Frederick Douglass would have been known by some other name had Walter Scott not been so widely read in the United States. The Waverley novels were among the first bestsellers in North America, and almost single-handedly transformed the book publishing and distribution business there. We have seen how his choice of ‘Douglass’ allowed him to exploit the aspirations and values associated with his mediaeval Scottish namesakes. But that he chose a name immortalised by Scott and not some other author endows that choice with an additional significance which derives from the particular distribution of Scott's popularity. ‘While the rest of America read Scott with enthusiasm,’ writes one historian, ‘the South assimilated his works into its very being.’ If it is true that ‘the South’ – in other words, the members of slaveholding families who bought or borrowed his poetry and novels – especially prized Walter Scott, then what does that say about a fugitive slave's willingness to follow suit?

The contours of Scott's appeal are open to dispute. Another scholar replied, ‘There is no hard evidence that Scott was read in Charleston or New Orleans with any significantly greater enthusiasm than in Boston or New York.’ But the idea that his popularity took a different form – or that his writing was popular for different reasons – in the South, has exercised several generations of critics. Certainly, the nature of Scott's specific influence in the slave states has long been a subject of some controversy, since Mark Twain – in Life on the Mississippi (1883) – railed against ‘the debilitating influence of his books’. According to Twain, the author of mediaeval romances single-handedly set

And he famously concluded that