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In the 18th and early 19th centuries, there were a few voices calling for the end of slavery, but the call for the compulsory abolition of slavery fell on fertile ground only with the religious revival's moral urgency to end sinful practices in the North of the 1820s. The abolitionist movement reached the crusading stage in the 1830 under the leadership of Theodore Dwight Weld, "the most mobbed man" in America, the brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan, and William Lloyd Garrison. At first, abolitionists, widely regarded as a lunatic fringe, caused riots and mob violence wherever they went. After all, in the common mind, slavery was an interest, "concentrated, persistent, practical, and testily defensive," while antislavery was a mere sentiment, "diffuse, sporadic, moralistic and tentative." Spurred by the Christian evangelical fervor of the era, abolitionism began to coalesce from a set of privately held beliefs into a political movement that generated a growing stream of books, pamphlets and petitions Although divided over the means of obtaining their goal, the abolitionists founded The American Anti-Slavery Society (1833), flooded the slave and free states with abolitionist literature, and lobbied in Washington DC for the end of slavery. Writers like John Greenleaf Whittier and speakers such as Wendell Phillips further spread the abolitionist message. As time progressed, anti-slavery societies were founded in every state, then every major city, then in many localities in the North. Here is a list of a few of the major events in the abolitionist movement during the period from the its inception to the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. 1831/01 William Lloyd Garrison begins the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. Nat Turner leads revolt of about 60 slaves in which fifty-five whites die and slaveholders are aroused Laws are passed in most slave states further restricting the movement of free and slave persons of color. 1833 American Anti-Slavery Society founded 1836 Anti-abolition riots in Cincinnati 1837 Congress enacts a gag law to suppress debate on the slavery issue 1838 Pennsylvania Hall, the newly constructed abolitionist meeting and lecture hall, in Philadelphia burned down May 17, just a few days after it opens. 1839 Sarah Grimke, Angelina Grimke Weld, Theodore Dwight Weld (husband of the great abolitionist orator Angelina Grimke) write American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. Selling 100,000 copies in the first year, the book is a compilation of news stories about slavery, ads for run-away slaves, ads for slaves for sale, and the like from at least 20,000 Southern newspapers that the sisters searched for months. A catalog of horror stories about slavery drawn entirely from accounts in the Southern press, American Slavery As It Is is an instant best seller and touches a raw moral nerve in the country. 1840 The World's Anti-Slavery Convention opens at London. African American abolitionist Charles Remond, William Lloyd Garrison, and others refuse to be seated as delegates because the convention refuses to seat women as delegates March 1, 1842 In The Prigg v. Pennsylvania the Supreme Court rules that the owner of a fugitive slave may recover him under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, overturning an 1826 Pennsylvania law that made kidnapping a slave a felony. The ruling says that although an owner cannot be stopped from recovering a slave, it also says that state authorities are under no obligation to help the slaveowner. January 10, 1844 The law in the District of Columbia, relative to fugitive slaves, compels a Negro under arrest to prove that he was born free. 1845-1849 In a cost cutting measure Sarah Polk, wife of the President, replaces White House servants with slaves and rearranged the White House Basement into slave quarters. 1847 Escaped slave Frederick Douglas, 30, begins publication at Rochester, N.Y., of an abolitionist newspaper, The North Star. The Massachusetts Antislavery Society had published Douglas's' autobiography 2 years before. From the sale of the book and from lecture fees in Britain, Ireland, and the United States Douglass bought his freedom. 1847-48 The Virginia Legislature enacts a law (Sess. Acts 1847-8, ch. 10, § 24,) that states "any free person who, by speaking or writing, shall maintain that owners have not right of property in their slaves, shall be punishable by confinement in the jail, not more than twelve months, and by fine not exceeding five hundred dollars." 1850 The Fugitive Slave Law passes, signaling the end of the Missouri Compromise. The Law compels all government officials to help apprehend escaped slaves, even those in free-states. Anyone who helped hide slaves or who aided fugitive slaves in any way could be prosecuted under this law. The slave catching business booms. Since the testimony of fugitives was not admitted as evidence, any black person could be accused of being a run-away slave and sold into slavery. Corrupt judges required very little proof that the accused was truly a slave. Often all the evidence a judge needed was the testimony of the slave catcher. Slave catchers roamed the whole continent looking for black people. Anyone who interfered with the enforcement of these laws was subject to punishment. 