Paroled from the Paywall
A White Nationalist Novel from 1902
Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots

4,184 words

Thomas Dixon Jr.
The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden- 1865-1900
New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1902

The most memorable book that I read in 2024 was written in 1902. In addition to being highly entertaining, I found it to be quite relevant to our cause today. This is, perhaps, rather peculiar considering that in addition to being well over a century old, The Leopard’s Spots is a work of fiction. But there is a great deal of truth in Thomas Dixon’s first novel. Dixon (1864-1946) was a committed White Nationalist who set out to spread the word to the masses, and The Leopard’s Spots is a metapolitical tour de force which gave the white man a dire warning, but also a positive vision for the future.Sadly, the warnings of the prophet have not been heeded, and Dixon’s greatest fears are being realized before our very eyes. Yet, the wisdom present in The Leopard’s Spots is there for all who care to look.

Thomas Dixon Jr. is a little-known figure nowadays. Those of you who recognize the name likely know him as the author of The Clansman, the book on which D.W. Griffith’s iconic film The Birth of a Nation is based. Dixon’s youth was spent in North Carolina under the heel of Union occupation, where the Radical Republicans in congress cynically used black freedmen to exact vengeance on the defeated South and maintain their own political supremacy. This experience imbued in Dixon a fierce racial consciousness that stayed with him for the rest of his life.

As a college student, Dixon made friends with future president Woodrow Wilson. Following brief stints as an actor, politician, and attorney, Dixon again switched careers and became a protestant minister. Before long, he developed a reputation as a gifted orator. He would leave Dixie to preach in Boston and New York, where he would prove to be quite popular. In an attempt to share the Southern perspective on Reconstruction, Dixon authored a trilogy of novels: The Leopard’s Spots, the aforementioned Clansman (1905), and The Traitor (1907). Though each of these is worthy of examination, this review concerns itself only with the first of the three.

The plot of The Leopard’s Spots centers around the life of fictional protagonist Charles Gaston. After the War Between the States, young Gaston is orphaned, is raised by race realist preacher John Durham, and eventually embarks on a political career that culminates in his election as governor of North Carolina. Gaston also falls deeply in love with Miss Sallie Worth, the wealthy daughter of a Confederate general, and must find a way to win her father’s approval. As Gaston grows older and wiser, he witnesses the effects of black suffrage on the politics of his state. Thanks in large part to the influence of Durham, he becomes convinced that racial separation is the only sensible solution to the troubles ailing America’s embattled Southland.

The Leopard’s Spots is, first and foremost, a work of political propaganda, and Dixon goes to great lengths to make sure the message (racial separation) is always present in the reader’s mind. Thus, the narrative of Gaston’s life is repeatedly interrupted with incidents involving side characters, which almost always relate in some way to the race question. Those hoping that the issue will be treated in a gentle or subtle manner will be disappointed, for Dixon is unceasingly blunt in his appraisal of blacks. Readers receive a heavy dose of political commentary in addition to Dixon’s storytelling. I would describe The Leopard’s Spots as part romance novel, part manifesto, an uncommon combination to be sure. It is highly dramatic, deeply emotional, occasionally disturbing, sometimes inspirational, and always uncompromising. Such a project could only have been brought into being by a writer of rare talent, which, luckily for us, Dixon happens to be.

The novel is divided into three sections. The first of these, titled “Legree’s Regime” chronicles Gaston’s youth and the sufferings of whites under Reconstruction. The second, “Love’s Dream” describes Gaston’s courtship of Sallie Worth along with his burgeoning political career and growing racial consciousness. Finally, we have “The Trial by Fire” where our hero must rescue the fortunes of the state’s Democratic party and overcome the objections of Sallie’s father in order to win her hand in marriage.

Legree’s Regime

The Leopard’s Spots was written in part to counter Harriett Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In that novel Stowe, a New England abolitionist who had never been to the South, portrayed white southerners as wicked abusers of black slaves. The types of atrocities depicted by Stowe did sometimes take place in the South, but Uncle Tom’s Cabin was intended to stir up maximum outrage against southerners; hence, its extreme depictions of white cruelty were not representative of a typical plantation. The same can be said of Dixon’s portrayal of Radical Republican officials during Reconstruction. Two of the villains from Uncle Tom’s Cabin make an appearance in The Leopard’s Spots; the vile slave owner Simon Legree directs the Reconstruction program in North Carolina, and slave-trader Dave Haley is one of his henchmen.

