Harriet Martineau's Black Hero and the American Antislavery Movement

Echoes of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution in Melville's "Benito Cereno"

“…18 But the more specific link is the connection between Toussaint Louverture and Babo. Harriet Martineau's novel The Hour and the Man, described as "an important and influential source of information" about Toussaint for Northern readers in the antebellum period, 19 is the only work on Toussaint that Melville is known to have possessed, and is arguably an important source for "Benito Cereno." Charlene Avallone is surely right in pointing out that Martineau "pioneered a tradition of historical romance that addresses the matter of slave revolt," that Melville was one of several who wrote within that tradition, and that like Martineau he "puts fictional and historical modes of discourse in dialogue through juxtaposing documents and imagined story."…”