If we want to know about both the best and worst side of our country, we should read Uncle Tom's Cabin. We are a country that practiced slavery and also a country that abhorred it.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written by Harriet Beecher Stowe. She was from a well-known New England clerical family, the Beechers, and she was active in abolitionist circles in Cincinnati. She married a professor of Biblical literature, and she eventually moved with him to Maine, where he taught at Bowdoin College. At some point in 1850 she started writing a tale about the evils of slavery, which was published in weekly installments by her friend Gamaliel Bailey, who edited the anti-slavery newspaper, The National Era. Her story was then published as a two-volume novel by John P. Jewett, who was a well-known publisher of sentimental literature—several years later, he’d also publish The Lamplighter, which I wrote about in my last post.2 As mentioned above, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an immediate bestseller, on a level heretofore unprecedented.
Stowe’s novel is about two slaves belonging to the Shelby family of Kentucky. This family has owned these two slaves since they were born, and it has treated them relatively well. These enslaved people, Tom and Eliza, are married (not to each other), maintain their own homes, and seem relatively happy. But…Mr. Shelby has fallen on hard times. One of his mortgages has come into the hands of a slave trader, who is demanding that Mr. Shelby make good on this debt, either in cash or by giving him some slaves. As the narration puts it, regarding slavery in Kentucky:
So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to a master,—so long as the failure, or misfortune, or imprudence, or death of the kindest owner, may cause them any day to exchange a life of kind protection and indulgence for one of hopeless misery and toil,—so long it is impossible to make anything beautiful or desirable in the best regulated administration of slavery.
This is the central theme of the novel. It is not that slave-holders are essentially good or essentially bad. Some are good and some are bad, but this system magnifies the worst in people and makes it very hard to be good. It is the system itself that is evil.
