“When I thought of slavery, with its democratic whips—its republican chains—its evangelical blood-hounds, and its religious slave-holders—when I thought of all this paraphernalia of American democracy and religion behind me, and the prospect of liberty before me,” wrote William Wells Brown, an escaped slave, “I was encouraged to press forward.” A white woman, Stowe excoriates North and South alike, and at story’s end, didactically and without apology, predicts that the wrath of “Almighty God” will be visited on the country if it does not eradicate slavery.
Thus a small, overburdened female writer rocking the baby’s cradle in freezing Maine was more a monomaniacal Ahab than a compromising Starbuck—at least in terms of the very act of writing—for Stowe broke the unstated, domestic law of the Victorian novel simply by producing one of anger, outrage, and of contempt for a system that allowed the slave trader to consider himself ill-used, the politician to consider himself humane, the abolitionist to consider herself without racism, and the man of moderation to shrug his shoulders and hope for better days. The author was flinty and unflinching, as a reviewer in the prominent Southern magazine DeBow’s Review noted with contempt. “It is a melancholy exemplification of the facility with which a philanthropist, who devotes himself exclusively to the eradication of one form of evil, can deceive himself, and come to regard any means justifiable, in the pursuance of a supposed good end,” the reviewer said. “That subtle analyst of character, Nathaniel Hawthorne, has ably dissected this species of delusion in the Blithedale romance.” He recommended that Stowe reread Hawthorne.
Yet Stowe’s book is not just a jeremiad. Tackling a controversial subject, she argued it with characters—audacious character, stereotyped character, three-dimensional character, and flat predictable character. Taken together, they present a range of real and harrowing views on slavery. And if Stowe could not reach beyond the platitudes of colonization or Christian charity, or if she trapped herself in a mire of racial pigeonholes, the very fact of her writing at all and writing and selling as she did and questioning the religious precepts she herself lived by—could her character George Harris, a former slave, ever again believe in God after what he’d seen of slavery?—made Uncle Tom’s Cabin a cultural event. So, this is the little woman who started the war.
When initially offered the book, the publisher Phillips, Sampson, & Co. declined. A novel about a touchy topic—by a woman, no less? If women were to appear in public unshawled and unbonneted, as the New York Christian Inquirer fussed, “what becomes of her modesty, her virtue?” “It does seem to me to deprive women of all delicacy,” Hawthorne groused. “It has pretty much such an effect on them as it would to walk abroad through the streets, physically stark naked.” A proper lady keeps her clothes on, which is why she shouldn’t write. A western editor objected to the women’s rights groundswell by warning, “If it should prevail, we may yet see some Mrs. Stowe in the Presidential chair.” But as the abolitionist Thomas Higginson said, “The anti-slavery movement had hardly made its way to the masses till a woman undertook to explain it.”
Stowe explained it in a book that ultimately gave no crisp solutions. “Of course, in a novel,” Stowe wrote in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “people’s hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us. There is a most busy and important round of eating, drinking, dressing, walking, visiting, buying, calling, talking, reading, and all that makes up what is commonly called living, yet to be gone through.”
Everyday life composed of obligation, grief, and slavery: who ain’t a slave to something? That was what technology, spiritualism, the women’s convention, and the antislavery movement, all of them, were hoping against hope to circumvent.
BECAUSE HE SEEMED so safe, so moderate, and so principled, Horace Mann had been elected in April 1848 to fill John Quincy Adams’s empty seat in the House of Representatives. Congressional tempers were hot that spring. Representative John Gayle of Alabama was grilling the abolitionist Joshua Giddings of Ohio about his alleged involvement in the Pearl affair, which involved the attempted escape by schooner of fugitive slaves in the District of Columbia. In the Senate, the slave owner Henry Foote of Mississippi was haranguing the antislavery John Hale of New Hampshire, inviting him to come down to Mississippi, where Hale “would grace one of the tallest trees of the forest, with a rope around his neck.” So the hand of Old Man Eloquent might have been on Mann’s otherwise temperate shoulders, for when asked, he felt he couldn’t really refuse to oversee the defense of Captain Daniel Drayton, who had sailed the Pearl, and of Captain Edward Sayres, who owned it, even though he hadn’t practiced law in twelve years.
