Susan M. Ryan
In the decades leading up to the Civil War, Americans produced a remarkable number of texts that sought to intervene in the debate over slavery, including polemical pamphlets, journalistic commentary, poetry, plays, short stories, personal narratives, and novels.1 Among these, the most famous and widely read – certainly in its own time and perhaps also in the twenty‐first century – is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was originally serialized in the National Era, a Washington, DC‐based antislavery newspaper, from 5 June 1851 until 1 April 1852 and was published (in two illustrated volumes) by John P. Jewett of Boston in March of 1852. Though precise sales figures are difficult to establish, the book’s immense popularity, both in the United States and England, was widely noted in the press and it was translated into a number of languages, including Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish, Polish, and Welsh. Stowe’s work also inspired a host of imitations, adaptations (e.g., versions for children, hugely popular stage versions), and counter‐narratives, as well as related board games, sheet music, dolls, dishware, wallpaper, and other commodities. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was, in short, a cultural watershed (see Parfait 2007; Winship 2002; on the novel’s commodification see Bernstein 2011; Meer 2005).
The novel’s popularity should not, however, be taken as evidence that American readers wholeheartedly embraced its antislavery content. Proslavery reviewers were vitriolic in their criticism of the book and its author, calling into question Stowe’s morality, her motivations, and her fidelity to truth – indeed, claims that her depictions of slavery’s horrors were exaggerated or invented in order to advance a political agenda were so widespread that she soon felt compelled to publish a compendium of documentary evidence and self‐justification under the title A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853). Stowe was attacked in fiction, too, as proslavery authors penned novels in response to her work. These offered representations of carefree slaves whose well‐being is threatened only by the meddling of abolitionist agitators, or depicted weary Anglo “wage slaves” in England or the urban North, where working and living conditions, the narratives suggest, make chattel slavery look comparatively appealing. Stowe’s novel troubled many abolitionist readers, too. Though most in the antislavery community applauded the work – and saw its popularity as a way to reach beyond those already converted to the cause – some of its representations and emplotments were less than welcome. The title character’s ostensible passivity irked many readers, especially African American activists who felt that Tom veered too close to the “contented slave” stereotype.2 But the biggest point of contention in the 1850s was the novel’s conclusion, in which Stowe has her surviving former slaves – all of mixed racial ancestry, with light complexions – emigrate to Liberia. Most abolitionists saw Liberian colonization as a pernicious scheme, authored and promoted by white elites, to rid the United States of a potentially transformative free black population.
Apart from these overtly political responses, the book proved to be a remarkably flexible cultural touchstone, available for appropriation by a range of authors and merchants with little or no obvious stake in the slavery debates, who diluted or erased altogether Stowe’s antislavery message. That a narrative both admired and reviled for its ideological potency could also circulate as a series of apolitical vignettes – tragic or comic by turns, but certainly not oriented toward social change – speaks to the complexities of the mid‐nineteenth century and the capacity for a burgeoning commercial culture to turn earnest activism into sought‐after commodities.
This chapter foregrounds the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a crucial moment in American literary history. Stowe drew heavily on previously published materials, including newspaper accounts relating to slavery and narratives written or dictated by fugitives, and her novel exerted tremendous influence over the cultural production that followed, shaping the work of fellow antislavery partisans as well as antagonists. But the fact that Stowe’s novel offers a way of organizing a daunting volume of material does not mean that it somehow encompasses or fully represents antebellum writings on slavery. On the contrary, this is a complex and contradictory discourse that used a range of genres and styles to express an even broader array of views, strategies, ideals, and warnings. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in other words, is a key node and point of departure for discussing the literatures of American slavery, but it’s far short of a microcosm.
Antislavery sentiments appeared in Americans’ writings long before the nineteenth century. In 1700, the Puritan Samuel Sewall wrote what is thought to be the first antislavery polemic published in British North America – The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial – in which he states unequivocally that “all Men, as they are the Sons of Adam, are Coheirs; and have equal Right unto Liberty, and all other outward Comforts of Life” (1). A half‐century later John Woolman, a New Jersey Quaker, published Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754), which also argued, however temperately, for racial equality and the eradication of chattel slavery: “If I purchase a man who has never forfeited his liberty,” Woolman writes, “the natural right of freedom is in him; and shall I keep him and his posterity in servitude and ignorance?” (1754/1806: 241). The enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley, though her most famous poem (“On Being Brought from Africa to America”) seems to align her enslavement with her Christianization, nevertheless criticized the institution and the racial prejudice undergirding it. In a letter written in 1774 to the Reverend Samson Occom, for example, she points out the hypocrisy of those who seek America’s independence from Great Britain even as they hold fellow human beings in bondage, while in a 1772 poem addressed to the British official William, Earl of Dartmouth, she asserts that her “love of Freedom” springs from her personal history of having been kidnapped and enslaved: “can I then but pray,” she asks, that “Others may never feel tyrannic sway?” (2001: 40, ll. 30–31).
A number of early texts affirmed the value and humanity of Americans of African descent even if slavery was not their central focus. Among the most important of these is A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia (1794), a pamphlet by two prominent free black Philadelphians – Absalom Jones and Richard Allen – who defended their community against the charge that its members had ransacked homes and otherwise taken advantage of ailing white citizens during the previous year’s yellow fever epidemic. Emphasizing the degree to which African Americans had put themselves at risk to aid the city’s many sick and dying – officials had claimed, erroneously, that black residents were less susceptible to the disease than whites, many of whom had the means to flee the outbreak in any case – Jones and Allen used this record of black benevolence and fortitude to argue for full civic inclusion. While only the tract’s final segment makes an explicit case against slavery, still legal in Pennsylvania at the time, the text as a whole powerfully asserts that African Americans deserved the respect and, in the immediate context, the gratitude of their white co‐residents.
