for different reasons. Emphasizing his personal characteristics of wisdom, dedication, humanity, and Christianity, some antislavery sympathizers invoked Toussaint in their arguments for the virtues of peaceful emancipation, calling special attention to his reluctance to engage in the more violent aspects of the Haitian Revolution and his loyalty to his white master, to the French colonial government, and even to Napoleon.44 In- creasingly, the figure of Toussaint served white abolitionists as a Romantic hero who demonstrated the capabilities of blacks re-

43 For a useful collection of primary materials relating to the life of Toussaint L'Ou- verture as well as helpful commentary, see George F. Tyson, Jr., ed., Toussaint L'Ouver- ture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1973). I am following Tyson's suggestion that Toussaint was an important figure to the American abolitionists and was used by them in a variety of ways (see pp. 12 1- 2 2). .

44 See Tyson, Toussaint, p. 122.




leased from the brutality of slavery, even as his story reinforced elitist notions about white superiority and conservative notions of societal reform.

During her American travels Martineau had met many white antislavery sympathizers who were reluctant to join the ranks of the abolitionists, fearing the radicalism of the early movement. To many of these sympathizers Martineau's emphasis on Toussaint, rather than on the whole history of the Hai- tian Revolution, may have served as way of championing the antislavery cause by foregrounding the potential of freed slaves and downplaying the violence that preceded and followed the rebellion. Among those who had been reluctant to join the ranks of the abolitionists were Charles Emerson, whom Marti- neau met in Boston, and his brother Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Emersons had invited her to their home in Concord in late 1835, actually rescuing her from the negative reaction that she was receiving in Boston because of her close association with the abolitionists.45 In her Autobiography Martineau remembered that Emerson had told her that when "he saw people of colour ill-used, or heard bad doctrine or sentiment propounded, he did what he could and said what he thought." She further observed that, since that conversation in 1835, Emerson "has spo- ken more abundantly and boldly the more critical the times became; and he is now, and has long been, completely identi- fied with the Abolitionists in conviction and sentiment, though it is out of his way to join himself to their organisation. The other eminent scholars and thinkers of the country revealed themselves no less clearly,-the literary men of Boston and Cambridge sneering at the controversy as 'low' and disagree- able, and troubling to their repose" (Autobiography, I, 375).

Just as Martineau outlined, Emerson steadily became more radical in his own antislavery views. He was sufficiently involved in abolition to serve as the central speaker at a celebration on i August 1844, where he delivered his first major antislavery lecture, "An Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in

45 For a brief discussion of Martineau's relationship with Emerson, see Len Gou- geon, Virtue's Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 199o), pp. 29-30. Gougeon does not, however, discuss The Hour and the Man or Marti- neau's writings about Toussaint L'Ouverture.




the British West Indies," in Concord under the auspices of the Women's Anti-Slavery Society. In this address Emerson argued for the intellectual equality of blacks freed from slavery and used the figure of Toussaint as a touchstone:

If the black man is feeble, and not important to the existing races not on a parity with the best race, the black man must serve, and be exterminated. But if the black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization, for the sake of that element, no wrong, nor strength, nor circumstance, can hurt him: he will survive and play his part. So now, the arrival in the world of such men as Toussaint, and the Haytian heroes, or of the leaders of their race in Barbadoes and Jamaica, out- weighs in good omen all the English and American humanity. The anti-slavery of the whole world, is dust in the balance before this,-is a poor squeamishness and nervousness: the might and the right are here: here is the anti-slave: here is man: and if you have man, black or white is an insignificance. The intellect,- that is miraculous! Who has it, has the talisman: his skin and bones, though they were of the color of night, are transparent, and the everlasting stars shine through, with attractive beams. But a compassion for that which is not and cannot be useful or lovely, is degrading and futile. All the songs, and newspapers, and money-subscriptions, and vituperation of such as do not think with us, will avail nothing against a fact. I say to you, you must save yourself, black or white, man or woman; other help is none. I esteem the occasion of this jubilee to be the proud discovery, that the black race can contend with the white; that, in the great anthem which we call history, a piece of many parts and vast compass, after playing a long time a very low and subdued accompaniment, they perceive the time arrived when they can strike in with effect, and take a master's part in the music.46

While Emerson affirmed the notion of white and black as separate races, he spiritedly defended the intellectual capacity of blacks as the central argument for emancipation. He thus urged both black and white men and women to practice self-

46 Ralph Waldo Emerson, "An Address ... on ... the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies," in Emerson' Antislavery Writings, ed. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1995), p. 31.




cultivation, themes that would become even more important in his later antislavery lectures.47

