Whitewashing Uncle Tom's Cabin: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists Respond to Stowe

Introduction: The Personal Becomes the Project

xv Introduction The Personal Becomes the Project F ew books have had more impact upon the history of the United States and, consequently, on more American lives than Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Few books have evoked such powerful emotional responses—and few continue, scores of years later, to do so. One has only to mention Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a faculty lounge or classroom of any American university to provoke a flurry of strident responses, often from those who have never read it: some will assume that because Uncle Tom’s Cabin attacked slavery, it must contain no racist elements; some familiar with a particularly disturbing racist caricature or scene in the book will argue that it has no redeeming value socially, historically, or literarily. Both these assumptions would be wrong. Some who have stumbled over its slave characters’ dialect or felt swamped by its sentimental, melodramatic tone simply dismiss Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a “bad book,” undeserving of their further reading time. This reaction, too, is regrettably shortsighted. The first American novel to sell more than a million copies, Uncle Tom’s Cabin incited an entire reading public to extol it, debate it, berate it, weep over its pages. Some were moved to compassion; others, to violence. One enraged reader sent Stowe the severed ear of one of his slaves. Published soon after the passage of the infamous Compromise of 1850 and its constituent Fugitive Slave Law, Uncle Tom’s Cabin fanned the firestorm that surrounded slavery. Abolitionists, who had viewed the Compromise as a cowardly capitulation to the South, rightly heralded the novel as a mighty stroke for their cause. Slaveholding Southerners, protesting what they saw as the novel’s excesses, inaccuracies, and misunderstandings, took offense at Stowe’s portrayal of their xvi Whitewashing Uncle Tom’s Cabin way of life. In her scathing review of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Louisa McCord, the mid–nineteenth century’s leading Southern woman of letters, accused Stowe of both ignorance and inhumanity, since it is a cruel task to disturb [the slave] in the enjoyment of that life to which God has destined him. He basks in the sunshine, and is happy. Christian slavery, in its full development, free from fretting arrogance and galling bitterness of abolition interference, is the brightest sunbeam which Omniscience has destined for his existence. (120) McCord employs here what I define throughout this book a “theology of whiteness,” a framework that manipulates religious language and ideology to support the economic interests of a white patriarchal culture, including the creation of a deity in its own image: white, male, indifferent to injustice, and zealous in punishing transgressions across the racial, gender, and class lines it has drawn.1 Positioning “God” as the chief creator and defender of slavery, and white slaveholders as innocent, McCord suggests that whites do not oppress enslaved blacks; they are not pursuing economic profit but merely obeying what “Omniscience” has “destined” for slaves’ “enjoyment.” “Arrogan[t]” abolitionists, therefore, challenge divine authority by opposing slavery. With a few exceptions, particularly in the border states of Kentucky, Tennessee , and North Carolina, regions whose economies did not depend on slavery , the South generally received the book with hostility. Angry townspeople in Mobile, Alabama, harassed a bookseller who dared to display Uncle Tom’s Cabin in his window and chased him out of town. Students at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville held book burnings. A Maryland court sentenced a free black found with a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and abolition materials on his person to ten years in prison.2 Reflecting this acrimony, most reviews of the book in Southern publications could best be classified as tirades, such as George Holmes’s assessment in the October 1852 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger: Every holier purpose of our nature is misguided, every charitable sympathy betrayed, every loftier sympathy polluted . . . and every patriotic feeling outraged by [Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s] criminal prostitution of the high functions of the imagination to the pernicious intrigues of sectional animosity, and to the petty calumnies of willful slander. Introduction xvii Holmes exemplifies here rhetoric that I term “theopolitical,” a word I have coined in this book to describe the way in which antebellum proslavery advocates continually weave their interpretations of Judeo-Christian scripture and theology into their political arguments as one of the key defenses of slavery, casting it as...