America Aflame Page 11
Harriet believed that even the most mundane household chores were worthy of a woman’s attention. The domestic sphere, rather than being a confinement for women, held liberating possibilities: “even the small, frittering cares of women’s life—the attention to buttons, trimmings, thread and sewing-silk—may be an expression of their patriotism and their religion.” She complained about modern middle-class city women who hired “operators [to] stretch and exercise their inactive muscles,” and extolled the women of bygone days who had “knowledge of all sorts of medicines, gargles, and alleviates … [and] perfect familiarity with every canon and law of good nursing.… To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.”25
Harriet did not attend the historic meeting of women activists at Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848; nor did she comment on its outcome. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a leading organizer of the event, believed, contrary to Harriet and Catharine, that a woman’s place in the home reflected her subordinate position in society and confined her to domestic duties that served “to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.” Stanton, like Frederick Douglass, appealed to the nation’s origins, especially to the Declaration of Independence, which became the template for her “Declaration of Sentiments” presented at the Seneca Falls meeting. Frederick Douglass was one of the few males in attendance, and Stanton drew a direct parallel between women’s dependence and that of the slave, a position neither Harriet nor her sister Catharine supported.26
Anti-slavery remained Harriet’s great interest. By 1850, she had not yet embraced politics as a means to attack the institution. She believed in the power of moral persuasion, of using evangelical Christianity to open minds and touch hearts. She believed in her literary gifts. She wanted to write again, to salve her grief and, not incidentally, to add to Calvin’s meager professorial income. Writing was one of the few acceptable ways a married woman with children could earn extra money for the household.
Harriet was not a stranger to writing. She shared her father’s passion for expository literature, though she wrote much more politely. In Cincinnati, her first publication was a geography textbook. A very practical endeavor for a nation in motion hither and yon; even more practical as her sister Catharine, following their father’s admonition to train up young Protestants, had opened a school. The textbook would be just the thing to familiarize recently arrived children—and everyone in those days was a newcomer to Cincinnati—with the West.
The research for the book provided an education for Harriet as well. Locating Cincinnati at the center of things was not only a device to engage her sister’s pupils, but it also seemed appropriate in other ways. Her father taught that curiosity was a good thing; that inquiry and freedom complemented each other. Cincinnati stood astride a great river that separated freedom from slavery, and, as a New England girl, she knew little of the latter. So she crossed the river and visited a plantation in Kentucky. To her evolving thought, this institution seemed a more immanent threat than the pope.
When Harriet returned to Cincinnati, she walked the streets with new eyes, as sometimes happens to returning travelers awakened to new experiences. Here, a bustling slave market existed beneath her very eyes. For a place north of the Ohio River, Cincinnati was deeply southern on slavery. In that, Cincinnati differed little from many other northern cities. In New York, on July 4, 1834, a mob attacked a church service celebrating the emancipation of slaves in that state. The following year, several northern and border cities experienced anti-abolitionist violence. To Harriet, these episodes threatened the coming Kingdom of Christ more than the machinations of the Roman Catholic Church. Here was an institution—human bondage—that also destroyed the family, stifled free expression, and contradicted the nation’s self-evident truths of equality and human dignity.27
She turned her pen from geography to gently prodding her neighbors on the subject of slavery. She was no firebrand, merely a pious young woman employing moral suasion and satire to stress the importance of airing unpopular views in order to better engage man’s God-given reason. What was at stake for Harriet was not merely free speech, freedom of the press, or even freedom itself, but the very future of mankind. If America was to be the Redeemer Nation, then it must purge itself of sin.
The parlor of mid-nineteenth-century homes functioned as a gathering place for family, friends, and ideas. It was in such a setting that Harriet first shared her anti-slavery essays during her years in Cincinnati. Family members and perhaps a few guests would exchange news and discuss literature and the day’s events. One of the most common parlor activities was to read letters from extended family members. In a mobile nation, letters connected far-flung families and friends, providing news and mutual support. One evening, sitting with her family in the parlor of her Brunswick home, Harriet opened a letter from her sister-in-law Isabella Jones Beecher. The writer, like those in the room, deeply regretted the recent passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. She concluded with a challenge to Harriet: “How, Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.” As she read that sentence, Harriet rose from her chair, crumpled the letter in her fist, and declared, “I will write something. I will if I live.”28
The result of her determination was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which first appeared in serial form in the National Era, a Washington, D.C.–based anti-slavery newspaper with a national readership, beginning in June 1851. Harriet had been conducting research for this book for most of her adult life. The anti-slavery tracts she read, the narratives of former slaves, her correspondence with Frederick Douglass, who served as a valued consultant to the project, her brother George, who lived in New Orleans, her contact with a runaway slave in Cincinnati, and her brief time in Kentucky across the river from her Cincinnati home provided the sinews for her novel. She would pour her research, her faith, her grief, and her love for her family into the work. It was a personal novel and as such appealed to people generally unmoved by the slave or by slavery. It was a book about family, God, and redemption—surefire topics to attract a broad readership in mid-nineteenth-century America.
