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ОглавлениеImagining the South Through the Caribbean:
Spatial Narratives of Liberty
in the Novels of Holcombe and Livermore
Deniz Bozkurt-Pekar Leipzig University, Germany
The notion that the US South, especially its most southern and coastal regions, including Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, function as a cultural extension of the Caribbean is no longer an innovative position in academia. Not only scholars of American and Southern Studies, like Vera Kutzinski (“in cultural terms, the southernmost parts of the United States are really rimlands of the Caribbean” (Kutzinski 61)) and John Wharton Lowe (“the U.S. South ... is in many ways the northern rim of the Caribbean”), acknowledge a socio-geographical and cultural link between the South and the Caribbean. Other fields including sociology, history, and political science also contribute to this established notion. As Lowe notes, Immanuel Wallerstein, too, in his seminal work on the historical developments of modern global capitalism identifies an “‘extended Caribbean’ and maps an area reaching from Brazil to Maryland, recognizing the transnational spread of the plantation economy that gripped the New World from its inception well into the twentieth century.”
The historical connection between the Caribbean and the US South has been illuminated in the comprehensive academic production on the “extended Caribbean:” the slave economy in the Americas not only created tightly-knit plantation communities within which the US American slaveholders – including those outside the South who had an economic interest in slave labor – gained “hemispheric identities” (Guterl 183) and carried on their enterprises – including the illegal slave trade – in the most profitable location in the slaveholding New World. We also know through works like Stephen Chambers’ No God But Gain that the US political machine made this geographical fluidity possible for the slave economy. Threatened by the abolitionist waves surrounding them, the US southern slaveholders turned their eyes to the Caribbean, as well as Central and South America where slavery continued in certain locations like Brazil and Cuba. These places functioned both as possible refuge to rebuild their slave-economy-oriented life styles in case of abolition in the US, and as a part of their expansionist dreams to keep slavery intact in the union. The Caribbean had negative connotations for the southern planter, as well. Wherever the hemispheric ties of the slave economy extended, there were also abolitionist and black cultures to be found. While the Haitian Revolution and other slave revolts in the archipelago, and in the continent, spread fear in the hearts of those engaged in the slave economy, abolitionist authors like William Wells Brown (“St. Domingo”) and Martin R. Delany (Blake) capitalized on this fear that is most famously known from Sansay’s The Horrors of St. Domingo.
The Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation erased neither the abovementioned connotations nor the ties that the South established with the Caribbean; quite to the contrary, these relations have constituted the roots of intertwined histories and cultures in these regions that have reached to our day. Thus, it is no longer debatable that a comprehensive study of the US American South, be it in the humanities or social sciences, calls for an inspection of a much larger area. The literature of the South, as well as the literature about it, justifies this analytical need. It is hardly possible to encounter a southern text that stands alone without any reference to its archipelagic neighbors, and other surrounding domestic or foreign regions. Moreover, finding just two southern texts that present common imageries of the region proves to be a challenge, justifying Douglas Reichert Powell’s critical regionalist arguments regarding the “rhetorical and poetic construction” of regions (6). In effect, Greeson writes, “[the] South that we hold collectively in our minds is not – could not possibly be – a fixed or real place. It both exceeds and flattens place; it is a term of the imagination, a site of national fantasy” (1). Still, however “collectively” we may hold an image in our minds, identifying the agent of image construction, the imaginer, or who we are, helps us discover why our individual conceptualizations of a region, in this case of the South, are not necessarily as analogous as one may assume. As Powell writes: “It matters, too, not only how a map is drawn, but who is drawing it and why” (6). The assumed collective image of the South today, which Greeson herself also deconstructs, is likewise one that is drawn. Among the echoing rumbles of UNC’s well-known Silent Sam that simultaneously reinforces and condemns the image of the South as “the internal other” within the US (Greeson 1), it is important to once again raise Powell’s questions here: who has drawn this image of the South as we understand it today, and why? And, equally significantly, whose spatial imaginations of the region does our collective image serve to obfuscate?
The pursuit of answers to these questions in antebellum texts may at first glance seem ludicrous. However, the roots of the most obstinate markers through which the South is identified today indeed lay in the events, discussions, and ideas that characterized the antebellum US. The nationwide tension between expansionism and nation-building processes coupled with relatively more southern-specific contentions such as the extension of slavery to newly acquired territories in addition to the overall discussions on the continuance of slavery in the Union and its neighbors present the antebellum era as one that is abundant with a literature that offers “a history of possible futures” (Hutchison 62). That is, the image of the South today which is frequently reduced to “an exceptional and racist ‘Other’” (Burton 8) helps to hide the co-existence of multiple Souths that has characterized the region for different actors, in other words, to mask the maps of the South drawn by those whose voices are lost in canonical metanarratives about the region.
