Faulkner and the Freedom Writers: Slavery’s Narrative in Business Records from Nineteenth-Century Abolitionism to Twenty-First-Century Neoabolitionism
This chapter contextualizes and explores the interplay of historical narrative and imaginative literature, surveying the historiography to which Faulkner and later writers contributed. Drawing on categories formulated by historian David W. Blight, it races a dialectical movement from an “abolitionist script” (grounded in antebellum ex-slave narratives) that “contrasted the humanity of enslaved people with the instrumentality of paper used to mediate slave transactions,” through a proslavery rhetoric that ignored economic context and ascribed paternalistic qualities to slaveholders, to an uneasy synthesis in antislavery novelists like Harriet Beecher Stowe, who decried “slavery's immoral accounting” while generally “affirm[ing] plantation paternalism.” The postbellum years saw a similar cycle, as emancipationist and white supremacist scripts collided before New South writers combined elements of both into a sentimental “reconciliationist script” that won popular support and influenced many of the era's professional historians.