SOURCE: Logan, Deborah. “Harriet Martineau and the Martyr Age of the United States.” Symbiosis 5, no. 1 (April 2001): 33-49.

In the following essay, Logan considers Martineau's tour of the United States and the inspiration it provided for a body of work about repression and slavery.

The accident of my arriving in America in the dawning hour of the great conflict accounts for the strange story I have had to tell about myself.¹

(AB 2:61)

She was born to be a destroyer of slavery, in whatever form, in whatever place, all over the world, wherever she saw or thought she saw it.²

As one of the most prolific writers of the nineteenth-century, Harriet Martineau observed with characteristic candor that there was a great deal to be said, and that she was more or less the person to say it. Included among her many literary and political interests is her lifelong fascination with...