The endeavor of studying antebellum literature in consideration of perspectives granted by critical regionalists, and transnational and hemispheric Americanists, has benefits beyond challenging monolithic considerations of the US American South. One such benefit is that favoring space and time proportionately in the analysis of texts – a requirement of all abovementioned theoretical discussions – allows a contextualization within much more comprehensive socio-political as well as literary geographies. This approach also helps reveal often disregarded assemblages and avoid anachronisms that neglect the fluidity of conditions and opinions. Besides, the archipelagic approach takes a step forward in overcoming our persistently and overwhelmingly continental geographical imaginations that, as DeLoughrey suggests, overlook the “system of archipelagraphy” and downgrade them to isolated spaces (23).
This article analyzes two literary presentations of the South by antebellum authors, whose conceptualizations of liberty place them on the opposite poles of the ideological spectrum in the antebellum US. It argues that these different understandings of liberty – defined in terms of emancipation and feminism in Livermore’s Zoë and a slaveholding anti-colonialism in Holcombe’s The Free Flag of Cuba – result in diverging visions for the futures of slavery and the South in the union, as well as conflicting imaginations of didactic relationships with the Caribbean. These spatial imaginations of the South challenge both the established borders and dominant spatial narratives of the nation and its regions, and the customary interpretations of geographical relations attributed to the social and political affiliations of the authors. These analyses demonstrate not only the coexistence of multiple pre-war projections concerning the South but also locate these different visions of the South within conflicting relationships with its Caribbean neighbors based on their understanding of liberty.
Accordingly, this article will first analyze the abolitionist spatial narrative of the South and Caribbean that Livermore’s Zoë constructs through the transformative power of an oceanic voyage. Later, The Free Flag of Cuba by Holcombe will be studied for its geographical imagination for southern and Caribbean futures within a slaveholding hemisphere.
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Although details of Elizabeth Dorcas Livermore’s life are largely unknown, her family lineage, literary works, and presence in Unitarian publishing suggest that she was an adherent Unitarian transcendentalist, who studied the preeminent authors of the movement, including Emerson, Channing, and Fuller, thoroughly. However, her commitment to transcendentalism – a movement taxed with divisions of opinion itself – is one that questions and criticizes the well-known names; it produces its own unique understanding of some of the principles of this school. Alongside the two-volume novel Zoë; or the Quadroon’s Triumph: A Tale for the Times, Livermore published poetry in journals, her own literary magazine The Independent Highway, and a play titled The Fugitives, all of which carry undertones of this unique transcendentalism. Since 1962 when William Coyle included a short biography of Livermore in his catalog of Ohio authors, there has been some scholarly interest in her novel. May’s reference to her as a contributor to the female filibustering narratives in the antebellum era (“Reconsidering Antebellum”), Turner’s short analysis of Zoë as an anti-slavery story, Bost’s Mulattas and Mestizas contextualizing Zoë among other antebellum “tragic Mullata” narratives, and O’Brien’s chapter pursuing the novel’s connection to other transcendentalists in a large transatlantic network are some of the products of this recent interest.
Zoë; or the Quadroon’s Triumph is about the daughter of two former slaves from the Danish colony St. Croix, who is sent by her parents to Copenhagen to be educated. The first volume follows the protagonist through her sojourn in Europe as well her transatlantic journey, witnessing the prejudice that little Zoë receives from her teacher and her nourishing friendships with Hilda – the daughter of a slaveholder from St. Croix – and the welcoming people in Denmark. In the second volume – which will be the subject of study here – the narrative introduces various people that Zoë and Hilda meet on their way back home after eleven years in Copenhagen. This maritime voyage through England, the Bermuda Islands, the United States, and the West Indies, it will be argued, has a transformative impact on the passengers. It also allows the narrative to construct an ideal for a transcendentalist Christian Republic. The transformation of an individual character during this journey, namely George Stephenson – also referred to as Young America in the narrative – will be of particular interest for the current argument.
