Yes, I know it's a non-music thread started by a Guest, but please leave this thread undeleted, because it is a cultural subject likely to apply to folk music and folk music performances. -Joe Offer-

---

I'm researching the life of Poe and I keep coming across references from people who say Poe was "pro-slavery" and "racist." One source even said, "Virulently racist." But none of these references are supplied with a single link to anything that proves it. It seems the strongest evidence against him is the Paulding-Drayton Review in an 1836 issue of The Southern Literary Messenger of which he was editor. For example, the following is attributed to him:

"Our assailants are numerous, and it is indispensable that we should meet the assault with vigor and activity. Nothing is wanting but manly discussion to convince our own people at least, that in continuing to command the services of slaves, they violate no law divine or human, and that in the faithful discharge of their reciprocal obligations lies their duty."

The problem is here that if Poe really wrote this, he's delivering a message of the magazine's owners and not necessarily his. We can't be certain that the writer is pro-slavery or merely trying to appear so without really committing. It's an ambiguous statement--no the bible does not forbid slavery and in a land where it is permitted it certainly cannot be against the law as well as the fact that the human race has used slaves for longer than anyone can be certain. So what is the writer really saying? The other problem is that neither rhetoric nor the subject matter is like Poe. He has left no personal statements behind that I am aware in which he comes out for against slavery nor has he left anything behind concerning his feelings or observations of race.

Some biographers have made mention of a 1940 article by May Garrettson Evans in the Baltimore Evening Sun concerning a chance discovery in an underground room at the Baltimore Court House of a bill of sale dated December 10, 1829 wherein Edgar Allen Poe is listed as selling a 21-year-old male slave named Edwin to one Henry Ridgway and was acting as an agent for his aunt, Maria Clemm.

I have checked and Poe was in Baltimore in 1829 trying to get a series of poems published. The problem is that Poe was very busy shopping his material around and talking with potential publishers.   He had only met Maria Clemm that year when he visited the Clemm residence but he did not stay there. The Clemms were poor and it is unknown how Maria Clemm could have come by a slave. Online sources say the slave was inherited but don't say from whom. Evans herself said she did not know how Clemm had come by this slave. Poe's deal with Carey, Lea & Carey fell through and he had to find another publisher. Finally, Hatch & Dunning published the book of poems in December, the same time the slave sale supposedly took place. It is very unlikely Poe could have had the time to sell this slave with all the work he was doing finding a publisher.

When a request for a notarized copy of the bill of sale was sent to the Baltimore City Archives, a letter dated April 7, 1976 was received from Ronald Schaefer, Senior Administrative Assistant in the Baltimore City Archives, stating that such a document was not and, to his knowledge, had never been in the City Archives. A Mr. Strickland in Room 610 at the Superior Court had also informed Mr. Schaefer that any such documents over 25 years old had been purged some years earlier and so there was no way of verifying if the bill of sale ever existed.

So with these two dead ends, people have analyzed Poe's fiction for clues. If ever there were a truly useless endeavor, it would be scouring a writer's fiction to determine what his personal beliefs were on a subject. So they point out that the slave Jupiter in the story The Gold-Bug is stereotypical. First, Jupiter is not a slave but was manumitted some years earlier. His vernacular would be considered racist today but had he been real it is a certainty that he would have talked in some such manner. Do we know better than Poe about the times in which he lived?? Yes, the language used by characters in the story is politically incorrect today but it's the intention behind the words that matter and I saw nothing there that told me much of anything.

Then there is The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym which is full of forces of light vs. forces of dark symbology that attempting to glean Poe's racial views from this is a slippery slope. That didn't stop Toni Morrison. She went on the attack. To then justify calling Poe's story racist she stated, "no early American writer is more important to the concept of American Africanism than Poe." Apparently because she says so. A statement I find to be bewilderingly nonsensical unless she can prove that Americans since Poe's time developed their views of race based on his writings and I doubt this in the extreme.

Poe's character, whatever it may have been, has been assassinated by the likes of Toni Morrison as racist, the same woman who absurdly called Bill Clinton "our first black president" which I found so completely incomprehensible that she must have felt pretty stupid for saying that after Obama was elected. He's our 2nd black president if you put any stock in Toni Morrison. Thankfully I don't.

What were Poe's political views? As far as I can tell, he was a Whig. I may be wrong about that but that's what it appears. His grandfather, General David Poe, belonged to the Whig Club and The Raven was published first by the American Review which is subtitled on the very issue that contained the poem as "A WHIG JOURNAL." The Whigs were essentially antislavery. They ran the gamut from extreme antislavery to mildly antislavery but you couldn't be a hard line pro-slaver and be a Whig. The Cotton Whigs got Zachary Taylor elected and he was a slave-owner but they were trying to advance a candidate that had broad appeal and didn't spook the salve states out of their boots but many Whigs deserted the party when Taylor won the nomination. Who else was a Whig when Poe lived? There was an Illinois congressman by the name of Abraham Lincoln. So, again, we have nothing to go on concerning Poe's views here either. If he was a dyed-in-the-wool Southern Democrat that might be a different story but I see no evidence that he was.

Yet I found this online, written by a erudite young lady: "Sadly I can't find a tutorial that really dissects the novel [Pym apparently] as a whole, so I'm stuck figuring out how to read it in a way that allows me to write a real paper on it. Moreover, the paper topics don't give any room to discuss my preferred topic: Why Edgar Allen Poe is a Racist Bastard." My requests for her source material on this matter have been unanswered for several weeks now.

Does anybody have anything written by Poe--preferably personal correspondence or diary entries--that tell us unequivocally what Poe's views of slavery and race were and is he deserving of the treatment he has received from history on this matter?