Recent scholarship on Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novels has concentrated in three main threads. First, primarily feminist scholars such as Jane Tompkins and Jean Fagan Yellin have explored Stowe's feminism and her place in the 19th century tradition of sentimental fiction. Second, scholars interested in race relations such as Sarah Smith Duckworth and Richard Yarborough have looked at Stowe's portrayal of Blacks and her place in the tradition of abolitionist writing. Third, scholars such as Theodore Hovet have read Stowe's antislavery books as primarily religious documents. By examining Stowe's indebtedness to a Southern tradition that is either neutral on or in favor of slavery, I wish to propose a new thread with much to offer both feminist and abolitionist readings of Stowe's work.
The difficulty of this project was greater than I had anticipated. Since her letters have never been collected, it is impossible to know what novels Stowe had read or was reading and thinking about when she sat down to write Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe's most recent biographer, Joan Hedrick, makes it clear that Stowe was never able to reconcile fully her public existence as a professional writer and advocate with her belief that women's proper sphere of influence was private, domestic, and noncontroversial. The extraordinary success of Uncle Tom led her to make a career out of deprecating her own role as author and of mythologizing her process of writing the novel. In The Building of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Kirkham collects several contradictory accounts by Stowe of how she first got the idea for the story, including the oft-repeated disclaimer that "God wrote it" (Kirkham 75).
Most critics who address the question of Stowe's sources follow Kirkham. He traces her use of certain slave narratives and abolitionist books, especially American Slavery as it is (1839), by Timothy Weld.(1). Hedrick adds that Stowe drew upon her own visit to Kentucky, her brother's travels in New Orleans, and upon her interactions and conversations with various Black maids who Stowe employed as housekeepers.
What is missing from these accounts are discussions of Stowe's novelistic inspirations. As a New Englander who had never been to the South beyond a brief trip to Kentucky, where did Stowe get her ideas of what Southern people were like and how they lived? Slave narratives and abolitionist literature were the last places Stowe was likely to find a positive description of a slave owner on which she could have modeled Mr. Shelby or Augustine St. Clare. Instead, Stowe's chapter on Mr. Shelby in The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin quotes passages from "J. K. Paulding's Letters on Slavery" and "Ingraham's Travels in the South-West." (8, 13).
Paulding's book was evidently (I have been unable to examine it or Ingraham) a collection of letters by various slave owners. Stowe judges the author of the letter she extracts "from his style, to be a very amiable, agreeable man . . . who probably describes very fairly the state of things in his own domain" (8). The letter blames ill treatment of slaves on overseers, or "harsh masters" who are "all exceptions to the rule"; but such abuses were in times past and are seldom found anymore (9). Its author claims that Virginia's slaves are treated in a "humane, and even indulgent manner" and that "constituted as they are, morally and physically, they are as happy as any peasantry in the world" (13). The author even claims that when his slaves are "very busy" (harvesting tobacco?), he "sometimes" works their garden patches for them himself (11).
Many items listed in The Key were put together after the fact. Let us assume, however, that Stowe had this letter or others like it in mind as she invented Shelby and St. Clare. How could she accept such a blatantly false propaganda as "very fairly" describing the "state of things" in Virginia? The letter as a whole emphasizes that slaves are well fed, cared for when sick, asked to work only moderate hours, indulgently treated, and live long lives -- also, they are less happy when freed than when enslaved. The thesis of American Slavery As It Is, which Stowe clearly used for numerous anecdotes in Uncle Tom's Cabin, is that slaves are starved, worked, and beaten to a premature and miserable death -- anything would be preferable to slavery.
I believe that Stowe was able to maintain these two contradictory visions of southern slavery by viewing them as a Southerner would, through an idealized mythology of "The South" which had emerged in Southern fiction and in regionalist essays or travel writing. This "plantation mythology," analyzed in Gaines's The Southern Plantation (1924), has by now become a cliche of historical romances like Gone With The Wind, but its origins are to be found in the early 19th century. The myth sees the South as a land of rich plantations, furnished with palatial mansions, inhabited by cultured and aristocratic gentleman planters, beautiful and eligible belles, and dashing young cavaliers. Behind the mansion are the pastoral huts of loyal, contented, pleasantly ignorant, musically and comically talented slaves.
