Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition and the Conspiracy Genre

Alex Beringer

This paper looks to Charles Chesnutt’s novel, The Marrow of Tradition as an example of that author’s participation in a “conspiracy genre” in the late nineteenth century. The Marrow of Tradition, recounts the true story of a successful white supremacist plot to carry out a coup d’état in Wilmington, North Carolina. Chesnutt’s behind-the-scenes account of the riot offers a glimpse at a web of sinister allegiances and influences, underpinning white supremacist politics in the 1890s. My goals in describing Chesnutt in this manner are twofold:

1.) Through my discussions of Chesnutt’s work, I outline the dimensions of a broader conspiracy genre in Gilded Age literature. The Marrow of Tradition was among a slew of late nineteenth century American texts that turned to conspiracy narratives for both political and artistic ends. By imagining the presence of vast conspiracies and secret plots, Chesnutt and his contemporaries offered explanation for a variety of mystifying events, ranging from financial panics to widespread urban crime. But in looking to conspiracy, Gilded Age writers also indulged in a sensationalist aesthetic. Much like Dan Brown’s contemporary conspiracy novel The Da Vinci Code or Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, conspiracy fiction in this period was as much about creating an experience that would entice and shock as it was about addressing any particular mystery.

2.) I describe how Chesnutt’s participation in the conspiracy genre provided him with a resource for his specific interventions in Southern politics and culture. Marrow of Tradition situates events at Wilmington as the latest episode in a longer, systematic chain of events dating back to the Civil War. In doing so, it provides a much-needed alternative to the vaunted “revision” of Southern history by turn-of-the-century writers who reinterpreted late nineteenth century as a history of the slave-holding aristocracy victimized by Northern politicians’ and African Americans’ vengeful designs. With his intimations of a secret design behind Southern politics, Chesnutt reimagines postbellum history not as a settled matter, but as an object of suspicion. Parallel to other works in the conspiracy genre, Chesnutt’s novel straddles the line between journalistic exposé, literary art, and populist folklore.

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