I've already been to that link but it's the very problem I'm talking about. They say things without any real proof. Read "The Gold-Bug" and tell me if you think that Jupiter is a racial stereotype. He would be by today's standards but the character in the story is an ex-slave. Sure he's going to talk funny to us. But there's a part in the story where Jupiter threatens Legrand with a thrashing and the narrator urges Jupiter not to thrash Legrand. In another part, Legrand orders Jupiter to go get the gold-bug and Jupiter flat out tells him to go get it himself which he does. Since these people think they can analyze Poe's stories to read his character, why don't they ever bring up that stuff? They're going to take some language that is politically incorrect in our day and age and apply it to the 19th century where virtually anybody is now considered a racist.

Then there's the Paulding-Drayton Review stuff that I've already gone over. I think Thomas White wrote it and gave it to Poe to rework since his name was going on it. It seems on the face to be pro-slavery and yet it never actually fully justifies slavery and the writer never comes out and says he's pro-slavery but sort of dances around it. The Southern Literary Messenger was based in Richmond and the magazine had to take into account the beliefs and morals of its readership and be careful how it stated things. It's no good for telling us what Poe's true feelings were. We need Poe's personal writings, private writings and correspondences and when you find them, they are bereft of anything about slavery or race. Poe lived a good deal of his adult life in poverty--a hand-to-mouth existence--he didn't really have the time to worry about slavery.   He was worried about where his next meal was coming from. He lost his brother and his wife/cousin to tuberculosis. He had a drinking problem. He was constantly begging his foster father, John Allan, for money and constantly bitterly feuding with the man. Poe had enough stuff to worry about.

Later in his life when he made more money and had leisure time to contemplate the universe, he wrote about astronomy and metaphysical philosophy rather than race.

Then the site talks about Poe selling a slave but we've gone over that too and that appears to be bogus. No true document has ever been produced and there is no explanation of how Maria Clemm had a slave to begin with or how Poe found the time to auction him off while trying desperately to get his poems published in book form before heading back to Richmond at the end of 1829. Poe wrote John Allan about meeting the Clemms and mentioned how poor they were. He never mentioned selling any slave for his aunt.

That's what I'm talking about. All these websites bring up the same crap over and over again but don't appear to have done any real research. They are just incestuously borrowing the same information from each other. It's kind of like the Bush administration and the Iraqi National Congress--both spent so much time making up propaganda and spreading it into every nook and cranny of the govt that when they went checking for facts they found their own propaganda and believed it.

The Pearl blog even states that had Poe lived to see the Civil War, he'd probably have supported the Confederacy. I won't even go that far. I don't know that he would have. It's just as likely that he'd be neutral. Yes he grew up in Richmond and loved Virginia but his real family--the Clemms and Poes--lived in Baltimore and Maryland, although a slave state, did not secede from the Union. I doubt Poe would have fought against his own flesh and blood. I think he probably would have declared neutrality.

In fact, Poe seems pretty neutral about everything. If he was pro-slavery he wasn't very passionate about it. He could not have been "virulently racist" or he certainly would have left behind writings to that effect like Lovecraft did. Poe left nothing of the sort behind that I have ever heard of.