I have found references to Stowe's place in this Southern "plantation tradition" in Gaines and in Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee (1961). Gaines is blatantly racist, while Taylor is a historian. Both adopt a dismissive, "new criticism" attitude that Stowe's work is not of serious merit. Pamela Smith mentions in passing that Stowe "was attracted by the plantation legend" (81), but her discussion of Stowe looks at motherhood and domesticity. The absence of critical discussion about Stowe's use of this Southern plantation mythology is the "lost argument" of my title. In "On 'The Yellow Wallpaper,'" Joanna Russ points out that
A new restricted canon of (women's) literary masterpieces is no improvement on the old restricted canon of (mostly men's) masterpieces; both all too often ignore the "paraliterary" traditions from which many such works spring, and the political, economic, and social context that is inseparable from such works' meaning and value Russ 159-60).
Feminist and cultural criticism have made one scholar's paraliterary tradition another's neglected classic. Before discussing Stowe's use of plantation mythology, however, I will briefly present some plantation realities.(2)
To the extent that it moves beyond the condition of slaves, American Slavery As It Is takes parts of the plantation myth for granted: Southern white society is assumed to consist of aristocratic planters who had everything and "poor whites" who had nothing. This economic aspect of the plantation myth was apparently common in abolitionist fiction: it appears, for example, in Hildreth's The Slave (1836). Plantations are seen in these books as places where slaves do manual labor, and whites leisurely manage and supervise. A farm, then, would be a place where the owner of the farm worked the land alongside his slaves or hired help. By this standard, each of Uncle Tom's masters is a leisured planter.
Early Virginia colonists found a fertile coastal plain that was virtually flat and infiltrated by numerous navigable tidal rivers. Since they did not acknowledge the rights of the Native Americans living there, the land was also cheap. These conditions made it profitable for a planter to locate beside a river, grow hundreds of acres of tobacco, and load it from the riverside directly onto a ship sailing for England. Further inland, however, hills and the lack of any reasonable transport system made farming of more than a few dozen acres impractical.
Thus a double society formed in Virginia and more generally throughout the South. Large plantations worked by slaves were concentrated in a few areas along the coastal plain, particularly in Virginia and South Carolina, and, eventually, in the lower Mississippi valley: in these places the economy was oriented around one or two cash crops (tobacco, cotton, sugar cane, indigo, rice). Even these areas, however, were dominated by small farms with few or no slaves. Outside these cash crop areas, agriculture was oriented around food crops, almost always grown on small farms and worked by the family that owned the land.
Evidently using the 1860 census, Hubbell claims that only 20% of all Southern families owned any slaves; of all slave holding planters and farmers, 80% had less than ten slaves and less than 500 acres of land. I am not certain how many slaves a working farmer would need to become a leisured planter, but the numbers drop off quickly: in 1860, less than 11,000 families in the entire South owned more than 50 slaves (Hubbell 331).
Both Mr. Shelby and St. Clare are thus members of a tiny group who own enough slaves that their work is limited to management. But Stowe goes further than this: she depicts her planters as Gentlemen, educated and cultured aristocrats who cultivate a lack of business sense and little concern for money. Shelby begins the story in debt; St. Clare complains about the wastefulness of his household but makes no attempt to right things. Uncouth Simon Legree, who keeps careful accounts with an eye to his bottom line, is marked as a low-class interloper.
Watson notes that tobacco (and cotton), planted in the same fields year after year, quickly depleted the soil. Between this and fluctuating prices, planters worked "endless hours supervising their estates, trying to keep their huge farming operations afloat" (46). Bankruptcy, followed by a loss of status (planter becomes farmer) or a move to yet-untilled land further West, was common. Few of the wealthy colonial-era planter families went on to become wealthy republican-era planter families. Gaines concludes that "there is no more pathetically untrue picture" than of planters "living a life of luxurious idleness" (155).
As to culture, the South was far more sparsely populated than the North; Genovese cites 18 people per square mile in the South as a whole, less than half the average for Northwestern frontier states (109). Schools thus were few and far between, and families who could not afford a private tutor or boarding school were unlikely to be able to educate their children. Southern illiteracy was high compared to the North, and even among planters who could afford to send their sons to school, Watson suggests education and reading were likely to be practical, focused on what a planter needed to know to run his the plantation (45).
