While the story does not
take enslaved persons as its subject, it seems to me to be a mistake to suggest that Bierce
ignores the existence of these individuals. Early in the second part of the story, the narrator
says of the , Peyton Farquhar, "Being a slave owner and like other slave owners a
politician, he was naturally an original secessionist and ardently devoted to the Southern
cause." Thus, Bierce acknowledges the existence of human beings in bondage in Alabama at
this time, but his purposein this texthas little to do with them or their stories. Rather, he
seems to be attempting to humanize Farquhar himself, something which could be viewed as
problematic given Farquhar's position as a well-to-do owner of a plantation and one who keeps
others enslaved.
After the Civil War, many would and still do demonize
Confederates and people who believed, as Farquhar evidently does, that slavery was right and
good. Bierce, it seems, is challenging the notion that individuals like this were monsters, as
the narrator describes Farquhar's "kindly expression" and how he "closed his eyes
in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife and children." Bierce works hard to get the
reader to see Farquhar as a human being rather than a person who enslaves others (though he is
both) so that we begin to sympathize with him and are all the more shocked by the story's abrupt
ending. The point of the story, so to speak, is not the evils of slavery but, rather, the evils
of war and how easily we tend to demonize others without thinking of them as individuals with
families and feelings.
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