1849 Maryland slave Harriet Tubman, 29, escapes to the North and begins a career as "conductor" on the Underground Railway. Eventually, Tubman will make 19 trips back to the South to free upward of 300 slaves, including her aged parents whom she will bring North in 1857. 1851 - 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe, scion of one of America's most distinguished religious family, serializedUncle Tom's Cabin, a sentimental novel with explicit Christian lessons, to rivet the nation's attention to the institutional evils of slavery, in The National Era, with the last installment published April 1, 1852. March 25, 1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin published in book form by J. P. Jewett & Co, Boston. 160,000 copies sold in 11 weeks (America only), with an estimated royalty of $10,300 after 3 months in print, the largest sum ever received by any author, either English or American, from the sale of a single work in so short a period. Before the end of 1852 it had been translated into 22 languages including French, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Swedish, Dutch, Flemish, German, Polish, and Magyar. It even was placed on the Pope's list of prohibited books. June 29, 1852 Henry Clay, the great conciliator, dies believing he has kept the Union together, not aware of the storm which will be galvanized by Uncle Tom's Cabin. There is no doubt that he would have been happy in the belief that it was in the way of gradual and peaceful extinction. With him, it was always the Union before state rights and before slavery. Unlike Lincoln, he had not the clear vision to see that the republic could not endure half slave and half free. He believed that the South, appealing to the compromises of the Constitution, would sacrifice the Union before it would give up slavery, and in fear of this menace he begged the North to conquer its prejudices. We are not liable to overrate his influence as a compromising pacificator from 1832 to 1852. History will no doubt say that it was largely due to him that the war on the Union was postponed to a date when its success was impossible. March 6, 1857 The Dred Scott decision by U.S. Supreme Court held, 6-3, that a slave did not become free when taken into a free state, Congress could not bar slavery from a territory, and blacks could not be citizens. 1859 The last ship to bring slaves to the United States, the Clothilde, arrives in Mobile Bay, Alabama. References The Story of Uncle Tom's Cabin) The page has been left in since it was a reference. The link has been disabled because it no longer functions. Sunny, Oct. 14, 2001) |
Harriet Beecher born June 14, 1811 in Litchfield, Connecticut, as the seventh of nine children of a famous Congregational minister, abolitionist, and founder of the American Bible Society Lyman Beecher, was an early convert to Christianity. Her mother, Roxana Foote Beecher, died when Harriet was 5 years old, and so Harriet grew close to her older sister, Catherine. When her father became president of Lane Theological Seminary in Ohio, she moved with him. In Ohio, Catherine founded the Western Female Institute, one of the earliest school for girls in the country, where Harriet taught from 1834 until her marriage. Her first publication was a geography for children, issued under her sister's name in 1833.
As Elizabeth Ammons points out in her preface to the Norton edition, if Beecher had been a man, she probably would have followed in her father's footsteps and become a minister, thereby depriving the world of one its most influential literary works ever written. As it was, she was also wife and sister to preachers. It was a theological age, and in the Beecher family theology was the supreme interest. Theology filled their letters, as it filled their lives. Not only was the age theological, but it was transitional, and characterized by intense intellectual activity, accompanied by emotional excitement. She maintained that it was her Christian passion which compelled her to write her novel.
In Ohio, she met Calvin Stowe, a professor of Biblical Literature at Lane and clergyman who fervently opposed slavery. He was nine years her senior and the widower of her dear friend, Eliza Tyler. They married in 1836 and eventually had seven children, four of whom died during her lifetime. Samuel Charles, "Charley" died at eighteen months from cholera and an older son, Henry, drowned while a student at Dartmouth College. Years later, their son Frederick, an alcoholic from the age of sixteen, died, never really recovering from the wounds he sustained at Gettysburg in the Civil War nor being able to cope with his mother's success. Daughter Georgiana, married to an Episcopal priest and a mother, died in her forties, having lost her health and mind to morphine addiction. Twin daughters, Eliza and Isabella, and a son, Charles Edward lived and were comforts to their parents.