Yet Mann wasn’t feeling altogether well that spring. Prematurely white-haired, he suffered from bouts of insomnia and periods of depressions as powerful as his passion for reform. Imagining a better and more democratically educated world than the one he inherited, he had been born in 1796 to moderately well off farmers without connections to Harvard and Yale. But he was industrious and determined and worked successfully toward implementing a vibrant public school system and establishing so-called normal schools devoted solely to teacher training. An antislavery (or Conscience) Whig, he’d also been the head of the Massachusetts Board of Education, which he had in fact helped to create, and as a Massachusetts state senator, he worked to pass legislation to build the state’s first insane asylum; to him, insanity was not a disgrace.
Devastated by the death of his first wife, when Mann finally remarried, the sleepless reformer whisked his bride away to Europe for a honeymoon—along with his best friend, Samuel Gridley Howe, and Howe’s bride, Julia Ward. Together, they would all study the Prussian school system and visit a few prisons, workhouses, and lunatic asylums. For the Howes, it was their first excursion into an unhappy marriage, but Mann had married a woman as devoted to him as he was to public life even though, as his sister-in-law once observed, Horace Mann had “the spirit of a Martyr.”
His new brother-in-law happened to be Nathaniel Hawthorne, and some members of the family thought Mann resembled the egomaniacal philanthropist in Blithedale. In fact, Hawthorne had completed the book while he was subletting Mann’s house. Yet Mann was less an obsessive idealist than a person who adhered closely to the rule of law. Admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1823, he was prudent and cautious, said his own wife, and he preferred nonpartisanship to popularity. “A partisan cannot be an honest man,” he claimed. The abolitionists of Massachusetts therefore distrusted him.
Yet in 1848 they turned to him. Staunch antislavery men such as Salmon P. Chase of Ohio and William Henry Seward of New York were too busy to defend the captain and owner of the Pearl, and Daniel Webster (still considered antislavery in 1848) charged too much money. The case went to the safe, judicious, and principled Horace Mann. “No man in the country will make more out of a bad case than you can,” his best friend encouraged him.
The schooner Pearl had been impounded in the lower Chesapeake with seventy-six slaves aboard; Drayton had been indicted for stealing and transporting them to freedom. On Sunday, April 16, 1848, the Pearl had departed without a hitch from White-house Wharf, a fairly out-of-the-way dock. But since the Potomac is a tidal river, and the Pearl was sailing against the tide, it had moved very slowly. Then a northerly squall stopped it cold before it had reached the mouth of the river. Anchored temporarily for shelter at Cornfield Harbor, located just above Point Lookout, Maryland, and about 140 miles from the District of Columbia, the vessel was waiting for the winds to calm, when, at two in the morning, a posse of thirty musketed men, tipped off about the Pearl’s mission, had sneaked onto the ship from their steamer, the Salem.
Wakened by the clack of footsteps above their heads, the slaves scrambled to the deck, ready to fight. Drayton told them not to do that; they hadn’t a chance. They were unarmed.
Drayton and Sayres and the crewman, Chester English, were hustled aboard the Salem w
hile the black men, women, and children were kept on the Pearl, which was towed back to the District. By the time they disembarked, a mob had gathered at the steamboat wharf. “Lynch them!” the crowd yelled at the white men. “Shoot him! Shoot the hell hound!,” they screamed at Drayton. One man jumped forward and with a knife sliced off part of Drayton’s ear.
For three days, the angry mob threw stones and shattered the windows of a two-story brick building across from the Patent Office building, which happened to house the antislavery paper The National Era. Gamaliel Bailey, its editor, denied having any connection with the Pearl. “Believing that the extinction of slavery can be effected in accordance with Constitution and Law, and that this is the better way,” Bailey insisted, “no system of unconstitutional or illegal measures will find in us a supporter.” The rational Starbuck had spoken, or so fervid abolitionists felt. But Bailey firmly believed that helping slaves escape from Washington was too risky for the fugitives. If they were caught, as was likely, they’d be hauled back into slavery and sold farther south, where conditions were even worse.
