D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation

by Melvyn Stokes

  There is now no way of establishing which version of the play Dixon saw in 1901. To reach the play’s position at the very heart of American popular culture, the antislavery critique of the novel had been steadily weakened. “Uncle Tom” and “Topsy” survived as signifiers whose signifieds had long since disappeared, the former as a dignified, stoical, rather elderly victim, the latter as a source of vulgar comedy. Since most of the audiences for the play were still in the North and West, many of these productions made the villainous Simon Legree into a Southerner instead of a Yankee. Inevitably, the most melodramatic aspects of the book found themselves emphasized: Eliza’s flight across the Ohio River, jumping from ice floe to ice floe with little Harry in her arms, was dealt with in the novel in two brief paragraphs. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, theatrical versions would have her chased by packs of dogs (in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1888, one drunken member of the audience shot one of the pursuing dogs).30 It may have been the success of the play even more than its bias that angered Dixon. Stowe’s book had become the “greatest popular hit in American dramatic history.”31 In the process, over half a century, it had established a master narrative that had succeeded in demonizing the white South and privileging the sufferings of black slaves.

  Dixon remembered his response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as virtually akin to his earlier “conversion” experiences. It changed his life and gave it new focus and direction. For several months afterward, while still lecturing across the country, he assembled around a thousand pages of notes on Reconstruction and plotted his novel. The actual writing took only two months, and early in 1902, Dixon sent off the unrevised manuscript to Walter Hines Page, an old North Carolina friend who had recently gone into publishing as part of the firm of Doubleday, Page and Company. According to Dixon’s later account in his unpublished autobiography, Page became so absorbed in the story that continuing to read it on the way to his office, he was knocked down by a cab. Picking up the dirty, crumpled manuscript, he carried on reading. When he was finished, he sent a telegram to Dixon inviting him to New York to sign a contract. The book, entitled The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, was published in March 1902. In the first few months after its appearance, it sold over 100,000 copies.32

  Dixon consciously framed his first novel as a “sequel” to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as well as a refutation of it. One character, Simon Legree, appears in both books, changing in the process from an evil slave owner into a local Republican politician. He is elected governor of North Carolina, making a fortune from corruption. On his final defeat, he flees to New York and buys a seat on the stock exchange. Tim Shelby, formerly a black slave on the plantation of Mr. Shelby in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, reemerges as a leader of the Union League. He is chosen as majority leader of the state House of Representatives, and serving also as school commissioner, functions as an important cog in Legree’s corrupt regime.33 Alec Haley, a slave trader in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, also now belongs to the Republican machine.34 One minor character, Bob St. Clare, the son of a Democratic congressman and former slave owner, probably belongs to the same family as another of Tom’s former owners.35 Other characters in The Leopard’s Spots are clearly identified as the children of those created by Mrs. Stowe. George Harris, the son of Eliza and George Harris, is the well-educated mulatto protégé of Everett Lowell, an important congressman from Boston. When he aspires to marry Lowell’s daughter, Helen, he is disowned by his patron. Finding it impossible, as a black man, to find work in the North, he turns for assistance to union official Hugh Halliday, the son of the Quaker couple who had originally helped his parents escape from slavery.36

  Yet if some characters are the same in the two books—or those in The Leopard’s Spots are descendants of those created by Mrs. Stowe—Dixon’s novel is different in many ways from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It begins in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, with defeated Southerners making their way home. While the South is physically ruined, the principal concern of white Southerners is with the threat posed by the freed blacks.37 Encouraged by the Union League, which gives them arms, blacks engage in violent acts and look forward to revenge on the whites. In the first election after “radical” Reconstruction begins in 1867, using fraud and intimidation they win control of the government of North Carolina.38 In the aftermath of the election, the new regime taxes the homes of whites so severely that a high proportion have to be auctioned to pay off tax debts.39 Dixon had already hinted that black men lusted after white women: Tim Shelby at one point refers to “Desdemonas” who would soon “be fascinated again by an Othello,” and after the elections, he proposes (and is persuaded to withdraw since his colleagues see it as inexpedient) a bill dissolving the marriages of all those who fought for the Confederacy. Yet black soldiers in the Union army have no similar inhibitions: seven of them, drunk, arrive at the house of one-legged Confederate veteran Tom Camp; his young daughter, Annie, has just been married, and they try to carry her off. In the mêlée that follows, Annie is shot dead. Another incident, shortly afterward, leads to the emergence of organized white resistance. Shelby, encouraged by a military order allowing the marriage of blacks and white women, dreams of “a fair white bride.” When a white girl, Mollie Graham, visits him in his capacity as schools commissioner to apply for a teaching post, he offers her the job in exchange for a kiss. The next night the Ku Klux Klan appears on the scene, and Shelby is hung for his affront to white womanhood. The union League is suppressed, and at the ensuing elections, white supremacy is restored.40