The 1820s and 1830s saw an intensification of American antislavery rhetoric. In addition to the founding of several newspapers either partly or wholly dedicated to the abolitionist cause – including the Genius of Universal Emancipation (Baltimore, 1821), Freedom’s Journal (New York City, 1827), and the Liberator (Boston, 1831) – a handful of publications commanded the attention of sympathetic and hostile readers alike. Perhaps most alarming to slaveholders was the publication in 1829 of David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a text that drew on such disparate sources as the Christian Bible, Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, and a colonizationist speech by Henry Clay in its spirited, not to mention typographically striking, denunciation of slavery. One of the most pointed passages involves a direct warning of retribution. Identifying himself as “one of the oppressed, degraded and wretched sons of Africa” (1830: 81), Walker warns of violence to come: “some of you, (whites) on the continent of America, will yet curse the day that you ever were born. You want slaves, and want us for your slaves!!! My colour will yet, root some of you out of the very face of the earth!!!!!!” (82). Later in the document, Walker invokes the Declaration of Independence in order to underscore the hypocrisy of white Americans: “Do you understand your own language?” Walker asks, insisting that white readers compare that document’s words “with your cruelties and murders inflicted by your cruel and unmerciful fathers and yourselves on our fathers and on us – men who have never given your fathers or you the least provocation!!!!!!” (85). For Walker, the measured language of figures like Wheatley and Woolman was not what the circumstances demanded. Unsurprisingly, proslavery responses to Walker were vehement. When slaveholders discovered that his text was circulating in the South, they experienced a kind of literacy panic, passing legislation that made it illegal to teach slaves to read or to disseminate antislavery writings and that restricted the movements of black sailors in southern ports because they were presumed to have imported and distributed Walker’s text.
Two other vigorous polemics appeared in the following decade. Lydia Maria Child’s Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833) attacked both slavery and northern prejudice. Though her tone was milder than Walker’s, as a woman she risked recrimination by writing about slavery at all, not to mention by taking the then‐radical step of defending interracial marriage, which Massachusetts law forbade. Anticipating that the book would be met with hostility, Child began her preface with the following plea: “Reader, I beseech you not to throw down this volume as soon as you have glanced at the title” (1833: n.p.).3 Child’s fellow New Englander Theodore Weld, with the help of his abolitionist wife and her sister (South Carolina natives Angelina Grimké Weld and Sarah Grimké), would move into similar territory six years later, compiling eyewitness accounts and newspaper pieces – many from southern venues – that detailed the appalling living conditions of enslaved Americans, publishing them under the title American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839). The book’s minute attention to whites’ cruelty, including extensive accounts of the flogging, torture, and dismemberment of slaves, made it a bracing and, for its time, a remarkably graphic text.
Walker, Child, and Weld differed markedly in style and tone, but they shared a palpable urgency regarding the abolition of slavery and a willingness to confront unpopular topics (e.g., interracial violence), elements that signaled a new assertiveness in antislavery discourse. American authors, black and white, would continue to publish antislavery polemics across the next 25 or so years. Among the most controversial of these was Henry Highland Garnet’s “Address to the Slaves of the United States of America,” in which he urged the enslaved to use any and every means at their disposal – including violent rebellion – to secure their freedom. After invoking such revolutionary figures as Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Madison Washington, and Joseph Cinque, Garnet, a New York City minister whose family had escaped slavery in the 1820s, enjoined slaves to “arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is the day and the hour” (1843/2000: 164). Garnet originally delivered the address at a black national convention in Buffalo, New York, in 1843 – to an audience that, ironically, included no enslaved auditors – and wished to have the text included in the event’s published proceedings. After extensive debate – and a split vote, with Frederick Douglass, among others, opposing Garnet’s faction – the group decided not to print the speech, fearing that it would incite violence against free African Americans and abolitionists of all races without yielding any discernible advantage. Garnet would publish the address himself in 1848 within a volume that reprinted Walker’s Appeal as well as Garnet’s brief biography of him, a move through which the militant minister aligned himself with the antebellum period’s most radical – and, in terms of white responses, most maligned – African American author.
Newspapers remained integral to the antislavery movement. Among the most influential were the National Anti‐Slavery Standard (founded in 1840), the National Era (founded in 1847), the Provincial Freeman (founded in 1853 by African American expatriates living in Canada), Frederick Douglass’s papers (the North Star, founded in 1847 and renamed Frederick Douglass’ Paper in 1851; then Douglass’ Monthly, founded in 1858), and William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, which would continue publication until 1865. These papers worked on a number of registers, addressing literary and cultural matters alongside various reformist projects (including temperance, desegregation of schools and public accommodations, workers’ rights, and women’s rights), even as they hammered away at the institution of slavery. As in so many antebellum newspapers, a great deal of space was devoted to the printing of speeches, not just from the United States Senate and House of Representatives, but also from various antislavery meetings and from the era’s many “colored conventions,” as they were often termed – events at which African American activists, intellectuals, and ministers gathered to address the many challenges that their communities faced. In this way, the papers used print to expand the reach of abolition’s vibrant oral cultures. Through these (re)printed speeches – as well as articles, notices, and letters to the editor – they also recorded the movement’s many internecine conflicts over strategy and ideology.