Readers familiar with Zoë may regard it a peculiar idea to search for alternative antebellum visions of the US South in it, since the expansive geography of the narrative touches the shores of the US only once and very briefly when the vessel carrying Zoë and Hilda back home stops at the port of Mobile, Alabama, to welcome new passengers aboard. Yet, with the inclusion of these new American passengers, all of whom symbolize the region they are coming from, the novel carries a miniscule America on board. Among the Pierson siblings and the Unitarian transcendentalist Mr. Lindsey from Boston, and Reverend Chichester of Missouri, the novel singles out George Stephenson as the only new passenger to be born outside of the US. However, against the novel’s transcendentalist abolitionism and feminism, the narrative designates Stephenson as a misogynist and racist, labelling him Young America after the homonymous movement that he supports, identifying him with the ideals of expansionist filibusterism. Indeed, the very reason Stephenson is on board with all the others is his plan to join a filibustering expedition in South America to see and possibly move to “a new settlement” (Livermore, Zoë II 107-8). In this sense, Stephenson becomes almost a symbol for the South as the region is imagined in the novel, while maintaining his contradiction to Reverend Chichester – another southern emblem in the narrative whose pro-slavery ideas remain intact throughout the novel.
The narrative defines superiority not by “[b]irth, rank, fortune, elegance, genius, intellect, beauty” (Livermore, Zoë II 198–99) but by principles and values, and constructs a philosophy of moral development. This philosophy centers on a notion of liberty designated in terms of individual self-actualization achieved via slave emancipation and female freedom. This article suggests that the narrative presents the Caribbean Sea as a space of transformation, where Young America can benefit from the guidance of his morally superior companions, according to this philosophy. The same setting also provides the novel with many necessary tools to enable such a transformation.
The first volume of the novel constructs an imagined space of freedom from racism in Europe – apart from her teacher’s intolerance towards Zoë. However, the second volume signals a shift in the protagonist’s life with the proximity to the US and the West Indies, where slavery still is either continuing or felt via the racist structures that were left after its recent abolitions. The Caribbean setting surrounds Zoë in an atmosphere that is heavily tainted by white supremacy and racial prejudice. The intellectual and moral enthusiasm that she has nourished in the freedom of Europe stands in stark contrast to the racist expectations of some of the white American passengers, including Young America, and eventually makes them question their racial biases. This setting provides the narrative with the opportunity for a dramatic display of Stephenson’s worthiness of the transcendentalist moral guidance by Mr. Lindsey, the abolitionist and feminist passenger from Boston. This opportunity arises with the employment of a common motif of Caribbean nautical fiction: shipwreck. While the passengers are sailing some miles away from Jamaica, the ship hits a reef. Everybody but a black waiter is saved. This gives Young America the chance for a heroic gesture: although he openly claims to “have a born antipathy to niggers” (Livermore, Zoë II 159), he still jumps into the water and rescues the waiter.
The post-emancipation scenery in Jamaica where the passengers find refuge after the shipwreck, as well as in Haiti where the vessel briefly stops after Jamaica, allows the narrative to contextualize the transformation of the young white passengers. Both Jamaica and Haiti attract criticism from the passengers who are in favor of racial segregation and who believe in the inferiority of people of color. These criticisms prepare the ground on which Mr. Lindsey lectures the white passengers on his and his wife’s ideas on true Christianity. For instance, after Meta and Emma Pierson discuss the problems that the emancipation in Jamaica in 1838 introduced, Mr. Lindsey reads them a letter by his wife. In the letter, Mrs. Lindsey argues that racism hinders the genius of the African-descendant which could otherwise contribute to the establishment of a true Christian society. The insights from the letter that the Pierson sisters gather bring them closer to Zoë and Hilda whose intellectual and artistic interests they find quite compatible with their own. Similarly, Young America’s fiery ideas on various subjects such as slavery, race, female emancipation, the future of the US, and expansionism, begin to change in Jamaica. Here, the narrative reveals that beneath his racist, colonialist, and misogynist stance is indeed a lack of “right relations with god, nature, and humanity” (Livermore, Zoë II 214-15). This disclosure, very much like his heroic attempt to save the black waiter, implies that Stephenson is capable of moral development and becoming a follower of the principles that the novel promotes.
Likewise, the narrative introduces Haiti to lecture on anti-colonialism and anti-racism. Some American passengers make condescending remarks about the difficulties that the troubled island faces more than four decades after its heroic revolutionary era, such as the division of the island, economic crises, and socio-economic disorder. The narrative dismisses these comments by comparing the island’s situation to that of France “as an instance of a Caucasian people finding same difficulty in their attempt at a perfect republican state, and [speaks] of the miserable condition of Europe generally in both her internal and external relations” (Livermore, Zoë II 216-17). Portraying the difficulty that Haiti experiences following its revolution as hopefully as that of France, the narrative creates a space of revolution in the Caribbean for its white American characters that is parallel to the recent history of the successful abolitionist movements in the archipelago. Furthermore, and even more significantly, in this wave of transformation the narrative endows the Caribbean, and its revolutionary and abolitionist histories, with a pedagogical value for the US South. The Caribbean, thus, becomes the pioneer of the values the novel repeatedly calls “the signs of the times” (31, 130, 297).