At the trial of Dayton and Sayres, the courtroom was hot and stuffy and, as Horace Mann dourly noted, as packed as a slave ship. Men in the gallery carried pistols. Drayton was indicted on 115 counts, his bail set at the astronomical amount of $76,000. Mann argued that the number of indictments and the cost of bail were excessive, for the slaves had not been “stolen” but had run away. Mann’s defense moved the question at hand from the rights of property owners to the moral meaning of so-called human property. Moreover, he asked, was the color of one’s skin sufficient proof of enslavement; and how could the court prove that these men and women and children were actually slaves? And, in any case, wasn’t slavery unconstitutional? Or wrong? “I feel in this case as if I were not working for Drayton,” Mann wrote his wife, “but for the whole colored race.”
After twenty-one hours of deliberation, the jury found Drayton guilty. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison. (Sayres was subsequently acquitted for stealing slaves though he pled guilty to the charge of transporting them.) Mann tried to have the verdict set aside and, failing that, appealed it in a higher court. Not only did he wish to free Drayton and Sayres but, as he said, “get the principles on record.”
There were three more trials. The convictions of Drayton and Sayres were reduced to a misdemeanor but not until 1852 and after being censured by abolitionists—William Lloyd Garrison ran a piece in The Liberator called “Inquiry after a ‘Back-Bone’ ”—did Charles Sumner, the tall, regal senator from Massachusetts, manage to get Drayton and Sayres an executive pardon. (Sumner then rushed Drayton and Sayres out of the city because he feared they’d be rearrested.) As Mann drily pointed out, Millard Fillmore had just lost his party’s nomination for president, which made it easier for him to issue a pardon—although the conservative Fillmore was fretting over what would now happen to his reputation. “I shall be abused and misrepresented for pardoning them,” he cried.
And what had happened to the fugitives? As Mann explained in his opening remarks, they’d been inspired partly by the speeches they heard in Washington, especially on the night of April 15, when bonfires blazed in celebration of the revolutions of 1848 and congressman after congressman proclaimed a new reign of free men. Representative Staunton of Tennessee likened the Tree of Liberty to Mississippi’s huge cottonwood (the same tree, likely, on which Henry Foote wanted to hang John Hale). Mann read from Staunton’s speech, and he read another one by Foote, extolling liberty. Perhaps these were the men who should be charged with inciting slaves to escape, snapped the Boston papers.
Yet they had tried to escape, and the court would not free them. Instead, the fugitives were marched through the streets of Washington and held in a pen until a gray slave trader from Baltimore named Slatter came to town to purchase a number of them, saying they would fetch good money down South. A pretty young woman would bring even more money, Horace Mann noted with disgust: a slave trader “knew how he could transmute her charms into gold through the fires of sin.” One such young woman, Elizabeth Russell, killed herself en route to escape her fate.
The men and women whom Slatter left behind were taken by the slave-traffickers, Bruin and Hill, of nearby Alexandria. This group included six of the children of Amelia and Paul Edmondson, four boys and two girls (Mary and Emily), who sold for $4,500. Held in the slave pens in Alexandria, right across the Potomac from the nation’s capital, they were eventually packed up and shipped off to New Orleans. In her Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe was trying to stem Southern criticism of her book by authenticating its sources), Harriet Beecher Stowe told what had happened to the Edmondsons: how they were clothed in blue pants and shirts, how the brothers’ mustaches had been shaved, how their mouths were pried open to check their teeth, how they had been staged, paraded, manhandled. One of the brothers was never seen again; another, luckier one was freed with funds from the grandson of the fur trader John Jacob Astor.
After yellow fever decimated much of New Orleans, the two remaining Edmondson brothers, Ephraim and John, and their two sisters, Mary and Emily, were hauled back to Virginia, where their father desperately tried to save the girls. Advised by the New York branch of the Anti-Slavery Society to consult the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, Edmondson went to Beecher’s home in Brooklyn, New York, but could not bring himself to pull the Beecher bell.
