Harriet Beecher Stowe

Uncle Tom's Cabin (UTC)

My heart filled to bursting with the reading of this agonizing account of slavery. What fed my anguish was not only what has been in this area but what most assuredly is. What is today!

There is a modern holocaust as devilish and horrific and yet it is allowed to "do everything quietly" hating "all kinds of agitation and fluster." And how can this be? Today's surprising answer is the same as it ever was: good men do nothing. (I was reminded of this in reading "In the day of a future Judgement, these very considerations may make it more tolerable for him than for you.")

Complacency is the order of all history, even that yet to be. Dear ol' Abe Lincoln was not immune, and illustrated this as he voted in opposition to abolitionist measures. He was not complacent on the issue of the Union. Disappointing. Rightfully, on more than one occasion in UTC, Stowe wench-slaps those sharing such a view, and laud her for it!

I understand that our anthology only allows so much space, but seriously, they could have 86'd the likes of Ginsberg for all I care, and put in the full text of UTC in addition to its Key. I had to go online to find these, and they are phenomenal. Literally, I thought I'd read eight pages when I'd read thirty-six! UTC is that absorbing.

It should be obvious by now that I have no qualms with so-called "political" works. Pooh! When a soul observes the beauty of the world and urges us by his writings to witness it, we call him an artist in our embracing. But let him observe the horrific things of man and nature and in our rejection, behold! In a transformation that would stun a mystic, he is a political scoundrel!

"Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured." The man who said this was assasinated. Society prizes highly the rose-colored glasses she dons and will war before giving pause to a stark reality that can only find its succor in much responsible sleeve-rolling. As for me, Stowe away!

Surely Stowe's Calvanist upbringing had something to do with her sense of what is right and what is wrong, though to hear the educated modern mushy middle tell it, there is no right and wrong but only what is individually right and individually wrong. Anything else is antideluvian barbarism. The kicker: the homage paid to the individual sense of right and wrong is precisely the kind of attitude that hand-delivered slavery to the people of our great nation and it has enabled other forms of piteously gross disenfranchisement. It is by its very nature the thing it condems: humanity retrograded. Stowe was able to reject the status quo in part because she had been properly trained in a discerning world view.

While we are on the subject, I have noticed that the authors of our textbook are exremely biased, but I don't begrudge them, for I also am. However, in the realm of the college text, the comments are unnecessary and can prove distracting. We seem to be at opposite ends of the spectrum. So often I find myself taking umbrage as in: "Profoundly influenced by Lyman Beecher's ambition and his deeply pessimistic theology-an orthodox Calvinist, he believed in a universal damnation, with salvation available only through God's humanly inexplicable choice..." First, inexplicable to whom? Second, only having this short biography, and knowing nothing more of Lyman, where is the pessimism? Surely they can't be calling Christianity pessimistic. More likely they are referring negatively to Calvanism, and yet, from whence is the pessimism? Not only that, but "many of the children grew up to make their mark on American culture," Harriet Beecher Stowe being one of them. It doesn't appear that "pessimism" had a pessimistic effect on the children or on greater society. Perhaps people today would benefit from a little more of Lyman's "pessimism" (and a little less of Jerry Springer's optimism).

In the biography, points of interest were that Stowe had lost her mother at the age of four and hated her step-mother. The most intriguing aspect had to do with the loss of Stowe's infant son. It is said to have "infused her writing with sympathy for people who were helpless in the face of great personal loss... her deep sorrow forged an emotional link with the oppressed." This reminds me of the debate on God's simultaneous omnipotence and benevolence. As the argument goes, if He is a good God, He can't allow bad things to happen to good people. If He does, then He is yet all powerful but not good.

It reminds me of an analogy:

A child is about to put a quarter into a soda machine when a grown man approaches him and demands the quarter. The child declines, and the adult grabs him roughly by the arm, forcibly, painfully opens the child's hand, thieves the quarter, and flees. On the outside, this is not good. It is not decent. The child is crying, the quarter was his, and we want justice.

