Shall we attribute this firm belief, that there were among the southern slaves many who were better christians than Christ himself is represented to have been, to a mere hallucination? That word is not strong enough. To explain the belief, we must think of visions suggested by the hypnotizing powers, or something like the spell on Titania, when Bottom with his ass’s head inspired her with the fondest admiration and love.
Although the foregoing is far from being exhaustive, it is enough; it shows incontrovertibly that Mrs. Stowe builded throughout upon the exceptional and imaginary. My father, a Presbyterian clergyman, with the strictest notions as to the Sabbath, as he generally called Sunday, made me read, when a boy, a book called, if I recollect aright, “Edwards’s Sabbath Manual.” Be the title whatever it may, the entire book was but a collection of instances of secular work done on Sunday, and always followed closely by disaster, which appeared to be divine punishment of sabbath-breaking. The author was confident he had proved his case. He believed with his whole soul that if one should do on Sunday any week-day work not permitted in the catechism, it was more than probable that God would at once deal severely with him for not keeping his day holy.
This is a somewhat overstrained example of Mrs. Stowe’s method. I will therefore give one which is as close as close can be. Suppose a diligent worker to cull from newspaper files, law reports, and what he hears in talk, the cases in which one party to a marriage has cruelly mistreated the other. If he digested his collection with a view to effect, it would prove a far more formidable attack upon the most civilizing and improving of all human institutions than Mrs. Stowe’s Key is upon slavery; and if he had her rare artistic gift he could found upon it a wonderful anti-marriage romance. The author of such a Key and romance would be confuted at once by the exclamation, “If these horrors are general, people would flee marriage as they do the plague.” Let it be inquired, “If ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and Mrs. Stowe’s Key truly represent, why did not more of the blacks escape into the free States? and why did they not revolt in large bodies during the war in the many communities whence all the able-bodied whites had gone to the front far away?” and there can be but one answer, which is, there was no general or common oppression of the African in slavery—there were no horrors to him in the condition—but on the contrary he was contented and happy, merry as the day is long.
How was it that a book so full of untrue statement and gross exaggeration as to an American theme found such wide acceptance at the north and elsewhere out of the south? For years I could not explain. When I read it at Princeton, I talked it over with the southern students. We pooh-poohed the negroes, but we admired the principal white characters except Mrs. St. Claire, whom we all regarded as a libellous caricature. The representation of slavery was incorrect, and the portrayal of the negro as only a black and kinky-haired white was so absurd that one of us dreamed that either would be taken seriously by the north. It was some ten years after the brothers’ war that the true explanation commenced to dawn upon me, and it has at last become clear.
It is an important fact that the great body of the people of the north knew almost next to nothing of the south, and especially of the average negro. As one calmly looks back now he sees that in the agitation over the admission of California, the cleavage between the two nationalizations treated in foregoing chapters was becoming decided, and that the people belonging to each were losing their tempers and getting ready to fight. When even a political campaign in which the only question is, who shall be ins and who outs, is on, each party is prone to believe the hardest things of the other. But when such a fell resort to force as that of 1850 and the years immediately following is impending, all history shows that those on one side will believe any charge reflecting upon the good character of those on the other side which is not grossly improbable. Such quarrels are so fierce that we never weigh accusations against our adversaries—we just embrace and circulate. Thus had the northern public become ripe for an arraignment of the morality of slavery, which—as was with purblind instinct felt, not discerned—was the sole active principle of the southern nationalization. Even without the provocation just mentioned, a northern man would liken the African in everything but his skin and hair to a white. We always classify a new under some old and well-known object. When the Romans first saw the elephant they thought of him as the Lucanian ox. The automobile which propels itself around our streets is made as much like the corresponding horse-drawn vehicle familiar to the public for ages as can be. The northerner knew no man well but the Caucasian, and he had long been led by a common psychological process to give his characteristic essentials to the negro. And now when anti-slavery partisans positively maintained that the latter was a white in all but his outside, adducing seeming proofs, and the free-labor nationalization was with its leading strings pulling all the northern people into line, even the calmest and most dispassionate among them were influenced to believe that the negroes were so much like our Anglo-Saxon selves it was an unspeakable crime to keep them in slavery. And all tales of cruelty and horror found easy credence.
