"Truth is" stronger "than fiction" — Epigraph

The North and the South

  According to an article in the 21 January 1853 Charleston Mercury, Caroline Rush was "a widow in destitute circumstances" who wrote to earn money for "the support and education of her fatherless children." "Uniting the offices of publisher and bookseller in her own person," the article continued, she was in Charleston to secure subscribers for this book, her fourth.
  According to her own words in the book, Rush was a Philadelphian who "spent three winters in the South." Her goal in the novel is to convince her Northern readers that the sympathy they lavish on Uncle Tom and Stowe's other slave characters should be saved for the (white) victims of urban poverty in the North. To this end, she tells the story of Frank and Gazella Harley and their nine children, a prosperous and happy family until drink and bad investments lead to Frank's bankruptcy and death. Abuse, starvation, illness and many more deaths follow when Gazella is forced to try supporting her children as a seamstress. The only children who succeed are the two who move south to live on a Mississippi plantation. Rush attacks Stowe and her "fiction" directly throughout her account of what she calls "the Slavery that exists in the North."
The North and the South; or, Slavery and Its Contrasts
By Caroline E. Rush
(Philadelphia: Crissy & Markley, 1852)

Digital text prepared with the help of the
Wright American Fiction Project, Indiana University Library.
Frontispiece
Frontispiece


  • PREFACE.
  • CHAPTER I.   INTRODUCTION.
  • CHAPTER II.   THE MARRIAGE.
  • CHAPTER IX.   LOVE IN ADVERSITY
  • CHAPTER XI.   LILY SHOWS A REBELLIOUS SPIRIT.
  • CHAPTER XVII.   MRS. DUNLAP TAKES IDA SOUTH.
  • CHAPTER XXIII.   IDA IN HER SOUTHERN HOME.


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