Chapter 6
Charles W. Chesnutt: Race and the Re-negotiation of the Federal Contract

I

Attempting a formal balance of diverse interests, Howells's realism demands continual revision because it assumes a world subject to historical change. But the need for revision does not stop with Howells. Our assessment of his formal solutions also requires revision as the importance we grant to the interests that he represents changes over time. An obvious example is An Imperative Duty (1892), in which race complicates the plot involving a woman who almost refuses to marry a man she loves because of a false sense of self-sacrifice.^[1] Rhoda Aidgate is a beautiful orphan, whose African ancestry has been concealed by her guardian aunt. Facing a bad conscience as her niece contemplates marrying a minister, the aunt tells Rhoda about her mixed blood and promptly dies from an accidental overdose of drugs designed to calm her after the nerve-wracking scene. Dr. Olney, who had known the two in Italy, has, in confidence, learned the secret while treating the aunt and finds himself falling in love with Rhoda. Rhoda refuses to go on with her planned marriage, not only because of her changed sense of identity but, more important, because she realizes that she does not love the minister. When, however, she begins to awaken to her attraction to the doctor, her recently revealed heritage seems to rule out marriage. Instead, she feels that it is her duty to find her unknown black family "to help them and acknowledge them ... [to] try to educate them and elevate them; give my life to them" (ID 96). Olney responds with logic similar to that generated by the love plot in Silas Lapham.

He tells Rhoda that she would have a duty to her relatives "if [she] had voluntarily chosen [her] part with them—if [she] had ever consented to be of their kind," but since she has not, "there is no more specific obligation upon [her] to give [her] life to their elevation than there is upon [him]" (ID 96). Reverting to an arithmetic calculation of responsibility, he jokingly asks that she renounce her puritan heritage of "dutiolatry" (ID 89). "No, if you must give your life to the improvement of any particular race, give it to mine. Begin with me . You won't find me unreasonable. All that I shall ask of you are the fifteen-sixteenths or so of you that belong to my race by heredity; and I will cheerfully consent to your giving our colored connections their one-sixteenth" (ID 96–97). Married after an exchange of promises—he not to reveal her secret; she to believe that he would not be ashamed to do so—they return to Italy, where Rhoda passes as a dark beauty.

Howells's story illustrates how much our assessment of realism is subject to a revision in attitudes between a work's past moment of production to its present moment of reception. To some of today's readers, by stressing personal gain over racial loyalty, Howells fails in his responsibility to paint "human feelings in their true proportion and relation" (SL 197). Indeed, from their perspective, Howells's devaluation of obligations owed to blacks in post-Reconstruction society limits his vision. A better solution for such readers is found in Francis E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy (1892), when a mulatto who can pass for white makes the choice that Rhoda rejects, and devotes her life to the advancement of blacks. But even though Harper's solution might seem more responsible to some today, we should not ignore how Howells's solution reveals his sense of realism's relation to the genre of tragedy.

Rhoda believes that her secret lineage locks her into tragedy. Facing a course of action determined by a racial heritage over which she has no control, she sees no possibility of self-assertion. Whereas Howells does not deny the existence of situations of life and death that are completely out of human control, he insists on using his fiction to help us to recognize chances for human action and development that would otherwise seem tragically and fatally closed off. For instance, in a review he writes that the "higher function" of the novel is "to teach that men are somehow masters of their fate."^[2] Thus the narrator mocks Rhoda's tragic reaction with: "As tragedy the whole affair had fallen to ruin. It could be reconstructed, if at all, only upon an octave much below the operatic pitch. It must be treated in no lurid twilight gloom, but in plain, simple, matter-of-fact noonday" (ID 94). As in The Rise of Silas

Lapham , Howells offers realism as an antidote to moralistic submissions to "fate."

The aunt is a special target of Howells's attack. She is one of those people "to whom life, in spite of all experience, remains a sealed book, and who are always trying to unlock its mysteries with the keys furnished them by fiction. They judge the world by the novels they have read, and their acquaintance in the flesh by characters in stories, instead of judging these by the real people they have met, and more or less lived with" (ID 24). This tendency makes her not only a poor reader of good literature, but also a potentially dangerous character. For Olney such a woman "would be capable of an atrocious cruelty in speaking or acting the truth, and would consider herself an exemplary person for having done her duty at any cost of suffering to herself and others" (ID 24). Olney unwittingly links her narrow moralism to contemporary views of the color line when he thinks that "the right affected her as a body of positive color, sharply distinguished from wrong, and not shading into and out of it by gradations of tint, as we find it doing in reality" (ID 24). For Howells questions of right and wrong are no more simple questions of black and white than are questions of race in a country where there is a history of racial intermixture. Similarly, the "race question" has no clear-cut and predetermined answers.^[3]

If An Imperative Duty is Howells's attempt to revise the plot of the tragic mulatto, his revision is in turn revised eight years later by the African-American novelist and lawyer Charles W. Chesnutt. In The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Chesnutt self-consciously responds to Howells by insisting on the tragic outcome of a beautiful mulatto's attempt to marry a white man. Molly Walden, a free person of color who mixes mostly European with African and a bit of Indian blood, has two children by her rich, white lover in Patesville, North Carolina. John, who inherits "his father's patrician features and his mother's Indian hair" (HBC 160), leaves Patesville as a young man, passes as white, manages a plantation in South Carolina during the Civil War, and marries the orphaned daughter of its owner, who bears him a son before dying herself. Rich and admitted to the bar, John, in a moment of "sentimental weakness" (HBC 28), returns home for the first time and convinces Rena, his younger sister, to live with him and care for his son. Attracting attention at a medieval tournament inspired by Walter Scott, the beautiful "Rowena Warwick" wins the heart of her brother's trusted friend, George Tryon. Before the two can marry, however, Rena, con-

cerned about her mother's health, sneaks off for a short visit home. As a result of crossed letters and coincidence, Tryon comes to Patesville on business and discovers the secret of his fiancee's identity. Tryon does not betray John by publicizing his black blood, but he does break with Rena, who, as a school teacher, now devotes herself to the education of black children. Tryon plans to marry Blanche Leary, his mother's favorite, but when by chance he sees Rena again his love rekindles, and he inwardly vows to marry her. But the vow comes too late. Rena has been struck ill by the stress and dies at her mother's house, having been brought home by Frank, the loyal black neighbor, who has consistently and unselfishly watched over and loved her.

Part of Chesnutt's response to Howells is to give Olney's logic to John. Commending that logic, William L. Andrews argues that "John Walden is a singular figure in the race literature of post-Civil War America," because "he is perhaps the first character in American fiction who, having been raised 'black,' decides on his own to pass for white and constructs a legal and moral justification for doing so." According to Andrews, when John disappears, the novel "retreats with its still largely unrealized heroine into the sentimental byways of the novel of seduction."^[4]

If Andrews is right about the novel's use of sentimentality, he fails to note how it supplements John's pragmatic logic. John's point of view gets human feelings out of proportion. As the narrator says of John, "Men who have elected to govern their lives by principles of abstract right and reason, which happen, perhaps, to be at variance with what society considers equally right and reasonable, should, for fear of complications, be careful about descending from the lofty heights of logic to the common level of impulse and affection" (HBC 28–29).

As contrived as it is, the melodramatic plot of The House Behind the Cedars responds to Howells's vision in An Imperative Duty by employing the Howellsian strategy of showing how difficult it is to translate the logic of one situation to a comparable, if somewhat different, one. But in this case Chesnutt outdoes his model. Not one of Howells's best works, An Imperative Duty falls short in part because it employs the logic of the "economy of pain" that helps to solve the dilemma of the love plot in The Rise of Silas Lapham , without complicating that logic by bringing it into contact with something like the business plot in Howells's earlier work. The House Behind the Cedars provides such complication by providing not one but two stories of passing, one of

John and one of Rena. Because what works for John does not work for Rena, these two stories complement one another in an almost Howellsian manner. But complications alone do not make a work realistic.

Biographically Howells may have believed in a moral order to the world, but in his best works he refuses to adopt a transcendental perspective that provides a clear standard of judgment. In contrast, Chesnutt not only retains an eighteenth-century vision of a morally principled world in which equitable standards are knowable through reason, he writes his fiction with the didactic purpose of helping his readers see those standards. One symptom of their differences is the third plot of Silas Lapham , which generates related but "novel" events that cannot be accounted for by an overarching logic governing all situations. In House Behind the Cedars we get the complications of two plots, but in the end both can be judged by the same equitable principle. Indeed, Howells and Chesnutt present different views of principles in their works.