Perhaps we would feel better if we were to consider that the man was actually a surgical assistant fleeing towards (operating) theatre doors and that the surgeon only had seconds to replace a broken metal disk that kept a life support machine running for a gravely ill man. The thief and the boy have actually saved a man's life. We can all be grateful that the surgical assistant loved saving the man's life more than he hated stealing money from a child. And we can all learn a lesson not only about the tears we shed outside of closed doors but also, perhaps, about the nature of God.

Hindsight is 20/20, and in this, we can see how the death of Stowe's child, a very bad thing, affected our world in a positive, necessary way. As Stowe writes, "There are in this world blessed souls, whose sorrows all spring up into joys for others; whose earthly hopes, laid in the grave with many tears, are the seed from which spring healing flowers and balm for the desolate and the distressed." In UTC at least, this is Stowe in a nutshell...

1. "And oh! mother that reads this, has there never been in your house a drawer, or a closet, the opening of which has been to you like the opening again of a little grave?"

2. "...the mortal anguish which he saw...clenched hands and suffocating breathings..."

3. "...but the ear was deaf with anguish, and the palsied heart could not feel."

4. "The woman did not sob nor weep. She had gone to a place where tears are dry..."

5. "'Couldn't dey leave me one? Mas'r allers said I should have one,-he did,' she repeated over and over, in heartbroken tones."

This woman is no stranger to deep sorrow. It is seen not only in passages like the above but also in her poignant observations regarding nature's indifference to the rabbit howl that is the soul weeping:

1. "...the gentle breeze, that never inquires whether the brow is dusky or fair that it fans."

2. "The poor bleeding heart was still, at last, and the river rippled and dimpled just as brightly as if it had not closed above it."

There it is, the familiar resentment that the sun goes out and yet life goes on. How dare it! If I had tears I would have cried a thousand times reading Stowe's biographical (and obviously autobiographical) passages in UTC.

In light of what Stowe was trying to accomplish, it is no small irony that UTC moved the Union closer to Civil War, but it does make me wonder if Stowe was perhaps a tad naive regarding the nature of her fellows. It seems sensible that, upon exposure to the oft-occurring cruel realities of slavery, society would recoil and abandon the practice post haste. Instead, light fell on roaches who simply scattered behind such dark corners as blame and rhetoric.

One of the last straws seems to have been the law that nullified the "conscience clause" of the North. We are seeing more than a resurgance of this maneuver today. There are so many parallels between slavery and the utter devastation of totally legal human rights violations that go on thousands of times every single day in our country. It is capable of driving one into utter madness.



Thirteen chilling, multi-angle comparisons to current attitudes concerning legal (and celebrated) modern day human rights violations:

1. "...don't dey pull 'em off and sells em? Don't dey tear wife and husband apart... when it's jest takin' the very life on 'em?"

2. "...you must consider it's not a matter of private feeling, there are great public interests involved..."

3. "...those who would put the welfare of a few miserable fugitives before great state interests!"

4. "'In Ramah there was a voice heard, -weeping, and lamentation, and great mourning; Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted.'" Jeremiah 31:15

5. "Haley forced his way into the group, walked up to the old man, pulled his mouth open and looked in, felt of his teeth, made him stand and straighten himself, bend his back, and perform various evolutions to show his muscles; and then passed on to the next, and put him through the same trial."

6. "'...they that wasted them required of them mirth.'"

7. "'That is a bad thing, certainly...but then, I fancy, it don't occur often.'"

8. "'We can't reason from our feelings to those class of persons,' said the other lady.
"Indeed ma'm, you can know nothing of them, if you say so,' answered the first lady, warmly... I know they do feel, just as keenly, -even more so, perhaps,-as we do.'
The lady said 'Indeed!' yawned, and looked out the cabin window... 'I think they are better off than they would be...'"

9. "...the weak broken and torn for the profit and convenience of the strong!"

10. "...he only thought of [death] as a hard customer, that embarrassed his property operations very unfairly; and so he only swore that the gal was a baggage, and that he was devilish unlucky..."

11. "'I tell yer what, stranger, it was years and years before I'd jine the church. 'cause the ministers round in our parts used to preach that the Bible went in for these ere cuttings up...'"