The antislavery movement also produced elaborate multi‐genre albums and gift books, which were sold – one imagines to the already converted – in order to raise funds for the cause. The best known of these, The Liberty Bell, was edited by Maria Weston Chapman and sponsored by the Boston Female Antislavery Society. It appeared nearly every year from 1839 until 1858 and featured such distinguished contributors as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Harriet Martineau, James Russell Lowell, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The Rochester (NY) Ladies’ Antislavery Society published a similar annual titled Autographs for Freedom in 1853 and 1854, which included works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and the ubiquitous Stowe. Although the majority of authors represented in these anthologies were white, Autographs also published work by leading African American figures such as William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, and James M’Cune Smith. As one would expect from the volume’s title, each piece concluded with a reproduction of its author’s signature.
These annuals suggest not only the quantity and variety of antislavery literature produced in the antebellum years, but also the ways in which the movement’s various genres and publishing ventures overlapped. For example, Frederick Douglass’s novella The Heroic Slave appeared in its entirety in the 1853 edition of Autographs for Freedom, but was also serialized (in March of 1853) in Douglass’s own newspaper. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow contributed work to antislavery albums, but he also published a volume of antislavery poetry, Poems on Slavery, in 1842, when abolition was still considered dangerously radical even by many New Englanders. John Greenleaf Whittier, a more active abolitionist than Longfellow, published his antislavery poems and prose in annuals, in freestanding volumes, and in a range of newspapers across the antebellum period. Though Whittier sometimes uses sentimental images of family separation to protest against slavery (see, for example, “The Farewell of a Virginia Slave Mother to Her Daughters Sold into Southern Bondage”), a number of his antislavery poems trade more in diatribe and political satire. In “Ichabod,” for instance, he likens Daniel Webster, the Massachusetts senator who supported the Compromise of 1850 (including the much‐hated Fugitive Slave Law), to a fallen angel, soulless and faithless, while in “The Haschisch” he compares cotton’s power to seduce and delude those who profit from it to the disorienting qualities of the poem’s titular drug. Another prominent antislavery poet, Frances E. Watkins Harper, placed her work in abolitionist papers, but also published a brief collection, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854), which went through several editions and included a preface by William Lloyd Garrison of the Liberator.
Prior to the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, fiction was a comparatively minor antislavery genre – certainly less prominent than verse, polemic, and personal narrative. Indeed, at least one early work of antislavery fiction initially presented itself as autobiography: Richard Hildreth, a white author and historian based in Boston, published The Slave; or Memoirs of Archy Moore anonymously in 1836, with an introductory “Advertisement” written in the first person that identifies the ensuing text as a manuscript that has come into the self‐described editor’s possession “with an injunction to make it public” (1836, vol. 1: n.p.). This was a common enough framing device in antebellum fiction, but it was especially apt here as a means of asserting the narrative’s credibility while simultaneously distancing the “editor” from the text he wished to introduce. The piece mixes such self‐distancing gestures with a defense of the story’s first‐person narrator, the titular Archy Moore: the author‐as‐editor disavows Moore’s “extravagant” expressions and sometimes questionable conduct, yet he also insists that this same figure “preserves throughout, a moderation, a calmness, and a magnanimity, which have never yet been displayed upon the other side of the question,” observing that the narrator’s frank confession of his faults lends him “credit” (1836, vol. 1: n.p.). As Hildreth would later note, early reviewers saw through this ploy, but for a pernicious reason – they could not fathom that a former slave could possibly have written the book. He wrote of a Boston reviewer, “To have been bred a slave, was in the estimation of this critic, (and he no doubt expressed the sentiment current about him,) to have grown up destitute of intellect and feeling. When the book and the criticism were written, there were yet no Fred. Douglasses. The author foresaw them; the Boston critic did not” (1856: xix–xx).
In the introduction to the 1856 edition, Hildreth quotes from a notice that appeared in the Boston Daily Advocate in early 1837, which opined that The Slave, “if it is ever read south of the Potomac,” will “produce more sensation” than did Nat Turner’s rebellion (1856: xi). While this is obviously an exaggeration, Hildreth’s novel was surprisingly militant for its time. For one thing, Hildreth has little patience for the trope of the benevolent slaveholder, which other authors – Stowe included – often employed as a kind of conciliatory gesture, though they typically dispensed with such figures in the course of the narrative in order to represent slavery’s deeper horrors. In The Slave, by contrast, each of the many masters portrayed is cruel, venal, or self‐serving in his or her particular way. Some are more overtly abusive than others, but none has the slave’s well‐being at heart. Even the kindest of them – a mother–daughter pair who buy Archy’s wife (Cassy) following her unsuccessful escape attempt – fail to ameliorate the conditions of their field hands, largely because they are unwilling to forego the luxuries to which they are accustomed. Perhaps more surprisingly, the narrative endorses retributive violence. It features an extended sequence in which Archy and his fellow runaway Thomas, a powerful and charismatic figure of “unmixed African blood” (1836, vol. 2: 71), capture the overseer who is hunting them and who, crucially, was responsible for the death of Thomas’s wife. After giving the man 30 minutes to repent for his many sins, Thomas shoots him in the head and the two fugitives bury him in a shallow grave with the corpse of his once‐vicious hunting dog. Although Archy confesses that he was initially moved by the overseer’s desperate pleas for mercy, he expresses satisfaction in the aftermath of the killing: “we now resumed our flight,” he states, “ – not as some may perhaps suppose, with the frightened and conscience‐stricken haste of murderers, but with that lofty feeling of manhood vindicated, and tyranny visited with a just retribution,” which other heroes throughout history have felt (1836, vol. 2: 117).