In A Hazard of New Fortunes Howells has the business manager of a literary journal contrast principles and convictions. But as the book's dramatic action brings various people's principles into conflict, they become harder and harder to distinguish from convictions. Similarly, in The Marrow of Tradition Chesnutt distinguishes principles from prejudice when a Southerner jeopardizes the success of an operation by refusing to allow a black doctor to participate. Evoking his professional code of ethics, the Northern doctor in charge protests. "It is a matter of principle," he proclaims, "which ought not give way to a mere prejudice" (MT 71). As in Howells, the distinction is called into question when another doctor compares the Southerner's stand with the Northern doctor's. The Southerner, he explains, also "has certain principles,—call them prejudices, if you like—certain inflexible rules of conduct by which he regulates his life. One of these, which he shares with all of us in some degree, forbids the recognition of the negro as a social equal" (MT 71). But if Chesnutt points to a structural similarity in how principles and prejudices can regulate people's conduct, he ultimately needs to differentiate between the two.

We can get a sense of how this difference affects Howells's and Chesnutt's presentations of their fictional worlds by comparing two characters sometimes taken as authorial spokesmen: Howells's Reverend Sewell and Chesnutt's Judge Archibald Straight. If Sewell's advocacy of an "economy of pain" is often taken as Howells's own, Howells places it in a dramatic context that questions its universal application.

Indeed, in his next novel, Howells tests Sewell's ideas in circumstances that place the minister in an ironic light. In contrast, Chesnutt's Judge Straight maintains an equitable point of view. From the bench he "dispensed justice tempered with mercy" (HBC 163), going so far as to sentence "a man to be hanged for the murder of his own slave" (HBC 163–64). Although Chesnutt does not mention it, this decision results from Straight's appeal to equity, since it defies the precedent established in State v. Mann (1829), a case used to structure Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp and cited by Stowe as proof of the horror of slavery in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin . In it North Carolina's Judge Thomas Ruffin ruled that because "the power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect," ^[5] an owner has the right to kill his slave. Straight's ability to overrule the law by an appeal to an equitable sense of justice shows the extent to which Chesnutt clings to a republican vision of a moral universe.

Although Howells's seeming spokesman is a man of God, Howells does not grant him a transcendental perspective. In contrast, Straight is an ideal republican lawyer, a southern version of the type that Howells kills off in A Modern Instance . Straight, however, is not naive. He knows that the abolition of slavery is not enough to ensure equality for people of color. Thus, although he feels that "in equity [John] would seem to be entitled to his chance in life" (HBC 35), he worries that John will be denied it. Howells does not abandon the effort to imagine a more equitable balance to social relations, but tries not to impose that balance from a transcendental perspective. In An Imperative Duty the result is a pragmatic solution with which he tries to avoid unnecessary tragedy. In contrast, Chesnutt presents a tragedy while measuring the unjust treatment of blacks by a universal standard of equity.

In a review Howells notes this difference when he argues that Chesnutt is not "so inartistic as to play the advocate; ... but while he recognizes pretty well all the facts in the case, he is too clearly of a judgment that is made up."^[6] Chesnutt's clear sense of judgment makes his fiction more didactic and less open than Howells's realism at its best. But, as Howells himself acknowledges in the same review, when the issue is race it is hard to fault Chesnutt on his principled stand. As the title of George Washington Cable's famous "The Freedman's Case in Equity" indicates, in the post-Reconstruction era those concerned about achieving justice for a group denied equal representation had few options other than an appeal to equity.^[7] In this chapter I want to explore how Chesnutt's fiction exposes the failure of contract—especially the newly

negotiated "contract" between North and South—to generate an equitable situation for people of color. At the same time, I want to draw attention to how Chesnutt's embodiment in fictional form of his belief in a " 'power that works for righteousness,' and that leads men to do justice to one another," distinguishes his work from that of the realists.^[8]

Chesnutt's differences from the realists do not, however, cause him to present a morally simplistic world. On the contrary, he is much more attuned to racial complications than Howells. For instance, on the highly charged issue of whether it is right or wrong for a person with African blood to pass as white, Chesnutt seems to adopt a stance of moral relativism. As the narrator notes, commenting on the dilemma, "It was not the first time, nor the last, that right or wrong had been a matter of point of view" (HBC 82). Andrews uses this statement to link Chesnutt to the realists and their challenge to clear-cut moral standards.^[9] But for Chesnutt the question of passing is morally uncertain precisely because the United States has failed to live up to its promise to provide equity for its black citizens. People designated white are not confronted with the moral dilemma of passing, because they have nothing to gain by claiming to be black. In contrast, for someone designated black there is a moral dilemma, because to remain black means being denied deserved opportunity, while to pass as white means the loss of connection to family and kin. Because the country has not reached the equitable state in which race is irrelevant, the proper course of action is unclear and Chesnutt has to evoke the equitable solution of judging each decision on a case-by-case basis. Chesnutt's moral uncertainty on specific issues, in other words, grows out of his belief that "the laws of nature are higher and more potent than merely human institutions, and upon anything like a fair field are likely to win in the long run" (HBC 148). Moral dilemmas arise—as today's debates over affirmative action indicate—when a fair field does not exist.

If part of the complexity of Chesnutt's fiction results from a lack of racial equality that creates moral dilemmas demanding equitable consideration, another part of its complexity involves the way in which it complicates standard notions about what constitutes an appeal to equity. Appeals to equity often rely on sentiment, whereas those to law usually rely on logic. But in Chesnutt's world what seems an equitable solution results from John's cool logic, while his sister's reliance on sentiment reinforces the absence of an equitable situation. This complication indicates that for Chesnutt the standard opposition between

reason and sentiment does not work. But before we see why, we need to compare the two stories of passing.

II

Rena's story functions by pitting the power of love against the prejudices of custom. Guided by novels that she has read, Rena hopes that love will conquer all, "that neither life nor death, nor creed nor caste, could stay his triumphant course" (HBC 75). Sure enough, in Tryon's case class would have been no barrier to their marriage. "Had her people been simply poor and of low estate, he would have brushed aside mere worldly considerations, and would have bravely sacrificed convention for love" (HBC 146). Race, however, is a different matter. Even though Tryon's love eventually overcomes his prejudice, it does so too late. Love alone, it seems, is not capable of overcoming racial prejudice.

John must also overcome prejudiced custom. But whereas Rena relies on love, he relies on reason. The result is, for the most part, more successful. That success is in part due to reason's power to expose the arbitrary determination of race by custom. As a boy, John, wanting to be a lawyer, visits the law offices of Judge Straight, a friend of his now deceased father. When the Judge finds out the boy's ancestry he tells him that he cannot fulfill his ambition. When John insists that he is white, the Judge responds that appearance doesn't matter because "one drop of black blood makes the whole man black" (HBC 170). To John's question, "Why shouldn't it be the other way, if the white blood is so superior?" the Judge answers, "Because it is more convenient as it is—and more profitable" (HBC 170). Nonetheless, in memory of an old friend, the Judge reconsiders.

Knowing that the determination of race is so arbitrary that it varies from state to state, he looks up the South Carolina law declaring that "mulatto ... is not invariably applicable to every admixture of African blood with the European, nor is one having all the features of a white to be ranked with the degraded class designated by the laws of this State as persons of color, because of some remote taint of the negro race. Juries would probably be justified in holding a person to be white in whom the admixture of African blood did not exceed one eighth. And

even where color or feature are doubtful, it is a question for the jury to decide by reputation, by reception into society, and by their exercise of the privileges of the white man, as well as by admixture of blood" (HBC 171–72). According to this law, the Judge agrees that "away from Patesville" John need not be black. Like Howells's Rhoda, John has the "unusual privilege" of "choosing between two races" (HBC 172). To help him choose, the Judge hires John as his office boy and lets him read his law books to prepare him for a legal career.

Supported by an understanding of existing law, John makes a logical choice and succeeds as a white lawyer. Nonetheless, when the Judge sees him on his secret visit ten years later, he warns him not to stay long. "The people of a small town are inquisitive about strangers, and some of them have long memories. I remember we went over the law, which was in your favor; but custom is stronger than law—in these matters custom is law" (HBC 34). When John leaves, Judge Straight muses on custom's power. "Right and wrong ... must be eternal verities, but our standards for measuring them vary with our latitude and our epoch. We make our customs lightly; once made, like our sins, they grip us in bands of steel; we become the creatures of our creations" (HBC 35).^[10] Worried about John, he goes on: "In equity he would seem to be entitled to his chance in life; it might have been wiser, though, for him to seek it farther afield than South Carolina" (HBC 35).

Despite the Judge's concern, John, unlike his sister, seems to have overcome the prejudices of custom by adhering to a strict logic derived from principles of higher law. How he should act was, for him, "in the main a matter of argument of self-conviction. Once persuaded that he had certain rights, or ought to have them, by virtue of the laws of nature, in defiance of the customs of mankind, he had promptly sought to enjoy them. This he had been able to do by simply concealing his antecedents and making the most of his opportunities, with no troublesome qualms of conscience" (HBC 78). What seems to deprive Rena of her equitable chance in life is precisely the troublesome qualms of conscience that her brother's logic has subdued. For instance, she feels that it is her duty to tell Tryon her "secret" before marrying him. John's counterargument sounds as if it were lifted from a Howells novel.

