America Aflame (14 page)

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

The last installment of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
appeared in the
National Era
on April 1, 1852. Shortly thereafter, John P. Jewett published the book version. On the first day in print, the book sold three thousand copies; by the end of the year, an unprecedented three hundred thousand copies had been sold. Only the Bible outsold
Uncle Tom's Cabin
that year. The book was translated into dozens of languages. In an era when spin-off products were unheard of,
Uncle Tom's Cabin
became a franchise, inspiring songs, theater performances, dolls, games, even wallpapers, spoons, and candlesticks.

Horace Greeley brought the book with him to read on the train from Boston to Washington, D.C. The tough-minded editor of the
New York Tribune
had supported the Compromise of 1850 and had little patience for abolitionists. Still, as the nation's most prominent journalist, he figured he should read this novel that everyone was talking about. Greeley opened the book as the train pulled out of Boston. By the time he reached Springfield, he was weeping so profusely that he had to get off the train and spend a night to compose himself.

Frederick Douglass read the book and found himself alternately moved and annoyed. Harriet had sought him out for information on plantation life from a slave's perspective as she wrote
Uncle Tom's Cabin
. In her characteristic straightforward manner, she also sparred with Douglass on the issues of religion and colonization. Douglass had attacked the Protestant churches for their silence; Harriet reminded him that most of the abolitionists were fervid evangelicals. She pointed out that her brothers and her father, ministers all, worked on behalf of “poor, oppressed, bleeding Africa.” Harriet was convinced, she wrote to Douglass, that the anti-slavery movement “must and will become a purely religious one. The light will spread in churches, the tone of feeling will rise, Christians North and South will give up all connection with, and take up their testimony against slavery, and thus the work will be done.” By the time Harriet wrote these lines to Douglass in July 1851, he had lost faith that evangelical witness could effect a revolution in public sentiment.
42

Harriet's position on colonization troubled Douglass more. The prospect of freed slaves created a conundrum for Harriet. Like some other anti-slavery proponents, she believed that Africa offered the best solution. There, black men and women would reach their full potential, unencumbered by white interference or prejudice. At the end of
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
Harriet sends escaped slave George Harris and his family (now living in Canada beyond the grasp of the Fugitive Slave Law) to Liberia. In a pointed reply, Douglass informed Harriet, “The truth is, dear madam, we are
here
, and we are likely to remain. Individuals emigrate—nations never. We have grown up with this republic, and I see nothing in her character, or even in the character of the American people as yet, which compels the belief that we must leave the United States.” Douglass, who had lost his faith both in the power of religious conversion to conquer slavery and in the political process to produce just laws, now placed his faith in the American people to live peaceably with free black men and women. Harriet was less optimistic. But Douglass's argument was so persuasive that she later told an anti-slavery society meeting “that if she were to write ‘Uncle Tom' again, she would not send George Harris to Liberia.”
43

The colonization issue, a minor element in the novel, paled in comparison to the larger questions Harriet addressed. After visiting Harriet at home in March 1853, Douglass was impressed by her freedom “from the slightest tinge of affectation.” Their cordial conversation and her willingness to rethink African colonization earned Douglass's respect. For here was a black man at a white woman's home discussing the major political questions of the day on an equal basis, a rarity in itself. He wrote of the encounter in his newspaper, in March 1853, where he called
Uncle Tom's Cabin
“the
master book
of the nineteenth century.… She who had walked with lighted candle, through the darkest and most obscure corners of the slave's soul, and had unfolded the secrets of the slave's lacerated heart, could not be a stranger to us; nor could we make ourselves such to her.” An eloquent endorsement from one who knew of slavery well.
44

Most southerners ignored Harriet's evenhanded treatment of their region. Slavery, after all, was the primary target of the novel, and slavery was primarily a southern institution. The immense popularity of the book caused southern states, even as far north as Maryland, to criminalize possession of a copy, which made the novel even more popular.

Maryland authorities, in April 1857, confiscated a copy of the book at the home of Samuel Green, a free black minister suspected of harboring runaways. They charged Green with “knowingly having in his possession a certain abolition pamphlet called ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin,' of an inflammatory character and calculated to create discontent amongst the colored population of this State.” Green was convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison. The conviction outraged many northerners, not all of them abolitionists, who barraged Maryland's governor, Thomas H. Hicks, with petitions for Green's release to no avail. Hicks's successor, Augustus W. Bradford, released and pardoned Green on the condition that he leave the state in sixty days. Green and his wife emigrated to Canada. Their daughter, Susan, remained enslaved in Missouri until the end of the Civil War. The Greens returned to Maryland after the war, where he taught at a black institution that later became Morgan State University. He died in Baltimore in 1877.
45

Most southern responses to the book were less draconian but equally hostile. Southern literati produced “replies” to the book in novels, plays, and short stories. These works typically emphasized the paternalistic relationship between master and servant. None came close to matching the popularity of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, which infuriated southerners all the more.

