A South-Side View of Slavery, Adams, Nehemiah

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A South-Side View of Slavery, Nehemiah Adams

Published in 1854, just two years after Harriet Beecher Stowe's best-selling Uncle Tom's Cabin swept the nation, Nehemiah Adams's A South-Side View of Slavery responded to Stowe's work by offering the author's own observations of the "true" state of southern slavery. As pastor of the Essex Street Congregational Church in Boston, Adams (1806–1878) had previously—and publicly—denounced slavery; he had even helped draft a letter on behalf of New England clergymen that protested its extension into the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska occasioned by Senator Stephen Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act (Mills Lane in Adams [1854] 1974, p. viii). But when Adams's ill health prompted an extended visit to the South during the winter of 1854, his observations of slavery in Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia yielded a book-length explanation of "the correction or confirmation of [his] northern opinions and feelings" (Adams [1854] 1974, p. 2). Aiming for a less impassioned and more "objective" view of slavery, Adams imagined his work as a simple response to a friend's questions: "What am I to believe [about southern slavery]? How am I to feel and act?" (Adams [1854] 1974, p. 2).

Since the time of its publication, the book has earned a reputation as a proslavery tract, or, at the very least, as a defense of slavery. Indeed, A South-Side View avoided advocating for black emancipation on U.S. soil and did not call for an end to slavery; instead, it promoted reforms to what Adams called slavery's "revolting features" and called for the cessation of what he perceived to be northern meddling in southern affairs. Pervading the text is Adams's sense of duty to temper the shrill voices of abolition by which he believed the nation's northern citizens had been misled; accordingly, he devoted a number of early chapters to the "favorable appearances" of slavery and southern society. He even attributed blame to northern antislavery activists for many of the South's most oppressive measures, arguing that southern laws regarding slave literacy, curfews, and education merely responded defensively to northern "offensive" actions such as aiding fugitives, luring "happy" slaves away from their masters, and inciting insurrections.

Like many of his peers, Adams believed blacks to be "naturally" subordinate to whites, and he argued that the two races could not live peacefully side-by-side if the slaves were emancipated. Instead, he claimed that blacks in the United States must either remain enslaved or be converted to Christianity and subsequently colonized to Liberia, where they would act as missionaries to native Africans. Yet, Adams maintained that this decision—whether to uphold slavery or to promote large-scale colonization—should be made by southerners alone. The South, he asserted, was most qualified "to lead the whole country in plans and efforts for the African race," and thus the North should allow the South to lead the way in reforming, and perhaps eventually dismantling, slavery (Adams [1854] 1974, p. 179). He offered a number of examples of reforms contemplated by southerners, including provisions for the legal marriage of slaves, the prohibition of selling slaves to repay debts, the right of slaves to release themselves from cruel masters, and the prohibition of separating children under thirteen years of age from their parents (Adams [1854] 1974, pp. 128-129).

Antislavery activists in Adams's home parish and throughout the North attacked A South-Side View for its disparagement of abolitionist tracts and its latent proslavery arguments, bestowing on him the pejorative nickname "Southside Adams" and prompting a reprisal from Adams in The Sable Cloud: A Southern Tale with Northern Comments (1861). Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) scorned A South-Side View by name in the chapter "The Church and Slavery," where she argued that Adams and other clergymen were tricked by their slaveholding hosts into seeing only the most positive aspects of slavery (Jacobs [1861] 2000, pp. 82-83). Yet, A South-Side View went through at least four printings between 1854 and 1860, and was widely praised by southern newspapers and literati as "the fairest picture of Southern Slavery ever drawn by a Northern pen" (Adams 1860, p. 216).

Nehemiah Adams was born February 19, 1806 in Salem, Massachusetts and educated at Harvard College and Andover Theological Seminary. He married Martha Hooper in 1832, and they had seven children. After Martha's death in 1848, he married Sarah Williston (1850), with whom he had two children. Adams was a member of the American Tract Society and the American Board of Foreign Missions, and he remained pastor of the Essex Street Congregational Church until his death on October 6, 1878. He was the author of more than fifteen books, including The Life of John Eliot (1847); Agnes and the Key of Her Little Coffin (1857); Bertha and Her Baptism (1857); Catharine (1859); A Voyage Around the World (1871), which was revised in 1873 as Under the Mizzen Mast; and At Eventide (1877).