Chiding Rena for taking "too tragic a view of life," he insists that marriage has to do with only the immediately contracting parties. "Marriage is a reciprocal arrangement, by which the contracting parties give love for love, care for keeping, faith for faith. It is a matter of the future, not of the past.... We are under no moral obligation ... to bring

out ... the dusty record of our ancestry.... George Tryon loves you for yourself alone; it is not your ancestors that he seeks to marry" (HBC 79). Evoking the logic of an economy of pain, John points out that for Rena to reveal her ancestry would cause unnecessary suffering for George, himself, and his son. What seems to her a noble act would, in fact, be a "bit selfish" (HBC 82), an effort to secure her "own peace of mind" (HBC 82). Convinced that to keep silent is an act of "self-sacrifice" (HBC 82), Rena agrees to her brother's plan. As logical as it is, however, the plan fails. Its failure points to the flaws in John's—and by extension Howells's—logical solution to the dilemma of passing.

The novel of passing was of special interest in an age in which one's duties and responsibilities to others were supposedly determined by contract rather than status, because contract tested people's resolve to accept people for who they were, in the present, without consideration of birth. For instance, Tryon is so convinced of Rena's value that, to overcome his mother's prejudice in favor of Blanche Leary, he plans to present to her Rena herself as his only "argument" (HBC 82). He believes, as Mrs. Burrage did of Verena in The Bostonians, that Rena can create her own value. Of course, the belief that Rena's presence alone without any other form of persuasion can overcome prejudice is naive, as indicated by Tryon's own inability to overcome his prejudice upon learning of her ancestry. Indeed, despite his protestations to the contrary, Tryon does not fully believe that Rena's ancestry plays no part in her present value. His mistake is to believe that her physical presence makes her value self-evident. Tryon claims not to worry about Rena's family because he believes that "she carries the stamp of her descent upon her face and in her heart" (HBC 84).

If there is such a stamp of descent in terms of race, the novel of passing forces us to realize that it is not necessarily visible.^[11] As a result, it seems that either where people come from is more important than who they are, or what people are cannot be defined by their physical presence alone, because where they come from helps to determine who they are. In the first case, we are confronted with a prejudiced society, in the second, one in which status remains important. There is, however, a third possibility. For both Olney and John, people's identities are indeed influenced by where they come from, but their descent should not influence how they are accepted by others. So long as racial prejudice exists, people have every right to conceal their racial descent.

But this logic contradicts itself by ruling out the possibility that someone of mixed blood can ever be accepted for who he or she is,

which is not only a self-contained person, but a person with an intricate network of relations. To fulfill one's potential for success means by definition the loss of part of one's self, while to embrace one's partial racial heritage is to deny oneself the success that one deserves. Rena's tragedy results from her inability to sever ties with those who help to define her. As the narrator notes, "Our lives are so bound up with those of fellow men that the slightest departure from the beaten path involves a multiplicity of small adjustments" (HBC 74). Rena easily adjusts "her speech, her manners, and in a measure her modes of thought" (HBC 74). But "when this readjustment [goes] beyond mere externals and concerned the vital issues of life, ... tragic possibilities" develop (HBC 74). In An Imperative Duty Olney mocks Rhoda's tendency to give in to such possibilities. Chesnutt lets us see that Olney's mockery is justified only because Howells creates special circumstances for his heroine.

Olney can dismiss Rhoda's desire to help blacks as sentimental "dutiolatry" because she was raised white and had no contact with the black family she dreams of elevating. Her racial identity is determined solely by blood. In contrast, Rena's is determined by close ties to the black community and a loving relation with her mulatto mother. It is no accident that Rena's identity is revealed to Tryon on a visit to her mother. In addition, Howells concocts a special relation between Rhoda and her possible husband. By manipulating the plot so that Olney already knows Rhoda's "secret," Howells relieves Rhoda of Rena's dilemma of whether or not to conceal her identity from her husband-to-be. As much as John's logic resembles Olney's, it is not certain that Howells's doctor would agree with Chesnutt's lawyer when the lawyer encourages his sister to withhold information from her husband-to-be with: "What a poor soul it is that has not some secret chamber, sacred to itself; where one can file away the things that others have no right to know, as well as things that one himself would fain forget" (HBC 79).

By having John advocate concealment, Chesnutt exposes the most obvious contradiction in both his and Olney's logic. Both see themselves as representatives of enlightened reason against prejudiced custom, but on the issue of race their reasoning leads them to champion concealment not revelation. Enlightened reason might be a force against prejudiced custom, but prejudice—at least in terms of race—has its revenge by forcing reason to advocate repression. This paradox leads us to the way in which Chesnutt complicates the opposition between reason and sentiment.

John's success in passing seems to come from his use of reason to cut off the ties of sentiment that would bind him to past attachments. In contrast, Rena's failure seems due to her inability to sever the sentimental ties that bind. But this contrast doesn't quite work. John may owe his success to reason, but, as we have seen, that success begins with a "moment of sentimental weakness" (HBC 118) on the part of Judge Straight when he helps John because of "quixotic loyalty to the memory of an old friend" (HBC 118–19). And just in case that action tempts us to believe that it is really sentiment rather than reason that is responsible for John's success, Chesnutt reminds us that Judge Straight's sentiment is itself guided by a reasoned judgment that allows him to transcend the prejudices held by most Southerners on issues of race. Furthermore, although Chesnutt makes clear that John's decision to conceal his past is dictated by a reasoned logic that cuts its ties with sentiment, his sister's decision to conceal her identity from Tryon is dictated by sentimental ties to her brother and his son. Her secret, she realizes, is "not hers alone" (HBC 76). To reveal her racial identity is necessarily to reveal that of her blood relatives. In one case logic dictates concealment, in the other sentiment does.

Finally, whereas John seems the one who follows an Olneylike logic, while Rena adopts Rhoda's sentimental position regarding duty to one's black relatives, Rena's own sentimental love for Tryon eventually leads her to adopt Olney's solution, even if it is too late. After her lover has spurned her, she laments to her brother, " 'The law would have let him marry me. I seemed as white as he did. He might have gone anywhere with me, and no one would have stared at us curiously; no one need have known. The world is wide—there must be some place where a man could live happily with the woman he loved' " (HBC 180). Rena may very well have moved to Italy with Tryon, if he had married her.

Although Chesnutt uses John and Rena to present two different stories of passing, by presenting the stories of a brother and a sister he necessarily links them. We could even say that Rena's tragedy results from her brother's sentimental link to her. If he had not wanted to share his good fortune by having her rise with him, she would have been spared her tragic fate.

The interaction between the two plots forces us to reconsider our tendency to think that John succeeds and Rena fails. Whereas John clearly avoids Rena's fate, there is, nonetheless, a tragic component in his success because he achieves it at the price of isolating himself from

his loved ones. As a result, rather than conclude that Chesnutt allows John to succeed and condemns Rena to tragedy, we should say that the tragic effect of his novel comes from their combination. There are, Chesnutt confirms, isolated stories of people of color who pass and achieve their deserved success, as in his subplot or Howells's novel. The tragedy is, however, that such success must remain isolated. John's "succeeds" only by cutting himself off from those he loves and relations that help define who he is.^[12]

Once again a comparison with Howells is useful. In The Rise of Silas Lapham Howells also stresses the interconnectedness of his various plots, but by offering an open-ended narrative economy rather than a closed one he is able to avoid a tragic ending and present an ongoing possibility of development. In An Imperative Duty he once again avoids a tragic ending by allowing his newly married couple the space to relocate in Italy. That relocation is, however, Howells's implicit acknowledgment that a solution for Olney and Rhoda does not exist in their home country. The tragic ending in The House Behind the Cedars is in part due to Chesnutt's effort to seek a solution within the United States. One result is a difference in the representativeness of the action in the two works, a difference that affects their modes of presentation.

Chesnutt uses the novel of passing as an allegory for the possibility of acknowledged racial intermixture in the United States. In contrast, for Howells, Olney's and Rhoda's dilemma is, quite literally, a novel one. Any solution that it offers is confined to their specific situation. To read it allegorically—as Howells's suggestion that a solution to the race problem in America is that people of color should escape to Italy—would be to misread it. In fact, its inability to find a solution within the United States suggests that it has a more important place in the corpus of Howells's work than normally granted.

An Imperative Duty is not simply Howells' brief foray into the issue of race. It provides insight into A Hazard of New Fortunes, which he was working on at almost the same time. If Howells resists the allegorical in An Imperative Duty, he succumbs to it in his major work when he uses the marriage of Northerner and Southerner to imagine a unified country after the Civil War and the tensions of Reconstruction. Thus, Howells has Mr. Fulkerson, a representative of Northern business sense, marry Madison Woodburn, whose father is a Southern colonel who defends slavery and Southern honor. By implying that their marriage will work because Miss Woodburn already recognizes the need to adopt Northern habits of industry and because Fulkerson is in need of a sense of honor

to temper his business morality, Howells reveals his desire to have the federal family reunite on new terms.^[13]

His hope that a new sense of interdependence would replace sectional rivalry was shared by Northerners and Southerners alike. Speaking in Atlanta in 1881 Edward Atkinson, a New England cotton-mill owner, stressed the need for citizens of both sections to "visit each other, learn the respective methods and opportunities of each State, and become convinced that in this mutual inter-dependence is the foundation of their true union."^[14] Even the violence of the Civil War was used to stress the bonds between North and South. In the poem "Spring in New England" Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who succeeded Howells as editor of The Atlantic Monthly and accepted Chesnutt's first conjure woman story for publication, memorializes the Northern dead buried in Southern soil.

