The book sold 300,000 copies in the first year of its publication (1852). It also inspired dramatic versions that were soon playing on stages all over America. The instant success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is often described as a kind of miracle. But few books have ever been published with more built-in publicity, courtesy of the federal government and the infuriated voices of thousands of abolitionists protesting the Fugitive Slave Law. Central to the book’s drama is the flight of slaves to the North and to Canada.
One of the most mesmerizing escapees is the mulatto slave Eliza Harris, who crosses the frozen Ohio River by leaping from ice floe to ice floe with her five-year-old child in her arms. Eliza was one of two slaves that Arthur Shelby decided to sell to save his Kentucky plantation from debt. The other was Uncle Tom, who rapidly became the most famous African American in real or imagined history. Described as tall and husky, with a wife and family from whom he was cruelly separated, Uncle Tom had a deep Christian faith that inspired him to love and forgive the whites who treated him abominably. He even forgives his last and worst owner, Simon Legree, who whips him to death in a fiendish attempt to break his spirit.
For twentieth-and twenty-first-century readers, Uncle Tom has been too noble to understand or accept. His name has become shorthand for a black man or woman who is ready to knuckle under to white prejudice and abuse. This criticism is an exaggeration, as some contemporary scholars are eager to maintain. They point out that Tom refuses Legree’s orders to whip a fellow slave. He also refuses to betray the hiding places of some runaways. But Tom’s faith in God’s ultimate love, and his anticipation of a reward in heaven if he forgives his persecutors, are not ideas that find much acceptance today.1
The problem of understanding Tom’s extraordinary spiritual life is compounded by the dialect in which he speaks, which seems to underscore his inferiority, if not his simplemindedness. As he parts with his wife, Chloe, who is angry at Arthur Shelby for separating Tom from her and their children, Tom says: “Chloe! Now if ye love me, ye won’t talk so, when perhaps jest the last time we’ll ever have together. And I tell ye, Chloe, it goes agin me to hear one word agin Mas’r. Wan’t he put in my arms a baby?—it’s natur I should think a heap of him.”
These words, even at their dialect-distorted worst, are still very important. Harriet Beecher Stowe was adding a dimension to the abolitionist crusade—personal love, or at least pity—for one of the South’s slaves. Unfortunately, Uncle Tom’s message was also tragically racist. Mrs. Stowe revealed this sad fact in her own words, in The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book she wrote after the novel’s success. “The Negro race is confessedly more simple, docile, childlike, and affectionate than other races,” she declared.
Stowe’s judgment was based on her religious convictions. “The divine graces of love and faith . . . in-breathed by the Holy Spirit, find in the [Negro’s] natural temperament a more congenial atmosphere.” She presented Eliza Harris and her husband George as far more ready to revolt and challenge slavery in language and action. Stowe attributed their defiance to the white blood in their mulatto veins. With unconscious complacency, Harriet Beecher Stowe created a huge wave of sympathy for slaves—and reinforced white convictions about their own racial superiority.2
Another interesting aspect of the novel is the almost complete absence of sneering snarling abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison or Wendell Phillips in its text. The only antislavery Northerners the reader sees are kindly Quakers in Ohio, who conceal Eliza Harris and help her escape to Canada. There may be an implied critique in this omission, but it probably was not deliberate. The writing of a novel is a complex psychological process, and the author often wonders as the ideas and images flow onto the page how much control he or she has over the literary imagination while it is at work. At one point, Harriet Beecher Stowe told a close friend that she was not the real author of the book.
“Who was?” the astounded friend asked.
“God,” Mrs. Stowe replied.3
Another aspect of her view of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is even more surprising. Mrs. Stowe was disappointed when Southerners reacted to the novel with rage and dismissal. She apparently thought that she had presented many slave owners in a positive light—and hoped the book would inspire some sort of emancipation movement in the region. In the closing pages of the novel, George Shelby, the son of the original master, travels to Louisiana in an attempt to buy Tom’s freedom, but he arrives too late. Tom is dead. Shelby returns to Kentucky and frees all his slaves.4
The central fact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the way it aroused intense sympathy for slaves—and rage at slave owners. At least as important, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had huge appeal to the chief readers of novels in the nineteenth century: women. Both reactions are visible in a letter to the author from a woman who had just finished the novel.