Christianity comes under attack in Hildreth’s book as well. Not only does the narrator detail the hypocrisies of Christian slaveholders, he also laments the effect of Christianity on the slave’s consciousness. Thomas, before he is radicalized by his wife’s murder, is a devout Methodist whose “naturally proud and high‐spirited” soul has been subdued by religious instruction. “Religion,” the narrator remarks, “has been often found more potent than whips or fetters, in upholding tyranny and subduing the resistance of the superstitious and trembling slave” (1836, vol. 2: 71–72). And the novel includes a number of lurid elements, most of which involve some degree of incest. Early on, Archy describes his mother’s beauty with a perhaps inappropriate level of detail, admitting that “I describe her more like a lover than a son. But in truth, her beauty was so uncommon, as to draw my attention while I was yet a child” (1836, vol. 1: 6). Archy’s own marriage is to a slave woman of mixed racial heritage who is actually his half‐sister, a fact of which he is aware but decides to conceal from her because he doesn’t wish to “harass” her with “unnecessary scruples” (1836, vol. 1: 49). As would become commonplace in antislavery fiction across the next couple of decades, Cassy’s master threatens her sexually. Where Hildreth takes matters further than most is that the master in question is also Cassy’s father – and Hildreth has the man persist in his coercions even after Cassy has called him out on the fact of their kinship. Finally, the novel resists any temptation to repair its main character’s relationship to the nation that has harmed him. Instead, Archy fights willingly and successfully against the Americans (presumably in the War of 1812) when he is impressed into the British navy, and his planned return to the United States at the end of the 1836 edition derives from a desire to locate his lost family, not from some lurking patriotism or nostalgia for home. The expanded 1852 edition – which, by Hildreth’s own account, was published in response to the popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin – details Archy’s later travels through the American South. This more pessimistic version ends with Thomas’s capture after some 20 years as a fugitive; Archy watches as his friend, still defiant, is burned alive by a white mob.
In a letter praising Hildreth’s novel, published in the 18 March 1837 issue of the Liberator, Lydia Maria Child wrote, “If I were a man, I would rather be the author of that work, than of anything ever published in America” (1837: 47). Though she does not specify which elements of the text forbade its creation by a woman author, her own story “The Quadroons,” originally published in The Liberty Bell (1842), offers some hints. Child’s beautiful heroines, a mother and daughter of mixed racial ancestry, steer clear of incest plots and retributive violence, though they are betrayed, lusted after, and threatened by white men – themes that other novelists, including Stowe and William Wells Brown, would take up in the years to come.4 As Nancy Bentley (1993: 504) has perceptively noted, antislavery fiction “gazed obsessively” on figures of mixed racial ancestry, even as nineteenth‐century law “averted its eyes,” recognizing no meaningful distinction between “black” and “mulatto/a” (or “quadroon” or “octoroon”) individuals. Uncle Tom’s Cabin offers several examples: Eliza and George Harris, whose portion of European ancestry, in Stowe’s rendering, lends them the assertiveness required for a successful escape; and Cassy and Emmeline, whose Euro‐tinged – but still “exotic” – beauty makes them vulnerable to Simon Legree’s sexual aggression. Mulatto/a characters (and their slightly paler counterparts) did important, if fraught, cultural work in these texts. They offered white readers conventionally attractive, white‐appearing victims with whom to sympathize if identification with darker‐skinned characters proved too great a leap; but they also allowed authors, black and white, to perpetuate a racial and complexional hierarchy, whereby the sufferings of the palest slaves are made to seem more pressing, and more tragic, than the miseries of the rest. Further, these characters enabled antislavery authors to foreground the institution’s sexual crimes without having to render more bracing scenes of rape (though its threat is often implied). Finally, mulatto/a figures dramatize slavery’s perversions of family feeling, as they are beaten, or sold, or worse by their biological fathers (white ancestry in these narratives, as in the institution itself, nearly always derives from the paternal line) or half‐siblings, and are forcibly separated from their own much‐loved children.
Antislavery fiction’s developing conventions included abundant use of both sensational and sentimental strategies. Sexual threat and coercion (not to mention Hildreth’s foray into sibling and parent–child incest) attracted the prurient curiosity of readers, as did the oft‐repeated scenes of violence and public exposure at the whipping post or on the auction block; meanwhile, the separation of enslaved families drew on a sentimental affective register. When a lascivious master sold his own child to a trader or disregarded the sanctity of his slave’s marriage, then both sensation and sentiment could be conjured at once. Stowe would wield these overlapping techniques masterfully in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but, as these earlier fictions suggest, she did not pioneer their use.
Most antebellum US publications, including those written and published in the North, supported slavery insofar as they complacently endorsed racial hierarchies, privileged the preservation of the Union over the eradication of slavery, or depicted enslaved people as contented with their lot. That said, some authors took the matter further, offering overt and elaborate defenses of slavery on economic, political, pseudoscientific, and even humanitarian grounds, however dubious. Abolition, various authors claimed, threatened American unity and prosperity, interfered illegitimately in southern and state‐level affairs, and sought to unleash a host of social ills, from the specter of starving, transient former slaves who could not fend for themselves to that of all‐out race war. Slavery, for these authors, called forth a range of justifications: some argued that it was a reasonable and just subjugation of the weak to the strong, but more often it was framed as a necessary evil, responsibility for which could be offloaded onto the British, from whom many Americans felt they had (innocently) inherited the institution, or the authors and ratifiers of the Constitution, which they felt affirmed the legality of the practice; as a paternalistic form of caretaking, with enslaved people in the role of the plantation’s and the larger economy’s perpetual children, who would neither work nor care for their own needs without white supervision and coercion; or as a providential institution that had brought those of African descent from a benighted existence into the light of Christianity. According to the historian Karen Halttunen (1995) and others, as Enlightenment thought and the eighteenth century’s emergent culture of sensibility yielded a new investment in humanitarianism that rendered cruelty increasingly objectionable (note the US Constitution’s proscription against cruel or unusual punishment), slavery’s proponents had to argue either that the institution was in fact benevolent – at least in comparison with available alternatives – or that its victims were somehow less than human (see also Abruzzo 2011).
