Chapter six explores adaptive resistance in Britain during the American Civil War. Black activists exploited this resistance strategy amongst a climate of growing scientific racism and pro-Confederate sympathy, two factors that were inseparable. Throughout the conflict, Black abolitionists used their testimony to revoke charges of Black inferiority and demanded Britons follow a policy of non-fellowship with slaveholders. Despite abolitionist networks which had dwindled at the start of the war, activists such as William Craft, Sella Martin and William Andrew Jackson lectured on both an abolitionist and non-abolitionist stage with a greater sense of urgency, convinced that the conflict’s outcome would mean either the consolidation or the removal of slavery. Craft and Martin in particular used dissonant language to target scientific racists such as Dr. James Hunt, who lectured and published work on Black inferiority. Hunt avidly supported the South and his friendship with Confederate propagandist Henry Hotze represented the synonymy of a cause that promoted slavery and racism, and as much as possible, Black activists used dissonant language to challenge such theories.

Robert Penn Warren produced in the early 1950s a classic portrait of New Orleans during the 1860s, particularly during its occupation by Union troops. The novel is subtly preoccupied by the events of its own time, as Warren addressed them explicitly in other texts composed while this novel was in process. The novel engages the long-established tradition of the tragic mulatress through a main character who had grown up in Kentucky with the assumption that she was white but discovered, upon her father’s death, that she is black and will be sold at auction in New Orleans; the novel then follows her experiences through the Federal occupation of the city and into Reconstruction and The Gilded Age, each step of the way conjuring in vivid detail its historical setting and the complex persistence of racism even in those who wouldpresume to fight hard against it.

Faulkner’s tragic masterpiece is, in essence, a novel of encounter, one in which different, even irreconcilable worlds collide most explicitly through their opposed understanding of race. New Orleans, in this novel, represents the radically cosmopolitan, a loose and ever-changing mix of Spain and France, Virginia and Kentucky, Haiti and Cuba, as well as many ethnicities and nationalities of Africa. In contrast, the world of Mississippi is organized according to the brutal simplicity of only two kinds of people: white masters and black slaves. Out of this conflict between New Orleans and Mississippi, Faulkner showcases the potential of New Orleans to lead the United States toward a progressive racial politics.