St. Clare is thus a tiny minority of a tiny minority: a planter, and a cultured, educated gentlemanly planter. In addition, Stowe gives him a life of idle ease and carefree luxury, something that was virtually nonexistent outside plantation mythology.
Gaines considers the mythology to have developed here and there, "as successive writers illuminated its various phases" (18). While he focuses on novels, he mentions that travel literature was also a place where plantation myths were created and perpetuated (Gaines 21; presumably Stowe consulted some of this travel literature in preparing her Primary Geography for Children in 1833). Clearly, then, plantation mythology existed in a paraliterary tradition -- it was a common cultural assumption -- as well as in a fictional tradition.
Watson's The Cavalier in Virginia Fiction traces the aristocratic myth -- that the Southern planter is a gentleman -- back to colonial times, when planters (a newly invented occupation) aspired to model themselves on English country squires (47). He notes that while the planter was a rarity, he also made up the upper class and as such held disproportionate political and cultural influence (48-49). Gaines writes that after the Revolutionary war, southerners were faced with an obvious gap between republican ideals and slave owning, with increasing economic precariousness, and with increasingly aggressive attacks from abolitionists (19). The mythology of what Southerners wished they were, or felt they ought to be, can be seen as defense against these psychological, economic, and political stresses.
Each discussion of plantation mythology I have seen mentions Swallow Barn, by John Pendleton Kennedy, as a originary text which brought together many threads of plantation mythology and described them as real and admirable. A book halfway between a collection of connected vignettes and a novel, Swallow Barn was first published in Philadelphia in 1832. The edition sold out and was popular and admired enough that the publisher asked Kennedy to issue a revised version in 1835 (MacKethan xi). It is possible that Stowe read or heard of the first edition. A second revised edition did not appear until 1851 (published in New York), and Stowe might have been able to read the second edition as she composed Uncle Tom's Cabin. Even if she never saw the book, it embodies many of the paraliterary ideas of Southern life which northerners in 1850 would think of when asked to imagine the South.
I have been unable to locate a copy of the first edition of Swallow Barn, and the second edition recast much of a chapter devoted to presenting planter Meriwether's views on slavery, as well as a discussion of a woman's proper education (MacKethan xxxi). Kennedy also softened much of his satire, treating his characters more fondly and with less distance.
A brief look at Meriwether's lecture in the chapter "The Quarter" shows that if he were a real person, he could well have been the author of the letter that Stowe cites so credulously in The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. MacKethan's introduction to the novel gives some of Kennedy's rephrasings in describing Black characters, which I think show the careful propagandistic self-censorship behind such accounts as that letter. "Flatnosed pygmy" in 1832 became a "flat-nosed compeer" in 1851, while a white's dismissal of a slave -- "now old gentleman, you have done your duty, so creep to your kennel" was deleted (xxv). A manuscript passage in which a master almost hits a slave who grins inappropriately never made it into the first edition (xxvi).
The narrator's first view of human life at Swallow Barn is of "three or four negro women" doing the white family's laundry, who "chant shrill music over their wash-tubs," and are besieged by "little besmirched and bow-legged blacks (3) who are never tired of making somersets, and mischievously pushing each other on the clothes laid down to dry" (29). The narrator later re-encounters a "horde" of these slave children, "darting about the bushes like untamed monkeys" (307), a "strange pack of antic and careless animals" (309-310) who race around the farm with a pack of dogs (both are animals and pets) in a comic riot to win a coin from their master.
These funny, pet-like, animalistic children are clearly akin to Stowe's Harry and Topsy. Harry, who is "petted and noticed" by Mr. Shelby, sings and does comic imitations for a handful of fruit (3); Topsy sings in a "wild, fantastic" way with "guttural sounds," and turns "a summerset or two" when asked (207). Stowe's entry on Topsy in The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin says nothing about her character, but instead dwells on Topsy's ignorance (chapter xii). That Black children -- whether ignorant Topsy or educated Harry -- are wild, animal-like sources of song, dance, and comic relief is something that she takes for granted, a paraliterary idea that "everybody knows" because it has been repeated so often as part of the plantation mythology.
Kennedy provides us with a picture of young and adult slaves together, with "the veteran waitingman" contrasted to the "rude half-monkey, half-boy," and between the two extremes the "successive degrees" of "advance" from the "young savage to the sedate and sophisticated image of the old-fashioned negro nobility," each wearing "some article of coxcombry" (327).