As Len Gougeon has noted, Emerson's laudatory reference to Toussaint had at least two possible sources. In his "Lec- ture on Slavery" in Concord on 29 April 1835 Charles Emer- son had referred to Toussaint as a hero and "worthy spirit of the black race"; and Emerson might also have read an article on Toussaint in the Concord Freeman on 1 i June 1836 (which referred explicitly to Toussaint as "the George Washington of St. Domingo").48 In addition to these and other print sources that were available, Carlyle had written to both Emerson and his wife about Martineau's new novel. On 9 December 1840 Carlyle asked Emerson: "Have you got Miss Martineau's Hour and the Man! How curious it were to have the real History of the Negro Toussaint; and his black Sansculottism in Saint-Domingo; the most atrocious form Sansculottism could or can assume. This of a 'black Wilberforce-Washington,' as Sterling calls it, is decidedly something."49 Two months later Carlyle wrote to Lid- ian Emerson, on 2 1 February 1841, with news about their mutual friend and her new novel: "The good Harriett is not well; but keeps a very courageous heart.... She writes unweariedly, has many friends visiting her. You saw her Toussaint L ouverture: how she has made such a beautiful 'black Washington' (or 'Washington-Christ-Macready' as I have heard some call it[)], of a rough-handed, hardheaded, semi-articulate gabbling Ne- gro; and of the horriblest phasis that 'Sansculottism' can ex- hibit, of a Black Sansculottism, a musical Opera or Oratorio in pink stockings! It is very beautiful. Beautiful as a child's heart,- and in so shrewd a head as that" (Correspondence, p. 29o). While this remarkable commentary suggests that both Emerson and his wife had seen and perhaps even read The Hour and the Man (their responses to Carlyle are lost), it also reveals something

47 See Gougeon, Virtue's Hero, pp. 75-85. For a discussion of Emerson's sources, see Joseph Slater, "Two Sources for Emerson's First Address on West Indian Emancipation," Emerson Society Quarterly, 44 (1966), 97-100.

48 See Gougeon, Virtue' Hero, pp. 27, 83, and 362, n. 74. 49 Thomas Carlyle, letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 9 December 1840, in The Cor-

respondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. Joseph Slater (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1964), p. 287-



HARRIET MARTINEAU 'S BLACK HERO 187

of Carlyle's racialist attitudes. Although impressed with her skills, Carlyle suggests that Martineau had created a fiction that distorts and prettifies the harsh historical reality of black revolution. Noting Martineau's Toussaint as a combination of Washington, Christ, and William Charles Macready (the distinguished English actor), Carlyle links Toussaint to the radicals of the French Revolution. His depiction of Toussaint as dangerous contrasts sharply with the milder version of him that Martineau, the abolitionists, and even Emerson were actively promoting.

In the same year as his emancipation address Emerson also alluded to Toussaint in "Character," in his Essays; Second Series (1844), using him as an example of the way in which "higher natures" can overpower "lower ones," despite the bond of an iron ring: "Suppose a slaver on the coast of Guinea should take on board a gang of negroes, which should contain persons of the stamp of Toussaint L'Ouverture: or, let us fancy, under these swarthy masks he has a gang of Washingtons in chains. When they arrive at Cuba, will the relative order of the ship's company be the same? Is there nothing but rope and iron?"50 Here Emerson clearly portrays Toussaint as an exceptionally talented leader; in a single sentence, Emerson suggests the plot that Frederick Douglass would later use in "The Heroic Slave" (1853). However Emerson learned about the hero of the Hai- tian rebellion, by 1844 the publication of The Hour and the Man, and its popularity among the members of the Transcendental- ist circle, had made the figure of Toussaint a logical and appropriate reference for new abolitionists like Emerson who wished to illustrate what freedom could do for the intellectual ability of slaves.

Emerson's growing sympathy for the abolitionists signaled that their movement was becoming increasingly widespread. In the fall of 1844 James K. Polk was elected president; in the next year Texas was annexed, and the Mexican War followed in 1846. These events all strengthened the proslavery interests in both the North and the South. The Narrative of the Life of Freder- ick Douglass was published in 1845 and quickly became a best-

50 Emerson, "Character," in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 498.




seller, and black and white abolitionists picked up the pace of their activities and publications. News of the revolutions in Eu- rope from 1848 to 1850 filled both Northern and Southern newspapers with accounts that would fuel new fears of slave uprisings. Many antislavery sympathizers became abolitionists, and proslavery advocates became more protective and defiant. Margaret Fuller, writing from Europe for the New York Daily Tri- bune on i January 1848, observed:

Then there is this horrible cancer of Slavery, and this wicked War, that has grown out of it. How dare I speak of these things here? I listen to the same arguments against the emancipation of Italy, that are used against the emancipation of our blacks; the same arguments in favor of the spoliation of Poland as for the conquest of Mexico. I find the cause of tyranny and wrong every- where the same-and lo! my Country the darkest offender, because with the least excuse, foresworn to the high calling with which she was called,-no champion of the rights of men, but a robber and ajailer; the scourge hid behind her banner; her eyes fixed, not on the stars, but on the possessions of other men.