While living in Ohio, they sheltered fugitive slaves in their home. Friends to slaves and slaveowners in neighboring pro-slavery Kentucky alike, the Stowe's came to understand the human dimensions of slavery both from the slaves point of view and from the slaveholders point of view. During this period, Harriet wrote mostly articles for periodicals for a modest fee to supplement the family finances.
In 1850, Stowe accepted a teaching position at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. In Maine, Harriet would continue to write honing her writing skill as well as contributing to the family's income. During their move from Ohio to Maine, they passed through Boston at the height of the public furor over the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, a law hateful to Northerners not only because it was cruel and degrading, but because it was seen to be a move for nationalizing slavery.
Harriet set about writing a polemical novel illustrating the moral responsibility of the entire nation for the cruel system. She forwarded the first episodes to Dr. Bailey, editor of the Washington anti-slavery weekly, The National Era. He agreed to pay $300 for the work, which she initially thought would run to a few episodes. Eventually, Harriet wrote a novel that was published it in 40 installments. The suspenseful episodes were read weekly to families and gatherings throughout the land. Despite The National Era's small circulation, limited to an audience already sympathetic to abolitionism, the installments reached a large audience as worn copies were passed from family to family. Although many Northerners considered slavery a political institution for which they had no personal responsibility, Uncle Tom's Cabin was becoming a national sensation.
The episodes attracted the attention of Boston publisher, J. P. Jewett, who published the work in March of 1852. Uncle Tom's Cabin immediately broke all sales records of the day, selling half-a-million copies by 1857. Uncle Tom's Cabin made her an international celebrity and a wealthy woman. Stowe's novel created such a controversy that when she was introduced to President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, he is said to have greeted her with the words: "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!" Her literary success enabled her to meet the rich, famous, and powerful. She met and corresponded with people as varied as Lady Byron, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and George Eliot.
Encouraged by Calvin to establish a writing career, Harriet continued to write while Calvin served as her literary agent in both America and England. Yet, none of her later works were as well received or as influential as Uncle Tom's Cabin. During her life, she wrote poems, travel books, biographical sketches, and children's books, as well as, at least, ten adult novels. For almost thirty years she produced a book a year and through her writing supplemented her husband's modest earnings. Her husband was regarded as a distinguished Biblical scholar, and she persisted in nagging him to write; eventually he published The Origin and History of the Books of the Bible, which was well-received and financially successful.
She lived ten years after her husband died, but retired from the limelight, and died in 1896 at the age of 85, in Hartford Connecticut.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
First printed as a serial in The National Era, an abolitionist paper, Uncle Tom's Cabin, was later printed as a book in 1852. On the first day, 3,000 copies of the book were sold, within a few days ten thousand copies were gone, by the first of April, the book was in its second edition by April 1, and eight presses running day and night were barely able to keep pace with the demand for it. By the end of the 1852, 300,000 copies had been sold in the US alone. Pirated, in 1852 one and a half million copies of the book were sold in Great Britain and the British colonies. Eventually the book was translated into over 20 languages including Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Hungarian, Illyrian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, modern Greek, Russian, Servian, Siamese, Spanish, Swedish, Wallachian, and Welsh.