I sat up last night long after one o’clock, reading and finishing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I could not leave it any more than I could have left a dying child; nor could I restrain an almost hysterical sobbing for an hour after I laid my head upon the pillow. I thought I was a thorough-going Abolitionist but your book awakened in me so strong a feeling of indignation and compassion, that I seem never to have had any feeling on this subject until now . . . This storm of feeling has been burning, raging like a fire in my bones all the livelong night.5
• • •
Uncle Tom was by no means the only new influence on the public mind of the 1850s. A handsome Swiss-born scientist named Louis Agassiz played a large role in the way educated people discussed slavery. Agassiz had come to America in 1846, after winning fame as a scholar of natural history in Europe. Among his more startling discoveries was the existence of the Ice Age. His series of lectures, “The Plan of Creation as Shown in the Animal Kingdom,” created a sensation in Boston. As many as five thousand people showed up to hear him speak, and he had to give each lecture twice to satisfy his enthralled admirers. Soon the newcomer was named head of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, created specifically for him.6
In America, Agassiz developed a new scientific passion: anthropology. He leaped into it with the same enthusiasm and self-confidence that had enabled him to churn out an astonishing amount of research on the history of the fish and animal kingdoms. He was galvanized by a Philadelphia scientist, Samuel George Morton, who had spent decades collecting and analyzing human skulls. The key to understanding human abilities, as Morton (and soon Agassiz) saw it, was cranial capacity. He saw humanity not as a unified entity, but as a collection of races. In descending order, these were: Caucasian, Mongolian, Malay, Native American, and Negro. At the top of this not-very-scientific heap were the German, English, and Anglo-Americans, who had the largest cranial capacity. Negroes had the smallest. Not surprisingly, some members of the latter race were, Agassiz concluded, “the lowest grade of humanity.”
Morton’s skull collection was totally haphazard. As science it was virtually meaningless. But Agassiz, charging into the new field, swallowed his conclusions in one spectacular gulp, and he used his fame to publicize them across the nation. Stopping in Philadelphia at a hotel staffed by African Americans, he told of his reaction in these appalling words: “As much as I feel pity for this degraded and degenerate race, as much as their fate fills me with compassion . . . it is impossible to repress the feeling that they are not of the same blood as us. Seeing their . . . fat lips and grimacing teeth, the wool on their heads, their bent knees, their elongated hands . . . I could not turn my eyes from their faces in order to tell them to keep their distance.”7
Agassiz soon concluded that “the philanthropists”—his name for abolitionists—and the defenders of slavery were both wrong. The abolitionists shared his reaction to negritude. They would never let their daughters marry a black man nor would they consider for an instant marrying a black woman. But the slave owners of the South were wrong when they tried to deny that a slave had any right to liberty. Agassiz did not seem to realize that his (pseudo) scientific opinions abou
t the Negroes’ intelligence made emancipation seem foolish and even dangerous.
Agassiz was soon telling his Harvard students and eager audiences in Boston that whites and Negroes were two distinct species. He journeyed to Charleston, South Carolina, to tell an assemblage of the city’s best people the same thing. “The brain of a Negro is that of the imperfect brain of a seven months infant in the womb of a white,” he said. It was the first of many Agassiz lectures in Charleston. He was as popular there as he was in Boston.8
Southerners were soon using Agassiz and colleagues who shared his views as proof that Negro slavery did not violate Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. When the founder wrote that all men were created equal, scientifically the statement did not include Negroes. In fact, Agassiz maintained that the whole history of the slave trade and the development of slavery in the New World was a gigantic mistake. The white and black races were never meant to interact in such an intimate and proximate existence.
Agassiz strenuously denounced all forms of interracial marriage and predicted mulattoes were doomed to swift extinction because racial intermixing violated the divine plan. At another point he declared that, scientifically speaking, sexual intercourse between blacks and whites was the equivalent of incest.
For Agassiz, Mexico was a living, breathing example of what racial mixing produced—a country in which the entire population suffered from massive mental instability and physical inferiority. “Can you devise a scheme to rescue the Spaniards of Mexico from their degradation?” he asked a Boston friend, Samuel Gridley Howe. Agassiz said America should remember what amalgamating the races did to this southern neighbor. Social equality between whites and blacks was “a natural impossibility, flowing from the very character of the Negro race.” At the same time, Agassiz placated his Bostonian supporters by reiterating that he nevertheless believed that blacks should be free.
This pro forma statement did not prevent southern audiences from inviting him to speak again and again. Echoes of his theories resounded in southern newspapers. In 1856, the Charleston Mercury dismissed abolitionist attacks by editorializing: “The moral justification of the South lies in facts against which fanaticism and cant are both powerless. . . . The Negro is inferior to the White Man by nature and by destiny . . . he can never be his equal until the laws of God are abrogated.”9
In 1859, an Englishman named Charles Darwin published a book, On The Origin of the Species, which maintained that the human race had evolved over millions of years but somehow retained, in spite of its many differences, a biological unity that made them a single species. Agassiz and his followers heaped scorn on this idea.
• • •
Yet another strand in bolstering the southern mindset about slavery was the reappraisal of the emancipation of Britain’s West Indian blacks. In the 1830s and 1840s, Theodore Weld and others had journeyed to the islands and reported that all was peaceful and prosperous. By the 1850s, it was apparent that the impact of emancipation on the West Indies was an economic disaster.
Most of the ex-slaves had refused to resume toiling on the sugar plantations. They preferred to cultivate small plots on which they raised enough food to feed their families. Sugar production plummeted, leaving Brazil, Cuba, and southern states such as Louisiana the uncontested rulers of this hugely profitable market.