Southern critics adopted two strategies: one to attack Harriet personally, the other to question the veracity of the book (though it was a work of fiction). They criticized Harriet for broaching the subject of slavery and the related topics of miscegenation, rape, and pedophilia. They called her “Harriet ‘Breeches' Stowe,” as her discussion of such delicate topics had unsexed her. George Frederick Holmes, a prominent southern writer, composed a lengthy review of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
in the
Southern Literary Messenger
, the region's leading literary journal. Holmes explained the consequences of violating gender proscriptions: “Where a writer of the softer sex manifests … a shameless disregard of truth and of those amenities which so peculiarly belong to her sphere of life, we hold that she has forfeited the claim to be considered a lady, and with that claim all exemption from the utmost stringency of critical punishment.”
46

Holmes next turned to the book itself. He admitted that such men as Legree and Haley (a slave trader) existed in the South. But while Harriet attributed their character to the evil inherent in slavery, Holmes argued that such depraved people existed everywhere, regardless of slavery. “Slavery only furnishes the occasion and determines the forms of the brutality; it neither generates it, nor would its abolition extirpate it.… There are worse Haleys in the large cities than on the Ohio River.” In fact, Holmes continued, “the evil assigned to slavery is equally or still more incident to societies where slavery does not exist.”
47

What exercised Holmes in particular was Harriet's use of Christianity to bind her characters and themes together. Holmes regretted that northerners used religion “as a common lure of deception to tempt the unreflecting favor of the populace to every scheme of anarchy or delusion.” These false disciples “all claim to speak as the oracles of heaven, and as special messengers entrusted with the authority of Christ.” Such assertions “may be legitimately regarded as presumptive evidence of unchristian motives and diabolical purposes.”
48

The international fame of the book also irked southerners and further isolated them from the humanitarian mainstream of the era. The
Southern Literary Messenger
confronted not only an unruly authoress but also a host of respected European publications that praised the novel and invariably used the occasion to condemn slavery and the South. As the
Messenger
's editor complained in January 1853, “From the
Revue des Deux Mondes
and the
Allgemeine Zeitung
down to the most insignificant journal … this miserable tissue of falsehoods and abominations has been highly commended and American slaveholders have been denounced as monsters of oppression.” The British reaction to the novel particularly cut the writer to the quick. If any journals should understand the role of deference and social hierarchy, it would be the high-toned British publications. But “in England, the assaults upon us have been peculiarly malignant. All classes and conditions of the English people—every shade of political sentiment and every tinge of religious faith—are found to agree to least in one thing—abhorrence, real or assumed, of negro slavery.” The editor assigned this attitude to the desire of the British to break up the Union.
49

Charley's death came to have a lengthy life beyond his tiny grave in Cincinnati. A mother could never get over the loss of a child; but Harriet possessed the talent to channel her grief into a cause greater than herself. As she wrote to a friend who had asked her how she came to write the novel, Harriet explained that she bore seven children, “the most beautiful and most loved of whom lies buried near my Cincinnati residence. It was at his dying bed and at his grave that I learned what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her. In those depths of sorrow which seemed to me immeasurable, it was my only prayer to God that such anguish might not be suffered in vain. There were circumstances about his death of such peculiar bitterness, of what seemed almost cruel suffering that I felt I could never be consoled for it unless this crushing of my own heart might enable me to work out some great good to others.”
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So it happened that a mother's grief became a nation's cause.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
did not cause the Civil War, but it touched the consciences of millions, and it put a face on slavery, and a soul on black people. The book did not transform northerners into abolitionists upon the reading. But it did cause people to think more deeply and more personally about the implications of slavery for family, society, and Christianity. The more southerners thrashed about trying to denounce, parody, or dismiss the book, the more impotent they seemed. The generation of southerners who grew to adulthood by the middle of the nineteenth century, who had inherited slavery from their grandfathers and fathers, who earned a substantial living from slavery, wondered how to protect an institution by which the world increasingly defined and judged them. Harriet had written that slavery was a national problem. But it was really the South that confronted the great dilemma of inheritance.

The failed revolutions of Europe provided an ominous background for the growing tensions over slavery. The agitation against the Fugitive Slave Law with states and citizens overriding its provisions, and the presumption of abolitionist ministers that individual interpretations of the Bible transcended the law of the land, resembled, to southerners, the Parisian mobs that turned promising republican movements into circuses of anarchy. Northerners increasingly viewed southerners as ancien régime despots intent on expanding their authoritarian reach and destroying the flame of individual liberty wherever it existed. Images, no matter how divergent from the reality of things, can quickly become facts, absent forces and events to the contrary.

The correct balance between individual freedom and collective order is the dilemma of democratic societies, of which the United States of America was then the world's sole representative. The brief and bloody revolutions of Europe failed to attain, let alone maintain, that balance. As the franchise in America expanded to include all white adult males in most states, and as an evangelical democracy and an evangelical religion spread across the land, some citizens wondered whether these centrifugal forces would ultimately tear apart the Union. In other nations, the institutions of Church and State held individual impulses in check. In America, these institutions existed, but their very nature encouraged individuality. Reading the popular literature of the era, including
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, Americans looked to the family as the basic building block in their democratic society. Morality, cooperation, and education received their foundation in the family setting. In a highly mobile society, however, where individual family members picked up and left with alacrity, the stress on family life was great.

What Harriet Beecher Stowe did not appreciate when she chastised Americans for loving the Union more than the slave was that for many of her fellow citizens, the Union symbolized not only the precious legacy of the Revolutionary era but also stability and safety in a rapidly changing society. The Union, in fact, was the only constant holding the expanding nation together. Many years before the present crisis, in 1838, the young lawyer Abraham Lincoln had wrestled with this dilemma of how to balance individual freedom and collective order, concluding that without the latter, the former could not exist. Living on the frontier and well aware of the rising religious and sectional strife, he believed that the Union and its sacred documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, must transcend individual preferences in order for the American experiment to survive. “Reverence for laws,” he declared, should be “the
political religion
of the nation.” Such reverence was the only prospect for securing the legacy of the Revolution: “Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to his posterity swear by the blood of the Revolution never to violate in the least particular the laws of the country, and never to tolerate their violation by others.”
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