Writers Tried to Solve the Slavery Debate

In the decades prior to the Civil War, the United States was home to some of the most famous authors ever known. Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass provided readers with numerous literary masterpieces during this era often referred to as the American Renaissance. It also was a time when the slavery debate swept through America. University of Missouri-Columbia English professor Maurice Lee has found that celebrated writers of this period attempted to solve the slavery crisis by including the slavery issue in their stories.

"The greatest works of literature before the Civil War were known for their failure to solve the philosophical crisis of slavery," Lee said. "The Civil War was a failure of philosophical differences and because these questions couldn't be handled philosophically, they had to be settled on the battlefield."

Lee points out that Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, the third-most read book in the 19th Century, has typically been viewed as political propaganda. In reality, Lee said, Stowe was trying to answer the philosophical question of, "What does it feel like to be a slave?"

"In Stowe's eyes, people could never truly understand slavery unless they understood what it was like to be in the person's shoes," Lee said. "Stowe asserted that whites could sympathize with blacks and could, in fact, recognize the evil scenario of slavery."

Lee found that Herman Melville attempted to show his criticism of both slaveholders and the abolitionists. According to Lee, Melville tried to temper Northern self-righteousness by showing how slavery was just one particular form of evil. Supporting Lee's view is a quote from Melville's classic novel, Moby Dick, "Who ain't the slave."

The pro-slavery writer in the list, Lee said, was Edgar Allen Poe. Poe understood and showed in his writings that racism was founded in white fear, Lee said. There are examples of it in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, The Black Cat and The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

"Poe asserted white supremacy and accepted the evils of slavery," Lee said. "Yet he himself realized that racism lay primarily in the minds of whites."

Lee is currently writing a book on the subject titled, "Split Visions: Slavery, Philosophy and American Literature," which will be due out this year.