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Legree’s Reconstruction legislature loots the treasury and ruins the state’s finances. One of the schemes concocted by Legree’s men involves the issuance of bonds to finance railroads which were never constructed. Corruption of this type really did exist in North Carolina at the time. Another threat to whites in The Leopard’s Spots is the presence of Union Leagues, which were very real black militias financed with northern funds. The Reconstruction officials in Dixon’s novel are either hopelessly stupid or needlessly cruel. Ezra Perkins, a Michigan-born agent of the Freedman’s Bureau, uses his position to steal money from southern whites, and black politician Tim Shelby is consumed with lust for white women. Most of the other black legislators are nothing more than comic relief. Excessive taxation, another reality in parts of the South, results in many whites losing their homes. Such a fate befalls the Gaston family. Young Charles’ father was killed in action during the war, and his mother dies of grief when she realizes that she will not be able to keep her home. Rev. Durham is able to raise the necessary funds to pay Mrs. Gaston’s mortgage, but the letter containing the money is intentionally “lost” by Dave Haley, who has been placed in charge of the post office by Legree.

After three years of occupation, white North Carolinians take back the state government with help from the Ku Klux Klan, though the Klan does not feature as prominently in The Leopard’s Spots as it does in the other two books of Dixon’s trilogy.

Love’s Dream

The second section of the book jumps ahead several years, and Gaston is now a young lawyer and a prominent man in North Carolina’s Democratic party. While delivering an address, he notices Sallie Worth in the audience, and is instantly captivated by her beauty. Charles and Sallie begin a whirlwind romance, and all seems well until her father, General Daniel Worth, forbids him from communicating with his daughter. This in no way lessens Sallie’s infatuation with Gaston. Likewise, Charles is heartbroken, but refuses to abandon his hopes of marriage.

Allan McLeod, the unscrupulous leader of North Carolina’s Republicans, tries his best to convince Charles to switch parties. Even though he agrees with the Republican position on most issues, Gaston cannot bring himself to join the party of Reconstruction and enter into a political coalition with blacks. Doing so, in his mind, would constitute a betrayal of his race. While contemplating this decision, he recalls the warnings of Durham, who is horrified at the prospect of a “mulatto” America. The character of Durham, a charismatic southern preacher passionately opposed to integration and miscegenation, is almost certainly a stand-in for the author.

The Trial by Fire

Charles decides to confront General Worth and find out why he won’t permit Sallie to marry him. The proud old aristocrat reveals that he has been told Gaston is a drinker and a gambler, and that some of his ancestors were “poor white trash.” None of the rumors are accurate, and Gaston surmises that it is McLeod who has been spreading them. McLeod desires Sallie for himself, and wants his political rival out of the way. Another tactic employed by McLeod is to have Gaston falsely imprisoned for electoral fraud. This plan backfires when Sallie marries Gaston in prison in defiance of her father’s wishes.

McLeod, realizing the he cannot have Sallie, tries to woo Durham’s wife, Margaret. The daughter of a once-wealthy family, Margaret despairs that John’s meager salary keeps the couple in poverty. Leaving her husband for McLeod would give her back the glamorous lifestyle she so misses. Even so, she rejects the younger man’s advances. Like Sallie Worth, Margaret is nothing if not fiercely loyal.

Gaston’s fiery speech at the state Democratic convention earns him his party’s nomination for governor, as well as the approval of General Worth. He is easily elected and promises to disenfranchise black voters. Published in 1902, the novel coincides with the adoption of the “Jim Crow” system of segregation across the south. Gaston is the man who is to implement this program in North Carolina.

Dixon’s Portrayal of Blacks

As previously stated, The Leopard’s Spots argues for racial separation. Dixon did not believe that a functional multiracial society was possible or desirable. The convictions of the author are fully spelled out in Gaston’s convention speech, which begins as follows:

Whereas it is impossible to build a state inside a state of two antagonistic races,
And whereas, the future North Carolinian must therefore be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto,
Resolved, that the hour has now come in our history to eliminate the Negro from our life and reestablish for all time the government of our fathers.

