A History of American Literature

by Percy Holmes Boynton

Nevertheless she was not to sink under the tide of home drudgery. She had visited in the South, witnessing the more kindly aspects of slavery, and in her own town she had seen the pursuit of fugitives, the conscientious defiance of law by devoted abolitionists, the violence of proslavery mobs, and had feared for the life of her brother, who was reported to have suffered death with his friend Lovejoy, when the latter was shot in Alton by a band of Missourians. In these exciting times it came to her more and more insistently that her writing must be turned to good account. Lane Seminary was a seat of antislavery doctrine and was very likely saved from destruction by its fortunate remoteness from the town. But “Uncle Tom” was not to be written from here. In 1850, impelled by ill-health, Professor Stowe accepted a call to Bowdoin College, in which he had been a student. With three children she preceded him, and for the two months before the birth of her seventh child, in Brunswick, she carried the entire responsibility of choosing, equipping, and settling in their new home. In the meanwhile the family bank account was disturbingly low, and she was attempting to write. And in the meanwhile, too, Webster’s “Seventh of March Speech” on compromise with the slavery forces had stirred the North as nothing before and carried the country one step nearer to the Civil War. In the winter that followed Mrs. Stowe came to her great resolve to write something that would arouse the whole nation; and at a communion service in February of 1851 there appeared to her, as in a vision, the scene of the death of Uncle Tom.

The story began its appearance in the National Era, June 5, 1851, and was announced to run for three months, but as it was allowed to take its own course it was not actually concluded until April of the next year. Although it had already attracted the widest attention, the question of publication in book form was in some doubt until it was undertaken by an obscure Boston firm, and the outcome was so uncertain that the Stowes did not dare to assume half the risk of publication for a prospect of half the proceeds. Three thousand copies were sold on the day of issue, and three hundred thousand in America within the first year. In England, also, after an initial hesitation, reprinting was soon started, and by the close of the year eighteen different houses had put on forty editions, and in the end a million and a half copies were circulated in Great Britain and the colonies.[23] Mrs. Stowe’s “fortune was made” of course; but of quite as much moment to her was the fact that her influence was made in the great fight in which she was enlisted. In 1853 she sailed for what turned out to be a sort of triumphal tour in Great Britain, in the course of which large sums of money were given her for use in antislavery outlay. Leading men and women, who had been formerly indifferent, became through her book secondary sources of influence. Moreover, there was value even in the opposition she had aroused. Whittier wrote to Garrison: “What a glorious work Harriet Beecher Stowe has wrought. Thanks for the Fugitive Slave Law! Better would it be for slavery if that law had never been enacted; for it gave occasion for ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’” And Garrison wrote in turn to Mrs. Stowe: “I estimate the value of anti-slavery writing by the abuse it brings. Now all the defenders of slavery have let me alone and are abusing you.” The volume of objection was so great and so much of it was directed at the honesty of the work that the author reluctantly compiled soon after a “Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” in which she presented documentary evidence for every kind of fact used in the story; and of this she was able to write: “Not one fact or statement in it has been disproved as yet. I have yet to learn of even an attempt to disprove.”

The only fair basis for criticizing “Uncle Tom” is as a piece of propagandist literature. It was not even a “problem novel.” It was a story with an avowed “purpose”: “to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race, as they exist among us; to show their wrongs and sorrows, under a system so necessarily cruel and unjust as to defeat and do away the good effects of all that can be attempted for them, by their best friends, under it.” Mrs. Stowe felt no pride in it as a story, referring with perfect composure to the criticisms on its artistry. But as a popular document she composed it with the greatest of art. It was based on a profound conviction and on unassailable facts. It was a passionate assault on slavery, but it was candid in its acknowledgments that many a slaveholder was doing his best to alleviate the system. Far more than half the book is devoted to kindly masters and well-treated bondsmen; the tragedy of Uncle Tom is emphasized by the frustrated or careless benevolence of the Shelbys and St. Clare. The appeals to antislavery prejudice, moreover, could not have been more effective. The democratic movement which had swept Europe in 1848 was fresh in the minds of all thinking people. The challenge to Biblical Christian principle was made in a day when the citation of Scriptural authority was almost universally effective. The natural resentment at beholding virtue thwarted by viciousness was stimulated at every turn in the story. And the frank association of beauty of character with beauty of form served its purpose. “Let it be considered, for instance,” wrote Ruskin in “Modern Painters,” “exactly how far in the commonest lithograph of some utterly popular subject—for instance, the teaching of Uncle Tom by Eva—the sentiment which is supposed to be excited by the exhibition of Christianity in youth, is complicated by Eva’s having a dainty foot and a well-made slipper.” This was a chance illustration for Ruskin, who was writing about pictorial art, but the point of it is fully illustrated by the visible charms of Eliza, Eva, Emmeline, and Cassie, as well as of George Harris, George Shelby, and St. Clare. Uncle Tom was almost the only good character who needed the defense “Handsome is that handsome does.” It is not at all likely that Mrs. Stowe calculated on these various appeals—democratic, theological, sentimental. In fact we have her word for it that the book “wrote itself.” With a moderately developed talent for story-writing she happened to have just the tone of mind and the level of culture which were attuned to the temper of her day, and she employed them to the utmost effect. Moreover, she used them just as Whittier used his powers in some of his moralistic poetry, not relying on her narrative to carry its own burdens but expounding it as she went along and appending a chapter of “Concluding Remarks” with various odds and ends of afterthought—matters which do not belong in a novel and which do not even belong together in any well-organized chapter, but matters which in a persuasive document doubtless were of great value in bringing back to the application the minds of those readers who may have been diverted by the sheer human interest of the tale.

