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Colonel Owens is a static character who functions as a representative voice of enslavers in the pre-Civil War South. He worked hard to acquire land and slaves, and although he is now wealthy, he carries the memory of the “comparative poverty” in which he grew up. By comparison, his own son is “wealthy and well-born.” The colonel indulges his son and sees Dick’s indolence as a birthright, evidence of the colonel’s successful rise.
The people the colonel has “toiled and schemed” to enslave are “sacred” to him as the “outward and visible sign of his wealth and station.” But the colonel considers himself a likable and kind man, so he needs to believe that the slaves on his plantation are happy and grateful to be there. By extension, he assumes all slaves everywhere must be similarly full of gratitude, as long as they don’t suffer under a “hard master.”
Sending Grandison with Dick is a kind of test of the colonel’s worldview. If Grandison stays faithful, his return will validate the colonel’s belief about the right relationship, as he sees it, between wealthy white men and enslaved Black people. When, at first, Grandison does not return, the colonel is hurt by his apparent disloyalty but then shifts the blame to abolitionists. When Grandison shows up with his wild story about being kidnapped, the colonel is overjoyed to have his worldview reaffirmed.
Not until the colonel pursues, and fails to apprehend, Grandison and his family does he seriously question whether slaves are, in fact, “contented and happy” workers who appreciate the men who enslave them. In the face of the unpleasant truth, the colonel can only shake an “impotent” fist as the steamboat carries Grandison and his family—or, as the colonel thinks of them, “his vanishing property”—to Canada and freedom.