Under the guidance of the northerner Mr. Lindsey and the pedagogical atmosphere that the Caribbean provides, Young America eventually declares a very fervent support for both female and slave emancipation even at the risk of the union between the South and the North. Even though other characters, including the Pierson siblings and Hilda, undergo an intellectual transformation during this voyage that eventually turns them into advocates of abolition and feminism, the narrative puts none of them under such a bright spotlight as Young America. Neither are they represented to be as strongly associated with an ideology like Young American filibusterism. Why does the narrative want to transform Young America, and no one else, so much? Doubtlessly, it is less Young America as an individual character than his expansionist, white-supremacist, and pro-slavery arguments that the novel places in such a focal point in its narrative of transformation. In this sense, Stephenson as Young America stands for what Livermore’s novel regards as southern; and thus, his transformation becomes symbolic of a revolution in the South that the novel promotes. Read in this sense, the geographical context within which this ideological transformation occurs gains another significance in terms of the way that the novel imagines the South and its future.
It is thus necessary to ask why instead of the other southern character in the narrative, namely Reverend Chichester, the novel chooses to put Stephenson in the center of this transformation. Throughout the story, Chichester maintains his racist stance, unlike Stephenson. The novel singles him out as the only passenger who is not in favor of rescuing the black waiter during the shipwreck, and displays him as one who misuses the word of God as a pretense for his white-supremacist opinions. That is, Chichester, more than Stephenson, is a character who is antagonized as the personification of “the South as Other” (O. V. Burton), or the South that even Stephenson eventually would sacrifice to achieve the liberation of slaves and women if the region refuses to follow “the signs of the times.” For the imagery of the South that the novel constructs, the direction from which these signs reach the South is equally important as what these signs are. Just as Young America needs guidance from the northerner and transcendentalist Mr. Lindsey and the example that the Caribbean so vividly exhibits in front of him, the South needs moral instruction from the North and the political guidance of the Caribbean to be part of the morally superior egalitarian and democratic Christian Republic that the novel promotes.
Stephenson’s remark, “[e]very mother’s son of them shall be freed, or I’ll divide the Union” (Livermore, Zoë II 227), hints at an unaccustomed version of northern abolitionism: one that is not strictly unionist as it is typically attributed to the northern ideologies in the grand North-South spatial metanarratives about the antebellum US. Nor does Livermore’s novel meet the antebellum expectations from women’s fiction, as Burton and Burton argue, to act as a mediator between the northern and the southern sections of the country (309). Instead, Zoë implies that it is only as long as the South follows the lead of its Caribbean neighbors on emancipation that it can become part of both the Union and the future Christian Republic. While putting its abolitionist and transcendentalist ideological stance ahead of the union between the North and the South, the novel still suggests that this republic will begin to flourish in the US. The narrative reaches an end following Zoë’s tragic death, with Hilda and Stephenson traveling to the northern US to publish the quadroon’s abolitionist manuscript; as O’Brien observes, “instructing America with lessons brought from the Caribbean” (O’Brien 102).
Livermore’s employment of the mobility through the Caribbean in the novel as a morally transformative journey, thus, makes a novel that barely ever takes place in the US South a utopian narrative that calls for a revolution in this region. While the novel depicts the region both woven into a circum-Caribbean network where established borders lose their significance, the South appears in need of the insights of its Caribbean neighbors to which it remains inferior in the rhetoric of liberty defined in abolitionist and feminist terms. Referred to as “the signs of the times,” the notion of liberty in the novel becomes the prerequisite for this region to be included both in the existing union of the US and in the imagined Christian Republic in the future. This unique vision of the South in Zoë establishes a great contrast against the spatial narrative in the pro-slavery and filibustering novel by Holcombe which will be the focus of study in the following.
