“Oh, that’s it, is it? Excuse me, but I have been living in France where these distinctions are wholly unknown, and I have not yet got myself in the train of fashionable ideas here.”
“Well, then, let me teach you. You know we republicans go for no distinctions except those created by Nature herself, and we found our rank upon color, because it is clearly a thing that none has any hand in but our Maker. You see?”
“Yes, but who decides what shall be the reigning color?”
“I’m surprised to hear the question. The only true color—the only proper one—is our color, to be sure. A lovely pea-green is the precise shade on which to found aristocratic distinction.... Society would become dreadfully mixed if it were not fortunately ordered that the Crickets are as black as jet. The fact is that a class to be looked down upon is necessary to all elegant society, and if the Crickets were not black, we could not keep them down, because, as everybody knows, they are often cleverer than we.... Their being black is a convenience, because, as long as we are green and they black, we have a superiority that never can be taken from us. Don’t you see now?”
The Colonel saw. The party was held; the Crickets, being very musical, were asked to play for the dancing and came in concourses to do so. The ball went on until daybreak, so that it seemed that every leaf in the forest was alive. In fact those dissipated Katydids kept up this sort of thing till Parson To-whit preached against it and even till the celebrated Jack Frost epidemic occurred in the month of September.
Plainly Harriet had made up her mind that color was never a fit basis for social distinctions. One could, perhaps, even further back in her life, find sources for the conviction that to hold any person in a subject state because of the color of his skin was the greatest injustice. She had in Litchfield heard her father preach sermons on the subject of slavery and offer prayers for the slaves that had made her heart throb and ache. And when her Aunt Mary, spoken of in an earlier chapter, came from San Domingo and told of the sufferings of slaves as she had witnessed them there, her feeling was deepened and intensified.
As early as 1837 Catherine Beecher published a small book called “An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism with Reference to the Duty of American Females.” It was written in answer to a movement to induce women to join the Abolition Society. She opposed this movement strongly. She agreed with the members of the society in thinking slavery an evil, but she was most disinclined to any radical measures against it. Indeed she spent most of her time in criticizing the unwise and hasty measures of the abolitionists, their undue urgency and sledgehammer methods.
Sister Catherine, however, showed some foresight when she said, “It is my full conviction that if insurrection does burst forth, and there be the least prospect to the cause of the slave, there will be men from the North and West,[11] standing breast to breast, with murderous weapons, in opposing ranks.” She counseled calm, rational Christian discussion as the only proper method of securing the ends of safety and peace. It seems that Catherine, with all her acumen, did not in the least realize that this was to be a case where benignity, urbanity, meekness and benevolence would not serve; and while she touches the idea of a possible “standing breast to breast with murderous weapons in opposing ranks,” the very fact that she can speak of it so calmly shows that it is now a matter of rhetoric with her rather than of shuddering prophecy. In her serene unconsciousness that the forces of war were even then forming, Catherine Beecher was not by any means alone. Almost to the last minute many, or perhaps most, of our great statesmen did not in the least imagine that sections of a people speaking one language, consecrated in their close relationship by like struggles in the past and united by like ideals and hopes for the future, could be separated by the sword over a mere difference of opinion as to the matter of holding slaves. We must try to remember that no one was really aware of this beforehand or we shall fail to understand why the formation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s thought on this subject was so gradual. No doubt she was influenced by such a statement of views as her sister made in her book; as a result of this, and perhaps of other influences of like kind, she was for years trying to keep the subject of slavery as much as possible out of her mind. To her it was a horror in a distant part of the world that she could do nothing to mitigate, and if she should let her mind dwell upon it, she would be unable to do the duties that lay at hand. It seemed a subject “too painful to inquire into, and one that advancing light and civilization would live down.”[12]
Meantime she was being quietly prepared in one corner of the world for a fit and not inconspicuous part in the thrilling drama of emancipation. She seems to have had a real human interest in the negroes as the expression of a certain individual and racial character. Nearly every novel she wrote had first or last a negro character. These dusky people of her imaginary world if placed by themselves would form a collection of highly individualized portraits, all taken from her picture gallery of actual memories. At Easthampton, Dr. Beecher had preached to an adjacent colony of colored people and when the family moved to Litchfield “one Dinah” and “one Zillah” came with the caravan and formed a very necessary part of the household at the parsonage. There were always colored servants to help about the work in the big Beecher home. One of these, whose name was Candace, a portly old black washerwoman, would sometimes take the little Harriet aside and tell her with tears about the saintly virtues of her departed mother. When Harriet visited her aristocratic relatives in Guilford and was taught the catechism by her Aunt Harriet, black Dinah, along with Harry, the bound boy, ranged at a respectful distance behind her, was taught also. “Dine” was a great friend of Harriet’s; they had many frolics together and the black playmate told the little girl many stories and made herself very interesting.
When the Beechers came to live in Litchfield they found colored people still living there who had been born slaves. “Old Grimes,” famous in song and story, was a Litchfieldian slave; his character was sufficiently notorious for his death to be chronicled in the affecting lines: