Charles Fowler - Historical Romance of the American Negro

For a number of years it has been on my mind to write a book regarding the principal events that have occurred to the colored race since the beginning of the agitation against slavery, going on from thence to the great Rebellion, passing through that war, and also dealing with all subjects of great importance that have arrested our attention under our glorious freedom.

At the same time it has occurred to me, as it has to many another writer, that my book would be far more interesting to the general reader, if I were to select a representative woman of our own race, and make her the mouthpiece of all I wished to say; in other words, to introduce the whole under the pleasing form of an historical romance, so that we might keep our heroine constantly before our eyes, and make her weave in a continuous tale of love, travel, war and peace, and thus portray the lady playing her own parts on that tremendous stage of Time that has been set forth for the gaze and astonishment of the whole country during the past fifty years. I hope those members of the general public who favor me by a perusal of my book will be pleased with my plan.

"Peace hath her victories, no less renowned than war," and I have introduced into my book all the great advances that our race has made since the fall of Richmond, and, indeed, have brought things down to this year. The reader will find a number of things that are intended to introduce humor, and to brighten the darker portions of the story.

And as some fault-finding person may say that I have overdrawn my heroine, and made her far more clever than she could ever have naturally been, I venture to affirm that such a charge can by no means be just, for we have women among us, and men, too, who are as intelligent and clever as can be found among any other race on the face of the earth. I believe my book will prove the truth of this assertion in those cases, at least, where the heroines and heroes of the colored race are mentioned in its pages by name.

Beulah Jackson will therefore stand as a representative woman among our own people.

In this period of the Negro's development so much has been wielded towards influencing him in the expression of manly sentiment, that when an unhampered and heartfelt defense is made in his behalf by one of his number, it should, and I believe will, secure a universal support by the defenders.

The eagerness to devour books is so prevalent in the present decade that the Anglo-Saxon litterateurs and publishers endeavor to withhold and suppress all that tends to prove the Negro a man and an equal, patting all of their writers and molders of public opinion on the back, who are cringing and palliating with the deceitful exclamation, "Behold, thee! thou art great!" The desire to secure this cowardly approbation has, indeed, become too numerous. Learned men, with ability to withhold the sentiments of their hearts and people, have too frequently sold the golden opportunities of their lives for paltry sums and positions to these literary hawks. But few of the public speakers and writers of these times dare utter the thoughts of Douglass, Turner, Price, Garnett, and that grand galaxy of post-bellum fighters, who knew no middle ground, but stood out for all that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution had embodied in them. They had no axe to grind, and even so, their oppressed feelings wouldn't permit them have it ground at the expense of the manhood of their four million brothers.

It is high time that the Negro judge whose utterances are fitting and suitable to his case, who stands for his utterances, and which have his sanction, not to allow those hostile to your very existence select, under the guise of friendship, those sentiments put forth by aggrandizing writers and leaders distasteful to you, and brand them as your daily thoughts and hourly prayers. Respect for the sycophant cannot exist long, even among them whom he traitorously serves. A tree is judged by its fruit; so is a race judged by its representative men. If they be honest, the race is placed in the category of men; if wicked, treacherous and deceitful, their place is fixed among the distrustful.

It therefore becomes a small part for us to perform in signalizing the honest writer and leader by giving him our unanimous support. The author has spent months of effort and toil in compiling data and accounts, that Caucasian authors with alertness suppress. He has made a strong case and defense of the Negro's manhood and trustworthiness at a time when most men would have been honest with pain. The simplicity with which his data is compiled and presented to the reader stamps him neither in quest of gold or greatness, but striving to convince the ignorant that heroes and heroines can even be found among this despised race of America, whom some would brand as rapists and thieves. A tale is welded together in which every experience, occurrence and stage is passed through that can occur to a poor, struggling people; yet, no instance presents itself by which the character, the basal part of any people, can be impeached. 'Twill serve as a firer of the ambition and aspirations of the young Negro, and at the same time, so thrilling are its narratives, that 'twill prove as interesting reading matter as many a romance. The eagerness with which our youth devour such tales as relates the better side of his ancestry's life, is too well known to us. The story of Beulah Jackson will fill a long-felt niche in the young Negro's reading matter, that will in itself prove highly beneficial.

Though this is the year of grace, just forty-seven years after the date when my adventurous story begins, my recollections of that bright morning in May, 1855, when I arose and at one bound broke loose from slavery, are as vivid as the lightning's flash. "A still tongue makes a wise head," and so I held my tongue and bided my time until I made at last that successful spring. And never do I behold the glorious sun rising over the hills and forests but the joyous recollection of that Wednesday morning in May comes back to me, like the rebounding reaction of the bow that is unbent.

I was born in the State of Kentucky, a few miles below Louisville, where my father's mansion stood on one of those sloping hills that faces the river Ohio, which the French named with justice, the "Beautiful River." That mansion, with all its splendid surroundings, belonged to my father and owner, a white man named Lemuel Jackson; but my own mother, a woman of uncommon beauty, belonged to the colored race. My mother, for some cause or other, was sold down the river in New Orleans, in the year 1853, when I was but fifteen years of age. I never got over that sudden separation, and I at once formed my own resolutions, of which I said nothing.

As my father was a rich man, who indulged me in many ways and appeared to love me, and as I often had occasion to accompany him and Mrs. Jackson, or some of the other members of the family, to Louisville, he seldom refused to give me the cash I asked for, which I now began to carefully put away in a secret place only known to the Lord and myself. Two eventful years had passed away. I had by this time discovered the whereabouts of my mother, Harriet, in New Orleans, and my hopes of meeting her again grew stronger every day as the time approached for me to kick off the detested chains of slavery. For the coming of this happy deliverance I prayed to my good Lord both day and night.

At last that day dawned upon me, the spring-time of all my joys. The Lord heard my prayers, and He cleared the way to freedom. There was to be a big church gathering at Louisville, and the first session of that great time was to be on Wednesday morning – the first Wednesday in the month, as I very well remember, indeed.