This study of slave manhood in the rural North begins with an analysis of William Allinson's and Andrew Mellick's racialized accounts of our three male protagonists. The purpose here is to situate their respective works, the Memoir of Quamino Buccau (1851) and The Story of an Old Farm (1889), within broader ideological and literary contexts, that is, within the larger Western (white) mind of the mid to late nineteenth century. Once contextualized, the works will comprise part of the greater hegemonic discourse on black peoples.

Indeed, Allinson and Mellick represent white authors in the nineteenth century, the majority of whom were male, and who constituted the conduits of power through which “Negro” slaves and other “subaltern” subjects appear in the historical record. Although Allinson's romantic racialist tract and Mellick's paternalistic account of his ancestors’ slaves are very different in terms of their politics, in the end they both dehumanize their black personages by failing to portray them as real or complex individuals having multiple dimensions. Specifically, Allinson depicts his protagonist, Quamino Buccau (Smock), as a good (righteous) slave turned safe and redemptive free black because of his remarkable religious devotion, whereas Mellick portrays Yombo Melick as the troublesome slave, and Dick Melick as the likeable slave, on his benevolent great grandfather's farm-stead. The authors, in other words, characterize Yombo, Dick, and Quamino not as real historical actors but as static and exotic objects largely acted upon by whites, including the authors themselves. In doing so, they reveal how their conceptions of manhood were forged partly through the oppressed condition of black peoples.

In no way is this chapter an effort simply to indict the white male authors’ skewed portrayals of the three bondmen, which would serve as a senseless and unproductive exercise. The overall success of this study is largely dependent upon the Memoir of Quamino Buccau and The Story of an Old Farm yielding critical insight regarding the lives and self-concepts of rural Northern slaves, which they both do rather brilliantly. Yet this does not protect them from scholarly criticism. Only by thoroughly scrutinizing these two important works can we understand fully their potential in terms of historical analysis.