The latter strategy aligned with a spate of purportedly scientific inquiries, especially prominent in the 1840s and 1850s, that sought to establish an array of fundamental biological differences among the races. Using such measures – or mismeasures, as the twentieth‐century biologist Stephen Jay Gould termed them – as cranial volume and facial angle, a number of American scientists, both northern and southern, argued that individuals of European ancestry were inherently more advanced, more aesthetically pleasing, and more intelligent than their African‐descended counterparts. This discourse also included a substantial challenge to the Book of Genesis, which framed Adam and Eve as the original parents of all humankind. Not so, argued figures such as Louis Agassiz (a Swiss‐born scientist who became a prominent Harvard professor) and Samuel George Morton (a Philadelphia physician and author): for them, the notion of polygenesis (or polygeny, as it is sometimes called) – that is, of multiple, separate sets of original parents – offered the best explanation for the visible differences among various racial groups. Adam and Eve, in other words, had founded only the white race, with others deriving from unnamed – and within this worldview, less refined – pairs. The theory also, conveniently enough, suggested that Euro‐Americans and their slaves of African descent were not in fact “of one blood,” as the Bible asserted and as antislavery authors were wont to insist. Indeed, a prominent theory among slavery’s advocates held that whites and blacks were effectively different species, such that the offspring of interracial sexual unions would prove to be not just physically weaker than their racially “pure” peers, but also less fertile. This notion inheres in the commonly used term for a person of mixed racial ancestry: mulatto is etymologically linked with mule – the offspring of a horse and a donkey that, though useful enough for farm work, was proverbially intractable, not to mention incapable of reproducing. As abolitionists often pointed out, these theories were patently false – that is, men and women of mixed European and African ancestry were producing offspring throughout the land and were no less healthy or long‐lived than their supposedly unmixed counterparts in similar circumstances – but their advocates continued to advance them in the absence of corroborating evidence.
It bears noting that the proponents of what we now call scientific racism were prominent, well‐respected figures in the antebellum scientific community, whose ideas found relatively broad public acceptance. If anyone was considered to be on the radical fringe, it was the “immediatists,” those who advocated the near‐term, universal abolition of slavery. While many white Americans, slaveholders and otherwise, conceded that slavery was a problematic institution, they often contrasted it with the greater ills they thought would emerge in its place should the abolitionists carry the day. One of the era’s most flexible “lesser evil‐ists” was the New York author James Kirke Paulding, whose View of Slavery in the United States (1836) worked through a remarkable number of scenarios its author considered worse than slavery, including what he believed would be government‐sponsored theft if the United States were to imitate England’s course of partially compensating slave owners in the West Indies under the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Paulding’s other grim scenarios included the freezing and starvation of improvident freed slaves; widespread amalgamation in the absence of slavery’s supposed social controls; and political domination of whites in areas of the South where freed (and presumably franchise‐eligible) slaves would outnumber them. Not only did the abolitionist movement threaten the well‐being of the nation, Paulding concluded, it also encouraged white women to leave their proper sphere in the foolish pursuit of social and political change.
Of course, some of slavery’s apologists went so far as to represent it as a positive good, an institution that ought to expand rather than die out. The most famous of these was the Virginia social theorist George Fitzhugh, who in Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society (1854) and Cannibals All! (1857) built an elaborate case for the benevolence of chattel slavery, as well as for the advantages of traditional gender roles for white women, which in his view abolitionist activism threatened. For Fitzhugh, the most egregious cruelty occurred in free societies under laissez‐faire capitalism, where “a part of the laboring class must be out of employment and starving, and in their struggle to get employment, reducing those next above them to the minimum that will support human existence” (1854: 222). Slaves, he countered, were far better off because their owners supplied their basic needs within a paternalistic system of mutual obligations. Northern society, he charged, was a miserable failure, while the South enjoyed a tranquil and flourishing culture that “suffered […] little from crime or extreme poverty” (1854: iii). In Fitzhugh’s rendering, slaveholding society functioned like the benign Shelby plantation where Stowe’s novel begins, but without the debts and mismanagement that spark the sale of two slaves and thus the launching of her plot. The slave, Fitzhugh writes, “is free […] when the labors of the day are over, and free in mind as well as body; for the master provides food, raiment, house, fuel, and everything else necessary to the physical well‐being of himself and family” (1857: 26). The wage laborer, meanwhile, “is overburdened with the cares of family and household, which make his freedom an empty and delusive mockery” (1857: 26). In keeping with his argument that slaveholding is a philanthropic act, Fitzhugh proposes extending that charity to working‐class whites as well, whose lives, he asserts, would be vastly improved by their enslavement. While this suggestion sounds like a Swiftian modest proposal, Fitzhugh appears to have been in earnest.
Scholars have analyzed proslavery writings in detail, but the field has struggled to figure out how – indeed, whether – to incorporate such texts into undergraduate and graduate curricula. American literature anthologies often include brief selections, on the grounds that excluding them altogether enables an all‐too‐convenient erasure of the nation’s history of racial injustice, but complete, freestanding texts appear far less commonly on course syllabi. It is difficult to justify spending long segments of the semester analyzing works that most readers now find morally reprehensible – and asking students to purchase them raises additional concerns. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, meanwhile, despite its abundance of cringe‐inducing racial stereotypes, has become a staple of university courses in American literature, for reasons I explore in the following sections.
