A Dream

Anonymous [published in 1831]
From American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation

Interesting Links
William Lloyd Garrison’s inaugural editorial in The Liberator (PBS)

Interview with James G. Basker on antislavery writings (Library of America)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “An Hour,” Louisa May Alcott
• “A Negro Tourist in Dixie,” Bettye Rice Hughes
• “What It Means to be Colored in the Capital of the United States,” Mary Church Terrell

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American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation
Autobiography, fiction, children’s literature, poetry, oratory, and song
970 pages
List price: $40.00
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Also available as an e-book

In an essay on the antislavery movement of the early nineteenth century, historian James Brewer Stewart describes rising racial tensions and violence in the North:

Race riots struck New Haven, Boston, and Pittsburgh in the mid-1820s. Throughout the decade groups of harassing lower-class whites in New York City periodically disrupted African-American theater performances. In 1829, white mobs in Cincinnati used unprecedented terror and destruction to force perhaps several hundred African Americans to seek refuge in Canada, and in November of that year, Philadelphia underwent its first major race riot. And finally . . . contention spread southward in 1831 to Virginia in the wake of Nat Turner’s rebellion.

In 1831 two short stories appeared anonymously; concerned by the increase in racial animosities, their author conveyed “the abolitionists’ apocalyptic premonition that stark alternatives awaited the nation as the 1830s opened—race war or interracial ‘amalgamation.’” * Both stories appeared with the byline “T. T.” in two issues of The Liberator, the weekly newspaper founded at the beginning of the year by the Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.

Although these stories are often discussed in historical accounts of the antislavery movement, they have never been reprinted—until now. Literary historian James G. Basker recently included them in the new anthology American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation, published two months ago by The Library of America. In an interview published by Barnard College, Basker describes their contrasting visions of an America future:

In one, the narrator wakes up in a world following a race war, where black forces have won and Congress is meeting to decide what to do with the remaining whites—enslave them, send them back to Europe, or kill them all. The other story is at the opposite end of the spectrum: Slavery has ended, equality has been achieved, and into the room walks the first black president.

In celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation’s 150th anniversary, Martin Luther King Day, and this week’s inaugural ceremonies, Story of the Week presents the latter of these two selections: T. T.’s utopian vision from nearly two centuries ago of a society in which “blacks and whites were mingling with perfect ease in social intercourse.”

Notes: The epigraph opening the story loosely translates a line from Cicero’s The Nature of the Gods and was used by Samuel Johnson in his serial publication The Rambler (1751). On page 295, the “new” place names—Lundy Place, Benezet Street, Granville Street—are meant to serve as fictional tributes to antislavery advocates Benjamin Lundy, Anthony Benezet, and Granville Sharp. Subsequent references to monuments and localities honor British abolitionists James Stephen, William Wilberforce, and Thomas Clarkson.

* James Brewer Stewart, ”The Emergence of Racial Modernity and the Rise of the White North, 1790–1840,” Journal of the Early Republic (Summer 1998), pp. 181–217.

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I was reading, the other day, some very curious reasonings upon time, which, as well as space, the author annihilates without any ceremony. ‘I have proved elsewhere,’ says he, ‘that the idea of duration offers nothing absolute. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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