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John W. Lowe writes, “Lucy Holcombe Pickens would have been a remarkable figure in southern and American history even if she had never written a single word,” given her fame as a southern belle in her youth, and later as the first lady of Confederate South Carolina and the only woman to have her portrait on a Confederate banknote. Her social position as a woman in southern history alone justifies the plenitude of biographical works on Holcombe. However, it has been her book The Free Flag of Cuba or The Martyrdom of Lopez, A Tale of the Liberating Expedition of 1851,1 which is regarded as “the first filibustering novel about Cuba” (Burton and Burton 298), that has brought the recent scholarly interest in the author more than anything else. Written under the penname H. M. Hardimann – a rather masculine choice of pseudonym – FFC has masculine purposes: vindicating Narciso López’s third and last filibustering expedition to Spanish Cuba and arousing a “spirit of vengeance” in the reader, as Holcombe puts it in the preface to her novel (Hardimann v).2 Still, to avoid being yet another “dry historical record” (v), Holcombe pens a semi-fictional novel that, besides the heroic depictions of the filibustering expedition, also includes the domestic story of two young women. This domestic hinterland of the expedition will be the center of analysis here.
The novel’s domestic side centers on two friends, the southerner, Genevieve, and the northerner, Mabel, reunited on the family plantation of the former on the coast of Mississippi. Having attended the Moravian Institute in Bethlehem, PA,3 together with Mabel, Genevieve appears in the novel as a southerner who knows the northern life maybe even more than the male circle surrounding her. Thus, when her lover Ralph Dudley and her friend Eugene ridicule her enthusiasm about a northerner’s visit, she dismisses their remarks as childish, as does the narrative. This small anecdote in the narrative functions in a multilayered way that implies a male disbelief for the sincerity of female friendship and indicates a meaningless dislike for the North by the southerners who do not know their sister region well enough. Indeed, once Mabel arrives, both Eugene and Ralph become astonished by her intellect and beauty.
Overshadowing Genevieve’s excitement by her friend’s visit is the anticipation of the upcoming filibustering expedition to Cuba, which her suitor Ralph is also joining. By the mid-century, Cuba appeared to most southerners as the solution to their anxieties caused by the recent emancipation movements across the hemisphere. The island was one of the remaining slaveholding locations in the Americas and an important port for the slave-labor economy and illegal slave trade. Securing Cuba from Spanish rule and, thus, avoiding a possible abolition of slavery on the island occupied the minds of many proponents of slavery in the US. López’s filibustering expeditions to Cuba were among the many antebellum US attempts to annex or to liberate Cuba, like the Ostend Manifesto of 1854. López found supporters both in the North and the South – even though his expeditions have gained a reputation as a southern ambition. Both López, and the filibusters that followed him, had an explicitly expansionist agenda to annex the island as a slaveholding state to the US; yet their supporters also included those who believed that liberating the island as an independent country would suffice in securing the future of slavery in the hemisphere.4
In the following it will be argued that Holcombe’s novel presents the filibustering expeditions as a non-annexationist endeavor. In a racialized fashion that regards the Cuban Creoles as superior to black people yet inferior to white southerners, and incapable of attaining their own liberation alone, the novel claims a patriotic white US American duty to liberate the island. It will be demonstrated that, in accordance with the abovementioned significance of the island for the slaveholding communities, the novel conceptualizes liberty in a way that includes slavery, standing in stark contrast to Livermore’s narrative. In the domestic background, on the other hand, the expedition is discussed as a US American rather than a sectional concern, and a secure position for the slave economy in the union is established.
Among the many protagonists of the novel, Genevieve appears as the single character who does not support López’s expedition to Cuba. While the narrative grants Genevieve rational arguments for her anti-filibusterism, as other scholars have demonstrated, her disapproval is often reduced to a selfish and feminine attempt to keep her lover away from the dangers of warfare. Unlike other characters, Genevieve contemplates the dangers of undertaking such an enterprise with fewer than five hundred people and the implications of acting against President Taylor’s 1849 proclamation which prohibited filibustering. Moreover, arguing that one’s patriotic duty is to her own country and its laws, she opposes Ralph’s suggestion that the expedition is a noble and patriotic mission. In this sense, Mabel and Genevieve are portrayed in strong contrast to one another. Greenberg suggests that Mabel, although a northerner, “is as strongly pro-filibustering as any man in the novel, and she makes it clear that only the most risktaking filibuster could win her heart” (224). When she and Eugene fall in love with each other, she encourages her lover to join the expedition at the risk of her own happiness. Against Mabel’s fiery rhetoric in favor of the filibusters, Genevieve’s portrayal as a woman who cannot comprehend what Greenberg calls the “male honor” that is embedded in the upcoming expedition becomes even more accentuated.