For most American literature scholars in the mid‐twentieth century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was considered important as a cultural or historical phenomenon but not as literature per se. F.O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941), which would inform US literary studies for decades to come, barely mentions Stowe, despite the fact that the work focuses on the half‐decade (1850–1855) in which her book dominated the literary marketplace. Uncle Tom’s Cabin would also prove to be an awkward fit with the reading strategies and aesthetic priorities of the New Criticism, which privileged ambiguity and linguistic intricacy over direct emotional appeals and strategically absorbing narration. Too, mid‐twentieth‐century African American intellectuals, both within and beyond the academy, were deeply skeptical of Stowe’s novel and the white reformist project it represented. Consider, for example, James Baldwin’s famously scathing essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in which he asserts that Stowe “was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer” and that her book traded in a dishonest sentimentalism (1955: 14). More broadly, in the twentieth century the term “Uncle Tom” came to signify a black man who submitted all too willingly to white authority, such that Stowe’s book, for many, seemed tainted by a misguided passivity.
By the 1980s, however, the novel’s stock was rising, at least among scholars of American literature. Jane Tompkins’s landmark study Sensational Designs (1985) made Uncle Tom’s Cabin a centerpiece of its recuperation of sentimentalism, arguing that the work was indeed revolutionary insofar as it enacted a realignment of cultural power that privileged faith, domesticity, and persuasion over individualistic self‐assertion and conventional forms of domination. Much of what followed was more critical of the novel’s racial representations and appropriations than was Tompkins’s analysis, but even scholars deeply uncomfortable with the novel’s racial politics were nevertheless taking it seriously as a literary and cultural force. Indeed, by the turn of the twenty‐first century Uncle Tom’s Cabin was receiving such sustained scholarly attention that it became difficult to track all the conversations in play. By way of illustration, from 2000 to 2018 more than 150 peer‐reviewed journal articles treated the novel (according to the MLA International Bibliography), while a Stowe chapter – more often than not featuring Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the central object of analysis – became a common feature of academic monographs in American literary and cultural studies. One marker among many of the book’s status is its appearance in Lawrence Buell’s Dream of the Great American Novel alongside such avowed classics as Moby‐Dick, The Scarlet Letter, and Huckleberry Finn. Some of the most intriguing recent work on Uncle Tom’s Cabin has considered anew its embeddedness in nineteenth‐century culture – with particular attention to its reception, readership, and aftershocks – but this interest in the book as a cultural phenomenon has shed the reflexive dismissal of its aesthetic register that characterized an earlier critical era (see especially Bernstein 2011, Hochman 2011, and Meer 2005). Individual scholars, teachers, and students may or may not like the book (keeping in mind the complex affective and aesthetic registers that bear on the matter of taste), but ignoring it is no longer a viable strategy.
One reason for the continuing prominence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in literary studies is the fact that it so strongly influenced subsequent literary production. Indeed, any Anglophone author writing about slavery in the wake of Stowe’s novel had in some sense to contend with it, though such encounters took very different forms. A number of works directly took up Stowe’s characters, themes, and settings: Frances E. Watkins Harper’s “Eliza Harris,” for example, rendered in verse its title character’s flight across the semi‐frozen Ohio River, a scene drawn from chapter 7 of the novel (and perhaps also shaped by dramatic adaptations that Harper may have seen); A Peep into Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853) and Pictures and Stories from Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853) repackaged the narrative for young readers; and Whittier’s poem “Little Eva: Uncle Tom’s Guardian Angel,” which Stowe’s publisher John P. Jewett had commissioned, was set to music and sold in sheets. Meanwhile, the narrative had a long and lucrative stage life. These adaptations, often called “Tom shows,” were enormously popular, disseminating Stowe’s characters and settings well beyond the many who had actually read the novel. George Aiken’s 1852 version was the best known and longest running of the lot; while it hewed more closely than many to Stowe’s own text, it nevertheless emphasized singing, dancing, and sentimental tableaux over the novel’s more overtly political passages. Indeed, Aiken’s version ends not with the Harris family’s reunification in Canada and subsequent move to Liberia, or with Stowe’s final admonition to “feel right” (1852: vol. 2, 317), but with Tom’s death or, in a later version, with Eva, Augustine St. Clare, and Tom in heaven. Henry J. Conway’s version, which was staged first in Boston and then at P.T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York City (where it competed directly with Aiken’s rendering at the National Theater), added even more singing and dancing and gave Tom a happy ending: instead of dying as a martyr on Legree’s plantation, he survives long enough to be rescued by the earnest George Shelby, the by‐then‐grown son of his original owner in Kentucky. Walter Burnot’s unpublished one‐act version, meanwhile, focused entirely on Tom, Eva, and Topsy. Here Tom is never sold to Simon Legree and never sacrifices himself to save his fellow slaves; instead, the play trains its attention on the death of Eva St. Clare and ends with Topsy’s Christian conversion – followed, predictably, by another song‐and‐dance number. As these examples suggest, theatrical productions over time drifted a great distance from the original novel’s antislavery message, as Topsy’s “wicked” laughter and Eva’s sentimental appeal emerged as their signal features.
