page_title: Matilda Charlotte Houstoun
section_title: Slavery and Racism
hierarchical_section_title: Matilda Charlotte Houstoun / Slavery and Racism
caption_attribution_description: English: A New Orleans 'black dandy' character from Mrs. Houstouns Yachting in the New World 1844.
context_page_description: Matilda Charlotte Houstoun was a British travel writer, novelist, biographer, and women's right activist. She is best known for her series of travel writings, particularly Texas and the Gulf of Mexico and Hesperos, and their observations about African-American life during the times of the Confederate Deep South. Later on, she turned her pen from novels to social reform, particularly on the rights of working class women and single mothers. During her lifetime, her best known work was Recommended to Mercy, a female-driven "yellow-back" novel published in 1862.
context_section_description: To the residents of the British Isles, slavery was considered abolished in the British Empire in 1772,  but was not illegal until the parliamentary action of 1840, which was a long process notably involving the work of William Wilberforce (whose work she was acquainted with) and the James Somerset Case in 1772. 
  Abolitionist works (see Clapham sect or Anti-Slavery society) and published authors like Ukawsaw Gronniosaw in his 1772 work A Narrative of the Most remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, Olaudah Equiano in his 1789 work The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley in her 1773 work Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Mary Prince in her 1831 work The History of Mary Prince, and in the work of the Sons of Africa (widespread literature publications in London society at the time, each often going through mutiple reprints) shaped how in 19th century Britain's societal views on the practice of slavery. Expansion of this was seen as a moral Christian duty to 'brothers' in need at the time and certainly appears to have been the mindset upon which Houstoun went to the United States with by her aunt Mrs.Townsend.    
    
  "There is scarcely any spectacle more affecting in idea than that of a human being being made a matter of barter. I went to America strongly prejudiced against this unnatural traffic, and prepared to view every instance of it with horror,  and every slave with compassion and sympathy.” Yachting in the New World"
  Particularly surrounding the culture of the 'black population' in New Orleans, she at first believed them to be something akin to passive agents, but over her 1844 work comes to form a more intersectional view of the New Orleanians in the period, regarding them as active agents in their own affairs.  
   "During our drives through the streets especially on Sundays, the display of Negro finery, and taste was very remarkable.  … No one pays higher for his outfit than the negro in the Slave States. He gives his money too, so carelessly, and with such an independent air. I have heard of their giving eight dollars for a suit of clothes, and their industry, and efforts to procure money, are highly praiseworthy. They are in the habit of giving their masters a certain sum of money, (generally I believe about two dollars a day) in lieu of their services. Their time then, is their own, and they are at liberty to make as much more out of it as they can. … though still regarding the slave trade generally in the same light,  I began to think that the slaves were not quite so to be pitied as I had imagined.”
  In ‘’Hesperos’’, Houstoun’s 1850 publication, she touches on a number of topics including Christianity amongst African-Americans, the ‘settlements of Liberia’ (which she describes as ‘the wilderness’),  the population figures in the Americas comparing ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’, the effects of slavery on wealth distribution on the upper classes amongst the northern states, ‘black … labour’ in the ‘West Indies’, redistribution of global slave routes, education among the southern African-American population and England’s role in the cotton trade, abolition and ‘prevention of the slave trade’.  
  All of this is measured by her own "social scale," which is evocative of the later The White Man's Burden race-based ideology. Her own intersectionality displays how she thought of the "blacks" as a group to be "pitied" and, particularly Africans who without "the light of civilization" and the "[Americans'] exertion throughout the means of missionaries to propagate the gospel and civilise the nations on the African coast ... [and] a perpetual stream of industrious and intelligent men [who] will be pouring in from the United States" would "retrograde":   
  “May we not, with these facts before us, come to the conclusion that the bondage of the black race in America is a medium [for the Christian god] through which it is probable that the heathen portion of benighted Africa may in time be civilized.”
caption: New Orleans Black Dandy from Texas and the Gulf of Mexico 1844
exif: {}