How it pleases me here to think of the Abolitionists! I could never endure to be with them at home, they were so tedious, often so narrow, always so rabid and exaggerated in their tone. But, after all, they had a high motive, something eternal in their de- sire and life; and, if it was not the only thing worth thinking of it was really something worth living and dying for to free a great nation from such a terrible blot, such a threatening plague. God strengthen them and make them wise to achieve their purpose! 51

Although Fuller had reviewed Douglass's Narrative and had written about antislavery activities in her position as literary editor of the New York Daily Tribune from 1844 to 1846, her position on slavery was crystallized in Europe, as she considered her own country in light of her experience in the Italian Revolution.

In the United States the possibility of the emancipation of slaves through peaceful means began to seem remote, espe-

51 [Margaret Fuller], "Things and Thoughts in Europe," New York Daily Tribune, 1 January 1848, p. i; rpt. in Margaret Fuller, "These Sad but Glorious Days "- Dispatches from Europe, I 84 6-I 850, ed. Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 165-66.




cially with the passage of the Compromise of 1850, which sub- stantially altered the boundaries of slavery. The Compromise, widely viewed in the North as a capitulation to Southern slaveholders, admitted California into the Union as a free state and abolished the slave trade in the nation's capitol. At the same time, however, the New Mexico and Utah territories were or- ganized with no prohibition of slavery. Even worse in the eyes of many, the Fugitive Slave Law made every American a party to slavery. While citizens in free states had always been required by law to return fugitive slaves (the first Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1793), the new law suspended due process. Almost immediately, the abolitionists moved into high gear. An aghast Harriet Beecher Stowe began work on Uncle Tom s Cabin: writing her novel in the midst of the outrage over the Fugitive Slave Law as well as the aftermath of the European revolutions, she alluded to slave rebellions and to Toussaint as a way of remind- ing Northern and Southern audiences of the potential for violence if slaveholding did not end in the United States.

After 1850, interest in Toussaint's career began to shift to the beginnings of his life and to the aftermath of the Haitian rebellion after his death. To black abolitionists who celebrated West Indies Emancipation Day on the first of August each year, of course, Toussaint was a vivid reminder that blacks were capable of liberating themselves from oppressive white rule.52 For

52 For a helpful study of the primary role of the slaves in the Haitian rebellion, see Michael Craton, "Slave Culture, Resistance and the Achievement of Emancipation in the British West Indies, 1783-1838," in Slavery and British Society, I 776-I184 6, pp. 1 oo- 2 2. As William S. McFeely reminds us in his biography of Frederick Douglass (who in

1889 would become the American minister to Haiti), "Toussaint L'Ouverture remained the most revered figure in the imagination of black people who wanted to find a way not only out of slavery but out of deference to a white world" (Frederick Douglass [New York: W. W. Norton, 199 1 ], p. 194). The figure of Toussaint and the Haitian Rev- olution were frequently invoked by other black abolitionists who are outside the focus of this essay. David Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles, Together with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of Amer- ica, first published as a pamphlet in Boston in 1829, stressed the consequences of a bloody resistance similar to the one in Haiti should slavery not be terminated at once (see Walker's Appeal in Four Articles, by David Walker; and An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America, by Henry Highland Garnet, ed. William Loren Katz [New York: Arno Press, 1969], pp. 30-31) . In 1841 the New York African Society for Mutual Relief sponsored a lecture series that included "Toussaint L'Ouverture" (see Philip S. Foner, History of Black Americans: From the Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom to the Eve of the Compro- mise of 1850 [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983], pp. 246-47). Henry High-