  Eighteen years pass and it seems that the “mistakes” of the Reconstruction period are to be repeated. The rule of the Democratic Party is challenged and then overthrown, as blacks combine with the state’s disgruntled white farmers. Against this background, Charles Gaston, a boy in the first part of the book, now falls in love with and courts Sallie Worth, the daughter of a prominent Southern businessman. Despite Gaston’s attempts to stop them, the Republicans carry the state elections. For the first time since Reconstruction ended, black officeholders return. Law and order begin to break down as many blacks roam the countryside stealing and committing other crimes. Matters come to a head when Tom Camp’s remaining daughter, eleven-year-old Flora, is raped and left for dead. Despite the best efforts to save her, Flora is hysterical at the memory of what has happened to her and finally dies. A crowd of whites identifies her killer as a black man, Dick, who has been Charles Gaston’s boyhood friend; ignoring Gaston’s plea for a fair trial, the mob lynches Dick by burning him alive. A year later, with crime and disorder still increasing, Gaston leads a movement called the Red Shirts that overthrows black rule for a second time. He is briefly arrested by the Republicans (and finally marries Sallie, over her father’s opposition, while he is in jail). Finally, in a great speech to the Democratic convention, he adopts the policy—urged throughout the book by the Reverend John Durham—of eliminating blacks completely from public life. With Gaston’s landslide election to the governorship, white supremacy returns and all black voters are disfranchised.41

  In common with most first novels, Dixon’s book was heavily autobiographical. The great-grandfather of Charles Gaston had fought the British (as had Dixon’s) at King’s Mountain, North Carolina, during the War of Independence.42 Like Dixon, young Gaston sits up at night with his sick and delirious mother, is immensely proud of his first medal won as a student, and (at least temporarily) abandons religion while away at college.43 Like Dixon, also, Gaston marries despite the strong opposition of his wife’s father.44 But Gaston is not the only doppelgänger for Dixon in the book. John Durham, like Dixon, has graduated at the top of his class at Wake Forrest and gone on to become a successful Baptist minister. Unlike Dixon, however, Durham has refused a call from a wealthy church in Boston to stay in the South with his own people.45 He is obsessed by the threat posed by blacks both to Southern society and, more generally, to the future of the American Republic. The United States is an “Anglo-Saxon” civilization, the product of 2,000
years of historical development. If race lines are abandoned and blacks allowed intermarriage with whites, that civilization will inevitably regress to the level of “African barbarism.” According to Durham, “One drop of Negro blood makes a negro. It kinks the hair, flattens the nose, thickens the lip, puts out the light of intellect, and lights the fires of brutal passions.” To safeguard the future of Anglo-Saxon America, equality of any kind between the races is impossible, since political equality will inevitably lead to social equality. “You cannot seek the Negro vote without asking him to your home sooner or later,” Durham maintains. “If you ask him to your house, he will break bread with you … And if you seat him at your table, he has the right to ask your daughter’s hand in marriage.” But to create a nation from two entirely separate, unequal, and antagonistic races is in the end unimaginable. Ultimately, therefore, Durham believes it will be necessary for blacks to be removed from the United States.46