Thus had the northern public been made ready for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” And although the book wholly ignored and obscured the really live and burning issue, and it was packed from beginning to end with the most gigantic errors of fact, it took the section by storm.
It is a great book. When something has been as persistently demanded as long as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” has been by the northern public and the “Conquered Banner” by the southern public; when thousands upon thousands of plain people weep over them and lay them away to weep over them again, you may know—it matters not what the unruffled and sarcastic critic may say—that each is a work of the very highest and the very rarest genius. Tears of sympathy for tales of distress and misery, whoever can set their fountain flowing is always a nature’s king or queen.
I have read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” four times: first at Princeton in 1852; the second time amid the gloom of reconstruction, more accurately to ascertain northern opinion of the negro and forecast therefrom, if I could, what was in store for the south; the third time as I was meditating the Old and New South; and just the other day the last time. The more familiar I become with it the greater seems to me the power with which the attention is taken and held captive. The very titles to the first twelve chapters are, in their contents and sequence, gems of genius, and draw resistlessly. I become more and more impatient with Ruskin’s reprehending the escape of Eliza, when, with her child hugged to her bosom, she leaps from block to block of floating ice in the Ohio until she is safe on the other side—a marvel like the ghost’s appearance in the first scene of Hamlet, exciting a high and breathless interest at the outset, which is never allowed to flag afterwards. Whenever I begin to read the book, I fall at once into that illusion which Coleridge has so well explained. I accept all her blunders and mistakes as real facts, and although it is hard to tolerate her negro travesties and the anti-slavery sentiments of her southern whites, somehow they do not then offend me, and there is chapter after chapter in which I follow the action with breathless interest. “Gulliver’s Travels” and “Pilgrim’s Progress” are examples to show how little of reality either entertaining or moving fiction needs. From a mass of false assumptions, seasoned with the merest sprinkling of fact; and especially from her taking for granted that the negro is really on a par of development with the white, she has constructed the Iliad of our time. The nursery tale out of which Shakspeare fashioned the drama of Lear did not furnish him with smaller resources. What a wonderful action he puts in the place of the nursery tale! how natural and probable it all appears to us as it unfolds! how we hate, or pity, or admire, or love as we cannot keep from following it! Likewise every reader in the north accepted Mrs. Stowe’s novel as the very height of verity, and afterwards saw in every fugitive slave a George Harris, or Eliza, or an Uncle Tom. And the book evoked the same effect out of America. The most curious proof of this that I can think of is the statue of The Freed Slave, which I saw on exhibition at the Centennial. It has nearly all the peculiar physical characteristics of the Caucasian; and it represents not a typical man of African descent, but a negro albino, that is, a white negro, not a black one. There are albino negroes, but there are also albino whites. That statue shows what was European conception of the negroes whose chains were broken by the emancipation proclamation. Its reception in America shows also that the same conception prevailed here. Day after day I saw crowds of northern people contemplating that counterfeit with deep emotion, many of the women unable to restrain their tears.
Surely “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in its propagandic potency is unrivalled. It did more than the anti-slavery statesmen, politicians, preachers, talkers, and orators combined. To it more than to all other agencies is due that the people of the north took such a stubborn stand in opposition that the south at last saw that the fugitive slave law had been practically nullified. Thus the fates worked to bring about secession. For secession was to bring the brothers’ war; and this war was to do what could not be done by law or consent,—that is, to get rid of slavery as the informing principle of southern nationalization.
The post-bellum propagandic effect of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” has been very malign. With the companion literature and theories, it formed the opinion that devised and executed the reconstruction of the southern States. The cardinal principle of that reconstruction was to treat the blacks just emancipated as political equals of the whites.