English 455 – Colloquium
Grant T. Smith, Ph. D.
Notes on Uncle Tom’s Cabin
From "Stowe, the Abolition Movement, and Prevailing Theories of Racae in Nineteenth-Century America" by Susan M. Nuernberg

        An easy way of looking at an historical/cultural overview of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is to look at three important issues of the mid 1800’s:  (1) race, abolition; (2) cult of true womanhood as an alternative ideology to capitalism; (3) religion.

Race:  In the 19th century you could not be for slavery and racial equality at the same time.  But you could be for antislavery while opposing racial equality!  (Remember that it wasn’t until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s that Black-Americans achieved civil rights!)

        Harriet Beecher Stowe did not write UTC to advocate racial equality in the secular and social sphere.  She wanted to end slavery, which opposed her notions of Christian morality.  Slavery had to be abolished for the nation to be purified of its national sin.

        In the first half of the 19th century, racial thought in the United States developed along two separate currents: science and romanticism.  But in neither of these arenas did anyone question the assumption of a racial hierarchy.
 

Polygenesis:  Racial differences are innate.  There must have been separate  and unequal creations.  The American school of ethnology affirmed on the basis of cranial measurements and other archaeological evidence that blacks were permanently inferior to whites.  This theory allowed for slavery, Indian extermination, and imperial expansion.  George R. Gliddon maintained in 1854 that pure-blooded non-white races were incapable of high intelligence or of civiization without the infusion of some white blood.  (Look carefully at the skin color of Stowe’s Black-American characters in UTC.

Monogenesis:  Racial differences are the product of environment.  Samuel Stanhope Smith, a Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) argued that racial differences could be attributed to differing physical and social environments.  This theory relies upon the assumption that a race can literally be transformed through the power of the environment.

        Blacks benefited from a protective social status or deserved animal-like treatment because of their inferiority to whites or their subhuman status.

        Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister, believed that Caucasians naturally had a “restless disposition to invade and conquer other lands; his haughty contempt of humbler tribes which leads him to subvert, enslave, kill, and exterminate; his fondness for material things…his love of personal liberty and his most profound respect for established law and his inflexible industrious, and unconquerable will.”
 

What was Stowe’s purpose?  To vilify slavery and by so doing help the cause of abolition.  She was the daughter of the preacher Lyman Beecher, one of the most powerful rhetoricians of the Second Great Awakening in New England; the wife of Calvin Stowe, a minister and professor of religion at Bowdoin College in Maine; and the sister of six ministers.

        Tom becomes a symbol of the Christian virtue and piety lacking in white America.  Tom is excessively kind, meek, patient, and humble.  He is affectionate, forgiving, compassionate, attached to family, nonviolent, and trusting.  Stowe’s treatment of Black characters is so ambivalent that it is impossible for the reader to determine how much of Tom’s meekness is due to his religious virtues and how much to his racial heritage.   Stowe describes him as “a large, broad-chested, powerfully-made man, of a full glossy black, and a face whose truly African features were characterized by an expression of grave and steady good sense, united with much kindliness and benevolence.”

        Tom represents Stowe’s idea that the highest virtue is Christian love.  Stowe claimed to have had a vision in church in 1851 of a black man being mercilessly flogged and praying for his torturers as he died, a vision of a black Christ that inspired his depiction of Tom.

        Stowe said, “The Negro race is confessedly more simple, docile, childlike and affectionate, than other races.  And hence, the divine graces of love and faith, when inbreathed by the Holy Spirit, find in their temperament a more congenial atmosphere.”

Why did Stowe advocate that the slaves emigrate to Africa, Liberia?  Because she saw the Blacks as more meek, long-suffering, loving and virtuous—and thus more receptive to Christianity, the could create a “high civilization” on the African continent.  George, who is the most “white” of her Black characters, chooses a return to Africa over social equality with whites in America.  By having the victim disavow any desire for social justice, Stowe resolves the conflict for those who support abolition but not racial equality in the social sphere.

Criticisms of Stowe:

Some black readers read in the novel’s ending and racist stereotypes Stowe’s alliance with the American Colonization Society whose chief aim was to export blacks to Africa (or elsewhere) to protect white supremacy in the United States.

Some questions regarding race to consider:



Nineteenth-Century Domestic Ideology – Slavery undermines domestic ideology and therefore, threatens the foundation of American society.
Notes from "Uncle Tom's Cabin and Conventional Nineteenth-Century Domestic Ideology" by Lisa Logan

Domestic Ideology:

How do Stowe’s female characters fit with the domestic ideology? How do Stowe’s descriptions of houses fit with the domestic ideology? Questions for discussion:

Religion

        Stowe said that her "great object" in writing the novel was "to bring this subject of slavery, as a moral and religious question, before the minds of all those who profess to be followers of Christ, in this country."  Stowe advocated individual action in the form of "active resistance against the law of the land."  Yet she did not advocate force to get the South to abolish slavery.  She did not promote forced abollition through either leagal or military means.  She intended not to provoke a war but to save souls--and in so doing to bring about a peaceful end to slavery.  She condemned slavery because it "entrusts the souls of black slaves to whoever can afford to buy their bodies, thus endangering their salvation and almost certainly condemning white America to everlasting hellfire."

        Stowe wanted her readers to look into their own souls.  See chapter 45 "Concluding Remarks."

        Stowe eventually came to believe in a theology of Christocentric liberalism, which emphasized not the judgment of God but the love of Christ and the availability of salvation for all.  This theological positin granted individuals more power to effect their own salvation.  Uncle Tom's Cabin works on the assumption of individual salvation, that there is something the individual can do to effect his or her salvation and so contribute to an end to slavery.

        Stowe blames St. Clare and Senator Bird's (see Chapter Nine) ability to privilege their "rational" acceptance of the slavery system over their sympathy for the slaves' plight on their reliance upon the law over the heart.  While St. Clare's portrait (Chapter 15) illustrates Stowe's conviction that most Southern whites were basically good people, if misguided by habit and convention and trapped by a cruel system, the predicatments of Senator Bird typify those of Stowe's entire Northern audience.

        Look carefully at Tom's transformation.  Eventually the issue for him is no longer the moral conflict between people and the institutioin of slavery, between people and racial prejudice, or between Tom as an individual and the political, social and economic circumstances that oppress him.  Instead, it is the spiritual conflict between Tom and his own stubbornly human heart, which finds it hard to let go of the world and to accept his miserable lot as providential.  Thus "The Victory," when it comes isn't over oppressiona and prejudice; it is the victory that Tom wins over himslef: "the human will, bent, and bleeding, and struggling long, was now entirely merged in the Divine."  See Chapter 38.

        At the end of his life Tom gives young George Shelby a message to take back to his family and fellow slaves in Kentucy.  "Tell 'em all," he says, "to follow me--follow me!"  He doesn't mean, of course, get sold down the river so you can be beaten to death by Simon Legree.  Neither he nor Stowe is thinking at all about his literal experience, his fate as a slave.  That story has been erased, and in its place the novel has put an allegory of salvation, in which the crucified slave can show others the way.

Discussion Questions: