I thought this was "The Adventure of A Lazy Son." I was wrong

The Passing of Grandison is a mockery of slavery and the inherent contradiction that the inhuman institution entails. The colonel represents the general viewpoints of a slaveowner and Grandison, through his actions, speaks the true intention of a man who is stripped of his liberty. One cannot escape to ponder on the tragicomedy of the interaction of two men whose souls never seemed to have shared the same universe.

The colonel, Dick’s father, is a self-made aristocratic landowner who fervently believes in his own virtue and benevolence in his feudalistic universe. Any of the anti-slavery argument hardly makes any sense to him: “[w]hat cold-blooded, heartless monsters they were who would break up this blissful relationship of kindly protection on the one hand, of wise subordination and loyal dependence on the other!” His black-and-white mentality does not hesitate to paint himself as the supreme goodness and demonize all opposing opinions, namely Northern abolitionists. His quasi absolute confidence in his judgment leads him to trust Grandison whose docile and loyal manner is deemed appropriate to accompany the trip of his son. It is curious to point out that the colonel’s trust in his chosen slave, however strong and unshakable it seems to be, is inevitably faith-based—consciously or not, the colonel suffers from deep anxiety. When his son comes back empty-handed, the colonel shuts himself in denial, unable to accept that his slave ran away: “[y]et, after all, he did not blame Grandison so much as he did the abolitionists, who were undoubtedly at the bottom of it.” Nothing hurts him more than admitting his own error and fallibility; thus when Grandison comes back, he is elated to find his faith redeemed, his self-confidence restored. His happiness, however, clearly is overblown and soon reveals to be delusory when he finally confronts the extremely unpleasant reality of having being completely fooled by the elaborate scheme of his unrealistically loyal slave Grandison.

Grandison, the hidden antihero of the story, is by far the biggest winner of all. The readers are led to believe his astonishing loyalty to the Southern homeland throughout the story. The reversal at the end is very striking and creates an entirely different meaning of his actions. The author intentionally covers the true motivation of Grandison until the very end, in so doing holding the interpretation of his actions largely through the eyes of his master and therefore strongly in favor of slavery. If Grandison himself is willing to come back to his master like a stray dog journeying back home, perhaps there are some aspects of slavery tolerable to the enslaved? That was the question I had to ask to myself, but Chestnut made his point rather clear in the last few pages of the story. Grandison is a shrewd, astute antihero who can calculate and act on his self-interest. He pulls off his masquerade as a docile slave and wins confidence of his master, defies the foolish scheme of young Dick and accomplishes a heroic solo journey back to South, orchestrates the full-scale escapade of his family and becomes together with his love—a perfect ending that should read “happily ever after.” His terrific determination and action marks the complete opposite of his young master Dick who marries his love by inspiring pity in his bride, not awe. Grandison is derisive of his master and his inability to grasp the reality. It becomes apparent that the skewed worldview and the “nobility” of his master entirely rest on the institutionalized oppression of slavery and come to an inevitable, tragicomic ending: “[t]he colonel saw Grandison point him out to one of the crew of the vessel, who waved his hand derisively toward the colonel.” It is the moment of truth when Grandison’s masquerade is finally over and the two men, for the first time, have faced off each other as individuals with irreconcilably separate value-systems.