The reverend found Edmondson crying on the stoop and invited him inside, and soon the Edmondson sisters were Beecher’s cause. He preached at the large Broadway Tabernacle on behalf of the girls, thundering and cajoling—and appalling—the audience, when he sounded as though he were an auctioneer bidding for the girls’ freedom from flesh peddlers. “A thousand—fifteen hundred—two thousand—twenty-five hundred! Going, going! Last call! Gone!”
Beecher’s church raised the money, and Mary and Emily were freed before being shipped back to New Orleans. Harriet Beecher Stowe and her brother, afterward, supported them through their years at Oberlin College. Horace Mann walked out of the House of Representatives to become the first president of the newly founded Antioch College, which admitted men and women, black and white. He died of fever and overwork in 1859, two years before the firing on Fort Sumter. He was sixty-three. His brother-in-law Hawthorne died in 1864, disgusted by the carnage of what he believed to be an ill-conceived war.
IN THE EARLY morning of September 11, 1851, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, a white man from Maryland, Edward Gorsuch, rode up to a stone house located in the small community of Christiana. The house was being rented by William Parker, a tall, strong, light-skinned man, himself once a slave in Maryland, whose rights as a freeman, he said, “were, under God, secured by my own right arm.” In his teenage years, Parker had escaped to Pennsylvania, where he had found work but was always looking over his shoulder for someone who might throw him back into slavery. As a result, he decided that he’d assist “in liberating every one within my reach at the risk of my life,” slavery was so terrible, freedom so good.
That September day in 1851 in Pennsylvania, Edward Gorsuch went to the Parker place with a six-man posse, which included his son Dickinson, his two nephews, and the well-known slave-catching constable Henry H. Kline, deputy U.S. marshal. Carrying arrest warrants in his satchel, Gorsuch was searching for slaves who had run away from him and were reportedly hiding at the Parker place.
When the posse attempted to enter the house, Parker met them at the landing and asked who they were. “I am the United States marshal,” Kline replied and read his warrants aloud. Parker answered that he cared little for him or the United States and that if Kline took another step, he’d break Kline’s neck. Kline turned around, or so he later claimed, to leave. Other testimony claimed that Kline hadn’t turned around but that he and his men had attempted to force their way upstairs while Parker tried to bide his time. Still other testimony claims that Gorsuch and his men said that if the slaves inside the house didn’t surrender, they’d burn the place down
and shoot the occupants. “Go in the room down there, and see if there is anything there belonging to you,” Parker allegedly told Gorsuch. “There are beds and a bureau, chairs, and other things. Then go out to the barn; there you will find a cow and some hogs. See if any of them are yours.” The message was clear; men were not property.
The people in the house began to sing a popular spiritual: “Leader, what do you say / About the judgment day? / I will die on the field of battle, / Die on the field of battle, / With glory in my soul.”
Eliza Ann Parker, Parker’s wife, went up to the garret and blew a horn to signal to her husband’s friends that there was trouble. Those friends were a group of armed black men dedicated, like Parker, to resisting slave catchers and the Fugitive Slave Act “at the risk of our own lives.” Hearing the horn, Kline ordered his men to shoot whoever was blowing it. Two of his men climbed up the peach tree near the house and started to fire but the thick stone of the house protected Eliza Parker from the flying bullets.
By now black men and women from the neighborhood had gathered, as many as two hundred, some reckoned, although Parker said that there weren’t that many blacks within eight miles. Parker’s friends had guns, axes, staves, and corn cutters. Two white men, Castner Hanway and Elijah Lewis, both of them Quakers, also appeared. They warned Gorsuch and Kline not to mess with Parker. Gorsuch and Kline, in reply, ordered the Quakers to help the posse. The Quakers refused. Gorsuch then strode back up to the Parker house, around which more men were collecting. He argued with Parker while his son Dickinson asked him if he’d “take all this from a nigger?”
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