Charity Begins at Home: Stowe's Antislavery Novels and the Forms of Benevolent Citizenship

Scholarly work on Harriet Beecher Stowe, at least since the recuperation of sentimentalism, has tended to foreground her cultural and racial politics. Much of her critical rehabilitation, in fact, has rested on assertions of her fiction’s progressivism. Most notably, Jane Tompkins, in her landmark study Sensational Designs (1985), finds in Uncle Tom’s Cabin a revolutionary agenda that calls for both the emancipation of slaves and the cultural empowerment of women. ¹ But the late 1980s and 1990s saw a backlash, not against Stowe’s sentimentalism per se but against certain of the ideological and racial projects in which she (and other sentimental authors) participated. In particular, the colonizationist ending of Uncle Tom’s Cabin has fueled the charge that Stowe’s representations are more damaging than liberating. Karen S·nchez-Eppler articulates many critics’ dismay at the novel’s segregationist resolution when she decries “Stowe’s failure to imagine an America in which blacks could be recognized as persons.” ² By invoking this disagreement, I do not wish to suggest that a simple binary pits Stowe’s advocates against her critics, in stark contrast and ongoing conflict; indeed, much of the scholarship highlighting Stowe’s politics has attended closely to the ambivalence her antislavery fiction engenders. My point, rather, is that it continues to matter how “good” Stowe’s politics were, and not only because her most famous novel is so explicitly and passionately activist. Stowe has come to represent—perhaps most pointedly for Euro-American women in the academy—earnest, middle-class, white activism. In the process, she has proven to be a vexing icon—both an honored foremother and a specter of good intentions gone awry. ³

To some extent, the current critical preoccupation with Stowe mirrors her “iterative” style, best exemplified by her figuring and refiguring of the suffering mother. ⁴ Scholars, that is, figure and refigure the activist author, struggling to devise a way of understanding her that escapes the opposing dangers of presentist recrimination and hagiography. The resolution of this dilemma, if such a resolution is possible, will not come through a retreat from politics; such a move would necessitate not only separating Stowe’s early novels from the cultural matrix in which they were produced and whose terms they helped to shape but also ignoring vast segments of their content. I argue, instead, that Stowe’s moral and racial politics should be historicized more thoroughly, along the lines of recent work by Robert Levine and others. ⁵ Specifically, I am claiming that neither Stowe’s literary representations nor her politics can be well understood apart from the antebellum discourse of benevolence within which she wrote her antislavery novels and in whose construction she participated. Her articulations of racial and national identity in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–1852) and Dred (1856) must be contextualized within a broader debate over the terms of what we might call benevolent citizenship—a way of thinking about national membership and national character through the paradigm of doing good.

In the decades before the Civil War, Americans used the terms benevolence and benevolent with astonishing frequency, not only where one would expect, as in reports by charitable organizations and in sermons or religious tracts, but also in political pamphlets, newspaper articles, poetry, and fiction. ⁶ Moreover, in much antebellum discourse, the nation was said to be legitimized through the benevolence of its policies. Echoing the Puritan John Winthrop’s notion of a city upon a hill, Americans repeatedly asserted that this was a benevolent nation, or they foretold national destruction should a particular humanitarian course of action be shunned. Debates over the future composition and character of the United States—most notably, over slavery, Indian removal, African colonization, and immigration—were suffused with benevolent rhetoric, a rhetoric that speakers on all sides, even those who seem to us patently malevolent, used frequently and artfully...