In desperation, British officials approached the U.S. government, hoping it would cooperate in a campaign to hire free American blacks to work on the islands’ plantations. They got a cold reception from federal spokesmen, many of whom were Southerners. They suspected that Britain was embarked on a policy of ruining slavery in other countries so they could emerge as the world’s chief economic power, growing cotton and sugar and coffee in their vast Far East colony, India.10
The American government asked the U.S. consul in Jamaica, Robert Monroe Harrison, to give them a report on conditions on that island since emancipation. His reply was devastating. The price of land in Jamaica had declined by at least 50 percent. Some big plantations, which used to produce thousands of pounds in profits for their owners, were now worth about 10 percent of their pre-emancipation value. “England has ruined her own colonies,” Harrison concluded, “and like an unchaste female seeks to put other countries, where slavery exists, in a similar state.”
Harrison and other Southerners saw the international pressure that Britain put on Brazil and Cuba, and their attempt to bribe Texas into antislavery, as part of their devious plan. It had nothing to do with benevolence or human rights. They pointed to Britain’s horrendous conduct toward oppressed Ireland, where the Parliament did next to nothing while a famine caused by the failure of the potato crop killed over a million hapless Celts.
The British tried importing thousands of East Indian “hill coolies” into Jamaica. They arrived in a state of near collapse after a voyage of 131 days. They, too, proved to be unproductive workers and were soon another clog on the islands’ ruined economy.11
In 1856 the New Orleans Picayune, one of the South’s leading papers, ran a long report from a correspondent who had just visited Kingston, Jamaica. “The impressions which, on a personal view, the dilapidation of Jamaica, has made upon me are of the most sad and somber character,” he wrote. “This city, which once counted eighty thousand prosperous inhabitants, who resided more in a great accumulation of beautiful gardens than in densely built squares, now contains, we are told, only about forty thousand . . . people, composed in great measure, to use the expression of an English gentleman resident here, of poverty-crippled Negroes.”
The white population was “rapidly disappearing.” A large number of the better houses were now “abandoned ruins, with creepers and small bushes clinging to their crumbling walls.” The wharves and storehouses were “sinking and going to decay, telling . . . of the abandonment of the fields and fertile vales of the interior.”
“The colored population” was a study in contrasts. The young men looked “hale, well-fed and joyous.” The young girls, mostly good looking, “sail along with the gait of a Juno and the simper of a Venus.” But the middle-aged of both sexes “seem everywhere sad and joyless, and the old are images of haggard want and despair.”
During a stroll around Kingston, the reporter found himself in the coolie section of the city. Here poverty was far worse than in the black neighborhoods. Everywhere beggars beseeched him in broken English for a few pennies to save them from starvation. The only prosperous people he saw were several dozen Chinese, who were running successful businesses. “The elements of society here are in rapid dissolution,” the reporter said, in a harsh closing sentence. “Social insignificance and impotence is [sic] fast closing around the island.”12
After eyewitness reports like this one in their newspapers, more than a few Southerners were not surprised when the London Times reported that slave emancipation in the West Indies was a colossal failure that had annihilated millions of pounds of capital and reduced blacks to a degradation lower than they had known as slaves. The Times urged English abolitionists to visit the West Indies and see with their own eyes what their fanaticism had wrought. Virtually every major paper in the South carried the story.13
• • •
In Washington, DC, politicians still sought a solution that would satisfy the South’s demand to take their slaves into the western territories. The South continued to trumpet this demand as a constitutional right, never mentioning that other motivation, the fear of a slave insurrection as the density of the black population continued to grow. Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois decided the answer lay in an idea that Lewis Cass, the Democrat who had run for president against Zachary Taylor in 1848, had proposed. Cass had called it “squatter sovereignty.” The voters of each new state would decide whether they tolerated or rejected slavery.
Douglas had emerged as a leader in the passage of the Compromise of 1850. Only five feet tall, when he spoke in the Senate he became a verbal tornado with a voice that seemed to belong to a man ten times his si
ze. Often he worked himself into a near frenzy, stripping off his coat, his vest, his shirt, and finally his undershirt, as he made his thunderous points. Before long he had earned the nickname “the Little Giant.”
Douglas decided that the South would be mollified if they were allowed to bring slaves into one of the two new western states that he had in mind, Kansas and Nebraska. Blocking this idea was the 1819–1820 Missouri Compromise, which barred slavery from territories north of the 36-30 line of latitude. The senator’s oratorical skills persuaded Congress to repeal the compromise, with the tacit understanding that Missouri slave owners would people Kansas and antislavery Iowans would do likewise for Nebraska. Douglas concocted a new slogan for his proposal, Popular Sovereignty.
The senator persuaded President Franklin Pierce that the proposal was the answer to achieving a peaceful solution to slavery. Pierce helped whip Democratic congressman and senators into line. On May 25, 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed with comfortable majorities in both houses, making the Missouri Compromise history.14
For New Englanders, the date almost coincided with the day that runaway slave Anthony Burns was led through the outrage-filled streets of Boston to the ship that would return him to Virginia. The coincidence produced something very close to hysteria in the Bay State. The frenzy multiplied when the Yankees learned that a Missouri senator was boasting that slave owners from his state were pouring into Kansas, staking out claims and virtually declaring a victory for southern pride and principles. Soon there was a New England response. An “Emigrant Aid Company” organized groups of antislavery pioneers and sent them to Kansas, armed with new breechloading Sharps rifles.
A Disease in the Public Mind Page 21