The spectrum from savage to civilized reappears in Stowe, although there the prime factors are not age but degrees of Christianity and whiteness. Brutal and unchristian Sambo and Quimbo, as their names indicate, are scarcely removed from the imaginary African jungle. Adolph and his cronies are no longer brutal, but clearly below white people. George and Eliza are equal to whites. Tom's superior Christianity puts him above all the whites in the novel. The stereotypical slave's passion for flashy dress ("coxcombry") reappears in Adolph.
Among Swallow Barn's adult slaves, Ganymede is sent to deliver a message. He twice begins to dash off as Ned is still telling him what to say. Exasperated, Ned says "I wish you would show something of this activity when it is more wanting." Finally, Ganymede "flourished his hand above his head," kicked his horse, "hallooed with a wild scream," and galloped off (313). Later, Carey, another adult slave, comments on an injured horse: "The mischeevous young devil wa'nt content with the paster" and, jumping over a fence, hurt herself, "which she deserved for be so obstropolous" (446).
Stowe's portrait of Black Sam, who approaches helping Haley catch Eliza with excessive enthusiasm, and who uses words he does not understand, is clearly based on the same myths of slave personality as Kennedy's portraits are, myths which were created and perpetuated in southern fiction.
Meriwether, like St. Clare and Mr. Shelby, "thinks lightly of the mercantile interest" (35). His wife, Lucretia Meriwether, has made a "perfect science" of running her household. She is "up with the lark" to clean and polish, and the narrator describes the meals at Swallow Barn with reverence: "I would put them [her breakfasts] for excellence and variety against any thing that ever was served upon platter" (38). Meriwether invites the entire neighborhood to dinner at one point, and the food is put on a huge table "rather with a reference to its own dimensions, than to the number or wants" of the diners (326). The novel's conceit, perhaps to be expected of a male author, is that all this is thanks to the work of the "thin" and "feeble" Lucretia (38), and that the "bevy of domestics" who attend "upon the table" arrayed in their "coxcombry," are there merely for entertainment purposes (326-27).
Marie St. Clare imagines herself to be feeble, but she is no Lucretia. Stowe instead shows a keen awareness of how housework gets or does not get done, and by whom. Ophelia, the New England housekeeper, is up early and bustling about. The person who is responsible for the magically appearing meals, however, is a slave, Dinah.
For a parallel in Kennedy to Marie St. Clare, we must turn to the plantation next to Swallow Barn, and to planter Isaac Tracy's younger daughter, Bel, a belle. In The Southern Belle in the American Novel, Seidel claims that Bel is in fact the first belle to appear in fiction. Bel has "an exuberant flow of spirits" which despite her father's "stiff and rigid" education, frequently breaks discipline, and shows itself in "the various forms which a volatile temper assumes in the actions of an airy and healthful girl." Again due to her father's education, she has a "rather too rigorous estimate of the proprieties and privileges of her sex" (Kennedy 78).
The hot temper and the overestimate of her own perks and value as a woman fit Marie St. Clare quite well. The function of a belle, Seidel notes, is to get married: the story ends with the wedding because afterward the belle more or less ceases to exist. Stowe's Marie is a post-marriage belle, who continues to exist only in the activities of a debutante: Seidel points out that she obsesses over her wardrobe, goes to church only to see and be seen, and dislikes Augustine because he no longer goes through the ritual of courtship "gallantries" with her (15). Seidel argues that in most prewar novels, "the belle was an actor" (127) who actively sought out her man. The question most depictions avoided therefore, was how that activity could be redirected after marriage into acceptable channels. In Dred, Nina's energy is refocused on Christian works. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Marie's energy is not refocused, but continues in the same path as before -- a path destructive to herself and those around her, especially her slaves.
