After the U.S. Civil War, beginning near the end of Reconstruction, white writers of the South felt called to break what several of them referred to as the region’s “silence” in the aftermath of war and emancipation. What could the South, briefly a nation, now a devastated and transformed section, say for itself? Answering this question became the principal vocation of the region’s white literary establishment in the period between Reconstruction and World War I. Speaking for the South was not a new enterprise; antebellum white Southerners had done so volubly in poetry, fiction, and polemical prose. But the present task, making the South articulate in the aftermath of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, imposed novel burdens on the region’s imaginative writers. Postbellum Southerners such as Irwin Russell, George Washington Cable, Thomas Nelson Page, and Thomas Dixon discovered that the South now needed two voices, represented as black and white, engaged in some kind of dialogue with one another over the South’s defining question, that of racial relations. This essay considers how these writers – though sometimes fiercely disagreeing with one another – summoned fictional black and white voices to engage their historical moment.

This chapter argues that anti-blackness lived on in the afterlife of slavery in Bret Harte's writings about the American West featuring the Chinese worker during Reconstruction. Through the evocation of minstrel figures in literature such as Topsy from Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harte's fictional writings reveal the ways in which anti-blackness functions as cultural form, rooted in slavery and the representational practice of blackface minstrelsy. In particular, the character of Topsy lived on through his Chinese worker characters in the West, beginning with and exploited further after the phenomenal success of his poem "Plain Language from Truthful James." In addition to reading the poem in the context of Reconstruction debates on changing definitions of enslaved/"heathen" and free labor, I propose noting the residual representational practices of blackface minstrelsy that pervaded much of nineteenth-century US literature as formal attributes of Harte's poem. Doing so reveals that Harte's West and the Chinese worker were not separate from Reconstruction and the history of slavery, colonialism, and racial violence in the United States in the construction of "American humor."

While always hostile to white demands that they expatriate, free black northerners considered emigrating on their own terms, as an affirmation of their dual identity as black and American. Even as stalwart integrationists such as Frederick Douglass criticized his peers for betraying their enslaved kin, emigrationists such as Martin Delany, Mary Ann Shadd, and James Theodore Holly debated the true purpose of black exodus, as well as the most desirable destination, concurring only in their dislike for the ACS and Liberia. Where to go? Canada, for its proximity to the United States? The Niger Valley, for its connection to their African ancestry? Or Haiti, the one black-run state in the Western Hemisphere, and a bastion of black militancy? As emigrationists duly divided, exploring and settling distant lands, they were shocked to realize just how American, even “Anglo-Saxon” their assumptions really were – and how much they had to call on much-resented white assistance. And so, like white colonizationists, they entered the 1860s praying that some more powerful entity would assume the onerous task of fostering African American emigration.