[I posted this on Mudcat last week and it vanished off the board--not scrolled off but vanished in about 5 minutes. Not sure why. It's not offensive in any way. So I'll try again.]

I have heard this a lot, that Poe was both pro-slavery and very racist. I have scoured the internet for sources and yet have found none. This is not an attempt to whitewash Poe's sentiments nor an attempt at apologetics where I twist his very words around to make them say what they obviously do not mean in order to make Poe acceptable to my own agenda. I state only the truth—there is very little in the way of evidence that Poe was pro-slavery or racist. What abounds on the internet are unsupported statements that Poe was "pro-slavery" and even one that claimed he was "virulently racist." But what is this based on?

Most scholars refer to the Paulding-Drayton Review of an 1836 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger to glean Poe's attitude towards race and say it proves the man was a racist. For example:

"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 truth is that no one is even certain that Poe wrote it (neither the rhetoric nor subject matter were typical of Poe). If he did, he was not necessarily expounding his own beliefs but those of his employer at the "Messenger" since Thomas White had final say on all the content that went into each issue so the Paulding-Drayton Review is of little use to us. What we need are private writings--letters, diary entries, etc. And what we have of those don't have anything about slavery or race in them that I am aware of.

But actions speak louder than words. How did Poe deal with people of color when he encountered them? We also have little to go on here except for one instance: The Baltimore Evening Sun printed an article in the April 6, 1940 edition by May Garrettson Evans concerning a chance discovery in an underground room at the Baltimore Court House of a bill of sale dated December 10, 1829 wherein Edgar A. 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. This article has been cited by a number of biographers of Poe since then and used as proof that Poe supported slavery. However, Evans herself could not account for how Maria Clemm came by this slave as she was too poor to afford one if we assume she even desired one.

An application was made for a notarized copy of the bill of sale from the archives and, in reply, 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.

Poe was also a Whig which was an essentially antislavery party. One other famous Whig was a congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln.

Toni Morrison wrote that "no early American writer is more important to the concept of American Africanism than Poe." Apparently because she says so. I can't think of why her statement should be taken anymore seriously anymore than the one in which she called Bill Clinton our first African-American president.

People attack his stories such as "The Gold-Bug" and "The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym" but I saw nothing there to cause me to conclude Poe was either pro-slavery or a racist for writing either of those. I rather enjoyed both tales.

Maybe somebody here has data I am not privy to that justify the conclusions about Poe. If so, please share them.