                      So let our heroes rest
                    Upon your sunny breast:
 Keep them, O South, our tender hearts and true,
Keep them, O South, and learn to hold them dear
                         From year to year!
                             Never forget,
              Dying for us, they died for you.
  This hallowed dust should knit us closer yet.^[15]

The marriage of Northern and Southern interests was especially important for advocates of the New South, such as Henry W. Grady. In his famous speech to the New England Club of New York, entitled "The New South" (1886), Grady ends with two emotional appeals for the united interests of North and South. The final one draws on the image of the handshake. Asking if the North will "withhold, save in a strained courtesy, the hand which straight from his soldier's heart Grant offered to Lee at Appomattox," he then quotes Daniel Webster from a speech on the North and South made to the same club forty years earlier: "Standing hand to hand and clasping hands, we should remain united as we have been for sixty years, citizens of the same country, members of the same government, united, all united now and united forever."^[16]

The image of North and South united through a handshake reinforces an image in the next-to-last paragraph that expands on Aldrich's trope of the Northern dead buried in Southern soil by adding the crucial metaphor of blood. His message, Grady insists, "comes to you from consecrated ground. Every foot of soil about the city in which I live is

as sacred as a battle-ground of the republic. Every hill that invests it is hallowed to you by the blood of your brothers who died for your victory, and doubly hallowed to us by the blow of those who died hopeless, but undaunted, in defeat—sacred soil to all of us—rich with memory that makes us purer and stronger and better—silent but staunch witnesses in its red desolation of the matchless valor of American hearts and the deathless glory of American arms—speaking an eloquent witness in its white peace and prosperity to the indissoluble union of American States and the imperishable brotherhood of the American people." By hallowing the Southern soil through spilled blood that has led to "white peace and prosperity," Grady reminds us how much the vision of a reunited North and South depended on the exclusion of blacks. For him the old division marked by "Mason and Dixon's line" could be "wiped out" only if the color line remained in place in the South.^[17]

That exclusion points to the importance of seeing An Imperative Duty as a supplement to A Hazard of New Fortunes . Whereas Howells seeks aesthetic and moral unity, he is also acutely aware of how efforts to balance accounts usually leave something unaccounted for. The something unaccounted for in his effort to imagine a union of Northern and Southern interests in A Hazard of New Fortunes is race. Not dealt with in depth in this major work, the problem of race is central to the minor work that he was composing at about the same time. His solution to the problem of race in An Imperative Duty may be unsatisfactory because he confines it to an individual level, but at least Howells felt the need explicitly to confront the problem, which is more than we can say of Henry James, whose fiction is virtually silent on the dilemma of blacks in the United States. Nonetheless, whether intended or not, The Bostonians was inserted into the context of the debate about race. Both The Rise of Silas Lapham and The Bostonians were serialized in the volume of The Century that published Cable's "The Freedman's Case in Equity" and Grady's response to it. Indeed, even James implicitly links the issues of race and national renewal by having his proposed unhappy marriage between a Northerner and Southerner coincide with the death of the abolitionist Miss Birdseye, who had mistakenly hoped that Verena would convert Basil rather than vice versa.^[18]

But James's portrayal of a potentially unhappy marriage was not the national norm. Again and again, writers imagined conciliatory marriages between Northerners and Southerners.^[19] Their narratives were complemented by new interpretations of the Civil War and Reconstruction

that helped to overcome sectional differences.^[20] Southern historians conceded that secession was unconstitutional and even proclaimed the war necessary for revitalizing the nation. In return Northern historians wholehearted denounced the outrages of Reconstruction. Equally important, Southerners got virtually unqualified endorsement of their belief that the national character born in the fratricidal struggle was Anglo-Saxon. As a Senator from Virginia put it, stressing sectional unity, "The instinct of race integrity is the most glorious, as it is the predominant characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon race, and the sections have it in common."^[21]

Within this context, Chesnutt's stories of the color line make clear what is only suggested by seeing An Imperative Duty as a supplement to Howells's vision of a possible North-South marriage in A Hazard of New Fortunes: the renegotiation of the federal contract needs to include all of its citizens in the new federal family. Chesnutt makes this point by appropriating the rhetoric of interdependence and interconnectedness but for different purposes. Take, for instance, the narrator's comment: "For connected with our kind we must be; if not by our virtues, then by our vices,—if not by our services, at least by our needs" (HBC 154). This belief in connectedness by kind underlay both Grady's vision of the white peace and prosperity of a new American people and Harper's call for mulattoes to devote their lives to the advancement of "their people." In contrast to both, however, Chesnutt seems to link connectedness, not to a progressive vision, but to tragedy, for it is Rena's inability to break connections with her kind that contributes to her fall. Indeed, Chesnutt recognizes that the image of connectedness lends itself to a traditional trope for Fate, that of an interconnected web woven together. His use of this trope is most obvious in the short story "The Web of Circumstances," but he also refers to Fate frequently in The House Behind the Cedars, including a direct reference before the narrator's comment on our inevitable connection to our kind. This apparent fatalism gives his fiction an atmosphere akin to that of the naturalists writing at the same time. Human attempts to break from the web of circumstances, which as Tryon remarks is spun by "nature and society" (HBC 257), seem condemned to fail. But as fatalistically tragic as Chesnutt's vision of interconnectedness seems, it eventually offers hope through an enlightenment belief in the universality of humankind.

Whereas Grady and Harper would limit connectedness by race, Chesnutt ultimately considers "our kind" to be all human beings. In The Marrow of Tradition, for instance, Chesnutt's narrator insists that the

"the people" means "the whole people, and not any one class, sought to be built up at the expense of another" (MT 92). To be sure, Chesnutt's stubbornly humanistic vision is open to criticism for its gender politics. Rena's failure to use marriage, as John does, to advance suggests gender imbalances in the marriage contract, which we have explored in earlier chapters. Furthermore, the narrator's remark that the strongest feeling of "universal brotherhood" comes "when one loves some other fellow's sister"(HBC 72) tends to reduce Rena to an object of exchange binding the fraternal bonds of two males.^[22] Nonetheless, this binding still establishes connection among the races.

The most obvious way in which the novel of passing demonstrates the interconnectedness between races is through its mixed-blood protagonists. A more subtle way involves the misrecognition at the heart of the genre, a misrecognition that allows connections between people who otherwise would be separated by the color line. If Tryon did not mistake Rena for white, he would never have considered marrying her. But because she can cross over the color line, he establishes a connection with her that eventually allows his love to overcome his prejudices. The tragedy is, of course, that his enlightened act of recognition—which grows out of an initial act of misrecognition—comes too late. Thus, as Aristotle describes in The Poetics, Chesnutt uses tragedy mimetically to generate an act of recognition. But Chesnutt does not use tragedy only mimetically. He also uses it rhetorically to bring about an enlightened attitude on issues of race. By presenting a tragic situation he urges readers who share Tryon's recognition of the interconnectedness of all human beings not to come to that recognition too late.

Contemplating a career as a writer, Chesnutt wrote in his journal on May 29, 1880, that the object of his writing would not be "so much the elevation of the colored people as the elevation of whites." For him the "unjust spirit of caste" that whites perpetuate is "a barrier to the moral progress of the American people." Breaking down that barrier requires not force but "a moral revolution." The Negro's role in that revolution is "to prepare himself for social recognition and equality." The "province of literature" is "to open the way for him to get it—to accustom the public mind to the idea; and while amusing them to lead them on, imperceptibly, unconsciously, step by step, to the desired state of feeling."^[23]

As a writer, Chesnutt never abandons this didactic purpose, which is linked to his ultimate belief in the possibilities of moral progress. But the fact that he has to present a tragic vision in order to get people to alter

their existing state of feeling indicates how for him such progress is connected with a sense of loss. Tryon, for instance, seems most open to transformation when confronted by the loss of a dream of what might have been. But even then an enlightened sense of reason is crucial in guiding him toward "the desired state of feeling." Tryon's love might eventually triumph over his prejudice, but only because he has "a mind by nature reasonable above the average" (HBC 144).

If in his first novel Chesnutt uses tragedy to make a reasoned plea for his audience to recognize, as Tryon does, the interconnectedness of all human beings, in his last novel he insists that only such a recognition will keep people's dreams of a reunited North and South from ending in tragedy.

III

The protagonist of The Colonel's Dream is Henry French, a white man who is part owner of a Northern company that manufactures burlap bags. By presenting the book's action through the perspective of a moderate white, as he did in the frame narrative of his conjure woman tales, Chesnutt tries to elicit the sympathy of his predominantly white audience. The book opens on Wall Street with the widower French and his junior partner awaiting the pending sale of their company to a monopolistic corporation. Holding out for terms that will make them and the widow of a former partner rich, the two risk disaster and win when the sale goes through.

