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“The Passing of Grandison” debuted in Chesnutt’s The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line in 1899, but the story is set in the 1850s, before the United States Civil War and the abolition of slavery. The story’s third-person omniscient narrator assumes that readers know the history of this setting and mentions without explanation the Fugitive Slave Act. For readers in 1899, this assumption likely holds, but readers today may benefit from a review of the historical situation in which Dick’s plan to impress Charity plays out.
At the time of the story, the existing states and territories of the United States of America were divided into “Free states,” where slavery was illegal, and “Slave states,” where slavery was legal. “Border states” were Slave states that shared a border with Free states and were thus easier targets for people attempting to help enslaved people reach freedom. “The Passing of Grandison” takes place in the border state of Kentucky.
Slaveholders in Slave states took comfort in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which compelled anyone living in a Free state to return slaves who managed to flee north to their enslavers. The 1850 Act reinforced the earlier Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. Under the later Act’s restrictions, fugitives could not seek trial on their behalf or testify in a trial if they were caught. Any person who helped fugitives was subject to penalty, and parties of slave hunters could enter Free states in search of fugitives. This is the Act under which the Ohio man in the story is convicted, and its force makes Dick careful not to come under suspicion as he tries to get Grandison to escape.
From the perspective of the Southern states that supported it, the 1850 Act had unforeseen consequences. Many people in the Free states resented the Act intensely, which led to greatly increased support for abolition. It spurred some Free states to write new personal-liberty laws and to attempt to enforce them, even against the Federal Act’s stipulations. It engendered bitter feelings among Northerners who, even if they didn’t agree with the ideas and goals of abolition, didn’t want to actively harm fugitives. Generally, the Act intensified the growing sectionalism that would lead Southern states to form the Confederacy, which in turn led to the Civil War.
By the time Chesnutt published “The Passing of Grandison,” the Fugitive Slave Acts had been repealed (1864). The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which abolished slavery, had been adopted (1865), and the Fourteenth Amendment had granted equal citizenship to Black people, including those emancipated during and after the Civil War (1868). The Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed that the right to vote could not be denied because of race or previous enslavement (1870).
Much had changed between the time the story is set and the year it was published, 1899. Yet Chesnutt’s stories and essays often explore continuing issues arising from the “color line”—that is, the discriminatory attitudes that many people held based on race and skin color.