12. "And he took out his pocket-book, and began adding over his accounts,-a process which many gentlemen besides Mr. Haley have found a [healing tonic] for an uneasy conscience."

13. "...like other supporters of our peculiar institution, he decidedly disliked agitation."

In spite of the pain inflicted by the oppressor, Stowe had the wherewithal to suggest that "the workings of a [malevolent] system" were "equally bad for oppressor and oppressed." I suggest that incredibly, she cared for both, and modern abolitionists must follow suit.

In spite of Stowe's elevated morality, she is still flesh and blood. If you'll indulge a few more quotes, here are some of my favorite UTC sarcasms:

1. (On helping a person escape slavery:) "...this poor, heathenish Kentuckian, who had not been instructed in his constitutional relations, and consequently was betrayed into acting in a sort of Christianized manner, which if he had been better situated and more enlightened, he would not have been left to do."

2. "...and the tears that fell, as he spoke, came as naturally as if he had been a white man."
(I'm not entirely sure of the spirit of this comment, but unfortunately for the time, it may have been equally informative and sarcastic.)

3. (On witnessing a 10-month-old baby boy being legally stolen from his mother... and then witnessing her subsequent suicide:) "To him, it looked like something unutterably horrible and cruel, because, poor, ignorant black soul! he had not learned to generalize, and to take enlarged views. If he had only been instructed by certain ministers of Christianity, he might have thought better of it, and seen in it an every-day incident of a lawful trade; a trade which is the vital support of an institution which some American divines tell us has no evils but such as are inseparable from any other relations in social and domestic life."
(This is a big one, thus bolded in total.)

4. (On searching for the above mother:) "The trader waked up, bright and early, and came out to see to his live stock."

5. "Who does not know how our great men are outdoing themselves, in declaiming against the foreign slave-trade. There are a perfect host of Clarksons and Wilberforces risen up among us on that subject, most edifying to hear and behold. Trading negroes from Africa, dear reader, is so horrid! It is not to be thought of! But trading them from Kentucky,-that's quite another thing!"
(This statement actually goes under "chilling comparisons", but that list is already too long, so you find it here.)

UTC's biting statements on the concept of "Union above human" would of course contribute to war. Evil rails against exposure, and exposure incites the passionate who would do away with evil. Slavery divided the country right down the middle; there was no collective acceptance, therefore no collective blind eye like we have today. One favorite nip:

1. "...[death] never will give up a fugitive,-not even at the demand of the whole glorious Union."

Very nearly finishing (although one could never finish on this piece)... I enjoyed the surprising relief of "We beg them to drop a silent tear, and pass on," as it related to the deplorable wet-weather conditions of pre-asphalt roads.









Examples of Early Roads
Taken at The Jr. Museum
Tallahassee, Florida

I also liked the Van Trompe personality (an image of Grizzly Adams) and rolled as he confided, gesturing to rifles hanging over the mantle, "...most people that know me know that 't wouldn't be healthy to try to get anybody out o' my house when I'm agin it."

Finally, anyone with any amount of truly honest introspection surely gets a chill up his spine in reading the remarkably humble: "His heart was exactly where yours, sir, and mine could be brought, with proper effort and cultivation. The wild look of anguish and utter despair that the woman cast on him might have disturbed one less practiced; but he was used to it. He had seen that same look hundreds of times. You can get used to such things, too, my friend."

That also goes under "chilling comparisons", but deserves this special mention, for much as we love our dear, good selves, "none can tell to what red hell his sightless soul may stray." Oh, I can hear modern throngs arguing with Stowe, contending that they would never, never, never participate in something so glaringly malevolent as dehumanizing humans no matter what! But the weakest of all weak things is a virtue that has not been tested in the fire, and many of these same people support what they would be surprised to learn is a modern day holocaust of a most abominable ilk.

At the crux of it, UCT, is a Thorn in the side of the anti-human movement, screaming red in grey streets that it's people... "We're eating people!"

God in heaven, we still refuse to hear!

Visit interesting interpretation exhibit

Visit Harriet's grave.