The novel’s story took shape as Harriet sat in church one February morning in 1851. She experienced a vision: a white man wielding a whip onto an old slave, beating him until the black man died. The vision became Tom. The book became a retelling of the crucifixion in family terms.
It was not an anti-southern book. Slavery existed due not only to southern forbearance but to northern complicity as well. “Northern men, northern mothers, northern Christians, have something more to do than denounce their brethren at the South; they have to look to the evil among themselves,” Harriet wrote in the “Concluding Remarks” that accompanied the novel.29 The slaveholders who appear in the book are decent Christians for the most part, with the exception of Simon Legree, who is from Vermont. Harriet wanted to show that slavery perverted Christianity, that even good Christian masters succumbed to the institution’s inherent evil. If northerners felt that the Fugitive Slave Law enrolled them into the service of slaveholders, Uncle Tom’s Cabin told them they were already serving southern masters. In the book, a New York City creditor sells a young woman to Simon Legree to settle an estate. Ophelia St. Clare, a Vermont woman of evangelical rectitude, visiting her relatives in New Orleans, recoils from the presence of a black child, Topsy. She confesses: “I’ve always had a prejudice against negroes,… and it’s a fact, I never could bear to have that child touch me.” Northern lawmakers supported the institution through the Fugitive Slave Law. Referring to a northern senator, Harriet wrote, “He had never thought that a fugitive might be a hapless mother, a defenseless child.” He had not realized that black people held the same sensibilities as whites. That they were people just like himself.30
What set Uncle To
m’s Cabin apart from other less sophisticated anti-slavery literature was its relentless criticism of the North and northerners, its insistence that slavery was a national sin, not solely a southern problem. Harriet put the matter bluntly in her conclusion: “The people of the free states have defended, encouraged, and participated; and are more guilty for it, before God, than the south, in that they have not the apology of education or custom.… Northern men, northern mothers, northern Christians … have to look to the evil among themselves.”31
Harriet, like Catharine, believed strongly in the power of education to convert Americans. Throughout the novel, she intrudes into the narrative with entreaties, biblical passages, and admonitions. Often, she uses irony to make her point. On the interstate slave trade: “Trading negroes from Africa, dear reader, is so horrid! But trading them from Kentucky,—that’s quite another thing!” Biblical quotes abound in the novel, passages that readers would have found familiar, though the context in which they appeared was startlingly different. When Legree beats Tom senseless, Harriet wrote, “Fear not them that kill the body, and, after that, have no more that they can do,” from Matthew 10:28, adding, “And yet, oh my country! These things are done under the shadow of thy laws! O, Christ! Thy church sees them, almost in silence.” At which point Tom dies.32
Tom is one of the book’s great teachers, along with Eva, the child of a New Orleans slaveholding family. The powerful—men, ministers, legislators, the Yankee schoolmarm, Ophelia, the Kentucky slaveholder’s son George Shelby, and all white Americans—are the students. The more Tom endures, his faith strengthens—“He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him” (1 John 4:16). Faith gives Tom comfort and strength as he confronts Legree in the chapter titled “The Victory.” A voice called out to him: “He that overcometh shall sit down with me on my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father on his throne” (Revelation 3:21). When a fellow slave is incredulous that Tom could love Legree, Tom assures her, “When we can love and pray over all and through all, the battle’s past, and the victory’s come,—glory be to God!” There is no other adult, white or black, in the novel that approaches the unalloyed goodness of Tom, whose ordeal has transformed him from a slave to a man, then to a martyr.33
When the prospect of imminent financial ruin compels the good-intentioned Shelbys of Kentucky to sell Tom to a slave trader, Tom is fortunate to land in the New Orleans home of Augustine St. Clare. Before Augustine’s untimely death forces another sale, this time to the infamous Legree, Harriet introduces the reader to Eva, the St. Clares’ doomed child. The St. Clares love Eva as Harriet loved Charley, and like Charley, Eva is a special child, too good to survive in a world saturated with sin. Eva’s innocence is the innocence of Eve before the fall, as Tom radiates the goodness of Christ before the cross. Like Tom, Eva is a teacher. “Eva was an uncommonly mature child,” Harriet wrote, “and the things that she had witnessed of the evils of the system under which they were living had fallen, one by one, into the depths of her thoughtful, pondering heart. She had vague longings to do something for them—to bless and save not only them, but all in their condition,—longings that contrasted sadly with the feebleness of her little frame.” In a chapter titled “The Little Evangelist,” Eva helps Ophelia overcome her prejudice against the black child Topsy, who is unruly because she has no family and therefore no love. When Topsy despairs of her condition, Ophelia cries out, “Topsy, you poor child, don’t give up! I can love you, though I am not like that dear little child. I hope I’ve learnt something of the love of Christ from her.”34
