SOURCE: Woodell, Harold. “Justice Denied in the Old South: Three Novels by F. Colburn Adams.” Southern Literary Journal 11, no. 1 (fall 1978): 54-63.

In the following essay, Woodell describes three unusual novels by the little-known Charleston writer F. Colburn Adams that attack Southern hypocrisy and the institution of slavery.

Francis Colburn Adams, a stage manager-novelist who lived in Charleston, South Carolina, in the decade preceding the Civil War, offers us an unusual perspective on the Old South with three works of fiction, Manuel Pereira (1853), Our World (1855), and Justice in the By-Ways (1856). This author's unflinching dissection of one of the greatest of American injustices—the institution of slavery—is valuable because he examined controversial issues as an insider, unlike the more famous Northern propagandists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote from second-hand accounts or from short visits to the South. Yet even though Adams was outspoken and productive, he attracted...