This sale is not a naive celebration of Northern capitalism. If the monopoly takes over, "labor" will have to "sweat and the public groan in order that a few captains, or chevaliers of industry, might double their dividends" (CD 5). Nonetheless, the focus of Chesnutt's concern is not the company's workers. Nor is it, as it was with Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, the gendered inequality of the firm's partnership. In fact, for Chesnutt, the chivalrous duty of the two active male partners is to shield their "silent partner" from "needless anxiety" (CD 7) about a risky sale. Instead, Chesnutt uses the sale to give his protagonist enough capital to spend time in the South—a course of action advised by his doctor for his health and that of his young son, Philip.

Once located in Clarendon, French cannot resist getting involved in the local economy, which is small enough for his money to make a

difference. In a city his capital "would have been but a slender stream, scarcely felt in the rivers of charity poured into the ocean of want," but in this small Southern town "he could mark with his own eyes the good he might accomplish" (CD 117). To do good French has to fight Bill Fetters, who exploits racial prejudice to control the local economy. Confident of the victory of "forces of enlightenment" over the "retrograde forces represented by Fetters," French dreams of a town, a "few years hence, a busy hive of industry, where no man, and no woman obliged to work, need be without employment at fair wages; where the trinity of peace, prosperity and progress would reign supreme; where men like Fetters and methods like his would no longer be tolerated" (CD 118). That dream is supported by Laura Treadwell, who embodies the cultivation and generosity of the Old South. Their shared goals lead French to ask Laura to marry him and serve as mother to Phil. But the proposed marriage never comes off, falling victim to a failed dream. Returning North, French ends up marrying the silent partner of his firm.

The colonel's failed dream not only challenges the standard plot that signals the reconciliation of the federal family through the marriage of a Northerner and a Southerner, it also complicates it by having French embody Northern and Southern characteristics. Born into one of Clarendon's first families, French fought for the South, receiving a colonelcy at nineteen. After the War he sought his fortune in the North, and he had not been to the South for thirty years. A true Southern colonel, who has internalized Northern commercial values, French is ideally suited to reconcile sectional differences. As Laura tells him, he "will do more for the town than if [he] had remained here all [his] life," because he has "acquired a broader view" without losing his "love for the old" (CD 85). French's potential for doing good makes his return to the North at the end of the book even more bleak, for he abandons not only his dreams of reform but also a woman who represents all that he loves about the South.

If Chesnutt uses the colonel's unfulfilled marriage contract to undercut visions of Northern and Southern reconciliation, he uses the South's appropriation of Northern contract ideology in the realm of business and labor to show why the promise of that vision goes unrealized. Fetters, after all, controls the population by keeping large farmers in his debt, while "the small farmers, many of whom were coloured, were practically tied to the soil by ropes of debt and chains of contract" (CD 78). A character similar to the uncouth Captain McBane in The Marrow of Tradition, this son of a speculator and slave catcher uses

contracts to perpetuate a system more ruthless at times than the Old South's slavery.

As we have seen, the belief that every adult male had the right to contract his labor for wages took on almost sacred status after the Civil War because it distinguished the Northern social and economic system from the depraved Southern system of slavery. If the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, the much more complicated 14th Amendment was evoked in the period to protect the "freedom of contract." Contrary to Northern expectations, however, the introduction of a contractual labor system in the South did not transform long-standing Southern institutions that had developed under slavery. In fact, the South, having waged an ideological battle with the North over the relative merits of wage and chattel slavery, was fully aware of how contracts exploit as well as emancipate.^[24] Thus, after Reconstruction some Southern states adopted "Black Codes" that used the logic of contract to institute a new form of "slavery." For instance, Albion W. Tourgée cites a Louisiana law in which "all agricultural laborers were compelled to make labor contracts during the first ten days of January, for the next year. The contract once made, the laborer was not allowed to leave his place of employment during the year except on conditions not likely to happen and easily prevented. The master was allowed to make deductions of the servants' wages for 'injuries done to animals and agricultural implements committed to his care,' thus making negroes responsible for wear and tear. Deductions were to be made for 'bad or negligent work,' the master being the judge" (IE 56–57).

Another ploy was to sell the labor of vagrants at public auction to pay off high vagrancy fines while setting wages as low as two dollars a month. In the year that Chesnutt published A Colonel's Dream, Florida passed a law subjecting vagrants to a $250 fine or six months on the chain gang. Included were "persons who neglect their calling" and "all able-bodied male persons over eighteen years of age who are without means of support," such as a labor contract.^[25]

To link criminality with breach of contract and the failure to be contractually employed was especially repressive because of the nature of the convict-lease system in many Southern states where fortunes were made off convict labor. The system even encouraged arrests, since more convicts meant more cheap labor for the state and private industry. In his Report on Peonage (1908) Assistant United States Attorney General Charles W. Russell, a native of Virginia, described the system as "largely a system of involuntary servitude." He added that "if a State can make

a crime ... whatever it chooses to call a crime, it can nullify the [13th] amendment and establish all the involuntary servitude it may see fit."^[26]

Peonage and convict-leasing raise two questions about contract's promise to produce liberty. First, can freedom of contract go so far as to allow people to contract away their freedom?^[27] Second, are not laws enforcing contractual promises themselves a denial of liberty? John Stuart Mill confronted the first question and concluded that there were limits to one's freedom to contract. For Mill someone who sells himself into slavery abdicates his liberty. "The principle of freedom cannot require that he should be free not to be free. It is not freedom to be allowed to alienate his freedom."^[28] Mill also implies that without limits to the enforcement of promises, the freedom to contract will result in the slavery that it claims to avoid. Mill, however, provides no means to determine precisely when people's freedom to alienate their labor needs to be limited in order to preserve their inalienable right to life and liberty. Since it is absurd to argue that such a limit can be determined by contract, the answer seems to lie in some form of legal paternalism.

The contract-oriented Supreme Court, however, only reluctantly acknowledged that it in fact perpetuated paternalism. Instead, it found a way to limit contractual abuses while claiming to uphold the freedom of contract.^[29] It did so by drawing on the precedents of an Anglo-American legal system that had managed to avoid facing contradictions that arose from putting the claims of personal autonomy against those of freedom of contract. For instance, there was a long tradition opposed to making breaches of contract criminal. Breaches were considered violations of private obligations not violations of duties owed to the public. In addition, the common law had resisted prescribing the specific performance of a task as a remedy for someone's failure to maintain contractual promises. One reason for that reluctance, as Frederick Maitland put it in his Lectures on Equity (1910), was that to make employees perform personal services as compensation for an unfulfilled agreement in a labor contract was to risk having them "in effect sell themselves into slavery."^[30] Provisions for specific performance were usually linked to equity, not common law. Drawing on common law precedent, the Court made two important decisions. In Bailey v. Alabama (1911) it struck down a law that declared it an act of criminal fraud to receive an advance loan based on a promise of future labor and then to breach the agreement. In United States v. Reynolds (1914) it invalidated laws under which indigent convicts contracted themselves into servitude for employers who would pay their fines.

These decisions helped economic conditions for Southern blacks. Nonetheless, they made no connection between race and the abuses in question. Indeed, the Court's contractual assumptions encouraged it to believe that it was simply creating conditions so that all citizens, black and white, had equal opportunity. For instance, in Hodges v. United States (1906) Justice Brewer writes, "When the problem of the emancipated slave was before the Nation," it "declined to constitute them wards of the Nation or leave them in a condition of alienage where they would be subject to the jurisdiction of Congress." They were given citizenship, because the nation "doubtless believed that in the long run their best interests would be subserved, they taking their chances with other citizens in the States they should make their homes."^[31] In Bailey Justice Hughes begins, "We at once dismiss from consideration the fact that the plaintiff in error is a black man." He adds, "No question of a sectional character is presented, and we may view the legislation in the same manner as if it had been enacted in New York or in Idaho."^[32]

Claiming to decide the cases on the basis of a race-neutral right guaranteed by freedom of contract, the Court avoided charges that it was providing for paternalistic, equitable relief against racial discrimination in the South.^[33] In contrast, Chesnutt makes clear why a solution blind to the issue of race is not enough. If the Court thought that guaranteeing color-blind rights based on freedom of contract would solve problems of racial discrimination, Chesnutt demonstrates that contract's promise will be fulfilled in the South only if racial equality is guaranteed.^[34]

Shortly after he arrives in Clarendon, the colonel witnesses a sale of vagrant labor. He is personally shocked when he recognizes one of the victims as Peter, formerly a loyal slave belonging to his family. Finding no other solution, French buys Peter's labor for life. In forcing the colonel to revert to his role as a slave owner to help Peter, Chesnutt shows how the new form of contractual slavery can be even harsher than the older variety, which at least occasionally tempered its cruelty through an owner's paternalistic sense of responsibility.^[35] In contrast, the new system was devoid of paternal appeals to sentiment. In the New South the entire criminal law system was marshaled to enforce obligations derived from labor contracts. Indeed, Fetters leases convicts to provide labor for his agricultural and indurial investments.