Stowe borrowed from the plantation mythology in creating Marie, but simultaneously subverted that mythology. Why then did she accept so much of the racial mythology at face value? Stowe adopted Southern myths of "the negro character" more or less intact, but, as is clear from comparing Kennedy's veiled contempt for the animal-like negro children to Stowe's long treatment of the evolving character of Topsy, she tried to shear off the value judgments with which the "negro character" usually came equipped. Instead she repainted the familiar stereotypes with what Fredrickson calls "romantic racialism," extolling supposedly innate African qualities as virtues rather than vices. This project is very reminiscent of contemporary attempts by some feminists to agree with misogynist stereotypes but insist that these "feminine" qualities constitute a different way of approaching the world which needs to be praised, valued, and practiced by more men.(4)
At the same time, Stowe was not a theorist. Slavery was wrong, for reasons she made very clear, but how to get rid of it, and what slaves could or should become after its abolition, were questions that had vexed abolitionists for years. I intended to argue at this point that Stowe had no well thought out theory, and merely suggested, in the mouths of one or more of her characters, all the solutions -- from gradual to immediate emancipation to colonization -- which were current at the time (Hovet thinks that colonization was not an afterthought but an integral aspect of Stowe's religious thesis). Then, however, I read her chapters on Ophelia and Topsy in The Key.
In the chapter on Topsy, Stowe writes that "it is often objected to the negro race that they are frivolous and vain, passionately fond of show, and are interested only in trifles." What of it, she asks: "take away all high aims, all noble ambition, from any class, and what is left for them to be interested in but trifles?" (92 her emphasis). In other words, the "negro character" of which she made so much and would again make so much in Dred, is, in this nonfiction polemic, strictly due to "the degradation of their condition, and the utter hopelessness of rising above it," in either South or North (91). As long as color prejudice continues, slavery "is not wholly abolished in the free states of the north" (91 her emphasis).
In the chapter on Ophelia, she notes the segregation enforced in northern states, where blacks are banned from "the railroad car" and black children from schools. These policies have "been justified by saying that they are a degraded race. But how came they degraded?" (52).
Stowe reports that up to a certain age, the "negro, mulatto, and quadroon children," whom she teaches "keep equal pace with, and [are] often superior to the white children" in the same classroom. At that age, however, they become "indifferent to learning, and make no further progress" (91) because, Stowe asserts, they realize, as Topsy does, that as far as the world cares, they are "nothing but a nigger" (92).
Class conscious Stowe is not: she does not mean that "all distinctions of society should be broken over," forcing people to associate with those whose education and habits are "unfitted" for her readers' sympathy (55). "Dirty" and "uneducated" foreigners with whiskey on their breath and unclean clothing are allowed to sit in a railroad car next to one of her readers, while a "respectable, decent, and gentlemanly negro" is not: this can only be thought of as an "irrational and unchristian thing" (55).
Stowe is equivocal on the equality of blacks: "the negro should not be lifted out of his sphere of life because he is a negro, but he should be treated with Christian courtesy in his sphere" (55). But she clearly comes down against the notions of an innate Negro character she uses in her novels.
To resolve this paradox, I will develop an idea suggested to me by Taylor's discussion of Stowe. In brief, I think Stowe's adoption of plantation myths to depict the "negro character" may have been a deliberate argumentative tactic. In response to the feminist abolitionism of the Grimke sisters, Catherine Beecher wrote a pamphlet saying that women's role in the slavery debate should be to "mediate between opponents and advocates of slavery" (Yellin, 88). Women were to "win everything by peace and love . . . but this is to all be accomplished in the domestic and social sphere" (Beecher quoted in Yellin 87).
Stowe could easily see that the frontal attack on slavery used by American Slavery As It Is had merely caused Southerners to become more absolute and defensive in their positions. Instead, she conceded everything to the proslavery camp: she imported the plantation mythology into her novel, and went out of her way to make Tom's first two masters represent "the fairest side of slave-life" (Key 8), and "the fairest picture of our Southern brother" (Key 61). She made Legree, Haley, and St. Clair northerners (the last by rearing), so that Southerners could not fairly accuse her of making them look bad, nor claim that bad masters were Northerners, good ones Southerners. Having surrendered virtually the entire territory, she then proceeded to show that nevertheless, slavery was a terrible evil which must be abolished. Again in The Key, she appeals to her reader's class bias. "Let this gentleman of South Carolina cast his eyes around the world. . . . and ask himself how many of the men whom he meets are fit to be trusted" with the absolute despotic power of a slaveowner (68-69).
After conceding so much, Stowe was still vehemently attacked. Despite this, she used the same tactics in Dred. Perhaps her discouragement at having only further entrenched Southern pro-slavery rhetoric caused Dred to have the darker, more despairing tone that it has -- a tone which seems prophetic of the war that followed a few years later.
