The Marrow of Tradition

The Marrow of Tradition (1901), was based on the 1898 race riot in Wilmington, North Carolina and depicts the problems afflicting the New South, offering an invective that criticizes the nation's panicked responses to issues of social equality and miscegenation. Set in the fictional town of Wellington, The Marrow ofTradition centers on two prominent families, the Carterets and the Millers, and explores their remarkably intersected lives. Major Philip Carteret, editor of The Morning Chronicle newspaper, emerges as the unabashed white supremacist who, along with General Belmont and Captain George McBane, seeks to overthrow "Negro domination," setting in motion those events that culminate in the murderous "revolution." Dr. William Miller, following his medical education in the North and abroad, has returned home to "his people," establishing a local black hospital in Wellington. Dr. Miller's wife, Janet, is the racially mixed half-sister of Major Carteret's wife, Olivia. Not surprisingly, Olivia Merkell Carteret struggles to suppress the truth of her father's scandalous second marriage to Julia Brown, his black servant and Janet Miller's mother.