Chesnutt exposes the horrors of the convict-lease system to induce moral shock in his readers, but he realizes that moral outrage is not enough. Thus he links his moral argument to an economic one. Critics

of the Old South had insisted that slavery was not only morally but economically wrong. In The Colonel's Dream Chesnutt makes the same point about racial prejudice in the post-Reconstruction South by evoking the image of a revitalized Southern economy promised by advocates of the New South. Chesnutt may not share New Southerners's views on race, but he does demonstrate, as the racist newspaper the Anglo-Saxon puts it, that the South's "vast undeveloped resources needed only the fructifying flow of abundant capital to make it blossom like the rose" (CD 86–87). The source of that capital was, of course, the North, and when the colonel begins to invest in the local economy "the stream of ready money" that he puts "into circulation ... soon permeated all the channels of local enterprise" (CD 88).

The resulting prosperity makes the colonel a popular man. One action, however, drives a "thin entering wedge" (CD 192) between him and his popularity. Buying a factory that hires local people to make bricks rather than import them from the North, the colonel replaces his foreman with the most efficient of his remaining workers, "George Brown, a coloured man" (CD 191). When whites protest, the colonel explains that his action is based on a proposition that is at "the very root of his reform" (CD 192). He respects someone's "right to choose one's own associates" (CD 192), but "the right to work and to do one's best work was fundamental, as was the right to have one's work done by those who could do it best" (CD 192). If Southerners cannot overcome "an unhealthy and unjust prejudice" (CD 192), they will undermine the efficiency of a labor system based on contract by allowing status to overrule merit. "These people," he argues, "have got to learn that we li in an industrial age, and success demands of an employer that he utilise the most available labour" (CD 192).

For Chesnutt North and South differed on the labor question. In "The Averted Strike," an unpublished short story set in the Middle West, "not far from the old line that in former years had separated free labor from labor enslaved," a factory owner born in New England considers promoting to foreman a man named Walker, the "only colored man employed in the factory" and the best qualified worker. The other workers object and threaten to strike. To the workers, who are thinking of unionizing, the owner responds, "You talk of the rights of labor, and yet you come and ask me to deprive an industrious and faithful man of the highest right of labor—the right to an opportunity to do the best he is capable of, and to obtain the proper reward for it."^[36] Soon thereafter the factory bursts into flames, catching in a tower the

owner's daughter and a friend who were touring the building. A former seaman, Walker scales the tower, rescues the women, and saves the factory by setting off the fire-extinguishing system. After Walker's display of courage, the workers quietly withdraw their objections, and he is promoted and given five thousand dollars' worth of stock in the company.

Because the Southern whites refuse to learn the lesson that the workers in the North did, the colonel's attempt to establish an efficient system based on the promise of contract cannot compete with Fetters' system based on the exploitative possibilities of contract. With Fetters in control the New South will not blossom, but slowly deplete its resources, just as Fetters exhausts a large stretch of land after working it for turpentine. "He had left his mark, thought the colonel. Like the plague of locusts, he had settled and devoured and then moved on, leaving a barren waste behind him" (CD 216). For Chesnutt the South's economic barrenness is linked to its moral barrenness. People complain about Fetters's control over them, but their prejudices support his corrupt system.

In exposing the abuses of contract in the South, Chesnutt points to the limits of the Republican Party's faith that moral and economic progress would follow once the South abandoned a slave economy for a contractual one. Southern institutions take over contract rather than vice versa. Nonetheless, by attributing contract's failure to "unnatural" racial prejudice, Chesnutt continues to support the Republican Party's link between moral progress and a particular economic system. But to show that linkage he has to demonstrate the superiority of the colonel's system over the system that defeats it. Because this point cannot be made by plot alone, Chesnutt evokes organic metaphors to suggest how a contractual economy devoid of racism's unnatural effects can cultivate life.

"Communities, like men," he tells us, "must either grow or decay, advance or decline; they could not stand still. Clarendon was decaying" (CD 118). Clarendon's decay cannot be attributed solely to the lack of capital. After all, Fetters has lots of money. What matters is not money itself but how it is used. Of the colonel, the narrator writes, "The love of money might be the root of all evil, but its control was certainly a means of great good" (CD 211). In contrast, Fetters's control of money leads to decay. "Fetters was the parasite which, by sending out its roots toward rich and poor alike, struck at both extremes of society, and was choking the life of the town like a rank and deadly vine" (CD 118).

A parasite chokes life because it lives at another's expense without making proper return. The colonel, however, reinvests his money so that it circulates throughout the economy. For instance, when he offers money to help blacks found an industrial school, "the result was the setting in motion of a stagnant pool" (CD 161). Crucial to Chesnutt's moral economy, therefore, is the contrast between circulation, which brings life and growth, and stagnation, which brings death and decay. Like Henry Carey, the prominent nineteenth-century American political economist, Chesnutt believes that the barrier to development is not lack of land but lack of investment. When enough capital circulates through the land, it will blossom. When its circulation is blocked, it dries up.^[37]

By linking the circulation of capital and life for a community, Chesnutt might seem to advocate a completely unregulated economy. But the free circulation of capital is not enough to bring about "the trinity of peace, prosperity, and progress" (CD 118) that the colonel envisions. Chesnutt's is a moral economy because society is best served when the circulation of capital is controlled by progressive ideas. At the same time, free economic exchange facilitates the development of progressive ideas.

Chesnutt does not believe that Southerners are constitutionally incapable of improvement. Despite noting their laziness and "quixotic devotion to lost causes and vanished ideals" (CD 89), the colonel is "glad to find that this was the mere froth upon the surface, and that underneath it, deep down in the hearts of the people, the currents of life flowed, if less swiftly, not less purely than in more favoured places" (CD 90). To activate those currents of life, Southerners need "some point of contact with the outer world and its more advanced thought" (CD 90). Railroads, for instance, "while they bring in supplies and take out produce, also bring in light and take out information, both of which are fatal to certain fungus growths, social as well as vegetable, which flourish best in the dark" (CD 215). Fetters's plantation, we learn, is remote from any railroad connection.

Fetters's control has national as well as local implications. The South's stagnant economy makes it a virtual colony of the North. "There were no mills or mines in the neighborhood, except a few grist mills, and a sawmill. The bulk of the business consisted in supplying the needs of an agricultural population, and trading in their products. The cotton was baled and shipped to the North, and reimported for domestic use, in the shape of sheeting and other stuffs. The corn was

shipped to the North, and came back in the shape of corn meal and salt pork, the staple articles of diet" (CD 77–78). This imbalance of trade might seem to benefit the North, which, like Fetters, can reap a profit by extracting wealth from the South. But in Chesnutt's moral economy, the South rather than the North is the parasite. If the South had a vital economy, its wealth would circulate throughout the nation, contributing to increased prosperity for everyone. As it is, the South is a drain on the nation's wealth. By insisting on the interdependence of the Northern and Southern economies Chesnutt also suggests an interconnection between social, economic, and political realms that the period's boundary ideologists would deny.

In renegotiating its relationship with the North at the end of Reconstruction, the South demanded control over race relations in the social sphere. Replying to Cable's "The Freedman's Case in Equity," Grady insists, "The South must be allowed to settle the social relations of races according to her own views of what is right and best. There has never been a moment when she could have submitted to have the social status of her citizens fixed by an outside power. She accepted the emancipation and the enfranchisement of her slaves as the legitimate results of war that had been fought to a conclusion. These once accomplished, nothing more was possible."^[38] Reasons why the North went along are complicated, but boundary thought made its capitulation easier by assuming that different spheres of action followed different natural laws.

According to the premises of boundary thought, blacks' lower social status should not affect their political and economic rights. As Grady puts it, "The races meet in the exchange of labor in perfect amity and understanding. Together they carry on the concernof the day, knowing little or nothing of the fierce hostility that divides labor and capital in other sections. When they turn to social life they separate. Each race obeys its instinct and congregates about its own centers."^[39] In contrast, The Colonel's Dream shows that the inferior social status granted to blacks stagnates the Southern economy by disrupting the natural efficiency of a labor force based on contract. As an old Southern general tells the colonel, "It's a social matter down here, rather than a political one.... We had to preserve our institutions, if our finances went to smash" (CD 166–167). Seeing no economic prospects in the South until it changes its sentiments about race, the colonel, disillusioned, returns to the North.

IV

In linking the prospects for progress in the South to a change in its sentiment about race, Chesnutt resembles Harriet Beecher Stowe. Indeed, like Stowe, he sees the function of his fiction to help effect that change. But if Chesnutt's desire to alter what Raymond Williams calls an audience's "structures of feeling"^[40] links his fiction to sentimentalists like Stowe, his relationship to the sentimentalists is complex. Like the realists, he mocks the romantic view of the world perpetuated by writers like Scott, and unlike most sentimentalists of the period, he makes virtually no appeal to religion. Furthermore, although he tries to alter people's feelings, he relies as much on logos as pathos to do so. Howells notes this appeal and argues that the case Chesnutt makes for his people "has more justice than mercy in it."^[41] As important as a "desired state of feeling" is for Chesnutt, it is achieved when feelings are guided by enlightened ideas. In positing an enlightenment view of a moral universe, Chesnutt's fiction is ultimately closer to that of staunch Republican John Hay than that of either the realists or the sentimentalists.

