Open Wound: The Long View of Race in America

The War of the Cabins: The Struggle for the Soul of the "Common Man"

130 Chapter 10 The War of the Cabins The Struggle for the Soul of the “Common Man” In the 1850s, no president, no general, no public figure was more controversial than Harriet Beecher Stowe. The southern poet William Gilmore Simms charged that she projected “a malignity so remarkable that the petticoat lifts of itself, and we see the hoof of the beast under the table.”1 But a correspondent for an abolitionist newspaper, watching a theatrical performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, exclaimed, “O, it was a sight worth seeing, those ragged, coatless men and boys (the very material of which mobs are made) cheering the strongest and sublimist anti-slavery sentiment.”2 More than anyone else, Stowe brought the antislavery message out of the shadows into the cultural mainstream. Stowe has always presented a problem to her biographers: a housewife with seven children who wrote one of the most popular and influential works in history. As she described in a letter to her sister-in-law, Sarah Beecher, “I have been called off at least a dozen times; once for the fish man to buy a catfish; once to see a man who had brought me some barrels of apples; once to see a book man; then to Mrs. Upham to see about a drawing I promised to make for her; then to nurse the baby . . . ; then to the kitchen to make chowder for dinner; and now I am at it again, for nothing but deadly determination enables me to write.”3 But Stowe presents an even harder problem for anyone trying to understand the relationship between culture and power. At the time her novel appeared, the antislavery message in the North had rarely reached mass audiences.4 The respectable norm of the day was that the disputes disrupting the republic were “sectional,” North versus South; or “constitutional,” states’ rights versus federal authority; or “racial,” white versus black. But to say that the root cause of all these disputes was slavery, and that it was cruel and un-Christian, was to be branded an abolitionist, a “race-mixer,” and to become a solitary voice crying in the wilderness. Despite the draconian Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, what ordinary Americans most often heard was that the plantation was a place of romance, certainly an improvement over northern factories and mines; and that blacks were banjo-strumming clowns who would scarcely feel the weight of oppression if indeed they had ever experienced any.5 In a matter of months, Stowe moved the antislavery message from church bulletins to the saloons, the street corners, and the parlors of America.6 To understand this sudden widening of the slavery debate, one needs to consider how hegemonic belief systems evolve. Commonly, only people with great resources can popularize their views and displace or marginalize the views of others. Governing classes possess the resources for shaping the prevailing outlook of a society.7 They can define orthodoxy and heresy, and determine which are proper topics of conversation in polite society and which are considered irrelevant or bizarre. They can define even the language, the phraseology, that a person must use to be understood or even heard. Class hegemony is achieved when most people do not perceive the limitations imposed by the prevailing belief system of their society, either its restrictions on subject matter or the biases inherent in the words that they use. Instead, one normally assumes that the discussion of everyday issues is framed by self-evident truths. The Hegemony of the Racial Defense By the 1850s, the racial doctrines that sustained planters and their northern partners had become hegemonic. Many people in antebellum America did not like all or much of the cotton establishment’s agenda, but they could not challenge what appeared to be the irrefutable arguments that sustained it. So they piggybacked—endorsed the national racial consensus—but tried to bend it to their own purposes. Thus, in 1847, when the United States was poised to the war of the cabins 131 take over a large part of Mexico, Representative David Wilmot advanced what became known as the Wilmot Proviso, which would have prohibited the extension of slavery into territory where it had been illegal under Mexican law. It was a free-soil amendment wrapped in the language of racial orthodoxy: “I have no squeamish sensitivity upon the subject of slavery, no morbid sympathy for the slave. I plead...