The friendship of Mabel and Genevieve and their conflicting stance with regard to filibusterism have significant implications for the novel’s imagery of the South. The ardent support for filibusterism from Mabel’s side and the lack of support from Genevieve function as a counterproof for the presentation of the expeditions as a solely southern matter, and allow the narrative to demonstrate the existence of opposition and support for filibusters both in the North and the South at the same time. But more importantly, the disagreement of the girls over this subject never serves to depict their friendship in conflict. Instead, when their suitors eventually leave for the expedition, a sense of increased solidarity arises between these two female friends. While Genevieve’s disapproval of the expedition does not seem to vanish, she begins sympathizing with the filibusters on an emotional level once her lover and male friends go to Cuba to fight for the island’s liberation. Thus, the girls find themselves in the hinterland of the expedition in the South united by a common concern for the future of their loved ones and the island. This shared apprehension hints at a unionist sentiment that anticipates a common and nation-wide concern for the well-being of fighting men, as it would be seen in times of national warfare.
The friendship of Mabel and Genevieve that remains unharmed by the disagreement over the subject of filibusterism – an uninterrupted domestic peace on a small scale – points at a desire for an undisturbed union on a larger scale: an analysis that has long escaped the attention of scholars who, distracted by Holcombe’s later secessionism, assumed a secessionist undertone in FFC, as well. Indeed, the novel ties the destinies of the northern and southern regions of the US together with the analogy that it creates through this friendship. Although Eugene dies in Cuba during the unsuccessful expedition, the narrative still prepares a happy ending for Mabel in the South through her marriage to another southern filibuster named Stuart Raymond. By setting up Genevieve and Ralph’s wedding on the same day, the narrative ties Mabel’s happiness not just to the South but to the happiness of Genevieve. In effect, the friendship between these two young women is reinforced with strongly connected futures. In this sense, the novel’s previous response to the mockeries of young male characters about the sincerity of female friendship can be read as a response to the cynicism of sectionalists who regarded a union between the two regions as unlikely or disingenuous.
However, the narrative does not put the southern values that it promotes at risk in its unionist sentiment. The first and foremost of these values is undoubtedly slavocracy. The novel makes its pro-slavery argument through its depiction of the slave characters as submissive and happy in their degraded condition. Lowe writes that “the blacks [in Holcombe’s novel] are [depicted as] naively comic but also strangely wise, and all of them are dedicated to their ‘white folks’” in accordance with the norms of antebellum southern literature. Burton and Burton highlight the exclusion of black men from the cult of male honor even though they fight next to white men in the Mexican War, as well as in the Cuban expedition (320). Instead, according to the narrative, they belong to the South’s “peculiar institution” and their appearance in these battles is only an extension of their loyalty to their white masters. The narrator’s voice interrupts the plot from time to time to justify slavery with remarks such as “Ah! how I wish some honest, but misjudging north-born friends we have, could or would take the trouble to see the many neat and comfortable settlements on the beautiful plantations of the south” (Hardimann v). The northerner Mabel comes in handy at this point: she feels at home surrounded by enslaved people on the southern plantation, as a person aggrandizing war for the liberty of others.
Thus, a strong contrast in the notion of liberty is observed between Livermore’s Zoë and Holcombe’s FFC. While Livermore’s Zoë understands liberty as emancipation of slaves and liberation of women, FFC takes the notion as anti-colonialist but only to ensure the continuation of slavery in the hemisphere. This disparity in their rhetoric of liberation leads to different directions in the pedagogical relationship they attribute to the geographies that they deal with. While the South in Livermore’s novel is depicted as in need of northern and Caribbean moral guidance, as previously demonstrated, it is without doubt not the case in FFC. Holcombe’s narrative may shy away from any explicitly expansionist rhetoric in its advocacy for filibusterism and present the expeditions as a liberating mission. Yet when it comes to slavocracy, its voice becomes very loud and clear. In this regard, the disparity that the novel observes between the South and the North becomes a matter of diminishing northern prejudices about slavery through southern pedagogy, and not vice versa. In building this rhetoric, the novel does a careful job to avoid antagonizing the North. Instead, by making the northerner Mabel a mouthpiece for its filibusterism as opposed to the southern belle Genevieve, it creates an atmosphere of unity within which the North and the South complement each other in this didactic relationship.
