Charles W. Chesnutt’s Moral Alternative to War in The Marrow of Tradition Available to Purchase

This essay argues that, in fictionalizing the 1898 Wilmington coup d’état, Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) constitutes the preeminent African American antiwar novel of the early twentieth century. It demonstrates how in the months leading up to the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot, conservative white North Carolinians recast racial equality as Black tyranny and then invoked the Declaration of Independence to portray their ensuing extralegal overthrow of elected authority as the newest iteration in a decades-long revolutionary battle against unconstitutional racial oppression. Finally, it argues that Marrow evokes, and then rejects as suicidal, the revolutionary martial traditions surrounding the coup and calls for Black retaliation, before offering a nonviolent alternative, associated with the female characters in the novel, to the martial consolidation of white political power during early Jim Crow.