Initial reviews of the book were mixed. By portraying many plantation owners in a positive light, by reserving onus for slave traders, overseers, and professional whippers, and by emphasizing psychological torment over physical violence, Stowe's work was criticized by some abolitionist for portraying slavery as a benign institution. Indeed, in The Liberator, 26 March 1852, an unsigned letter reads:
The appalling liabilities which constantly impend over such slaves as have "kind and indulgent masters" are thrillingly illustrated in various personal narratives; especially in that of "Uncle Tom," over whose fate every reader will drop the scalding tear, and for whose character the highest reverence will be felt. No insult, no outrage, no suffering could ruffle the Christ-like meekness of his spirit, and shake the steadfastness of his faith. Towards his merciless oppressors, he cherished no animosity, and breathed nothing of retaliation. Like his Lord and Master, he was willing to be "led as a lamb to the slaughter," returning blessing for cursing, and anxious only for the salvation of his enemies. His character is sketched with great power and rare religious perception. It triumphantly exemplifies the nature, tendency and results of CHRISTIAN NON-RESISTANCE. We are curious to know whether Mrs. Stowe is a believer in the duty of non-resistance for the white man, under all possible outrage and peril, as well as for the black man; whether she is for self-defense on her own part, or that of her husband or friends or country, in case of malignant assault, or whether she impartially disarms all mankind in the name of Christ, be the danger or suffering what it may. We are curious to know this, because our opinion of her, as a religious teacher, would be greatly strengthened or lessened, as the inquiry might terminate. That all the slaves at the South ought, "if smitten on the one cheek, to turn the other also"--to repudiate all carnal weapons, shed no blood, "be obedient to their masters," wait for a peaceful deliverance, and abstain for all insurrectionary movements--is every where taken for granted, because the VICTIMS ARE BLACK. They cannot be animated by a Christian spirit, and yet return blow for blow, or conspire for the destruction of their oppressors. They are required by the Bible to put away all wrath, to submit to every conceivable outrage without resistance, to suffer with Christ if they would reign with him. None of their advocates may seek to inspire them to imitate the example of the Greeks, the Poles, the Hungarians, our Revolutionary sires; for such teaching would evince a most unchristian and blood-thirsty disposition. For them there is no hope of heaven, unless they give the most liberal interpretations to the non-resisting injunctions contained in the Sermon on the Mount, touching the treatment of enemies. It is for them, though despoiled of all their rights and deprived of all protection, to "threaten not, but to commit the keeping of their souls to God in well-doing, as unto a faithful Creator." Nothing can be plainer than that such conduct is obligatory upon them; and when, through the operations of divine grace, they are enabled to manifest a spirit like this, it is acknowledged to be worthy of great commendation, as in the case of "Uncle Tom." But, for those whose skin is of a different complexion, the case is materially altered. When they are spit upon and buffeted, outraged and oppressed, talk not then of a non-resisting Saviour--it is fanaticism! Talk not of overcoming evil with good--it is madness! Talk not of peacefully submitting to chains and stripes--it is base servility! Talk not of servants being obedient to their masters--let the blood of tyrants flow! How is this to be explained or reconciled? Is there one law of submission and non-resistance for the black man, and another law of rebellion and conflict for the white man? When it is the whites who are trodden in the dust, does Christ justify them in taking up arms to vindicate their rights? And when it is the blacks who are thus treated, does Christ require them to be patient, harmless, long-suffering, and forgiving? And are there two Christs?At first, the pro-slavery forces ignored the book. Some southerners even felt that the work was a defense of slavery. But when it became apparent that the work was having a profound effect on the American public opinion, pro-slavery forces unmercifully attacked Stowe and her work. In defense, Harriet wrote A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853) extensively documenting the realities on which the book was based and published a second anti-slavery novel, Dred in 1856.
Abolitionist pamphlets had long been written, newspapers published, books written, speeches and sermons given, lectures on the Lyceum circuit made, and conventions held. Sarah Grimke, Angelina Grimke Weld, and Theodore Weld's American Slavery As It Is (1839), which cataloged horror stories about slavery drawn entirely from accounts in the Southern press, had been an instant best seller and touched a raw moral nerve in the country. Even the degrading requirements of the Fugative Slave Law had not roused public opinion against the institution of slavery. The abolitionist movement had not been able to appeal to the mass of the people and anti-slavery agitation was still restricted to a relatively small group of activists. So what was it about Stowe's work that appealed to such a mass audience?
Drawing on her personal experience with slavery, the antislavery movement, and the underground railroad, Stowe gave slavery a human face. In Cincinnati, she had learned of the humanity of the slave. Negroes were her servants and her students; hunted fugitives applied to her, some of whom she ransomed by her own efforts. Every day she heard new stories of the hunger for freedom, of the ruthless separation of man and wife and mother and child, and of the heroic sufferings of those who ran away from the fearful doom of those "sold down South." At the same time, she had befriended slaveholders in neighboring Kentucky and came to learn of the slaveholder's concerns.