“Uncle Tom” was a success which, of course, could not be duplicated. The second antislavery novel, “Dred, a Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp,” sold enormously on the strength of its predecessor and on its own merits, but it could only fan the embers which had previously been inflamed. The task had been done; and though it was well repeated, and though the application pointed this time to the degrading effects of slavery on the master class, “Dred” could never be anything but an aftermath to “Uncle Tom.”

With a removal to Andover, Massachusetts, in 1852, Mrs. Stowe accompanied her husband to his last post in another theological school, settling into a congenial New England village in comfort at last and among cultured and orthodox neighbors. And here she continued to write until her final move to Hartford, doing her best work in the field of provincial stories of New England life and character. The first of these, “The Minister’s Wooing,” was her contribution to the newly established Atlantic Monthly. With her recent successes fresh in the public mind, she was an indispensable “selling feature” for the ambitious magazine. With this novel she made her first attempt, since the forgotten “Mayflower” volume, to write a story in which the moral should take care of itself. There was a moral, to be sure, and a striking one, for it pointed to a distrust of the older New England Calvinism and made clear the distinction between a religion that uplifts and a theology that turns to scorn the religion it assumes to fortify. In Simeon Brown she developed the obnoxious professor of the declining faith.

He was one of that class of people who, of a freezing day, will plant themselves directly between you and the fire, and there stand and argue to prove that selfishness is the root of all moral evil.... He was one of those men who suppose themselves submissive to the divine will, to the uttermost extent demanded by the extreme theology of that day, simply because they have no nerves to feel, no imagination to conceive what endless happiness or suffering is, and who deal therefore with the great problem of the salvation or damnation of myriads as a problem of theological algebra, to be worked out by their inevitable x, y, z.[24]

It answers to the refrain of “The Deacon’s Masterpiece,” which appeared while she was writing the book: “Logic is logic. That’s all I say.”

It is no accident, therefore, that she represents Simeon, this piece of corrugated inflexibility, as equally far from Dr. Hopkins, the large-hearted Puritan who was bigger than his creed, and from young James Marvin, who wanted to be better than he was but had no creed at all. In the chapter “Which Treats of Romance” Mrs. Stowe perhaps did not let the moral wholly take care of itself, since she came into court as a special pleader for beauty as an ally of religion and brought an indictment against the niggardliness of a life founded on a dogmatic dread of eternal fire. The moral of the book, if one must be given in a sentence, is that love realized is even finer than love renounced.

Like “Uncle Tom” and “Dred,” “The Minister’s Wooing” has its element of instruction as well as of edification, for it is a studied and faithful picture of Rhode Island life just after the Revolution—a period about as remote from Mrs. Stowe as the slave-story epoch is from the modern reader. And because it is less of an allegory the characters are more lifelike, not having to carry each his Christian’s pack of argument on his shoulders. As Lowell stated,[25] they were set in contrast not by the simple and obvious method in fiction of putting them in different social ranks—aristocrat and commoner, master and man, Roundhead and Cavalier, pioneer, Indian and townsman. Between Mrs. Stowe’s village folk caste distinctions were of little moment; a careful realism was taxed to show the vital and homely differences between one individual and another. Her success in this respect is what gives any distinction to “The Pearl of Orr’s Island” (1862). The Pearl herself, who is a bit of labeled symbolism (chap. xxviii),—a Little Eva transported to the Maine coast and thence to heaven,—is almost the only insignificant character. Moses Pennell, an exotic, is comparatively lifelike, and the actual village people are as real as can be.

“Oldtown Folks” (1869) is Mrs. Stowe’s most effective and least adulterated novel. The people of the story are many and varied, ranging from Sam Lawson, the village Rip Van Winkle, to the choicest of Old Boston adornments of society. While the book had no social purpose it had the avowed narrative “object ... to interpret to the world the New England life and character in that particular time in its history which may be called the seminal period”—a statement followed by the complacent and thoroughly provincial assertion that “New England was the seed-bed of this great American Republic, and of all that is likely to come of it.” It should be remembered in Mrs. Stowe’s defense that when she wrote these words the cleavage between North and South could account for many asperities from both sides and that to most Easterners “Trans-Mississippi” meant territory rather than people. In “breadth of canvas,” to resort to the slang of criticism, “Oldtown Folks” is in Mrs. Stowe’s whole output what “Middlemarch” is in George Eliot’s. It is filled with popular tableaux—in the old Meeting House, in the Grandmother’s Kitchen, at the Manor House, in the coach on its grave progress to Boston, in the school and its surroundings; and it is red-lettered with festivals in which the richest flavor of social life in the early nineteenth century is developed.