The Caribbean part of FFC, however, tells another story. The above-mentioned view that places the Cuban Creoles in-between people of color and southern whites in its racial hierarchy locates the island in the position of a student that learns a “noble principle” from the US.5 The novel makes it clear, through a conversation between Genevieve and Eugene, that the “Cubans are not worthy of freedom” but “they will be” once López’s “gallant little [US American] army” reaches the island to help them gain it (Hardimann 26). Thus, the US – presented as united and without sectional conflict – assumes its common historical self-image in Holcombe’s novel as the “export[er] of its ideas of freedom and liberty worldwide,” as Levander puts it (823). In this sense, Holcombe’s FFC shows a sharp divergence from the geographical rhetoric of Livermore’s Zoë, depicting the South as a geography that is surrounded not by morally superior domestic and foreign neighbors from which it can learn and flourish as a “real Christian republic” (Livermore, Zoë I 283). Instead, it appears, together with its northern sister, as the guide and savior of its racially inferior archipelagic neighbors, in this case Cuba, which are suffering under the yoke of European colonizers.
Conclusion
The legacies of the Civil War and Reconstruction, as well as the ways that these eras and the following decades were for long studied, have imPrint.ed in our minds an adamant connotation of antebellum secessionist sentiments with the South and a steady will to protect the Union with the North. Neither the Confederate monuments nor the flags all over the region erected by the daughters and the sons who still cherish the confederate legacy of the South contribute to the scholarly and political endeavors to deconstruct this association that augments the monolithic and inflexible narratives of southern, as well as US American, histories. Similar connotations exist in the way our collective conceptualization of the relationship between the South and the Caribbean, based on the conviction that the continuation and extension of the slave-labor-based plantation economy would necessitate a strict southern commitment to an expansionist agenda. While these convictions reflect a certain historical accuracy, they undermine the multitude of divergent spatio-political opinions about the nation both in the South and the North. They also neglect the conditions under early globalization, national consolidation, and territorialization processes, which collectively resulted in this coexistence of divergent ideologies.
The above analyses of antebellum novels by Livermore and Holcombe, both of which turn their faces to the Caribbean to construct their narratives about the South, point to this pre-war multivocalism regarding the future of the union and its relation to its Caribbean neighbors. Even though neither of these narratives pursues an explicit expansionist agenda, the former condemns and seeks to transform the filibustering schemes while the second is dedicated to vindicating their cause, both in accordance with their respective visions regarding the future of slavery in the hemisphere. The discordant natures of the southern-Caribbean relationship that each novel depicts arise from precisely these conflicts in their stance towards new-world slavery, as well as their take on the notion of liberty. In Holcombe’s FFC, the history of American independence grants the white US American a legacy of liberty that is defined in terms of anti-colonialism. Blended with a pro-slavery argument, Holcombe’s liberty also includes the right to hold slaves. In this sense, the US South for FFC stands above its Caribbean neighbors and has a duty to aid them in their struggle for freedom. In Zoë, on the other hand, personal freedom constitutes the basis of liberty, and thus the narrative builds its ideal Christian Republic on the foundation of emancipation. Surrounded by its Caribbean neighbors, most of which have recently abolished slavery through different processes, the South has but to follow their morally superior lead.
Remarkably, neither of these novels conforms to the spatial ideologies conventionally associated with their stance toward the “peculiar institution” or with the regional backgrounds of their authors. Livermore’s abolitionism within which the South does not appear as indispensable for the ideal transcendentalist republican future, on the one hand, and Holcombe’s pro-slavery southern filibusterism laden with a unionist sentiment, on the other, speak for the diversity of antebellum spatial visions. The fact that these novels, despite considerable academic attention, have, until today, remained unacknowledged for their unique stance regarding the future of the Union highlights the persistent embeddedness of canonical spatial metanarratives in our analyses.
Works cited
Primary sources
Hardimann, H. M. (Holcombe, Lucy). The Free Flag of Cuba or the Martyrdom of Lopez. New York: De Witt & Davenport Publishers, 1855. date of access: November 20, 2016. http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/filibusters/free-flag-cuba.pdf
Livermore, Elizabeth D. Zoe, or, The Quadroon’s Triumph: A Tale for the Times. Vol.1 & 2. London: Forgotten Books. 2019. Print.
Secondary sources
Bost, Suzanne. Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas, 1850-2000. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2003. Print.
Brown, William Wells. St. Domingo: Its Revolutions and Its Patriots: A Lecture Delivered Before the Metropolitan Athenaeum, London, May 16, And at St. Thomas’ Church, Philadelphia, December 20, 1854. Philadelphia, PA: Rhistoric Publications, 1969. date of access: November 10, 2016.
https://archive.org/details/stdomingoitsrevo00brow/page/n2 .