example, in "The Heroic Slave" (1853) Frederick Douglass at- tempted in fiction what he had earlier suggested about the native intelligence of black slaves, both in his autobiography and in lectures staunchly celebrating black heroes as equal to white heroes. In "The Heroic Slave" Mr. Listwell, the traveler who observes and hears Madison Washington's poignant soliloquy and becomes an abolitionist on the spot, recognizes that "here is indeed a man, .. . of rare endowments,-a child of God,-guilty of no crime but the color of his skin."53 But Douglass moves Madison Washington from slavery to freedom and then back to the South, where he leads a successful revolt aboard the Creole. When Tom Grant, the white first mate of the Creole, describes the rebellion, he surprises the sailors with an ardent defense of Washington's intelligence and leadership as he observes: "The leader of the mutiny in question was just as shrewd a fellow as ever I met in my life, and was as well fitted to lead in a dangerous enterprise as any one white man in ten thousand" ("The Heroic Slave," p. 232). Like Martineau's Toussaint, Douglass's Washington is not only a shrewd organizer and heroic leader but also a caring and courageous family man, one who certainly knew when and how to seize a moment of opportunity to free fellow slaves. Indeed, Douglass emphasizes the necessity for violent action as the only way to freedom for slaves.54

Other abolitionists would also draw on the themes of rebellion and revolution. William Wells Brown used the figure of Toussaint in his lecture "St. Domingo: Its Revolutions and its Patriots," first delivered in London on i6 May 1854, and then

land Garnet's famous "Address to the Slaves of the Unites States of America," first delivered on 16 August 1843 in Buffalo, New York, linked the insurrections of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner to a tradition of heroism that included Moses, Lafayette, Wash- ington, and Toussaint L'Ouverture (see Garnet, "Address to the Slaves of the United States of America," in The Black Abolitionist Papers, ed. C. Peter Ripley, et al., 5 vols. [Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1985-92], III, 409).

53 Frederick Douglass, "The Heroic Slave," in AutographsforFreedom, 2 vols. (Boston: John P.Jewett, 1853; rpt. Miami: Mnemosyne, 1969), I, i8i.

54 For a discussion of "The Heroic Slave" and Douglass's increasing interest in active rebellion, see Robert B. Stepto, "Storytelling in Early Afro-American Fiction: Frederick Douglass' 'The Heroic Slave,"' Georgia Review, 36 (1982), 355-68; rpt. in Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass, ed. William L. Andrews (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991 ), pp. 108-19.




in Philadelphia on 2o December-but, as his title suggests, his emphasis was on the history and the uprisings of St. Domingo.55 Brown meant the lecture as a warning to slaveholders that rebellions could be successful, and he was graphic in his descriptions of the cruelty that prompted the Haitian rebellion and the aftermath following Toussaint's death. By the mid 1850S the United States was deeply engaged in the conflict over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a controversy that presaged the Civil War to come. Increasing acts of violence, such as John Brown's raid at Pottawotamie Creek and the beating of Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate, sparked new fears of rebellion and out- right revolution. In addition, Stowe once again decided to use fiction as her way of protesting what she saw. At this time she was living in Andover, Maine, with her family, but she nonetheless remained active in the antislavery movement through her work with Garrison on an antislavery lecture series in Boston. Deeply concerned about the increasing sectional violence and the inability of abolitionists to bring an end to slavery, Stowe determined to write another novel. As Martineau observed in her Autobiography, Stowe had truly "thrown [her] whole future into the cause" (Autobiography, I, 358).

Stowe hurriedly wrote and published her second antislavery novel, Dred, during i 856. The central figure of the novel is a black revolutionary, the fictional son of Denmark Vesey, and Stowe suggests that if Dred had lived in freedom instead of slavery he would have ranked in greatness with Toussaint.56 This lengthy novel, finished while Stowe was en route to England to secure a copyright there, sold 165,000 copies in England, and 150,000 in the Northern states, during its first year of publication.57 Admirers included Martineau, who must surely have ap- preciated the reworking of a familiar black heroic figure. Little studied today and only recently available in England in reprint

55 For an excellent discussion of Brown's career, especially as an abolitionist play- wright, see John Ernest, "The Reconstruction of Whiteness: William Wells Brown's The Escape; or, A Leapfor Freedom," PMLA, 113 (1998), 1,1o8-21.

56 See Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, 2 vols. (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Co., 1856), II, 299.

57 See Forrest Wilson, Crusader in Crinoline: The Life of Harriet Beechier Stowe (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1941), p. 419.




editions, Dred is generally dismissed by modern critics as a care- lessly written novel with an overblown cast of characters. And yet, like The Hour and the Man, the novel made an important impact in its day and presented yet another image of a power- ful black man of wisdom and strength of character. In this novel Stowe abandons the forbearance of Uncle Tom in favor of the active resistance of Dred; she based the character on Nat Turner, whose 1831 "Confessions" were included as an appendix to the novel.