In debate, conceding most of your opponent's argument in an attempt to win can often lead to defeat. After the war, Joel Chandler Harris introduced his first collection of Uncle Remus stories as a "sympathetic supplement to Stowe's wonderful defense of slavery as it existed in the South. . . . [she] painted the portrait of the Southern slaveowner, and defended him" (quoted in Riggio, 142). Stowe's concessionary argument, which modern critics have lost or overlooked, was also an argument that Stowe lost.
Duckworth, Sarah Smith. "Stowe's Construction of an African Persona and the Creation of White Identity for a New World Order." In Lowance, et.al, The Stowe Debate. 205-235.
Fredrickson, George M. Uncle Tom and the Anglo Saxons: Romantic Racialism in the North." In Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin. 429-438.
Gaines, Frances Pendleton. The Southern Plantation: A Study in the Development and Accuracy of a Tradition. New York: Columbia U.P, 1924.
Genovese, Eugene D. "The Significance of the Slave Plantation for Southern Economic Development." National Development and Sectional Crisis, 1815-1860. Joel H. Silbey, ed. New York: Random House, 1970. 103-118.
Hedrick, Joan D. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. New York: Oxford U.P, 1994.
Hildreth, Richard. The Slave: or Memoirs of Archy Moore. Upper Saddle River, NJ: The Gregg Press, 1968. Reprint of 1836 edition.
Hovet, Theodore R. The Master Narrative: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Subversive story of Master and Slave in Uncle Tom's Cabin And Dred. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989.
Hubbell, Jay B. The South in American Literature, 1607-1900. NP: Duke University Press, 1954.
Kirkham, E. Bruce. The Building of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977.
Kennedy, John Pendleton. Swallow Barn, or A Sojourn in the Old Dominion. William S. Osborne, ed. New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1962. (reprints 1853 illustrated edition).
Lowance, Mason I, Jr, Ellen E Westbrook, and R.C. De Prospo, eds. The Stowe Debate: Rhetorical Strategies in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994.
MacKethan, Lucienda H. "Introduction." in Kennedy, J. P. Swallow Barn. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986.
Riggio, Thomas P. "Uncle Tom Reconstructed: A Neglected Chapter in the History of a Book." Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe. Elizabeth Ammons, ed. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980. 139-151.
Russ, Joanna. "On 'The Yellow Wallpaper.'" To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction. Bloomington, IN: Indiana U.P, 1995. 159-166.
Seidel, Kathryn Lee. The Southern Belle in the American Novel. Tampa, FL: University of South Florida Press, 1985.
Smith, Pamela Christine. Images of Slavery in American Women's Fiction, 1836-1868. Dissertation. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1992. UMI order #9104969.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Judie Newman, ed. Halifax, England: Ryburn Publishing, 1992.
__________. The Key To Uncle Tom's Cabin. New York: Arno Press, 1968. Reprint of 1854 edition.
__________. Uncle Tom's Cabin: A Norton Critical Edition. Elizabeth Ammons, ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.
Sundquist, Eric J. New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Taylor, William R. Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character. New York: George Braziller, 1961.
Tompkins, Jane P. "Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Politics of Literary History." In Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin. 501-523.
Watson, Ritchie Devon. The Cavalier in Virginia Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985.
Weld, Timothy Dwight. American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. New York: Arno Press, 1969. Reprints 1839 edition. Weld was assisted by the Grimke sisters.
Yarborough, Richard. "Strategies of Black Characterization in Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Early Afro-American Novel." In Sundquist, New Essays. 45-84.
Yellin, Jean Fagan. "Doing it Herself: Uncle Tom's Cabin and Women's Role in the Slavery Crisis." In: Sundquist, New Essays. 85-106.
1. Yellin asserts that this book was co-authored by feminist abolitionists Sarah Grimke and Angelina Grimke Weld, in addition to Theodore Weld. Back
2. Material not specifically cited in the following discussion is abstracted from historical material in Hubbell; Gaines; Watson; and Genovese. Hubbell and Gaines are plainly pro-southern partisans, and I take their assertions with caution. Back
3. "Negro" was the polite term at the time, "black" was colloquial. Back
4. That we can easily label Stowe's attempt to retain but invert the dominant white value system as racist, but are not so willing to label feminist inversions of dominant male value systems, is suggestive. It is too easy to condemn Stowe from our enlightened radical position, without considering that she was also enlightened and radical then. Back