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Persistence and patience bring rewards.
In “The Passing of Grandison,” Dick and Grandison each want something. Dick wants to impress Charity so that she will marry him. He’s so accustomed to being given whatever he wants that he doesn’t even come up with his own idea, instead mimicking the case of the Ohio abolitionist. But when Dick finds out that it won’t be easy to tempt Grandison to freedom, he doesn’t quit. The judge who teaches him law predicts that if necessity ever compels Dick, he’ll be hard to stop, and this proves to be the case.
When Grandison refuses to leave his service in New York City, Dick comes up with a new plan to have abolitionists approach Grandison in Boston, and he gives Grandison a large amount of money to enjoy his “liberty” while in the city. When that fails, Dick plays tourist at Niagara Falls and conveniently visits the Canadian side, where no one can stop Grandison from leaving. And when, even there, Grandison professes a desire to return to Kentucky, Dick abandons the sleeping man, saying that if he can’t figure out a way to get rid of Grandison, he deserves neither his American citizenship nor Charity’s love. Because he doesn’t give up and is willing to risk his father’s anger, Dick gets what he wants.
Grandison also gets what he wants. All along he has been patiently—not stubbornly, as Dick assumes—refusing opportunities to flee so he might lay the groundwork for a more ambitious plan: securing the freedom of his entire family. To achieve this goal, Grandison must suffer indignities, play the fool, endure separation from those he loves, and make the risky trip from Canada to Kentucky. His quiet persistence pays off when he returns to Canada with his family.
Pride can blind people to the facts at hand.
The wealthy characters in “The Passing of Grandison” have such an inflated estimation of their personal and social value that their pride and entitlement distort their understanding of reality. The need to protect this prideful view of themselves as masters of their world causes them to twist facts to suit their worldview, and they maintain this effort till facts finally cannot be denied.
For Charity, this blindness allows her to romanticize the imprisonment and death of the Ohio abolitionist and to challenge Dick to do something worthwhile. The idea of cruelty, at least in the abstract, stirs Charity’s “Quaker blood.” Quakers were not allowed to enslave people, and many Quakers contributed significantly to the campaign to end slavery. Yet however proud Charity seems to be of her Quaker heritage, she also contradicts that heritage when she asserts that abolitionist activism is “outrageous.” Thus, when she professes her horror at the actions of the “hard master,” she does so mainly to cultivate a sense of superiority. This stokes feelings of pride that blinds her to the fact that everything in her life depends on the enslavement of Black people.
The colonel’s prideful blindness is well developed in the story. He needs so much to think of himself as a gracious and paternal “master” that Grandison is able to flatter him with words of “appreciative homage” while quietly planning his family’s escape. The colonel’s hatred of “rascally” abolitionists’ desire to disrupt what he considers the “blissful relationship” of enslaver and enslaved sets him up to believe Grandison’s wild tale as “gospel truth.” It’s only when the facts of the escaped family become undeniable that the colonel “impotently” faces them. Even then, he continues to believe in the “fidelity” of the other people he enslaves.
Only Dick lets his self-important understanding of the world crack enough to admit a misconception. While in Boston, he fumes over Grandison’s stubborn unwillingness to embrace freedom. However, after Grandison returns to Kentucky and then disappears again, Dick entertains a “more likely explanation” for his behavior: that he used his time in the North to plan his family’s escape.
Financial security can be mistaken for personal worth.
One belief that animates Colonel Owens, Dick, and Charity is that financial success is roughly synonymous with personal worth, value, or significance. The self-satisfied colonel, for example, thinks himself a good man and kind “master” because he “toiled and schemed” to climb the ladder to wealth. He earned his place among those who matter and who wield power in his world. And because his son, Dick, was born into wealth, he esteems his son even more. Dick has internalized this notion that inheriting wealth somehow makes him a better, worthier man than he’d be had he earned it himself. Finally, though Charity teases Dick for being a smart but lazy man, she ultimately accepts him because his wealth situates him within her social and economic class.
The conflation of wealth and worth results in an illogical argument, according to which wealthy whites are seen as inherent masters and poor Blacks are seen as inherent slaves. This logic explains the essentially “feudal” nature of the colonel’s worldview. He believes that he has the right to own slaves, whose only value is their monetary value as his property, not people in their own right. As a result, he despises the “heartless” abolitionists who attempt to disrupt what he considers a “blissful relationship” between a wealthy white man and his Black slaves. In the context of this mindset, Black people in the slave-holding South are denied their inherent value as humans.
