I've tried to read Uncle Tom's Cabin, but never got very far. I was happy to find in Iola Leroy (1892) what I wanted in a Civil War novel: the point of view of the slaves, written by a black author, who in this case was an ardent abolitionist, born to free black parents in Baltimore.
A kindly Southern plantation owner thinks the slave system is wrong, and will eventually just kind of dwindle away. In the meantime, though, he doesn't mind profiting from it, and wishes those Abolitionists would keep their mouths shut and their noses out of everyone's business. This cognitive dissonance is very 2020! He marries and frees a beautiful mixed-race slave, and continues to think the best of his relatives despite their continued prejudice, but the minute he dies, they swoop in, invalidate the marriage, and plot to sell the family into slavery.
The
couple's beautiful and refined daughter Iola, raised oblivious to her
racial heritage, is at school up North, believing that slavery isn't all
bad, just before she's tricked into returning home, where that very
fate awaits her. Her story carries through the aftermath of the Civil
War, showing a (historically accurate but little publicized) world of
former slaves desperate to find their separated family members with the
scantiest of information, and debates on how to best help them find a
place in the new world. Plus romance!
There's a clear didactic intent to the novel, which is something talking about as if it's always bad, even though many things are didactic just in supporting a status quo, and that goes unnoticed. Harper wrote mainly for overtly Christian audiences, who wanted their moral lessons plainly expressed, so that's nothing to condemn her for.
Editor Koritha Mitchell (author of the amazing book From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture) provides an excellent introduction, and a wealth of historical documentation impressive even by Broadview Press standards, with seven appendixes!
Harper, Frances E. W, and Koritha Mitchell. Iola Leroy, Or, Shadows Uplifted. Broadview Press, 2018.
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