He confided to his journal that he felt called to a literary occupation, and he described the goal of his prospective career in clear terms: “The object of my writing would not be so much the elevation of the colored people as the elevation of the whites-for I consider the unjust spirit of caste which is so insidious as to pervade a whole nation, and so powerful as to subject a whole race and all connected with it to scorn and social ostracism-I consider this a barrier to the moral progress of the American people: and I would be one of the first to head a determined, organized crusade against it” ( The Journals of Charles W. Throughout his early years as a student, a teacher, and a young lawyer, Chesnutt harbored a passion for literature, and his keenest ambition was to write fiction.
In 1878 he married Susan Perry, a Fayetteville schoolteacher, and five years later the couple relocated to Cleveland, where Chesnutt completed his law degree and opened a lucrative court stenography business. He flourished as a student at the Freedmen’s Bureau school in Fayetteville and then at the State Colored Normal School, of which he became the principal at the age of twenty-two.
In 1866, immediately after the Civil War, the family moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where Chesnutt spent most of his youth in the charged atmosphere of Reconstruction. Charles Waddell Chesnutt, a prominent author, lawyer, and civil-rights activist, was born 20 June 1858 in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of middle-class parents of mixed-race ancestry.
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