Violence and Sacrificial Displacement in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred

RICHARD BOYD Violence and Sacrificial Displacement in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred In the fall of 1 856, the anti-slavery periodical, the Boston Liberator , reported that a wealthy white slaveowner by the name of G. W. Vandell had purportedly uncovered a plot among his African-American slaves to murder the white populace of Fayette County, Tennessee and then to proceed to Memphis, where they would be met by co-conspirators with additional weapons. The most frightening discovery for the vigilance committee investigating Vandell's report was the "fact" that the incipient rebellion "was not confined to this particular neighborhood , but that they [the slaves] expected to act in concert with various others in the surrounding counties and States."1 Indeed, as the Boston Liberator and otherperiodicals ofthe day would make clear on a repeated basis, reports alleging the existence ofplans for slave revolts dominated the popular consciousness throughout 1856 (Wish 206).2 Labelled by the historian Harvey Wish as the "slave insurrection panic of 1856," pro and anti-slavery papers took turns blaming the other side for the violence which all believed to be imminent. The New York Tribune would, for example, declare: "Let the South with her growing insurrections look to it. . . . These last suppressed insurrections grew out of the discussions on Kansas. . . . The manacles of the slave must be stricken off." And although this was by no means an unjustifiable position to assume toward the institution of slavery, the important thing to recognize about the Tribune's rhetoric, with its evocation ofwidespread slave rebellions, is that it took shape only as a direct response to a New York Arizona Quarterly Volume 50 Number 2, Summer 1994 Copyright © 1994 by Arizona Board ofRegents issN 0004-1610 52Richard Boyd Herald attack three days earlier on "the apparent gusto with which our nigger-worshiping contemporary of the Tribune gloats over the news of projected Southern servile insurrections."3 How much of this popular hysteria was attributable to the violent drama enacted during the previous two years in Bleeding Kansas is not completely clear, though the representations of this "central symbol" (Fellman 288) of the North/South conflict were a particularly fertile ground for the accusatory rhetoric of the era. It was not uncommon for Northern reporters to characterize pro-slavery partisans in Kansas as "drunken ourang-outans" and "wild beasts" whom all should "aid in killing . . . off," or to have such abolitionist calls for vengeance echoed by a Southern rhetoric which represented free-soilers as "the filth, scum and off-scourings ofthe East and Europe [sent] to pollute our fair land."4 Each side ceaselessly worked to represent the other as subhuman and capable of the most "foul indignities": the proslavery Leavenworth Journal branded Northern immigrants to Kansas as "merciless savages," who respected "neither age, or sex" in their violence and plunder; while the free-soil Chicago Tribune compared Southern "Ruffians" to a "brutish . . . race of beings" reminiscent in look and action to "a Cuban bloodhound " in search of prey.5 As Michael Fellman has concluded, the rhetoric of Bleeding Kansas organized itself around the effort of "each side [to initiate] the blood purge of the other and those evils which the other embodied" (303). From the perspective and distance offered by the passage of nearly one hundred fifty years, the echoed calls of "Blood for Blood!" and the mirrored boasts that for "each drop [of blood] spilled we shall require one hundred fold!"6 seem today the virtually indistinguishable words of rivals caught within a spiraling cycle of vengeance and retaliation. The most striking aspect of the textual war for Kansas is neither its virulence nor its blood-lust, but rather the almost hypnotic power each side holds over the other, so that accusations and recriminations rebound from side to side in an ever-escalating call to violence. The literary theorist René Girard has explored at considerable length the "purely reciprocal nature" of the accusatory rhetoric deployed by antagonists caught in a cultural order drifting inexorably toward generalized conflict and the "violent elimination of differences between the antagonists" (Violence 71, 72): "Each [of the antagonists] sees in the other the usurper of a legitimacy that he thinks he is...