Plantation-school novels reframed enslavement as civilized paternal care.

Evidence

The sexist opposition seemed wrapped up in the proslavery opposition, especially since a woman had penned Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Southerners hailed the publication of Caroline Lee Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride, and William Gilmore Simms’s The Sword and the Distaff, the most prominent of the more than twenty plantation-school novels published in the reactionary aftermath of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In these books, professorial planters, and their pure and upright wives, civilized their animal-like or childlike contented captives on their family farms. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 523

Categorization

• XREF: This is a textbook instance of Kendi’s causal inversion: proslavery policy already existed, and the plantation novels were produced to justify it in the reactionary aftermath of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
• SEED: Angle: examining ‘the reactionary novel’ as a genre — how contested progressive art spawns an entire counter-literature dedicated to restoring the status quo’s self-image.