In his first appearance in the book Dred emerges from the swamp, where he has created a community for fugitive slaves. Stowe describes him in terms of power and strength:

He was a tall black man, of magnificent stature and proportions. His skin was intensely black, and polished like marble. A loose shirt of red flannel, which opened very wide at the breast, gave a display of a neck and chest of herculean strength. The sleeves of the shirt, rolled up nearly to the shoulders, showed the muscles of a gladiator. The head, which rose with an imperial air from the broad shoulders, was large and massive, and developed with equal force both in the reflective and perceptive department. The perceptive organsjutted like dark ridges over the eyes, while that part of the head which phrenologists attribute to the moral and intellectual sentiments, rose like an ample dome above them.

(Dred, I, 240-41)

A combination of Moses and an African king, Dred is a black revolutionary-not a mulatto-in the spirit of Martineau's Toussaint. By 1856 even Harriet Beecher Stowe realized that no peaceful end to the slavery question would be possible and that nonresistance was no longer a viable option. Her second antislavery novel, Dred, is testimony to that realization.

By the latter part of the 1 85os, it seemed obvious to many observers that war was inevitable, and abolitionists pressed harder for emancipation. In his popular lecture Wendell Phil- lips used his biographical account of Toussaint to demonstrate how slavery as an institution demeaned blacks and prompted them to violent rebellion as their only recourse. The purpose of this lecture was to establish the equality of blacks with "the Saxon" by demonstrating that races may be judged "by the great




men they produce, and by the average merit of the mass of the race."58 Phillips favorably compared Toussaint to famous white leaders such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Cromwell, and John Brown, emphasizing Toussaint's courage, intelligence, and tenacious pursuit of liberty and justice. Going even further than Martineau, Phillips proclaimed that Tous- saint's story was "the finest chapter in the history of the race" and proved the capacity of blacks for self-government. Further- more, he suggested that black heroes like Toussaint and Cris- pus Attucks, who died defending his country in the Boston Mas- sacre of 1770, confirmed the position of blacks as equal to that of the Saxon. In fact, in Phillips's speech Toussaint becomes the "Black Napoleon," a figure who was in direct competition with Napoleon for control of Haiti. It is significant that in 1863 Phil- lips altered his lecture to argue that the prejudice against em- ploying blacks as soldiers for the Union Army was wrong, by demonstrating Toussaint's abilities as a soldier and pointing out that his army of blacks and mulattoes had defeated better- equipped British forces in Haiti and then nearly outwitted some of Napoleon's best generals. Thus Toussaint, first linked to the heroes of 1775-76, becomes central in the argument for recruiting black soldiers for what was, to Phillips and to many others, the second American Revolution.

On 26 December 1883 a large group gathered in Boston at the Old South Church for the unveiling of Anne Whitney's statue of Harriet Martineau. William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., spoke first and was followed by Phillips, who gave what proved to be his last public address. In a warm and enthusiastic tribute to Martineau's life and works, he observed:

Harriet Martineau saw, not merely the question of free speech, but the grandeur of the great movement just then opened. This great movement is second only to the Reformation in the history of the English and the German race. In time to come, when the

58 Wendell Phillips, "Toussaint L'Ouverture," in his Speeches, Lectures, and Letters (Boston: James Redpath, 1 863), p. 469. This is the text of the 1 861 lecture; it was evi- dently revised many times. An edited version of the 1 863 lecture is in The Heath Anthol- ogy of American Literature, Third Edition, ed. Paul Lauter and Richard Yarborough, et al., 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), I, 1,967-76.




grandeur of this movement is set forth in history, you will see its proportions and beneficial results. Harriet Martineau saw it fifty years ago, and after that she was one of us. She was always the friend of the poor. Prisoner, slave, wage-serf, worn-out by toil in the mill, no matter who the sufferer, there was always one person who could influence Tory and Liberal to listen. Americans, I ask you to welcome to Boston this statue of Harriet Martineau, because she was the greatest American Abolitionist.59

In writing The Hour and the Man Harriet Martineau made a significant contribution to the American antislavery movement. Her presentation of Toussaint made a black man central to the concept of heroism for the mid nineteenth century and demonstrated her notion of what freed slaves were capable of accom- plishing. Martineau, a well-respected British author, provided a popular version of an important historical figure. As political events altered the antislavery movement during the 1 840s and 1 85os, the model of Toussaint proved to be a useful, if complicated, one for black and white abolitionists. While Martineau's contributions to the antislavery cause in the United States are overlooked today, they were well known in the nineteenth century.

University of Nebraska

59 Phillips, quoted in Carlos Martyn, Wendell Phillips: The Agitator, revised ed. (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Co., 1890), p. 477.



Documents

Harriet Martineau's Black Hero and the American Antislavery Movement