Written as the letters of a northern woman visiting Virginia, Cousin Franck’s Household, or Scenes In The Old Dominion is Swallow Barn in reverse. Slave-traders and fugitives are again described. In addition we have close observations of domestic life. Some of the slaves, with good right, resemble the master too much for his wife’s comfort and she begs him to sell them or send them off to his Alabama plantation. A slave drover remarks:
Fact is, I’ve got a specimen lot ... of Anglo-Saxon blood, I reckon they calls it; at any rate, I’m takin’ ter market some of the best blood in the “Old Dominion”.... Ingenus, ain’t it now, for a body to tarn a body’s own blood to sich account.
A Yankee overseer, who “calculates what a nigger is wuth, and how long he’ll last on the hard drive plan;” a beautiful octoroon and her mother, crazy Millie, deranged by the tragedy of slavery, are types that will frequently be met with in later fiction. Although apologetic to “fastidious readers” who might object to her recording “dialectal peculiarities,” Mrs. Pierson kept voluminous notebooks “to secure accuracy in the nondescript vernacular of the cabin and the hut.” She sees the social setting, likewise, with accuracy; she records what southern novelists preferred not to show: the poor whites, not an accident but a logical result of slavery; and the worn-out, profitless land, which brought it about that Virginia’s best crop was the crop of slave children in the quarters.
Harriet Beecher Stowe. In 1851, a little woman in Cincinnati sent the first chapter of Uncle Tom’s Cabin or The Man that Was a Thing to the National Era. The daughter of a famed preacher, and the sister of another more famous for his antislavery sermons, Harriet Beecher Stowe had grown up in religious, humanitarian surroundings. Cincinnati, a border city, was a battleground for antislavery and proslavery forces; Dr. Bailey, abolitionist editor of the National Era was mobbed there, and Quakers spread the antislavery gospel in “sewing societies.” Mrs. Stowe, whose home was at times a shelter for fugitives, had listened to pathetic or hair-raising stories of the South, and had written two antislavery sketches, “Immediate Emancipator” (1848) and “The Freeman’s Dream” (1850). Her anger at the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law made her dissatisfied with such weak parables, and she set out to write a passionate protest. In preparation she read books like Weld’s Slavery As It Is, and the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, of Lewis Clark, who suggested George Harris, and of Josiah Henson, who suggested Uncle Tom.
In 1852 when the completed serial was published in book form as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among The Lowly, its success was instantaneous. Over three hundred thousand copies were sold in America in the first year; in a very short time there were forty editions in England, and over a million and a half copies sold in the Empire. It was translated in many foreign languages, including Bohemian, Welsh and Siamese. It was acclaimed by George Sand, Dickens and Kingsley, who naturally were not annoyed by the sentimentality and melodrama; it set Heinrich Heine to reading the Bible; to Macaulay it was the greatest American literary achievement. Whittier rejoiced in the Fugitive Slave Law, since it gave occasion for the book. Lincoln later said to Mrs. Stowe, “So you are the little woman who brought on the great war.” If this is overstatement, it is true that many of the voters who elected Lincoln in 1860 were greatly influenced by the household favorite. Tolstoy grouped it with the few masterpieces of the world, and Howells considered it the only great American novel produced before the Civil War. Detractors have for a long time been undermining its prestige, but it has probably been more widely read than any other novel in the world, and it is still popular.
In characterizing the Negroes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mrs. Stowe faced the dilemma of the propagandist. If she showed them as brutalized by slavery, she would have alienated her readers, whose preferences were for idealized heroes. If on the other hand, she made her characters too noble, her case against slavery would be weakened. She did this with Uncle Tom, and critics have stated: If slavery produced a Christian hero so far superior to free whites, then slavery is excellent. This dilemma was hardly recognized by Mrs. Stowe, however, as all of her training and inclinations were toward sentimental idealism. Eliza and George, if not models of Christian forgivingness, are still virtue in distress, to be saved by poetic justice. Eva’s ethereal goodness, and Legree’s cruelty are examples among the white characters of the same idealization. But Topsy must not be overlooked; although minstrel shows have made her into a Puck in blackface, Mrs. Stowe intended to show her as a pathetic victim of slave-trading as well. Sambo and Quimbo, the slave-drivers, had been dehumanized by the system; Cassy is the octoroon whose beauty has crushed her; and Chloe, while traditional, is made realistic by the little touches of a woman well acquainted with kitchen-lore. Mrs. Stowe has a wide range of Negro characters, and one southern critic finds in Uncle Tom’s Cabin just about all of the traits he is willing to grant the Negro. High spirits are shown on Shelby’s Kentucky plantation, but tragedy lurks in the background. Mrs. Stowe handles the tragedy with the bold melodramatic strokes of Dickens; but she artfully blends the shocking with humor and pathos, with mystery and suspense; familiar domestic scenes with cotton-planting, steamboating on the river and gambling in New Orleans; pious moralizing with fascinating wickedness—all in all a successful recipe.
When Mrs. Stowe rattled the bones of the skeletons in southern closets, howls arose from the manors. A South Carolinian recorded the rumor:
That the whole “nigger kingdom” of the South had been killed, smothered, torn to pieces by bloodhounds, ground up for bone manure; children dragged from mothers’ breasts, and the whole plantations turned into slaughter-houses, we fully expected; and yet nobody had read it.
It is needless to say that no such pictures occurred in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, yet Mrs. Stowe was called a defamer, a hypocrite, “snuffling for pollution with a pious air,” a plain liar.
A moralist and debater, Mrs. Stowe returned the lie. She published A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book as long as the novel, giving sources for all of her charges. The Key, largely unread by the critics, remains unanswerable. Granting that such feats as Eliza’s crossing the ice are sensational, although vouched for, in what did the lying in Uncle Tom’s Cabin consist? Joel Chandler Harris goes too far in calling it a defense of American slavery as Mrs. Stowe found it in Kentucky, but his comment has point. Shelby and St. Clair are kindly owners, in the plantation tradition, whose humanity was overpowered by the system. The two Yankees,—the vicious Legree and the priggish, unsympathetic Miss Ophelia are certainly in line with southern gospel. It is no lie that there were slave auctions, slave cellars such as the ones where the flies “got to old Prue,” public whipping posts, mothers separated from their children, and slaves like Cassy whose beauty was their doom. With allowances for sentimentality and melodrama, essential truth is in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. To argue against its artistic faults and to consider it incomplete representation are possible. The charge of lying, however, is confusing. Mrs. Stowe showed that slavery was a great wrong, and that Negroes are human. Is it here that critics believe that she lies?