The Leopard’s Spots

The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden is the 1902 first novel by Thomas Dixon Jr. (1864-1946), the opening book of his Reconstruction trilogy. Dixon, a former Baptist minister and lecturer, wrote the novel as an angry answer to a stage production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and it presents Reconstruction-era North Carolina through a white-supremacist lens that made the book a national best-seller in the South and a scandal among Black writers and Northern critics. Sutton Griggs and other Black novelists wrote direct fictional rebuttals. The novel launched the literary career that led to The Clansman and The Birth of a Nation. It is read today as a primary source for the Lost Cause mythology and the racial politics of the Jim Crow era. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.