WASHINGTON

The Vile Wretch in Petticoats

1851

IN WASHINGTON, SOUTH CAROLINA’S REPRESENTATIVES IN CONGRESS had something new to rage about that was far more insidious than abolitionist petitions.

On June 5, 1851, the National Era, an antislavery newspaper based in Washington, published the opening chapter of a serialized novel, the first of forty-one weekly installments. It began innocuously enough. “Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two gentlemen were sitting alone over their wine, in a well-furnished dining parlor, in the town of P—, in Kentucky.” The author quickly qualified her use of the plural “gentlemen,” stating that one of the men, “when critically examined, did not seem strictly speaking, to come under the species.” She identified him only as Haley but in short order revealed him to be a slave trader in the midst of haggling over the purchase of a slave named Tom.

By the time the last installment appeared, on April 1, 1852, the serialized chapters alone had drawn some fifty thousand readers, many of whom had come to eagerly look forward to Fridays, when each new edition of the National Era would arrive. The complete novel, titled Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Or, Life Among the Lowly (in promoting the serial, the newspaper used the subtitle “The Man That Was a Thing”), was published March 20, 1852, and made its forty-year-old author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, a literary sensation adored in the North, reviled in the South. Its central character was noble God-fearing Tom, acquired by a cruel planter named Simon Legree, who beat his enslaved laborers, took female slaves as lovers, and ultimately ordered his overseers to whip Tom to death. The book also depicted the separation of enslaved families and the tragic consequences, as when one Black woman, Cassy, told Tom how, having previously been separated from a son and daughter, she killed her new baby rather than face another separation. At the time of publication the book’s portrayal of the sheer brutality of slavery proved revelatory to many readers and added fuel to the already surging antislavery movement.

Reaction in the South was harsh and immediate. Louisa McCord, an essayist herself and wife of a planter, dismissed it angrily as “one mass of fanatical bitterness and foul misrepresentation wrapped in the garb of Christian Charity.” Suddenly, owning the book or being seen reading or carrying it became a dangerous pursuit for Southerners and visiting Northerners alike. Stowe had delivered perhaps the ultimate insult to the South’s honor, attacking an institution that decades of proslavery writing by James Hammond, the fire-eater Edmund Ruffin, and others had positioned as a thing of beauty and beneficence. That Stowe was a woman made the sting all the more pronounced, drawing forth a barely disguised misogyny. Some of the book’s most persistent and aggressive detractors were Hammond’s closest friends, including novelist Simms and George Frederick Holmes, a former president of the University of Mississippi. In an invitation to Holmes to write a review, one Southern editor specified, “I would have the review as hot as hell fire, blasting and searing the reputation of the vile wretch in petticoats who could write such a volume.”

Immediately after the book version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin emerged, Simms and others responded with a barrage of proslavery, anti-abolitionist novels, well over a dozen, that took the themes of Stowe’s story, notably the separation of enslaved families, and contorted them in ways that verged on the comical. One author, Charles Jacobs Peterson, paradoxically a Philadelphia-bred writer and editor, in that same year published The Cabin and the Parlor, which laid the blame for separation at the feet of financiers in New York, specifically a firm named “Mssrs. Skin and Flint” whose predatory behavior forced a planter to sell his slaves. Another novel, with the cudgel-like title Uncle Robin, in his Cabin in Virginia, and Tom Without One in Boston, blamed slave separations on Northern abolitionists who cajoled slaves into escaping their plantations, thereby leaving them vulnerable to capture and resale by unscrupulous slave traders. The traders were Yankees. Another book, Aunt Phillis’s Cabin, carved an especially contorted path, likewise blaming abolitionists for causing slaves to flee, but with the twist that once the fugitives were captured and returned to their plantations, their presence proved so disruptive that the loyal stay-behinds forced their masters to sell them in order to restore harmony.

These did little to blunt the effect of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In book form, it sold three hundred thousand copies in just the first three months after its publication. In the North, it confirmed readers’ worst imaginings about the true nature of slavery; in the South, it was spurned as yet another Northern failure to understand how slavery benefited the enslaved themselves by providing for all their needs, every day and every night, all year long, regardless of the nation’s overall economic condition.

What the North truly failed to grasp, however, was the degree to which the proslavery writers like James Hammond had succeeded in persuading themselves and their peers that slavery had indeed produced this best of all societies, and that anyone who condemned the institution of slavery slandered the South and the chivalry in particular. Southern society had worked out a mechanism for dealing with such offenses between individuals, the Code Duello. But no such mechanism existed to address the hurt and shame inflicted on the South as a whole by Harriet Beecher Stowe and her abolitionist allies.

It was here that resentment dwelled. Not yet hatred—at least not the pure intractable hatred that allowed men to imagine armies marching across the landscape.

But close.