She portrayed slaves and slaveholders alike as both saints and sinners, virtuous and villainous. Tom, the title character was portrayed as a staunch Christian, an honest slave who would never cheat his master or anyone else. Aunt Chloe, Tom's wife, mother of a couple of boisterous boys, and proud cook of the plantation home, was also a committed Christian. The light-skinned George Harris invented a machine which made his master famous. Yet, perhaps the most memorable of the slaves were the slave mothers who tried to protect their children from the evils of slavery, often by risking their lives in the run to freedom with their children so that they could be raised as free men and free women. St. Claire, Tom's benevolent second master and the angelic Eva portrayed the slaveholder at his best, while the sadistic Simon Legree portrayed the slaveholder at his worst.
Emphasizing emotional suffering over physical suffering, Stowe penned a psychological drama and imbued each page with her religious conviction, that all men were created equal in God's sight. By portraying some slave men as being light-skinned enough to pass as white men and who as slaves are expected to react to tyranny with meek forbearance as if they were women, Stowe exposed the emasculating influence of slavery to white men. As a mother who had grieved for her own children, Stowe created an emotional bond between white mothers and slave mothers who lost their children to the auction block.
She described many of the psychological terrors of slavery: escape and pursuit of fugitive slaves; separation of husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters; compulsion of almost white women into prostitution; and repeated rapes of slave women by their masters.
She showed how slavery corrupts both the slave and the slaveholder. A manufacturers grows rich from the invention of his slave, while the slave remains in bondage. The slaveholder has no incentive to produce anything of value because all of his needs and wants will be provided for by his slave, and the slave has no incentive to produce to his highest ability for his work will only serve to enrich another and to forge his chains stronger. In another case, a master rapes a slave woman, corrupting the slave woman, victimizing his wife and destroying the bond of love between him and his wife with his infidelity.
By describing the innocence of children, Stowe explains that prejudice had to be taught and learned by both the slaveholder and the slave. By elucidating the power of the slaveholder to deny that slave marriages are marriages, Stowe shows that the slaves don't even have the power to build responsible family units.
Her romanticized Christian sensibility was much in favor with the audience of her time. One of the most effected pieces of reform literature ever written, Stowe insisted that slavery undermined the morals of whites who tolerated or profited from it as well as degraded the Blacks who were victims of it. She exposed the myth that benevolent masters treated their slaves humanely, asserting that slavery corrupts all who come in contact with the system, people both North and South who trade with slaveholders, slaveholders, slaves, people both North and South who buy products dependent on slave labor. Even kindly slave owners, when desperate for cash, separated and sold slaves "down the river."
The following excerpt, which very much resembles a sermon, is taken from the last chapter of Uncle Tom's Cabin. In it, she urges white Northerners to welcome escaped slaves and treat them with respect:
On the shores of our free states are emerging the poor, shattered, broken remnants of families,--men and women, escaped, by miraculous providences, from the surges of slavery,--feeble in knowledge, and, in many cases, infirm in moral constitution, from a system which confounds and confuses every principle of Christianity and morality. They come to seek a refuge among you; they come to seek education, knowledge, Christianity. What do you owe to these poor, unfortunates, O Christians? Does not every American Christian owe to the African race some effort at reparation for the wrongs that the American nation has brought upon them? Shall the doors of churches and school-houses be shut down upon them? Shall states arise and shake them out? Shall the Church of Christ hear in silence the taunt that is thrown at them, and shrink away from the helpless hand that they stretch out, and shrink away from the courage the cruelty that would chase them from our borders? If it must be so, it will be a mournful spectacle. If it must be so, the country will have reason to tremble, when it remembers that fate of nations is in the hand of the One who is very pitiful, and of tender compassion.
So. for Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe ranks as one of the most influential women of the millennium.
On-line works
Bibliography of Stowe's works
from A Celebration of Women Writers S
References
about.com by Jone Johnson
Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture
Harriet Beecher Stowe: 1811-1896 at Celebration of Women Writers
Third Floor Publishing: Harriet Beecher Stowe: "A Little Bit of a Woman" By Barbara Smith
National Women's Hall of Fame: Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
Domestic Goddess: Harriet Beecher-Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1811-1896.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Story of Uncle Tom's Cabin (link no longer works)
from Liberator Review Unsigned, William Lloyd Garrison, Boston: 26 March 1852
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last updated February 2001