But like Tom, Eva must die for the sins of America. Eva confronts death with rapture and grace: “A bright, a glorious smile passed over her face, and she said, brokenly,—‘O! love,—joy,—peace!’ gave one sigh, and passed from death unto life!”35
In the concluding section of the novel, Harriet addresses the men and women of the South, “whose virtue, and magnanimity, and purity of character, are the greater for the severer trial it has encountered.” She beseeches southerners to recognize that the system of slavery endows man with a “wholly irresponsible power.” While some masters wield that power benevolently, even the most Christian masters, such as the Shelbys, cannot overcome the evil of an institution that sunders families and exposes the slave to brutality.36
Then she addresses the people of the North, especially the mothers. From Charley, his unconditional love, his unmerited suffering, and from her own helplessness and loss, Harriet imagined the agony of slave mothers. She asks her readers to extend such feelings from their own experience to slave mothers who hurt and love and grieve just like them. “And you, mothers … you, who have learned, by the cradles of your own children, to love and feel for all mankind,… I beseech you, pity the mother who has all your affections, and not one legal right to protect, guide, or educate, the child of her bosom! By the sick hour of your child; by those dying eyes, which you can never forget, by those last cries, that wrung your heart when you could neither help nor save; by the desolation of that empty cradle, that silent nursery,—I beseech you, pity those mothers that are constantly made childless by the American slave-trade!”37
What can the people of the North do to efface the sin of slavery, Harriet asked? First, personal conversion. Second, “you have another power; you can pray!” Finally, she entreats her readers to open northern schools, churches, and homes to their black neighbors. If instead they shrink away “from the helpless hand,” then “the country will have reason to tremble, when it remembers that the fate of nations is in the hands of One who is very pitiful, and of tender compassion.” A born-again faith, a change of heart, and the actions that naturally flow from such a transformation would redeem the nation.38
The consequence of not addressing this sin was the loss of God’s favor, the casting down of America as the Lord’s Chosen Nation, and a still worse fate. For evangelicals who believed in the immanence of the final battle before the coming of Christ’s reign, the failure to expiate the sins of the world, especially human bondage, risked eternal damnation. “This is an age of the world when nations are trembling and convulsed,” Harriet wrote. “A mighty influence is abroad, surging and heaving the world, as with an earthquake. And is America safe? Every nation that carries in its bosom great and unredressed injustice has in it the elements of this last convulsion.”39
Harriet concluded with a sliver of hope. She understood well the compulsion of those who voted for slavery as a concession to the salvation of the Union. Her counter point was that the fate of the Union depended not on temporizing but on repenting and expiating the sin of slavery. “A day of grace is yet held out to us,” she wrote encouragingly. “Both North and South have been guilty before God; and the Christian church has a heavy account to answer. Not by combining together to protect injustice and cruelty, and making a common capital of sin, is this Union to be saved,—but by repentance, justice and mercy; for, not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the ocean than that stronger law, by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of Almighty God!”40
Literary critics have dismissed Uncle Tom’s Cabin as melodramatic—Eliza’s escape over the ice of the Ohio River to freedom, Tom’s improbable stoicism in the face of base brutality, and Eva’s treacly goodness and untimely death. They have also complained about the novel’s didactic passages and the frequent biblical references and digressions. But to the middle-class Americans in towns, in cities, and on prosperous farms in the 1850s, Uncle Tom’s Cabin resonated deeply. They were romantics, deeply religious, viewing childhood as a time of innocence, and the family as the foundation of faith and society. Harriet touched all these chords of feeling, faith, and experience. Many of her readers had lost children; many of her readers experienced a crisis of faith; many strove to be better Christians; but most did not consider slavery or the slave as someone that bore an integral relationship to their own spiritual striving and family condition. The genius of Uncle Tom’s Cabi
n was that it made the personal universal, and it made the personal political as well. For millions of readers, blacks became people.
Abraham Lincoln was only half-joking when he met Harriet at the White House in 1862 and exclaimed, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!” The book had a profound impact on northern public opinion. Relatively few northerners read the narratives of escaped slaves, and fewer still consumed abolitionist tracts or attended their rallies. But tens of thousands read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As one northern reader exclaimed, “What truth could not accomplish, fiction did, and Harriet Beecher Stowe has had the satisfaction of throwing a firebrand into the world.”41