Burton, Orville Vernon. “The South as ‘Other,’ the Southerner as ‘Stranger.’” The Journal of Southern History, 89.1 (2013): 7–50. Print.
Burton, Orville Vernon, and Georganne B. Burton. “Lucy Holcombe Pickens, Southern Writer.” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, 103.4 (2002): 296–324. Print.
Chambers, Stephen. No God But Gain: The Untold Story of Cuban Slavery, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Making of the United States. London; New York: Verso, 2017. Print.
Coyle, William. “Livermore, Elizabeth Dorcas Abbot.” Ohio Authors and Their Books: Biographical Data and Selective Bibliographies for Ohio Authors, Native and Resident, 1796-1950. Cleveland; New York: The World Pub. Co., 1962. date of access: May 3, 2018.
https://archive.org/stream/ohioauthorstheir00coyl/ohioauthorstheir00coyl_djvu.txt
Delany, Martin R. Blake Or, The Huts of America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2017. Print.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. “‘The Litany of Islands, The Rosary of Archipelagoes:’ Caribbean and Pacific Archipelagraphy.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 32.1 (2001): 21-51. date of access: August 24, 2018. https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/ariel/article/view/34394/28430
Greenberg, Amy S. Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire. New York, NY: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print.
Greeson, Jennifer Rae. Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010. Print.
Guterl, Matthew Pratt. American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008. Print.
Hutchison, Coleman. Apples and Ashes. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2012. Print.
Kutzinski, Vera M. “Borders, Bodies, and Regions: The United States and the Caribbean.” A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture 21. Ed. Charles L. Crow. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2003, 171–92. Print.
Levander, Caroline F. “Confederate Cuba.” American Literature 78.4 (2006): 821–845. doi: 10.1215/00029831-2006-053.
Lowe, John. Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature. Chapel Hill: The U of North Carolina P, 2016. Kindle.
May, Robert E. Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: The U of North Carolina P, 2002. Print.
___ . “Reconsidering Antebellum US Women’s History: Gender, Filibustering, and America’s Quest for Empire.” American Quarterly 57.4 (2005): 1155–1188. doi: 10.1353/aq.2006.0013.
O’Brien, Colleen C. Race, Romance, and Rebellion: Literatures of the Americas in the Nineteenth Century, U of Virginia P, 2013, Print.
Powell, Douglas Reichert. “Introduction.” Critical Regionalism. Chapel Hill: The U of North Carolina P, 2007. 3–32. Print.
Sansay, Lenora. Secret History: Or, The Horrors of St. Domingo and Laura. Ed. Michael J. Drexler, Broadview Press, 2007. Print.
Sundquist, Eric J. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1998. Print.
Turner, Lorenzo Dow. Anti-Slavery Sentiment in American Literature Prior to 1865. The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Inc., 1929. Print.
Further reading
Hutchison, Coleman. Apples and Ashes. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. Print.
Lassiter, Matthew D., and Joseph Crespino, eds. The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.
LeMenager, Stephanie. Manifest and Other Destinies: Territorial Fictions of the Nineteenth-Century United States. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2004. Print.
May, Robert E. The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854-1861. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1973. Print.
Schoolman, Martha. Abolitionist Geographies. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2014. Print.
Woertendyke, Gretchen J. Hemispheric Regionalism: Romance and the Geography of Genre. New York: Oxford UP, 2016. Print.
1 Hereafter cited in text as FFC.
2 Here the author will be referred to as Lucy Holcombe, author of The Free Flag of Cuba, as she penned it before her marriage to F. W. Pickens. In the bibliography, her work can be found under her penname Hardimann, since the analysis here will be based on the first edition of her novel that was published under this pseudonym rather than the 2001 edition that was published with her married name Lucy Holcombe Pickens.
3 Lucy Holcombe herself received her formal education with her sister at the same institute.
4 For a comprehensive review of Cuba’s significance for the South, US attempts to annex the island, and filibusterism see: Chambers, Stephen. No God But Gain: The Untold Story of Cuban Slavery, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Making of the United States. RePrint., Verso, 2017.; May, Robert E. Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America. The University of North Carolina Press, 2002.; Sundquist, Eric J. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Belknap Press, 1998.
5 Ironically enough the novel almost disregards the non-US American origins of the expedition’s leader, the Venezuelan-born López, in this hierarchy: while Lowe notes that Holcombe “equates Lopez with the beau ideal of Southern masculinity,” Greenberg stresses that the novel emphasizes his European roots and argues that this “whitened” representation of López was indeed popular among his supporters (183).