  The extreme racial philosophy articulated in The Leopard’s Spots represented an important change in Dixon’s earlier outlook. Although he would remember, as a child, arming against an attack from a crowd of threatening blacks during the Reconstruction era (an attack that never materialized), he was not initially anti-black. At one stage of his boyhood, his closest friend was an African American boy called Dick, and he would recall this friendship even decades later with “nostalgic tenderness.”47 Dixon also had an affectionate memory of his “dear old nurse … at whose feet I sat and heard the sad story of the life of a slave until I learned to hate slavery.” In a book of religious essays published in 1896, he celebrated the demise of slavery, arguing that while it may have had its benevolent aspects, “democracy is the destiny of the race, because all men are bound together in the bonds of fraternal equality with one common father above.” “Race prejudice,” he observed later in the same volume, “is a terrible fact.”48

  Sometime around the turn of the century, however, Dixon became obsessed with racial fears. One catalyst for this change may have been the Spanish-American War. The outbreak of war seemed to promote a new mood of national unity. In The Leopard’s Spots, indeed, Dixon would look back on the war of 1898 as the moment when the Anglo-Saxon race became reunified.49 But the war, in destroying Spanish power, also raised the issue of what to do with the native inhabitants of the former Spanish colonies, including the Filipinos. Dixon, together with other fervent imperialists, thought that the United States had a moral duty to help such backward peoples. At the same time, he did not believe that they had the necessary judgement and self-control to govern themselves, making it necessary for the United States to manage them without their consent. Having supported white supremacy in the colonies gained from Spain, Dixon may subsequently have begun to rethink his views on race relations at home.50

  A second possible influence on Dixon’s thinking was the growing significance of racial “Radicalism.” Joel Williamson has distinguished three main varieties of Southern thinking about race at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. “Liberals” were open minded on the potentialities of blacks and believed that by absorbing aspects of white culture they might improve. “Conservatives” regarded them as inferiors who should be assigned a fixed place in American society. “Radicals” were convinced that African Americans were swiftly retrogressing to their primitive roots (a major symptom of this being the alleged increasing frequency of black sexual assaults on white women) and that they would soon be eliminated from American society, either through racial decline leading to extinction or mass deportation. Radicalism had its political roots in the elections of 1888, when the Republicans not only elected a president but also gained a majority in both houses of Congress. For a time, it seemed likely that they would pass bills giving federal aid to the education of blacks as well as whites and introduce federal election supervisors, thus beginning a second period of Reconstruction. The economic origins of Radicalism lay in the problems faced by Southern farmers, especially during the depression years of the 1890s. Williamson suggests that for some whites, an assault on “the black beast rapist” offered “psychic compensation” for being unable to provide for their families in material terms.51

  Other Southern farmers, moving from the Farmers’ Alliance protest movement into the Populist Party (formed in 1892), unwittingly encouraged the eventual growth of Radicalism by allying themselves with the Republican Party (and its mainly black voters) in an attempt to secure their economic aims through political means.52 In some Southern states, fusion tickets of Populists and Republicans succeeded in ousting the Democratic Party and gaining power: North Carolina, for example, as Dixon observes in The Leopard’s Spots, was ruled by an alliance of Populists and Republicans between 1894 and 1898. With the collapse of the Populist Party in and after 1896, many vengeful Southern Democrats (supported by a number of former Populists) became converts to the Radical position. They set out—through tighter legal disfranchisement and segregation—to weaken the position of blacks (especially black men), to make them insecure “and ultimately less aggressive,” and to induce them to take “with minimal resistance the inevitable path to racial extinction.” By 1902, radicalism was thriving in many parts of the South, including Virginia. While Dixon was writing The Leopard’s Spots, a constitutional convention was meeting in Richmond and debating the issue of whether blacks should be able to vote. Delegates from the east of the state (where Dixon lived) were passionately in favor of complete black disfranchisement.53