By “eliminate the Negro from our life”, Gaston is referring to disenfranchisement, which would effectively remove blacks from the political life of North Carolina. He proposes setting aside state funds to educate blacks, on the grounds that it is impractical to deport them. Durham, however, tries to persuade Gaston that he is not applying his principles consistently. The preacher is adamant that blacks must be colonized outside of the United States:

Even you are still labouring under the delusions of ‘Reconstruction.’ The Ethiopian can not change his skin or the leopard his spots. Those who think it possible will always tell you that the place to work this miracle is in the South. Exactly. If a man really believes in equality, let him prove it by giving his daughter to a Negro in marriage. That is the test. When she sinks into the black abyss of a Negroid life, then ask him! Your scheme of education is humbug. You don’t believe that any amount of education can fit a Negro to marry an Anglo-Saxon, or to marry his daughter. Then don’t be a hypocrite.

At one point in the book, a white girl is abducted, violated, and killed by a black man. A band of whites gathers to lynch the culprit. A horrified Gaston tries to convince the whites not to resort to lynching, but his pleas fall on deaf ears:

Under the glare of the light and the tears the crowd seemed to melt into a giant, crawling, swaying creature, half reptile half beast, half dragon half man, with a thousand legs, and a thousand eyes, and ten thousand gleaming teeth and with no ear to hear and no heart to pity!

Gaston fears that the future will be full of racial violence, as blacks would not long tolerate abuse from white mobs:

And then he thought of the day fast coming when culture and wealth would give the African the courage of conscious strength and he would answer that soul-piercing shriek of his kindred for help, and that other thousand-legged beast, now crouching in the shadows, would meet thousand-legged beast around that beacon fire of a godless revenge.

As far as sympathy toward blacks is concerned, this is as far as Dixon goes. There aren’t any attempts to win potential black readers to the cause of separation. Perhaps this was a miscalculation on Dixon’s part, seeing as Black Nationalism flourished in the early part of the twentieth century. Fostering a spirit of cooperation between separatists of both races might have represented a more promising path toward the achievement of the author’s objective. [1]

Dixon’s portrayal of blacks in The Leopard’s Spots is uncharitable, going well beyond a frank but measured race realism. For instance, the physical features of blacks are disparaged several times throughout the novel. Additionally, the blacks depicted in the novel tend to be criminal, selfish, lazy, cruel and moronic. Yes, there are real-life blacks who fit this description, but Dixon emphasizes these traits more than is really necessary. The harshest example of criticism towards blacks comes from the mouth of Rev. Durham, who tells a black preacher that his race has “shown no power to stand alone on the solid basis of character” and then goes on to opine that:

You negroes need a racial baptism into truth, integrity, virtue, self-restraint, industry, courage, patience, and purity of manhood and womanhood. I used to be hopeful about you, but I’d just as well be frank with you, I’ve given you up. I’ve said the grace of God was sufficient for all problems. I don’t know now. I’m getting older and it grows darker to me. I have come to believe that there are some things God almighty can not do. Can God make a stone so big He can’t lift it. In either event, He is not omnipotent. It looks like he did just that thing when He made the Negro.

Dixon does include in the novel an admirable black character in the form of Nelse, a former slave of the Gaston family, who is introduced to readers as “a black hero of the old regime.” He is subservient, faithful to the Gastons, and ardently opposed to Reconstruction and the Union Leagues. Nelse becomes a pariah to his race and suffers physical abuse at the hands of other blacks. Absent from the story is any black leader who preaches independence, self-sufficiency, and self-improvement.

