Stowe in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, F

“Harriet Beecher Stowe” (1898)

M [261] “Harriet Beecher Stowe” (1898) Paul Laurence Dunbar By 1896, the year of Stowe’s death, the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) had gained a considerable reputation, befriended by Frederick Douglass and praised by one of the most influential white critics, William Dean Howells. In a lengthy review of Dunbar’s second book of poetry , Majors and Minors (1895), Howells described him as a poet of “fresh and direct authority.”1 Dunbar’s versatility included writing poems in dialect as well as what Howells called “American English.” Some African Americans felt that Dunbar’s dialect poetry perpetuated the plantation myth, a pervasive idea that life in the antebellum South had been better for both masters and slaves. Recent scholars, however, have suggested that Dunbar’s poems subverted this plantation myth at a time when repression of blacks was omnipresent , reminding readers of a major reason for the Civil War: the horrific realities of the slavery system. As historian David Blight has noted, “By 1900 the flame of emancipationist memory still burned, but it lit isolated enclaves in a darkening age of racial antagonism.”2 In many poems, Dunbar celebrated abolitionist leaders for their efforts, implicitly calling for full emancipation for African Americans in the aftermath of the failure of Reconstruction. Dunbar’s sonnet to Stowe, which affirms the central role that Uncle Tom’s Cabin played in the struggle for freedom and justice, was first published in the Century Magazine on 6 November 1898. harriet beecher stowe She told the story, and the whole world wept At wrongs and cruelties it had not known But for this fearless woman’s voice alone. She spoke to consciences that long had slept: Her message, Freedom’s clear reveille, swept From heedless hovel to complacent throne. Command and prophecy were in the tone, And from its sheath the sword of justice leapt. Paul Laurence Dunbar, ca. 1900. Dayton Metro Library. Paul Laurence Dunbar [263] Around two peoples swelled a fiery wave, But both came forth transfigured from the flame. Blest be the hand that dared be strong to save, And blest be she who in our weakness came— Prophet and priestess! At one stroke she gave A race to freedom, and herself to fame. Notes 1. William Dean Howells, “Life and Letters,” Harper’s Weekly, 27 June 1896, p. 630. 2. David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 345. Paul Laurence Dunbar, “Harriet Beecher Stowe,” Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 57 (1898): 61. ...