Apart from this abundance of adaptations, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was widely credited with (or in many instances blamed for) initiating a literary trend toward antislavery fiction and toward reform‐minded fiction generally. As a commentator in Graham’s Magazine noted, “the shelves of booksellers groan under the weight of Sambo’s woes, done up in covers” (Anon. 1853: 209). The Southern Literary Messenger, meanwhile, greeted this development with even greater hostility: “The literary workshops of the North,” wrote the author, identified by the initials W.R.A, “are even now resounding with the noisy and fanatical labors of those who, with Mrs. Stowe as their model, are forging calumnies, and hammering falsehood into the semblance of truth” (W.R.A. 1856: 243). One such author, the white New Englander Mary Hayden Pike, modeled her 1854 novel Ida May closely enough on Stowe’s work that many initially thought Stowe herself had written it. Indeed, Ida May echoes Stowe’s principle that white Americans must engage with the question of slavery intensively in order to feel right with regard to it; Pike’s title character, a white girl living in Pennsylvania, learns empathy the hard way, as she is kidnapped by a ruthless gang and sold into slavery. Though her identity is discovered and she is set free in time to receive a good private education (and to avoid the sexual abuse that so many enslaved girls and women suffered), Ida’s early experiences remain foremost in her consciousness, as she grows into a benevolent, principled woman who frees the slaves she inherits – and converts her politically timid love interest to the cause. Pike’s enslaved character Alfred, meanwhile, is a version of George Harris, though with a darker complexion. Like Stowe’s character, he is prone to righteous anger, but eschews retributive violence. Intelligent, independent, and capable, his goal of buying his freedom is repeatedly thwarted. When his master learns of his escape plan and threatens him with a severe beating, Alfred kills himself rather than submit to (or attack) his master.
Stowe’s influence is evident even when a work seems explicitly calculated to correct or reframe her much‐discussed representations. Stowe’s own later novel Dred (1856), for example, borrows a number of elements from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, including a range of benevolent and malicious masters, alongside admirable characters of mixed racial ancestry struggling for freedom and family coherence; but it also takes more seriously the possibility – and the logic – of violent rebellion. Though Dred ultimately forestalls that outcome – the title character is killed before he can carry out a planned attack on white plantations – the narrative ends with its former slave characters remaining in North America, as if to correct the much‐derided Liberian solution that the first novel offered. William Wells Brown’s 1853 novel Clotel also shares a number of elements with Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Brown’s comic character Sam trades in the same tropes of minstrelsy as Stowe’s Topsy, while Clotel’s surviving ex‐slave characters, like the Harris family in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, can only find happiness abroad. That said, Brown pushes harder than Stowe does on the matter of national guilt; his subtitle, which identifies Clotel as “The President’s Daughter” in a nod to the Thomas Jefferson paternity scandal, foregrounds the imbrication of slavery with the founding of the United States. That Clotel’s eventual suicide takes place in Washington, DC, within sight of the White House and the US Capitol, drives home the point. Even the relatively mild Mary Hayden Pike both borrowed and departed from Uncle Tom’s Cabin in her 1856 novel Caste: Pike’s more quiescent slave characters are reminiscent of some of Stowe’s plantation denizens, but Caste also features a subnarrative in which an escaped slave gets away with killing his white pursuer – and, like Hildreth’s characters, feels entirely justified in the aftermath.
Perhaps the most pointed of the antislavery responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin are Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave (1853) and Martin Delany’s Blake; or, the Huts of America (serialized in 1859 and 1861–1862), both of which confront the romantic racialism of Stowe’s novel by creating bold, self‐asserting main characters with dark complexions and unmixed racial ancestry who serve as antidotes to Uncle Tom’s acceptance of circumstance. Douglass’s Madison Washington, based on the historical figure of the same name, leads a successful slave rebellion on board The Creole and subsequently gains his freedom in British‐controlled Nassau, while Delany’s Henry Blake escapes from slavery only to return to the plantation in order to lead a group to freedom, and later plans a large‐scale rebellion in Cuba. Because the final chapters of Delany’s serialized novel have not been located, we cannot know whether the proposed rebellion proves successful or even whether the complete novel was ever published. What’s clear is that both Delany, who was deeply critical of Stowe, and Douglass, who mostly defended her, were keen to counter her novel’s suggestion that a propensity for manly self‐assertion was an inherently European trait.
If Douglass and Delany were revising Stowe’s narrative to foreground black independence, a number of proslavery authors sought to rewrite her book from a different perspective altogether. That is not to say that these “anti‐Uncle Tom” novels have no common ground with Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its imitators – their political purposes may have been at odds, but the two discourses shared a representational repertoire of racial stereotypes and stock characters, including the gentle white lady, the loving mammy, and the mischievous black child.5 Indeed, the happy plantation life that Stowe renders in the opening segments of her novel seems quite like those of her proslavery respondents – while financial exigencies and a visit from a slave trader destroy Stowe’s idyll, it turns out to be northern abolitionists who threaten those of her counterparts. In Caroline Lee Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854), for instance, an abolitionist interloper agitates among previously contented slaves in an (ultimately thwarted) attempt to prod them into rebellion against their white masters. In Mary Eastman’s 1852 novel Aunt Phillis’s Cabin, a young slave named Susan is “seduced off by the Abolitionists” (60) while visiting Boston with her mistress. Not only does Susan’s flight leave her mistress’s sick infant alone in a hotel room, in violation of the proslavery ideal of a loving, mutually obligated plantation family, it eventuates in her own abuse at the hands of her new employers who, despite their avowed antislavery sentiments, treat her terribly. W.L.G. Smith’s Life at the South; or, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” As It Is (1852) features another troublemaking abolitionist, this time a schoolteacher who convinces the titular Uncle Tom to run away; the novel’s happy ending has Tom restored to his plantation home after myriad trials in the North. The Cabin and the Parlor (1852), by J. Thornton Randolph (a pseudonym for the Philadelphian Charles Jacobs Peterson), also features a misguided runaway and a happy return: here the fugitive Cora is rescued from a northern urban mob by a benevolent Virginian and is ultimately restored to a secure enslavement. And when an abolitionist acquires slaves in proslavery fiction, the outcomes are dire. For instance, in John W. Page’s awkwardly titled Uncle Robin, in His Cabin in Virginia, and Tom without One in Boston (1853), the villain is an ostensibly antislavery northerner who, upon acquiring slaves through marriage to a southern woman, sells them for profit with no regard for their feelings or family ties, while the novel’s southern‐born slaveholders look on with disgust. And in Robert Criswell’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” Contrasted with Buckingham Hall (1852), an erstwhile abolitionist who inherits a plantation becomes, over time, an exceedingly cruel master. Abolition, in these narratives, threatens not just the Union or the prosperity of southern whites, but the very slaves it purports to aid.
