Sewall’s “Selling of Joseph,” the first American
anti-slavery tract published in 1700. But we especially see in the influence of the Negro’s condition
in the work of the masters of the 19th century,
like Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf
Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Walt Whitman,
Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe and
Lydia Maria Child. With these must be named
the orators Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner,
John C. Calhoun, Henry Ward Beecher. In our
own day, we have had the writers of fiction,
George U. Cable, Thomas Nelson Page, Thomas
Dixson, Ruth McEnery Stewart, William Dean
Howells, Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
It may be said that the influence of the Negro here is a passive influence and yet one must remember that it would be inconceivable to have an American literature, even that written by white men, and not have the Negro as a subject. He has been the lay figure, but after all, the figure has been alive, it has moved, it has talked, felt and influenced.
In the minds of these and other writers how has the Negro been portrayed? It is a fascinating subject which I can but barely touch: in the days of Shakespeare and Southerne the black man of fiction was a man, a brave, fine, if withal overtrustful and impulsive, hero. In science he was
