The Colonel's Dream

Regenerations: African American Literature and Culture

by Charles W. Chesnutt

In this provocative novel of reconstruction and race, a Civil War veteran tries to create a new utopia in his Southern hometown after gaining enlightenment and riches in the North.

Revolutionary in both its storyline and its storytelling, The Colonel’s Dream was one of the most progressive books of its time when it was first published in 1905. Few authors of African descent created white protagonists, but Charles Chesnutt did just that, exploring the economic and social conditions of freed slaves through the eyes of Colonel French, a former Confederate officer.

Returning to his impoverished hometown after years as a successful businessman in the North, French attempts to revitalize the community and improve living conditions for a vibrant cast of characters living there, including his old servant and an ambitious young woman. Despite his hopes, French faces roadblocks at every turn, including a corrupt convict-leasing system that essentially re-enslaves many of the town’s black residents.

With a new, no-holds barred Introduction by the incomparable Ishmael Reed, The Colonel’s Dream offers a prophetic perspective on modern issues of multiculturalism and economic disparity, making it a keystone in American literature and history.

Genres: Classics, American, African American, Race, Fiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published July 17, 1905

About the author

Charles Waddell Chesnutt was an author, essayist and political activist, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity.

Reviews

[Brian Meadows · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating novel. It is written in a readable style and it keeps your interest with many plot twists and turns. My daughter loaned it to me to read as it was one of the books covered in her college Interpretation of Fiction class. It was so far ahead of its time and progressive and the author was not completely accepted when written in 1906 that its original sales was very low. It is now more widely acclaimed. THe author was a mulatto who could have well passed for a white man in his day, as he was only 1/8 African-American, but chose to identify as a Negro (accepted terminology when written). He was among the first recognized American authors of African-American descent and was a prolific writer.

The story is of Colonel French, who was raised in the south and was a Confederate officer in the Civil War. He went to New York after the war and made a fortune as a business man. When he and his partners sold the manufacturing operation, he was overworked and went back to the small town in which he was raised as he had not been back since the Civil War. He undertook to get involved, buy his home place back and do many things to help with the deplorable conditions he found during reconstruction. He also started to rebuild a mill to help the local economy and provide jobs. He found a form of "legal" slavery going on in that Negroes would be arrested for minor violations (e. g. vagrancy for just sitting around for longer than the allowed amount) and fined with a fine they could not hope to pay. Then they would be contracted out to locals who mostly used to be poor whites before the war (not the aristocrats) and would be required to "work off" their debt to pay the fine for a long time - bound as prisoners - with hard labor.

There are many other details, trials, and tragedies as the plot unfolds. I will leave it to the reader to discover how it all turns out for Colonel French.

[Karen Chung · Rating 5 out of 5]

I discovered this author and book by going through the most recent works of fiction available in audio on the Librivox site, and happened to pick this one, based on a personal interest in the workings and abuses of power and social inequalities.

I had no idea there was such an outstanding work on the postbellum period in the South - Chesnutt is not even mentioned in the "American Literature: A Complete Survey" volume on my bookshelf. I was astounded at the excellence of the writing and plot development in this book, in addition to how informative it is about conditions in the South following the Emancipation Proclamation. Chesnutt was 7/8 white, but identified as African-American, and he presents the viewpoints of both White and Black convincingly, sympathetically and insightfully. Chesnutt also succeeds well in creating reader interest and suspense. It was hard to get myself to finish the last several chapters because I knew things couldn't go well, and I indeed did end up sobbing.

The professional-quality reading, with dialect in the dialog dramatizations, by Librivox volunteer James K. White, made the work extra enjoyable - I didn't have to backtrack at all due to lack of clarity. I highly recommend both the book and the Librivox audio reading.

[William Durkee · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book. A genuine glance at the ugliness of the post-reconstruction South. The colonel discovers that some walls cannot be brought down. I recommend this book. It illustrates why Southern Society was so difficult to reform, and how deep the racism was.

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one started out as a Utopian ideal much like other progressive books of the early 20th century. The Colonel is almost unbelievably upright and honest, but likable. Going to the post-reconstruction South creates in him a desire to better the lives of the people in his hometown. He has the means and the ability to do some good there and begins with a passion. I expected the book to end on the same note, but it didn't. The ending was fairly realistic as far as how much good one person can do when a huge part of the community bands together against the changes. In the end, their fear and hate win the day and he goes back to the North. He gives up his dream of creating a better world for the entire town, but he does make life better for a few people.