A Message to the North

It is abundantly clear that blacks were not part of the intended audience of The Leopard’s Spots. Who, then, was the book written for? The novel appears to have been written specifically for a Yankee audience. Of course, it could be expected to appeal to southern whites too, as it offered a defense not only of southern resistance to Reconstruction, but also the system of racial segregation that was then emerging in the states of the former Confederacy. Yet, while such a book was surely welcome in Dixie, it was not going to inform southern readers of anything they did not already know. Southerners in 1902 did not need to be told of the horrors of the postwar years, nor of the challenges posed by the emancipation and enfranchisement of the freedmen. The minds which Dixon aimed to change were those of northerners who had no experience living alongside blacks, and whose impression of the south was shaped by decades-old wartime propaganda and books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. While almost all of The Leopard’s Spots takes place below the Mason-Dixon line, it does feature several characters of Yankee origin. That Dixon was writing with a northern readership in mind is strongly suggested by what he includes, and by what he omits, when describing the Reconstruction-era south.

Dixon does not attempt to vindicate the Confederate cause and delegitimize that of the north. Instead, he depicts the soldiers on both side of the conflict as brave and noble, with each army fighting for what it believed was the correct interpretation of the Constitution. Dixon’s aim was to promote reconciliation and understanding between northern and southern whites, not refight old battles. He does not dwell on Union war crimes committed on southern soil. The Union soldiers overseeing Reconstruction are shown as kind, courteous, and genuinely sympathetic to the plight of southern civilians, with one Union officer saying this to Durham:

I wish I could do more to relieve the distress of your people. Believe me sir, the people of the North do not dream of the awful conditions of the South. They are being fooled by the politicians.

The responsibility for the abuse of the southern people is placed squarely at the feet of the Radical Republicans in Congress. Dixon states that blacks in the South were being pitted against whites by “the Carpet-bagger from the north, the native scalawag [2], and the Negro demagogue.” The “Carpet-baggers”, opportunists like Legree, Perkins, and Haley who moved south in search of profit, are clearly differentiated from the honorable Union soldier.

Abraham Lincoln also escapes any blame for the misfortunes which befell the south after the war. In Dixon’s narrative Lincoln was prepared to welcome the southern states back into the fold, and the exhausted, war-weary south was perfectly willing to accept the result of the conflict. Reconstruction as implemented by the Radicals, who Dixon likens to wolves, is painted as a betrayal of Lincoln’s wishes:

Mr. Lincoln had held these wolves at bay during his life with the power of his great personality. But the Lion was dead, and the wolf, who had snarled and snapped at him in life, put on his skin and claimed the heritage of his power. The wolf whispered his message of hate, and in the hour of partisan passion became the master of the nation.

Northern readers, therefore, can be converted to Dixon’s views on race while still taking pride in the Union cause and revering the memory of Abraham Lincoln. Dixon takes pains to assure his audience that abhorring Reconstruction and sympathizing with the white people of the south does not constitute a betrayal of the northern cause- indeed, it’s what Lincoln would have done! Asking northerners in 1902 to adopt the Confederate perspective on secession, repudiate the war, and radically revise their perception of Lincoln would have been unrealistic I suspect that there were plenty of southern readers who — with good reason– bristled at Dixon’s praise for Lincoln and his armies. However, the conciliatory tone taken toward the north was a wise decision on the part of the author. Too much “Yankee-bashing” would have been off-putting to northern readers, and could only have undermined his attempt to recruit them to the White Nationalist cause.

The one class of Yankees that Dixon shows no mercy are the true-believing egalitarians who agitated for racial equality in the south while they themselves were shielded from the consequences of their schemes. This group is represented in The Leopard’s Spots by Susan Walker, a wealthy, childless middle-aged woman from Boston who “fell just a little short of being handsome” and “whose life and fortune was devoted to the education and elevation of the negro race.” Miss Walker feels nothing but contempt for southern whites and considers their poverty and misery to be the result of divine justice. Prior to her activism on behalf of blacks, she had started a home for Boston’s stray cats, which eventually grew to host more than one thousand feline residents. This Yankee crusader evidently has far too much time on her hands. Durham diagnoses Walker as a “fanatic” and, in what may be the best line of the entire novel, tells her that:

I should like to help the cause you have at heart; and the most effective service I could render it now would be to box you up in a glass cage, such as are used for rattlesnakes, and ship you back to Boston.

