The South did not participate in these statistical marvels. The fate of literature below the Mason-Dixon line inverted the experience of the North, as if to underline the close connection between freemarket capitalism and the flourishing of native fiction. Thomas Jefferson, the country's leading eighteenth-century man of letters, was a Virginian who practiced authorship as a gentlemanly avocation. In the nineteenth century, as the rest of the nation modernized, an anachronistic understanding of the arts as nonprofessional persisted in the South to the detriment of the area's culture. The South lost its literary luster and didn't regain comparable distinction until the novels of William Faulkner. The problem, of course, was slavery: its expansion committed the region to an agrarian economy, retarded the growth of industry and cities, and had the inevitable consequence of devaluing all forms of labor. The South failed to nourish literature, said the North Carolinian abolitionist Hinton Helper, because it lacked a modern system of production. Its authors "have their books printed on Northern paper, with Northern types, by Northern artizans, stitched, bound, and made ready for the market by Northern -54- industry" — and, added Helper, the books found the vast majority of their readers in the North.
Literary supremacy decamped for the bustling commercial centers the South never had. The area's major fiction writer, Edgar Allan Poe, served a stint in Richmond as a magazine editor before fleeing for the more congenial cultural climes of Philadelphia and New York. The most prolific novelist, William Gilmore Simms, was clubbed the "Southern Cooper" but never attracted a large enough Southern readership to approach Cooper's financial independence. Although he chronicled regional history and mores, Simms remained dependent on Northern royalties and lecture tours. The principal outlet for the Southwestern humorists was a periodical edited and published in New York by William T. Porter, The Spirit of the Times. And the major Southern novel written before the Civil War, Uncle Tom's Cabin, was the work of a Northern woman and bore the imprint of a Boston publisher.
The African American novelist struggled under far greater disadvantages than the Southerner. Nearly all African Americans were in bondage, and those who gained or were born into freedom had little access to education. A minute pool of possible authors faced an audience problem unknown to whites. Free African Americans numbered barely a quarter million, or about 2 percent of the North's population in 1860, and few among these despised and impoverished people had sufficient leisure time or money to expend on novels. A readership of sympathetic whites failed to materialize. So formidable were the hindrances that just four novels by African Americans reached print before the Civil War. Only Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859) was published in book form in the antebellum United States. Martin Delany's Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859-62) appeared serially in two African American periodicals but had to wait until the 1960s to achieve publication on its own. The other novels, William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853) and Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends (1857), were issued in London with British imprints.
Unlike the typical slave narrative, which appeared under white (abolitionist) sponsorship and was introduced by white testimony to -55- its authenticity, these novels make few concessions to the sensibilities of white readers. The Garies and Their Friends details the racial hypocrisy of Northerners; Blake advocates African American separatism and refers to whites as "devils"; and Clotel broaches the scandal of Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and rumored father of two mulatto daughters who are sold into slavery during the narrative. Our Nig, easily the strongest of the novels, refuses to honor the conventions of African American publication. Wilson consigns white testimonials to the back of the book and excoriates abolitionists "who didn't want slaves at the South, nor niggers in their own houses, North." Her novel received not a single American review and didn't sell enough copies to keep its author from the almshouse.
Such works make abundantly clear how stifling the antebellum marketplace could be to unwelcome ideas and unpopular voices. White buyers needed to be conciliated before they would agree to patronize African American artists. In Our Nig Wilson thematizes the prohibition against African American self-advocacy: the efforts of her protagonist Frado to make herself heard are repeatedly frustrated by whites, who find her words too discomforting to listen to and try to muzzle her. Frado has her mouth stuffed with a towel and a block of wood; her mistress, Mrs. Bellmont, threatens to cut out her tongue to prevent her from "tale-bearing." Written from the perspective of a mulatto servant, Our Nig paints a relentlessly bleak picture of race and class relations in the North. The book flaunts its unsalability by debunking the middle-class domestic scene that Stowe and other female abolitionists mobilized against slavery. The family for Wilson is not a stronghold of emancipatory affect; it is a plantation or factory where Nig suffers brutal mistreatment from other women. No other antebellum novel by a woman, white or African American, places itself so far outside the expectations of the feminine reading public.
Although white authors had a much easier time of it, not all of them, even in the North, fared well now that literature was a trade. In general, one can divide the novelists of the 1840s and 1850s into three groupings: the small circle of men who over the course of the next hundred years came to constitute the canon of national literature; the domestic or sentimental women; and the quasi journalists -56- like Lippard, most of them male, whose narratives of urban violence and sexual titillation shaped a sensationalized popular culture. These three groupings constituted the first generation of Americans able to view storytelling realistically as a career, a vocation that promised a decent livelihood and held out the prospect, for the lucky few, of real wealth. Least is known about the purveyors of sensationalism. Their paper-covered pamphlet novels, hawked on street corners or sold through the mails (until the U.S. Post Office withdrew their permits to ship at inexpensive newspaper rates), proved both popular and highly ephemeral.
Our concern here lies with the canonical and domestic writers, the major artists of the period and figures who often seemed to occupy antipodal cultural spheres. Rivals for the respectable, middle-class audience, they differed in subject matter, popular appeal, and understanding of the literary calling. Yet a series of paradoxes and inversions joined them and pointed to a broader area of agreement. In varying degrees, each school internalized but also set itself against the social and economic universe identified with Adam Smith. Although the women enjoyed immense commercial success and frankly viewed their writing as a lucrative form of employment, American culture — and they themselves — defined womanhood as the antithesis of acquisitiveness. They retained traditional ideas of the novel as committed to service; for most of them, the self-expressive dimension of art was subsidiary to the doing of good. The men, on the other hand, sold modestly or poorly in their lifetimes and felt estranged from the market, yet they forged an individualized conception of literature as "high" art, as a separate realm analogous to the newly theorized category of the economic.