  At one point in Dixon’s novel, there is a reference to Harriet Beecher Stowe. “The history of the world is made up of the individuality of a few men,” argues Mrs. Durham, the preacher’s wife. “A little Yankee woman wrote a crude book. The single act of that woman’s will caused a war, killed a million men, desolated and ruined the South and changed the history of the world.” While Dixon may have exaggerated the political impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he clearly hoped that The Leopard’s Spots would have an equally drastic impact on American public opinion. A number of critics commented on the similarity between the two novels. When they compared them, Dixon’s often came off the best. “It is an epoch-making book,” one critic declared, “and a worthy successor to ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ It is superior in power of thought and graphic description.”54 Few observers appreciated that Dixon intended quite consciously to supplant the images in Uncle Tom’s Cabin with impressions of his own. One who did was Max Nordau, the German writer and physician. “You have deliberately undone the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe,” Nordau wrote to Dixon in the summer of 1902.55

  In place of the victimized blacks of Stowe’s creation—saintly Tom, homely Aunt Chloe, anxious Eliza Harris, her exploited husband George, devious Topsy, and bitter Cassy—Dixon offered either “faithful souls” (Nelse and Eva) or, more usually, aggressive men intent on sexual relations with white women (Tim Shelby, the anonymous troopers at Annie Camp’s wedding, and Dick). The white men of Uncle Tom’s Cabin are nearly all flawed in some way: Shelby is impractical and cowardly, St. Clare skeptical and fond of procrastination, Harris and Legree (together with more minor characters such as Tom Loker, the slave catcher) cruel, violent, and narrow-minded. By contrast, the Southern white men described by Dixon, especially the Klan leader Stuart Dameron, John Durham, and Charles Gaston, are in the main heroic figures battling in defense of their civilization. The Southern white women in Uncle Tom’s Cabin are marginalized for most of the book: Mrs. Shelby, though sensitive and businesslike, is sidelined from the affairs of the plantation while her husband is alive. Marie St. Clare is selfish, self-absorbed, and, when afforded the chance, cruel to her slaves. Dixon’s white female characters, by contrast, are idealized and made appropriate symbols of threatened white civilization.56 Young Flora, in particular, has an innate goodness and innocence that reminds one forcibly of little Eva. But instead of dying of tuberculosis like Eva, she is a victim of black lust.

  If Mrs. Stowe’s book foregrounded the sufferings of black slaves at the hands
of whites, Dixon’s focused on the later anguish of whites, supposedly at the hands of free blacks. There are a number of similarities between the two novels. Both are structured around a racial division between “Anglo-Saxons” and “Africans.”57 Both agree that there was racial prejudice in the North as well as the South: St. Clare’s sister Ophelia from Vermont, while trying to help Topsy, cannot bear to touch her, and Dixon’s Congressmen Lowell, a fervent advocate of political equality between the races, hysterically rejects the possibility of George Harris marrying his daughter.58 Both, confronting the realities of entrenched racial prejudice on the part of whites, support plans for ultimately colonizing blacks back to Africa.59 Both accept that blacks often behave in ways that are deceitful, dishonest, and brutal; yet they part company over why this should have been the case. To Dixon, American blacks are descendants of the ancient tribes of Africa who, over thousands of years, had failed to make any progress toward building a true civilization. Slavery, however blameworthy in moral terms, had succeeded in civilizing them to some limited degree. With slavery gone, blacks had swiftly regressed to their earlier, primitive state. Dixon, disagreeing with the leading advocates of black education of his time (including Booker T. Washington), saw no point in educating blacks. It would only persuade them to believe in ideas of political and social equality that would eventually destroy Anglo-Saxon civilization by promoting miscegenation. According to Stowe, in contrast, the defects of character supposedly displayed by many blacks were a consequence not of their African heritage, but of the brutalizing effects of slavery. She believed it perfectly possible for them to be civilized and morally uplifted by means of education.60

  The first edition of 15,000 copies of The Leopard’s Spots was exhausted on publication. The book eventually sold over a million copies, helped establish Doubleday, Page as a major publisher, and made Dixon several hundred thousand dollars in royalties.61 What Dixon had essentially done with his novel was to dramatize the black problem as a national rather than merely sectional issue,62 to encourage Northern whites to redefine themselves as “non-blacks,” and introduce to Northern readers radical Southern ideas on how blacks should be treated.