Readers are also introduced to another Bostonian, congressman Everett Lowell. Mr. Lowell preaches the gospel of racial equality in his public addresses, and often brings along as a prop a young mulatto man by the name of George Harris, who happens to be the son of two characters from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Harris was educated at Harvard and is a talented poet and composer of music. While he is treated coldly by most white Bostonians, Harris takes solace in the knowledge that Lowell is sincere (or so Harris believes) in his egalitarianism. Indeed, Harris’s admiration for the congressman borders on idolatry:

Others had failed him, but this man of trained powers had never failed him. He had taught him to lift his head up and look the world squarely in the face. Lowell was, to his vivid African imagination, the ideal man made in the image of God, calm in judgement, free from all superstitions and prejudices, a citizen of the world of human thought, a prince of that vast ethical aristocracy of the free thinkers of all ages who knew no racial or conventional barriers between man and man.

But Harris’s god-like image of Lowell is irreparably shattered when the legislator forbids the young man from courting his daughter. In this respect supposed champion of equality and avowed foe of prejudice turns out to be little different than the southerners he denounces. In no uncertain terms, Lowell informs Harris that he believes whites to be a superior race, and that he finds the very idea of miscegenation to be abominable. “One drop of your blood in my family,” Lowell says to Harris, “could push it backward in history three thousand years.” After this rejection, Harris quits the government job that Lowell had secured for him. When he attempts to find other work in the city, he is refused on account of his racially mixed heritage. Following his unsuccessful search for work, he goes on a pilgrimage to all of the northern towns where blacks had been lynched. To his dismay and wonderment, he discovers that these crimes had taken place even in locales known for abolitionist and Radical Republican sympathies.

It probably did not come as a great surprise to Dixon that the revived Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s was strongest not in Mississippi or Alabama, but in the midwestern state of Indiana. Nor is it likely that he was amazed when race riots broke out in East St. Louis and Chicago after scores of blacks migrated northward to those cities. As of 1902, the land above the Mason-Dixon line was far from an egalitarian utopia, but instead was a landscape dotted with Sundown Towns, a place where blacks had, until fairly recently, been barred from voting in several northern states, and were still forbidden from marrying whites in several more. [3] Had the author lived to see the implementation of busing programs for the purpose of integrating urban public schools, he may have smiled wryly upon noting that the white residents of Boston opposed these schemes with a ferocity seldom seen even in Dixie.

Dixon did not choose to shine a light on these racial attitudes in order to shame northerners into integrating blacks into the social fabric of the north. Instead, his aim was point out that Yankee critics of segregation were willing to subject southern whites to conditions that would never be tolerated in their own home states. From northern readers he asked not for an apology, but only for the recognition that if the whites of the north were entitled to the benefits of a homogenous body politic, then so were those of the south. Dixon longed for reconciliation and the healing of past wounds, so that white Americans from every state could move forward as one untied people.

Conclusion

The Leopard’s Spots sold well, and Dixon would build on its success by publishing sixteen other novels throughout the course of his life, as well as several plays and screenplays. The dramatization of his Reconstruction narrative in The Birth of a Nation inspired the revival of the Klan. His Reconstruction novels made a lasting impression on a southern girl named Margaret Mitchell, who would write her own bestselling pro-Southern novel Gone with the Wind. [4] The 1939 film adaptation of Gone With the Wind is still one of the most commercially successful movies ever made. All this is to say that Dixon’s work had a pronounced effect on American politics and culture.

For the last four decades of his life, Thomas Dixon Jr. was an indefatigable promoter of White Nationalism. The Leopard’s Spots launched his career as an activist, and for that it is worthy of study, but even if one disregards the novel’s historical significance, it is worth reading on the basis of its literary merit alone.

Notes

[1] Dixon would go on to promote the work of the Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey in his 1939 novel The Flaming Sword

[2] “Scalawag” was a derogatory term for a native southerner who supported the Republican party during the Reconstruction era.

[3] In 1902, marriages between blacks and whites were outlawed not only in all states of the former Confederacy, but also in California, Colorado Delaware, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky Maryland, Missouri Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, and West Virginia.

[4] Andrew Leiter, “Thomas Dixon Jr.: Conflicts in History and Literature”, Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina Libraries.