[Jefferson Fortner · Rating 4 out of 5]

This 1905 novel by the black writer Charles W. Chesnutt should be more widely read. It touches on themes and aspects of Southern history that have not appeared in many works of fiction, or very much in history. More on one of those issues in a moment.

The main character of the novel is a white, ex-plantation owner, ex-Confederate colonel who, at the beginning of the novel, has been living in New York City for decades. He has made a fortune owning and operating New England factories. Having just sold his business and retired, he moves back to North Carolina where he finds that his hometown is stagnating under the benighted leadership (or economic pillaging) of the local “boss,” a former plantation overseer (scalawag / white trash) turned capitalist money lender and convict crew operator. We are not meant to like him, and these two men have a history and do not like each other. The interesting thing is that this black writer tells a tale revolving around white paternalism as the colonel sets about bringing reforms to the community. He sets about trying to improve the negro school and begins to build a factory to bring employment to the locals. In direct contrast to the non-aristocratic white villain, higher wages than the starvation wages being offered at the moment in the community are offered by the colonel. However, the poor whites do not like his attempt to improve the negro school, and now they really do not like the fact that he is offering employment to the blacks on the same terms as to the whites. Eventually, the colonel’s dream is just a dream and, when the town rises up against him, he returns to the north in defeat.

The poor treatment of the blacks along with the community’s ostracism of the white man who sympathizes with them is the main focus on this novel, along with the historical methods used to keep the blacks down. The issue that I mentioned above that takes a prominent place in this novel is the way that the laws were sharpened for all kinds of offenses, and harsh fine were placed upon offenders, especially black offenders. One of the black characters is walking home one day from a very brief day-job that he managed to get. While walking home, the sheriff comes out from behind a bush and arrests him for vagrancy. This old black man spends the night in the jail without being able to contact anyone. Early the next morning he (and several other men) are tried and found guilty. An impossibly high fine is levied. He cannot pay it, and he is immediately auctioned off as a convict laborer to a convict labor contractor (guess who pays the fine). He is sentenced to six months on a former plantation, picking cotton. I cannot think of any other work of fiction that covers this convict laborer system, but it was used throughout the South. I cannot even remember any main-line history texts that covers the system, but this is one way that former slaves were returned to forced labor. This book being read more often would lead to some awareness of this practice in our history. It would be a positive to bring this and the other practices that this books covers into an open conversation.

[Mbuye · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is engrossing, but appears to be very naive and simplistic in its approach to Reconstruction after the Civil War, the poison of white supremacy, and the feckless attitude of the blacks themselves, resigned to whatever is dished out by the white men.

Col. French, a Southern gentleman who has prospered in the North after the Civil War, returns to his hometown in North Carolina, one of the former Confederate states, after overwork brings about a collapse in his office, and the doctor advises him to take a long break in a sunny climate far away from the hectic pace of New York.

The racial divide in the South offsets all of Colonel French’s visions of revitalizing the local economy and promoting democracy, equality and social harmony. His zeal to reform his hometown is rather in the superficial than in the fundamental – buying properties for repair and redevelopment rather than in looking seriously at the underlying malaise of graft, labour chain-gangs, peonage and convict-lease. While fired with the noble desire to uplift the black man, the Colonel underestimates the conservatism of local politics, and his arrival only adds to the tensions, ending in death, grief, murder and a lynching. Is it nostalgia for the Old South, or a genuine instinct for justice that accounts for French's blindness? Why the Colonel, a hard-headed businessman, extremely shrewd, and with real staying power in a New York business deal, is so idealistic over his plans, or should so undervalue the negotiating skills of his adversaries in this small-town is hard to understand, nor does it quite explain the disillusion and even defeat that follow. The Colonel in the end pays a heavy price for his compassion without craft or guile, and sadly, so do those around him.

In despair, after the death of his little son, the Colonel returns to New York.

