I often fancy, as I think over it, that the last quotation describes suggestions from the fates.
But we must let Mrs. Stowe finish what we have had her tell in part. Informing us that, after writing “two or three first chapters,” she made an arrangement for weekly serial publication in the National Era, she says:
“She was then in the midst of heavy domestic cares, with a young infant, with a party of pupils in her family to whom she was imparting daily lessons with her own children, and with untrained servants requiring constant supervision, but the story was so much more intense a reality to her than any other earthly thing that the weekly instalment never failed. It was there in her mind day and night waiting to be written, and requiring but a few moments to bring it into veritable characters. The weekly number was always read to the family circle before it was sent away, and all the household kept up an intense interest in the progress of the story.”[91]
This household had been indoctrinated by the zeal of Dr. Lyman Beecher into believing unreservedly all the inventions of ignorant assailants of slavery instead of the widely different facts.
Before I begin a detailed statement of the material errors and perversions of fact in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” I want to emphasize it that every one of them appeared to northern readers, unfamiliar with the negro and the south, to be true, and most efficiently helped to form and strengthen sentiment against enforcement of the fugitive slave law.
Many things that she writes show that Mrs. Stowe was completely ignorant of the ways of the cotton plantation. I have space to mention but one. Tom was bred in Kentucky, where no cotton was grown. And Cassy, by reason of her indulgent rearing, had had as little experience as Tom in cotton-picking. Yet these two show such expertness that Tom can add to the sack of a slower picker, and Cassy give Tom some of her cotton, and each have enough to satisfy the weigher at night. The good cotton-picker is surely a most skilled laborer. He must be trained from childhood to use both hands so well that he becomes almost ambidexterous. The training that the typewriter is now urged to take is a parallel.
Mrs. Stowe shows that she had no accurate knowledge of the sentiments of the whites of the south as to slavery. As we have already suggested, there may have been among the Kentuckians of the border some outspoken opponents of slavery; but it is very probable that in her womanly ardor for her great cause she lavishly magnified their numbers. In her novel she has nearly all of her white southerners—I may add all of the attractive ones—to declare themselves as abolitionists at heart. Misrepresentation of fact could not be grosser than this. I was twenty-five years old when the brothers’ war commenced. I had mingled intimately with the people, high and low, of my part of the south. During all of this time I never found out there was a single one of my acquaintances, man, woman, boy, or girl, who did not believe slavery right. The charge implied by Mrs. Stowe that we southerners were doing violence to our consciences in holding on to our slaves is utterly without evidence; nay, it is unanimously contradicted by all the evidence. As we and our parents read the bible, it told us to hold on to them, but to treat them always with considerate kindness.
Mrs. Stowe emphasizes the frequent cruelty of the master to the slave; and she emphasizes more strongly still that under the law he was helpless. The slave was not helpless. He was protected by law. Note this example, given by Toombs:
“The most authentic statistics of England show that the wages of agricultural and unskilled labor in that kingdom not only fail to furnish the laborer with the comforts of our slave, but even with the necessaries of life, and no slaveholder could escape a conviction for cruelty to his slaves who gave his slave no more of the necessaries of life for his labor than the wages paid to their agricultural laborers by the noblemen and gentlemen of England would buy.”[92]
The witness just called has full knowledge, and is the extreme of frank honesty and truthfulness.