Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
who opposed slavery and president Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policies.
Child’s writing on housewifery, as well as stories for children published in The
Juvenile Miscellany (1827), focused on subjects deemed suitable for conventional
women. Nevertheless, Child took the radical step of using her prots from these
publications to support their marriage. Acting against society’s expectations lost
her many readers and adversely aected her independent income, particularly
when she joined the Abolitionist movement and the American Anti-Slavery Society
(1833–1870). She was made a member of the executive committee of the American
Anti-Slavery Society in 1839.
Her subsequent writing attested to her Abolitionist beliefs. In 1841, she became
the editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard (1840–1870). She published An
Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833); defended
John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry; and published at her own expense The
Freedmen’s Book (1865), a collection of biographies of freed slaves from the past,
including Toussaint L’Overture and Phillis Wheatley, intended to give strength
and courage to living freedmen. Child also wrote of slum conditions in New York
and the mistreatment of blacks in that city.
Child’s writing laid bare outrageous injustices with concreteness, clarity, and
logic—letting their horrors speak for themselves. In this way, she inuenced citizens
like Charles Sumner (1811—1874) and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823—1911)
to turn against slavery.
4.12.1 “The Quadroons”
(1842)
“I promised thee a sister tale
Of man’s perdious cruelty;
Come then and hear what cruel wrong
Befell the dark Ladie.”—Coleridge.
Not far from Augusta, Georgia, there is a pleasant place called Sand-Hills,
appropriated almost exclusively to summer residences for the wealthy inhabitants
of the neighboring city. Among the beautiful cottages that adorn it was one far
retired from the public roads, and almost hidden among the trees. It was a perfect
model of rural beauty. The piazzas that surrounded it were covered with Clematis
and Passion ower. The Pride of China mixed its oriental-looking foliage with the
majestic magnolia, and the air was redolent with the fragrance of owers, peeping
out from every nook, and nodding upon you in bye places, with a most unexpected
welcome. The tasteful hand of Art had not learned to imitate the lavish beauty
and harmonious dis—order of Nature, but they lived together in loving unity, and
spoke in according tones. The gate—way rose in a Gothic—arch, with graceful
tracery in iron-work, surmounted by a Cross, around which uttered and played
the Mountain Fringe, that lightest and most fragile of vines.
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