The Planter's Northern Bride, Caroline Lee Hentz

Caroline Lee Hentz's (1800–1856) 1854 novel The Planter's Northern Bride belongs to a genre of proslavery literature written in the era before the American Civil War (1861–1865). Hentz, a northerner who had spent much of her adult life in the South, wrote this and other works of fiction, which sought to portray involuntary servitude in a favorable light at a time when the nation was growing increasingly divided in opinion on the matter. The Planter's Northern Bride was one of several novels published in the wake of Harriet Beecher Stowe's (1811–1896) 1852 best seller, Uncle Tom's Cabin, an important landmark in the antislavery movement that aided the abolitionist cause immensely.

Born in 1800 in Lancaster, Massachusetts, Hentz was descended from Puritans who came to Massachusetts in 1636, and her father, John Whiting, had fought in the Revolutionary War (1776–1783). In 1824, she wed a French entomologist, Nicholas Marcellus Hentz, who wrote an important work on the arachnids of North America. Hentz's husband became a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill two years after their wedding, and in 1830 the couple moved to Covington, Kentucky, to run a private academy for young women. Over the next two decades, the couple relocated five more times when he took positions at similar schools. In Cincinnati, where they lived from 1832 to 1834, Hentz befriended Stowe, who was living there at the time.

In between her duties as an aide to her husband at the series of schools in Alabama and Georgia that followed their stint in Ohio, Hentz became a mother to four children and continued a writing career that had been launched in 1831 when she won a playwriting contest. De Lara, or The Moorish Bride was a historical romance-drama that was staged in Philadelphia and Boston, and she followed it with two more plays and then a novel, Lovell's Folly, that appeared in 1833. Its plot centered around tensions sparked by the visit of a southern family, along with their two slaves, to acquaintances in New England. Hentz's short stories were published in leading periodicals of the day, including Godey's Lady's Book, and several of them were collected for the 1846 volume Aunt Patty's Scrap Bag.

In 1849, Hentz's husband was disabled by an illness, and was unable to return to teaching. After this point, she became the sole financial support for her family. One of her most successful works was the 1850 novel Linda or The Young Pilot of the Belle Creole, and subsequent ones followed a formula that centered a romantic drama around an adventure-filled plot. The Planter's Northern Bride, published in two volumes in 1854, became her most enduring work, and seems to be written as a retort to Stowe's best seller. Uncle Tom's Cabin had appeared two years earlier, and was a fictional but frank exposé of slavery in the South and the cruelty necessary to its survival as an economic institution. Its popularity marked a turning point in the abolitionist movement in America.

The titular heroine of The Planter's Northern Bride is Eulalia Hastings, the educated and attractive daughter of a firebrand New England abolitionist. She meets Morehouse, her future husband, when his business brings him to her town, and they marry and return to his Georgia plantation. Eula, as she is called, is initially uneasy with the idea of becoming the mistress of slaves, but comes to believe in the justness of the institution once she experiences it firsthand. As seen through Eula's eyes, slaves in the antebellum era lived a relatively idyllic existence; in one scene, Eula visits Dicey, the elderly slave who had once cared for the infant who grew up to become Eula's mother-in-law. "If any one could find any poor, old, infirm woman at the North, happier than Dicey, more kindly treated, more amply provided for, living in a more nicely furnished cabin, and more comfortably clothed, we should like to see them and congratulate them on their favoured destiny," the novel asserted (p. 128).

Hentz, a Massachusetts native and therefore familiar with the working conditions in the textile mills that were an integral part of the New England economy, compares the conditions of mill workers with the lives of slaves, and deems the southern system more humane. She writes of the young women who worked at the mills, enduring eighteen-hour days, and housed in dormitories that were little more than hovels, and contrasted their lot with those of her slaves, wondering if "songs ever gush from those bloodless, pallid lips?" of the factory classes. "Do those weary feet ever spring in the light and joyous dance? Alas! no! The breath of life comes struggling from the weak and wasting lungs, and every step is impeded by the dull, heavy, leaden weight of despair" (p. 133).

The Planter's Northern Bride featured various subplots tied to the Morehouse family and their slaves, and was anchored by the threat of a slave revolt. Once it was thwarted, Eula's family visits her in Georgia, and even her abolitionist father is swayed to the other side. "Mr. Hastings acknowledged, that, if all masters established as excellent regulations, and enforced them with the same kindness, wisdom, and decision, the spirit of Abolitionism would die away for want of fuel to feed its flames," the novel reads. "He carried a memorandum-book in his pocket, which he filled with notes, as materials for a new course of lectures, with which he intended to illuminate the prejudices of the Northern people."

Hentz's book was one of several novels written as literary rejoinders to Stowe's best seller. She wrote a few other novels, and in the final years of her career enjoyed tremendous financial success, with sales of The Planter's Northern Bride and her other works reaching 90,000 copies in the space of just three years. She died in Marianna, Florida, where she and her husband had been living, on February 11, 1856.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cuenca, Carme Manuel. "An Angel in the Plantation: The Economics of Slavery and the Politics of Literary Domesticity in Caroline Lee Hentz's 'The Planter's Northern Bride." Mississippi Quarterly (Winter 1997): 87.

Hentz, Caroline Lee. The Planter's Northern Bride. Philadelphia: Parry & Macmillan, 1854. Reprint, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004. Page references are to the 2004 edition.

                                            Carol Brennan