"The Sense of Liberty": Rethinking Liberalism and Sentimentality in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Antislavery Fiction

Is not the sense of liberty a higher and finer one than any of the five?

—Harriet Beecher Stowe

Writing in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853) about the Presbyterian Church's role in the slavery debate, Harriet Beecher Stowe noted how church leaders in the late 1830s began gradually pivoting away from their long-held and widely shared antislavery position. As Stowe saw it, the minor concessions church leaders began making to Southern factions within the denomination eventually became thorough submission to a "slave power [that] has been a united, consistent, steady, uncompromising principle," while "the sincere opponents of slavery have been unhappily divided among themselves as to principles and measures, the extreme principles of some causing a hurtful reäction [sic] in others." These various divisions over "principles and measures," which would also rupture the Methodist and Baptist churches,¹ mirrored the ideological divides tearing at the fabric of national life, leading Stowe to agree with Senator Charles Sumner's view "that the history of this Presbyterian Church and the history of our United States have strong points of similarity."² By the 1850s, the nation's political divisions, unlike those of earlier decades, began reverberating into the religious realm—that is, into people's most deeply held beliefs about human existence, as political questions increasingly turned into questions about morality. And, as often happens with clashes over belief, violence soon followed, erupting in the streets of Boston, on the borders of the Kansas territory, and even in the Senate chambers of Sumner himself.

Given the conflict of convictions that defined the era, it is not surprising that Stowe undertook a literary examination of belief's core component: human emotion. As Gregg Camfield and Maurice S. Lee have demonstrated, Stowe's admonition to readers in the "Concluding Remarks" section of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) that they should "see to it that they feel right" about slavery involved her in an inherently philosophical endeavor that placed Stowe's sentimental literary practice in dialogue with moral sense philosophers and American religious thinkers, including her father, Lyman Beecher.³ What united these various intellectual figures was a concern for belief's inherent complexity and the role that emotion plays in cultivating and judging convictions. As Lee puts it, "How can one judge the accuracy of convictions based on affect? How can one know for certain if one does in fact feel right?" (S, 67). Such questions were integral not only to religious practice but, in the divisive and often-violent world of the 1850s, to the nature of the nation's democratic life.

From a political perspective, however, critics have frequently criticized Stowe's concern with individual feeling because it tends to privilege private experience over public action. As Lauren Berlant has shown, Stowe's "liberal sentimentality," while motivated by suffering and injustice, actually short-circuits politically effective solutions to issues such as slavery because politics "as a place of acts oriented toward publicness becomes replaced by a world of private thoughts, leanings, and gestures." Moreover, Stowe's emphasis on sympathetic identification often employs a "universalist rhetoric" that can erase important social differences, elide complexity, and suppress dissenting viewpoints.⁴ Such critiques shed important light on Stowe's racialist assumptions and other shortcomings of her sentimental literary project, though recent scholars, still attuned to sentimentality's inherent problems, have contributed significantly to recovering the political promise of Stowe's endeavors by highlighting her fiction's concern with institutional frameworks and "transpersonal" forms of affect.⁵

I will join this recovery effort by highlighting what might be overlooked when attending to the institutional or the transpersonal elements of Stowe's fiction—namely, the political significance that individual emotional experiences retain. While the imperative to "feel right" certainly involves the problems and limitations that critics have noted, and while Stowe's political thought certainly extends to frameworks beyond the individual, personal experiences of feeling nevertheless remain central to her political imagination and the sentimental literary practice through which she explored and expressed it. We should...