The Uncle Remus stories create a racial utopia in which black and white love one another and share a childhood, just as Harris thought he had done at Turnwold. Uncle Remus’s cabin constitutes one of the most secure and serene environments in American literature. In the half-light of evening, in the flickering shadows of the fire, black man and white boy enjoy an intense and loving bond. Time stands still while animals walk the earth like natural men. Parental authority has retired to the big house, and the confusing world of racial caste disappears at the slave cabin’s door. Two human beings share an atmosphere of mutual care and respect, a frozen moment of innocent childhood purity.

That only one of the participants is actually a child goes unnoticed; that it is an unnatural environment is beside the point; that it never really existed historically is forgotten; Uncle Remus’s antecedents in both the dialectology of the American minstrel show and the antebellum myth of the contented slave fall by the wayside. For a brief moment, history is suspended in the fire-lights flickering glow.

Yet only for a moment. Uncle Remus as a phenomenon of American cultural history quickly reappears, even before the child leaves for his bed in the big house. Harris is the captive of a plantation tradition that includes, in Brown’s words, the courtly planter, the one hundred percent Southern belle, the dueling cavalier, and the bighearted mammy. In a strange way, Uncle Remus in the quarters was intended to serve as a signpost on America’s “road to reunion,” a uniting symbol for South and North.

An editorial writer for the Atlanta Constitution, Harris joined the paper’s chief editor, Henry W. Grady, one of the region’s most dynamic leaders, to manipulate public sentiment toward the goal of reuniting the country — Northern capital joining Southern labor in a new industrialism. As Grady put it in his famous essay entitled “The New South”: “The Old South rested everything on slavery and agriculture. . . . The new South presents . . . a diversified industry that meets the complex needs of a complex age.” Grady’s ultimate purpose, as expressed by Harris, was “to draw the two sections together in closer bonds of union, fraternity, harmony and goodwill.”

Uncle Remus became a historical instrument promoting closer bonds of sectional harmony, representing an image of black people around which Northern and Southern whites could unite. Harris borrowed Uncle Tom’s faithfulness but did away with his harsh masters, took the minstrel’s grin but added a loving demeanor, affixed to them his hazy, romantic memories of life at Turnwold, and created a figure who could contribute to the country’s reunification. Uncle Remus reassured Southern whites about their darkest fears: free black people would love, not demand retribution. At the same time he assured Northern whites that abandoning black people was not a failure of moral responsibility. Uncle Remus, immensely popular, witnessed that black people would turn the other cheek, would continue to love, despite all the broken promises of American history.

Invented as Federal troops withdrew from the South, Uncle Remus was the perfect figure to allay Northern uneasiness about the abandonment of the Negro. Uncle Remus promised the North that Southerners could see the Negro’s virtues and could even celebrate them, which was proof that rehabilitation had occurred and that force was no longer necessary to ensure that black people would be treated with justice by their former masters. In an editorial written in the same year that Uncle Remus was published, Harris claimed that the South had made “a disastrous and demoralizing mistake” after the war by “refusing to take their old slaves into their care and confidence.” The solution, so obvious that it hurt, was, “We had only to hold out our hands to these poor, unfortunate people to renew the confidence and affection that had always existed between the white and colored races in the South.”

For moderate Southerners of Harris’s stripe, slavery now seemed a blot on the civilization that had produced Washington and Jefferson. There was a reluctant admission that slavery was wrong, even though the means of ending it had seemed an outrage. Harris himself believed that the South would have abolished slavery, in all deliberate speed, without the Civil War. By referring to the romantic tradition of the plantation, a warm, mythic memory that had existed in the South since the proslavery fiction of John Pendleton Kennedy in the 1830s, Harris reinforced a historical theory of slavery that began with the premise, widespread in his generation, that the human relationships of the peculiar institution had been close and mutually supporting. There is relatively little truth to this assertion, especially from black people’s point of view, but it was a premise that could be manipulated to enlist support for the cause of the New South. Since slavery had receded into the past, and Reconstruction had brought such violence, blacks and whites were losing sight of the virtues of those former days.