Negro Life at the South

The decade of the 1850s was, for many, a period of a satisfying coming of age. The Industrial Revolution, which had developed in the United States a bit later than in England, had matured, and the nation was on its way to being a global economic presence (despite a financial depression in 1857). The Gadsden Purchase in 1853 transferred Mexican land (this time without going to war) to the US...

There are many and obvious similarities between European and American, especially British and North American, literary and visual images of blacks. Ever since the eighteenth century there had been a transatlantic interchange of writings about slavery ...

The fictions that whites built about the black people in their midst were very different from those they constructed about one another. In the eyes of almost all the dominant citizens who put themselves at the center of the body politic, scheming Yankee farmers and vaguely disreputable Westerners might be of dubious commercial malleability or low social standing, but they were indisputably in the competitive race that linked citizens across the electorate. African-Americans, however, were not. …