While romanticized portrayals of plantation life were common in anti‐Uncle Tom fiction, some authors instead granted that slavery was a problematic institution but differed from Stowe in their representations and resolutions. Among the most intriguing of these is Sarah Josepha Hale, a prolific author and the long‐time editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, who viewed the abolitionist movement with suspicion but was also critical of slaveholding society. In response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she expanded and republished her 1827 novel Northwood in 1852; the new ending has Sidney and Annie Romilly planning to educate their slaves for eventual manumission and emigration to Liberia – those, that is, “whose services are not needed to keep up the present income of the estate” (1852: 404). Hale concludes the book by asserting that “Liberia has solved the enigma of ages. The mission of American slavery is to Christianize Africa” (408), thus bringing the providential argument for slavery full circle. Hale’s 1853 novel Liberia, as its title implies, also advocates emigration to western Africa, though here she first has her slave characters fail miserably at self‐sufficiency within the United States, in case any of her readers conceived of domestic emancipation as a viable solution to the problem of slavery. Hale’s Liberian outcome bears less resemblance to Stowe’s than would initially appear, however. Whereas Stowe has George Harris choose emigration from a position of strength – he is confident that he can succeed in a white‐majority society, but wishes instead to align himself with his mother’s race – Hale moves her characters to Africa because their improvidence and general incompetence render them uncompetitive at home. In Africa, as she sees it, they thrive in the face of weaker (native) competition and seize the opportunity to build their own nation – one premised on a cohesive racial identity that, crucially, leaves unchallenged what Hale saw as the foundational whiteness of American society.
This attention to national concerns pervades anti‐Uncle Tom literature, which framed itself as a bulwark against the dissolution that its authors felt abolition portended. Just as abolitionists threatened the plantation’s affective economy within these novels, so did they threaten the country as a whole. And, because anti‐Uncle Tom authors shared with Stowe not just a reservoir of beliefs about racial identity, but also a fundamental faith in the capacity of narrative to shape cultural and social perspectives, they used their novels as a means of arguing for national coherence via an acceptance of slavery, at least for the time being. Hentz put the matter clearly at the end of The Planter’s Northern Bride: “should the burning lava of anarchy and servile war roll over the plains of the South, and bury, under its fiery waves, its social and domestic institutions, it will not suffer alone. The North and the South are branches of the same parent tree, and the lightning bolt that shivers the one, must scorch and wither the other” (1854, vol. 2: 281). Born in Massachusetts but living in the South, Hentz perhaps saw herself as especially well positioned to make such an argument through a protagonist who, though northern‐born and educated in antislavery principles, marries a slaveholder and comes to embrace the institution. In a neat reversal of Stowe’s strategy of conversion through identification with suffering others, Hentz’s Eulalia gets to know slavery (from the point of view of the master class, that is) and decides that it’s just fine after all.
The end of legal slavery in 1865 hardly signaled the end of American racial exploitation; as Saidiya Hartman has provocatively written, “emancipation appears less the grand event of liberation than a point of transition between modes of servitude and racial subjection” (1997: 6). Neither did 1865 mark the end of the literature of slavery. A detailed consideration of these later offerings is beyond the scope of this essay, except to note the endeavor’s remarkable longevity. Autobiographical narratives, penned or recounted orally by former slaves, would continue to emerge for several decades after the end of the Civil War; meanwhile, the postbellum plantation novel offered a sanitized and romanticized version of antebellum life not unlike what we see in the anti‐Uncle Tom subgenre. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1885) would restage antislavery awakening as a white boy’s coming of age story, even as African American authors such as Frances E. Watkins Harper, in her 1892 novel Iola Leroy, revisited slavery and Reconstruction (not to mention the mulatta heroine) as a means of exploring the potential of social activism to ameliorate the wrongs of the past.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin itself has had a vibrant afterlife, too. Not only did Tom shows persist well into the twentieth century, but the narrative was adapted into various film versions, including at least nine in the silent era, and was endlessly referenced and reproduced in popular culture, including cartoons, Abbot and Costello and Shirley Temple films, the Our Gang television series, and the Broadway musical The King and I (1951) and film of the same name (1956). More incisively, Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976: 8) begins with an irreverent riff on Stowe, here called “Naughty Harriet,” who, the narrator asserts, “borrowed”/stole the stories of slaves like Josiah Henson. Like Reed’s novel, a number of works, often termed neo‐slave narratives, have reformulated the antebellum genre for new eras and audiences – for example, Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990) and Oxherding Tale (1995). The topic’s staying power becomes even more evident when we consider that Toni Morrison’s landmark novel Beloved (1987), which bracingly reimagines the fugitive slave mother as an infanticidal, haunted, and ultimately redeemed figure, is among the most widely assigned books in postsecondary American literature courses. More recently, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), a revisioning of the slave narrative that renders its titular escape route as a literal entity, was a New York Times bestseller and won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. It would appear that the literature of American slavery still has important aesthetic, ideological, and cultural work to do.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 12 (THE LITERATURE OF ANTEBELLUM REFORM); CHAPTER 15 (GENDER AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF ANTEBELLUM SLAVE NARRATIVES); CHAPTER 16 (ANTEBELLUM ORATORY).