ABSTRACT
'The Grateful Negro’, written as a didactic tale, proceeds as many conservative abolitionist narratives do, expounding plantocratic paternalism and reciprocal gratitude by slaves as the preferred solution within a historical context of massive slave insurrections in the West Indies. In the manner of Thomas Day’s interpolated tales in Sandford and Merton, the story prefers cardboard versions of virtue and vice, contrasting the generous planter, Edwards with the tyrannical one, Jefferies; the grateful slaves, Caesar and Clara, with the rebellious ones, Hector and Esther. Poetic justice means that one slave’s gratitude and his master’s paternalism are rewarded even as another master’s extreme cruelty, and violent insurrection by his rebellious slaves, are correspondingly punished.
