The Passing of Grandison

“The Passing of Grandison” was published in 1899, and takes place roughly 45 years earlier, in the mid-1850s, in Kentucky. The story is set several years after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, which was part of the larger Compromise of 1850, a package of five bills that attempted to cool tensions between the Northern and Southern United States. The law required that all escaped enslaved people be returned to the location they fled from and that citizens and officials in both the northern and southern United States cooperate. A previous Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1783, but many free states made it difficult for the South to repatriate escapees or simply refused to convict escapees altogether. The new law heavily fined officials who flouted the law as well as any citizen who aided or fed an escapee, and it incentivized enforcement with hefty rewards. These rewards were so tempting that officials would sometimes claim that free Black citizens were escapees to gain the reward. Escaped families like Grandison’s would find much more security in Canada, which outlawed slavery in 1834.

As of 1899, when Chesnutt published this story, racial tensions in the United States were still high, and racism was still deeply embedded in American social and legal systems. While the 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery except as a punishment for a crime in January 1865, civil rights for Black Americans were slow to come. The 14th Amendment, which granted citizenship to formerly enslaved people, was not passed until 1868. The 15th Amendment, which prohibited the use of race, color, or previous enslavement as a determination for which citizens could vote, was not passed until 1870. Even after all three post-Civil War amendments were passed, white Americans constructed new ways to disenfranchise Black voters: instating a poll tax, employing literacy tests, creating property restrictions, enacting grandfather clauses, and simply using threats and violence. Thus, even though formerly enslaved people were technically free at the time the story was published, the era in which Chesnutt wrote was heavily influenced by the legacy of slavery.