Chesnutt, like Hay, stresses justice more than mercy precisely because he believes in the possibility of achieving an equitable moral economy. For both, the barrier to its realization is unenlightened ideas. Nonetheless, a crucial difference remains between Hay and Chesnutt on the degree of moral progress in the United States at the turn of the century.

In 1869 Hay wrote "The Foster Brothers," a short story set on the banks of the Mississippi River between Missouri and Illinois in the antebellum period. In it Clarence Brydges, a Southern white, falls in love with Marie Des Ponts, a woman who, unknown to her, has inherited black blood from her father, now passing as a white lawyer, but who turns out to be an ex-slave—and half-brother—of Clarence's father. Traveling North for the wedding, Clarence's father meets and recognizes his brother who helps rescue him after a shipwreck. Marie's father refuses to let his ex-master stop his daughter's wedding, and the two fight, sinking to death at the bottom of the river. When their intertwined bodies are recovered, the newly wed couple assumes that they died trying to save one another from drowning. Commenting on the fraternal violence of the recent war, "The Foster-Brothers" implies that the only hope for racial mixture in the United States is an act of re-

pression, an apocalyptic moment of forgetting in which an older generation must be sacrificed for the future of the new.^[42]

By the end of the century Hay had joined most members of the Republican Party in their own act of forgetting. But the terms of the plot had dramatically changed. No longer was the Civil War's conflict between North and South seen as a sacrifice necessary for the birth of a new generation of Americans mixing the interests of blacks and whites. Instead, the common sacrifice of the Civil War was memorialized as the basis for a new federal family that married the interests of Northern and Southern whites, while forgetting those of blacks. The terms of this family romance allowed Hay, as secretary of state, to forge an Anglo-Saxon alliance with England that for him stood for the "triumphant march of progress."^[43]

Insisting that the moral and economic progress of the country will be stunted until an equitable remedy is found for forgotten people of color, Chesnutt cannot join in Hay's end-of-the-century optimism. The result is Chesnutt's presentation of a tragic plot. Nonetheless, as we saw in The House Behind the Cedars, Chesnutt can use tragedy as didactically as Hay uses his happy ending in The Bread-Winners . Chesnutt's combination of tragedy and didacticism contributes to his presentation of allegorical rather than individualized characters and raises technical problems that he does not always successfully overcome.

For instance, having used the marriage plot to represent the union of Northern and Southern interests, Chesnutt is faced with the possibility that the colonel's symbolic act of giving up on the South at the end of the book will force the colonel to refuse to honor the promise he made to marry Laura Treadwell. That, of course, will not do for such an honorable man. Thus, Chesnutt has Laura refuse to accept the colonel's offer because she fears that his love for her was linked to a false dream he had of the South. A part of the colonel's memory of a lost past, Laura, like the South, seems "too old to learn new ways" (CD 284), and in a moment of sentimental sacrifice she declares, "My duty holds me here! God would not forgive me if I abandoned it. Go your way; live your life. Marry some other woman, if you must, who will make you happy. But I shall keep, Henry—nothing can ever take away from me—the memory of one happy summer" (CD 285).

As much as this romantic sacrifice would have irritated Howells, it is complicated. First of all, it is not only the colonel but Chesnutt himself who sees Laura as a type who takes meaning from her role in an imaginary scheme. Furthermore, there is an element of psychological realism

in the scene that helps to give power to Chesnutt's fiction. As Chesnutt knew—it was hard for anyone of color not to know—people are rarely seen as individuals. Laura, for instance, is right about the colonel. His love for her is linked to an unrealistic dream. As such, it has little chance of surviving. Indeed, one point that Chesnutt wants to drive home is that dreams influence personal relations and that the false dream of the New South is as destructive of relations as false dreams of the Old South. He makes this point in a contrived subplot that, nonetheless, contains some of the book's most interesting suggestions about the role of blacks in the Southern economy.

V

Lifted from the unpublished short story "The Dumb Witness" and grafted onto the main plot, the subplot offers a postbellum version of Hawthorne's "Peter Goldwaithe's Treasure" or The House of the Seven Gables . It involves Malcolm Dudley, an old Southerner, and his ex-slave and lover Viney.^[44] Dudley is from a North Carolina family that includes a Revolutionary War general and a distinguished judge. The family's estate began to decline while in the hands of Malcolm's bachelor uncle Ralph, who lived a life of pleasure and left management of the property to his nephew. During the Civil War, Ralph worked for the Confederate government in Richmond. Meanwhile, Malcolm courted a rich Southern war widow, who accepted his offer of marriage. When told to prepare the house that she had run for ten years, for a new mistress, Viney intervened and caused the widow to cancel the engagement. Enraged, Malcolm had her whipped but later regretted his cruelty, especially when he found a letter from his uncle saying that on a short trip home he hid fifty thousand dollars in gold in the house and confided its whereabouts to Viney. Because the uncle has died, Viney is Malcolm's sole access to the unsolved mystery. Viney, however, has been rendered speechless by her beating, and for twenty-five years Malcolm seeks in vain to get her to reveal the secret that he hopes will make him a rich man.

During this time the Dudley estate lies in neglect, as Malcolm dreams about a lost treasure rather than devote his energy to productive farming. At the time of the main plot Ben Dudley, Malcolm's nephew, runs the decaying estate. But, although gifted, he too, much to the dismay

of his ambitious girlfriend, dreams of finding the long lost treasure. Finally, on his deathbed, Malcolm learns from Viney that she has been faking for all these years, that she could indeed talk, and that the real secret that she kept from him was that there was no hidden gold, the uncle having removed it an hour after he wrote the letter indicating its presence. Thus, Dudley had truly wasted his life in a vain dream, which is, as Viney makes clear, her revenge. "You had me whipped—whipped—whipped—by a poor white dog I had despised and spurned! You had said that you loved me, and you had promised to free me—and you had me whipped! But I have had my revenge!" (CD 273). Nonetheless, Viney still loves Malcolm, and when he dies, she kisses him passionately and dies herself.

The importance of this subplot is indicated by changes between the unpublished story and the novel. The major difference is that in the unpublished version a "treasure" exists, and Viney reveals its whereabouts to the young nephew, but only after Malcolm dies. Not gold, "the treasure" consists of several promissory notes and mortgages on neighboring plantations plus the old uncle's will leaving the estate to Malcolm. Although many of these papers can no longer help accumulate or protect property, their existence does lend some legitimacy to Malcolm's dreams. In contrast, the nonexistence of a treasure in the novel powerfully exposes the debilitating effects of Southerners's dreams of romance buried in the past, thus allowing the subplot to complement the main plot's demystified dream of the New South by adding one of the Old South. The novel also undercuts the unpublished version's suggestion of renewal in the South. In the short story the nephew, carrying his great-uncle's name, restores the estate. In the novel the nephew, like the colonel, sees no hope in the South as it exists. At the end of the book he and his new bride follow the colonel North where he can use his imagination to invent new machinery for industry.

The bleakness of the novel's ending is intensified by another change. In the story Malcolm courts not a Southern war widow but a rich Pennsylvania widow who recently moved South. By having Viney stop their marriage Chesnutt undercuts the standard plot of Northern and Southern marriage, reminding us that a history of abuse to blacks can disrupt that attempted union. Nonetheless, the failed marriage is at cross-purposes with the resulting Southern renewal. The novel eliminates this inconsistency. Furthermore, the unpublished version's themes of inheritance and North/South marriage are not lost. They are transferred to the main plot where they receive fuller development.

The marriage theme is, of course, dramatized through the colonel and Laura. The theme of inheritance through long lost documents occurs when the colonel finds some old papers in a desk that Laura insists on giving him because it had once belonged to both his father and hers. Unexamined, the papers are misplaced until late in the book when the colonel discovers that one is a promissory note, about to expire, requiring Fetters to pay considerable money to Laura's father. This note makes it easier to accept the colonel's failure to marry, since it leaves Laura and her mother financially secure—financially secure, but not restored to power. Though forced to pay this debt, Fetters remains in power in the South.

Fetters remains in power, and yet another change between story and novel suggests that his rule will be uneasy. In a deathbed confrontation added to the novel Malcolm accuses Viney of failing to forgive even in the face of death. Through this scene Chesnutt warns his white readers about blacks' capacity for revenge.

