Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism

6 The Contradictions of Benevolence, 1852–1861

chapter six The Contradictions of Benevolence, 1852–1861 By 1852 the debate over slavery and the debate over its humaneness had grown practically inseparable, albeit theoretically distinguishable. Decades earlier, that overlap had provoked less concern: both sides believed that the meaning of humaneness was clear. But the ensuing decades had shattered that illusion: invoking humanitarianism did not settle the debate or establish moral clarity. The malleability of the shared cultural sensibility of humaneness sapped attempts to apply it in a univocal way; humanitarianism splintered, rather than forged, moral unity. After decades of debating, the prospect of resolution only retreated further from view. Yet neither side could escape the rhetoric; the debate had made the issue of humaneness too important to the slavery question. Antislavery authors drew on the workings of sympathy to inspire moral outrage at slavery, but their opponents relied on the same theories to defend slavery. To antislavery writers freedom meant release from torture,buttheirproslaveryopponentscalledlibertythe‘‘FreedomtoStarve.’’∞ Proslavery denials spurred antislavery attacks; antislavery assaults in turn spawned denials and counterattacks. When Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1851–52, she hoped the novel would break through this The Contradictions of Benevolence, 1852–1861 191 spiral of charge and countercharge. Stowe succeeded in turning Americans’ attention to the emotional su√erings of slaves, but her book stoked the fires of long-standing debates over the role of imagination and emotions in sympathy. Rather than breaking through the debate over the humaneness of slavery, the book escalated it. On both sides the intertwining of the two issues and the heightened rhetoric created a series of dilemmas. Both sides struggled with ambivalence within their own camps about the rhetoric of humaneness and its implications . Doubts nagged antislavery activists about their reliance on the imagery of physical cruelty to evoke sympathy for slaves. Would a kinder, gentler slavery really pass moral muster? Should activists pay so much attention to the bodies of slaves, to the detriment of focusing on the hearts and souls of enslaved human beings? For slavery’s defenders, too, the need to resort to ever-stronger claims of benevolence took its toll. If slavery’s justice depended on humaneness, how could they deal with slavery’s admittedly harsher elements : separating families, the necessity of physical punishments, and its origins in the cruel slave trade? Did admitting the inhumanity of elements of slavery undermine the whole institution? How could proslavery polemicists reconcile their claims that nature designed blacks for slavery with their condemnations of the slave trade? On both sides activists radicalized unevenly ; polemicists divided over how to answer these questions and devised strategies at cross-purposes. As the rhetoric on both sides escalated, internal contradictions proliferated. Humanitarianism generated far more controversy than it settled. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Emotions, and Sympathy In 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin ignited a firestorm. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s widely read novel inspired outrage—at slavery or at Stowe’s mendacious imagination, depending on the reader’s view of slavery. The novel drew e√usive praise and execration, in part because it fit neatly into long-standing moral disputes. Even as the book sparked new controversies, its power came from investing conventional arguments with new, emotional import. Genre mattered. Stowe used the style and formulas of sentimental novels to rewrite antislavery rhetoric.≤ Yet the same sentimental formulas that made her arguments so appealing to antislavery readers also fit neatly into proslavery stereotypes of antislavery argumentation. Sco√ers had long denounced distant 192 Polemical Pain antislavery sympathy as no more e√ective than the sympathy of teary-eyed novel readers; skeptics likewise discounted antislavery rhetoric as the flights of overwrought imaginations. Morality, critics charged, depended on active benevolence, not Stowe’s emotive sentimentalism. While some readers wept in sympathy with Stowe’s su√ering victims, other readers found ready rebuttals in proslavery traditions. The novel struck at the heart of proslavery claims of humaneness by treating all slaveholders—even supposedly humane ones—as participants in a cruel system. Antislavery writers had insisted time and again that humane slaveholders—even if they existed—could not protect enslaved blacks from the system’s cruelties. But rather than excoriating all slaveholders for personal cruelty, Stowe’s novel cast some kindhearted individuals as slaveholders . She portrayed two slaveholders so sympathetically that, as Lydia Maria Child reported, a Maryland senator mistakenly praised Stowe: ‘‘She knows how to feel for a man, when he is obliged to...