Buried in the social message of the novel are several subplots, including a search for buried treasure, illegal foreclosures on non-existent mortgages which have impoverished a great many formerly leading aristocratic families, and enriched what had once been looked down as poor white trash. Several romances promise happy endings, but only one actually does end happily. The idea of balls and Assemblies in the reconstructed South is again a look back at the antebellum south of romance and hard to imagine in the context in which they are held.

I listened to a magnificent reading of this on Librivox by James K. White.

[Victoria McGuigan · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you’d like to continue the fun that you most definitely did not have while reading The Marrow of Tradition, you might want to consider being victimized by Charles Chesnutt’s final novel, The Colonel’s Dream. Contrary to what the title seems to suggest, magical realism is seldom invoked and even then, the narrative, largely centered around the white, wealthy, and aristocratic Colonel French, rarely, if ever, interacts with it.

There is something so infuriating about the sort of phrasal metaplasm, drawn out of a harsh truth of the exposed American Dream, that Chesnutt repeatedly employs, not just in the title of the novel, but in the scenes that follow it, where aristocratic whiteness becomes the thermometer by which the success and prosperity of a capitalist economic system is measured.

I wonder, sometimes, if novels, like The Colonel’s Dream, are meant to reach out to folks, who may not always “buy into” a novel that harbors within it a real and tangible weight, or if these novels are meant to have us interrogate why we continually run towards what feels positive, even when the majority of our lives are spent fielding heaviness in some capacity or another.

We should be well acquainted with suffering. We should have enough space within ourselves to look suffering straight in the eye and name it. We should know enough to be able to distinguish between ourselves and its entanglements.

A book that makes you think, which, of course, is the best kind of book. Solid 10/10.

[McKinsey Crozier · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first of Chesnutt’s novels I’ve read, and while I don’t think it quite reaches the brilliance of some of his short stories, “The Colonel’s Dream” is a fascinating, beautifully written examination of the post-Reconstruction South with unflinching commentary about local corruption and convict re-enslavement. Chesnutt was an activist in the early years of the NAACP and was largely considered a moderate between the two positions of his more famous colleagues, Washington and Du Bois. Yet this novel engages explicitly with the realities of racial brutality, counteracting what some may expect given Chesnutt’s integrationist hopes for America’s future. Foreshadowing the rise of the UNIA and the tide of Black nationalism, Chesnutt wonders in “The Colonel’s Dream”: “Is there any hope for Black people in America?” and perhaps more radically, “Should we abandon the South?” I found this a compelling, though often disturbing engagement with the questions facing early Black radicals. Chesnutt really is one of American literature’s most important contributors.

[Jim Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Colonel’s Dream is a strange but fascinating novel. Written at the turn of the last century by the African-American writer Charles Chestnutt, it is an indictment of the post-reconstruction South. The novel is pessimistic about race relations and white’s inability to give up their notions of superiority. Chestnutt shows how they are determined to keep black people 2nd class citizens using peonage, lynching, voter suppression and intimidation. The last 20 pages are particularly harrowing and there is no happy ending. Yet all of these things happened (and some of them are still happening), so it is an historically important work. The novel is not without its problems (women and poor blacks are one-dimensional chess pieces, and the old white aristocracy is treated far too kindly), but Chestnutt is a good writer and keeps the reader riveted to the story.

[Michelle Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book. I enjoyed Chesnutt's reflection of a post Civil War South. But, I could not help but to notice that John Jakes and Margret Mitchell may have read this book. =0.
I would recommend the audio version. Peter won my heart.

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

The South

Chesnutt's style is outdated and his tendency for foreshadowing heavy-handed but his love for and disgust with the South is palpable. I feel the same.

[jade · Rating 3 out of 5]

this white man really thought he was going to end the tradition of racism in Southern ? please ew. nasty white savorism

[T Cruz · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5/5 ⭐️

long read, however when studying whiteness i think this book is so important. Truly a window into the white moderate MLK Jr discussed in his letter from Birmingham jail. Such a great story

[Dexter K-R · Rating 4 out of 5]

slow novel but with the authority context becomes a deeply depressing and introspective look into the heart of a man admitting defeat against racism

[Michael Thom · Rating 4 out of 5]

this made me really uncomfortable to read ... which I suppose is the point

[Cody · Rating 2 out of 5]

ehhhh if you're gonna be 1800s america book u gotta amp up the crazy factor for me to stay interested. magua kickin in the door on a whale or somesuch