Tourgée wrote that people were mistaken when they assumed that "in the course of a generation or so the descendants of the American slave will have forgotten all about slavery." On the contrary, he asserts, citing history and the Old Testament, "a hundred years hence the hardships and wrongs of slavery will constitute a stronger impulse to united action on the part of the colored race than they do to-day." Sounding prophetic, he predicts that "even with the lapse of centuries, the colored orator and poet" will likely "dwell upon the wrongs of their forefathers with a fervor and intensity that would surprise the recipient of the wrongs described" (ATC 103–4). Viney's obsession with revenge for an action long past makes a similar point. After witnessing the final scene between his uncle and Viney, young Ben "thanked God that he lived in another age, and had escaped this sin" (CD 274). But Viney's response suggests that the present may not escape the effects of past sins, even when it no longer sins itself. Chesnutt's subplot reinforces that suggestion by using the old-fashioned romantic device of lost and mysterious letters to complicate Chesnutt's life-giving metaphor of circulation, a complication that has important consequences for the effort to introduce a contractual economy into the South after the Civil War.

One of the dangers of Chesnutt's use of the metaphor of circulation is that it can create the illusion that the flow of either capital or ideas is self-generating. But circulation can occur only through a series of exchanges, exchanges that in the case of ideas involve communication and in the case of capital involve contracts. Tourgée, for instance, describes

Wall Street as "a contract-machine" (GS 11). We have already seen that in the main plot Chesnutt shows how racial prejudice can block the natural circulation of capital, which contributes to the free trade of ideas necessary to overcome unenlightened prejudice. The subplot suggests another way in which racial prejudice can disrupt the exchange of ideas and capital. The handing over of gold from uncle to nephew, if it had happened, would not have been direct, but dependent on a letter. And not a letter alone, but on someone reading and interpreting it. By drawing on the convention of a mysterious letter in the subplot, Chesnutt reminds us of the mediations that occur in any exchange. It is not an accident that when letters play an important part in the action of both The House Behind the Cedars and The Colonel's Dream, Chesnutt often entrusts their delivery or the delivery of their message to blacks.

In The House Behind the Cedars Judge Straight senses potential disaster when he sees Tryon in town, so he sends a letter to Rena's mother warning her not to let her daughter out of the house for a day or two. But the black boy paid ten cents to deliver the letter dawdles and arrives too late. As a result, Rena wanders into town, where Tryon discovers her secret identity. If in The House Behind the Cedars a black boy's late delivery of a letter results in an unintended revelation leading to a personal tragedy, in The Colonel's Dream a black woman, whose trust in her lover had been violated, intentionally withholds information that she has been entrusted dutifully to deliver. Both of these incidents suggest difficulties that the South will have in maintaining a productive economy that by necessity involves neglected blacks in the circulation of its capital.

In the first case the late delivery of the message is due to the boy's unexpected delight at receiving money that he does not know how to use wisely. As the narrator puts it, upon receiving his ten cents, our young "capitalist" heads to "the grocery store and invested his unearned increment in gingerbread" (HBC 122), which he consumes before accomplishing the task for which he is paid. A labor force made up of people like this well-intentioned but undisciplined boy does not make for an efficient system of exchange. Judge Straight may be Chesnutt's figure for equity, but when the Judge attempts to ensure an equitable outcome through the delivery of his letter, the letter hardly takes a straight path. Its path is diverted and delayed by the young boy's desire to reward himself with some long-deferred pleasure.

In the second, and more telling case, Chesnutt implies that even though denying blacks a position as free and equal bargaining partners

places them at an economic and social disadvantage, they still have the power to disrupt the exchanges necessary for the development of a productive economy. This example has emotional appeal because it involves a couple whose "natural" exchange of love has been distorted by socially condoned racial prejudice. Thus the failed trust between lovers in the subplot supplements the failed promise of marriage in the main plot, a reminder that the marriage of Northern and Southern interests will not be fully possible until there is also recognition of the marriage between the interests of whites and blacks. Without harmonization of those interests, Southern whites will face black revenge that causes economic as well as moral deprivation.

That for Chesnutt such revenge results from more than a betrayal of trust between lovers is signaled by the similarity between Viney's response of silence and that of the black laborer Bud Johnson, who like Peter is sold under the convict-lease system but, unlike Peter, does not have a paternalistic protector like the colonel to buy him. Instead, he is sold back to Fetters, from whose service he had previously escaped. Asked to defend himself, he has nothing to say because he feels that nothing he says will be listened to. Chained, Johnson looks at his captors with an expression of "fierce hatred, as of some wild thing of the woods, which finding itself trapped and betrayed, would go to any length to injure its captor" (CD 69). Then, "he threw toward the colonel a look which resembled an appeal; but it was involuntary, and lasted but a moment, and, when the prisoner became conscious of it, and realized its uselessness, it faded into the former expression" (CD 69). Indeed, Johnson later escapes and gains revenge by shooting Fetters's son, rendering him permanently blind in one eye and dedicated to racial hatred. Captured, Johnson is lynched, his earlier silent appeal to the colonel hauntingly raising the question of who is responsible for the book's bloody violence.

Johnson's unanswered appeal for help from the colonel is paralleled by the 1903 Supreme Court case of Giles v. Harris, which Chesnutt discusses at the conclusion of a unpublished speech he wrote, entitled "The Courts and the Negro."^[45] On behalf of himself "and on behalf of more than five thousand negroes, citizens of the county of Montgomery, Alabama, similarly situated and circumstanced as himself," Giles brought forth a bill in equity demanding relief for being denied the right to register to vote on the arbitrary basis of color. Speaking for the Court, Justice Holmes denied the request, noting that "equity cannot undertake now, any more than it has in the past, to enforce political rights."

If the conspiracy to keep blacks from voting is as powerful as alleged, Holmes concludes, "unless we are prepared to supervise the voting in that state by officers of the Court, it seems to us that all that the plaintiff could get from equity would be an empty form. Apart from damages to the individual, relief from a great political wrong, if done, as assigned by the people of the state itself, must be given to them or by the legislative and political department of the government of the United States."^[46] Refusing a paternalistic role for the Court, Holmes signals the legal system's unwillingness, for the most part, to entertain the freedman's case in equity.

The public's unsympathetic response to A Colonel's Dream also indicated that it was not willing to listen to Chesnutt's equitable appeal in fiction. When Chesnutt began his career as a writer, he shared the classical republican belief of the antebellum lawyer Rufus Choate, who argued that literature, even more than law, could move the nation by speaking "directly to the heart and affection and imagination of the whole people" and instruct them in right reason. Elaborating, Choate adds, "A keen, well-instructed judge of such things said if he might write the ballads of a people, he cared little who made its laws."^[47] But in his next-to-last novel Chesnutt has a character proclaim, "The man who would govern a nation by writing its songs was a blethering idiot beside the fellow who can edit its news dispatches" (MT 83). With his final novel and the poignant image of Bud Johnson's silent, unanswered appeal, Chesnutt himself moves into silence as far as published fiction is concerned.

He did not, however, retire into silence. He continued to make appeals for racial justice in his community activities and essays. In his speech "The Courts and the Negro," he identifies the "separate but equal" decision of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) as the most important case restricting the rights of African-Americans. Chesnutt even gives us a glimpse of the consequences of that decision in The Colonel's Dream, when the colonel witnesses a young mulatto being kicked off a train for having "presumed on his complexion to ride in the white people's car" (CD 109), a reminder that in the South even the railroads that facilitate the exchange of ideas and goods carry evidence of unenlightened prejudice.^[48] It is to Plessy v. Ferguson and its relation to the promise of contract in the fiction of Mark Twain and Tourgée that I now want to turn. But before doing so, I need to call attention to my use of a contemporary label that does not quite do justice to Chesnutt's fictional world.

Frequently, I have referred to Chesnutt's advocacy of the rights of blacks. But Chesnutt, himself a mixture of African and European blood, fought against seeing race solely in black-and-white terms. To do so was to fall prey to terms adopted in Grady's "In Plain Black and White." Chesnutt's stories of the color line complicate that simplistic opposition. As Judge Straight knows, "the two races had not dwelt together, side by side, for nearly three hundred years, without mingling their blood in greater or less degree" and "that in their mingling the current had not always flowed in one direction" (HBC 117).^[49] One implication of Chesnutt's life-giving metaphor of circulation is that the free exchange of racial blood is a natural and healthy component of a progressive moral economy. But for him to advocate that exchange too openly was to guarantee that the ideas embodied in his works would find very little circulation with the public. Thus, whereas he uses his fiction to present to the public his arguments, which, like the colonel's, "avoided the stirring up of prejudice" by being directed "to the higher motives and deeper principles which underlie society, in light of which humanity is more than race" (CD 195), his advocacy of racial mixing in his fiction is usually indirect.

Nonetheless, reminders of an already existing racial mixture are present in even its tiniest detail. For instance, when sight of the uncle's letter convinces Ben's lover of the reality of Dudley's buried treasure, the narrator remarks that, after all, "it was there in black and white, or rather brown and yellow" (CD 127).^[50] A black-and-white division of races, Chesnutt suggests, is as nonexistent as the buried treasure, even if legal documents try to establish its existence. The fiction of such a division is central to Homer Plessy's case against Jim Crow laws as well as to Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson and Tourgée's Pactolus Prime .